A Clearing in the Wild (23 page)

Christian learned English too, and I surmised that our teacher, Karl Ruge, owned a variety of books on more subjects than German or mathematics. I remembered seeing him read a book of plays once, written by someone named Shakespeare. The very tools that would let me
survive in the world outside were seeds in my father’s garden. I would become fluent in English, that would be my new vow.

Right now, I needed to meld into that outside place, watch and learn as I could, become someone who didn’t stand out, at least not for what I lacked.

I slept off and on during that day that Christian left me. I’d awaken, startled by the unfamiliar setting, then think of his leaving me behind. My stomach felt as heavy as a rock plopped into water. “
Tschuess, Liebchen
,” he’d whispered before he left. “Good-bye, sweetheart,” he’d repeated in English. I’d turned my back to him.

Hours later, though I needed a bath, I simply could not bring myself to ask where I could heat water or even to bother trying to explain myself. I’d just suffer for a time, scratch where the wool wrapper chafed at my neck and across my belly. I wrote a letter to Mary but couldn’t begin to tell her of the awful thing Christian had done, leaving me here alone, putting his precious mission before anything else. Isolation. He’d certainly found that for me, and he didn’t need colony wilderness to do it.

Sometime in the late afternoon, a loud thump hit my door, once, twice, three times. It wasn’t a knock exactly, coming low on the door as it did. With a push of energy I got up from my bed and lifted the latch.

“Simmons,” Nora said to her son, holding a hard leather ball. She shook her head at him, smiled at me with apologetic eyes. Nora motioned me out then and offered me a chair in an open room that housed Japanese prints on the whitewashed log wall. I’d spent the day alone, and now she had a tea service set up in the open room. I could hardly turn her invitation down.

After she poured me tea, she tended her youngest, whose name I didn’t yet know, while I sat on an embroidered stool. My fingernails needed attention. My wrapper, all speckled with spots, looked like it
had measles. Simmons now bounced the ball against the wall, watching me watching his mother.

Nora used the word
mess
when she changed the napkin of her youngest, a girl with just a fuzz of blond hair.
Could that be the child’s name?
“Mess,” Nora said with a bit of disgust in her voice, but she grinned at her daughter. I knew it couldn’t be a name. But when she proposed we go to the “mess,” I wasn’t sure I wanted any part of it.

She motioned eating with her hands, and I nodded, though I did wonder if eating would end up in a “mess.” My stomach growled with hunger. I’d spent most of my last twenty-four hours in my windowless room, since late afternoon of the day before. A charcoal dusk brushed the sky. I’d brooded and pouted with no one even seeing how I struggled. No wonder I felt hungry.

I should have bathed, should have combed my hair or at least rebraided it. But what did I care? It would serve Christian well if others judged his wife to be a “mess.”

A knock on the door revealed a tidy-looking Indian woman, who took the towheaded child from Nora. She said something to Simmons and he laughed, but he put down the ball that he’d been bouncing in a steady rhythm against the wall, and instead from the Indian woman he accepted what looked like skin stretched across a narrow circle. It now assumed his attention as he struck it with his hand.
A drum
. The child played a drum. He made me think of my little brother William, who would have loved such a toy.

Nora motioned to me, then pulled me up from the stool. Her hands felt warm and smooth. She said something and with her eyes asked permission to do something to my face. I nodded, and she brushed the loose curls from around my ears, then led me to the wash basin in the room she and her husband must have shared. “
Danke
,” I said. I’d just do my face. I didn’t care about the aroma of me at that moment.

The
gut
doctor came out from the other side of the cabin and bowed slightly to each of us. He pulled his wife’s arm through one of his own, then offered me the other. I took it. It must be the custom in these parts, I decided as we walked to the next log cabin. Apparently, the officers and wives were served their evening meals, all taken together like a family.

Walking in to a room full of faces, five men and two other women besides Nora, was not my idea of pleasant. I wished now I had changed my clothes and asked for a garlic compress to reduce the puffiness in my eyes.

I hiccupped. One of the women giggled. My face felt hot. I had to find some way of turning this discomfort into grit. It would be my … theology. If Martin Luther and my husband found meaning in life by facing challenges they’d have preferred not to, then I would do so as well. I’d ask for no special attention, not that I could ask for anything with clarity. I’d listen carefully to what everyone said but watch what people did more. Maybe each day, I’d choose one word that I’d try to remember and write down, making it sound in a way that Nora could read it and say it out loud, and then I’d know I had written it well. I’d know I pronounced it correctly.
Superior
. I knew it as a word that meant someone above me, someone higher up. Why it came to me just then I do not know, but as I looked into the eyes of those women, I felt low and small, making them my superiors I was certain.

For this meal, I’d be lowly, quiet, not bring attention. I’d behave as a deaf woman, using my eyes to interpret whatever I could.

The
gut
doctor stood beside his wife while she made introductions. I heard my name spoken. A blond woman with a long, narrow face raised her eyebrows at my introduction, and I curtsied and repeated her name, as I understood it, with the title, “
Frau
Flint.” She waved her hand as though dismissing me, and then whatever she said next made
everyone laugh. My face felt as though I’d been sitting beside the fire all day. I caught the English words “emigrant” and “beefy.” I knew what emigrant meant, but
beefy?
We’d jerked beef before we left Missouri to feed us along the way. Were they serving beef? I wished Christian were here to help me translate, though with that thought came outrage masquerading as an unexpected hiccup.

Nora patted my hand, then shook her finger at
Frau
Flint the way my mother often did at William when he was younger and avoiding his bath. It was done in jest, and I supposed someone had offered a tease spoken at my expense. I was glad I couldn’t understand their comments about my uncontrollable stomach acids.

My brother teased me often at the table, his sign of affection, my mother said. Maybe it was
Frau
Flint’s way of being friendly, too. I smiled at her, hoping to win her over.

Captain Maloney sat at the head of the table, and he jumped up to pull out my chair. His quick movement attracted the attention of the other table mates, so I sat while their eyes looked at him instead of at me.

Someone must have prayed a grace, as each one bowed their heads. I did as well, taking in a deep breath and praying for strength to survive this … mess.

I survived the mess—my word for the day—without spilling the juice from the venison onto the apron I’d pulled from my pack, still clean from its last washing the day we arrived at Toledo, the day we left the Cowlitz River behind. I ate the pink-fleshed fish they called salmon and let the white sauce swirl into the inside of my mouth. Butter, sweet butter, something I hadn’t tasted for months. I savored it slowly. I listened to the barrage of sounds, knowing that my mother had been insulated from English by living within the colony. Her choice made it easier to remain as a German speaker only. This would not be the case if the colony moved here. We’d all have to learn English unless we settled
in a place so remote no one lived there but us. We couldn’t rely on just a few like my father or Christian or Adam Schuele to be the salt that seasoned the outside world.

I ate the fluffy white vegetables Nora called
wapato
. Words swirled around me like music sung in a language I didn’t know. Eventually, the
gut
doctor stood and broke my reverie. He pulled Nora’s chair out so she could stand. I lowered my napkin and started to stand too, but Nora waved me to remain. “Finish,” she said, the meaning clear.

Captain Maloney then said something, and Nora spoke in a reassuring tone to me, pointing to the captain and adding the English word
home
. I watched
Frau
Flint elbow the woman seated next to her, and the two patted napkins to their lips but not before I saw the looks they exchanged.

Then my guardians left me.

I dropped my eyes, poked at the pudding a soldier now placed before me as he took my plate away. It wasn’t supposed to be this way—me, alone, making a fool of myself with total strangers while my husband explored for new worlds. “Home,” Nora had said. I missed being home. Even a windowless room with my husband in it would have been “home.” I wanted to go home, but I had none, at least not here.

I had no strength for this.

Indigestion left a foul taste in my mouth. My food no longer appealed, and I could feel that prickle at my nose that told me tears threatened like a summer storm. There appeared to be no reason to continue to endure this. I stood abruptly, nodded at
Frau
Flint and the others and stepped behind my chair, my lumbering body pushing it up against the table. I turned to go unescorted back to my room, but the captain reached my side in seconds. I had no idea what he said, but his hand felt firm at my elbow, and I heard more laughter as we walked out the door, him straightening Nora’s loaned shawl over my shoulders.

I said nothing. What could I say? He chattered, using words all foreign to me. He pulled me closer, maneuvered me past a rock in the path that he bent to pick up and toss. He patted my hand, smiled, pulled my arm through his. His voice came low and lilting. He leaned over me to pull my shawl tighter around me. “Chilly,” I understood him to say, but his breath felt too warm at my cheek. I was a lamb alone in the wolves’ quarters.

I pulled my arm free and set a faster pace, stepping ahead of him. He talked, using a tone like the petting of a frightened pup, as he hurried to catch up with me. My fury at my husband grew. I should not have been left in this kind of setting. I did not deserve to be treated as though I were some trollop free for the taking. What must the captain think of a man who would leave his wife behind?

I couldn’t depend on Christian—or anyone else, for that matter.

The lamp in the window flickered as I opened Nora’s door. I turned to curtsy to the captain, and before he could say anything either to me or to the
gut
doctor as he had answered my knock, I closed the door in the captain’s astonished face.

If Christian wouldn’t help me, I’d have to help myself.

Tending the children was something I could do. There were only Nora’s, I discovered in the days that followed. All the other couples here either had grown families as the tiny drawings in their lockets showed, or they’d left their youngsters behind with relatives while their husbands served in this faraway place.

Simmons, the boy, had decided I could stay when I played ball with him one afternoon, never stopping, never tiring. I’d done such things with William and David Jr., and I found it a soothing thing to do. Nora
kept saying, “Thank you,
danke
,” and I realized that occupying Simmons allowed her to accomplish necessary tasks when Marie, her toddler, took her nap or when An-Gie, the Steilacoom woman, came to help. Simmons apparently did not nap.

Nora also taught her son and allowed me to sit in on the sessions. I picked up new words that way and found I could recognize some words in the Germanic language of English that sounded much like the German words. This made memorizing the words written down on Simmon’s slate next to simple drawings much easier to learn. It also meant I could add to the list of English words I kept in a book I’d acquired on account at the sutler’s store.

A few Indian words came into my vocabulary too, words An-Gie said more than once that I thought I understood. She called Simmons
tolo
when she nodded her chin toward the boy. I assumed it meant “boy.” She’d call, “
Muck-a-muck!
” and he’d come running, so I guessed that word meant either “eat” or “the stew’s getting cold” or something to do with food. She used the word
klose
often, too, and Nora even used it. I guessed that must mean “
gut
” or “fine” or “great,” a word one should know in many languages, I decided.

In the afternoon when the women gathered together to stitch, Simmons and I played ball. I knew I should have been working on clothing for the baby, but I devoted my evenings to this task, stitching the flannel into a long dress that I could knot at his or her feet to keep the child warm. In the evenings, I took out my chatelaine and sewing kit to mend my own wrapper and let the pretty tin needle holder hang openly at my neck. The work served as backdrop to the evening time when I talked to the baby as though it could hear me. Listening to the chatter of all the women at the fort fatigued me. I learned better with just Nora or An-Gie to listen to.