A Clearing in the Wild (6 page)

Outside our great-room windows, tiny buds of crocus pushed their way up through the soil, and already robins sat on the porch rails, watching for early worms. The dog slept at my feet. Then at last I had him to myself, after a fashion.

“What did I see in you to make me want you for my wife?” Christian repeated my question. “Your kind spirit, indeed. And your willingness to question even when there might be … consequences. These are good qualities. Necessary for learning, my friend Karl says, necessary for change.”

I hadn’t thought of myself as unusually kind and said so.

“Remember New Year’s Day?” Christian told me.

How could I forget?
“It was the day you asked me to be your wife.”

“Yes, yes. But more,” Christian said. “In the corner of Elim where
we gathered sat a woman with three children huddled around her. She was not of us.”

I thought back. Yes, there’d been a woman who piled her hair on top of her head in an Apollo knot, the false hairpiece standing up behind the center part instead of in a chignon at the back as we colony woman wore ours. She wore fancy clothes, cloth with new dye, something else that made her different. The rest of us dressed in flannels or woolen dresses, clean but well-faded. New cloth was seen as a luxury we made and sold, unless one had worn out a dress and had already turned it into strips for rugs or repatterned it for a child’s gown.

Louisa Keil, our leader’s wife, pulled her dark woolen shawl tighter around her as she knelt at that woman’s feet. She patted the woman’s knee, talking quietly to her. The woman nodded, wiping at her eyes with a handkerchief. Louisa looked up, and spying Christian and me—had I detected a frown?—she motioned us over.

“You’re good with
Kinder
,” she said to me, nodding to the children. “Help them join in with the others, give their mother a bit of rest.”

I remembered that the children’s mother wore bruises on her cheek and lip, and I assumed she was one of many women whom the colonists took in to help as they made their escapes from harsh men. Some remained and joined us; others recovered and moved on, often returning to the men who’d harmed them, a choice I never could fathom. I’d taken her children and we’d played Ring-around-the-Rosy, with all of us falling down in heaps, serenaded by their peals of cautious laughter.

“I remember the woman’s bruises,” I said. Sheppie’s tail thumped the floor at the sound of my voice. “I wonder at times if our offering help to such people makes us suspect to other Missourians. We colonists step into the middle of a fray, act as servants to those in need, but such work can cause resentments.”

Christian nodded. Missouri was a slave state, but on the border with freer territories, and many people didn’t own slaves here. There’d been talk of repealing that compromise that allowed Maine to enter as a free state and Missouri as a slave. Perhaps Missourians feared our colony would harbor escaped slaves, since we rescued broken women. I wasn’t sure that we wouldn’t. Maybe that was why there’d been discussion about the colony moving again. We danced around issues, and sometimes we stepped on someone else’s toes.

“The children, they were so frightened; so many changes.”

“You answered Louisa’s call without hesitation. You were selfless. This is good. It tells me you can see beyond your own needs to those of others. I had seen this before in you.”

His praise warmed me to my toes, and I vowed to give him more reason for such words, though vows among the young are often soon forgotten. “And what else?”

“Those questions,” he said. “You ask … pointed questions, a sign your mind keeps working. Just as now, about slave and free. And you’re persistent when you want a thing.”

“Stubborn, my father says.” I felt my cheeks grow warm.

“Indeed.” Christian smiled and lifted my hand, placing it in his. I waited for him to give me an example that I could cherish ever after, but instead he said, “And you are beautiful,” the words a whisper. “Beautiful as God has made you without adornment. So my admiration for your form, my filling up by looking at you, watching you float across the room as graceful as a swan, causes no challenge to our need to set aside all but simplicity and what is useful. You cannot help how you’ve been formed.” With his other hand he drew his finger around the outline of my lips, an act so surprising that his touch sent shivers through me, past the chignon that gathered at my neck. I swallowed and thought of Saint Paul’s words about marriage being better than to
burn, about the rocks that must surround such fire or it would flame across a field, taking everything in its path.

My mother coughed, and he dropped his hand from my face as though he’d been stung.

Some days later I told Jonathan that my intended saw the good in me, a loving heart. “Ha,” Jonathan said. “The man is blinded then,” but the sparkle in his eyes told me he teased.

“By my beauty,” I told him, flipping my fingers at my ears. It was an idea still settling in my mind.

My brother softened then. “That you are, sister. That you are.”

My only regret from my conversation with Christian was that I wanted to share what in him appealed to me, but he never asked.

Fireworks marked March 6, as always, it being Father Keil’s birthday. Our leader chose it as the time for our discussion of our marriage.

It was to be a simple declaration of our intentions so that we might begin to tell others of our plans. I saw myself as a person seeking the sonata rather than the dirge. I held on to those notes now.

I knew the rules, of course, about unions among the colonists or outsiders. Father Keil raised few objections, however, if a man became engaged to marry an outsider, as it was believed she would eventually join the colony, accept the colony’s ways, and consent would be freely given to their nuptials. She would move in with his family until a home could be built, but at least the couple could begin or continue to work without the colony having to take time out to build a house for them. The man almost always had a meaningful job within the colony already, or he wouldn’t be a Bethelite. His intended bride would soon find her place in worthy work.

Women finding men outside created a different problem: even if Father Keil approved their marriage with the man’s intention to join us, the building of their house would take labor from other valued work: farming, the furniture factory, our Bethel Plow manufacturing, and this year, building wagons. And should the couple later choose to leave, this new man who had not contributed all his life nor had a family do so before him would require compensation, something our leader offered anyone who later settled out. Men received money for each year of service to the colony whether or not they’d brought wealth in to the common fund; married women received half of what men received for each year of service.

Christian assured me that since we were both of longstanding families, Father Keil would have little objection to our marrying.

We arrived separately to put off wagging tongues. I spoke with Louisa on the main, or family, floor as she mended little Aurora’s torn skirt. She didn’t ask me about my appointment. Neither did she raise her eyes when, with the arrival of Christian, I stood and climbed the center staircase to Elim’s third story.

Once there, Christian and I sat on tall hardback chairs and faced our leader in his office. The large room served as his laboratory, too, where he grew and experimented with healing herbs. People were healthy in Bethel; few had even a sniffle. When they did, our leader offered relief with his blends of teas or things to swallow or rub to bring about cures. Many in the surrounding community even asked for his slippery elm brew or peach tree bark concoctions. They all called him “Dr. Keil,” a name that always brought a smile to his lips. It was rumored he’d once had a magical book that held healing potions, written in his own blood. But that was earlier, before he led us as a Christian colony.

Light streamed down through the clerestory windows that from the
outside reminded me of an Indian’s eyes, narrow. Those third-story openings were barely a third of the size of those on the first and second floors, and they were high above so we couldn’t look out through them to the spring beyond.

Father Keil’s chair, on a platform behind a heavy walnut desk, would have resembled a throne if the desk hadn’t been there. Leaders in Germany lived in castles, had thrones … it was expected of a colony leader, not something meant to be ostentatious.

Or so I told myself.

His forearms rested on the desk, hands folded as in prayer.

It was my first visit to this room. A single bookshelf held titles about medicines and plants. Wooden bowls and pestles perched neatly on a long table off to the side. The room felt almost steamy on this warm March morning, what with all the plants and earth readied to be set out as soon as any threat of a freeze had ceased.

Our leader’s eyes looked tired as we waited for him to begin. I thought perhaps as this was his fortieth year, he might be weary of the celebrations of his birth and the fireworks that crackled every now and then. Men seem generally less interested in fusses made over birthdays, or so my father always said when my mother tried to do something special on his day.

“So,” Father Keil began when the last singing hiss of a firecracker faded. “You wish to marry.”

I knew enough to remain silent until after Christian spoke, though it surprised me that our leader already knew. Christian must have told him. Or rumors spread despite our trying to keep it quiet. Christian told him about conferring with my father and then with me and now with him, how he had prayed about this union and felt God answered after all this time his desire for a workmate by raising me before his eyes.

“You might have talked to me first, Chris,” Keil told Christian. “It would have saved this … disharmony now, as you will surely see it.” He looked at me for the first time.

My heart began to pound. Fear like a startled cat pounced on my chest. I hoped I didn’t whimper out loud. Our leader sighed deeply, turned back to Christian. “I see no good thing to come of this union, Chris.”

I nearly bit my tongue through to hold my words in my mouth. I hiccupped. Both men looked at me, then Christian went on as though he hadn’t heard what our leader had said.

“She has a loving spirit. I’ve seen her kindness. Indeed, I’ve watched her grow into a young woman of substance. Even my sister Helena comments on Emma’s good way with the children. She helps with the
Kinder
, so my sister sees firsthand this woman’s strengths. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ our Lord said. Children know a person’s heart, Wilhelm.”

“But they lack judgment,
ja?
Until they’ve grown. Emma is not grown, and she will bring your work down as you must pause to raise her.”

Could smoke come from one’s ears? Could a heart explode like the firecrackers outside?

“She will be a good mother to my children,” Christian said, his eyes lowered now.

“But this is exactly my concern, Chris. You are nearly my age, and to begin now with a family will take you from the work you’re called to just when we need you most.” He said the word
just
as though it were
yust
, and for the first time I wished we were speaking in German instead of English and wondered why that was so on such an austere occasion. Maybe he knew I had trouble understanding English, even more to
speak well in it. Did he intend to demean me before my beloved’s eyes? “You will have a woman to worry over, a family. There’ll be the need to build a house for you when you should be off recruiting.”

He actually thought I would interfere, that I would not support my husband’s work? He didn’t know me or know my heart. I started to speak, but he held his hand up to stop me as though I were a mule pushing too close to the one in front of it.

“Chris, you are a good man whose strength lies in your compassionate spirit toward our people and a fire that burns for God.” He switched to German now. “That fire brings new people to His way. Your life tells the story again and again to people seeking to live according to the Golden Rule, to give one’s all to God, and through that, to each other. Look whom you have brought to this colony. Karl Ruge, among others, a man of great wisdom whose practical teachings enhance our youth. He nurtures ideas of invention, just like how we solved problems when we lacked a way to bring water to the fields. Remember? You helped design the special drills to bore holes through the center of the logs to act as pipes. As inventive as the Romans and their aqueducts. But this takes a singular mind of care for others. I know this. I must keep my own family’s needs as well as the entire colony, and it is a trial,
ja
, a trial. One our Lord has given me, and only a strong man so anointed can endure. Now, more than ever, with the words of Daniel coming closer, telling us how human conditions will end, we need you and only you to continue as a singular flame for God, Chris, not as a man burdened with family.”

I hated that he called him Chris, as though he did not deserve the full use of his own name, as though our leader could ignore a name given at his birth that spoke of who he was and would ever be, Christian. The scent of green plants growing in this warm third-story floor
seemed suddenly overpowering. The smell of earth, while usually so inviting, smelled of decay to me now. Our leader stood, revealing his long black coat hanging funereally to his knees.