Widow Walk

by Gar LaSalle

  To the items recovered by Jojo, she added the ones she had brought from home, put all the keepsakes into his hands, and let him finger them one by one. Then she put them all into his pocket and kissed him.

  When Jacob was returned to her, she cradled him in her arms and told him she would never let him go again. She would take care of him. She would take care of him, her little brother. Could he hear her? Was it too late? Would he ever snuggle with her as he had just a few months before? It would take time to see whether he had been broken; she would work on that, she promised herself.

  From these events, Sarah wondered about her own frailty in the face of it all. Her home, and the security she had felt here, had been forever changed. Could she ever find that again? And her inner being had been assaulted as well, she knew. As strong as she believed herself to be, she foresaw herself over the next few years likely ebbing, doubting from time to time, fraying a bit, surprising the framed image of tranquility, an emulation of her mother’s behavior, which she wished to project and protect for herself, like when a stone is dropped into the still pond that a modest person should rely upon as one’s only mirror. She would keep guard for that.

  She wondered what Jacob would see when looking there with her, while waiting for the return to soft reflections off tranquil water — if, indeed, that ever came. She wondered, with all that had occurred, whether he would avoid ever again letting go of the security he would certainly now need, holding on tightly to those precious little things she had found and preserved to help bring him back.

  And would he come back?

  It would take time, she decided. It would take time.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Pickett and Emmy

  The shelling from the two Brit frigates began at six o’clock in the morning, just as Pickett had sat down for his breakfast with his staff. The incoming shells, striking the beach 500 yards east of his camp, reverberated with enough force that coffee mugs flew from their laps and set a few younger officers into a frantic tizzy.

  Pickett did not lose his composure, however. He had been under fire many times, in Mexico and then from Apache and Kiowa small arms in the badlands of Texas. He had the well-proportioned and measured understanding of danger that can only develop when one is being targeted for death.

  He watched the earth spraying up, following each report, and realized immediately that the Brits were simply attempting to intimidate him with their gunnery exercise. So he sat back down, ordered his coffee mug to be refilled, and waited for their range practice to cease.

  It kept up for an hour, finishing dramatically with a full barrage from the HBMS Tribune’s and the HBMS Satellite’s port eight-pounders, all twenty of them. And then he heard the Brit marines’ laughter from both ships, rolling across the water as a mocking peripety to their display.

  It made him furious at the bastards.

  The next morning, the barrage started again and continued every day for the next few days, not on the clock but rather on cue with the pouring of his staff ’s breakfast coffee.

  Pickett knew they would be tested by the Brits like this in the same manner as he had seen schoolyard bullies taunt smaller children into flight or futile fight. So he waited calmly for three more days, and then, on the fourth, moved his camp with as much solemn dignity as he could display over to the windy south side of the long spit, out of reach from their sneering morning provocation.

  It was on that day that he received the note. It was from Mrs. Emmy Evers. She had chartered a passage to the island and was waiting for him twelve miles away at the harbor they called Roche. Would he meet her there the next day to receive a package she wished to personally deliver?

  He did not sleep that night at all, and, as he lay awake in the tent, blustered about by a heavy southerner gale, he tried to reconstruct his feelings the last time they had seen each other. How was she?

  He had read in a Victoria newspaper two months ago that a woman, who had preferred to keep her anonymity, had survived an arduous journey and had succeeded in rescuing her son from a band of vicious Northerner aborigines. Word of that feat had spread down the coast, and he had speculated it could only have been Emmy.

  But there had been no word from her, and the silence had convinced him he was sadly mistaken. She must have perished.

  But now that he knew she was alive, he realized it could only have been her! What would she say? What would she be like?

  He needed to know. He was up at five the next morning and waited for another cannonade. But none came. So at nine o’clock, containing himself no longer, he ordered his mount and rode west unaccompanied by an orderly.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Upon her arrival, Emmy had booked lodging for one day with an American couple who maintained a small house overlooking a protected cove shared by two other families, one British and the other loyal to neither country.

  As she awaited Pickett, she wondered if he would respond, and when she found herself hoping, she thought again about the propriety of this encounter, curious as to what family and friends might think.

  But she reminded herself that she had finally decided she did not really care what anyone thought. Something had compulsively drawn her to Pickett, and she still did not know what it was.

  She needed his counsel, she told herself. And she wanted to finish a conversation that had been initiated on the day they had inspected cattle together on Whidbey.

  As she watched Pickett ride up in the distance on his strong gray mare, with swelling happiness she thought about the freeing finality of her situation.

  The week after she had arrived home with Jacob, she had arranged for a quiet ceremony at Isaac’s grave. Attended only by Jim Thomas who dug into the grave and his wife Princess Susan who sang a quiet dirge, Emmy buried Isaac’s remains—the mask she had stripped from Anah—with the rest of his poor body.

  And then it was finished.

  She stopped dreaming about him that week, and when word came down about the confrontation on San Juan one week later, she decided she would make this trip. And she decided it was nobody’s business.

  Watching him approach, she stepped out onto the porch and walked down to the beach below. She noted that Pickett had the same carry as she had seen the day she met him, slightly self-conscious but with a flair that superseded that flaw.

  The canter of his horse said something about the rider, revealing a dimension she could not discern from his conversation or in the letter he had first written her. It was a gallant form of communication by him, and it made her heart race, a response reinforced with each toss of his proud mare’s head.

  As he drew up, Pickett paused for a moment, then he swooped down off his horse, pushed his cape aside, slowly dropped his field cap, and bowed deeply in the French manner.

  When she offered her hand, he pulled it to his lips and kissed it gently.

  “My deepest respects for you, Mrs. Evers. My profound, deepest respects and admiration for all that I now know you have endured.”

  “Thank you, Captain Pickett,” she said, swallowing her words out of a desperate need to control herself. “I have attempted to keep these travails from the gossip of the community. It seems I have failed.”

  “I do not believe you fail in any endeavor, Emmy,” he said, smiling, but obviously holding himself from saying more.

  She nodded, not at his assertion, but in approval of his use of her first name.

  She plucked up her courage. “May I call you ‘Pickett George’?” she asked with a sly smile.

  He straightened, and, from his surprised expression, she saw he realized that she knew much about him.

  “You may, Emmy. You may,” he said.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  They walked along the beach for hours until the light started to fade, past the pounding surf in a misting rain, an
d shared with each other what they had endured during the past several months.

  By comparison, his ordeal was slight, he knew. The stories Emmy conveyed were overwhelming to him, as hardened as he believed himself to be. In fact, a few times he had to turn away lest he show emotions that were not befitting a man of his age.

  She asked his counsel about the turmoil that definitely was increasing in the East between the states over slavery. She wondered about whether a confrontation was likely to erupt between the opposing cultures of the North and South, each advocating passionately for its position—one side in favor of imposing a civil solution to the affront to human rights represented by the enslavement of others, the other side defending its rationalized position to preserve an economic infrastructure that had existed for generations.

  “My father has written. My mother is very ill. With all that is happening, the threat of war, how safe will my children be if I to return with them to my home in Boston?”

  “I believe you will be safe there, Emmy.”

  “And what will become of you, Captain Pickett? How would you, as an educated man, place your bets on the next few years?”

  He shook his head. He didn’t have an answer.

  How closely tied to his heart would his decisions be, she wondered?

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Pickett was quiet as they walked, for Emmy’s questions about his future decisions were ones he had pondered over the past several months.

  He knew he would likely move to where his heart brought him rather than where convenience seduced. He understood the value of passion as an underpinning to everything that ultimately mattered, to everything that defined one’s legacy, and to the difference he would or would not make in this life.

  But what of Emmy?

  He looked at the sturdy and beautiful woman who walked beside him and wondered how she might fare and whether she ever could fit into those travels.

  He had seen much, and as he thought about her, thought of the wiles and courage necessary to survive in a cold, brutal world, he sensed she would endure and likely flourish.

  She did not need to be protected, and that realization was a comfort and a disappointment to him all at once, bred as he was to believe that being a hero and rescuer was a noble reason for a man’s existence and ample enough foundation for a durable love.

  He did not have answers for Emmy.

  And he understood, with some sadness, it wasn’t time to make those decisions. He was duty bound for now, so hoping for a future with her in any case would be far-fetched and out of his control.

  So, he was silent, and they walked on.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  They stayed together there for the balance of the day and then, on the next day, she returned home. On the morning she left, she presented him with the inlaid box that contained his Belgian Mariette six-barrel pepperbox. It was the last time they saw each other.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Emmy

  Emmy looked over the rail, looked at the dock below, and then up at Port Townsend, framed by the deep green forests and blue mountaintops of the Olympics.

  It was warming now, and enough blue patched through the clouds that, it seemed, she saw the land again in a way she had not since the time she had first arrived so many years ago. She would round the Horn again, going against every vow she had made after that first awful journey, and present her children to her family in Boston for the first time.

  She wondered whether she would ever return again, here where so much was buried now. Isaac’s body was finally at rest, she knew. She hoped his soul finally had moved on and melded with the land that he had believed was his own.

  She looked north and thought of George Pickett again. She had heard he had faced down the Brits up on the San Juan and that General Winfield Scott himself had trekked across the Panama isthmus to take over and attend to the disengagement of the hostilities.

  She wondered how Pickett George would fare in a world of men who thought themselves and their business and causes so important. She had written to him once since her visit there. She wished that noble, sad man great luck in this desperate world.

  She thought of Jojo and how brave he had been and how grateful he was to receive from her the ability to read. She believed the leverage such a commodity would provide to him was a fair exchange after all.

  They found his father, MaNuitu ’sta, gravely ill when they returned, but Jojo had been able to read to him before the old tyee died. She knew she had fulfilled an important promise to MaNuitu ’sta—for the time being the best she could do in return for all he had done.

  She wondered if she should do more for Jojo, perhaps help in his education?

  Would she ever return here? Would her children come back here someday, to this raw and savage land that seduced one with its beauty but tested one so severely with its moodiness? The terrible changes in seasons constantly reminded her she was alive but mortal. She wondered what it would be like if she were to live in a climate where the seasons were less dramatic. Would that cause her to become tepid and complacent and forget about death? Would that be fair?

  And what should she tell her family in Boston? What should she write about her own thoughts and memories? What could she preserve for others that would be an adequate mark for her time, her family’s suffering, and everything she felt so deeply?

  All so real and yet, all so unreal.

  All so painful, and all so much at rest now. All at rest . . . and with her duty done.

  Could she ever come back? Could she ever will herself into that time and make things right somehow, the way they had been before Isaac had been killed? So much was buried here. But so many people were arriving now and building over it all that soon it would not matter what rested here from before.

  The reality, she knew, as she reflected on her journey here in this big Northwest, is that our finite time in life does not allow us to really go back. The biographies and autobiographies, based on the exploration and interpretation of the notes we have saved and the markings shaken loose from the corners where we have tucked them, most often stay unwritten. Thus, the memories and mementos become encumbrances, if not for us, then for the family, friends, and strangers who must clean up afterward. Instead of them being loving presences with fragrances that grace a room, they become pale pieces of paper with words that no longer echo and move mountains and souls. A pity, she thought. But there was still much to see in this life, and that was good.

  She would accept that and move on.

  Epilogue

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Isaac, Anah

  Out of darkness . . . and suddenly he was a leaf on the porch pushed across with the yellow and orange ones, blowing across the stoop of this home that was his. It was west to east, this wind from the strait below, and he couldn’t be angry with it as he had in the past for pushing him so, because then he was part of it, this wind.

  Now he finally understood why it had howled when it found tunnels to whistle itself through. He finally understood that it was a joyous cry because the sound gave him a voice that lasted for just a bit as he buffeted about.

  He found a place, a little tube from a broken bottle stem, and he dove into it, and its glass walls vibrated, and he heard the echo of the yearning whistle, a whoop and a warning, and as he swirled up out of it, he was borne up again and he was flying high above what had been his home but no longer was. And as he swooped above, he was in control, and by leaning to the right, he soared high above the beachhead and homestead and saw it all, with its time passing below, all the elements, waiting for their time to fly like him.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  He hovered out above the sliver-moon bay, above the tall, empty ship with ragged sails, and as he landed on its mossy deck, he found scratches on the walls left by sad creatur
es in sad pain. He hopped along the gangway and saw the drops of blood, long dried and faded, that told some other tale that he could no longer remember.

  In an empty, dusty room below, next to a broken chair, he found a globe of glass, and inside was a snowing scene with a bright shiny pin inside. He picked it up in his beak and pushed himself aloft and out above the dead ship.

  He took himself to a shoreline where he saw a rocky beach to drop his prize, burst it, and get the shiny pin. And as he let go, as he had always done so cleverly, something came from out of nowhere, and his catch was gone. And he was wandering again, and his shore and ship and moon were gone, and he was in darkness without a bearing.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  Widow Walk is a historical adventure novel depicting real and fictionalized characters and events.

  Isaac and Emmy Evers. The fictionalized characters of both Isaac and Emmy Evers of Widow Walk is partly derived from the 1857 diary entries of Isaac and Emily Ebey.

  Like so many other enterprising speculators in this turbulent era, Isaac had emigrated from the Midwest with his skills to California in search of quick fortune. He found none. Luckless and frustrated, he turned his entrepreneurial hopes to the Oregon territory.

  When he arrived in the Puget Sound area in 1850, fewer than 1,500 white settlers had settled there. With the discovery of gold on the Fraser River in 1858, all of that changed and a great booming migration began, with settlers moving northward by ship into the region from California and overland from the Midwest.

  After surveying areas like Lake Washington and Whidbey Island, Ebey energized that migration by writing effusive letters to friends and relatives, encouraging them to emigrate “before the good land is all taken.”

  In 1852, possibly guided to Whidbey Island by Si’ahl, the man later to be known as Chief “Seattle,” Isaac Ebey re-established an abandoned claim on 640 acres of the fertile prairie now known as Ebey’s Plateau. There, he and his first wife, Rebecca, developed a prosperous farm that serviced the needs of the military and civilian populations in Bellingham and Port Townsend. After Rebecca died in 1854, Isaac remarried to a durable woman named Emily.