A Clearing in the Wild (30 page)

I felt an envy pang, or was it disappointment? “He takes care of his own,
ja
,” I said. I took Sarah’s place at the churn, pounding with vigor though I didn’t know why.

“Mr. Woodard says your plan to build right on through the winter is also a … crock full of wish. A dream, my words for it,” she said. “Instead, the mud will keep you in one place. Venturing out or chopping trees will be too difficult. My husband says you should be preparing food for winter storage now. Chopping wood and keeping it dry for firewood.” She stopped my hand and lifted the plunger. “I think it is
churned enough.” She finished the butter, and we pasted it into wooden molds. “Do you have candles for the winter?”

“Some.” I thought of our lantern and how easily that light blew out.

“Plan to stay with us. We’ll read and tell stories and sing and maybe even dance while the rains come down.”

It had been a long time since we’d danced.

“My husband is determined to have three dozen structures by next fall for when our friends join us.”

Sarah nodded her head. “This is the stubborn part my husband says defines yours. You won’t be able to work so hard through the rains, and the trees … the trees demand respect and are not easily changed.”

“You make it sound as though trees have a soul,” I said.

“The Indians say they do. The trees give them so much—canoes and clothes and houses and tools.” She showed me a deep scoop spoon made of wood the color of my sister’s chestnut-colored hair. “Smell it,” she said, and when I did I knew it was a cedar burl. “Something that gives so much needs to be noticed, witnessed to,” Sarah said. “It gives up in its own time, giving itself as a gift rather than a taking.”

“People are counting on us to have homes when they arrive,” I defended.

“This forest and river land will be their home,” she said. “People here just take temporary cover inside their houses.”

Christian’s constant enthusiasm and my commitment to be his helpmate silenced me. Even when we poled upriver in the Woodards’ boat so Christian could show me another piece of property he’d claimed for the colony, I kept my tongue about whom he built for and whether we could accomplish all he’d set to do so we could make a life here.

It wasn’t that the land near the river wasn’t lush and laid out for easy tilling, but that these meanders of river were separated by ghastly tangles of vines and trees and sometimes close-in hills that seemed to suck the air from my throat. We could cut trails along the river through those sections, but most likely living here, we would use the boats often, ride in small crafts that were not nearly as grand nor as sleek or as stable as those used by the Cowlitz people. We’d be dependent on this river, to go from here to there. I’d be on water nearly every day of my life if I wanted to visit someone, or become a hermit connected only to my husband and my children.

“I’ve purchased these three hundred twenty acres,” Christian told me when we’d beached the boat and climbed up a high bank. “It was a donation land claim of a man who is prepared to leave.”

“But it’s so far from Woodard’s Landing and our place,” I said. “Won’t we all want to be close, the way we were in Bethel?”

“This is maybe seven miles, nothing more.” He bristled.

“I only meant that in Bethel we all lived close together. In a town, with streets that—”

“Some stayed in Nineveh, you forget. We can have settlements separated by a few miles and still remain true to our cause. We all agreed to settle along the Willapa, Emma. We will need to do things differently in the West. Around us is free land if a family lives on it for five years and improves it. It’s theirs. There is no such thing as this in Bethel. We cannot afford to drain the entire treasury there to buy land for us,
Liebchen.
” He patted my shoulder.

“I’ve seen no buggies, or even people except for the Woodards.”

“I told you. Here we walk or go by water. It is the way. There’s a post office in Bruceport and warehouses, so there are people closer to the bay. We’ll go there one day. You’ll see. This will be the route nearest to the Cowlitz, and those from Bethel will come across our trail, and
maybe by then we’ll have time to clear it further so the stock can be driven across too. The returning scouts will advise that we bring only mules or oxen to drive the wagons. Our farm will be along the way for people heading to the coast.”

“Whose name is this property in?” I asked, changing the subject.

“In the Territory’s eyes, it is ours,” he said. “But it belongs to the colony, all held in common as in Bethel.”

“Then who owns the Giesy place with the one nearly finished house?”

He cleared his throat. “I claim that for my parents. This section, distant but not so far away, this one will be ours to farm.”

Andy shouted, then pointed at a squirrel and took my attention.

“You let us men attend to these things,” he said, following me as I changed Andy’s diaper. I grabbed at some cedar duff as an absorbent. “Your job is to make what we will build into a home to raise our sons in. Wait here.”

He walked down the riverbank and leaned into the wobbly craft we’d pulled up onto the shoreline. From it he took a pack with a shovel pitched over his back. “I begin,” he said.

He lifted the sod from a square, pushing and scraping the tall meadow grasses. Sweat dripped from his forehead, but he whistled as he worked. I gingerly walked through the grasses, felt the sun warm my face and knew it must be warm on Andy’s too, though I’d set him in the shade. I took his hand and he waddled upright. He still hadn’t taken his first steps alone, but with help he grinned at his success. “We may as well see if there are late-blooming berries, since your father is so occupied in digging.”

I’d filled my apron with flowers instead, sticking one behind Andy’s ear, tickling him as he sat. I slapped at mosquitoes. They’d be swarming by sunset. Andy pulled against my skirt to raise himself and stay
balanced. Finally, Christian whistled his single loud tone and motioned me to return to the square he’d scraped out. Across it, he’d spread the canvas. Come,” he said. “Let’s christen this land we’ve been given to turn into service to our Lord.”

The look in his eye told me he had more than the Lord’s service in mind at that moment. I felt a stirring in my own heart. My face grew warm. I marveled that his hours of intense labor poling upriver, then clearing the sod, hadn’t weakened him in the least. If anything, it seemed to fire his desire.

“When do we begin work on our house?” I said as he reached to untie my bonnet.

“Don’t worry about that now.” He pulled me to him.

I said, “Right here? Won’t it tire you for the return trip? And what about Andy?”

Christian smiled as he lifted his son still clinging to my skirt, laced him into the board leaned against the tree. His wide fingers wove the rawhide strings through the buckskin covering, then tied them neatly in a bow. Something about the movement softened me.

“Andrew has perfect timing,” he said. “See? He sleeps.”

Swaddling did usually put Andy to sleep. His father laid the board propped up against the shovel base, but in a shaded area beneath some arching vines. On his cheeks I wiped the mud paste to counter mosquito attacks. Christian replaced the flower behind Andy’s ear, and our son took two quick breaths but didn’t awaken.

“As for me being too tired to love my wife and then take her safely back to the landing, you forget.” He grinned now and began untying my wrapper at the bodice. “Do you still wear the petticoat with the ruffles?” I nodded. “Then here is another occasion to mark your uniqueness on
our
Giesy place.” With Christian, life felt right, even in this
place so far upriver from the others. Geese called above us on their way south for the winter.

“Trust me,
Liebchen
,” he whispered as he led me onto the canvas he’d unfurled on the ground. “It’s an easy ride downriver to wherever you wish to go from here.”

He kissed my neck, and I felt like a tall cedar going slowly down.

Fog, like a faithful scout sent ahead to survey the land, eased into the Willapa Valley. Behind it came the storms.

At first we crunched our necks into our shoulders, doing our best to ignore the rains, my mother’s wool cape no longer spotted with water but soaked instead. Our lack of attention to the rain must have angered it, for soon it came down harder, and the lean- to Andy and I huddled in beneath a cedar while the men worked in the trees on another Giesy house, not ours, could not keep out the damp. The fire I kept going at the entrance of the lean- to billowed smoke back into our faces. We coughed but chose that discomfort over being drenched.

One or two seagulls continued to seek us out, which surprised me, as we had little to offer them. I now used the deer bladders—the rounded organ that I learned to pick out quickly from the entrails—to hold dried berries. Sarah said she’d seen Chehalis people dry deer ears and later boil them with roots and little plops of flour. That sounded like a dumpling stew, so I did that too. She told me to save the brains for tanning hides (we’d done that back in Bethel) and that the broth from boiled tongue helped people with a cough. I even kept the sinew away from the seagulls, that stringy part along the deer’s back strap that proved as tough as any thread I’d ever used before. One day I boiled the shinbones and found the tallow a palatable fat. Even the antlers became
digging tools, not that the seagulls hungered after them. The birds had all looked alike to me, but when Andy and I sat in the lean- to and watched them screech at one another, lifting up and settling back, I did notice one with a chip out of his flattened bill. He returned often enough we named him Charlie. He became a friend for Andy.

Opal, the goat, bleated protests, lifting her right leg up onto my squatting knees as I cooked. I protested too when I had to clean out the area of the shelter where I milked her and where she stood during the night. How she must have resented my cold hands on her bag in the morning, but she never kicked. A docile female indeed—as I was becoming.

I considered building a corral for Opal using abandoned branches from the trees but wasn’t sure she’d stay in it. And besides, I’d be leaving that corral for Christian’s sisters or brothers. It wasn’t as though we were establishing the home we’d be staying on. That was selfish of me, I knew, but I’d endure the weather better, I thought, if I knew that one day soon I’d have a place to call our own.

By December, with every day crying rain and a coldness I didn’t remember while I lived at the fort, I risked again urging Christian to reconsider staying with the Woodards at least until March, when the rains tended to come more intermittently—or so I remembered Sarah saying.

“You’re soaked all the time. I’ve given up washing, or have you noticed? The mud clutches at clothes, and they’re dirty before I even finish, and they never dry. You’ve started to cough. We’ll all be sick, and when spring comes you won’t be able to make up for the time you’re losing now.”

“We have to keep going,
Liebchen
. They count on us. So many count on us.” He coughed a racking cough, bent over, barking like a sea
lion. When it stopped he said, “In November next year, if all goes well, they’ll arrive. How will they live through the winter if we have no houses for them?”

“They’ll do what we’ve done. Live in lean-tos and under canvas.”

“They count on us for better,
Liebchen.
”

“Andy and I count on you too,” I said. I saw the pain in his eyes and I softened. “Please. Let’s stay with the Woodards. They’ve offered this to us, and you always say the receiving of gifts is as important in the Christian way as giving is. Why shouldn’t we learn to receive? Accepting their generosity would be a good witness, wouldn’t it?”

“If we stay at Woodard’s Landing when the weather is good, we’ll lose precious daylight making our way to the woods. Here, we can get up in the morning, and our work is before us, as the Lord provides.”

“He provides more work than necessary,” I said under my breath.

“Your being here helps,” Christian said. He patted my shoulder, then coughed again.

He’d never said such a thing to me before. “You’re pleased I stayed despite my … ways?” I said.

He nodded. Dirt caked the lines in his eyes, and for the first time he looked old, my husband did. Old and tired. And sick. I thought back. He’d stopped doing his pushing-ups.

“Why don’t you build more homes on the original Giesy place, then?” I said. “We could stay at the Landing and you’d still be close to your work.”

“Each claim needs a house or we will lose the deed.”

“There’s time,” I said. “Isn’t it five years to develop the land before the risk of loss?” He took a drink of the hot tea I’d made and pulled a piece of tea leaf from his lower lip.
Is he considering my idea?
“At the least, why not roof one house to make it livable? One house we could all stay in and be dry. The one you’re working on now, maybe. It’s as
though you’re putting together puzzles, but you don’t stay long enough to finish even one.”