A Clearing in the Wild (47 page)

On the boat ride back, my mind raced with possibilities. Here, Christian could find meaning and good work; here, he could perhaps forgive himself for being human, for doing the best he could, though all hadn’t turned out as he’d once hoped. But how to convince him that such a move could be a statement of faith?

“You are in deep thought,
Frau
Giesy,” Karl said.

I nodded. “I want to find a way to help my husband see oystering as a buttress to his faith. And I want to be sure I’m not making my own religion up, as I sometimes think
Herr
Keil has, while I wrangle with how we should be in this western place.”

“There is an old Norse word for religion that translates in the English as ‘tying again,’ ” he said. He gazed out across the water, the silence broken only by the swish of the boat cutting through the water. “Somehow I think those Norsemen must have realized that life unravels us at times. It is the way of things. It is our faith, our religion, I believe, that then binds us together.”

“ ‘Begin to weave / God provides the thread,’ ” I said. “My mother gave that German proverb to me.” It came to me then what that proverb meant: that life is a weaving with our fine threads being broken and stretched. It’s our calling to keep weaving, find ways to tie things together again.

“The band played in Portland,” Christian said. “March 22, 1856, our first performance in all these years.”

“You played?”

He shook his head no, his enthusiasm apparently coming from the association with the players, not anything he did himself. “Jonathan played.”

“You saw my brother? Is he well?” I clutched at his arm. “I wish he’d come back with you.”

“He seemed content to be with the band and those who wintered in Portland. They played at the request of someone named Grimm, the same one who told Wilhelm about the apples. He sold us 256 bushels of oats at forty cents a bushel and 165 bushels of wheat at seventy cents each. They can begin grinding flour, and best of all, I’ve brought apples and more flour to tide us over until we leave. They’ll take the grain to Aurora Mills; that’s what Wilhelm calls the land they purchased. He’s named it for Aurora.”

Not for Louisa
, I thought.

“It’s a rolling piece of prairie south of Portland. Many acres. It already has a gristmill on it. Their neighbors are from French Prairie, named for all the retired Frenchies of Hudson’s Bay and their Indian wives.”

“So we can keep the grist stones your parents brought here, then.”

Christian looked puzzled. “We won’t be here, so why would we leave them?” He looked around. “In fact, I wonder why they’ve wasted time plowing up the soil and planting oats here.”

“Have they already begun to build Wilhelm’s
gross Haus
at Aurora Mills?” I asked.

He looked away.

“I suspect Keil and company wait in Portland in a nice warm house where food is plenty and he can hold court—I mean preach—to many, while my brother and others like him build his house for him. My own brother who doesn’t even make a way to see me or his niece and nephew. Well, so be it.” I brushed at my apron, though I saw nothing there.

“You can see him when we join them in Oregon,
Liebchen
,” Christian said.

“I don’t plan to go to Oregon, Christian. And when I tell you what I’ve found and who agrees with me, you won’t want to leave here either.”

“Emma …”

We took our small boat to our claim, seven miles up the Willapa from Woodard’s Landing. I wanted a pleasant place to talk to Christian, and he was willing to take me to the site he’d once picked for us to build on. He was saying good-bye to the landscape, he said; I was beginning to say hello. We stood there now, overlooking the four logs we’d left last fall to outline the house. They’d been pushed and tossed in different directions. Maybe from stout winds. I hoped not from high water or flooding. Andy whined to be carried on his father’s shoulders, and he
did, riding high while reaching for the leaves of trees. I held Catherina in my arms. We ate biscuits with butter, a luxury, then sat on a quilt my mother had sent in the trunk.

It was now or never. “The scouts were right, husband. The Willapa Valley will provide everything we need if we’re patient and are willing to accept not the perfect pearl but one that is distinctive.”

“Indeed.”

“Karl thinks that oystering can work,” I said, after telling him about Joe Knight and our trip to Bruceport. “He’s willing to remain here to make it happen and teach any children who stay here too.”

“Karl is? He’s so … loyal to Wilhelm. Always has been. And Joe.” He shook his head.

“It isn’t disloyal to follow your heart,” I said. “Karl didn’t go with Wilhelm to Portland because he believes there is something here worth staying for. Everything about it here, except the rainy winters, is an Eden. We’d appreciate the blooms and beauty less if we had nothing to contrast it with, and therein lies the joy of the rainy winter months, the dark heavy clouds that shadow our days and promise sunshine in due time. I never thought I’d say such a thing, but I mean it, Christian. I do.”

“Wilhelm is right, though. There is still no market here for whatever we might produce.”

“But you were right too. We’re on rivers and near oceans, so we can ship things to markets.” He shook his head, still not convinced. I tried another tactic. “It doesn’t mean that Wilhelm was wrong about this place. It just means others can listen and hear something else. Wilhelm has done that. He’s decided to go somewhere else. Neither of you made a mistake. Each is free to make other choices. We just have to make a change in what we thought we’d do. Less grain farming and more … oyster farming.”

“Emma, I—”

“At least until we get field crops established. We can cherish what we have, still be a part of the colony if you wish, but separated. Maybe the way Nineveh was back in Missouri.”

“Nineveh grew just a few miles down the road. We’ll be a hundred and thirty miles distant from Aurora Mills. It’ll make decision-making difficult.”

“Not if we’re really … separate.” Andy draped his arms around his father’s neck as the child stood behind him. “He missed you terribly,” I said, then continued. “We can pay off the land claims with what we sell. And maybe, just maybe, living communally isn’t what we were called to do. We can still be faithful to our beliefs even if we don’t have a common fund.”

Christian shook his head. “What beliefs are there except to follow Wilhelm’s way of serving? I have trouble seeing anything else.”

“But that’s it, Christian. Maybe, like Wilhelm, you too are visionary and you can see things differently if you can stop blaming yourself for what happened here. We don’t need to separate our hearts from the other colonists nor from our neighbors to be in service. We can look at what our neighbors might need. Your recruitment brought in good people like Karl Ruge, but most were people who just made the colony bigger and produced more work. It didn’t bring people in who had needs that we could meet. We tended one another, but isn’t giving to those truly hurting what service is all about?”

He dug at his ears. He was thinking.

“Oystering, if we’re successful, would allow us to be good neighbors to the colonists and to those here.”

I decided to be still. My father said to sell a wagon, one needed to sing its virtues and then be quiet and listen to how the customer would
then tell him why he needed that very wagon, how he had a big family and could use a sturdy vehicle, or how his wife was sickly and needed one that handled the ruts well. The rest would be simple.

Christian stayed silent a very long time. I’d probably strained my threads in trying to describe what I meant, in trying to tie things, again. He stayed quiet too long.

“We could share the costs and profits of those at Willapa, maybe send a percentage each year on to Aurora Mills. Tithe our harvest. But there won’t need to be
one
leader with all the weight of the success or failure on his shoulders. We can decide as a family what to do, or as a group of families. We don’t need to wait for just one ruler.”

A seagull, probably not Charlie, flew overhead with several others. “Bread, Papa. I want to throw him bread,” Andy said. I overlooked the fact that my son asked his father and not me for bread and handed a biscuit to Christian who gave it to Andy. The child threw up breadcrumbs and squealed in delight when a bird swooped down to catch a crumb in midair.

“Even the seagulls adapt to new opportunities,” I said. “You know Wilhelm will never let another lead while he’s alive, and he won’t prepare another to take his place. So we should listen to our hearts, listen to what we think we’re hearing and follow that.”

Christian played with a long strand of grass, running it through his wide fingers. He watched Andy’s interest in the root of a cedar tree. Catherina had decided to nap.

“We came to serve people,
Liebchen
. Wilhelm was right about that. This place has no people to recruit or bring into the fold, none to help prepare for the last days ahead.”

“We don’t bring them in, God brings them. Didn’t you tell me this once? And we don’t have to be so separated from our neighbors. Look
at all those oystermen. Look at Joe. I think he feels a bit guilty for having left us. If we join him, you could help relieve that. There are dozens of people suffering in silence. We might hear them if we weren’t listening to the chop of trees building the colony for the sake of … the colony. We can’t just worry about our little group, Christian. How else can we be salt and light?”

“Father Keil sent us west to protect us from the world.”

“Maybe we’ll best prepare for the end times by behaving as though we can’t control their coming. Because we can’t. We can only love one another, trust we’re not alone here. We can be good neighbors to people like Sarah and Sam. Remember how the Chehalis offered us hides and house-building help? Perhaps there are things we can do for those people whose lives are changing with these treaties and with us being here. Perhaps living in the world instead of apart from it will make us better servants in the end.”

“My parents will want to go with Wilhelm. They’ve followed him their whole lives. From Pennsylvania to Missouri—”

“If you said you were staying and that you wanted something a little different from what we had at Bethel, I think they’d remain. They’ve already finished the log house they started for Mary and Sebastian. They’re even going to roof it.” He raised his eyebrows in surprise. “They trusted your judgment. So does Karl. So do I.”

He leaned over Catherina, brushed a spider making its way toward her neck. “You think I can be an oysterman.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe Joe Knight is. He never seemed the type to branch out on his own.”

“We never know what we’ll do,” I said, “when challenged. We’re like oysters sometimes, I think. Trying to stay deep in the mud, out of the way, but then we get selected. But we’re not alone, even in the worst of storms.”

“I doubt Joe was ‘challenged’ by some storm to become an oysterman,” he said.

“How can you know?” I asked him. “There he was all that time, and we didn’t know it because we never ventured far outside our own little world.”

He rose to follow Andy. He lifted the child onto his shoulders once again. He stood above me, and I shaded my eyes with my hand. “We can’t know for certain about anything,” I continued. “We listen, try to do our best to help our families and our neighbors, that’s all we can do. Here, Andy. A little more bread for you to toss.” I handed it to him and Christian set him down. I picked up the picnic things, started to carry them to the boat. “I’d like to ask Jonathan to come stay with us. At least make the offer. He might not come, of course.”

“
Ja
,” he said. “All we ever wanted to do was to take care of those we loved. It was all we did, we scouts. You included, Emma.”

“Love’s the thread. Then listen,” I said. I put my finger to my lips. We could hear the wind through the treetops, the soft breathing of a baby, the shouts of a child racing a seagull, the rush of the river water behind us.

“I like what I hear,” he said.

“We can go with you to the coast, maybe sell the claim,” I ventured. “Or we can build our house, and I’ll remain with the children while you’re oystering.”

“I don’t like being separated from you.”

“Seasons,” I said. “There’ll be seasons when we’re apart, as when we were first married, but I won’t long for you so much because I know you’ll be doing something you’ve chosen to do, not something you do because you felt yourself a failure.”

“You think we Giesys and Stauffers and Schaefers can survive not as colonists but as friends and family, together? Neighbors, too?”

“It’s a path that has meaning, Christian. I truly believe that.”

“I listen to you,” Christian said. He reached his arm around me, pulled me close.

“Does that mean you’ll stay?” I sank into his eyes, as inviting as a warm bath in winter. I was sure I knew the answer.