A Clearing in the Wild

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “I’ll bet Wilhelm hated that,” I said, then clasped my hand over my mouth. Wilhelm Keil demanded recognition, acclamation almost; he hadn’t had it in this territory so far. But I didn’t need to announce it. I looked for Louisa. Her sunken cheeks burned red.

  “It … grieved him,” Karl said, his eyes resting with kindness on Louisa.

  Late in the day, one of the colonists who’d remained at the stockade came through the forest and said we were to bring the hearse and come to the stockade. I saw this as a hopeful sign that our leader had seen our land and approved and now we could move toward home. Home.

  “No. I don’t think my husband would want the hearse hauled by any but our two mules,” Louisa said. “And they are being ridden by our … by Wilhelm and Chris.” She crossed her arms over her narrow chest. “I’ll wait here with the hearse until he brings the mules back.” She wrapped her cape around herself, an immovable log.

  “We must take people to the stockade area,” Peter said. “We will wear out our welcome at the Woodards’. Wilhelm wants this done.”

  Louisa hesitated, bit her lower lip, but then the lessons ingrained to women, that we must follow our men, overtook her and she nodded. Peter and the other men harnessed two oxen to haul the hearse the last mile or so to the Giesy claim and stockade. The rest of us would form the funeral march that followed.

  I helped pull up tents and talked with several of the women, assuring them that there were roofs, at least a few, so we could get in out of the rain once we arrived at the Giesy site.

  And we did so, many of us huddling into the log house I’d spent the last winter in, more pitching tents outside.

  I’d claimed this hut as my own last winter and noticed anew the hides that I’d helped tan, the sleeping mats that bore our blankets, the moss that I’d cleaned the slugs from. It now belonged to … all of us. My stomach knotted. I wondered if Christian and I would be allowed to take the elk hide gift when we moved, or would that now remain as a part of the house rather than a part of our lives?

  Louisa sat down on my blanket, pushed it back behind her so she could lean against it. She patted the soft bedding, looked around. She nodded approval. Her eyes met mine. Once again all that we had would have to be shared with everyone else.

  In that moment I knew that the colony had truly arrived.

  “He’s taken Wilhelm to your claim,” Adam Schuele told me. “He wanted him to see the widest prairie and where the gristmill could be placed. All our ideas Chris wants to share with him.”

  “What has our leader said?” I whispered. We stood in a large tree-fall that some of the men had scraped out for a dry place to sleep. “Does he give an indication of his approval from this morning’s trip?”

  Adam looked away, picked at some pitch stuck on his hand. “He spent a good amount of time on the hill behind the stockade overlooking the valley.” Adam shook his head. “I don’t know. We were all so sure …”

  “Because it is a good place,” I said, certain. “I struggled at first, remember? I didn’t think this land could support us all. It took so much work just to build, but Christian assured me. You assured me. That all the scouts agreed, that’s the true sign that we have chosen well, that it was chosen for us. Surely our leader will not dispute that?”

  Adam said nothing, walked over to take the blinders from the horses he said were given as gifts to only Keil’s sons. They were chestnuts with white spots spattered across their sides. Adam tied the horses at young trees far enough apart that they didn’t entangle each other. The goat ran around trying to decide if all the additional dogs were pets or peril.

  Work would set my mind at rest, quell my imaginings of what occurred between Christian and our leader. I helped milk the few cows that Peter’s group had driven down the trail. I showed the new women the latrine area, commented on the berries we could eat to supplement our diet. “You can squat and eat,” I said, grateful for their chuckles. I urged them not to hunch their shoulders against the rain, as it did no good and only caused later aches. “We can weave capes,” I said. “Right from this land. What we know of wefts and warps serves us here.” I showed them where I kept food cool in the river, the large drums that we collected rainwater in for drinking and washing. They peered at the meager grain storage. “I know there isn’t much, but we can buy flour through the winter from the ships coming in.” Potatoes were plentiful. We’d have a little milk now with the few cows here, though not enough for all these people. We could perhaps buy a few more of Sarah’s eggs, maybe even some of her chickens. “We have plenty of ammunition, so we can have game to eat. We won’t go hungry, that’s certain,” I told them.

  Christian had planned well, considering he never knew how many people would actually come here or the circumstances when they did.

  “It’ll be a bit squeezed in together, and we’ll need the tents still,” I told the women. And maybe a few more of these rotted logs carved out for people to stay in. “It doesn’t snow much here at all, and by February, the sun comes out more often and flowers begin to bloom. By March, this is an Eden, it truly is. Even I plowed and seeded the grain field, the soil is so easily broken.”

  “Will we rotate being able to sleep under the roof?” one of the women asked.

  “The doctor will need this roofed house,” Louisa told her. It was the first time she’d engaged in the conversations, and I noted that she referred to Wilhelm as the doctor. “Or had you planned that for yourselves, Emma?”

  My faced burned. “We’ll live in a tent through this winter as we did most of the last,” I said. “All the scouts lived in this house; it wasn’t ‘ours.’ We built it for the colony.”

  “Ja, well, you call it the Giesy place, so I assume,” Louisa said.

  “Christian claimed the land in his parents’ names, as the law requires, but of course it is for the colony.”

  “The land in Bethel is in my husband’s name.”

  “But here, the free land needs specific people named,” I said. I was even more grateful that Christian had made it clear where our claim would be … far down the road, seven miles down the road, and we’d spent no time at all on building it at the expense of building for others. He’d sacrificed a dry home for us to make homes for others. Couldn’t they see his generosity?

  “I note there is no Keil place,” Louisa said. “Or does my husband go there with your husband, and you have saved the best for last?”

  She grieved; I needed to remember that, to chalk away the blemish of her words.

  “This stockade, this roofed house will house you as it does all of us. It isn’t Elim yet, I know. But once we have a mill, we’ll have all the timber we could need to build grand houses just as we had in Bethel, just not with brick.” Even Christian’s parents would not assume they alone would have a roof over their heads. “There are some other structures on adjoining claims, a few, with canvas roofs. With so many of us, now we will be able to finish those.”

  It flashed through my mind that with so many people here we’d also be spending more time hunting, more time handling food than we had before. I hoped that Christian had put in a large-enough order for wheat to come into Woodards’ warehouse, and I wondered if some of the party still to arrive might come up the Cowlitz and take the trail as Peter Klein had and bring sheep. Mutton would taste good, and we could use the wool to spin to replace our threadbare clothes. That reminded me that I hadn’t noticed that our leader’s group included any trunks marked with our name on them. So it would be Christian’s parents I’d have to count on. They carried the grist stones and were coming by ship. Surely they would have our trunks and bring our personal effects.

  When Christian and Wilhelm returned, I could tell that something was very wrong. Our leader walked with his shoulders bent, striding well in front of Christian, who slowly unsaddled the mules. Wilhelm walked purposefully. He stopped at the hearse standing beside the log house and gazed around, finally pointing at Louisa that she should follow him, and they disappea
red behind the hearse.

  “What does he think?” I asked Christian. Andy patted the mule’s front leg. “Did he approve of God’s choice?”

  “Take the boy. He could get hurt.” I reached for Andy, lifted him.

  “Well?”

  “He does not,” Christian answered me then. “But he says he has no choice but to bury his son here.” He wouldn’t look at me, just started brushing the mule.

  “But that’s good. He’ll want a home close to where his son is buried.”

  Christian turned to me, his eyes like my old dog’s when I’d refused to give him a bone. “He’s telling people to head back south, into Oregon Territory. He’s sending Michael to stop the rest from coming here. He wants them to find jobs in Portland through the winter. He says the women can clean and cook, and maybe there is work for the men there. He’s sure there is nothing here.”

  “Jonathan won’t even come north, then?” I asked.

  “Don’t cry over your brother,” Christian snapped.

  “I … I hadn’t meant to. I’m just disappointed.”

  “Ja,” he said, leading the mule away from me. “You and Herr Keil have that in common.”

  27

  Drowning in Bounty

  In the midst of people deciding who would leave first and who would remain, leaving in the spring instead of this winter, Sam Woodard told us, “The army says we should all move into an area that can be defended well. Sarah and I will come here if that’s agreeable. The stockade, it’s more isolated. A few others in the valley are being urged to come this way too.”

  “More outsiders in this small space?” Louisa said. Wilhelm frowned at her. Probably more for having expressed an opinion than for what she said. She stepped back and clasped her hands before her now-bowed head.

  “How good we have a place of safety you can come to,” I noted. “And that we can share it with others, as good Christians, as we did in Bethel.”

  “Ja, come here,” Wilhelm said, speaking to Sam as though Christian weren’t even present, as though I hadn’t even spoken.

  “What we have is always available to you, Sam,” Christian said. “Did the army say what the new threat was, or how long it might be, all of us here together?”

  Sam shook his head. “Only that the whole region is a prime target. The governor’s dislike of all Indians has fired even the friendlier ones. The Shoalwaters feel left out of the negotiations, so they’re refusing to go to another tribe’s designated reserve. Governor Stevens wants no negotiating with anyone. So the Indians have nothing to lose by attacking whenever they wish.”

  One of the men who’d traveled with Wilhelm said, “Our leader charms the Indians. We had no trouble coming across, did we, Wilhelm?”

  “No,” Wilhelm said. “No trouble. But here is different. Ve have trouble here.”

  So we would all be housed inside the stockade walls with our tents and a few under roof. Christian assigned men to rotate watch at the guardhouse; Wilhelm voiced his opinion about who would follow whom. I noticed that the men took orders given by either Christian or Herr Keil.

  Inside the house that evening, several of us scrunched together at one end, the smells of wet wool and smoke filling our heads. Adam and Michael Sr. and other scouts who’d been a part of this journey from the beginning stayed close together. I wished that the Knights were here, but Adam had signed up for the military when they’d reached The Dalles with Keil’s group and was said to be fighting the Cayuse. How strange that was to me with Wilhelm speaking pacifism, at least before we left Bethel. No one knew where Joe Knight was. I longed to know what had happened and why after all this distance and all we’d done together that the Knights had decided to separate.

  I poured hot tea into mugs while Hans spoke with several men about heading out in the morning as a group to bring in meat. John Genger had acted as a hunter on the trip out, and he oiled his gun as Hans spoke.

  “Didn’t you hear Woodard say we’re not to go into the woods?” Wilhelm said. “Too dangerous.”

  “I think he meant alone and to fell trees,” Hans said.

  John Genger stopped, his oil rag midair. “We have to eat, Wilhelm.”

  “I saw a few deer when we brought the hearse here yesterday,” Hans told him. “Off by that ravine, where we took out the big root ball, remember?” Michael Sr. nodded.

  “We must preserve the ammunition now so ve can defend ourselves,” Wilhelm said. “How foolish it would be to use it all up gathering food. Ve must think ahead. We are planners, we Germans.”

  “The people need food, Wilhelm,” Christian said, his hand resting on our leader’s forearm. “And we’re still quite a distance from the trouble farther east. It’s good to be here together and be cautious, but we have hungry children.”

  “Did I not see fish jumping in that river?” Wilhelm countered. “If this is such a promised land as you have dubbed it, Chris, then let us fish. Let us club them as you say the Indians do.”

  “To supplement the meat, yes, but to—”

  “There will be no using the ammunition except for defense.” Wilhelm’s voice boomed, silencing even the children whimpering as they tried to fall asleep. Rain pattered on the peeled logs, and the pitch in the cook fire flames hissed like huddled witches.

  “Wilhelm, my friend and leader,” Christian said, his voice like the stroke of a gentle hand on a skittish cat. “In this clearing there are different ways of doing things. It is not a challenge to you that I tell you that having meat makes sense. We will be frugal with the ammunition. Hans knows this.”

  Wilhelm’s eyes grew large, the white around them reminding me of a buffalo’s eyes. Christian dared challenge him in front of all of us, and challenge he must, or we could all die of starvation.

  “I have paid the bills,” Wilhelm began. “The one thousand dollars you charged for this and that; it has cost us almost eight hundred dollars just to bring these few people from Portland to this godforsaken place. To pay off the claims you’ve bought will deplete us even more. I need to make these decisions now, Chris. No ammunition for hunting. I’ll not risk the loss of ammunition when we may need it to defend ourselves against those Indians. You have brought us to a hellish place, Chris. Now I must get us out.”

  “Send a letter to Bethel,” Keil directed Karl Ruge. It was the third day behind the stockade. At least fifty people remained; the others had risked the river and the bay to return to Portland as Keil directed. The rain fell steadily. Andy hadn’t seen the seagull for several days, but he’d stopped asking when I’d snapped at him. I tried to imagine myself alone, in my own home, but Keil’s voice took me from my escapist thoughts. “Tell them we will bury Willie here, on the hill just beyond the stockade walls. Then we will all go to Portland and spend the winter in better conditions.” I watched the pain in my husband’s eyes, moved to stand beside him.

  “We will do what Judge John Walker Grimm suggests,” he dictated to Karl. He’d apparently met this man in Portland while the judge shipped apples to California. Grimm sold fifty-six apple trees to a man named Adair while Keil watched. Pippins and Winesaps and Northern Spy apples (such detail our leader recalled and had Karl Ruge put into the Bethelites’ letter), and the judge told the colonists where the trees were grown, somewhere in an area on the Pudding River in Oregon Territory. Our leader saw hope in such trees for the colony; he didn’t see hope in this clearing.

  If such a man can ship apples south, why can’t we ship our grain south and other products we grow, just as we did in Bethel? I hoped Christian would say such things, but he didn’t. He stayed silent as a saw leaned against the wall.

  Then Keil began what to me was a tirade against this landscape. He had Karl write terrible things about this valley, about how long it took them to ride a mule seven miles, of how he had to cross the Willapa six or seven times to get from one claim to another, and that the road to our claim had been the most dangerous trail he’d taken since he’d left Bethel. “The soil may be rich, but it is cov
ered with three to four feet of decaying tree trunks,” he dictated. “The land grows anything, but there is no one here to buy it except ourselves. There is no prospect of more people coming here, as the rain sends everyone away, everyone with any sense; and everything we need is too far away and too expensive to get. A barrel of flour in Oregon costs three dollars and fifty cents, while here it costs fifteen to twenty dollars, and it will be impossible much of the year to even get it here by boat. There is no good farm land and can never be.” He looked up at me. “Little fields cleared beside the river. A pittance. There is no fodder for cattle or sheep; the land is covered with trees or what is left of them. If we built a distillery, only a few oystermen would consume our product. In one day I can see the problem of this place, and yet the scouts, they claim this as God’s land. They were not listening to the voice of our Lord, our Savior.” He took in a deep breath. “They listened to one another.”

  My husband sank into himself. I couldn’t bear to look at him.

  I stared instead across the room at Louisa. Does Louisa look proud? No, it was another emotion I saw there in the eyes that gazed back at mine. Pity, perhaps, that emotion that covers fear.

  Keil finished with the admonition to any Bethelites still in Missouri to remain there. “You are a poor, unbelieving people without me,” he dictated so each of us could hear. “Like Moses, I’ve led my people through the desert, and no one has sacrificed his firstborn to the Lord except me, myself.” He left out Louisa’s sacrifice. “But God has called us to be at peace.” His words were full of consuming fire, not a word of peace except the word itself.

  He finished by having Karl tell them that when they wrote, they must send their letters to the Portland post office, Oregon Territory, and a copy to Bruceport post office, as he wasn’t sure when the weather would let them bury Willie or when the army would release us from this stockade so we could all leave this hellish Willapa Valley. As a last act of control, he ordered cattle, mules, and oxen to be taken to Portland to be held there or sold. Once Willie was buried, those favorite mules of Wilhelm’s would be taken south as well.