A Mending at the Edge: A Novel (Change And Cherish)

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  Big Jack took his seat in the middle of the men, and I kept my eyes averted from his. I worried over our crops he’d left behind in Willapa. Who farmed it now? Why didn’t he go back? I’d give him no satisfaction by asking.

  The men nodded in agreement that the railroad would be a good thing for Aurora. I shook my head in wonder. Keil had sent us west nearly ten years earlier to find a new colony site, specifically to avoid the bad influences that a railroad would bring. Now here he was championing it. I’d never understand the thinking of men. Sometimes Brother Keil’s enthusiasms centered more on economics than on living a faith-filled life. We didn’t even have a church building yet and held a service only once a month. I thought that a loss, even though I took issue with a few of his points of view on religion. Well, perhaps I took issue with his views of economics too. After all, he’d belittled Christian’s and my plans for farming oysters as a way to survive in the Washington Territory, and yet it had served us well—until Christian’s death.

  Again my thoughts turned to Christian. How I missed his strength and vision. I understood Louisa better now, since we had both suffered the deaths of loved ones dearer than skin. Ja, she hovered over her husband, but she did not judge me that I failed to hover over the husband I’d been left with. Well, the one I’d poorly chosen.

  If my parents would come, if my brother Jonathan could help me build the house and use his good business mind here, the entire colony would benefit. I had to press that point to my parents when I wrote next. They believed in generosity and in the work of Keil’s communal society. At least they always had.

  I think Brother Keil secretly liked to have us under one roof. He puffed up, sitting at the head of the long table, and faked chagrin when he was called out by local people seeking medicinal help. He’d sigh and say, “Ach, the demands,” as he pushed himself away from the steaming food, while the women scurried to gather up his tailored coat and bag, several vying to go with him to serve as nurse. If Louisa was in the kitchen, Helena answered his every beck and call, bringing him his pipe or tobacco twist.

  “Catie,” Brother Keil called out to my daughter as she sat stitching. “Ah, you do such fine work, Catie.”

  “I’m Kate,” she corrected him. But she beamed with pride at his recognition of her efforts.

  “Gut, very gut. You’ll make a fine seamstress one day. I’ll show you special stitches if you’d like. I was trained as a tailor, you know, ja?” He patted her hair and didn’t look at all chagrined when I frowned at him, though he did take his hand from her head.

  To the young girls and those of marriageable age, Keil told stories, tweaking their cheeks and patting their shoulders as though they were recently out of their pinafores, instead of young woman harboring hope in their hearts. Most of his stories were about women being in service to their community and their Lord, about how they found happiness through these means rather than in marriage. It was a theme he’d been increasingly harping on even though it hadn’t worked to keep Christian from marrying me. Now he urged celibacy even to married people. I thought it was renewed effort to keep us all available for the work of building the colony rather than our faith.

  I watched to see if Louisa noticed his flutterings with the serving women. There might not have been anything untoward occurring between them, but he did sometimes let his hand linger longer than I thought necessary at a woman’s waist when he moved through a crowded group to his seat at the table. I watched looks pass between two mothers when one of the daughters ducked and quickly moved away from Keil as he attempted to pat the braids on her head. And once I thought his face turned pink when a mother slapped his hand as he reached across her to pick up an oatmeal cookie from the pan in the kitchen. Her reaction said more about what part of her anatomy his hand had brushed than about his taking the cookie.

  Louisa didn’t appear to notice these little indiscretions. If I’d have mentioned it, she’d have defended Keil as she always did. They had found a way to be together all these years. She tittered and laughed overly much at his jokes; in return he allowed her to do Fraktur lettering. Each evening she put coals in the pan to make the flannel sheets warm before he slipped into them. I hoped she warmed up her own side of the bed, since she had a bad hip that pained her in the cold weather. When I asked her once, she looked surprised and said, “Ach, we don’t sleep in the same bed. The hard floor works best for me and gives the good doctor fine rest, what he needs to be fresh to serve so many.”

  “Many of us colony women sleep alone,” I said.

  “How else do we wives get so much done,” Louisa said, “except if we’ve had a decent night’s sleep?” She didn’t see the humor in what she’d said.

  I never saw Brother Keil do helpful things for her, at least not the way Christian had for me. I don’t think he ever made a gift for her, though I saw him tailor a dress for Aurora’s doll, the daughter for whom he’d named the town. Christian had given me gifts of his tinwork, a chatelaine to hold my needles, for example, and a real pearl taken from an oyster. And once, when we were both young, he’d given me a ruffled petticoat that said he understood more than anything else my need to be unique in the midst of so many common threads.

  Keil scoffed at such frivolities between a husband and his wife, as I recall. But Christian’s gifts had fueled me as coal to a fire. They helped me endure our separations and warmed over the chill of words sometimes spoken in haste.

  Even now, as I lifted the chatelaine from the chain around my neck, I could almost feel Christian’s presence. My throat tightened. I blinked back tears and stepped back into the kitchen, wiping my eyes with the edge of my apron. I thought my grief had spent itself, but I’d cried more since being here than in those first months after Christian’s death.

  Of course, the greatest gifts Christian gave me to remember him by were our children. They were his legacy, the one I was meant to take care of.

  At the close of the evening meals, while we served men desserts piled high with sweetened cream, several of us women washed the heavy dinner plates. Painted with tiny tea leaves, each one was different, though they were clearly a set. As I wiped them dry, I watched Louisa follow Keil to their quarters on the first floor. He said something and she laughed. He laughed too. I shouldn’t judge what happens in any other couple’s bedroom, I decided. It was a fault of communal living that stitched a married couple too close beside others, without a proper sash between them.

  I carried the dishwater out to put into the barrel to be used on the floors later. I sometimes wished that I shared Louisa’s oblivion and acceptance. Instead, Keil’s actions drove me to think of how to get my girls out from under his roof before my Kate became old enough to notice.

  I walked a narrow path, though: Keil might be willing to build my house only if Jack moved into it with me.

  I began to wonder if moving elsewhere might be a choice, if I should take that train to some faraway place and begin again. Perhaps I could find employment with a family in Portland, cooking while caring for their children and maybe my own. There were wealthy families there who might want a German maid.

  “Emma,” Jack said, catching me on my way back into the house. Twilight lingered in the August evening. I stood rigid as a churn paddle at the sound of his voice.

  “What do you want, Husband?”

  “I’ve discovered a puzzle,” he said. He chewed on a toothpick. “I thought you maybe could explain it to me.”

  “I’ve no spare time for puzzles, Jack Giesy, They expect me back in the kitchen to work, where you should be off to as well. Earning your keep.”

  “Ja, earning is the puzzle.” He tapped at the air with his finger. “I understand you earned a ten-cent piece for one of your paintings at the fair last year.” I nodded agreement before the wariness hit. “A wife’s earnings belong to her husband. You must remember that, Emma. What did you do with your profit?”

  I swallowed. “They were given over to the common fund,” I said.

  “But aga
inst your ledger page, ja, Emma? So you can buy against it?”

  “I’ve only gotten things for my children.”

  “Not women,” he said. “They shouldn’t have a ledger page.”

  Haven’t I seen other women’s names in the store book? Perhaps not. “Helena has her own page,” I risked.

  “No, she doesn’t. But if she did, it would be because she is a single woman, Emma. Brother Keil let your page slip by, because you behave like a widow when you’re not. It’s my earnings you’ll squander if you select a ribbon in exchange for it. I thought I’d let you know that I know.” He yawned then. “I encourage your work, but don’t assume you are making gains from it. You’ll have to see me if you care to spend it from now on. I’ll see to the ledger page to make sure it reflects the truth, so you needn’t worry over that detail. Have a good evening, Wife,” he said as he turned to go into the house.

  I had forgotten the laws of this land. I didn’t even own the clothes on my back; my husband did, along with my earnings.

  I waited until I was sure it was safe, returned to the kitchen, and made my way to the wide hall to be with my children. I envied Brita for a moment, despite her challenges and losses. She at least could work for herself.

  “He’s a good one, that Martin,” Brita said. We sat together and carded wool brought in from one of the Giesy farms. It was a soothing thing to do before we bedded down. “And your Andy likes him well too. Follows him around when he feeds the chickens on the way to the store to work.” I’d noticed that too and sometimes felt saddened that my son preferred the company of Martin to me.

  “Seems a waste,” I said. “Martin should go to school and become that doctor instead of helping to run a store. Then he could really remove the weight from Brother Keil’s shoulders. Maybe then we’d get more homes built.”

  “Perhaps Brother Keil doesn’t want help,” Brita said. “People often say one thing and may even believe it, but then they do things that make getting what they wish almost impossible. I should know. I’ve had a habit of such myself.”

  “How could that be?”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t want to be stared at for my…size, but then joined the circus where they paid me to endure the insults. I got the very thing I didn’t want.”

  She wasn’t alone. I had wanted independence from Christian’s family in Willapa after his death but then made a poor marriage that left me even more dependent on others. Our minds moved our bodies into the strangest places.

  Brita didn’t want to join our colony or be a permanent part of our family. She had other hopes, and someday before long, she’d move on, she said. Until then, she was grateful for the work in return for the shelter. The colony women assigned tasks to her, including caring for the children. While she looked after my Christian and Ida, keeping them out of Jack’s way, I helped cook at the new Aurora Hotel, now serving the stage route. We’d located it in the old house that had been the Keils’ first home, at the base of the hill. I wasn’t working for Jack, I told myself, but for my children. I checked the ledger and saw I still had a page in my name, but Jack had posted tobacco twists on the debit side. I didn’t notice any other pages with a woman’s name on it, not even the single women.

  Karl had opened school in the toll hut, and Andy and Charles, Brita’s oldest, were there during the day. When I wasn’t at the hotel, Brita was still there, scrubbing pans nearly as large as herself or raking white linen tablecloths across washboards, so the guests would feel pampered when they ate with us. Brother Keil proposed that such exquisite care would make customers stop at our business, even though they were but a half day’s ride from their destination in Portland. What but fine German food and excellent service could make them forget how tired they were from riding the stage all the way from Sacramento?

  So far, the stages stopped at our site, and we sent people off filled to the brim with our biscuits and bratwursts. I made sure the colony goat was milked so Pearl would be fed, since I’d weaned Ida. While we worked, Brita would tell stories of unusual things, such as chickens that laid blue eggs.

  “They’re from someplace very warm in South America. I saw them with my own eyes. Sailors from ships sailing into San Francisco had them. Prettiest birds, with no tail.”

  “That can’t be true,” I said.

  “It is. They’re acalled”—she hesitated, trying to remember—“Araucana. Brown and reddish with sprinkles of blue in their feathers. But no tail. Shortened. Like me.” She grinned, her mouth nearly filling her lower face.

  “Ach,” I said. “You tease.”

  “I don’t. You look for them. They’ll come this way.”

  Perhaps because she was an outsider, I found it easy to share laughter and my longings with her. I didn’t have many women friends. Mary Giesy was a Willapa friend, but there’d been strain there. Jack had lived with them once. I suspected she thought I’d treated him unfairly by leaving.

  “My father would stand for me if he were here,” I told Brita one day. “He’d tell Jack it was time to go back. Or my brother Jonathan would.”

  “Family stands for you,” she said. “My family what took me from the orphanage couldn’t have been better to me. They chose me, even when they could see what they was agetting.”

  Family stands for you. It hadn’t happened that way for me. I wanted to make it so for my own children.

  I enjoyed cooking at the stage hotel, away from Keil and Jack. Some of the guests teased me, and while I was a mother and a married woman, I saw nothing wrong with smiling and letting people know I enjoyed making spinach salad the German way or peeling potatoes or serving freshly made blackberry pies. Food prepared with unhappy hearts causes indigestion, so I wanted to be sure such didn’t happen to my guests. I thought of them all as my guests, and doing so made my frustration with Jack’s power over me less draining.

  I eavesdropped on guests’ conversations when I refilled their coffee cups or brought out the bread puddings for their desserts. They spoke openly of events happening far away. Gold had been discovered in the mountains east of us, and people expected a rush as they’d had in California. Quite a lot of chattering went on when Stonewall Jackson and General Lee defeated the Union forces at Bull Run for a second time. Someone boasted that Colt was producing more than one thousand guns a day for the war effort, and a new kind of gun had been patented that had ten barrels and could fire two hundred fifty shots per minute. Admiration mixed with worry on men’s faces at this talk of the Gatling gun, as they shoved my hot potato salad into their mouths. “At least the army abolished flogging last year,” one of the men said, to bring a lighter note.

  Keil had sent letters back to the Bethelites, telling them to be careful what they spoke about there. He declared that we were Unionists, one and all, and they should be too, though quietly. A part of me wondered what it must be like for the men to be silent about something that mattered. It was a new path for them, a path we women knew well.

  One evening, a lone man with a limp stepped off the stage, settled at the table, and said he was from Missouri. I saw the others show new interest. Missouri was a state of widely divided loyalties, which had seen abolitionist battles even before the war began. Keil had urged the Bethelites to send the young men west, where emotions didn’t run so hotly, or so he thought. But we’d heard that Oregon had raised the first cavalry of six companies preparing to enter the war. Maybe the boys weren’t safe even here.

  “I come from Virginia, first,” the man said. He needed a shave, or perhaps he planned to grow a beard. At his table, the men moved away ever so slightly at his mention of one of the seceding states. So far, the people we’d encountered from South Carolina or Virginia had been civil, and we’d heard of no altercations resulting in forced duels or, worse, deaths. But we were wary of arguments, even so far from the fighting.

  “Where are you heading?” one of our colony men asked him, and he hesitated.

  “Is there a welcome here?”

  I watched as the men c
leared their throats, diverted their eyes. I waited for someone to say something. Didn’t we open our doors to everyone in need, isn’t that what Brother Keil had always said? Isn’t that why Jack is still here?

  “We’re a Christian community,” I said. “Everyone in need is welcome.”

  I heard a woman gasp from the kitchen. Then my name was called.

  “It isn’t a woman’s place to make such statements,” Lucinda Wolfer whispered to me. She acted more upset that I’d spoken than that I’d spoken the truth. She’d come out from Bethel with her husband, John, and two daughters, first to Willapa, but then she’d followed Keil to Portland and on to Aurora. I hadn’t noticed in Lucinda the gossipy nature that plagued some women, even though she now chastised me for answering that Virginian. At least she hadn’t corrected me in front of the others. “Father Keil determines who’s in need and who should be offered refuge. Don’t let Louisa or Helena know you said such a thing or even spoke up at all.”

  “But I was only being welcoming.”

  “Something a woman should not do in our communal ways.”

  Just one more thing defining what a woman could do in a family by what she wasn’t supposed to. I still had much to learn.

  And It Will Change

  September 6. Dried blackberries on the rooftop. Covered them with muslin to keep the birds away. Filled four baskets. Now have fifteen baskets of dried berries, various kinds.

  September 8. Made tomato figs. Used brown sugar Louisa said that I could have. Exposed them in the summer sun. Will take some with us to the fair. Still no plans for my house. Still no word from my parents. My dear Kate now wants to be called “Catie,” spelled differently and because Brother Keil calls her that. He influences my children too much.