I always attended the twice-monthly service at the Keil house, in part because I knew that the boys would be there, sitting across the room from me on the men’s side. An ache always preceded my seeing their heads come through the door, but it eased as I listened to the music, and my spirits would lift if I caught Christian’s eye and he smiled and waved at me, or if Andy nodded to me before I nodded first.
On the off Sundays, the boys came to my home and played with their sisters and the other children who might have come with their mothers that day.
Kitty attended the Keil church with me, but the others often didn’t. It wasn’t a requirement that people attend the worship at the Keils’, at least not a requirement in order to remain living at my house. I should not have been surprised, then, when at a Sunday afternoon gathering in my parlor—on an off Sunday when Keil did not preach—Louisa and Helena arrived too.
I could hardly turn them away, but their presence interrupted the spontaneity of our gathering, as had also happened the day that Barbara and BW had attended. Any change in a routine causes some readjustment. Hadn’t we had less spontaneity the first few times that Christine had joined us? And Martha Miller came sometimes too, a quiet, kind girl. Our little grouping felt safe; Louisa and Helena’s presence menaced that safety a bit.
“We thought we should have more time with you,” Helena said. “We see so little of you, Emma.”
“I see you every other Sunday,” I said.
“Such interesting things that affect the colony have arisen from your home, Sister Emma.” She’d frowned when we first brought out Barbara’s Friendship quilt, but when we explained that it would be a gift given away charitably, “as our Lord once healed on the Sabbath,” Helena nodded and lifted her needle from her own chatelaine.
“Not all that much happens when we meet here,” I sighed. “My boys don’t live here anymore, but then you knew that before I did. Little occurs in Aurora without everyone’s soon knowing. So there are no secrets, not really.”
“Ja, but they do well with Martin, don’t you think?”
“They wouldn’t be there if I didn’t think it was a good place for them,” I said.
“Well, of course they wouldn’t be,” Louisa said. “It’s a nice arrangement that works out well for everyone. My husband wouldn’t have approved it otherwise.”
Approved it? He engineered it. These were thoughts I chose not to say.
Louisa continued. “Both Martin and, one day, Andy will make fine doctors, and the colony needs that. It’s good you understand that, Emma. My boy August has trained himself well in herbs and all too. But he’s back there in Bethel. I don’t get to see him.” She took a deep breath.
I didn’t point out that August was a grown man she was missing, while I had young sons who didn’t live with me.
“Besides,” Helena said, “we wanted to see those cabinets Jacob Stauffer made. I was also hoping you’d returned to your painting, Emma. It was such a comfort to you when you first arrived in Aurora.”
“It was my voice then,” I said, “when I didn’t have one. Now I do feel heard more, even if I don’t get my way.”
“Ja, submission means not always getting our own way,” Helena said.
I wasn’t ready to say I was submissive, but her definition was one I’d consider.
“Andy will be scientifically trained when he goes to school,” Kitty said. “Not that herbs are not healing, but August didn’t really have ‘the touch.’ Remember, we lived in Bethel after you came west. August, well, I don’t mean to be critical.”
“He didn’t? He followed his father everywhere, held the horses for him when he had to tend to an ill person.” Louisa sounded defensive.
“Maybe he held horses well,” Kitty said.
I wondered what might have gone on back in Bethel, where August Keil had been sent and in the process escaped the smallpox deaths of his brothers and sisters. My parents, too, had found disruption in the arrival of August. But they’d found more dissension with Andrew Giesy, from what I’d gleaned in their conversations.
“Andy will make a good doctor, Emma,” Helena said. “He’s from our Giesy line. And isn’t it nice that the colony will pay?”
The colony pays, but there is always a price.
“And how long do you plan to remain with us, Mistress Raymond?” Helena asked then.
Almira had been quietly stitching, not saying a word, so a question directed to her startled us all. She stared at Helena, who continued, “I mean no disrespect. I’m only making conversation. It must get crowded here. And you’ve added another.”
Christine had a frightened-deer look on her face.
“Jacob Stauffer’s been an easy addition,” I said. “He puts the dog out at night if need be and has built shelves in the bedroom. They’re up above us even now,” I said and pointed to the room over the parlor.
“You let the dog stay in the house?” Helena said.
“How heavenly,” Louisa said, looking upward to where Jacob and Matilda’s footsteps could be heard above us.
“It may not be,” Kitty said. “They have the girls up there across the hall, and one of the shelves in their room is storage for Kate’s and Ida’s stockings and leavings dolls. They rarely get any time alone with the girls’ knocking on their door.”
“They’ll stay as long as they need to,” I said. “Almira can remain as long as she likes too. You’re of help to all of us here”—I turned to acknowledge that she sat in the room with us—“and when the girls are in school, you intend to add your hands to the work at the tannery, isn’t that right?”
“If they’ll have me with these knuckles,” Almira said. “Though they’re doing much better with that salve you gave me, Emma. Otherwise I’ll find other work.”
“Well, it’s good that you and Christine and the new Stauffers have a place to live, with so many other worthy people waiting on houses. You didn’t have to wait for long, Emma. Maybe the Stauffers won’t have to either,” Helena said.
“How fortunate I am, then, to be able to give rooms in this one so generously provided by the colony.”
“How fortunate you are.”
Everyone smiled sweetly. Almira rose to bring in tea. Kitty looked bewildered, and Christine exhaled. The afternoon proceeded civilly, and I discovered that a jibe gracefully acknowledged frames a picture of success.
Spring arrived with a blush of warm air that moved the scented blossoms from their limbs. In March, Mr. Lincoln was reinaugurated in Washington DC, and we hoped his reelection would bring the war to a close. New beginnings occurred for everyone, and we prayed we wouldn’t have to worry over any more of our Oregon boys going off to fight.
The bustle of spring planting, of cleaning and sweeping mud from our rugs and doorsteps kept each of us occupied. With so many women living under one roof, the rhythm of our bodies could be seen by the string of washed rags stained by our blood hanging side by side on the line, almost exactly the same days of each month. Jacob took all of this in stride, and we often heard him and Matilda laughing behind their closed door. They didn’t seem to mind staying on with us, but they made themselves scarce when the women gathered for those Sabbath afternoons, sharing laughter and pleasantries and speaking prayers for the war’s end.
Sometimes Matilda still joined in the stitching. She worked on a “lifelong project,” as she called it. The quilt cover she stitched was composed of blocks of yellow diamonds with vibrant dark blue centers sewn onto a backing of angry ocean blue. She’d made a bright red border around them all and called it her Sunflower quilt. The boldness, repetition, and form were things I’d never seen before. It wasn’t pieced of leftover material either. Jacob wasn’t earning enough money outside the colony to purchase so much fabric of single colors like that. Perhaps her father bought the cloth.
Matilda wanted to quilt it herself too. She placed fifteen stitches per inch, tiny as dots. The quilted pattern stitched into the dark blue formed an intriguing shape. When I looked c
losely, I could see it was a sand dollar, reminiscent of life along Willapa Bay. The patterns, material choice, and her unique quilting style all spoke of her independence, her history, her love of beauty and life. We women found our voices in our textiles.
I was in my thirties now, feeling the need to do something significant with my life, a lifelong project of my own. I knew a great many women who had died before they turned forty, not of accidents but of what was wearing out. I said as much to what I now called our house church. Helena and Louisa were there that day, but it was a Saturday, so mending was allowed, not just stitching on a quilt for someone else.
“Where do you learn such things?” Helena asked Matilda. “I’ll be fifty this December, and I don’t worry about doing something grand with my life. Living is enough.”
“But it is scriptural, isn’t it, Helena? To seek and pursue?” I asked.
“A deeper faith, yes. But not some wild adventure. Heaven knows what that might entail with you, Emma.”
We all laughed, and Helena looked startled, as though she hadn’t expected to say anything funny.
“It probably does look like I’ve done more than my share of unusual things. And, now that you say it, those actions have improved my faith. I hated water and river crossings, and I ended up twice living by a river. When we try something we think we can’t do, we have to trust more in someone larger than ourselves. More in one another too. Approaching the end of what might be my final decade spurs me on.”
“Having children is adventurous,” Louisa said. “That should be enough to give a woman pause and deepen her faith. Don’t you agree, Almira?”
Almira nodded agreement. “But it’s also tedious and can drain a woman’s faith. ‘Is this all I’m meant to do?’ I asked myself that at times, with a broom in my hand.”
“Tedious?” This from Matilda, who looked up from her work.
“Washing, mending, sewing, cooking. I know it’s important work, but I have this other part of me, as though I had two doors: one open to service and one open to my heart,” Almira said. “Tedium gets in the way of both!”
“Those second doors don’t get pushed open very often,” I said. “I miss adventure. I miss…affection. A son’s hug, for example.”
Louisa added, “Instead of a son breaking his mother’s dishes on the trail before her very eyes. Poor Catherine Wolfer.” We all shook our heads in sympathy.
“Though just learning something new, like how to stitch a different quilt block, helps,” I said. “Or considering those Greek nouns that Brother Wolff talks about in the evening class. Who knew that ‘hearth’ was a word that gave birth to the English word ‘focus’? That gives what we women do in our kitchens at the fire a certain weight, doesn’t it? Warmth and passion for a life.”
“Affection only gets a girl into trouble,” Helena pronounced. “She has to make decisions she wishes she didn’t have to make.”
I kept my eyes from seeking Christine’s, but Kitty said, “You can only say that if you’ve been romanced. I haven’t, so I guess I’d like to know that for myself. That would be a door I’d like opened. A real adventure.”
“Without getting into trouble,” Louisa warned, her scissors raised toward Kitty.
“What kind of adventure did you have in mind, Emma?” This from Almira.
“I remember you climbed to the top of the mill in Willapa, for the view. Or so I heard,” Helena said.
“This summer, I think we should…climb something higher. Mount Hood.” That just came to me, like my thoughts used to, when saying them out loud was the first time I heard them myself.
“Climb Mount Hood?” Christine shriveled into the bench pillow she sat on. Her skirts billowed out around her. “The height…”
“You’re so daring, Emma,” Martha Miller noted. “I wish I had an ounce of that in me.”
“We’d have to find out about it,” I said. “Talk to someone who has done it. Maybe not go all the way to the top. We don’t want to be foolish.”
“I should hope not. It’s eleven thousand feet high,” Helena said. “It’s not feasible for a woman to do.”
“It would be formidable,” Almira said. She looked at her hands. “I’m not sure I could hang on to…whatever it is people must hang on to, to keep themselves safe.”
“One of us might die there,” Martha said.
“If it’s Emma, we’ll put on her headstone, ‘I didn’t plan for this,’” Kitty said, and I nudged her with my elbow but smiled.
“Planning is half the fun of it. Few people have climbed that mountain, or so Karl told me. No woman that I know of,” I said. “Imagine the view from there!”
“Imagine the snow,” Kitty said.
“It’s a good three days’ ride to the base, and then it would take a day or more to climb it. You’d have to bring food,” Helena said. “You’d have to have animals and people to look after them while you went on this whim. You know nothing of mountain climbing. I’m Swiss, Emma. I know about mountains.” Helena was adamant. “It would be a foolish, foolish thing for you to do. You have children to think of. Ach! Don’t spur these younger women to go along with such nonsense. Louisa is right. Being a mother, or for that matter being a woman, is adventure enough.”
She took the heat from my pan. “It was an idea,” I said. “Something we could all work on together that had some passion in it. Something…invigorating.”
“Well, think of another,” Helena said. She tugged on her scissors ribbon.
“The men have their band they get to go around the country and play with. The girls’ chorus doesn’t even get to sing away from Aurora,” Kitty complained. She brightened. “Maybe we should push for a joined boys’ and girls’ chorus.”
“Talk to Chris Wolff before you engage in something like that,” Louisa said.
“Yes, he might broach the subject with Brother Keil, so you won’t need to,” Almira said.
“That could be dangerous,” Louisa said.
I laughed, and she looked startled but then smiled.
“But at least not life threatening, Sister Louisa,” I said.
The afternoon faded with grace. A family gathering, that’s what it was. Family, a word that Chris Wolff said came from the Latin famulus, meaning “servant.” We were sisters, serving one another, serving our families.
Then an interruption as we stitched. “You didn’t even knock,” Martha Miller said to Mr. Ehlen’s rush through the door. She rarely challenged anyone, let alone an elder like Mr. Ehlen.
“Mr. Lincoln’s been assassinated,” he said, his loose arm flinging wildly as he turned to catch each of our eyes. “Friday last, at Ford Theatre. Telegraph just came through.”
A universal gasp stilled the room. We sat with hands across our mouths to keep from screaming.
“Tragic,” Almira said at last. “How very, very tragic.”
“I’m going home,” Louisa said. She gathered up her things, followed by Helena.
Kate waved good-bye at her and asked, “What’s wrong, Mama? Who was Mr. Lincoln?”
“He was our president,” I told Kate. “And someone took his life.”
“What did they do with it?” Ida asked. I pulled her to me.
“Like Papa?” Kate said.
“Like Papa, yes,” I said. I felt tears begin, for the senselessness of such a loss, for the uncertainty flooding in that assassin’s wake.
“We will lower the flag to half staff,” Mr. Ehlen said. Matilda and Jacob stood at the stairwell, having descended at the sound of Mr. Ehlen’s voice. “And Herr Keil wishes us to gather at his house. The band will play. We will pray, ja?”
“I’ll tell others,” Mr. Ehlen said, swinging that useless arm as he headed out. “At times like this we need to gather close.”
The rest of us stayed for a time, bowed our heads in silence, each lost to our thoughts, speaking our prayers. I could hear Kitty crying softly; others too. Then Kate began a prayer for the president’s family, for us, for “all people inc
luding the man who is making everyone cry.” I wished now, more than ever, that the church were finished, but it wasn’t. Not yet. So many distractions. I prayed at that moment for my children, that their lives would be full and long. I prayed for Jacob and Matilda, that their marriage would be rich and blessed with children. I prayed Kate’s prayer and for myself, that I’d be found worthy as I worked to do the everyday things that kept a family whole, that I’d listen to that voice. I prayed I’d have the courage to let myself be led.
Two Doors
That fall of 1865, Captain John Vogt brought in eleven wagons, all pulled by big Missouri mules. Nearly one hundred additional Bethelites increased our population and the demands on our resources. They’d left Missouri shortly after the president’s assassination, uncertain about what would happen now in this divided country. The coconspirators had been tried and hanged in July while the Bethelites traveled west, but their deaths didn’t mean that grief was now relieved. I wondered what these latest Bethelites thought when they arrived and found themselves not in a thriving village but bunked down with other families still awaiting housing.
Sometimes the wait for houses here in Keil’s town gave me a kind of warped satisfaction. After all, it was for lack of housing in Willapa that first winter that Keil had separated the colony. He couldn’t believe we had so few homes prepared for the arrival of two hundred fifty people. Yet there’d been people living in Aurora now for ten years, and out of the nearly six hundred people who now claimed Aurora as their home, only half had single homes to live in. I never said that out loud to anyone, but I felt some vindication when I heard the mumblings of both newcomers and old-timers about what they found once they left Bethel. Aurora was not yet anyone’s Heimat, that special place of belonging, that I could see.
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