A Mending at the Edge: A Novel (Change And Cherish) Page 27

  The apothecary shop, or pharmacy, was nearly complete though, and Martin moved into it with my sons about the time the colony band and many others headed for the state fair that fall. Martin didn’t play in the band, but he was busy with his studies, and I asked if the boys might travel with us. I was pleasantly surprised when he said they could. The bile in my stomach had begun to lessen each time I asked for permission to have time with my own sons. We were doing this together, after all, not because I was a failure as a mother, but because it was the best for my sons. Karl would remind me that I had given my heart to my sons, and I did what I did in love for them. “Such love will be rewarded,” he said. It was a belief I held on to.

  I took the girls with me to the fair that year and convinced my sister Christine that she should come as well. “You can help cook, but you can also enjoy yourself. You work so hard and such long hours, I worry over you,” I told her.

  “Penance,” she’d said and smiled, making her round face open up in warmth like the sun.

  “Nonsense. It’s time you did what young women do, enjoy themselves.”

  We began planning yet again for the fair, as much an announcement of seasonal change as the vine maple turning red. Almira sounded enthusiastic at first but then decided she wouldn’t join us. She worried about old memories in Salem, she said. While I assured her that time scrubs away much of the edge of sharp memories, she didn’t believe it. She’d become quiet of late, and sleeping more, as when she’d first come to stay with us. She didn’t seem interested in talking about why. “I’ll stay with Po,” she said. “Keep him from chewing Opal’s ears into shredded meat.” She scratched the dog’s head. “That’s all right, isn’t it? That I stay here alone in your home, without you here?”

  “Matilda and Jacob are here, and besides, it is your home too. You contribute to the colony,” I said.

  “I’ve never officially joined.”

  “I’m not sure how one ‘officially joins,’” I said.

  Kitty expressed readiness to pack up for the fair, but she’d been asked to remain behind, to help cook for the bachelors and newcomers at the Keil house. So Christine and my children and Jonathan filled the Wagner wagon. I looked forward to seeing Brita and having time with my children, but I wondered if I was doing Almira a disservice by leaving her behind.

  The band was a huge success at the fair. This second year of the new hall crystallized their prominence. There were stories that the governor would invite them to play for a holiday ball, or that they’d be invited to do a tour by someone named Ben Holladay, who was interested in railroad expansion. I suspected our Keil had been having words with him.

  I confess to a bit of nostalgia as I walked around the exhibits in the Homemaking and Household Arts tents. There was that Nancy Thornton’s name again, signed right on her paintings. She gave art lessons in Oregon City, or once had. The address on her exhibitor’s card attached to the landscape read Salem. If it was too far to travel for a class at the university, it would be too far to travel for a private class too. I’d never even taken myself off that Wallamet class list, so even if I did find a way to join, they might not trust that I’d follow through in the future. I didn’t trust me either.

  Looking into the paintings was a gift I gave myself. A scene of an Indian encampment near a shoreline brought back good memories of a day when Christian and Andy and Kate and I had camped at the Bay. I stopped before a portrait of a woman spinning. She wore a dark green dress, no apron, as though the work she did was for another purpose than just everyday tedium. Window light illuminated her concentrated face. Her hands had large knuckles not unlike Almira’s. She was beautiful. The painting was beautiful in its simplicity. I felt my eyes tear up that such a humble subject could make me feel prayerful in the midst of a festive fair.

  “You paint like that, Mama,” Kate said. I softly brushed at her hair, took in her words as a compliment.

  Andy lagged behind as we walked through the exhibits, and at one point he asked if he could go to the horse barns instead.

  “Looking at art is good for a future medical person,” I told him.

  “Why?”

  I wasn’t sure how to answer. Keil didn’t seem to appreciate art; I didn’t know if Martin did. “Because healing is knowledge and science wrapped up in experience and heart,” I said. “Art helps us reach deeper into the heart, and we experience things we otherwise never could. It tells us something about people, about what they draw on to help a physician heal them. A doctor and patient must work together. There’s artistry in that.”

  He grunted, but I thought he paid more attention to the artists’ works.

  Most of those exhibiting were women. Louisa had entered her Fraktur lettering. I respected the time she’d taken to make the letterings, but even more I admired her willingness to exhibit them and have them judged each year. They’d gotten only a white ribbon, but somehow just seeing them made Louisa stand higher in my eyes. At least she had entered her work. It was an art. Some might call it frivolous, but I could see the careful strokes of her brush, and she must have mixed her own paints. Perhaps she even cut and smoothed the boards she painted on. I suspected that her work took as much time and careful attention as making a sampler, and there were plenty of those on display. Perhaps the work comforted her in her losses. I thought I’d ask her. It might be the reason she urged me to keep painting, a gift she wanted to give me.

  Near the exit, a painting of two doors caught my eye. One was a lavish portal with gold-embossed curlicues and what looked like emerald stones inlaid. A rich woman’s door. The other was equally intriguing for its spare and splendid nature. No embossing, just fine-grained wood painted white, promising the calm of simplicity behind it. I stood there a long time. The artist couldn’t know that I would see it and go to my own inner world of doorways to open, yet she’d conducted my experience, the way Henry C conducted listening experiences for his audiences of the Aurora Band. Music, stories, art, even our quilts and samplers were all products that Keil might deem less important than the compounding of medicines for healing. But like those medicines, the artists’ imaginations emerged from the backwaters of their spirits into the stream that the viewer brought to that place, and there they merged. Two experiences. One for the artist and one for the viewer. Both of us receiving something quite grand.

  I remembered what Almira had said in our discussion at the house church on the day of Mr. Lincoln’s death. We’d talked about two doors: one for service and one for seeking deeper meaning for ourselves as women. We felt completed taking care of others, our children and families, even members of the larger communal family. And yet the demands of others sometimes pushed aside our own need to be creative in more personal ways. Perhaps that was why the quilting time offered so much. It let us open both doors at once. Even Almira, who didn’t quilt, found ways to open both doors. She looked after others but was revived when she walked her “lab-rinse” path.

  I continued meandering through the exhibit hall, answering questions raised by my children. But I couldn’t keep the idea of the blend of richness and simplicity from my thoughts. Simple contentment followed our house church gatherings where we read Scripture, talked with one another of its meaning while we had our hands on fabric. But I always felt as rich as a queen then too. Joy could so easily disappear from our efforts, be as temporary as an aroma. A woman had to nurture what was behind both doors to truly feel whole. And only she can decide which door to devote time to.

  It was a thought I’d share with Almira when I returned.

  Music lightened our steps at this first fair after the end of the war. Christine enjoyed the dancing, once Kitty and I pushed her to it. “I had partners waiting,” she said. Her round face glowed with perspiration, her cheeks as pink as watermelon. “One said he didn’t think so large a woman could be so light upon her feet. Should I take that as a compliment? Or not?” She laughed.

  “We women take good words wherever we can get them,” I said. “When I
saw Adam Knight after not seeing him for years, he told me, ‘You weather well, Sister Emma.’ He compared me to a good leather saddle, but I decided to not take offense where none was intended.”

  “I haven’t danced since we came to Aurora,” she said. “And not much before that either. It’s been lovely. Thank you for making me come.”

  “You’ve earned your dancing shoes,” I said. “We’d best get back to preparing the sausages. When the horse races finish, we’ll have a crowd of hungry people making their demands.”

  “Like at the gross Haus,” she said and laughed.

  It was good to see her out with young people and for her to realize that her smile and willingness to move to music brought her young men interested in dancing with her. Several came by to talk later, and I heard a giggle from her that was new to me. She was a woman noticed, and it brought both high color and delight to her being.

  Andy and Christian were accustomed to a regular routine, I could tell. Christian especially whined when the evening meal dragged on because we were serving others from the tent. “He goes to bed early,” Andy told me. Andy spent most of his time in the science exhibits or walking the barns, talking to the men who cared for the animals. He said they had lots of ideas for mending broken limbs or sore muscles, ideas he thought Martin might find interesting. Jonathan was off talking business somewhere, and some others from the colony were selling food too, though most brought enough only for themselves. Several had something exhibited or were related to the musicians. Despite that, we were heavily outnumbered, we German Americans, and I became conscious of my still-stumbling English when people from outside our colony talked with me.

  That night I bundled down with my children. The stars, like silver candles on black silk, formed a canopy overhead. I heard Christine’s laughter in the distance. She had not yet joined us in the wagon. And while the cool evening air threatened to bring me a headache, I talked it away. “I will think myself happy,” I said and thought it fortunate that Christine was doing the same.

  In the morning I looked for Christine in the quilts beside me. I hadn’t been awake when she joined us. She wasn’t there, and I assumed she’d gotten up early to begin fixing bacon and eggs for the many hungry customers. I needed to remind her that she didn’t always have to be the first one up. Jonathan still slept, as did the boys. I sat up, stretched, and looked around. I didn’t smell bacon cooking. The fairgrounds were as still as a cemetery. I couldn’t see Christine anywhere.

  Discomfort accompanied me to the wash tent where I carried my bucket. I splashed water on my face, considering what to do. Christine was a grown woman, an adult. She could certainly take care of herself. If I were Christine, I’d resent intrusion and the assumption that something might be amiss.

  Still, she was my sister. When she rushed into the wash tent with her hair pulled loose from its usual swirl of braids around her head, I said nothing except, “Good morning,” and put aside that niggling of anxiety that rose there when she answered, “Ja, the very best.”

  Later that day I told the children, “Let’s see if we can find Brita.” She hadn’t appeared anywhere at the fair. Andy and Christian walked with their sisters and me to the livery where we’d last seen her. The Durbin brothers said they hadn’t heard from her. I wondered if she’d perhaps left the area completely. Maybe she’d gone to the gold fields near Canyon City, east of here, to make her fortune. I issued yet another letter to general delivery. Andy expressed equal disappointment when we couldn’t locate Charles or Pearl or Stanley.

  “They moved away,” Christian said as we walked back.

  “We’re the ones who moved, silly,” Andy said.

  “As it happens, you’re both right,” I told them. “They moved to Salem, and you boys moved to Martin’s. Changes like that happen all the time. But they’ll find us in Aurora if they need to.”

  “You moved too, Mama. To that house. Where you wash the clothes and feed the dog and pick up eggs.”

  That house. He doesn’t call it a home. “That house,” I said. “That’s right. There are people who have a fine roof over their heads at my home too.”

  “You’re a two-door, Mama,” Christian said. “That’s what Henry says.”

  “And what do you suppose he means by my being ‘two-door’?” The band instructor’s son had quite a lip for quips.

  “One for all your friends to come in, and one for your boys to go out.”

  The words stung.

  “There’ll always be a place for you there,” I said. “Your going out is only from the house, not from my heart.”

  “But we’re the only boys who don’t live with our mother,” he said.

  “Ja, well, that’s not your fault,” I said. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

  “Then why can’t we come home to that house?” Christian asked.

  I suppose it was time I told a story they might be able to live with. I chose my words. I could give him a door with longing behind it, or one that moved him toward satisfaction, a way to be a good steward of his disappointments. “When your papa died, your uncles thought it best that one of them should stand in for him, take his place to be your papa, to look after you. I didn’t think we needed anyone until later, and then I chose one of Papa’s cousins instead. Jack.”

  “Oh, Jack.”

  “My choice wasn’t so good, ja, even though I meant the best. Sometimes one’s best isn’t. So we came here, but still your uncles and others thought it best that you boys live with a man to guide you. When we stayed at Keils’, there were lots of men to guide. Then I got that house and they chose Martin, and he’s a good man and I agreed. You’ll go on to school when you’re older. And someday you might be the uncle who helps your sister’s children or someone else’s child. It’s a way of family passing goodness on. Does that make sense?”

  “Ja. I wish Martin made cinnamon rolls like yours. Then I wouldn’t miss that house so much.”

  “I’ll bring them to you,” I said, holding him close. “It’s the least I can do.”

  In the spring of 1866, Brother Keil announced that several young men would be asked to preach in his stead. He said this at a Sabbath service and gave names. Several were newer arrivals, men who’d come the previous year. John Giesy shifted in his seat with the announcement, but I thought Chris Wolff, Dr. Wolff as many called him, looked pleased. Karl Ruge did too.

  The winter months following the fair had been filled with “consternation,” as my brother called it. He claimed people were distressed with Keil because he devoted as many resources to the hotel building as to the church, and because few houses had been constructed in the six months since the last group from Bethel had arrived.

  Jonathan was a great defender of Keil, telling me, as he ate bacon and eggs at my house, that Keil had authorized the building of Jonathan’s house at the north edge of the village. Jonathan complained that people could do more for themselves and not put so much pressure on Dr. Keil to do it for them. “People would rather use their tongues to complain,” he told me, “than their hands to take action. The apostle Paul said all parts of our bodies must work together, each in their own unique way, but some of these colonists would prefer to push us all into one single way of doing something.”

  “Keil did set it up like that,” I said. “He wanted to make all the decisions, so he does have to live with the consequences.”

  “For good reasons, he made these decisions!” Jonathan’s face grew red. He’d put on much weight of late, and now he started to gasp.

  I got him a glass of water and didn’t pursue the subject further. But obviously, others had been expressing their opinions that we needed more leaders, that we needed to expand the work. Those conversations might have been heard by Brother Keil, as he’d announced the change soon after the new arrivals.

  At our house church gathering that afternoon, neither Louisa nor Helena attended. The rest of the regulars were there, except for Jacob, who had begun work on a log home. The entire Stauffe
r family, including Jacob and Matilda, would move into this log home before long. On this house church day, Jacob had ridden out to check on progress.

  We opened our gatherings with a reading. Matilda chose a verse of Scripture, and I’d suggested that we talk about where we saw God in such a verse. We’d had such conversations before, and even when Louisa or Helena came, they didn’t seem offended by our exploring how mere women might see God in Scripture. After all, we weren’t arguing doctrine, just speaking of our lives. Then one day Martha added that we ought to talk about how we saw God within our lives, not only in the verse. That had caused some to shift uneasily beneath their hoops. Kitty rose to get us all more tea. Almira coughed until she had to leave. But then I said what I thought. The verse happened to be about the tax collector Zacchaeus.

  I said, “To me, the verse says that even the most ostracized person on the edge could find a place within the love of God. I’ve seen that for myself, when I felt I needed to leave Willapa. And the verse says, too, that I had the choice to accept the love and healing salve that were offered, but then I needed to do something with it, act outwardly to show that I had been truly changed. For me, that’s been the hardest part.”

  The room had grown quiet. No one else said anything until Almira asked, “But don’t you think being brought into something good when one has been at the edge, doesn’t that mean one will not make decisions that put one back out at the edge again? I mean, once having chosen to receive, if we make a mistake, it must be because we weren’t really healed…right?”

  Martha expressed her view. Matilda too. Christine stayed silent. She was with us that day. Since the fair, she’d often been absent on these afternoons. I didn’t ask where she’d gone. But it was Kitty who offered comfort.