A Clearing in the Wild (24 page)

So during the day, I played with Simmons. My afternoons with
him were much more invigorating than listening to
Frau
Flint and
Frau
Madeleine—the other wife at the fort—gossip about me with words I couldn’t understand.

Besides, I contributed more to their conversations by being gone.

I wondered if I contributed to the conversations of the scouts. I missed the men. I wondered where they were, how far away, whether they’d found that perfect place they sought. I missed being with them, all of them.

I missed Christian most of all, especially at night when I could hear the muffled laughter of the
gut
doctor and Nora rising and falling as I sought sweet sleep.

Before long, the anger I carried at Christian’s leaving me behind turned into aching and, I decided, a theology of unrequited longing.

It was while playing ball with Simmons on October 19 that I stumbled and fell. As An-Gie would say, this was not
klose
, not
gut
at all. I was careful how I fell, aware of my baby even while in slow motion I watched the spruce trees’ branches sway above me as I reached for Simmon’s ball and lost my footing.

I felt a single sharp thrust beneath my breast that made me gasp for air when I hit on my bottom, hard. Then a jolt at my wrist, where I tried to keep from falling backward. I felt dizzy sitting, holding my wrist. I must have cried out, because Simmons came running.

“Missis, Missis,” he said, his small hand patting my shoulder.

“
Danke
,” I told him. I’d ripped the hem of my skirt and would now need to acquire more thread at the store. I smiled to reassure him but swallowed instead as water gathered at the back of my throat. I thought I might be sick. My face must have paled. I felt clammy, lightheaded.

“Mommy! Mommy!” he shouted as he ran to the cabin where the women stitched.

“No, no,” I called to him. The last thing I needed was
Frau
Flint making some comment about my clumsiness or my beefy nature. I tried to stand, couldn’t. My bulky body rolled on the dirt and spruce boughs I’d slipped on when I went to catch Simmons’s tossed ball. I panted now, looked around for something to use to pull myself up with, but we’d been in a field and the tree that gave its boughs up kept its trunk beyond the fence, too far away for me to reach or lean against.

“
Ach
, Christian,” I said, wanting to curse him for not being there. I supposed that even if he’d stayed with me, he could have been in Steilacoom for the day or back at Fort Nisqually and not been able to help me now, but I wouldn’t let him off that uncomfortable hook when I saw him. I suppose I shouldn’t have been playing ball, but it seemed a harmless-enough occupation.

Nora rushed out of the house then, followed by
Frau
Flint and
Frau
Madeleine. An-Gie rushed too, carrying Marie.

“
Ach
, I’m such a bother,” I said. They each took an arm, and one got behind me to ease me up. “
Ja
. Good.
Klose
,” I said, nodding. I was still panting and lowered my head to keep the world from spinning. My mother said such behaviors often worked.

Nora on my right put her arm around my waist,
Frau
Flint did likewise on the other side, and with slow steps they took me to the side of the house, where Nora’s husband worked in the infirmary. She shouted something to Simmons, and he dashed from the porch, where he’d been staring, and ran through the door to his father.

The
gut
doctor held a towel in his hands, sleeves rolled up, and he frowned as the women led me closer. “I’m good,” I said. “
gut.
”

“Here,” he said and motioned the women to help me inside.

I tried to pay attention, listen to what he might try to tell me I
should do to ease the motion sickness. His kind face and gentle hands helped lay me on the cot. “Good,” he said. “Very good.”

At last something was
klose
, and I hadn’t had to ask for help after all; it had been offered. It was the last thing I remembered before I fainted away.

I saw Christian’s face in dreamlike motions leaning over me with gentle eyes, caring globes of sky above me that I fell deeply into. I wondered how they’d found him, told him of my need to have him near me, sighed with relief that he’d returned.

But his voice had changed, and when I focused, these were not Christian’s azure eyes at all. The
gut
doctor stared at me instead. I pressed my eyelids closed against the disappointment.

Distant sounds of wind through trees rushed against my ears, so I heard little of whatever chatter there might have been within that room. The scent of Nora’s lavender soap drifted past me as she placed a cool cloth on my head. Someone brushed glycerin on my lips, a woman’s soft finger easing like a skater across my flesh.

I hadn’t fallen on my stomach, I knew this. I had protected my baby even in my reaching for Simmons’s throw. That was why my wrist hurt so. I’d turned it nearly backward to break my fall. I lifted my hands, opened my eyes to peek. Tiny bits of stone and dirt ground into the flesh of my palms, proof of how I’d kept my child free from harm.

Dirt on my hands
.

My wrist throbbed. Nora washed my palms and then my fingers, massaging them, one by one. I flinched at the pain in my left hand, wondering why her touching my fingers should bring such pain to my wrist.

She replaced the cool cloth grown hot from my fevered head. The
gut
doctor left then, and Nora sat beside me, sometimes reading from her Bible words I couldn’t understand; sometimes sewing tiny stitches on a quilt square. Simmons came in once and leaned against her, asked a question. His mother gave an answer. He sighed and left. I so wondered what they said.

The day went on in dreamy states and, except for my wrist, I felt no piercing pains, but my body felt as though it carried a rock dropped inside my pelvis. My child kicked once, and my back ached as it never had before. I breathed words of gentleness to him, and he rested for a time.

But in early evening a kind of motion sickness interrupted what had felt like troubled sleep. I sat up, must have cried out, that rock sinking in my pelvis pushing to get out, stretching flesh and searing through my body in an effort to be free. An ache rolled over me more frightening than painful in its change. I was alone, though Nora must have lit the lamp beside my bed. “
Frau
Nora!” I shouted. What was this? It couldn’t be labor, could it? I remembered then our leader’s admonition that women experience pain in childbirth as a universal act of remembering our Garden sins. Perhaps Fort Steilacoom was too far from Eve’s Garden for God to care about my pain, this unusual pain. It was not as our leader foretold. I didn’t feel cut in two. I didn’t feel as though sin lay on me. I felt discomforted, yes. But it was pain hard to describe … distinctive. Unique. I panted.

I felt wetness beneath me, and then, as though I’d swallowed a horse, a burning pushed through my abdomen, but I swore I wouldn’t cry out again. My husband abandoned me. My mother lived months away. No stranger offered comfort.

But then Nora scurried inside the room, took one look at me and left, returned in minutes behind her husband, her skirts swaying. I
motioned with my hand to my abdomen, wondering how I might ask for soda for the burning there. A sting of pain rose over me then, followed by a climbing pain that arched above me and made me want to push my insides out. My eyes throbbed like a heartbeat. “Is this it?” I panted. “Does my baby come?”

Before the
gut
doctor could answer, he threw my skirt onto my abdomen. The pain crested. I shouted loud, a wail almost, and then this aching stretching as though I’d ridden through a rock cleft to the wide clearing on the other side.

“Boy, Mrs. Giesy.
Junge
,” the doctor said.

“
Es ist Junge?
” I asked in German. “It’s a boy?”

In response, I heard a baby’s cry as he held the infant up for me to see. A twisting cord of flesh tied us together, and then I saw toes, then chubby legs and all the parts and hands and head that spoke of his completeness and perfection: our son. The doctor continued speaking, but all I really understood was
Junge
. Boy.

Heartburn. Stretching flesh. Not much to complain about. I lay stunned by the arrival of an infant with so little trouble. My wrist from the fall I took hurt more.

Our leader might say I’d slipped past sin.

As Nora laid the infant on my breast I sighed, so grateful, so amazed that I had given birth with so little fanfare. I felt no guilt at all, but rather joy that I had co-created with our Lord and brought new life into the colony!

The child’s dark fuzz brushed against my face. Nora rolled a quilt behind me so I could sit up a bit, then I nestled the boy in the crook of my arm. The size of a watermelon, he promised as much sweetness. I gazed into his face. He’d be tall one day like his father. His hands were large, his fingers long. He was full term, arrived when he should have.
I’d tell them if I could. He wasn’t a month early, as the two medical men predicted. I’d love to tell them they were wrong, but it would have to wait for Christian’s arrival for that translation.

I wished my husband had been here. He’d missed his son’s arrival. Otherwise, this child appeared on time, in October, just as I predicted, without tragedy or unbearable pain.

I named him Andrew Jackson Giesy for the president that Christian loved so much. Christian’s grandfather carried the name too, but it was for the president I’d call our son. “A man of the people,” my husband called Andrew Jackson, “who fought the banking institutions and other powered men in order to bring better lives to those who worked so hard.” It didn’t matter that the Senate later censured him. That act was led by his former rival, Henry Clay. Jackson said the banks monopolized and therefore hurt each small farmer. Being censured for seeking truth, my husband told me, was a badge of courage. Experiencing challenge and distress in the name of virtue was a virtue itself.

The year of my birth, Jackson was nearly assassinated for his views. He became even more worthy in Christian’s eyes when he died ten years later, having never given up on his beliefs. I hadn’t followed politics all that much until I married Christian, but he’d said if our child was a boy, we should call him Andrew Jackson.

As a dutiful wife, when the child opened his eyes to me, I did just that.

I stayed in a daze of wonder throughout that evening, considering our leader’s predilections for my disaster. Except for my aching wrist, this childbearing had been an easy venture. Perhaps it was man’s duty to imagine the worst and woman’s duty to prove them wrong.

I slept with my son beside me, though I woke often to be sure he still breathed, those tiny lips like pumpkin seeds barely moving as air as soft as sunrise moved between them. I so wanted to share these moments with Christian, to have him see that I could do what he hoped: give birth without bother, tend to our child, and as Scripture advised, bring the baby up in the way that he should go so he would never depart from it. I’d begun that very morning saying prayers for Andrew—Andy, as I thought of him—someone firm and sweet and not needing the power of the former president, an infant basking in the love of his mother.

Andrew was the name of a disciple, too, the one who pointed out the boy with the basket of fish when our Lord gave His sermon on the hillside. An observer, that Andrew, and a good and loving man who noticed children and all they could contribute.

I showed my Andrew to Nora in the morning while he wore the long gown I’d made for him.
Frau
Madeleine tucked the blanket under his chest with her bony fingers, speaking in her high-pitched voice. Her words sounded joyous, and I heard her say “bright,” a word I’d thought referred mostly to a bold dye or the sun.

I kept him tightly wrapped when I met
Frau
Flint at the sewing time, not certain what her English words might say. She didn’t seem the least interested, merely lifted her glasses on her beaked nose to stare at him, grunted once, and returned to her stitching.