A Clearing in the Wild (12 page)

“So. We talk again,
Frau
Giesy,” our leader said. He wore his long coat for the occasion, but he bent to work at his plants, mortar and pestle in hand. He hadn’t motioned me to sit, so I came to stand across from him at the high table. Dried plants lay like corpses between us. “You have news to share with me?” he said. “I hear you share news with many.”

I swallowed. “No, no news.”

“
Ja
, you tell our new families it would be better to live elsewhere than at Bethel.”

“I only discussed what people already spoke of,” I defended, “after one of the Kentucky families left. I didn’t know them and had nothing to do with their leaving.”

“You want to leave yourself,
Frau
Giesy?” He raised both bushy eyebrows at me. He reminded me of a horned toad.

“I go where my husband goes,” I said. “ ‘Whither thou goest, I will go.’ I’m a faithful wife.”

His voice softened. “Ruth of the Scriptures went with her mother-in-law, not her husband, Emma. Those are a widow’s words you speak.”

“I fear I might become a widow,” I said, “should something happen to Christian on this journey west.”

“Ah. You are fearful. This is why you ask to speak to me.” He motioned for me to take a chair, and then he put away his plant musings and pulled a chair up before me. Not the inquisition format, but one of a father to a child. He acted the kindly
Belsnickel
who granted gifts at Christmas. He was the “Father Keil” my own father referred to, someone loving who cared for each of us as though we were his own. So many loved this man. Why was I so suspicious? “Tell me what is on your mind.”

“I … I think it would be good for Christian, my husband, if I went with him on this journey west.”

He raised his eyebrows again, assessing me as though I were an object in the distance he wasn’t sure was friend or foe. “This is not even worth considering,” he said then and started to rise.

“No, wait. Please, just entertain the possibility,” I said. “You always tell us to think creatively, to use our God-given abilities to solve a problem. Remember when you came up with the plan to make a drill to go through the pine logs so they could act as pipes with seams tarred tight? No one had ever done such a thing before.”

“It was ingenious, that plan for the fields.”

“Yes. So just consider my going along. Please.”

He took it as a puzzle, I think, a small challenge from a mosquito buzzing at his ear. “Vell, then. You’d slow them down, I think. This is one reason you cannot go.”

“I’d cook their meals. It would free them to make better time.”

“You’d tire and they would have to stop for you. You’re tiny, Emma. Now your sister Catherine is a big girl—”

“I’ve never been ill, not once. I know remedies, too, so if one of them became ill, I could minister to them. Perhaps even help others we meet along the trail. Wouldn’t this extend our Christian love, our Golden Rule, to serve strangers we find in need? We could even tell them of our mission. They might wish to join us. A woman’s presence would suggest family, safety.”

“
Our
mission,” he said. “You assume much,
Frau
Giesy.”

“Only that we are all communal here, so it is our mission whether we go or stay.”

He stared at me. “The separation will make you grow fonder of each other, you and Christian, so your hearts will be fuller when you meet again.”

“As it did this past year,” I said. I paused. “You may be right. Our love just grows stronger as we’re apart. Perhaps we should be separated and never discover each other’s faults. We will always be on a bridal trip.”

He considered that, tapped his finger against his thigh. “Where there are women, there is dissension. How would you explain away this fact, should you go with the scouts?”

“There’d be only one woman.”

“And what of the others? What if all the spies wish to bring their wives or sisters or mothers, someone to take care of them, because you are going?”

“Have they brought this to you? No? Then it is safe to say they have no interest in traveling with their men. I do. My husband has been taken from me—sent out in service, I mean—for more months of our marriage than not. I miss him, Father Keil.”

“What does Christian say of this?”

“He thinks you would not approve.” I ignored the fact that Christian also thought it wasn’t wise and that I was not to bring the subject up, ever. “But you know he wants a family and while he is your age, Father Keil, he is well behind you with your nine loving sons and daughters. How will we populate the new colony if not with the children of your loyal followers?”

He adjusted his glasses. “We will populate it by taking more than two hundred people from Bethel with us when the site is found out west and by gathering new followers to our way.”

He had that finality to his tone, and I could feel myself losing him to some prepared text. I’d have to put my last ladle into the dutch oven.

“How am I ever to experience what God wants of my womanhood if my husband is never with me?” I wailed it almost. “It’s what you said God required of a woman, to conceive so she can know such pain as to be reminded of her sins and save her soul.”

“You remember our discussion, then, that you were meant to bear the turmoil as penance for Eve’s sin?”

“Yes,” I said. “You are wise, Father Keil.” I bit my lip against the bile I felt rising in my stomach for my demure demeanor when what I wanted to do was shout.

“Perhaps you have learned something in these past months. I’ll think about this,” he said. “Then let Christian know.”

“NO
, no!” I grabbed at his arm as he stood. “If your answer is no, please don’t tell him I’ve come to you. Please. He’ll be distressed that I’ve disobeyed him.”

“He told you not to come here?”

“He told me not to even think about going with him. He never dreamed that I’d bother you with my concerns.”

He pursed his lips, pressed his palms against his thighs, elbows out, and held them that way.

“Perhaps I erred in preventing you from knowing all that a woman’s lot entails. Perhaps Christian needs to understand why I could not bless your marriage.” He stood, paced back and forth, hands clasped behind his back. I sat still as one of his discarded stems. Then he said, “I
will
send you out with them. You will have the chance to bear him a child, though such a hard journey might cause you to … but both of you believed you were meant to be together. Now you will have the chance to know for certain.”

Would Christian blame me for my manipulation? Or would he celebrate that we now had what we both wanted with the direction, if not blessing, of our leader?

“I wouldn’t consider it if Wilhelm hadn’t suggested it himself,”
Christian said when we lay in bed that night. Our leader had called him into Elim, he told me, and with the others scouts gathered he’d affirmed Christian’s leadership of the journey. “Then he said that you would be going with us. It’s as though he read your mind,
Liebchen
. His kindness and his vision know no end.”

“You don’t object, then?” I asked.

“It’s an answer to my prayer. He said we’d waited long enough to begin our family. This is a double blessing.”

“The first being?”

“That Wilhelm thought of this on his own, that he understood then that ours is a marriage ordained by God.” He kissed me. “Still, if you were already with child, I’d make you stay behind even with Wilhelm’s suggestion that you could prepare meals for us and minister to any ills we have.” He stroked my face. “The trial of the journey might make it difficult for you to conceive, but it will be good to travel with you, to share what we’ll discover there together.”

“Once in Oregon, we’ll find shelter and the promised land our leader says is there, and all will be well,” I said.

So Wilhelm had let a lie stand, or at least had let Christian think my going with them was our leader’s idea. I wasn’t sure I liked conspiring with our leader against my husband, nor discovering that our leader and I had something like a deception in common.

“All will be well,
Liebchen
,” Christian said and snuggled close to me.

Within minutes I heard his breathing change to a man in restful sleep, but I lay awake for hours and wondered how far along the trail we should be before I told him we could expect an infant in October.

I enjoyed the attention offered me by this journey’s twist. Some of the looks came with clicking tongues, as from Helena and
Frau
Giesy, though neither dared protest too much, since our leader had proposed this idea of my “being sent” as one of the scouts.

“Even ordered that you go, I heard,” Helena said. “What strangeness. No woman has ever been told to go with scouts. Men have much to do to carry the message of our religion. Women will be in the way.”

Her words reminded me of a time when I was thirteen and Christian Giesy had just returned from one of his journeys south. Perhaps I fell in love with him that hot September day, now that I think of it. We were all in the vineyard harvesting grapes, as the nights had been cool. Our baskets were full of the purple fruit, and several children swatted at bees to keep them from devouring our harvest. That was my task, too, to swat at bees.

Christian rode by on his big horse, and as people recognized him, they stopped working and shouted hellos, welcoming him back. He shook hands with the men, and I remember their grips left purple stains on his wide, soft palms. He dismounted and wiped his wide forehead with the back of his arm, adjusted his hat and pushed it back on his head. His teeth were naturally white, not yellowed as my father’s, and his big smile seemed just for me when I handed him a tin cup of fresh water. “It’s pleasant to be served on a hot day,
Fräulein
Wagner,” he told
me, treating me as though I was someone. “A traveler misses such tending when he has to look after things for himself day after day.”

“It’s a cup you made,” I told him.

“So it is,” he said, turning the tin in his large hands. His long fingers wrapped around the cup gently, as though he held an instrument. He started to put the cup to his lips, then stopped as a wide-eyed boy stepped up beside me. Christian said his name, squatted to his height, then offered the cup to him. The boy drank, handed the cup back to Christian, then scampered off. “His mother’s a widow,” he said, as though I didn’t know. “Will you refill me?” He handed me his empty cup. I didn’t correct him; no one can fill up another. But I did replenish the liquid. “We both do the Lord’s work,” he said after he finished drinking. He turned to talk with the men, then I eased to the sidelines, watching until Mary called me back to my task.

When I asked my father later what Christian meant by both of us doing the Lord’s work, my father quoted Scripture to me, James 1:27: “ ‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ That’s Christian Giesy for you, always serving. And you did too, offering cool water for that boy. Christian put the boy’s needs first. That’s what Father Keil wants for each of us, to serve in such ways.”

I considered how I could serve on this trip despite the reservations some might have about my going along. Certainly, there wasn’t a rule against having fun while being a servant, was there?

“You’ll take herbs with you,”
Frau
Giesy said. She became practical, accepting things without protest. She might have even enjoyed the challenge of preparing a woman for a scouting journey. She wore her hair braided three times like a crown on her head, unlike most of the women with chignons. But then her hair might have been quite curly, and such
gaudiness she would want to hide behind braids. “Herbs offer a service you can provide, and will keep my son and the other scouts well.” She patted a loose hair into the braid ring. “I suppose he will worry less with you along.”

“My thoughts exactly,” I agreed. “I’ll make his long days light.”

“
Ja
, I’m sure,” she said.

“Let me show you about cold camps,” Louisa Keil told me at the storehouse one day, where I picked up flour for my mother. “You must make meals quickly for them, often without a campfire. We will prepare pemmican and jerky before you go. Many dried peaches, too. Willie I’ll send to listen carefully when men arrive to pick up their wagons. He can tell what overlanders claim as critical to take with them and what they think they can purchase in the West. Whatever else is needed, we’ll bring with us when we follow in a year or two.” She looked away, distracted. “Perhaps God wishes us to go around the Horn, travel by ship to California, then north?” She put her fingers over her mouth to silence herself. “What am I saying here?
Herr
Keil will decide such things. He always tells me, ‘You women stick to your
Strudels
, and let us men deal with travel and theology.’ ” She dropped her eyes, touched her fingers lightly to the part separating her hair, and slipped away.

A part of me admired Louisa’s devotion and acceptance. But another part of me wondered if one day as a leader’s wife I’d need to be so docile. I pitched the thought.