A Clearing in the Wild (15 page)

He didn’t respond.

“I would. It’d give me something to do while the rest of you are all working together so hard.” He stayed silent, and then I realized by his slow breathing that he slept.

I wondered if our days would be like this: hard, silent rides with shared meals and prayers but few moments to truly be with my husband. And when I was, would not his mind be on the challenges of the mission or on seeking exhausted sleep?

His responsibility in this journey struck me for the first time as I watched the stars, and I hoped, even prayed before I slept, that I would do nothing to trouble him, nothing that would get in the way of my
husband’s success; though when I, warm beneath my sleeper, prayed those words, I felt a twinge of regret.

I turned over and decided then not to tell Christian anything about my carrying his child. Why worry him when he had so many other worries, and perhaps this one might never come to pass. It was possible I’d lose the child, a thought that sent more than threads of fear through me, threatening to knot up in tangles. That sort of thing happened even in our colony with good care and midwives to assist.
Look at Mary and Sebastian
, I told myself. Better to keep this all silent, wait and see what each day might bring. Besides, this day had already cracked me open, watching my brothers and sisters and parents disappear from my life; I couldn’t afford to split my heart further.

I tossed and turned, trying to get comfortable. I slipped my hand up under the quilt rolled beneath my neck. I felt something cool there, hard. I pawed beneath it and pulled out a tin chatelaine. Slender as a finger, it had tiny designs on the side, a flower, a small bird. I removed the cap and inside were four sewing needles, the finest Shelbina had to offer.

Christian must have made it! But why didn’t he give it to me? Why let me find it beneath my quilt?
I held the gift in my hand. It had a ring so I could wear it around my neck. My husband gave me a gift both pragmatic and beautiful, and I, I kept secrets from him.

Our leader’s words from Genesis of a woman’s punishment came to me. But oddly, so did the words God said to Adam and Eve first:
Where art thou?

Where was I, indeed, leaving the safety of my family, carrying secrets, hiding a possible harm from my husband whom I barely knew, who had dimensions and depth I was only now uncovering? What else was I hiding from, and what price would I eventually pay for my
wanting to be known, to stand out in this monotony of colony I’d grown up in?

I’d have to eventually tell Christian about the baby. Would he forgive me for not telling him or our leader, who would surely not have sent me along if he had known? At least Christian would believe that of
Herr
Kiel.

I was not so sure. It might have made our leader more likely to have banished me to a wild place, to show me the power of God’s words in Genesis that promised I’d bring forth children in sorrow. I tried to remember the rest of that verse:
Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee
.

But there’d been earlier words, spoken to Eve as she came out of the Garden, naked and ashamed, words that now spoke to me, a woman who had the will to choose her way. They were words not about the present, nor the future, or what my pushing to be here would eventually mean. They were words about my past. How had I gotten here? What price had I paid? What had I feared would happen if Christian had left me behind?

I prayed for sleep then and that I’d accept the answers to so many questions all begun with God’s words to Eve:
What is this that thou hast done?

I counted days by sunrises, noting their distinctive spread of dark to light, the way the pink gave way to ivory clouds against the morning blue. Each noon, Christian read from Lansford Hastings’s
The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California
until we’d all heard every word written by this man through Christian’s booming voice. He halted on occasion, translating from the author’s English into the German we all spoke. Adam suggested we should hear the words in English to accustom ourselves to the language of the land we now lived in. The others nodded agreement. No one looked to me.

The writer of this guide blended his enthusiasm with details about river crossings and camping suggestions. But listening, even in the English I still struggled with, it gave me a sense of belonging, of hearing what they all heard at the same time even if some of the subject matter prickled. I hoped I’d find some small piece of information that I could later draw on that might save the day, that would please Christian, make him grateful I’d come along for more than someone to warm his bed. I didn’t want to be a burden; truly I didn’t. I wanted to belong and not stand out because of trouble, but from what I could offer. I wanted to be as reliable as sunrise, yet as singular.

Christian finished reading the Hastings book the day before we
reached St. Joseph, where we hoped to catch a ferry. Hastings had recommended this Missouri River crossing and the road that would take us west, following the Platte River. He related details of what each wagon should contain and what routes were wise and what to be wary of at various watering places.

More than once in the few days we’d been on our way, I wished we had a wagon hauling items such as kegs of water and stores of food and extra clothing more easily reached than that tied up in the bedroll knots. I had only one change of clothes—a woolen dress, another wrapper, and my ruffled petticoat—and before the second day passed, as I watched women doing laundry along the way, I realized I’d probably adjust to the smell of my own perspiration rather than endure the effort of scrubbing and pounding at rocks near streams along the trail. Doing my wash and Christian’s would be work enough. For a moment I longed for the large group of women who scrubbed their laundry together at Bethel. I pitched that thought.
No sense hanging on to what will not be
.

Most of all, I wished a wagon for the privacy it would have provided when I tended to my hygiene; in the shade of it, if not inside. But a wagon would have slowed us, the men agreed, so during our ten-minute respites for the animals, I found a tree or shrub and hoped such sentinels of sanitation would continue to dot the landscape as we crossed the continent. I imagined discovering shrubs with new kinds of berries I could squat behind, increasing my understanding of botany while managing bloat.

Hastings’s book for emigrants did not promise such extensive trees or shrubs once we reached the prairie country. His little book ignored most of a woman’s needs, so I hoped he might have misunderstood the importance of mentioning such facts. Instead, Hastings wrote words that encouraged early starts with longer rests at noon to manage the daytime heat, or identifying prudent encampments and explaining how
to avoid “noxious airs” found near muddy waters. The author of Christian’s noontime read spoke little of diseases and had written his book back in 1845, after the first cholera epidemic, but before this most recent scare that still plagued travelers’ westward journeys. After reading the section about “muddy waters” and “noxious airs,” Christian urged greater caution at watering sites. “We’ll boil all drinking water not from springs,” he said, so that we might all arrive healthy and well.

“We’ll ask about illness on the wagons we encounter,” he told John Stauffer, who patted his horse’s neck as they spoke. “They’ll have sent scouts ahead and may know of places we should avoid.”

“Scouts sending out scouts,” Hans Stauffer said. He removed his hat to scratch at his head where an early receding hairline made his hair look like a brown peninsula with white sandy beaches on either side. He scratched that spot so often that a callus formed on the right side.

“How I felt about you sometimes,” Adam Knight told his brother, Joe. “When you’d run off as a
Dummkopf
and I’d have to catch you before Mama found out you’d left the yard or were so lost you whizzed your pants in fear.”

“At least I explored a place or two over the years,” Joe Knight said. A pink flush formed on his cheeks. “While you were busy chasing skirts.”

“Joe!” Adam chastised. He nodded toward me.

“Oh, sorry,
Frau
Giesy. I forget you were here.”

“I suppose that should be a compliment,” I told him, curtsying as I handed him a refilled cup of corn juice. “I don’t want to be a bother.”

“No bother,” Joe replied. He raised a single finger to the air, one of his habits when he spoke.

“I didn’t wish you along,
Frau
Giesy,” Adam said. “But you weren’t no trouble this past week, and you even helped some.”

“That might make a fine epitaph,” I said. “
She weren’t no trouble and she even helped some.
”

“Let’s not think morbid thoughts,” Christian said. “Indeed, you’ll help even more before long, become a true member of this scouting party.” His words lifted my spirits.

“
Ja?
How will I do this?” Were they going to let me cook then at last?

“You’ll be in charge of washing our clothes,” Christian told me.

Unintended, my lower lip pouted out.

I confess, the excitement of wagons and horses and mules and oxen and people with accents closer to mine
—are they Swiss or maybe from Bavaria?
—intrigued me when we reached St. Joseph, Missouri, where Christian had said we would cross the great river. I heard French and what I assumed to be Spanish intermixed with English, and within an hour my ears hurt with the barrage, and my head ached from deciphering. What were all these people doing here? Where were they going? How would they know when they got there? I began to appreciate that we scouts had criteria, we knew what we needed to find and why we were seeking. Wilhelm held all of us together even in his absence, his words of life and death reminding us of the little time we had in the former and the encroaching hot breath of the latter. Did these others traveling west trust only Hastings’s words? Or perhaps the leaders of their wagon groupings? I began to think about leadership and what it meant to the success of our task.

We had all we needed for our survival, were secure in our journey west.

We staked the horses above the ferry, awaiting passage while Christian and Adam Schuele, who understood English the best, prepared to venture forth to find out how long the wait for the ferry crossing would be. Adam headed south.

Christian asked, “Would you like to come along?” I beamed. “You’ll need to watch where you walk to avoid horse apples and garbage plaguing the streets,” he told me. I didn’t mind. I could enter a world I’d never known. I’d love the confusion of people.

“I thank you for the gift,” I said. “You were asleep when I found it. I didn’t want to wake you.”

Christian nodded. “You’ll have need of it, mending our clothes.”

“My mother sent her sewing kit with me. But this”—I patted the chatelaine hanging beneath my bodice—“the designs on the chatelaine make it more than just a tool. It’s … art. Beauty for its own sake.”

Christian’s ear turned the color of tomatoes, and he seemed relieved when tent store hawkers offered meat on sticks and wild-eyed mountain men announced “essentials” for sale for the journey west. Christian’s height caused people to step aside for us, though he never pushed or shoved his way. He tipped his hat to women and children, and I wondered what it would be like to understand all their English phrases as easily as Christian did.

A buxom woman with a painted face must have heard me talking to him in German, for she stepped out from the shade of her tent and smiled, boldly placing painted fingernails on his forearm. She said to me in German as she gazed up at Christian, “Your papa here is a handsome man, maybe in need of someone to look after his
kind.
”

I frowned. “I’m not his
kind.
” I added in English, “I’m his wife, not his child.” Were these the kind of women that Willie and my brother spoke about in whispers after they’d come back from Hannibal?

She stepped closer to Christian and patted the lapel of his jacket as she inhaled his scent. The drift of her perfume rose over the garbage smells from piles around her. “
Ach
, my foul luck,” she said, slapping Christian’s lapel now in good humor.

I put my arm through Christian’s, something I’d never have done in a crowd back in Bethel, where I’d have walked a pace or two behind.

She stepped away but kept eyeing him as though he were a good horse. “I always have an eye for the unavailable.”

“Do you have an eye for the time of the crossing?” Christian asked her. “I suspect you’ve seen these lines before and know how long it’ll take.”

She stretched her neck to look at the rows of wagons and cattle, people and dogs, that crowded toward the narrow docking area. “Days, I’d say. By wagon?” she asked. “You go west by wagon?” Christian shook his head no. “Moving fast then. Someone on your tail.” She leered at me.

I gripped Christian’s arm. “
Ach
, you are a—”

“Our marriage is blessed,” Christian said, “and our journey, too.” She lowered her eyes just a moment, and Christian spoke into that interlude. “You could have such assurances too,
Fräulein
. There is someone always available, someone who would care for you as a parent loves a child. A whole community exists of people who love each other, who serve and demonstrate God’s grace on this earth. No needs go unmet. It is a place of Eden.”