A Clearing in the Wild (41 page)

When Christian and Wilhelm returned, I could tell that something was very wrong. Our leader walked with his shoulders bent, striding well in front of Christian, who slowly unsaddled the mules. Wilhelm walked purposefully. He stopped at the hearse standing beside the log house and gazed around, finally pointing at Louisa that she should follow him, and they disappeared behind the hearse.

“What does he think?” I asked Christian. Andy patted the mule’s front leg. “Did he approve of God’s choice?”

“Take the boy. He could get hurt.” I reached for Andy, lifted him.

“Well?”

“He does not,” Christian answered me then. “But he says he has no choice but to bury his son here.” He wouldn’t look at me, just started brushing the mule.

“But that’s good. He’ll want a home close to where his son is buried.”

Christian turned to me, his eyes like my old dog’s when I’d refused to give him a bone. “He’s telling people to head back south, into Oregon Territory. He’s sending Michael to stop the rest from coming here. He wants them to find jobs in Portland through the winter. He says the women can clean and cook, and maybe there is work for the men there. He’s sure there is nothing here.”

“Jonathan won’t even come north, then?” I asked.

“Don’t cry over your brother,” Christian snapped.

“I … I hadn’t meant to. I’m just disappointed.”

“
Ja
,” he said, leading the mule away from me. “You and
Herr
Keil have that in common.”

In the midst of people deciding who would leave first and who would remain, leaving in the spring instead of this winter, Sam Woodard told us, “The army says we should all move into an area that can be defended well. Sarah and I will come here if that’s agreeable. The stockade, it’s more isolated. A few others in the valley are being urged to come this way too.”

“More outsiders in this small space?” Louisa said. Wilhelm frowned at her. Probably more for having expressed an opinion than for what she said. She stepped back and clasped her hands before her now-bowed head.

“How good we have a place of safety you can come to,” I noted. “And that we can share it with others, as good Christians, as we did in Bethel.”

“
Ja
, come here,” Wilhelm said, speaking to Sam as though Christian weren’t even present, as though I hadn’t even spoken.

“What we have is always available to you, Sam,” Christian said. “Did the army say what the new threat was, or how long it might be, all of us here together?”

Sam shook his head. “Only that the whole region is a prime target. The governor’s dislike of all Indians has fired even the friendlier ones. The Shoalwaters feel left out of the negotiations, so they’re refusing to go to another tribe’s designated reserve. Governor Stevens wants no
negotiating with anyone. So the Indians have nothing to lose by attacking whenever they wish.”

One of the men who’d traveled with Wilhelm said, “Our leader charms the Indians. We had no trouble coming across, did we, Wilhelm?”

“No,” Wilhelm said. “No trouble. But here is different. Ve have trouble here.”

So we would all be housed inside the stockade walls with our tents and a few under roof. Christian assigned men to rotate watch at the guardhouse; Wilhelm voiced his opinion about who would follow whom. I noticed that the men took orders given by either Christian or
Herr
Keil.

Inside the house that evening, several of us scrunched together at one end, the smells of wet wool and smoke filling our heads. Adam and Michael Sr. and other scouts who’d been a part of this journey from the beginning stayed close together. I wished that the Knights were here, but Adam had signed up for the military when they’d reached The Dalles with Keil’s group and was said to be fighting the Cayuse. How strange that was to me with Wilhelm speaking pacifism, at least before we left Bethel. No one knew where Joe Knight was. I longed to know what had happened and why after all this distance and all we’d done together that the Knights had decided to separate.

I poured hot tea into mugs while Hans spoke with several men about heading out in the morning as a group to bring in meat. John Genger had acted as a hunter on the trip out, and he oiled his gun as Hans spoke.

“Didn’t you hear Woodard say we’re not to go into the woods?” Wilhelm said. “Too dangerous.”

“I think he meant alone and to fell trees,” Hans said.

John Genger stopped, his oil rag midair. “We have to eat, Wilhelm.”

“I saw a few deer when we brought the hearse here yesterday,” Hans
told him. “Off by that ravine, where we took out the big root ball, remember?” Michael Sr. nodded.

“We must preserve the ammunition now so ve can defend ourselves,” Wilhelm said. “How foolish it would be to use it all up gathering food. Ve must think ahead. We are planners, we Germans.”

“The people need food, Wilhelm,” Christian said, his hand resting on our leader’s forearm. “And we’re still quite a distance from the trouble farther east. It’s good to be here together and be cautious, but we have hungry children.”

“Did I not see fish jumping in that river?” Wilhelm countered. “If this is such a promised land as you have dubbed it, Chris, then let us fish. Let us club them as you say the Indians do.”

“To supplement the meat, yes, but to—”

“There will be no using the ammunition except for defense.” Wilhelm’s voice boomed, silencing even the children whimpering as they tried to fall asleep. Rain pattered on the peeled logs, and the pitch in the cook fire flames hissed like huddled witches.

“Wilhelm, my friend and leader,” Christian said, his voice like the stroke of a gentle hand on a skittish cat. “In this clearing there are different ways of doing things. It is not a challenge to you that I tell you that having meat makes sense. We will be frugal with the ammunition. Hans knows this.”

Wilhelm’s eyes grew large, the white around them reminding me of a buffalo’s eyes. Christian dared challenge him in front of all of us, and challenge he must, or we could all die of starvation.

“I have paid the bills,” Wilhelm began. “The one thousand dollars you charged for this and that; it has cost us almost eight hundred dollars just to bring these few people from Portland to this godforsaken place. To pay off the claims you’ve bought will deplete us even more. I need to make these decisions now, Chris. No ammunition for hunting.
I’ll not risk the loss of ammunition when we may need it to defend ourselves against those Indians. You have brought us to a hellish place, Chris. Now I must get us out.”

“Send a letter to Bethel,” Keil directed Karl Ruge. It was the third day behind the stockade. At least fifty people remained; the others had risked the river and the bay to return to Portland as Keil directed. The rain fell steadily. Andy hadn’t seen the seagull for several days, but he’d stopped asking when I’d snapped at him. I tried to imagine myself alone, in my own home, but Keil’s voice took me from my escapist thoughts. “Tell them we will bury Willie here, on the hill just beyond the stockade walls. Then we will all go to Portland and spend the winter in better conditions.” I watched the pain in my husband’s eyes, moved to stand beside him.

“We will do what Judge John Walker Grimm suggests,” he dictated to Karl. He’d apparently met this man in Portland while the judge shipped apples to California. Grimm sold fifty-six apple trees to a man named Adair while Keil watched. Pippins and Winesaps and Northern Spy apples (such detail our leader recalled and had Karl Ruge put into the Bethelites’ letter), and the judge told the colonists where the trees were grown, somewhere in an area on the Pudding River in Oregon Territory. Our leader saw hope in such trees for the colony; he didn’t see hope in this clearing.

If such a man can ship apples south, why can’t we ship our grain south and other products we grow, just as we did in Bethel?
I hoped Christian would say such things, but he didn’t. He stayed silent as a saw leaned against the wall.

Then Keil began what to me was a tirade against this landscape. He
had Karl write terrible things about this valley, about how long it took them to ride a mule seven miles, of how he had to cross the Willapa six or seven times to get from one claim to another, and that the road to our claim had been the most dangerous trail he’d taken since he’d left Bethel. “The soil may be rich, but it is covered with three to four feet of decaying tree trunks,” he dictated. “The land grows anything, but there is no one here to buy it except ourselves. There is no prospect of more people coming here, as the rain sends everyone away, everyone with any sense; and everything we need is too far away and too expensive to get. A barrel of flour in Oregon costs three dollars and fifty cents, while here it costs fifteen to twenty dollars, and it will be impossible much of the year to even get it here by boat. There is no good farm land and can never be.” He looked up at me. “Little fields cleared beside the river. A pittance. There is no fodder for cattle or sheep; the land is covered with trees or what is left of them. If we built a distillery, only a few oystermen would consume our product. In one day I can see the problem of this place, and yet the scouts, they claim this as God’s land. They were not listening to the voice of our Lord, our Savior.” He took in a deep breath. “They listened to one another.”

My husband sank into himself. I couldn’t bear to look at him.

I stared instead across the room at Louisa.
Does Louisa look proud?
No, it was another emotion I saw there in the eyes that gazed back at mine. Pity, perhaps, that emotion that covers fear.

Keil finished with the admonition to any Bethelites still in Missouri to remain there. “You are a poor, unbelieving people without me,” he dictated so each of us could hear. “Like Moses, I’ve led my people through the desert, and no one has sacrificed his firstborn to the Lord except me, myself.”
He left out Louisa’s sacrifice
. “But God has called us to be at peace.” His words were full of consuming fire, not a word of peace except the word itself.

He finished by having Karl tell them that when they wrote, they must send their letters to the Portland post office, Oregon Territory, and a copy to Bruceport post office, as he wasn’t sure when the weather would let them bury Willie or when the army would release us from this stockade so we could all leave this hellish Willapa Valley. As a last act of control, he ordered cattle, mules, and oxen to be taken to Portland to be held there or sold. Once Willie was buried, those favorite mules of Wilhelm’s would be taken south as well.

Christian got up and left. I wanted him to fight, to send another letter, to see what he had seen before, in the beginning. I followed him out as Mary reached to distract Andy. Outside, I couldn’t see him, as he’d walked into the foggy mist. At the brush-covered lean- to where the cows lay, I found the goat tethered near the outside. Even she had been asked to share her space. I put my arms around her neck and felt hot tears pour out onto her musty hair. We’d waited for this day, this time, with such anticipation. All our efforts for nearly two years had been for the benefit of the colony, and it had abandoned us.
Poor Christian
. I didn’t know how I could comfort him. I mumbled a prayer for him, not sure if we’d moved away from God or if God had stepped away from us.

How could we not have seen what Wilhelm saw in just a few days here? Maybe because he was a visionary, had always seen more than others. But we’d followed his directions and listened, believing God spoke to us as well. Had our souls slept while our hearts worked long hours?

I had once seen this place as Keil did. I’d seen the troubles he wrote of but told myself, for Christian’s sake, that they could be overcome. I hated that I hadn’t stood my ground with Christian and the other scouts and insisted that we leave, that we find a landscape more hospitable to clearing, to building, to life.

But more, I hated having anything in common with
Herr
Keil.

At dusk on the afternoon of November 26, 1855, we sang the funeral dirge
Herr
Keil composed for his son’s burial. We followed Willie’s hearse to the gravesite on the hill, the bells of the
Schellenbaum
tinkling in the rain, the majority of us carrying small candles that flickered as we walked. It took the mules and men to push the heavy casket up the hill and roll it over tangled vines and small fallen logs. How they had ever brought this boy’s body all that distance, all that way, was a feat few would ever attempt, let alone achieve. Couldn’t Keil see that his very act of doing the impossible was but a forerunner for what we could do here in this bountiful place?