A Clearing in the Wild

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “Perhaps we are the lost.” I cried now, the words suffering through sobs. “Maybe we are the ones who need someone to reach out to us. Maybe what Wilhelm preaches isn’t all that we’re to understand. Perhaps this is the very place we were led to, so we could discover Him for ourselves before we attempt to tell others how He is.”

  “Stop now,” Christian said. “It’s no good, Emma. No good. It is finished.” Christian took me in his arms and held me. His tears on my cheeks mingled with my own.

  29

  No Salve, Save Love

  Word reached us of the death of Jacob Keil, Wilhelm’s brother, and then of Fredricka and Benjamin, in an Indian massacre near Skamania on the Columbia. Not three months of marriage living outside the colony, and Fredricka and Benjamin’s lives were over. So there had been Indian attacks in the world around us, but we’d been safe in our Giesy stockade.

  I thought of our colony in Bethel, how it had been insulated from the world around it, but not for long. We needed that outside world, too, in order to survive. Nonbelievers bought our furniture and wagons, our whiskey and quilts. It was an intricate task blending isolation with protection, melding worldliness with spiritual calm, and Wilhelm must have done it well in the beginning to have so many remain with him for so long.

  Or perhaps it was his talk of our deaths that kept us looking into his eyes, finding solace and obedience in his fold.

  Had we spent so much time only with one another that young souls like Fredricka and her husband had no skills to make it in that outside world? These were questions I wanted to talk about with Christian but couldn’t. I watched him suffer hopelessness, feeling that he had no meaning now, his inability to forgive himself, and worse, how separated he was from those who loved him. These were wounds as deep as if he’d sliced himself with a butchering knife, and I had no salve—save love—to offer to heal the wound.

  Christian said what brought us together in the beginning was our wish to be in service, to treat one another with the Golden and the Diamond Rules. I wanted to make Christian’s life better than my own, but I couldn’t.

  He’d committed to taking Wilhelm back to Portland.

  A ship arrived, bringing us many sacks of grain. It was the same ship Christian and Wilhelm would leave for Portland on. We baked bread and packed it into the trunks of those heading into Oregon Territory. Christian suggested we prepare to leave too, but Wilhelm hedged. “You’ve endured this long. A few months more vill make no difference to you, ja, Chris? Until the site is ready, Louisa and I will rent a place in Portland, and when ve find the colony is ready, ve send for you. It’s unfortunate, this kind of … separation,” he said. “A better site would have prevented these adjustments needed now. Ja, that’s so, Chris?” My husband nodded his head as Keil patted his back. It didn’t look like brotherly love.

  I seethed for my husband. Wilhelm didn’t even want us with him while we waited. He treated us like children sent to the back of the room for our misbehavior while everyone else played outside. We’d been asked to wait until Herr Keil determined the perfect place … when we were already there. I could hardly stand it.

  “We won’t leave now either, then,” Andreas, Christian’s father, said. “No reason to find yet another place to wait while Wilhelm seeks out a new site.” Sebastian Giesy nodded agreement. So at least I’d have company waiting. I smiled at that wish, when once I’d only wanted to be left alone.

  “The rest of us will travel together for safety,” Wilhelm said. “It was good we saved ammunition.”

  I wondered if Christian would decide that protecting Wilhelm would still be reason to go to Portland with him now when his parents said they’d wait in Willapa. Or would he think risking us, Andy and the baby and me, on this trip south might not be wise?

  “You stay with my parents, here, Emma. You and the children.”

  “No. I’m sorry that I am always saying no to you, husband, but we need you here if we’re here. Wilhelm does not ask his wife to remain away from him while he waits for their new home to be readied.”

  “I’ll come back for you. I need to do this, Emma. It is the least that I can do for Wilhelm, considering.” He gave me the look that said he’d bear no more dissent from me, so I waited until evening and asked him to walk with me to the far corner of the stockade area. Willie’s grave overlooked us from the hill beyond. I carried Catherina in the board on my back, and Andy chased field mice before us. Dogs fought over a deer antler shed the previous winter that lay among needles and leaves. They growled and barked in the distance, and I wrapped my shawl around me against the evening chill. We hadn’t had rain all day. White trillium bloomed on the forest floor. A spider busied itself with a web against the cedar’s bark.

  “Don’t you see?” I said. “Wilhelm could go alone and let everyone wait here now that we have grain. No one needs to be uprooted while he finds the perfect place. But the truth is, he will take a group with him, and then while he waits in Portland, he’ll disrupt them again, send others out as he did the scouts while he waits in luxury until they’ve built his gross Haus, his grand house,” I said, repeating it in English.

  “I doubt there are many grand houses for rent in Portland,” Christian said.

  “He isn’t thinking about the colony’s needs, not now. He’s thinking of his own. He talks about his sacrifice with the death of Willie, but it was he who said we should leave Bethel, leave the simple yet contented lives we had there. He bears no responsibility for the hardships we’ve endured for the sake of the colony. He might accept your protection while he travels south, but he doesn’t need to travel at all, and he doesn’t seem all that concerned for those of us left here.”

  “It’s a terrible thing to lose a child.”

  “It is! But Willie died in Bethel, not as a result of his sacrifice to come here. And think of what the colonists endured traveling with that hearse. That journey was made harder because of Wilhelm’s … tending. He didn’t think anything of the challenges others faced because of his orders. And now he will take us away from what we believed was God’s calling for the colony and for us. Can this be right, husband?”

  Andy chased a dog and rolled with the puppy belonging to one of the arrivals of Klein’s train. Christian dug in his ear, so I knew he was thinking. “I know you didn’t come here to please yourself, Christian. You came because of what you believed was good for all of us. That’s true leadership, it is. Being faithful to your beliefs for the good of everyone.”

  “Indeed.” He sighed. “I’ll be back, and then we’ll make our way together to the new colony. My father will look after you until then.”

  “You see? You think of us, of who remains behind. He doesn’t. He thinks only of himself.”

  Christian shook his head. That pain of helplessness settled in the lines of his eyes. “That’s not true, Emma. He’s a good man, has always been so. This is … this is an unusual time. New nails have been pounded into his life, and like us, they stand out a little. This is something I can do, to help now. I need to do that.” I pouted, I knew. “What we did here, Emma, is done.”

  My husband was falling into Wilhelm’s way. Soon he’d want me to walk behind him on that path again. I could do that, and would, if it kept Christian from seeing himself as a failure, this place only as a sign of lost dreams, just a memory of a clearing he once made in the wild. “If Wilhelm was a true follower of our Lord,” I said, “he’d be preparing other leaders now to take his place. He’d begin to trust others and not only his own visions. I thought he’d chosen you, but he won’t relinquish control. But you would. You’re the better leader, Christian.”

  “You say this because you want your own way, Emma.”

  His words stung, but I let them sink in to find their truth before I answered. “We are all entitled to want things to go well with us. That’s not un-Christian. But what I want most of all is for you to believe in what you’re doing. I confess I don’t hold Wilhelm in the esteem you do, so you’re right to sift th
rough what I say about him. Nothing he’s done since he arrived has made me trust him more. If you go with him, I’ll follow you, Christian. But I want to follow the husband who saw the possibilities here, not the man who walks with the slumped shoulders of defeat. You changed my mind, husband; now I want to change yours.”

  What do men do while they wait? They whittle. They plow. They build. They talk of the future. At least that’s what Christian’s brothers and parents did, working together to finish a roof or push with their adzes to smooth a wooden doorway. They considered gristmill sites as though they might stay on here along the Willapa River. The plow my in-laws brought on their ship turned soil. They planted oats, as Christian’s father thought it had a better chance than wheat of maturing in the cool climate. I wondered why they bothered when it was clear Christian accepted Wilhelm’s decision that the Willapa Valley was a mistake. He intended to follow Herr Keil to wherever it was he might go. Christian even traveled with him, left us here to … wait. There’d be no one to harvest the oats.

  At least we had food now, with the shipment of grain and Wilhelm no longer limiting the use of ammunition. Hans stayed with us, and so did his father, who had arrived with Keil and Christian and the hearse. All the scouts were accounted for now except Joseph Knight. For the rest of us, we simply waited for the perfect place to go to, the one Wilhelm would find for us. Except for me.

  Louisa’s last words before they left stayed with me. “We women are asked to support our husbands,” she said. “Even when it may not be the best decisions that they make.”

  “Are you talking about our living on fish all winter while your husband prevented us from hunting?”

  She straightened her shoulders. “That too.” She tickled Catherina’s chin, and my daughter jerked in my arms, flailing to reach out to Louisa. “She reminds me of Aurora at that age, all eyes and mouth, so ready for living.” I nodded. Louisa talks as though we might be … equals, even friends. She reached for my daughter, who went willingly to her. “I referred to our coming here and then leaving here,” she said. “I can see why your husband chose this place and how you found contentment here.”

  “You see contentment?” That wasn’t a word I would use to describe my current state, but I had found gratitude here. Peacefulness did come floating to me when I walked the prairie, when I huddled in the trees to think, when Mary and her family arrived with the Klein train, when we’d worked together to bring in our meager grain, when Catherina had been born healthy and strong. A double rainbow colored the sky.

  She continued. “I would be content to stay here, to walk daily to my son’s grave. I’ll miss not being able to do that. And here,” she looked up at me, paused. “Here, the weight of decisions would not lie only on my husband’s shoulders but on all the men’s, especially your husband’s shoulders. It would relieve my husband of much strain.” Her dark coal eyes stared into mine. “When things did not go well here, my husband wouldn’t need to bear all the weight. There is something good in that.”

  Louisa knelt and fussed at the mud caked on Aurora’s skirt. All I could see was the white scalp that lined the part in her graying hair. “It is a sadness that either of them bears it,” she said. “They follow our Lord, and yet they refuse to let Him carry their burdens.”

  I’d never heard Louisa express such thoughts, nor any colony woman for that matter. Did she question her husband’s choices? Yet she followed him.

  It didn’t have to be that way for me, for us. Why should Christian bear the responsibility for this failed venture? It was only a failure if we defined it so, not because our Lord did. It was another part of a journey, not something so disastrous nothing good could come from it.

  “Maybe we refuse to let Him carry our burdens too,” I said. She nodded, and it came to me that if this landscape was truly what we’d been led to, there had to be a way to make our being here successful despite Wilhelm’s pronouncement about it. I didn’t know how that could be, but for the first time since my husband said we’d be leaving, I felt light as the orange butterfly that landed only for a moment on Louisa’s shoulder.

  Sarah had asked for goat’s milk in exchange for eggs, and I carried it to her with Catherina on my back. With Andy in Mary’s good hands back at the stockade, I made my way through the spring forest to the landing, walking the nearly dried-up path beside the Willapa. There had to be something we could do here, something that might intrigue Christian enough to make him remain. It had to be a new thought, a new way. I remembered hearing of the Rappist Colony back in Pennsylvania discovering silkworms as a way to contribute to colony funds. Maybe mulberry trees would grow here, and we could become a western silk-growing group. In Bethel, it was furniture-building and wagon-making and Golden Rule Whiskey that brought in money to serve the colony. Those needed people to purchase them, and as Wilhelm noted, we had few people here able to do that.

  If the whole colony couldn’t be supported in this valley, perhaps a small portion could. That smaller group could contribute to the larger group wherever we ended up. No, wherever they might end up. Wilhelm saw our success here as a challenge to him; that’s why he twisted my husband into the ground beneath his boots like the remains of old tobacco. I couldn’t stand by and let that happen.

  If Christian moved us south, if we followed Wilhelm, my husband would forever carry the stigma of failure. A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps. I had to trust that proverb.

  I reached Woodard’s Landing, and Sarah motioned for us to sit. She lifted Catherina in her cradle board and braced her upward at the corner of her chair. I was tired and not expecting answers to the voiceless prayers lifted while I walked. Show me the way. Show me the way.

  A warm fire crackled in the fireplace, and beside Sarah on the rough plank table laid an open book. Shakespeare, a word I sounded out in English. Karl Ruge had such a set of books that he’d brought with him, and through the waiting months stuffed together in the stockade houses, he often read to us using different voices for all the parts. We’d scoffed when he said all the roles had once been played by men. Wilhelm snubbed books and said there was no book but the Bible with anything to offer. Still, he listened when Karl read.

  “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Sarah said when I picked up the book. It smelled musty and damp, but most things did here.

  “What makes the wives merry?”

  “I’m not sure,” Sarah said. “He talks about oysters, so it’s fitting for this Willapa place.” She laughed, then quoted, “ ‘Why, then the world’s mine oyster / Which I with sword will open.’ I think it will have a happy ending.”

  “Oysters are so hard to open he needs a sword?” I said. I’d eaten one or two oysters at Woodards’. Christian had opened the shell, then dug around and removed the meat. He opened his mouth, and the slimy white strip slipped down his throat. We’d boiled the remainder, as the oysters didn’t easily give themselves up from their safe little shells. I found them tasty but not particularly filling.

  “I think it means the world is rich and wonderful and can be tasted like a good oyster, and the character in the play plans to do that with his power, his might. The Californians must think a little like that. They order so many oysters and pay so much for them.”

  “This is part of Shakespeare’s writing?”

  She shook her head. “Our oysters here are as good as those anywhere in the world—even from the Orient, my husband says. I always thought it amazing that right in the middle of those ugly-looking oysters grow pearls. They grow out of irritations, things that don’t belong, and yet they make themselves a part of the oyster. I like those little treasures in a story.”

  I thought of my mother’s pearls. I had no idea they came from the misshapen, craggy shells called oysters, oysters that grew just downstream.

  “Our Willapa oysters don’t offer up lovely pearls,” Sarah told me. “They’re dull in color and uneven. Not nice and round. But they’re pretty to me.” She pulled a slender strand up over
her collar. “See? They’re not perfect but each is unique. Each one individual. I like that better than the perfect ones that I’ve seen that all look alike.”

  Unique. Formed out of irritation. I asked her to tell me more.

  “They grow them in beds, like farmers do their wheat,” she continued. She unwound Catherina from her board and held her firmly at her shoulder, patting her back as she talked. “Only in ocean water and in the tide flats. It takes a hardy soul to be an oysterman, someone who can work in the wet and up to their knees in mud or out on the skiffs, yanking and raking up clusters of shells, and yet can wait. They have to keep guard against predators, just like farmers have to keep birds from their fields. That’s what my husband says.”

  What kind of predator would harm an oyster? Their shells looked like long tongues with bumps, and if what Sarah said was right, they were impossible to get inside of without a knife or some large rock to break them open. What could harm something so hard and well defended?

  “People rob oyster beds,” she said. “And there are green things in the ocean that can kill them. Things you’d never expect. They have to be tended. Everything has something wanting to destroy it.

  “Only the faithful watchman can prevent it,” I said.

  Sarah nodded. “In San Francisco restaurants and saloons, raw oysters sell for one dollar apiece on the half shell. Same as what an egg costs there. Gold miners think nothing of celebrating their new wealth with extravagant dinners that always include fresh raw oysters.”

  Was it really just like farming? We Bethelites knew about farming. Perhaps the Willapa Colony could remain here yet. We could earn our way to repay what Wilhelm had invested in us. Our market didn’t need to live close to us; we could ship our wares. Willapa could become the world that was “mine oyster” for those who chose to stay in the place the scouts had staked out. We’d simply have to learn something new from this Edenlike place.