A Mending at the Edge: A Novel (Change And Cherish) Read online

  A fiddle joined the horns. I heard a concertina.

  “Can’t they rest here with us, in this corner area?” I said.

  “I said to send them to the men now. Go. It will be better. We must have some sort of order in this household. I am still in charge.”

  “If they remain here, Charles can step into the root room sometimes, where the cool air might make him feel better,” I said. “I’ll gather up some quilts and they can settle on the floor, not spread the coughing through the rest of the house.”

  “That’s a good idea, Husband,” Louisa told him. She nodded to me that we should exchange children, I taking Ida from her while she comforted Brita’s middle child. Her willingness to support me against her husband both surprised and comforted me.

  “She needs goat’s milk,” I told Louisa. “It would be best if they are close to their mother.”

  “It’s a strange, new place for them, Husband,” Louisa told him.

  “Ach,” he said, dismissing us. “You women do what you will. I have more important matters to attend to than sick children,” and with that he turned back into his room, as unpredictable as a household goat.

  Jack bounded down the steps then, and I realized too late that I didn’t want Brother Keil to leave. My taking umbrage with him might have upset him, and now that the accommodations for the Engels had been decided, I had my own troubles to contend with.

  “I have the right to see my daughter,” Jack said.

  “You put her in harm’s way, so I don’t think you’re owed anything more than to gaze on her face, which you are now doing. You didn’t like the responsibility of me and the children. You have a farm that ought to have gone to my sons, but you have it. I left everything for you.”

  “Emma,” he began, took a step toward me. I backed up, clutching our daughter between us. She stared at him with wide eyes. “A woman is meant to be with her husband. He has the right to discipline his wife. Scripture says she’s to surrender to him.”

  “Surrender to a husband who treats her with love. You have a habit of referring to the portions of Scripture you prefer,” I said, “and interpreting them so they support you.”

  “As do you.”

  One of Jack’s manipulative tools was his ability to hit a target with his piercing darts, making me question myself and thus giving him room to maneuver. But not this time. “We are not a matched team, Jack. I regret that I offered up our marriage bargain at all. Not only for what it did to hurt my family…but you too. It pushed you. Ida is the only good thing to come out of it, ja? But let’s keep her from being pulled and tugged at like a flighty kite. She needs…a solid place to be, safe. She needs to be here.”

  “Which is why I’ve returned.”

  “You’re not staying.”

  He reached to touch her head. She leaned back into my chest but allowed his caress. I shivered and she fussed.

  “I’ll build a house for us,” he said, removing his hand from her hair. “One without the memories of Christian in it, so we maybe could have our own life, put the pieces back together, Emma.” A cunning boy’s look came to his face. He smiled and raised his eyebrows, as if he were asking me to put my skates on and join him for a swing around the frozen ponds beside the Pudding River.

  For a moment I wondered if we could. Maybe he had changed.

  But then I saw Andy on the landing, his arms crossed over his chest. It would never work. “The pieces of our puzzle never did fit, Jack. It was a labyrinth of loss.”

  Behind me I heard the rustle of Brita and her children, the chatter of women in the kitchen. Louisa giggled at something I hoped had nothing to do with us. Everyone could hear our marital discussion. The safety found with others also robbed me of needed private space.

  “We could be together again, and with Brother Keil and others close by, I won’t be tempted to let you twist my good nature into something foul.” He smiled.

  “Take her, would you?” Brita said, at my knees again.

  “What?” I said, turning to look down.

  “Hold her for a moment, please? The…privy makes an urgent call.”

  “But—”

  Brita was already waddling out through the root room. The weight of the second child in my arms brought me back.

  Jack said, “Your Kate is as short and squat as that Zwerg.” His insult was the perfect nail to hammer my decision tight. Having Big Jack Giesy back in my life on any terms was nothing short of insane. I’d have to ask Brother Keil for wolfsbane to calm me down, or be sent to an asylum if I even considered moving into a house with Jack Giesy. It wasn’t worth the price. I slowed my breathing, grateful for the children that weighed against my chest.

  “No, Jack.” I looked at Brita’s child in the crook of my arm as I talked. “You should do what Brother Keil said weeks ago. Leave us and stay gone.” He grunted, and I looked up at him. His face clouded again. Somehow the presence of these children in my arms, the music from above, and the smells from the kitchen all served to remind me that I was not alone. The presence of the others didn’t have to be an anchor to hold me down but could be a raft to buoy me up.

  “You take in vagabonds and circus imps and their kin but want to send me out into the rains? Not even Doctor Keil would do that. No. A divorce is wrong.”

  “I haven’t said I’d divorce you,” I told him. A divorce would be one more thing that might separate my parents from me. In this country, regardless of the circumstances, divorced men always got the care of the children. No, I’d never choose divorce and risk that!

  Brita returned and took her infant back into her arms. I didn’t know her story yet, but she had a way of intervening at the perfect moment. “You said you could awet-nurse my Pearl,” she said.

  “Ja,” I told her. “As soon as I get Brother Keil.”

  I entered Keil’s workroom without knocking and asked him to step out. Patiently, acting calm, I explained again my plight, my need to be free from Jack’s pressuring presence. Getting other people to do what you want takes effort. You’d think after my years with Keil back in Bethel, trying to get him to let me go west with my husband, I’d have learned how fatiguing that is. It’s a woman’s necessity, to name her desires and then find ways to achieve them by meeting the needs of others. I remembered how my uncle, the ambassador in France, wrote of having to think in such ways, organizing certain gestures, looks, and words, pulling them together to create a new image, like disparate fabric pieces forming a quilt. It was all such a puzzle, this living.

  Keil looked over my shoulder at Jack, then finally spoke. “He’s calm, Sister Giesy, despite a justified distress at being separated from his wife. If he lives with the bachelors and stays away from your boys, he can stay.” I opened my mouth to protest, but Brother Keil quieted me. “I decide these things, not you, Emma Giesy. All are welcome at my door.”

  He looked at Brita and her brood, nodded his head as though to assure himself that all really were welcome, and then he returned to his room.

  Jack grinned. “So. I have license to convince you, Wife,” he said. “In my timing.” He tipped his hat at me in a rakish way, then took two steps at a time up to the main floor. I heard his boisterous laugh as he brushed at Andy’s hair when my son ducked beneath his hand and descended the steps to me.

  What could I do? I’d need to keep the children constantly within my sight, hen-clucked around me, have them stay in the wide hall near the kitchen where Brita had joined us with her coughing sons. I’d need to wear vigilance like a cape.

  “I don’t like Jack’s being here, Mama,” Andy told me later, as we settled in for the night. Christian nodded his head in agreement as he slipped into his bedsack.

  “I know. I don’t either,” I whispered. “But Jack won’t hurt you as he did before. There are always people around. And you needn’t worry over me either. I’ll be fine. We have friends.”

  “We had friends before, but they didn’t help,” Andy said.

  “You forget Karl,” I remin
ded him as I pushed the cloth beneath his chin. “He helped us. And so did Martin.”

  Andy nodded. “But I can’t be with Martin with Jack up there.”

  “When the weather improves, building will begin again, and maybe Martin will have his own house soon, and you can go stay with him sometimes. Or maybe your Opa and Oma will arrive from Missouri and we can live together with them. Maybe Big Jack will leave. Maybe Brother Keil will build our promised home. Any number of things will happen to change, Andy.”

  “So far, most of what’s changed has been bad.”

  “That’s the way the walnut rolls sometimes,” I said. I brushed his straight blond hair from his eyes. “And besides, we’re here together. There’s nothing bad about that.”

  Sleep did not come easily for those huddled on the floors in the hallway. Outside, the weather turned beastly cold, and the mighty Columbia and the Willamette River froze over. Adam Schuele, one of the original scouts, made his way to the gross Haus, and I heard him and Brother Keil arguing. Such close quarters made privacy a treasure. Adam had given his all, yet Brother Keil kept him now at arm’s length. I wondered if Keil held a grudge because Adam hadn’t joined the colony in Aurora but had remained instead for a time to help Christian and me and the other scouts still in Willapa. When he left, he’d returned to Bethel, not come here. He’d only recently shown up in Aurora. These acts of independence bothered Brother Keil, though I wasn’t sure that’s what brought on the intense voices behind the closed door. I closed my ears and thought of pleasant times past.

  After the Pudding River went back into its banks, oval pools of water clustered in the low-lying areas and froze into perfect skating ponds. The cold kept us mostly indoors. Men bundled up to feed the animals or to bring in hams from the smokehouses. They couldn’t heat the mills up to work, and the logs froze together. The men around Aurora stayed indoors, weaving baskets or using builder’s sand to smooth the banisters. They set up a loom in the parlor area. Jack stayed in the house with the rest of them, rarely venturing outside, keeping me and the children stuck in the hall, where I told them stories or made up puzzles to keep their minds clear.

  We all bundled up to race to the privy and, shivering, returned.

  We did hear of Solomon Durbin in the town of Salem taking a team of sixteen horses with three sleighs attached and driving them across the frozen Willamette River. Someone took a photograph celebrating the winner in a contest to see who could handle the biggest sleigh and team.

  “Men,” I said, when Helena mentioned the competition and the lengthy sleighing season in the usually temperate valley. “So cold they can’t work, but not too cold to compete.”

  “We women aren’t so competitive as that,” she agreed.

  Through the winter, Brita looked after Ida and Christian, my younger son, while I helped in the kitchen, contributing to the colony as I’d agreed to. A few of the women spoke asides about “extra mouths to feed” or of an “invasion of Zwerg,” but most of the colonists lived out their belief that it was worthy work to make another’s life better than their own: the Diamond Rule, the luster of our Christian faith.

  At night, I listened to Brita’s stories that made my past and current trials look like puppies playing. She had endured a life of jeers and jokes over things she couldn’t control: her small size, her pointed ears, her waddle-walk. One night she quietly told of the death of her husband in a circus fire and her journey to bring her husband’s children north from California. They’d lived in a cave for a time, only to have that refuge washed away in the floods. So much loss seemed more than a person could bear, yet she had.

  In the gross Haus, with the cacophony of coughs from Brita’s brood, my own sons soon took ill, and I spent the spring doing what I could to comfort them. Both Martin and Brother Keil drew remedies from the blue cabinet we slept near.

  Jack’s presence on one of the floors above us cast shadows over my days. I could encounter him on our rushes to the outhouse. I had to serve him meals at the long men’s table. At any time his dark looks might turn into actions. I listened for intruding steps in the night, planned activities based on smidgeons of information gleaned at the table to guess where Jack might be. Uncertainty fatigued as much as the hard work of doing the laundry for dozens.

  I prayed for my parents’ arrival. They’d be the stakes on either side of my family, safe and separate from Jack. I longed for my own home, with locks to restrict unwanted visitors. I hoped that Brother Keil would keep his word and soon build me a house.

  “This is such a beautiful day,” Brita announced one spring morning. We were bending over, planting beans in plowed fields of black earth.

  “It is.” I stood and stretched my back. “You’re such a hopeful person, Brita, despite all the tragedies you’ve faced. How do you do it?”

  “You can’t always get what you want in this life,” Brita said. Her smile filled her wide face. “But as any wise Zwerg knows, a hopeful soul learns to spin gold from the straw she’s been given.”

  A Closer Weave

  May 4. I wore Brother Martin’s felt hat to keep the sun from my face while dipping water from the barrels to feed the bean plants. Helena clucked her tongue at me, but a hat opens the face while a bonnet is a blinder, and I have enough of those in my life already. I intend to weave a straw hat for myself.

  June 10. I wrote to my parents. They’ve long supported Keil, and I wonder if our staying in Willapa instead of going with him is the reason they do not contact me. I’m trying to find the perfect stitch to hem my need for them while not sounding as though all my edges are frayed.

  Dear Parents, Sisters, and Brothers,

  Several days ago Brother Keil received some letters saying that none from Bethel will come to Oregon this year. For me, no news, not even an answer about the letter Brother Keil sent to you in the beginning of this year, where he said it would be helpful if Jonathan would come and take over my personal business. I would have written sooner to you, if several of my children had not taken ill, Christian and Kate. Now the little ones, thanks to God’s blessings, are healthy and very active again, but it took many months before they recovered from the nasty fever.

  Dear Parents, I am willing to obey and respect all orders which you gave me personally and the advice for my children’s well-being, but you will forgive me if I ask what delays you after such a long separation and bitterness for which I have no explanation? I long for a peaceful reunion with my good loving Parents, Brothers, and Sisters. How to arrange that I do not know. But I hope that Brother Jonathan, if not on his way already, will arrive this summer and will give poor Keil relief. He has so many worries, the whole town surrounded, some wondering if our communal ways are a challenge to them, and Jonathan could help relieve him of me and my children at least. Most of all, I am grateful for the daily love and devotion that Keil and his whole family have shown to me. I wish you to come not for my benefit but his, when he has so many continuous responsibilities to carry already. He is hoping my family will give some relief to ease the situation.

  Many hearty greetings to my good Parents and my Brothers and Sisters, to my Friends, and everyone who knows me in Bethel, who remember me lovingly.

  Live well and keep on loving. Come soon.

  Your obedient Daughter and Truly Devoted Sister.

  P.S. I almost forgot, Big Jack has been here since Epiphany. I’m hopeful he’ll leave soon as Andy stays with me and goes to school. I am doing what Brother Keil says to do. Greetings to little Louisa. We think of her often. I remain your loving Daughter and Sister,

  Emma Giesy

  That summer, while waiting for my parents, I churned butter or toted water from the spring, carrying questions about what I’d done to upset my family so that they’d stopped writing to me. I had left Jack, yes, but I hadn’t divorced him. There were only one hundred divorces in the whole territory, or so Karl Ruge had told me when I once broached the subject with him—just in passing, of course. I’d explained to my parents why I
’d left him. My brother Jonathan had urged me to come to Aurora long before I even married Jack, and here I was now, so the problem couldn’t be that I’d come to Aurora to stay. They’d always supported Keil. I’d thought my being here would please them.

  The crops had been late coming on, as we’d had a very cool spring to follow the hard winter. The wheat crop promised to be smaller than normal, and I supposed in some ways Brother Keil might have been glad that the Bethelites would not be coming this year from Missouri. Feeding them—and housing them—once they arrived promised to be a major task. Yet he lamented their delay as I grieved my parents’ silence.

  Thousands of new settlers had come into the valley the previous winter, but few of them spoke German. They came from the Ohio Valley and farther east, and some from the rebellion states, so Brother Keil said he felt “surrounded” by those who might see the world differently. People seemed threatened by our sharing of resources. I’d thought that was the point and part of why we invited others to learn more about us, why we helped people as we could, to introduce them to our ways. But I suppose we did want to change other people’s ways at least a little; we just didn’t want their presence to change ours.

  I’d listen to railroad talk at the long dining room table where we served the men. More than thirty thousand miles of tracks marked the country now, and Congress had authorized the Union Pacific Railroad to build from Nebraska to the Deseret country of Utah, where my aunt lived. That rail line would meet up with one being laid eastward from California. More people would come…but apparently not my parents.

  “We’ll get a spur through here one day,” Brother Keil said, as he motioned for Louisa to bring him more coffee. “That will bring us work for the men and industry for Aurora.” His wife hustled to him, fluttering over his comforts. Her constant deference to him was not a good model for her daughters, in my opinion, or for other colony girls either. But every now and then she resisted him. Perhaps she’d found that balance a marriage requires. I didn’t like eavesdropping on other people’s lives. Oh, how I longed for that home of my own!