A Clearing in the Wild

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  Christian got up and left. I wanted him to fight, to send another letter, to see what he had seen before, in the beginning. I followed him out as Mary reached to distract Andy. Outside, I couldn’t see him, as he’d walked into the foggy mist. At the brush-covered lean- to where the cows lay, I found the goat tethered near the outside. Even she had been asked to share her space. I put my arms around her neck and felt hot tears pour out onto her musty hair. We’d waited for this day, this time, with such anticipation. All our efforts for nearly two years had been for the benefit of the colony, and it had abandoned us. Poor Christian. I didn’t know how I could comfort him. I mumbled a prayer for him, not sure if we’d moved away from God or if God had stepped away from us.

  How could we not have seen what Wilhelm saw in just a few days here? Maybe because he was a visionary, had always seen more than others. But we’d followed his directions and listened, believing God spoke to us as well. Had our souls slept while our hearts worked long hours?

  I had once seen this place as Keil did. I’d seen the troubles he wrote of but told myself, for Christian’s sake, that they could be overcome. I hated that I hadn’t stood my ground with Christian and the other scouts and insisted that we leave, that we find a landscape more hospitable to clearing, to building, to life.

  But more, I hated having anything in common with Herr Keil.

  At dusk on the afternoon of November 26, 1855, we sang the funeral dirge Herr Keil composed for his son’s burial. We followed Willie’s hearse to the gravesite on the hill, the bells of the Schellenbaum tinkling in the rain, the majority of us carrying small candles that flickered as we walked. It took the mules and men to push the heavy casket up the hill and roll it over tangled vines and small fallen logs. How they had ever brought this boy’s body all that distance, all that way, was a feat few would ever attempt, let alone achieve. Couldn’t Keil see that his very act of doing the impossible was but a forerunner for what we could do here in this bountiful place?

  With ropes, the men lowered the casket into the ground as we sang our German dirge. Then Keil spoke, our faces shadowed by the candlelight. He reminded us that light would overcome darkness; Christ’s light would shine above all. His words heartened me, spoken in German. Everyone spoke in German now. What was American, even English, was being set aside.

  But as we filed back down the hill toward the stockade, I knew we’d buried more than this boy. We buried promises, efforts, and our future.

  The Woodards joined those of us at the stockade, and then began the strangest time in Willapa that I could remember. The first nights were chaotic and close. Children cried, and the smells of their dirtied napkins permeated the air. Thank goodness for abundant moss that all the women soon used. Old men sweating and women perspiring in the damp heat added to the mixture of scents strong enough to make a pregnant woman ill. Rain dribbled in through slits in the canvas roof when we bedded down that first night with townspeople and us Germans together, with growls in our stomachs. A few people had come inland from Bruceport on the Shoalwater Bay, having been told of our isolated encampment.

  I pushed back hot tears while my husband snored into my neck, his arm across my chest. I longed for escape in his whispered words of love; I longed to feel hopeful once more. As I lay, eyes resisting sleep, I recalled Christian’s return from his walk in the mist. Since then, he’d turned inside himself, his eyes empty as the grain bucket.

  By the second night, it was decided the men would risk time in the woods in order to build another house so those staying in tents outside would have better shelter.

  I wondered how Sarah felt with this German spoken all around. She’d so often opened her home to us; we had so little to offer back.

  Bickering broke out. Hunger takes away one’s patience. People moved into tents to have time alone. Smoke from the cooking fires—with little to cook—permeated the entire area.

  The Woodards remained but a week, deciding to take their chances back at the wharf. “We can’t help you,” Sarah told me as I begged her to stay. “We add to your trials. So many of you to feed, and the rule you have about saving ammunition will only keep you hungry while there is game available.” She shook her head. “Maybe it isn’t so bad with the Indians. Maybe the military exaggerates.”

  “I’ll miss your company,” I told her.

  She patted my hand. “My husband says we’ll send peas to you and a bag of potatoes from the warehouse. We’ll pray the ships will come before long and bring the flour you ordered.”

  After a day of trying to finish another house, Christian said, “Tomorrow, you must club fish.” His voice was low, but everything was easily overheard. There was no escaping unless we went outside and stood beneath a cedar tree. Andy cried and I rocked him as we sat our backs against the logs. Herr Keil played scales on his harmonica, up and down, like a bad whistler who refuses to stop.

  “Just send Hans and John out into the woods,” I whispered. “There is plenty of meat. Keil doesn’t have to know. Why—”

  “Nein. We are not to use the ammunition. Wilhelm forbids it.”

  “Overrule him,” I said.

  “We’ll club fish. All of us, though the more we men can work in the woods, the better. So you must set the tone and get the women to help.”

  My face grew hot. It was insane, this thought of clubbing fish when we could feed ourselves well with game. What was my husband thinking? What was Herr Keil thinking?

  I shook my head, too outraged to even argue with words.

  In the morning, Christian reached for my hand. “I’ll show you how to do it,” he said. “Let Andy sleep.”

  We eased our way past sleeping bodies. Louisa, awake, followed our movements as we made our way out through the door.

  The rain had stopped, though a heavy mist sifted around the stockade. I could make out the men in the gun turret area and felt a flash of outrage that they would stand there with ammunition while we would club fish for our food.

  “Like this, watch now, Emma,” Christian said. He’d picked up an oar for each of us, then he let himself slide down the side of the bank, taking dirt with him. His feet sank into the mud, and the edge of the river filled in around him up to his calves. “Come.” He held out his hand to me.

  The water mesmerized, swiftly flowing along, carrying branches and leaves. But within its roiling it carried food for the taking. I could see the fish roll, giving up flashes of silver and blood red. I hiked my skirt up between my legs and hooked it into my apron belt, then used my oar to balance myself as I slid down the bank and sank, the wet squishiness against my moccasins, cold on my feet, my ankles. I shivered.

  Christian moved a few feet away from me so as not to hit me by accident when he struck at the fish. “See,” he pointed. And then with a loud slap and whack, he hit a dog-head salmon swimming upstream. He slammed it into the bank. “One chub,” he shouted, then unstuck himself enough to strike the fish before it flailed and tossed itself back into the water. He grabbed it by the gills, and from the effort it took to hold it up, it must have weighed what a wagon hub weighed, several pounds. “Now you.”

  What did this man think? It took all my effort to maintain my balance, standing, with the pressure of the water against my legs, let alone strike at a fish. My belly threatened to get into the way of my oar swing. Bile rose against my wishes. I spit, took a deep breath, and then whacked but only hit the water, splashing cold onto my chest and face. I struck again and again. What would my baby think, getting baptized early with splashes from the Willapa River?

  “Try to reach underneath one,” Christian said. “Use the wide end of the oar to lift and then throw the chub out.”

  I glared at him. “Why don’t you just shoot it?” I said. “Why don’t you shoot a deer or an elk? Butcher one of the oxen. This is—why are you letting him do this to you, to us?”

  “Lift it out. Hit it. Like this,” he said, sliding back down into the water. “Can’t you do anything I tell you?” He struck at the fish,
the river, sliced the oar into the water’s rush, and the silvery flesh rose from the river and soared into the air, where he struck it again and again, then tossed it up high on the bank. He returned like a madman, I thought, pushing and clubbing. I pulled away, clawed my way back up to the top of the bank. My heart pounded as I watched this man I didn’t know. The curls of his hair were matted with the rain, and bits of mud speckled his face like freckles. He walloped and whacked until he had fifteen of the fish, their tails still swishing and jerking on the bank. He slid back down into the stream, a grunt coming from him with each blow. Sweat poured off him.

  “Enough,” I shouted. “It’s enough, Christian.”

  He struck the water, even though there were no fish being lifted out. How he must ache. Despite the current and the depth, I slid back down and pushed my way over to him, touched his shoulder. He shivered.

  This was what love was then: meeting another’s need, not our own.

  “Christian,” I said. He jerked and stared at me, his eyes vacant and filled with such sadness I thought if I stared longer I’d sink away. “Christian,” I whispered to him and opened my arms. He leaned into me then, and we stood in the rush of the water while I felt more than heard my husband’s deep sobs.

  “They’ll make good eating,” I told the women. “See how we clean them.” I stabbed the head with a knife, asked Mary to hold it tight to the wood slab. Then with another knife I filleted them, cutting lengthwise from the head to the tail, then turning them over and slicing another long side, piling the bones with tiny bits of flesh left on them beneath the rough table we used. “We can make fish soup from the heads and bury the bones in the garden. My friend Sarah said not to let the dogs eat the raw flesh. It will kill them. The fish tails and bones will make everything grow better come spring.”

  “We’ll not be here to see that,” Louisa said, her arms crossed over her chest.

  I ignored her comment, kept helping the women. Mary gouged out the side of a chub, nearly cutting it in two. “It takes practice,” I told her, wiping the slimy film from the fish off my hands in the dirt.

  There were no fish left to smoke after that first meal. I tried to make light of it, that wasn’t it grand we had bounty from the water for our bellies and bounty from the forest to cover our heads. The thought of going out again in the morning sent chills down my back, but if we women killed the fish, the men would be free to build. And if they built, perhaps Wilhelm would change his mind and want to remain.

  I wanted so much for people to see the good in this place, to not question what God had provided for us. How could this not be the chosen place when each of the scouts had concurred?

  But one had defected. Now the whole colony planned to leave. I wondered if we would.

  “We’ll go out tomorrow, and we can bring back enough for two or three meals,” I told the women.

  “Should you be doing that?” Mary asked. “Might you hurt the baby?”

  I shook my head. “Christian showed me how. I’m healthy, though a little weak. But the fish will be good for us. It has fat, and if we can find a dry place to smoke, we can pound some into pemmican like we do dried venison or beef. It’ll be good for the men to have when they work so hard.”

  “It’s terribly oily,” one of the women noted as she wiped her hands on her apron. “It almost looks like wax. And they stink.” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Maybe we can burn the oil,” I said. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that before. We could put the oil into tin cups and burn it for light. Another bounty.

  That’s what I told Christian that night when he returned with thirteen other men who had been working to build another house.

  “Some bounty,” he said.

  “But it is, just as you said it was.” Even though we’d moved into a tent outside so one of the other families could sleep within walls, we spoke in low whispers. No need for everyone to hear our business.

  Christian lay silent, but I knew he didn’t sleep. “Our leader is right, Liebchen. How could I not have seen that what is here is not enough to sustain us all? I should have sent word when I realized how long it took to build one house. Or we should have looked elsewhere, maybe closer to your Steilacoom. I should have diverted them in The Dalles, given them a better choice. A good leader would have. That’s what Wilhelm is doing now, giving people a better choice.”

  “To die of starvation because he’s afraid of Indians?” I said.

  “The fish will be enough. And the ships will come in, and Sam Woodard will send word that flour is here. We’ll count on that. Until spring.”

  I thought of taking a rifle and trying to bring a deer down myself. I thought of what that act would do to my husband. I decided against it.

  After three weeks, the men had completed one more house. We did not celebrate, as I thought we should have, marking a good thing, a met goal. We didn’t even pray over the safety of the men as they’d worked in the woods and built another house within the stockade. Even the band instruments stayed silent. The children complained about the fish and potatoes, fish and potatoes, all we had to eat. The close quarters railed against our good natures, and people snapped at one another. To find privacy, we might leave one of the two houses within the stockade, but just outside were people in tents to maneuver around; others camped beneath cedar trees outside the stockade but close enough to seek cover if needed. The path to the latrines grew muddy and slick, and even the constant rain did not cleanse the stench.

  Then the fish stopped swimming upriver. We were left with potatoes and a few of the Woodards’ peas and the small amounts of milk that the cows and goat gave up. We divided all of it among the children.

  “Perhaps when the flour arrives,” Louisa said when I commented out loud inside one of the houses that it would be nice to celebrate the addition of the house, since we hadn’t celebrated much at Christmas. We hadn’t broken bread together in any special way; in fact, we had no bread to break.

  “The band played in Bethel whenever we completed a new home,” I said. “Will we not keep the same customs in our new colony?”

  “This will never be our colony,” Wilhelm said, in a rare act of speaking directly to a subject I’d raised. His voice silenced even the children. He sighed then. “Please will you write another letter, Karl?”

  Dictating letters seemed to be all Wilhelm did now that Willie was buried and several had gone south with the cattle. Now the weather appeared too inclement for Wilhelm to head south to Portland himself.

  Karl Ruge brought out paper and lead. He was such a kindly man with his graying beard and no mustache, his cheeks reddened from the wind and rain as he helped with the building. He was of an elder’s age and could have simply stayed back with Wilhelm and the women and children, teaching, one might have said. But he chose to participate in my husband’s efforts to ease the discomforts of this place. He rolled the lead across his knuckles while he awaited Wilhelm’s dictation. He winked at Andy, who watched Karl’s hands with careful eyes.

  In this latest letter sent to the Bethelites, Keil reported on how long it took us to build the house and then announced that next week he would leave for Portland to see how the rest of the colony fared. “Take your time in coming out,” he said. “Until we find the place the Lord has called us to, I wouldn’t leave my home in Bethel.”

  The Lord had called us here. How was it that one man could change that? What about the voice we heard? I started to speak, but Christian anticipated and squeezed my arm as he stood behind me. I turned to look at him, and he shook his head. Silence, he mouthed. Silence. My greatest challenge.

  Would it be so sinful to ask for help, maybe from people at the coast town of Bruceport, I wondered. They might have flour we could buy now. Keil wouldn’t let us, I supposed. He was the keel, the wedge in this ship.

  I dreamed that night of water, of Wilhelm taking me on a small boat across the Shoalwater Bay to the Wallacut River, then upriver on the Columbia and into Portland. At least that had
been his plan. I ate from the leg of a deer in my dream but didn’t swallow it. My hunger continued. Then the ship capsized in the bay, and I couldn’t reach Wilhelm; I was too frightened to throw him a rope, too frightened to help him, and so he had drowned.

  I woke up with a start, my heart pounding. What kind of mind did I have, dreaming of the death of Keil? Christian patted my arm. “Water,” I said. “I dreamed of swirling water.”

  I shivered and felt wet. My whole mat was wet. I looked up. No leaks. And then I knew: my water had broken. My second child pressed its way into this chaotic world.

  28

  It Is Finished

  “Get Mary,” I told Christian. “My baby comes.”

  “I’m already here,” Louisa said. She’d slipped into the corner of the Giesy House that now belonged to everyone. “Let’s not bother Mary or alarm her. In case something goes wrong.”

  “Something goes wrong?” I croaked. Why bring in the ghost of suffering at such a time like this? “I’ve been through this,” I said, firm. “Maybe I don’t even need a midwife. Christian will help me.”

  “Ach, it’s no job for a man. He has things to do, don’t you, Chris?” She shooed her arms at him as though he was the goat. “Don’t be selfish and risk your baby,” Louisa said, patting my arm. “We women must suffer the pangs of childbirth together. Leave now, Christian.”

  “I missed Andrew being born,” he said.

  “Men usually do,” she said. “Well, then. If we need you, we’ll send someone.” She pushed him aside.

  I wanted him to stay, to resist the push and pull of others, but he stepped away. Louisa hung a quilt for privacy, which I later appreciated when the waves rose and ebbed through my body, carrying me up and over the pain. I didn’t cry out, though, at least not that I remembered. Muffled conversations of others in the house drifted to me as did the smell of the cooking, the crying of a child. I tasted sweat on my upper lip and welcomed the wet cloth Louisa placed on my forehead as I waited for the next cry of my child’s journey into life.