A Clearing in the Wild (44 page)

Through the drizzle of March, a letter arrived in Bruceport on the coast, and Sam Woodard brought it to us. One of Keil’s nieces, Fredricka, had married Benjamin Brown, a man she’d met in The Dalles, in the Skamania country east of where we were. The couple had met again in Portland and married January 3, 1856, beginning their new year in the Washington Territory. They’d decided to live separate from the colony, an act I thought very brave for Fredricka. I’d tell her so
whenever I got to see her again. Her father, Keil’s brother, had remained in the area with them, but when someone commented on his following in his daughter’s footsteps, leaving the fold, Wilhelm announced, “He looks for a place for our colony. He’s still engaged in the Lord’s work.”

The Lord’s work
. The words sounded empty. It seemed all of us were engaged in Wilhelm Keil’s work, trying to find a place to serve him. If it were otherwise, we’d be discussing how to move forward here, how to make what the scouts had chosen
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into the service we’d set out to perform. We’d be hunting and feeding our people. There were a few other English-speaking people besides the Woodards who might come to join us if we demonstrated strength, showed ourselves to be loving and generous rather than stingy with our hope.

“Do you think this time here might change Wilhelm’s mind?” I asked Christian. “Maybe seeing that we survive even with little grain and without using ammunition to hunt will help him think differently. Maybe he would bring everyone from Portland after all in the spring.”

Christian said nothing.

“We still have the promise of a spring to win him,” I said. “Even I long for the prairie and when we can begin building on our place.” I patted Catherina’s bottom as I rocked her to sleep.

He turned to me then, my husband, his handsome face marked now by puffy skin beneath his eyes, the bones of his cheeks sharp as elbows, the hollows near his mouth as cavernous as caves. He’d lost teeth. So had I. Many of us had. We’d had a last apple peel sometime in January. I couldn’t remember. But what he said then was more frightening than any of the physical fears we’d faced and overcome. “There is no future here, Emma. Father Keil is right.”

By mid-March, Wilhelm decided the weather was agreeable enough that he would now act according to the letters he’d had Karl Ruge write. There’d been no more messages of Indian attacks and, in fact, we’d not heard of one person dying in the region due to hostile natives. Wilhelm’s coat hung on him like a jacket slipped over a chair, waiting for someone to put it on and give it substance. But his voice still boomed.

“I will leave for Portland and from there onto a new life. A place has been found, according to the Bruceport letter. You are all good people,” he said then, giving up a small crumb of praise. “Some of you may wish to stay until you can sell your claims, but the rest should be prepared to go with me before the week is out.” He’d gathered everyone into the largest of the houses inside the stockade.

Coughs and muffled cries of children answered him first. Then Hans Stauffer said, “I’m staying here. I never once thought the Lord wasn’t in this place, and I think we can still make a go of it. With ammunition—no offense, Wilhelm—we can eat well and have skins to put into service.”

Adam Schuele nodded agreement. Michael Sr. and the Stauffers did too. “We all believed it was a good place when we found it. Even a woman could plow the soil here, and that means with more hands, we can have more ground planted. We can sell the grain and—”

“To whom?” Wilhelm asked. “And the grain, it’s puny. Besides, you’ll eat up your own profits.”

“Near the bay, a man named White, who is a former Indian agent, he buys property, and those from San Francisco will come north to live here, for the climate. We’ll sell to them,” Hans said.

“The climate!” Wilhelm laughed at that, a big deep laugh without joy in it. His bushy eyebrows raised, then lowered into a scowl.

I hoped Christian would stand and speak. Here were two men agreeing that remaining was worthy work.

“It is a fine climate in the spring and summer and fall,” I said, finally.

Wilhelm turned to me. “It is a place that encourages women to go beyond their position.”

“Our Lord never asked women to take a place behind,” I said quietly. Louisa gasped. “I know the apostle Paul had many thoughts of how women should be in the worship, but work is worship, too, and we women always served where we were called to work back in Bethel. We worked side by side with men. We do that here, too. But in deciding things, we were silenced, though not by our Lord.”

“There are flowers blooming in the woods already,” Mary said. I turned to her and smiled at her gift of support. “I would like to see how this landscape changes when the rain is replaced by more of the sun.” Her eyes met mine.

“You, Christian,” Wilhelm said. “You have your hands full enough with this woman of yours. I will understand your wish to remain here with her.”

If Wilhelm couldn’t see the good in this place, then we’d just let him leave. Without him here, Christian’s waned confidence could return. We’d have a life again, not one focused on what was good for the colony but for our own families.

“And you make my point, Mary Giesy,” Wilhelm said. “This place encourages defiance. The landscape itself commands too much. Ve learn to protest against it and mistakenly believe ve must protest against our leaders.”

Louisa’s eyes watched the floor, but I noticed that her hands folded in prayer had turned her knuckles white.
Does she wish to speak? She won’t, not here, not now
.

“Who leaves with me?” Wilhelm asked. “And who wants to remain?”

Peter Klein and several others said then that they would leave. They
looked apologetically at Christian as they spoke. One by one the group expressed their wishes until we got to the part of the circle where Christian and I stood. I waited to hear my husband say that we would stay; we’d build our Giesy place upriver. Wilhelm had even approved of it.

“We do,” Christian said. “My family and I go with you.”

I turned to him. “We can’t abandon all you’ve done here.”

He shook his head at me, signaled silence.

“No,” I said. “It’ll destroy you.”

“We do not need to heed the voices of women,” Wilhelm said gently. A man who had won could afford to be gracious. “I believe you have made a good choice, Chris. In some things, at least.” He turned away from me. “Who else?”

“You can’t, Christian,” I pleaded. “You can’t turn your back on all this. You did well. It is an Eden, it is. How can you say God acted wrongly?”

Wilhelm turned back to me to answer. “In Eden, God asked, ‘Where are you?’ and ‘What have you done?’ He punished Eve for being independent, for pushing beyond. God gave the Garden,
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, but then He removed people from it. He changed His mind.”

“God is unchanging,” I hissed at him.

“So then, you have come to accept your role, that God made woman of man and that you bear the sins of what happened. Your punishment will be always as a mother in peril at childbirth, at the mercy of her husband, never to make her own choices. Never,” he said. “A good woman knows her place and stays there. She goes where her husband tells her.” He turned to Louisa. She smiled at him, but I thought I saw something besides docility in her eyes, something I couldn’t name.

I felt my hands grow wet with sweat. Catherina squirmed.
Not now, not now
. This was not about me being submissive; it was about supporting my husband. “Even when God removed them from Eden,” I
said, “He provided for them. He made clothes for them from animal skins, from the very bounty of the Garden. He was tender and loving and forgiving.”

Mary had her arm crooked, holding her infant. She bore a healthy baby here, even with the trials of coming across the plains. “Don’t you want your baby to grow up where she was born?” I asked Sebastian. Mary had expressed her wishes openly, but so far Christian’s brothers had not.

I turned to
Frau
Giesy, Christian’s mother. Surely she’d know that leaving now would be a final defeat for her son. It would deplete him. I pleaded with my eyes. She said nothing.

“Don’t you want to finish what you started?” I asked my husband. “You’re the one who convinced me of the merits of this clearing. You told me to put aside our own wishes for what God wants of us. Wasn’t this colony to be in service to others? Who’s to say that there aren’t many in need of His love here? The settlers, though not many, might be soil we can plant seed in. Each other.” I whispered that last. “We can be salt and light to the world around us if we open our arms wide. Even to each other.”

“We have no need of a world so large around us,” Wilhelm said. “Such intrusions only bring trials. Wars.”

“You sent us out to find an isolated place, to find one where our faith could take root. But there is no isolated place, not really. And now you abandon your own mission? For … comfort?” I said.

“Emma—,” Christian said.

“But you said this place was chosen for us, that we were chosen. When I struggled with the rain and mud, you’re the one who reminded me.”

“There are no people here, Emma,” Christian said. He had tears in his eyes. “Father Keil is right. There are none to buy our products, none
to bring into the fold. Only us, and we cannot feed ourselves, let alone those around us. Maybe some oystermen on the coast who are lost, maybe to those few we can bring the message of love and compassion, but not if we cannot survive.”

“Perhaps we are the lost.” I cried now, the words suffering through sobs. “Maybe we are the ones who need someone to reach out to us. Maybe what Wilhelm preaches isn’t all that we’re to understand. Perhaps this is the very place we were led to, so we could discover Him for ourselves before we attempt to tell others how He is.”

“Stop now,” Christian said. “It’s no good, Emma. No good. It is finished.” Christian took me in his arms and held me. His tears on my cheeks mingled with my own.

Word reached us of the death of Jacob Keil, Wilhelm’s brother, and then of Fredricka and Benjamin, in an Indian massacre near Skamania on the Columbia. Not three months of marriage living outside the colony, and Fredricka and Benjamin’s lives were over. So there had been Indian attacks in the world around us, but we’d been safe in our Giesy stockade.

I thought of our colony in Bethel, how it had been insulated from the world around it, but not for long. We needed that outside world, too, in order to survive. Nonbelievers bought our furniture and wagons, our whiskey and quilts. It was an intricate task blending isolation with protection, melding worldliness with spiritual calm, and Wilhelm must have done it well in the beginning to have so many remain with him for so long.

Or perhaps it was his talk of our deaths that kept us looking into his eyes, finding solace and obedience in his fold.

Had we spent so much time only with one another that young souls like Fredricka and her husband had no skills to make it in that outside world? These were questions I wanted to talk about with Christian but couldn’t. I watched him suffer hopelessness, feeling that he had no meaning now, his inability to forgive himself, and worse, how separated he was from those who loved him. These were wounds as deep as
if he’d sliced himself with a butchering knife, and I had no salve—save love—to offer to heal the wound.

Christian said what brought us together in the beginning was our wish to be in service, to treat one another with the Golden and the Diamond Rules. I wanted to make Christian’s life better than my own, but I couldn’t.

He’d committed to taking Wilhelm back to Portland.

A ship arrived, bringing us many sacks of grain. It was the same ship Christian and Wilhelm would leave for Portland on. We baked bread and packed it into the trunks of those heading into Oregon Territory. Christian suggested we prepare to leave too, but Wilhelm hedged. “You’ve endured this long. A few months more vill make no difference to you,
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, Chris? Until the site is ready, Louisa and I will rent a place in Portland, and when ve find the colony is ready, ve send for you. It’s unfortunate, this kind of … separation,” he said. “A better site would have prevented these adjustments needed now.
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, that’s so, Chris?” My husband nodded his head as Keil patted his back. It didn’t look like brotherly love.

I seethed for my husband. Wilhelm didn’t even want us with him while we waited. He treated us like children sent to the back of the room for our misbehavior while everyone else played outside. We’d been asked to wait until
Herr
Keil determined the perfect place … when we were already there. I could hardly stand it.

“We won’t leave now either, then,” Andreas, Christian’s father, said. “No reason to find yet another place to wait while Wilhelm seeks out a new site.” Sebastian Giesy nodded agreement. So at least I’d have company waiting. I smiled at that wish, when once I’d only wanted to be left alone.

“The rest of us will travel together for safety,” Wilhelm said. “It was good we saved ammunition.”

I wondered if Christian would decide that protecting Wilhelm would still be reason to go to Portland with him now when his parents said they’d wait in Willapa. Or would he think risking us, Andy and the baby and me, on this trip south might not be wise?