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

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “What did you call this?” Kitty asked, running her palm across the blocks. “It still looks like Diamonds on Edge to me.”

  “I suppose it is, but I wanted a new name, one unique to me. I call it Running Squares, and I added a few different things to make it mine.”

  “The wide border of squares,” she noted, “with double rows of quilted stitches.” She pressed her fingers against the red block in the border, then turned it over. “CG? For Christian?”

  I ran my fingers over the cross-stitched initials. “I started the quilt before he died,” I said. “Diamonds on Edge is how I felt after he died. Our Diamond Rule, about making another’s life better than our own, seemed to be pushed on edge when Christian died to save another man.” I sighed. “So Running Squares it is now, since I seem to be always running somewhere.” She sighed.

  For the wedding celebration, men placed flat boards into a square beneath the trees, and people danced and danced while we sat and watched. Festivities—weddings—were truly some of the best times at the colony, and I noticed that outsiders made their way here without invitations, knowing there’d be music and good food. Given the smiles and laughter, I wondered if they also came to be rejuvenated among us Germans, as we lived simple yet productive lives, knowing how to celebrate as well as toil, sometimes doing both at once. They didn’t know the inner turmoil, the trials that strained our communal threads. We probably looked to them like a serene pastoral scene, painted and hung over a fireplace.

  “I didn’t even know they knew each other,” Kitty said.

  “What?”

  She nodded toward the glowing wedding couple. Louisa carried a bouquet of blue flowers with long white ribbons hanging down, standing out against her dark wool dress. “Frederick never mentioned Louisa to me.” She spoke with a tone of wonder, mixed with betrayal. “I don’t know how I could not have known.”

  “There’s no reason to be hard on yourself,” I said. “Did you and Frederick talk so much?”

  “When I brought the dinner baskets to the field I sometimes shared a word or two. But then this one time, he took me on a boat on the Willamette River, moving up the backwaters. He was a gentleman,” she assured me. “We saw lush water plants, and the trees draped over the boat like a green veil, just so pretty with the sun sparkling on the river.” She wiped at a tear.

  “It sounds lovely,” I said. “Though a little risky without a chaperone.”

  “You could draw it, I suppose. I couldn’t, but you could. I’d have it as a memory, then.”

  “Have you ever tried to draw anything?” I realized I didn’t even know what she liked or didn’t, what her talents were or weren’t, except her love of music. Here she was, my sister who had been so dear to keep writing to me when I’d felt abandoned by everyone else, and I’d paid scant attention to her now that she lived within touch. “Maybe I could teach you to sketch.”

  “It’s not an interest of mine,” she said. “Except to remember that day. Maybe I’ll put it into a song, though what’s the use of that? He’s gone off to someone else.”

  “It’s still your memory. You felt…cared for. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “The day was dreamy.” She smoothed the quilt border over and over with her palm. She chewed her nails. I’d never noticed that before.

  “Backwaters hold mystery,” I said. “There’s life in the water’s edge, sometimes things there we never see in the faster-moving stream.”

  Her eyes watered. “I thought I was special.” She removed a handkerchief from her basket and dabbed at her nose. “But all the while he courted Louisa. How could I not have known that?”

  “Maybe Frederick didn’t even know. Maybe he looked for a friend and found that in you. Maybe he didn’t realize that Louisa would come into his life as a future wife. Perhaps his mother influenced the Giesys to come here now, and then—”

  “But they’d been writing to each other!”

  “It doesn’t take away the fact that he was there with you that day.”

  “He did mention marriage.” I looked at her. “Oh, not ours, no. He said his father didn’t approve of marriage, that he thought it took us from the important work we had to do to live the Christian life.”

  “He would say that,” I muttered.

  “I actually agreed with him,” Kitty said. “But I thought I could devote my life to the colony in the way you do, Emma, if sometimes I had happy days with Frederick, rowing a boat or sitting at the bandstand and listening with him beside me.”

  I didn’t want to think about her view that I was somehow a model “single” woman in her eyes. I nodded for her to continue. “I thought my biggest obstacle to a marriage one day would be Father Keil, but it turned out to be a Giesy.”

  She leaned against me and cried then. I held her, rubbing her back. “It’ll be better in time, it will, Kitty. This is something I know.” Wounded by a Giesy; that was something my sister and I had in common.

  As I’d promised, I wrote letters back to friends in Bethel, everyone I thought might still think kindly of me. I encouraged them to come, to help us build. I smiled to myself; Christian would have been pleased, though he’d have wagged a finger at me. I was encouraging them to come mostly to ease my guilt at wanting a house before a church could be built.

  The autumn turned to times of harvest. Sometimes I wondered why I was so happy when the seeds sprouted in spring gardens, as they promised hard labor come fall. In between gathering pumpkins and potatoes, we dried apples, peeling and slicing them, the juice sticky against our fingers. Some we hung to dry, stringing them with big needles onto flax. Kate helped with that, though she ate nearly as many as she threaded. Days we spent making soups of vegetables and meat, to preserve the broth. We made Kraut until I could smell the cabbage in my sleep. We dried seeds to be used for next spring’s plantings too. Ida carefully turned each one over on the cloth, her tiny fingers barely bigger than the seeds. We dug trenches lined with straw to keep cabbages and watermelons covered for use in the dead of winter. In between we did the usual: laundering, rug beating, daily meal preparations, care of our families.

  I was aware, slowly, that our women’s work did allow a certain amount of laughter, a bit of pleasantry, as we exchanged stories. Perhaps I was being allowed to become a part of things here. Helena’s quick tongue could calm as well as strike, and when she raised some scripture for an occasion, it was often done not with a hammer but on a platter, offering something up to nourish, if someone chose to pluck the morsel. Sometimes in the midst of stirring beans in crocks, I’d look over at the elder Louisa Keil and see her crying, and without even thinking I’d put my arm around her shoulder and just let her, knowing how memories like steam arise to take us somewhere else and how a loving shoulder can be enough to bring us back.

  Even Mary Giesy had begun to joke with me as she had in years past, before Jack. She was the only woman besides me who’d spent time around Jack. I wasn’t sure how long they intended to stay, for she still called Willapa home. Once she even praised a suggestion I’d made. “Nailing drying strips to the ceiling was a good idea, Emma,” she told me. “I wished I’d done that years before. The mosquito netting worked well hanging from there too, with our dried apples and peaches, when I could get them.”

  “You hung them right in your kitchen?” Martha Miller asked. “Didn’t you have a drying shed in Willapa?”

  “Ja, good and high so we didn’t bump them with our heads. It made the room smell nice. It was Emma’s idea. At least I saw it at her house.”

  My life was a river’s flow. I’d be an outsider at the edge, then move slowly into the current of influence. Perhaps I wasn’t so selfish. I was able to give, to be in service, doing for others. Maybe I had more to give because I spent time at the edge, seeking to nurture myself.

  All the while I worked, I prayed that I’d be doing the work of drying food and preparing for winter in my own home before too much longer. But soon after the wedding, Keil ordered construction of
John Giesy’s house. Frederick and Louisa’s, he said, would be next.

  Fortunately, Brother Keil began to hold services again, and I hoped that would ease the pressure to construct the church until we had more people to help. “My brother talked sense into Brother Keil,” Helena told us as we dried wild grapes in the airing boxes. Apparently Brother Keil wasn’t going to get all the grapes for medicinal purposes. “John told him he simply must hold services until such time as we could construct a building.”

  “John convinced him?” I’d heard it was John Will who had approached him. But I had as well. I wondered if I should tell her about my conversation with Brother Keil. Helena and I were alone at the big red dryer, placing fruit on the flat pads.

  “Oh yes,” she continued. “My brother said they’d come from Willapa just to follow him and his great relationship to our Lord. He said none of us could afford to lose that connection if our colony was to succeed here as it had in Bethel. It was all about Brother Keil’s great faith and how he led us in it.”

  Those were the very things my brother told me John Will had expressed to Keil. Helena was usurping a bit of influence, it seemed.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m glad he listened to someone.”

  At the toll bridge, Karl Ruge let out a shout I heard from the hotel. Several of us stepped outside that cool morning, because it wasn’t the usual announcement that someone had attempted to cross without paying. It was the wrong time of day for the mail run or the stage bringing passengers to eat with us. A wailing cry, then a trumpet blast, then another horn or two echoed in the air.

  “What do you suppose is going on there?” Helena said, hurrying from the ox barn, her hands shading her eyes.

  I watched Michael Rapp and Henry Burkholder, the blacksmith, men in their midthirties, running like boys toward the bridge. Conrad Yost came out from his post to see what the ruckus was. The young Snyder boy who’d come along on Keil’s first trip out started to skip. Andy rushed by me as well. “Come, Mama,” he shouted. Martin walked slowly toward us, his sleeves still wearing the straw-woven cuffs worn to protect the cloth as he worked. His forehead frowned in question. Henry C’s choral class stopped their vocalizing beneath the trees, and the girls clustered together, chattering.

  “What is it?” I asked, as Martin got beside us. He shook his head as though he didn’t know. And then I could see for myself. I’d truly have to trust in God’s timing if I’d ever get my home built.

  Conflicted was the word for my feelings as I watched the first of many wagons drawn by big Missouri mules roll across the bridge. I counted twenty, thirty, forty. A light wagon pulled by mules preceded more wagons, each pulled by two teams of oxen. Then the pattern began again with mule-drawn wagons, oxen-led ones carrying cages of chickens at the sides. Behind them, dogs barked and kept a flock of thin sheep bleating forward on the wooden bridge. In the distant dust, I could hear mooing. A few rust and white colored cows with short horns shook the bells around their necks and trundled across the bridge, driven by young men riding on still more stout-looking mules or astride Morgan horses.

  “They sound like the three billy goats gruff clumping across the bridge, Mama,” Kate said. “Trap, trap, trap. ‘Eat me when I’m fatter!’” Kitty had heard the story from Norwegian travelers in a wagon train and shared it with my children, much to their delight.

  “Is the troll under our bridge?” Christian asked, his eyes the size of apples.

  “Nein,” I said. “Trolls are only in stories.” I thought of Jack and forgave myself the lie.

  Christian and Kate had joined us and Amelia Keil too. She carried Ida from the lawn beside the ox barn, where she’d had the youngest children in tow. Pox scars marked her face, but otherwise she had survived the pox when her siblings had not. She lifted Ida to my arms. My head began to ache. All these people arriving would change things again. Poor me! I started to think, then, Nein. Fear must not be my master. I would make things change for the better.

  I think myself happy, like the apostle Paul. I reached for Kate’s hand. “Pick up your skirt,” I said. “This is a joyous occasion.” And we started to run too.

  There were forty-two wagons in all. Jonathan sent one of the boys up to the Keils’ to tell them that the Missouri Bethelites had at last arrived. He stopped at the mills along the way, so soon all the Aurorans were there, greeting old friends from Bethel.

  Joe Knight touched his fingers to his hat brim in greeting. Joe and Adam Knight were both former scouts, and their grins carried a brother’s familiarity.

  “Isn’t Matilda with you? The women…?”

  “We went to Willapa first,” Joe said. “The women will come up later on boats. We’ll bring them here, but we brought the cattle down overland. Stauffers are coming too. We’ve scooped up the Willapa contingent, Emma. We’re coming here as you did.”

  “All of them?” I asked, uneasy.

  “Ja, well.” He coughed and looked down. “I was sorry to hear of your troubles with Jack Giesy, Emma.” He looked me in the eye then. “But you found safety here.” I nodded. “You deserve that.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if any of us deserves anything good,” I said.

  “You do no one good by not taking up what the Lord provides, though.” He leaned toward me so only I could hear and added, “And Jack didn’t come with us.”

  Adam Knight reined in his horse, then, to say how sorry he was about Christian’s death.

  “Ja, that was a long time ago now,” I said. It was the first time I’d characterized my loss that way—that it was a long time ago. And suddenly it had been.

  “No one wrote to say you’d be coming. Didn’t you get my letters? And with forty-plus wagons? It’s like when Keil came out with lots of people and us not really ready with houses for you all.”

  “But here it’s the third of October, ja? Didn’t Keil tell you? We wrote to say we’d be arriving. Most of us are hoping there’ll be houses ready, since there are working mills here. Not like at Willapa at all.”

  “I imagine the important people knew,” I said.

  “It doesn’t rain so much here as it did in Willapa,” Adam Knight added. “This is the truth, ja, Emma? Tell me that Keil has not exaggerated in that.”

  “Brother Keil was right about rain,” I laughed.

  Professor Christopher Wolff captained this train, and he stepped down now from the first wagon. He was the one who’d read Keil’s letters to the Bethelites, sent first from Willapa and later Portland. He shook his head.

  “This…this is not what we expected,” Christopher said. He scanned the area.

  I looked to see what he saw. A few scattered houses with a smokehouse or two. Partially built commercial buildings. The ox barn and our hotel of sorts beside it. Privies like pox marks at the end of scratched paths. Tree stumps, a few corrals, a horse or two ripping at grass, a few Missouri mules.

  George Wolfer stood beside him, shaking his head. “When I met an old Bethelite at the bridge, I asked, ‘How far to Aurora?’ and he said, ‘You are right in Aurora.’ Can this be?”

  “I’m afraid this is it,” Jonathan told him.

  Christopher Wolff had a university degree, was considered brilliant, and had just successfully led more than forty wagons and two hundred fifty people across the plains. But at this moment, he looked as though he’d stepped in a pile of manure and couldn’t imagine how he’d get his boots cleaned. I was only one step ahead of him in scrubbing at the uncertainties of Aurora under the direction of Dr. Keil.

  The wagons stayed circled in the middle of Aurora for several days as we feasted, listened to music, and put all work aside to welcome the Bethelites and hear their stories. Andy took a liking to Lorenz Ehlen, a boy of about thirteen whose sunset-colored hair waved away from his high forehead. He pushed it that way as he talked about the most exciting part of the trip.

  “It was as we left,” he said. “The last three wagons caught fire and burned, and we had to leave them and push everybody else into othe
r wagons while we urged the others on. We unhitched the mules and the oxen and pushed them along.”

  “A fire?” I said. “Did someone not properly care for the fire starter?”

  I looked to Mr. Ehlen. He was a widower who had brought along his five children. Without a wife to assist, accidents like that could happen. We sat at their evening campfire, one built the right size. Lorenz’s father rubbed at his arm and shook his head.

  “Nope,” the younger Ehlen said. He popped the end of his lips so the English word sounded different. “The Confederates burned ’em. The antiabolitionist Confederates.”

  “In Bethel?” I asked.

  “Nope.” That pop again. “They caught us as we came through St. Joseph.”

  “That’s an amazing story,” Andy said.

  “Well, Lorenz might be exaggerating a bit,” Mr. Ehlen said. “He has a dramatic flair. We did have some trouble with a little fire. And it was hard to hide our Union support. But I’m not sure we can attribute the disaster to the Confederates.”

  “It could have been,” Lorenz protested.

  “I was discharged from the army with a wound, just a few weeks before we headed this way. Ought not to have worn my uniform, I’m guessing. They knew we were Unionists.”

  Andy pressed for more details. Christian wanted him to describe how he got his wound, then Andy asked if he could see the arm that hung useless at Mr. Ehlen’s side.

  “Andy,” I said. “You mustn’t pry—”

  “It’s all right. The boys should know what can happen when you stand for something. I’ve long lamented the practice of slavery. But when they threatened the Union itself, then I had to go to fight. But it was time for us to come and find a new place to live. Build us up a new home and restore things in the colony the way they used to be. I was tired, I think, not looking forward to the journey out. House building, well, it can trouble a one-armed man.” He patted his elbow, setting the limb to swinging slowly. “Sometimes a man’s not certain of a thing, but then he gets propelled forward, and he knows he has to act to catch himself or he’ll fall flat on his face. Coming here was me, catching myself.”