Waves of Mercy

by Lynn Austin

  Geesje’s Story

  Holland, Michigan

  26 years earlier

  As I rode to church a few weeks later on that fateful Sunday—October 8, 1871—I couldn’t remember the last time it had rained, the last time the clouds had rolled in from the lake bringing relief with life-giving water. The ground was parched and brittle, the air dry and crackling, the creek beds shriveled down to a trickle. At the same time, everyone in our household seemed to be holding his breath over Christina. She barely spoke to us, and when she did, her temper often flared like one of the forest fires that kept erupting outside of Holland. Piles of logs and dry brush lay scattered throughout our area, left over from clearing the land, making the arid countryside a tinderbox. A week ago, Maarten and Jakob had helped the other townsmen extinguish a fire that had threatened the south side of the city and the Hope College campus. But none of our efforts could extinguish Christina’s anger. She endured church services with simmering rage, sitting between Maarten and me like a slowly heating pot, ready to boil over. We waited with hope for her to change, the same way we waited for the weather to change and bring rain. Either Christina would bend her will to ours and to God’s, or she would explode.

  A dry, brisk wind blew from the south as we rode to church that Sunday afternoon. The air felt gritty with ash from the recent fires. “It’s been a month,” Christina said as we climbed the front steps between the pillars. “I’ve done everything you said. When are you going to trust me again and let me sit with my friends?”

  “Your mother and I will pray about it,” Maarten replied. Christina carefully banked her anger like hoarded coals. She sat statue-still in church. But then everyone seemed to be motionless on that warm afternoon.

  Around two o’clock the wind shifted and began to blow harder from the southwest. I could hear it whistling around the church, rattling the tall, multi-paned windows and rustling the dried leaves outside. I had left several windows open at home, and I worried that ash and dust would blow inside. The service was still in progress an hour later when we heard the tower bell at Third Reformed Church tolling the fire alarm. Dominie Van Raalte was out of town that Sunday, and the minister preaching in his place quickly ended his sermon and dismissed us.

  “We received word that piles of dry brush are on fire in the swamp near Pine Avenue and Sixteenth Street,” someone told us when we stepped outside. The new Third Reformed Church, only recently completed, was on Pine Avenue and Twelfth Street.

  “Take your mother and Christina home for me, please,” Maarten told Arie. “Jakob and I will go see if we can help with the fire.”

  “In your Sunday clothes?” I asked.

  “There’s no time to change.” Maarten and Jakob removed their suitcoats and ties and handed them to me. Orders were coming from every direction as the men mobilized. Someone shouted for them to run to the hardware store and get shovels and other tools to fight the fire. Someone else said the president of Hope College needed all the students to return to campus and form bucket brigades to soak the rooftops of the buildings in case the fire spread in that direction again. Farmers were ordered to harness their teams and plow firebreaks to try to stop the flames. As the men mobilized to fight the fire, I sensed Arie’s humiliation that he wasn’t deemed fit to help. Delivering the women to safety hardly seemed like a heroic job for a seasoned soldier.

  “Do you think we should pack up some of our valuables, just in case?” I asked him when we reached home. Smoke already darkened the afternoon sky, blotting out the sun.

  “It probably wouldn’t hurt.” He kept the carriage parked outside and the barn door open. I asked Christina if she wanted to pray with me for the men’s safety, but she shook her head. She stood outside on the front porch, staring into the distance, as if hoping Jack Newell would arrive to rescue her.

  Maarten and Jakob didn’t return home until after nine o’clock that night. By then a layer of smoke hung over the street outside our house like fog, and I was worried sick. In the distance to the southwest, the rim of the sky glowed orange, like a sunset. But the sun had long since set. The men looked battle-weary, their faces smudged with soot, their eyes reddened from the smoke. Both Maarten and Jakob were coughing smoke and ash from their lungs. They had rolled up their shirtsleeves to fight the fire, but I suspected that their Sunday clothes, reeking of smoke, were ruined. I followed Maarten into our bedroom when he went there to change his clothes, and I hugged him tightly.

  “What’s going on, Maarten? Is the fire out?”

  “No one knows. It’s spreading faster than we can battle it. We extinguish it in one place, and then the wind carries the sparks and cinders someplace else. The fire skips around as if it’s taunting us.” He and Jakob had come home to rest for a few minutes and eat something, then they were going back. As they were getting ready to leave again, Christina tore past them through the front door and rushed into the arms of a stranger standing outside. It could only be Jack Newell. The comfortable way they held each other alarmed me.

  Maarten couldn’t seem to move as he stared at them in shock, but I hurried down the front steps after Christina. I could see why she’d been attracted to him—he had a handsome face and wavy, light brown hair and a sturdy, muscular build. But there was something in his arrogant stance and cocksure grin that made me dislike him on sight. He obviously hadn’t been helping the other men battle the fire, or he would have looked as filthy and disheveled as Jakob and Maarten did. “I’m getting out of town before things get worse,” I heard him say. “I’ve come to take you with me, Christina.” He and Christina pulled apart as I approached, but he draped his arm around her shoulder as if he owned her.

  “She isn’t going with you,” Maarten said as he also stepped forward. “Christina, could you really respect a man who would run away to save himself without even trying to help save our town?”

  Jack shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him if Holland burned.

  “It’s the very least you can do if you love my sister,” Arie added. He stood on the porch steps beside Jakob, his crutches propped beneath his arms.

  Maarten picked up one of the soot-covered shovels leaning against the porch railing and held it out to Jack. “We’re going back out to fight the fire. Why don’t you come with us, son?”

  Jack sighed in resignation and took the shovel.

  “This time I’m going, too,” Arie said, hobbling down the front steps. “I want to help.”

  Maarten stopped him. “I need you to stay here and try to save the print shop and our house, Arie. Some of the other people in town are soaking their rooftops to prevent blowing sparks from igniting the shingles. I think we should do the same.”

  “Christina and I will help you, Arie,” I said. I hugged Maarten again and begged him and Jakob to stay close together and watch out for each other. Then I hurried away to gather up every tub and bucket I could find. I couldn’t bear to watch my husband and son go.

  The night was pitch black except for the fire’s distant glow as Christina and I dragged the buckets and a ladder to the print shop. Arie limped along behind us. He unlocked the door when we got there and stood in the darkened shop, gazing all around. “We can’t possibly move the printing press,” he said. “I suppose we could try to save some of the equipment, but . . .”

  “Our best chance is to soak the roof like your father said.” The wind had become so strong by then that it nearly blew the ladder over as we tried to prop it against the shop. I knew Arie couldn’t climb it or stand on the sloping roof, so I put him to work filling the buckets with water. Christina carried the buckets to the ladder, and I hauled each one up and doused the roof with it.

  The work was exhausting. And it seemed to me that the wind grew stronger by the minute, the distant glow in the sky brighter. When we finished soaking the roof, Arie brought the carriage around and we piled the cash box, record books, and other valuables from the shop into it. Then we dragged the ladder and buckets back across our property to our house and s
et to work all over again, soaking the shingles and loading our possessions. The carriage couldn’t hold very much, so I had to leave all but our most important things behind.

  Hours had passed. It had to be nearly midnight. Maarten and Jakob still hadn’t returned. We sat inside the house in the dark, waiting. I was too worried about sparks starting another fire to light a candle or a lantern. I closed my eyes and prayed, terrified for the men’s safety as the wind howled around our house. Please don’t take Maarten . . . I love him . . . If anything happened to him, I don’t know what I would do.

  I heard Christina pacing restlessly in the darkness. “Why don’t you sit down?” Arie finally asked her. “Aren’t you exhausted?”

  “I can’t sit down. I’m worried about Jack. Why did Papa make him go?”

  “Could you really love a coward, Christina?” Arie asked. “I knew a few men like him during the war. Always looking out for themselves. Selfish to the core.”

  “Well, Jack went, didn’t he?” she said angrily. “He isn’t a coward. And now I’m worried that something will happen to him.”

  “You should be worried about him, and about his eternal soul—especially if he isn’t a believer.”

  “Shut up, Arie! You’ve never been in love! You don’t know how it feels!”

  But I did. I knew exactly how Christina felt. I had already lost one son. Would I now lose another, along with my husband? And what about our home and our business and our church and our town? Would God really allow everything we had worked for these past twenty-five years to go up in flames? I thought I understood how the biblical character Job felt.

  The three of us sat in the darkness, waiting, while the wind shook the house like a hurricane. I had waited in suspense this way after I’d learned that the Phoenix had sunk, worrying and praying for Hendrik’s safety. The love and concern I felt now for Maarten were just as great—maybe greater. If only God would give me more time with Maarten. I would tell him every day how much he meant to me, how much I loved him. My feelings for him were different from what I had felt for Hendrik—that great rush of passion and attraction that Christina now felt for Jack. But I loved Maarten for his solid, steadfast faith; for being the man who would have sacrificed his dream to take me back to the Netherlands; who would now risk his life to save our home and our town. Maarten never once made me feel abandoned or unloved or insecure all these years. He had grieved with me, laughed with me, raised our children with me. He had never been impatient or angry with me. And in those moments of great doubt and uncertainty over the years, he had always turned to God in prayer, believing in His goodness despite appearances and helping me to do the same. How very blessed I was to have this steady, uncompromising man for my husband.

  Please, God . . . I don’t want to lose him.

  Just after midnight, Maarten and Jakob finally burst through the front door, breathless from running. Their reddened eyes were nearly swollen shut from the smoke. Christina leapt to her feet first. “Where’s Jack?”

  “He deserted us hours ago,” Maarten said. “Come on, hurry! We have to get out of here! We need to run!”

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “Third Reformed Church has caught fire. We couldn’t save it.”

  “They just finished building it!” Arie said.

  “I know. Now the wind has carried flaming shingles from the church over to Cappon’s tannery. The factory buildings and that huge pile of dried hemlock bark—they’re all on fire. When we saw flaming chunks of bark from the tannery blowing toward the Eighth Street business district, we knew it was time to run. There’s no stopping the fire now.”

  “The carriage is packed and ready,” Arie said. “Where should we go?” I felt so shaky I could hardly stand or walk as Maarten herded us to the door. My heart had never pounded so hard before.

  “Some townspeople are heading west to the lake and getting into boats,” Maarten said. “I think we should go east, toward Dominie Van Raalte’s house. It’s on the creek—if it hasn’t dried up by now.”

  Outside, the wind was blowing so hard that Maarten had to support me. A gust snatched the kerchief from my head before I could catch it and blew ash and grit into my eyes. Washtubs and buckets and wooden crates summersaulted down the street as if they weighed nothing at all. We joined hundreds of our neighbors crowding the road that led out of Holland, all desperate to save our lives. As the carriage moved forward, I turned around and gazed in horror at the scene we were fleeing.

  It was the middle of the night, but the burning city looked as bright as day. We could feel the heat of it, as hot as an oven, blowing toward us on the wind. I watched the fire jump from one roof to the next, one house to the next, faster than anyone could outrun it. Waves of flames rolled along the ground, consuming everything in their path.

  “Hurry, Maarten!” I begged. “We have to hurry!” My eyes watered from tears and from the smoke, which nearly blinded us at times. All the while, the wind battered us, raining sparks down on us like biblical fire and brimstone. I have never known such terror in my life.

  At last we made it to Dominie Van Raalte’s house on Fairbanks Avenue and collapsed to our knees to thank God. His house was packed with refugees like us, even though he still hadn’t returned from preaching in Muskegon. What would he say when he saw his beloved kolonie in flames? We waited there throughout the night, watching the distant fire, ready to flee again if the wind carried the inferno our way.

  At dawn, the wind and flames seemed to die away. The rising sun hid behind a haze of smoke and ash. “Jakob and I are going to walk back with some of the other men to see what’s left,” Maarten said. I was too weary to move, too heartbroken to view the destruction. Christina began to pace again as we waited, but I knew her anxiety wasn’t for her father and brother. Hours passed before they returned.

  “It’s gone, Geesje,” Maarten said, his voice hoarse with grief and smoke. “Nearly the entire city is gone. Burned to the ground.”

  “It looks like a field that’s been mowed clean with a scythe,” Jakob added. “There’s hardly a fence post or a sidewalk board or even a tree stump left.”

  I drew a shaky breath before asking, “What about the print shop and our house?”

  Maarten shook his head. “Gone.” He gave me a moment to absorb the news before saying, “But Pillar Church is undamaged. It’s a miracle. And the buildings at Hope College were spared, too.”

  “Did everyone make it out of town? Do they know if everyone is safe?”

  He hesitated for a long, dreadful moment. “Only one casualty that we know of for sure—Widow Tolk.”

  “Maarten, no!” I covered my mouth in grief. I knew Sara Ooms Tolk, an elderly widow who lived alone.

  “Someone told us that she stayed too long, that she was trying to save more of her belongings. They couldn’t get her to leave. I’m so sorry, Geesje.”

  As everyone expected, Dominie Van Raalte was heartbroken when he returned to find our twenty-five years of hard work in ashes. Nevertheless, he held his head high and said, “With our Dutch tenacity and our American experience, Holland will be rebuilt.”

  Later that day, our little family of five rode home in our carriage, packed with our only remaining belongings, to see what we could scavenge from the ruins. I wept when I saw the blackened skeleton of the printing press among the shop’s charred beams and debris. That sight hurt me even more than seeing our home’s crumbling chimney, the only thing left standing above the foundation of our house. Behind the house were the sad remains of the log cabin that Papa and Maarten had built when we’d first arrived. I looked over at Maarten, wondering if his spirit felt as broken and defeated as mine did. “Can the press be salvaged?” I asked him. He shook his head.

  He climbed down from the carriage and rummaged in the back of it for his Bible. I had packed it for him, and he opened it now to read to us from the prophet Habakkuk: “‘Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be on the vines; the labor of the
olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation.’”

  Christina exploded. “How can you say that? The town is in ashes! We lost everything! We don’t have food or clothing or even a place to live! You have no way to make a living—”

  “And yet we are all alive, Christina. Nothing else matters as long as our family is safe. ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’”

  She jumped down from the carriage and stormed off, crossing our property to where our home had once stood. “Let her go, Geesje,” Maarten said when I started to follow her. “Maybe when she sees how our brothers and sisters from neighboring churches come to Holland’s aid, she’ll understand Christ’s love.” I hated the thought of living on charity, but Maarten was right. The Christians from local churches would gladly help us get back on our feet.

  We were among the more than three hundred families left destitute by the fire, the thirteen hundred people now homeless. The final statistics, when we learned them, were incomprehensible: two hundred ten homes destroyed, seventy-five stores, fifteen factories, five churches, three hotels. Then came another shock—unbelievably, the city of Chicago had also caught fire on the same night as Holland and had burned throughout the night and the following day. The destruction and loss of life there had been even greater than here.

  I helped Maarten and our two sons sift through the rubble of the print shop. An hour later, my hands blackened, my face smudged, the hem of my skirt soiled with soot, I decided to go help Christina sort through the remains of our home. I found her sitting on one of the foundation stones with the charred, tin tea box on her lap, reading through the letters I had kept inside. Some of them were from Arie, written to us during the war. Most of them were from Hendrik. Why had I kept them all these years?

  The angry expression on Christina’s face when she looked up and saw me, told me that she had read enough of Hendrik’s letters to understand their significance. “These are love letters!” she said. “From another man! Not Papa!”