A Clearing in the Wild (4 page)

Then I heard my father say to Christian something about “asking for trouble,” and before I could lick the peppermint from my lips, that handsome friend of my father’s turned to me. He clicked his heels as though a Swiss soldier and bowed at his waist. “Your father consents to my walking you home, should you concur,” he said. “Though he warns me of the trouble.”

“Trouble is the needle God uses to stitch us into finer quilts,” I said before I could censure the spicy words as they rose through the tightness in my throat.

“I warn you,” my father told Christian with raised eyebrows, but also with a smile.

We started off walking past the houses that inside were filled with celebrating Bethelites. I hardly heard a word Christian said, aware more of how close he stood, how the backs of our hands barely brushed, yet I could feel the heat of them like hot rocks my mother placed at the foot of our bed to warm the sheets of my sisters and me. Once I nearly stumbled in the snow, and Christian caught my elbow but in an instant
released it, keeping chaste as required. He spoke a little of his journeys into Kentucky. I merely listened, hoping he’d not ask questions of me. What in my life was worthy of sharing with so important and so fine a man twenty years my senior? My feelings bounced like bells in a strong wind.

We sauntered toward the sawmill, past brick houses. Up the incline stood Elim, the large three-story home of our leader set up like a castle on a hill. We would walk to it later, and on the second floor, everyone would gather. Suddenly, our leader rushed out of the Latimer
Haus
toward us, his white napkin still tugging at his throat as he strode to where we stood.

“Chris, it is
gut
you have passed by. Ve have much to talk about. I’m finished eating here, so come, ve go to Elim.”

Christian smiled at him. “Wilhelm, can it not wait until—”

“You rush along now, Emma Wagner,” our leader said, shooing his hands at me as though I were his chicken. “Catch up with your father and brothers and stop bothering Mr. Giesy. He has little time to look after girls who fall behind their families.” He tugged at the tuft of hair below his chin kept separated from his beard. “Go, then. See, your father waits now.”

I wondered what Christian would do to correct our leader’s understanding of my annoying him.
Annoying him
. I pushed my shoulders back straight as a knitting needle.

“Wilhelm,” Christian began, but our leader already headed up the hill toward his home. He rolled his arm as though inviting Christian to hurry along, refusing to look or listen to what anyone else had to say. He left his wife and children at Latimers’ to fend their own way home.

Christian smiled at me, eyes sparkling and wistful as a boy’s. But he shrugged his shoulders, lifted his palms, then pointed with his chin to
my father. “Hurry along then, Emma Wagner. There must be trouble I need to tend to.”

“
Ja
, there’s trouble,” I said as I turned my back to him before I had to watch him do the same.

I reasoned something as I stomped away: Keil, our leader, pronounced his own name in the English as
keel
, the word that means the backbone of a vessel. He saw himself as a keel, that portion of a boat’s structure which runs from bow to stern and to which all else must attach to form the ship. It is what keeps the ship afloat. But in German the word does not mean “keel,” but “wedge” instead, something that splits, heavy like an anchor piercing the sea to hold the ship or keep it from moving forward. As I turned to see the back of Christian walking from me, I began that day to wonder if Father Keil would form a wedge in what I wanted for my future.

“Remember the old German proverb,” my mother said later as I sniffled about my budding romance so early thwarted by Father Keil. “Begin to weave / God provides the thread.”

I nodded, though unsure of what that meant. Should I spend my time weaving and hope something good would come of my creations when I gave them away? Or did it mean that I should just begin, take my stand, and God would provide whatever was needed to serve His purpose? I let my mother wipe at my tears and cheer me as she said, “There’s always the New Year’s dance.”

Waltzing is allowed by our leader, as are the colony’s many festive days, though I suspect Father Keil didn’t expect Christian to dance with the likes of me. I know that now. Following the wedge he placed between us on Christmas Day, I neither saw nor heard about Christian’s activities for an entire week. I’d said nothing when my father raised his eyebrows as I caught up with my parents Christmas morning, and my mother merely handed me a handkerchief when I failed to hold back tears. But later, gaining rhythm, I threw off my brother’s teasing that I’d been left behind like an old potato. “
Ja
, little you know about making stew,” I said. “Potatoes, even old ones, give stew substance.”

He wrinkled his brows. “What does—”

“Never mind,” I said and hurried up the stairs to the loft room I
shared with my three sisters, where if I was lucky and the girls played downstairs, I could smooth my rebuff in private.

But midweek, my mother’s word of weaving brought hope. So on New Year’s Day, with the Missouri winter pining for spring, I thought of dancing. We’d have a celebration later that evening with the brass band playing full force in Elim, the largest house in the colony, where our leader lived and where we often gathered for dances next to his octagonal music room. I had hoped, prayed too, that Christian might ask me to dance at least once, assuming he attended and hadn’t been sent off again by our leader to some faraway place to gain additional converts. I revisited each thing he’d said, remembered the tingling of my skin as I recalled the closeness of our hands. Words formed into music as I beat our rugs beneath the opaque sky, then brought the handwoven carpets inside.

To touch the face / Of one so dear / Is like music / Falling on one’s ear
.

I knew the words were not at all like the elegant music of Papa’s second cousin—mine too—Richard Wagner, who couldn’t even hear his opera
Lohengrin
performed the year before because he displeased the German government. Franz Liszt conducted instead. Maybe music and dissent mixed in my ancestral blood, though it didn’t help me carry a tune. But so mixed passion, too, as Cousin Wagner was a romantic man and so was my father. Even my uncle was an American ambassador to France, that most romantic of lands. My mother still wore beneath her dark high-collared dress a tiny strand of pearls my father must have given her. I’d glimpsed it once before she discreetly tucked it away, blushing as she did.

Later, after New Year’s, I’d help my mother store the few Christmas decorations we kept up until Epiphany. I most loved the tiered carving of the Christmas story, each layer a circle, with wooden shepherds on
the bottom, then on the shelf above them, wise men, and finally Joseph and Mary with the Christ child on top. The whole structure stood on the floor, and each level spun in circles by the heat of candles moving wooden flaps. My mother had brought it from Germany with her. I’d never seen one in any other colony home, and we were only allowed to display it during this season. Putting it away always marked the end of a celebrating time and then the beginning of the long wait for spring.

Sheppie barked, and I went to the window expecting to see a squirrel scampering. I instead delighted in watching Christian make his way through the melting snow to my father’s house. I’d begun to think his little invitation to venture into “trouble” with me on Christmas Day was nothing but a
Peltz Nickel
treat with a twig attached: a promise of a treasure but with a punishment, too. But now, here he appeared, and me with dust fluffs hanging from my dress!

Seeing him stride up the steps onto the porch, his head almost touching the corner filigree, made me forget the punishment part. I pitched aside disappointment brought on by our leader’s interruption on Christmas Day. The dust fluffs were forgotten too.

Christian struck the porch post, knocking mud from his half-boot ankle jacks, then he bent to unlace them. Sheppie barked a happy bark, his gray tail wagging like a metronome, his nails scraping across the pine floor, meeting my father approaching the door. The shepherd dog acted as though he knew the man when he surely didn’t. But the dog’s delight pleased me, and I felt myself emboldened enough to pull back the simple curtain covering our windows and stare out at Christian, willing him to look at me.

He didn’t.

“Your beau’s here,” Jonathan said from behind me.

I turned and shushed him with my chin stuck out and a grit of my
teeth. “He’s here to see Papa, no doubt,” I said, though I hoped I told a lie.

My father answered the door when Christian knocked, and for a moment I wondered if Christian would take offense at the lavish garlands of greens I’d woven dried berries into and hung around the room. I’d set candles in such a way that they, too, looked inviting and shimmered against the wooden cabinet in which my mother kept her good dishes that even today she had not pulled out. It was far from a simple great room, with the festive boughs acting like necklaces, candles flickering, and the fire crackling at the end of the house. Both Catherine and Johanna worked with thread and needles in their laps while Louisa napped. Books spread across the table and on the divan, and I wondered if that would upset him, since our leader didn’t care much for books unless they offered practical advice for making better whiskey or gaining higher yields from fields. A colorful purple and green Wandering Foot quilt almost shouted its lavish comfort. Would Christian think us too worldly?

I stepped in front of the wooden Christmas tier to keep him from seeing its fine carving, just in case. My little ruffle, still stitched to my crinoline, seemed heavier. I had yet to remove it.

The smell of my mother’s baked cinnamon buns permeated the air. At least good scents were not forbidden in a German colony.

Christian seemed not to notice any of his surroundings. He entered in stocking feet against my father’s protest that the floor easily cleaned and he could keep his boots on. Instead, he set the boots with heels precise against the wall, then accepted my father’s offer of ale. He didn’t even acknowledge me as he bent to pet Sheppie.

My father ushered him into the dining room. “Come along, Jonathan,” he told my brother, acting as though I were nothing but a candle stand.

Apparently, if I was to hear the conversation or even share Christian’s presence, it would be as a serving woman unless I did something about it.

“I’d be interested in hearing what Mr. Giesy has to say about his travels,” I said.

My father turned, frowned. “In the kitchen, your mother needs you.”

“
Ja
, I’m sure,” I said, “but—”

“Emma …”

Jonathan grinned as he marched by me and motioned to David and even little William to join him with the men.

I couldn’t overhear them in the kitchen. When I brought in trays of tea to offer, they looked serious as I slowly served them, my brothers included, sitting stiff as bedposts. None of them even acknowledged my presence with a simple nod of thanks. All this men’s talk apparently meant Christian truly had come only to see my father.

“They’ll pass laws against communal living,” Christian said. “And this will not be good for us.”

“We’re not like those … others,” my father said. “We don’t share our wives or husbands. We don’t all live in one huge house. We’re happy, giving to each other in a Christian way. Why should the government care?”

“Sometimes we do, though, live in one house. The bachelors who come with no family to stay with. And until we build them homes, new recruits and whole families do live with others.”

“
Ach
, that is just family,” my father said. “You have generations living in the Giesy house. It is nothing wrong.”

“All we earn we put into one place, communally. All of Bethel’s land is in Wilhelm’s name, no one else’s. This bothers some officials who see such commonness as … against the nation. They wonder if our loyalty is to our leader rather than to the country, and with the rumblings
of
war … ja
, well, they might think we long to become our own country inside this new American state of Missouri.”

“Wilhelm would change that in a moment if asked,” my father said. “He does not keep the land for himself, only for the good of us all.” My father’s voice rose.

“I know this, David,” Christian countered. He reached for my father’s hand and patted it with assurance. Christian had fine, high cuticles, and his nails were white as piano ivory. “But outsiders, they don’t understand. It seems strange to them, how we do things here. We are foreign to them, more German than American.”

“When you recruit, are you able to win hearts for our Lord?” my father asked.

Christian nodded yes. “But it is harder to describe the necessity for all of us to live in one colony with one storehouse to fill and only one to take from. People wonder why our Lord asks us to live so … communally—”

“When all around us yearn for things, for new dresses, big horses, more fields to call their own,” I said and continued before they could stop me. “We prosper by meeting those very needs we say we don’t believe in. We sell whiskey and gloves and lumber to those who do not live as we do. I don’t understand that either.”

Even Jonathan’s eyes grew wide. My father frowned. “Emma …”

“What she says I have thought too,” Christian said. He sat straighter in the high chair and stared at me, elbows out as his palms rested on his thighs. “It seems a contradiction to separate ourselves and then to take gain from the sales to the fallen world.”

He considered something I said important?

“But we do not get rich from it,” my father protested. “Only enough to serve one another comes into the storehouse. We tend widows, orphans, no matter if they are colonists or not. That is our mission.”

“But perhaps it’s tainted,” I said, pushing my good fortune. “How do we look to those we seek to convert? Maybe it appears as though we recruit to
our
way rather than to God’s.”