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

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “Do you ever wish you were back in Willapa?” I asked Martin.

  He pulled at his galluses. “I worried about leaving John to look after my mother. Well, Louisa looked after her too, of course. I didn’t mean to leave her out.” He looked away. I guess my penchant for reminding people that women were citizens of equal merit had dribbled over onto Martin’s plate.

  “I know you didn’t,” I said. A raging romance had blossomed between her and Frederick Keil, so Louisa must have yearned like the rest of us. I wondered if Martin did.

  “We Swiss don’t intend to exclude girls, Emma,” Martin said. “I know you think that,” he added, when I opened my mouth to protest. “It’s a way to keep you women safe, to make sure you don’t have to struggle with the challenges that men have to face. Sometimes sending girls to school to learn more than simple reading and writing exposes them to…unnecessary demands on their thinking. Brain sickness can result,” he added.

  I looked at him through squinted eyes. “You’re teasing me, ja?”

  He looked ruffled.

  “Living gives us those demands, Martin. Then we lack good tools for how to solve the problems, tools the boys get through education.” I didn’t mention that stretching of a woman’s mind could also help to lift the monotony of her days, while she worked beside her husband or brother, plowing fields or digging up potatoes, or while she ran the piles of laundry through the hand wringer. If it weren’t for the complicated quilt patterns we constructed that kept us sharp as our needles, our brains would be tied up in knots. Brain sickness, indeed! The men around me found any number of pleasant distractions in their lives. The Pie and Beer Band provided excuses for the bachelors to gather. They tossed balls around and formed elaborate practical jokes that took weeks to implement, while we women worked: cooking, stitching, doing the laundry. Thank goodness for the girls’ choir at least, and Kitty’s instructing us in choral psalms.

  “Enjoy your time with your sons…and daughters…while they’re with you,” Martin said.

  “Why wouldn’t they be with me? Oh, you mean when they’re not in school. Ja, well, here my girls will be educated now that Christopher Wolff has arrived.” He raised an eyebrow. “Karl’s going to be a professor again and work with him. Henry will teach music, and Karl and Christopher the mathematics and science and English. Maybe even offer evening classes in Greek and the classics. He told Jonathan he would and that women could attend too.”

  “Brother Keil has approved the curriculum?”

  “Karl assured me that Kate and all the girls would attend school. How can a people do better than they have if they don’t take advantage of teaching all their citizens, ja? Teaching them to think and reason. Aren’t we supposed to make sure others’ lives are better than our own?” I could hear my voice rise. I wasn’t sure why I became so bristly by the suggestion that girls weren’t as worthy as boys, that women didn’t deserve to be stimulated as well as men. Brain sickness. I pitched that thought away.

  Martin pressed his palm down as though to calm me. “In this new country, that’s what we should work for, that all the children go to school. Adults too,” he said. “And former slaves too, now that the president signed a proclamation for them to be freed in the rebellious states.” He brushed at a smudge on his galluses, then ran his thumb up under one of the two wide straps holding up his trousers. “They aren’t citizens yet, but education should be meant for all, don’t you know.”

  “I wonder if that’s why the wagons were burned,” I said. “When the Wolff train left.”

  “I think that might be an exaggerated story,” Martin said. “The conscription law wasn’t in place when they left Missouri, and that’s when the trouble arose, at least in New York. Negroes have signed up to join the Union forces now, even though they don’t need to. The rest of us, we can get out of going to war, if we have three hundred dollars. I imagine they can too, if they have the money.”

  I hadn’t realized there was such a way out, or what the cost might be. “You’re of age,” I said. I squinted up at him. My eyes hurt so. I heard Ida pounding with something on the other side of the counter.

  Martin leaned over. “Ida,” he said. “Play with this.” He took a soft leather ball from a shelf and gave it to her to toss. Her pounding ceased. “Ja. John and Wilhelm and I have had discussions,” he continued. “I want to go to the Wallamet University, in Salem. I hope to do so this fall, but…there are other expenses the colony undertakes now, with so many new arrivals. And the conscription requirements, well, I have no children, of course, so I am a logical man to go.”

  I shook my head slightly, wishing immediately that I hadn’t.

  Martin thought I was disagreeing with him about it being logical that he would go to war as he insisted that the bachelors were the most likely to be called up to serve. “We need you here, Martin.”

  He ran his thumb up under his galluses again. “Maybe if I were gone, Wilhelm would find new reason to engage with the colony, not be so distant as he’s been.”

  I wondered if Martin was tired. He’d taken on many of Keil’s patients, and now there’d be even more to serve. He wouldn’t be able to go on to school if his days were taken up with mixing potions and pills, and if Keil stayed locked in his workroom, who would offer healing herbs? Once I’d felt competent using herbs myself, but I hadn’t kept my sons from being ill, and no one was interested in having a woman treat them anyway.

  “He’s come back into his own, what with the Bethelites here,” I said. “You help him. Better you should go away to school instead of to war. That would arouse the need for Brother Keil to return to his doctoring, and be a much better use of your time and contribution to all of us.”

  “Wallamet offers no medical courses as yet,” he said. “But they do have art courses.” He smiled. “Did you paint something for the Agricultural Fair this year?”

  “Ach, that’s nothing I can find time for now,” I said. “I’m getting a house built, did I tell you?”

  “That will be good for you, Emma.” He said the words, but they lacked enthusiasm, which struck me as odd. “It is a good use of the colony funds.”

  I reflected that the cost of my house might cost Martin his schooling or maybe even send him to war, or some other man as well. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t shown much regard for my home. Perhaps I was being selfish in wanting my own house. “The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul,” the proverb said. Surely that meant that having a desire lacked sinfulness and that achieving it brought sweetness.

  I tried to get Andy to come with me as I left to nurse my headache further. He insisted Martin had more work for him to do. Kate and Christian begged to remain too, and even Ida looked at me, yearning in her eyes. I allowed only Andy and Christian to stay. I needed Kate to help me with Ida. We girls had work to do.

  All winter long I said, “This is the last”: the last Advent season of anticipation that we’d celebrate while living in the hall of the gross Haus beside the blue cabinet, the last Christmas when Belsnickel would bring us gifts to tuck beneath the evergreens of the Tannenbaum, the last time I’d catch my breath when the root room door opened and I smelled that wet earth and remembered the day Jack Giesy returned.

  Karl told me once that early Christians imagined there was a golden thread, given its light by the beginning of the world. They believed that it extended to us each Advent season, so we were all linked with those who’d come before, and we carried the thread on to our next generation. So while I celebrated these last times, it was also the next time, and perhaps the first time as well, for my children, that they’d be drawn together by the thread of remembering.

  Then while reading one morning, I found the verse I’d been looking for, the one to tell Helena that we women could express ourselves about Scripture without a man’s guidance. “Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it: and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that tho
ught upon his name.” It was from Malachi 3:16. I’d have to tell her.

  On the Twelfth Day, Epiphany, a celebration Karl said the Lutherans observed, when the gifts of the Magi were given, I felt hopeful by remembering all those last times framed by next times. I was looking forward, carrying that golden thread while taking stock of where I was. The thread made me think of Brita and her words that one must turn into gold the straw one is given. I hoped to turn my straw into a house that would serve.

  I walked to the site of my house’s going up. It was March and my birthday. I’d given myself the present of helping dig the basement, though with many hands, I’d not done much. Framing and standing the walls proved a more time-consuming effort with only a few men assigned. The diggers, too, were soon called off to work elsewhere. I loved the smells of earth and loam almost as much as the scent of sea, and I pitched as much dirt as I could before rushing to work at the hotel.

  I’d thought that maybe Joseph and Adam Knight would be around to help, as they’d shared in building Willapa. In early December, they’d gone to meet the women coming by boat from Willapa, including Joe’s sister, Matilda, a woman nearly my age. She had sad eyes, a fact that surprised me. I remembered her as a young girl with self-assurance, who thought me pushy to want Christian as my husband.

  We’d embraced and she said I looked well and I told her likewise. She’d be staying at the Keils’, she told me. She and my mother and the sister, Christine, arrived at the same time in the colony store. Matilda said she needed thread and calico. I was there talking to Jonathan. Matilda said something to my brother about a girl back in Bethel, and Jonathan had turned beet red. He must have had a sweetheart that I hadn’t known about.

  “Ja, ja,” my mother said. “That girl you liked so well up and married, just like that, as soon as we left, I guess. You should have brought her with you, Jonathan. I’ll have no grandchildren to carry on the Wagner name if you don’t get busy.”

  “Brother Keil discourages marriage, Mother. You know this, ja?” Jonathan told her.

  “It seems shortsighted,” Matilda said wistfully. “How will the colony grow unless our families grow?”

  “We’ll recruit,” Jonathan said. “Bring others into our happy fold. Adopt.” He nodded to Christine.

  “I’m not sure how happy it is, to have so many bachelors and single women as our community calling cards,” Matilda said. I laughed and she smiled.

  “Maybe you should come in on Tuesday next,” I told my mother, my eyes inviting Matilda and Christine too. “We’re going to stitch one of young Louisa Keil’s quilts.”

  “Matilda is a magician with a needle,” my mother said.

  “We can use that. And then I’ll show you the progress on my house. I’m sure there’ll be some.” I’d looked pointedly at Jonathan.

  They’d come then to the quilting time, but Matilda stitched in silence while young Louisa Keil chattered on about her new marriage. Then we’d all walked out to see my lot, which was all there was to see of my house in December.

  I hadn’t chosen this site. Keil had. He must have plans for more houses to go up nearby so I wouldn’t be “isolated.” Oak and alder trees, with branches hanging over the construction site, covered the lot. There were no street names yet. But my house would be at the edge of the colony. The Pudding River rushed in the distance, but I tried not to concentrate on the sound. A white frost dressed the trees beneath a clear blue sky. They’d been the first I’d shown my “home” to, claiming it as mine. No one contradicted me that day, and I was grateful.

  Now, in March, my brother and Mr. Ehlen, with his one arm, pounded square nails into studs, a structure of wood lying flat, not even resembling a wall. Then together they stood it up, and I could see the outline of a room now. I noted where the stairs would go, that divided my “two houses” on the ground floor. A hole had been cut out for the stairs into the root cellar.

  In the next few days, other men would come to build fireplaces with bricks Conrad Yost baked in a kiln across the river. One man was known for his stair building, a special art, and he would be there soon.

  On my birthday, boards climbed up the sides to cover the wall studs, and I could imagine the rooms and what I’d see out of my windows. I’d grown up in a brick house with my parents back in Bethel, overlooking a wide community garden. Christian and I had lived in a log house (after the winter under tents). This would be my first framed house, made with the lumber cut from the mill the colony operated.

  “It’s going to be a dandy house,” Mary Giesy said. I was surprised to see her there on this spring day, especially since it was a good twenty-minute walk from the gross Haus. She pulled a shawl tight around her shoulders. She’d brought dear Opal back to me. Even now the goat meandered among the workers, being shooed off every now and then, until she found some shrubs along the river’s bank to chew on or a pile of wood on which to climb.

  “A dandy house. Yes. I can thank Jonathan for that.” I’d brought him his basket of food, but he wasn’t ready to stop yet. The air smelled fresh, with damp soil and sawdust mixed with honeysuckle. The men chattered as they worked.

  “Family is good, ja? Sometimes I forget that,” Mary said. I wondered what could have caused her to forget, but I wasn’t going to ask. “So you will move in here before long.”

  “I’m counting the days.” I leaned into her. “I won’t have to hear Brother Keil clearing his throat or making wind when he’s in his workroom and forgets my family and I live outside his door.”

  Mary laughed. It was a twinkling sound. Four-year-old Salome stood to her side, hugging her mother’s skirts. Elizabeth would have been in school with my Kate. Mary’s skirt swirled out as she set down a basket on the ground beside her. Is Mary wearing a hoop? “I hear it is a two-family house you designed. Very practical. Efficient. Communal.”

  “The German way,” I said.

  “And inventive. So, your way. Emma’s way.”

  I couldn’t tell if she spoke with a sense of appreciation or if something darker loomed behind her words.

  “It’s come at a cost,” I said. “I was separated from my boys, you remember. And Jack—”

  “I’m so sorry,” she blurted then. “Oh, Emma, I should have been more aware. I should have listened to what we were thinking inside, when I saw you grow scared as a rabbit. We…I have prayed that I would never again remain silent when someone looks at me the way you did those months. If a child jumps when I approach, the way Andy and Christian did when they stayed with us, I will act, Emma. I will not remain silent. I didn’t want to see it.” Her voice broke. Salome moved away from her, still holding onto her mother’s skirt. She looked up at her mother, whose bonnet covered her face so I couldn’t see her crying, but I could tell she was. Her shoulders shook. “Can you ever forgive me, Emma?”

  Only Christian had ever asked me to forgive him. It wasn’t a human being’s role, was it? I put my arms around her. “There’s nothing to forgive, Mary. We all do the best that we can. If you could have done differently, you would have. As would I. I’m working at forgiving myself for the things I put my children through. Even Jack. That’s all the forgiveness I can muster, or should. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “Oh, I do, Emma.” She whispered the words and looked away. Then more firmly she said, “Poor Jack.” She wiped at her eyes. “He mopes around, works at the mill some, takes his charcoal and makes drawings.”

  I bristled at her apparent compassion toward Jack. “I’ll not go back with him, Mary.”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean…I just…” She took a deep breath. “I say the wrong things. I see pain and disappointment everywhere and wish it weren’t so. I disappoint so many.” It felt as though she spoke of something else, but I didn’t know what. “Sebastian says we’ll be returning to Willapa soon.”

  “After all this time, I thought—”

  “I want to stay here,” she said as she grabbed at my arm. I heard a note of desperation in her voice. “But I miss o
ur own house and having the rocking chair to myself without having to wait until Barbara is out of it.” I had a matched chair to Mary’s that was still in our home back in Willapa.

  “Tell Sebastian you won’t go back,” I said.

  “Ach, I’m not you, Emma. It’s better that we go. Sebastian, well, all the people make him…nervous. And Jack’s back there. Sebastian feels an…affinity to him. Family and all.”

  I didn’t want her to leave. She was as close to a friend as I had, someone who’d been through the good times and bad. Those were treasured people not easily found. With effort, we could recover a closeness once lost.

  “I brought you a birthday present,” she said then, making her voice cheery. She reached into the basket. “It’s one that I pieced myself. One of the good things about the Keil birthday celebrations each year is that it reminds me that your birthday is nine days later.”

  I untied the string and folded papers I’d reuse for my oven when I got one, one day.

  “Oh, Mary, it’s beautiful!”

  It was a Mariner’s Compass quilt, with the compass rose pieced like golden threads pouring out of a central core toward the edges.

  She picked at a loose thread I couldn’t see. “I knew you liked bright colors, and the compass rose looked like a sun to me, with its yellows and the sky beyond all filled with stars. I hoped it would remind you of the good things of Willapa and not the bad. I wanted to show the good direction you took for you and your family when you came here.”

  “I shall use it only on Sundays,” I teased. “It will keep me going in the right direction.”

  She couldn’t have known about Christian’s compass words, about being sure we found that compass in our lives so we could always find our way, nor about the golden threads that call us back to our place of remembering.