Steal the North: A Novel

by Heather B Bergstrom

  I imagine Kate’s hair is what first attracted Jamie Kagen to her that summer at camp. There’s not a lot of sunshine west of the Cascades, but there’s a certain light, the kind right before a storm or right after, that also set Kate’s hair ablaze. Matt thinks Kate lost her faith after camp when Jamie shunned her, but faith was never easy for my sister. It kept her awake at night when we were kids. During the day she dragged it around, as she did the awful memories surrounding our mother’s death. Without my faith I couldn’t get out of bed after each miscarriage. I quit teaching Sunday school years ago. Not out of bitterness—I refuse to drink from that cup—but because of the deep longing the small hands of the children brought out in me. Not just longing for a child of my own but for my niece, Emmy, whom Matt and I cared for every day for seven months before Kate left town with her.

  Kate had to leave Washington. In truth, I knew that before she did. But sisters can share a baby in such a way. It’s not that Emmy loved me more than her mom, but almost as much. After all, it was my voice that lulled her to sleep most nights and Matt or I who brought her warm bottles of milk. Poor Kate would see Jamie in Emmy. I tried to convince her that Emmy got her fair-colored hair from me. We’d nap sometimes, the three of us girls, all on one bed, the baby between. It hurt Kate’s feelings when Emmy reached for me first after opening her sleepy little eyes.

  I suffered my first miscarriage soon after Kate and Emmy left.

  Not wanting to replace Emmy so soon, I was almost relieved. She had this way of looking at me, of pausing in the middle of cooing or crying, and staring intently at me. Perhaps she sensed our time together would be cut bluntly short, like her mother’s hair, and she wanted to suspend it. My breath still catches when I remember those moments.

  My second miscarriage was probably the hardest. It signaled the first wasn’t a fluke and that God had a different plan for me. I wasn’t to rush to the church nursery after service with the other young moms to collect my bundle and then show it off to the older ladies. I was to serve refreshments, straighten hymnals, rinse drops of grape juice from communion glasses as I rinsed the drops of blood from my sheets and the carpet. For a few years, at the special Mother’s Day service, having neither mother nor child, I handed out the corsages, until Matt put a stop to that, saying it broke his heart. He pleaded with me to see a doctor behind the church’s back. He’d take a day off work and drive me to Wenatchee or Spokane. He’s probably the only deacon who finds some of the church’s rules archaic, even barbaric. But we’re to put our trust in God, not man. Matt wasn’t raised in a Christian home. “God helps those who help themselves,” he persisted.

  “I won’t go against the church.”

  “You did before, Beth. We did. For Kate. For us. We did the right thing.”

  I’ve never regretted what we did for Kate. And certainly I’ve never regretted marrying Matt, even if I was only sixteen and he only a year older. We were both ready. My father didn’t give his blessing, but neither did he try to prevent the marriage. The church chastised me for helping Kate, but my father never did. He continued to shun Kate until she left. He never met his only grandchild. For years he refused to talk about Kate. As time passed, however, he started to inquire, casually, then with concern, then desperation, if I’d heard from my sister and if I knew how the baby was doing. He died of a massive heart attack. One day he was alive—I phoned to tell him I’d finished his mending and that Matt had some venison for him—and the next day he was dead.

  After my third miscarriage, Matt and I fought for weeks over his setting up a doctor’s appointment to get a vasectomy. It’s the only time we’ve truly quarreled. He even stayed home from church two Sundays in a row: the first to tie flies at the table, an activity he usually saves for winter evenings, and the second to fish with his new “backslidden flies.” That’s when I took up herbs to help myself. I make natural remedies from plants I grow in my own garden. For the most part, I do so without the church’s knowing the extent. I’ve been likened to a witch with potions. The new preacher, Brother Mathias—he likes us to call him brother, though he’s our shepherd—was so taken with my garden the first time he saw it that he entreated me to plant him a small herb garden between the church and the parsonage. As a single man who cooks his own meals, except when the church widows bring him casseroles, he can use the added flavor. “You’re no more a witch, Sister Bethany,” he declared when I disclosed to him the rumors, “than I am the devil.”

  * * *

  The first time Kate called our father the devil, she and I were alone in the backseat of the car. I was seven and scared. My memories of that evening are like a grainy snapshot. I remember it was Sunday and summertime. I remember foolishly thinking our family was going on a picnic, even though Mother hadn’t left the house for months. Women from church had been coming to feed her broth and to read her passages from the Bible. Suddenly the whole family was getting into the car. Father had to carry Mother because her feet curled inward. She moaned. It was hot, but he covered her with a quilt. Father said we were going to a lake, and he wouldn’t answer Kate when she asked which one.

  He drove us north toward Grand Coulee Dam and its reservoirs. The highway followed the base of a giant basalt cliff. Terrified of large bodies of water as a kid, I knew the farther north we traveled, the deeper and colder the lakes got. Even when instructed to stay dry, Kate waded into any lake or stream. I was almost asleep when I felt the car slow and heard the crunch of gravel under the tires. I didn’t immediately recognize the lake. Then I saw the suds along the shoreline and the almost black mud. It was the Indian lake. The church forbade its members to swim in this mineral lake because Indians had supposedly cured their horses and warriors in it years ago. An Indian legend claimed that Coyote, the pagan animal chief and “creator,” had defecated in the lake—where had I heard that?—giving it restorative powers. Now white people came from across the state to soak in the soapy water or to smear the mud on their naked bodies and pray to the devil. I feared the worse.

  Shutting off the engine, Father said, “We’ll wait in the car until the beach clears out.” There were about a dozen people around. One fat man in just a pair of shorts had mud smeared all over him. He smiled in our direction. “Unroll the windows back there,” Father instructed. But if I did, evil spirits would surely enter the car.

  “I’m afraid,” I said.

  “Of what?” Kate asked. She told me to unroll my window before I suffocated.

  “The lake is evil.”

  “A lake can’t be evil,” she said. “I’m getting out.” She started to open her door.

  “Sit back, child,” Father said sternly. Then Mother, who’d been asleep, or just in a stupor, tried to say something but choked. She coughed violently, and Kate slipped out of the car, heading toward the swings and the twisty slide. Mother kept coughing and moaning and, I think, unless I remember wrong, begging for it all to be over. How I wanted to get out of the car and join Kate on the playground, not be so near Mother, whose face drooped and whose breath was stale. But terror pinned me in place. Kate swung high in the air, so high no evil spirit could snatch her. I remember a wooden sign hanging between two posts that read HEALING WATERS, swaying as the wind picked up and the ripples on the lake’s surface turned white. The spirits were churning it.

  “I want to go home, Daddy,” I pleaded.

  He spoke more gently to me when Kate wasn’t around. “Lie down and take a nap.”

  Something about the inside of a car made me sleepy. So I did as he said, hoping when I woke back up, we’d be home. The sky was tinged pink when I sat bolt upright. Kate was beside me, but our parents were gone from the front seat. “Where are they?” I asked. Kate pointed to the beach, which was now deserted. The wind pushed the empty swings, and the sign squeaked. “Where’d they go?” I started to panic. I may have even screamed.

  Kate explained that Father had taken Mother to soak in the lake, to try to h
eal her without the church elders. “We’re supposed to be praying,” she said.

  “Dear Heavenly Father—”

  “You pray. I’m going to go check on Mom.”

  She started to get out of the car.

  “No, Kate. No, Kate. Don’t leave me, Kate!”

  I remember her pausing, as if trying to decide between Mother and me, and I remember feeling the whole of my life depended on her decision, and maybe it did in some ways. She shut the door behind her. I rolled up all the windows and locked the doors.

  If only I’d been brave enough to follow her.

  Whatever my sister saw, and she never told me, left her shaking with rage and revulsion when she got back into the car, hair dripping wet, mud smeared on her face and arms. “He’s the devil—the devil!”

  Mother died a week later with traces of the black mud still under her fingernails.

  * * *

  I keep my fingernails clipped short and soak my hands in herbal tonic water. I tried to wear gloves when I first began gardening, but herbs are delicate, and I like to feel the different textures of the stems and leaves. My touch helps the plants grow. I started with just a few potted herbs I found in Kmart’s gardening section: lavender for calm and balance and rosemary for stimulation. Even the mighty King David pleaded, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.” I soon added chives, sage, mint, basil, oregano, thyme. Driving to out-of-town nurseries made me feel a little like the virtuous woman in Proverbs 31 who “bringeth her food from afar.” Chamomile for heart palpitations. Ginger for tiredness. Black cohosh. I ordered seed catalogs. Hyssop as a blood purifier. Sweet marjoram to ease menstruation. Nettles. Calendula. The list goes on. Afternoon sunlight is best for herbs this far north, but because eastern Washington gets so warm, I rotate my pots daily in the summer. There’s not a lot of space for a garden between lots in Quail Run Mobile Home Park. I have two raised beds and shelves of pots, plastic buckets, coffee cans. Matt built me a pea gravel walkway and bought me a small stone bench. Sometimes I pretend Kate, her hair glowing, sits on the bench and watches me garden. I think she’d be proud of my handiwork. Instead of Kate, the neighbor lady, an Indian from the Colville Reservation, stares at me through her curtainless kitchen window.

  As a member of the church I’m not permitted to buy secular books or to check them out from the library, so my knowledge about herbs remains limited. I have to rely on intuition, which may not be a bad thing. Over the years I’ve managed to read a few pamphlet-size books while standing in grocery store checkout lanes: The Power of Healing Herbs and Aromatherapy for Housewives. I used to simply dry my herbs, hang them in bundles. I made lots of teas. Now I also make essential oils, which take a lot of time but are well worth it. Matt drove me to Spokane to buy a distiller and dozens of miniature glass bottles in amber and cobalt blue. Sunlight dispels the oil if it is stored in clear bottles. Our pantry is halfway full of my oils and apparatuses. Besides medicines, I make bath salts, face creams, hand lotions, massage oils, as well as teas and cooking spice packets. I sometimes give them as gifts to the ladies at church.

  I haven’t yet been able to stop my miscarriages. The last time I conceived—it’s been awhile now—I didn’t tell Matt. When I lost the baby, I think he suspected. But he didn’t ask. I’ve never lied outright to my husband.

  I hope I’m not being deceitful by meeting in confidence with Brother Mathias today in his office at church. I help at the church half a day on Tuesdays and all day on Fridays: cleaning, typing the weekly bulletins, organizing the missionary supply closet, gardening, running errands, anything that needs to be done. I fellowship plenty with Brother Mathias on these days. He even has me help choose hymns for services. Sometimes he asks me to play the hymns for him on the church piano. I prefer the Sunday school piano in the basement because it used to be my mother’s. After Father died, I loaned it to the church since there’s no room for a piano in our singlewide trailer. Brother Mathias insists I’m a better player than Sister Dorothy, who has slowed with age, and her unmarried daughter, who pounds the keys.

  I knock on his office. “Come in, Sister Bethany.” I open the door. “I recognized your knock.” He gets up from his desk. “Please, come in. Shut the door.” We usually leave it open, but this is a confidential meeting.

  He seems as nervous as I do, offering me a seat. Matt has teased before that Brother Mathias seems smitten with me. But that’s ridiculous. He has a deep respect for Matt and me as a couple. He’s mentioned more than once that Matt and I remind him of Priscilla and Aquila, a childless couple in the Bible who befriended and aided the apostle Paul with his ministry. Matt and I are close to Mathias’s age. I’m thirty-three and Matt is thirty-four. Brother Mathias is twenty-nine and from the South. He grew up with lots of sisters and is friendly and gentlemanly. Different from men in the West. Not as reserved or stone-faced. “Or masculine,” Matt commented once. More than once.

  I notice the lavender sprigs on his desk.

  “From your garden,” he says. He means the garden I started for him. “Freshly cut.”

  After he prays, I confess that over the course of sixteen years, I’ve had numerous miscarriages. I tell him I’m embarrassed to say how many, but I do. He looks pained and rubs his forehead. I tell him there isn’t a single example in the Bible of a barren woman of prayer who doesn’t finally become a mother. For the first time I confess to anyone that my longing for a baby consumes me. In part, because I haven’t lost faith that my Redeemer will hear my cries. There’s a box of tissues on his desk, but he offers me his hankie. I tell him I’m pregnant again. It’s been nearly two years. “It’s my last chance. A woman knows.”

  He walks around his desk and sits in the chair next to me. “Bethany,” he practically whispers, “I knew you were burdened.”

  “Who told you?” Maybe my husband already set up a special appointment with Brother Mathias. It doesn’t seem like Matt. But he is weary of my pining for a baby. He wants to adopt. He wants to buy land. He wants us to move on, maybe move away.

  “‘For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail,’” Brother Mathias quotes. “‘The voice of a daughter of Zion.’”

  He doesn’t try to hide his tears, as Matt always does.

  “I heard your voice,” he says. “It summoned me west.” His countenance is still troubled, but relief flickers in his eyes. “My father, a minister himself, didn’t understand why I was moving so far away from him. I told him I heard a voice.”

  I am speechless and feel more enraptured than during his most passionate sermons.

  He continues. “My father feared the voice I heard was just the restlessness of my own spirit. But it wasn’t.” He pauses, then says with the deep conviction and humility, “Some are called by thousands, others by just one. You are my one, Sister Bethany.”

  * * *

  “Sister Bethany,” Matt says when I wake him up with a kiss. He calls me that only when joking around in bed or when he feels disgruntled toward the church. He’s a field mechanic for Basin Irrigation. He had a long day yesterday with a cranky farmer and a thrice-broken pump, so I insisted he sleep in a bit. I kiss him again. “Rise and shine. You’re taking me on a picnic.”

  “I am?”

  “I made chicken, potato salad, and your favorite, apple cake.” I plan to tell him the good news that I’m pregnant.

  “So, in other words, you’re taking me.” He sits up. “Can I bring a fishing pole?”

  “If you bring one for me too.”

  I used to go fishing with Matt more than I do now. In fact, we even took baby Emmy fishing a few times. Those were the best trips. I still ride along when he goes pheasant hunting. I embroider in the cab of his truck, waiting for him to return across the open fields with a bird or two in his bag. When he hunts deer or elk with his brother, they dress the animals at his brother’s because we don’t have room. They soak the meat there, and Matt stores our porti
on in one of his brother’s game freezers. He smokes his fish at his parents’ place. Sometimes I go over there with him. He keeps his boat at his parents’, in one of the large sheds, where he also stores his waders, float tubes, most of his poles, his old dirt bike and snowmobile, along with countless tools, old and new. Soon we’ll buy a larger place of our own with a shop and property. We’ve saved for years, just waiting for the first baby. We planned to have a big family by now.

  “Children,” the book of Psalms says, “are an heritage of the Lord.”

  Brother Mathias, after taking time to pray and fast, agreed to perform a public faith healing for me. I’m usually a private person, but sometimes I think I’d do anything for a baby that didn’t involve disobeying or denying God. Brother Mathias tried to say all he can do is bless my womb because he doesn’t have the gift of healing that the Lord bestows on just a chosen few. I assured him I sensed it in him, and I do. Still, he said we should call it a laying on of hands. He’ll ask the congregation to participate. For years the church elders have opted for small, closed-door healings and anointings, so Mathias has to convince them, and I have to persuade Matt. I feel guilty having told another person I’m pregnant before telling my husband. He’ll surely be hurt by this, and the longer I wait, the worse.