A Mending at the Edge: A Novel (Change And Cherish) Page 31

  A spring storm threatened throughout dedication day but never materialized. It seemed a fitting sign, since so often I worried and agonized over things that never came to pass and could lose the joy of what was before me while I lamented “what might be later.”

  The bells rang out, calling everyone together. The Aurora Band played, standing on the platform that circled the top of the steeple. The Pie and Beer Band warmed up at the lower balcony, and sometimes the bands played back and forth to each other, as though across a mountain valley. Inside the church, large pillars rose up on both the men’s and women’s sides. We’d made one inroad this day with our blended chorus.

  The oldest women sat toward the front and at the center, with the rest of us graduated on either side of them, as though we were those smaller companion bells. Barbara Giesy had the front row. Helena settled between Giesy nieces. My mother sat in the row with me and my girls. Midway up the center aisle stood a large wood stove, with a steel drum to help spread the heat in the winter. Behind it and a little higher rose the altar. It wasn’t ornately carved as I’d expected. Instead it reminded me of a swan’s neck, graceful as the turned pillars. Two lovely candelabra held oil laps, and the wooden benches were as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

  “What do you call these?” Ida whispered as she patted the bench.

  “A bench?”

  “Kitty calls them stinks,” she said. “I told her that was wrong.”

  “Oh, pews,” I said. “That’s another name for them. Not stinks, but pews.”

  The pillars in the center had been turned by Jacob Miller, and they were elegantly spare, much like the other crafts of the colony. Today Oregon grape leaves had been pasted around the pillars, giving them a festive air. And from the tables set along the back, we could smell the food that we’d be consuming when the service was complete.

  I looked to my sons, sitting on the other side of the church with Martin. I really didn’t know what they thought of this church building, or what they thought of the spiritual life that would go on within it or outside of it. I’d done my best to introduce them to experiences of faith, but my own journey had been so garbled at times—and still was—that I found few ways to even talk about it with them. I saw things differently; but I kept seeking, questioning; and that seemed an important part of one’s faith journey. It couldn’t be wise to become so certain of how God worked in the world that we stopped seeing evidence of divine surprise.

  That was probably heretical thinking—frivolous. Perhaps that was why Keil and Martin and John thought I wasn’t competent enough to raise my sons. They might think that the spiritual life of girls wasn’t nearly so worrisome and that I could muddle my way through guiding them. But Martin said the separation was more for the benefit of the colony and my sons than for a punishment of me. I’d hang on to that.

  Then the girls and boys rose and stood together. Even Ida at five years shuffled forward, turned to face us. She opened her mouth wide as an apple to sing, proclaiming the “wonders God had done.” For today, that was really all that mattered.

  Andy and Christian stood in the back rows, Andy already so tall. John and BW’s girls stood in the row before them. A dozen others filled out the choir. Then the combined chorus raised their voices to sing that great German hymn of tradition, “Dear Christians, One and All Rejoice,” the first verse perfect for this day:

  And with united heart and voice

  And holy rapture singing,

  Proclaim the wonders God hath done…

  I patted Christine’s hand and leaned forward to catch Helena’s eye. She winked. At least I think she winked. She might have been blinking back tears.

  We learned later in the week that yet another group from Bethel had headed out for Oregon. Seventy-five more were to arrive in the fall of 1867, in a mule-team train led by yet another old friend and former scout. Land deeds were being given over to some of the earlier arrivals, so they now had property in their own names. I think Keil did this because the younger men urged the advisors to do so and they’d listened. It was rumored that those coming from Bethel had lost the guiding purpose to make another’s life better than their own. They wanted to be like others in the West, independent, earning something to leave to their children when they died. In many ways, I saw Aurora becoming less of a colony and more of a village, no longer distinguished by its expression of faith, just one with a common treasury. I was surprised that I felt sad.

  One spring afternoon, my girls and I unrolled a blanket at the Park House while the Aurora Band played. Then Kitty walked with the girls through the forest nearby, and my parents and younger sisters joined me on the blanket. I hoped they’d start coming to the church now so I’d see them more often. I’d asked them specifically to eat with us that day.

  “I hear you’re thinking of climbing Mount Hood,” my father said.

  “Ach, who told you that?”

  “It would be a silly waste of time,” my mother said. “I thought you’d outgrown some of those things.”

  “It was just an idea.” I wonder where they heard of it? “We were looking for things to invigorate our days.”

  “Raising children isn’t enough?” my mother asked.

  “They stimulate in a different way,” I said. Andy would be fourteen this fall, and he already stood taller than I. Martin said Andy knew all the ins and outs of running the pharmacy when Martin was away at school. He expected to finish up before long and had promised me again that Andy would be sent off to Wallamet University once he turned eighteen. Wasn’t that the greatest work of a mother, to help her children achieve what they could?

  “Andy will be tall like his father,” my sister Johanna said. She looked out to where Andy was warming up his clarinet. Johanna had weepy eyes, maybe from the spring blossoms, for she constantly wiped at them.

  “He’s a nice young man,” my father said. “I see him at the pharmacy at times, and he’s always very polite to his uncles when they come in. Christian’s quite the storyteller. Both fine boys.”

  I couldn’t help myself from smiling.

  “And my girls?”

  “They’re fine too, Emma.”

  “Don’t you miss the boys?” my mother asked.

  “Of course I do.” I always felt a pang of guilt whenever anyone mentioned that my sons weren’t raised by me. With my parents, it was worse. “But they are well tended by Martin.” I was too tired to fight it again, and maybe not be able to give them the life that they obviously have had there, the good life. “Andy will study medicine.”

  “Ja, we hear that Henry Finck’s son will go to that Harvard school when he’s old enough. He might be the first from Oregon to attend,” Johanna said.

  “The boys have learned Latin and Greek and had excellent teachers,” I added to my sister’s comment. “The girls, too, are receiving such instruction. At least the promising students are.” Ida had begun classes, and Kate hadn’t said anything about Latin as yet. “I wouldn’t have been able to offer that to them as a widow—as a woman alone—if I hadn’t come back here. And I’ve tried to do my best to give back all that’s been provided.”

  My father patted my shoulder. “I heard about your house church,” he said. “Will you stop that now that there is at last a real church?”

  I fidgeted on the blanket, smoothed a wrinkle or two with my palm, gaining time for my answer.

  “Keil still only plans to meet every other Sunday, and some of us do remember the fourth commandment to honor the Sabbath and keep it holy.”

  “They say it’s as important as the fifth,” my mother said.

  Again I felt that twang of guilt. “Have I not honored you?” I asked. “I offered my home to you, but you didn’t want to move in with me. Or live in a house that Keil provided? Was that it?”

  “We understood the offer,” my mother said. “We just miss seeing you. You rarely come by.”

  “Ja,” my sister Lou said, “it can be pretty invigorating when I have one of my fits.” She smi
led, and I thought how hard it must be for her, for all of them. I did have a very blessed life. Maybe I stayed away from seeing them because I couldn’t give to them in the way Johanna and my brothers did. Maybe I anticipated parental barbs and didn’t feel strong enough to hear them without having the words sting me like wasps.

  “We miss Christine too,” my mother said. “She used to come by every day on her way back from the Keil house to yours, but she hasn’t of late. I don’t see her here today, either. Kitty keeps us filled in on you, Emma, you and your gaggle of women.”

  “I bet she does.”

  “What’s this strange path you have the girls walking? Some kind of witchcraft or voodoo?” This from my father.

  I laughed. “If Kitty told you that, you’d better question the other tales she tells you. It could be a quilt design, you know, Mama, like that one you made that looks like a carpenter’s square, with a path in between going toward the center. Or Walk Through the Wilderness.”

  “Someone said it was like a labyrinth,” Johanna said.

  “Your very own brother is the one who told us about labyrinths,” I told my father. “They’re ancient ways of praying, that’s all. They put feet to our thoughts and our words. I find it very soothing.”

  “First you want invigorating, then something to calm you. You have two sides to your wishes, don’t you, Emma?” Johanna said.

  “We all do,” I said.

  “She has two doors to her house,” Lou said. “Why not two doors to her heart?”

  I looked at her. She was right. There were many doubles in my life: two husbands, two boys, two girls. Twice I’d allowed others to raise my sons. I could be morose and sad and wallow in my headaches, or I could behave in ways that gave encouragement and hope, too. I could be pushy and prophetic.

  “Maybe two doors means you need twice the opportunity to get something right,” my mother said.

  “Or when I get discouraged, there’s always more than one way out.” I was surprised to see my mother nod in agreement at that.

  Someone knocked on the kitchen front door while the moon was still up. I grabbed my robe, looked out the window to see if I could recognize a wagon, but saw only a lone horse hitched to the front rail. I raced down the steps, throwing a knit shawl over my nightdress, and opened the door to Andy.

  “Martin sent me. He’s gone on ahead. Matilda’s babies are coming early, and Jacob says she’s having a hard time of it.”

  “I’ll get dressed and come with you.”

  “No, he said to pray for them, for him too, to get the women together to do that.”

  “I’ll gather the women, but as soon as I’m dressed, I’ll come out there. Have you told Louisa and Helena, those at the Keils’?” He nodded. “Good. Go then. Let your grandmother know. She’s a good midwife. I’ll see you there.”

  I awoke the others, and they talked softly as they moved to the room that had been Matilda and Jacob’s. “Maybe praying for them in here will make the prayers more powerful,” Kitty said. I told her I didn’t think it worked that way, but that wherever they gathered would be fine. “You’re not going out there without us, are you?” Kitty added.

  Maybe I didn’t have the right to tell them they should stay home or to go. “I’m going,” I said as I dressed. Then I remembered the girls. “But if you’d stay with the girls…”

  “I will,” Almira said. “I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that my presence there brought about bad spirits.”

  “I can’t believe they would, but thank you,” I said.

  Christine said she’d remain behind too. “Matilda will have her family there,” she said.

  Kitty’s shoulders sagged. “You go, Emma. Martin sent Andy to tell you about it and for us to pray. We’ll do that. You ride careful.”

  At the barns, the stableman was already up. He’d saddled the Kartoffel horse for Andy and gotten Martin off in his carriage. Now he saddled a big roan that murmured to me as I touched my head to his nostrils and sighed. I pulled up the hem of my skirt and tucked it into my apron, then stepped onto a stump and swung my leg over the saddle. I pressed my knees, and the horse took off at a fast but comfortable canter.

  As I rode, I sent up prayers that Matilda would be all right, that her children would arrive healthy and alive. Many babies came early and lived. My mother had told of keeping a tiny infant, in a box no bigger than for knives, behind the stove where the water usually heated. That baby would die of old age, she’d said on his first birthday. And she was right.

  But there were so many that didn’t. Matilda and Jacob had had a late start on their happiness, and in my mind, these babies were to help them catch up with joy. Please let them be all right.

  By the time I tied the reins to the rail in front of Stauffer Farm, the sun poked its head over the treetops. I heard the buzz of bees already at the apple blossoms. The morning breeze brushed cool against my sweaty face. I saw Andy’s horse tied beside Martin’s buggy, tail switching. I recognized Jacob’s father, a former scout, standing on the porch, a pipe in his hand. John nodded to me. “Emma,” he said. “It’s good you’ve come.”

  “Ja, I will do what I can to—”

  Jacob burst through the door then and stumbled toward the porch rail post. He clung to it as though if he let go, he would sink like a rock into swirling water.

  “Jacob?” I touched his shoulder.

  He turned to me. His eyes were like caverns deep in his head. I knew what lay behind the door he’d just exited.

  Sweeping in Front of the Door

  April 10. Maybe the 11th, 1867. Whatever days, they run together. Matilda Stauffer gave birth early to her twins, and then she died. One twin survives, though like a tiny stitch in Matilda’s Sunflower quilt, so fragile, so easily she could yet be snipped away. The twin girl was buried in her mother’s grave. Jacob’s sisters, Sarah and Rosana, care for the baby they named Matilda, for her mother. One day she’ll have the quilt her mother made, but it will never comfort as would a mother’s love.

  “But we prayed,” Christine said, “all of us did, that they would be all right. How can that not have happened? Didn’t we do it right?”

  Her lament set us all on edge as we gathered at the house church. It had been two weeks since Matilda’s death, and I’d made several trips out to Stauffer Farm. Opal was tethered at the post there, giving milk for the baby. I came to comfort those grieving Matilda and her infant, but also to soothe my own sadness. I carried another worry too, hidden like a small child, hoping no one would notice the broken milk pitcher. I didn’t want Jacob to become an angry man, to blame himself for moving toward a marriage that instead of giving him joy now left him empty. Jacob hadn’t talked to me, and his sisters said he spoke to no one, just sat in the room and stared. He didn’t seem able to look at the baby much either when they brought the infant to him.

  “We did what we could do,” Almira said. “It isn’t ours to decide such things as life or death. The things in between, yes, those belong to us. Doing something worthwhile. Giving back to others. That we can control, but not life or death.”

  “Amen to that,” Louisa said. Since the dedication of the church, Louisa had been a regular at our house church. Once or twice she even asked an opinion about how to talk to her daughter-in-law about the way she kneaded bread dough, or what we thought of a new Fraktur design she’d made. Today she continued, “I know something about death. My son Willie died, and I could do nothing for him. I prayed for them all. The same with my girls and Elias.”

  “Gloriunda, Aurora, Louisa,” I said, not sure why I wanted to hear the girls’ names spoken out loud.

  “All such good girls,” Louisa nodded. “And I prayed that they’d live, or that I might die instead.”

  “Your prayers weren’t answered,” Christine said.

  “So we go on. Don’t we? It is what makes us human, to live and endure the deaths of those we love. Maybe if we’re young enough, we try again to have children. Maybe if we lose a husband, we try
again to marry, ja, Emma? That doesn’t always work so well, nein, but we try to find, if not a reason, a comfort in what happens. We find God in it, eventually.”

  “Why pray, then?” Christine asked in her tentative voice. “If we can’t make things happen through our prayers, then why bother?”

  “Our faith overcomes death,” Almira said. “That is our hope. At least that’s how I see it.”

  It occurred to me in that moment that this was a way we found Providence within the trials, within these expressions of grief and wonder, of uncertainty and hope. We meandered on our faith paths, not only through the Scripture readings and our leaders’ interpretations, but through hearing of how others lived through tragedy and trial. I’d once thought it took great courage to live isolated and alone, but living with one another took more. Our reward was hearing words that rang a bell within our souls. We’d be encouraged by the toll.

  “I think prayer is how God moves us, more than how we get God to move,” I said. “It’s as with any friend or husband or wife: you talk, you share, you don’t always understand, but you are there and you feel them there, and somehow you can live inside the loose threads of life because of that. Prayer, for me, is like a basket filled with love from which one draws courage for the next step forward.”

  “That’s a lovely thought, Emma,” Helena said. She stared at me. I couldn’t read her expression.

  “Is it?” I hadn’t known I knew that until I’d said it.

  “Though I’m not sure how scriptural,” she added.

  “It sounds scriptural,” Louisa said. “I’m sure Scripture promises we’ll be fed and filled up. In Hosea there’s a verse like that.”

  “In Malachi, it says people who fear the Lord hearken together, and that our prayers are heard. They create a scroll of remembrances.”

  “What’s ‘hearken’ mean, anyway?” Kate asked.

  “To listen attentively with one’s heart. The verse gives support to the times we gather here, on our own, without one of the advisors to guide us in spiritual discussions.” I expected Helena to protest, but she didn’t.