A Clearing in the Wild (48 page)

Christian woke me in the morning. “I do my seventy-six pushing-ups, and then we go down to see Joe Knight,” he said. “I want to know that this is part of what was to happen here, not just the hardships, but the unexpected turn of events.” For the first time since Wilhelm had arrived in November, my husband had a sparkle in his eye. I recalled a psalm where the speaker asked that he not be ashamed in God’s sight for what he had done, and God answered. So He’d answered again. I nearly cried watching my husband lift and lower himself on the moss-covered floor. He did seventy-seven. “One for good measure.”

We took our boat with the small white sail on it out onto the Willapa River, heading for the bay, and worked our way around the point to where Bruceport thrived. The wind and tide worked with us. Karl Ruge came along. I held my breath as the boat lifted onto a swell, then slapped down hard. Working with oysters would surely take the fear of water from me. Familiarity breeds freedom, I decided.

On this trip, the children stayed with their grandparents so I could concentrate on the details Joe could tell us about this work we were stepping into. I wanted to listen and look and smell what would become the way of our lives.

A Chehalis woman ran the trading post right on the bay. Her husband had died the year Andy was born. “Drowned in the Wallacut River, Captain Russell did,” Joe Knight told us. “But in 1851 he introduced
the first Shoalwater oysters from here to the San Francisco merchants. We can thank him for that and for what we do because of it.”

“I’ll thank the Provider of the oysters,” Christian said.

Joe dropped his eyes, ran his hands through his thick blond hair. “
Ja
,” he said. “Him too.”

So on this day at the Willapa Bay, Joe Knight and Christian and Karl discussed how they would work together as oystermen. I watched as oyster boats came alongside schooners out in the bay and men handed up their baskets of oysters. I counted twenty-eight boats, twenty-one scows, and thirteen canoes coming and going out to the huge schooner. “Some of the holds have timber in them too,” Joe told us. “It’s a lucrative place with gold from the forests and ocean here for the mining.”

Christian would stay with Joe and work the oyster beds; Karl’s investment came from money he had saved on his own as a teacher before he became a part of the colony. His contribution would pay wages for workers, and one day, the children and I would work in the oyster beds, filling up baskets to be taken out to schooners.

I’d remain on our Giesy place once we finished our log home. I’d be within a few hours’ travel downriver to see Mary and Christian’s parents, less time than that when the paths were dry and the mule surefooted. I could see Sarah and be there for her when she had need of help to deliver her baby. I’d make quilts again. We’d get sheep and weave when I wasn’t plowing or milking or planting oats and peas.

The wind whipped Christian’s hair as we made our way back toward the landing. His hair looked thinner, but his thick reddish beard framed his face. We’d spend the night at the stockade and then move the few things we had to the site he’d chosen for us long before, seven miles up the Willapa. We’d live in that tent a few more weeks, until his father, brothers, and nephews helped finish our house at last.

“I hope during the winter months if I have to be gone, that you and
the children will stay with my parents or with Sebastian and Mary,” Christian said.

“If it will make you feel better, we will,” I told him.

Christian helped any of those who’d stayed behind to make their way to Aurora Mills, the site where Wilhelm would soon take up residence. As he talked with his family, his brothers and his parents, he found each wanted to remain in the place Christian had chosen, the place all the scouts had selected. “What is the likelihood that all nine men—and one woman—would be duped by the devil?” Christian’s father said. “This must be a good place.”

I didn’t suggest that he used a poor standard, since hundreds of Bethelites were scattered throughout the Oregon Territory because of
one
man. Had we all been duped? Or was God still in charge of the colony, even our Willapa splinter, no matter what we humans chose to do?

Michael Schaefer Sr. and his son and children did stay. Even John Genger and the Becks, who came out with Wilhelm, presented their decisions at a gathering at the stockade that June. The Stauffers remained too. The tents of those leaving were all rolled up and ready to board the ship that would take them to the Columbia River and the Oregon Territory and Keil.

“We don’t do it for you, Christian,” his father said. “Though we are glad it is you who found this site first and put your sweat into building us a house. We stay because of the promise here. Yes, it will be hard to clear the ground, but what else do we have to do in this life? Yes, it will be difficult to build more houses, but we have many hands now. And there is something … pleasant about living close but not so close to one another as we did in Bethel. We can build a school and gather for worship. We depend on one another for help. We’ll look to the Lord for guidance instead of just Wilhelm.”

“We might have baptisms and communion,” Karl Ruge said.

“Without Father Keil, we have no leader for those,” Mary said.

“We didn’t do it when we did have a leader,” Sebastian reminded her. He didn’t even seem surprised that his wife spoke up in this gathering of women and men.

“
Ja
, by golly. We’ll celebrate the sacraments as they did in the early church,” Karl Ruge said, clapping his hands. “We’ll share the duties and the joys together.”

“We can begin with my Elizabeth and your Catherina,” Mary said. “We have a christening to look forward to. Maybe we can invite Sarah and Sam.”

Christian then brought out a basket of oysters, and the men with their knives cut the membranes to open the shells. “Show me,” I asked Christian. “I want to be able to do that.”

He stood behind me and placed his warm hands around mine. I could feel the heat of his chest as he leaned against my back. Then with the knife I held, his hand clasped over mine, we sawed back and forth until the oyster shell cracked and I could twist it open with the tip of my knife. Inside was the white flesh of the oyster, moist and lying like a shimmering jewel on the half shell. And in the corner was a surprise: the tiniest gem, a pearl.

It was more the color of earth than ivory.

“Indeed. Did you know that pearls come from irritations, from something like sand gritting its way into the oyster, and it wants to get it out? It forms this shell within a shell,” Christian said. “A little protective covering to keep the sand from doing damage to the oyster. In the end, it gets picked up for its singular beauty and becomes more a part of the world than it ever imagined.” He was already becoming an expert on his new calling.

I had known. But this first pearl my husband gave me marked a
new beginning in our lives, one I’d thought might never come about. My husband leaned on his faith and his family just a little more than he ever had before.

Best of all, when I later placed that little pearl on the thread of the dozen pearls of my mother’s and hung it openly at my neck, I knew it would always stand out as unique and singular, though clearly, it belonged.

How did you decide to write
A Clearing in the Wild
,
the first book in the Change and Cherish Historical Series?

I’d visited the Old Aurora Colony Museum a number of times and found the lives of this utopian community of interest. But it wasn’t until I read a brief mention in a quilting book,
Treasures in the Trunk
, written by a friend, Mary Bywater Cross, that Emma Wagner Giesy came into my life. She wrote, “1853. Emma Giesy came as the only woman in a party of ten Bethel, Missouri, scouts to find an Oregon site for their communal society.” Little did I know that this sentence would take me from a communal world of nineteenth-century Missouri to one in the Washington Territory and eventually Oregon, introducing intrigue and unanswered questions along the way.

How much of this story is history, and how much is fictional?

“Between history and story lies memory,” one sage wrote. Our memories of events are retold like a story, but they claim us as history, as fact. So two people can be absolutely certain of an event but carry opposing memories of it. I try to remember that when I’m researching and discovering diverse accounts of similar events. I tried, through reading descendant accounts and historical material about the Bethelites and where they came from, and through letters left behind, to create an accurate account of the colony, the faith that defined it, and the place
of women within it. I had to sort through many accounts of which scouts actually came west and who returned to help bring the large group out in 1855. Opposing accounts and names and numbers exist between eight and nine, not counting Emma. I finally settled on nine men and one woman, using material from Clark Moor Will, a descendant. I knew Emma was pregnant when they left Missouri and where Andrew was born. I have genealogy information about family lines, children, and so on, and kept that factual. Christian was considered the leader of the scouts, or spies, as they’re sometimes called. He had been a tinsmith and a recruiter, traveling outside Missouri to bring in new converts. Much has been written about Keil’s history and his views, which could be described as autocratic at times. (He once broke away from a church because they planned to pay the pastor a salary, and Keil felt the pastor should live by the charity of his parishioners.) Letters by Keil that were translated from the German reveal his views of Willapa, and the chaos that reigned once the group arrived there. The difficult winter of 1855–56 is based on these letters and other historical accounts, so as much as possible, I’ve remained true to the “shared knowings,” the facts that most people agree on, as I call them. He did limit the use of ammunition. He did require them to club fish to survive. The reports of others in the region at that time describe the German community as nearly starving to death that winter. Keil’s letters provide clarity about his worries of Indian wars and the seeming impossibility of the colony being successful if they remained at the scouts’ chosen site. He was quite vocal about his unhappiness with Willapa.