Widow Walk
Page 1
Book ONe of the Widow Walk saga
widow
walk
Gar LaSalle
widow
walk
Widow Walk is a work of historical fiction. Apart from some well-known actual people, events, and locales that are part of this narrative, all names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of this author’s imagination or are, in all cases — are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events, locales, or to living persons is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-0-9978436-5-1
Published by Solipsis Publishing Seattle, WA
SolipsisPublishing.com
Copyright 2017, Solipsis Publishing
Editor: John DeDakis
Design: Maps and Widow Walk Medallion — Randy Mott (MottGraphics.com)
Cover Design: Neil Gonzalez (Greenleaf Book Group - (GreenleafBookgroup.com)
Interior Design: Alex Head (TheDraftLab.com)
Social Media and Marketing: Scott James
Web design: Archana Murthy and Scott James
Audio Book Production: Mike McAuliffe, Tom McGurk, Wendy Wills (Bad Animals.com); Narrator: John Aylward
Table of
Contents
Dedication
Dramatis Personae
Map One – The Homestead, Whidbey, Port Gamble, Port Townsend, Bellingham, Olympia
Map Two – A Land in Contention, Vancouver Island and Puget Sound
Map Three – The Haunt of the Northerners,Puget Sound, Vancouver Island and Northern
British Columbia
Prologue - Emmy
Chapter One - Emmy
Chapter Two - Isaac
Chapter Three - Emmy
Chapter Four - Anah
Chapter Five - Pickett and Ingalls
Chapter Six - Anah
Chapter Seven - Isaac
Chapter Eight - Emmy
Chapter Nine - Pickett
Chapter Ten - Emmy and Pickett
Chapter Eleven - Isaac
Chapter Twelve - Anah
Chapter Thirteen - Isaac
Chapter Fourteen - Anah
Chapter Fifteen - Isaac and Anah
Chapter Sixteen - Emmy
Chapter Seventeen - Jacob
Chapter Eighteen - Emmy
Chapter Nineteen - Emmy
Chapter Twenty - Joseph Edwards
Chapter Twenty-one - Emmy
Chapter Twenty-two - Jacob
Chapter Twenty-three - Sarah
Chapter Twenty-four - Emmy and Pickett
Chapter Twenty-five - Emmy
Chapter Twenty-six - MaNuitu ’sta
Chapter Twenty-seven - Napen ‘tjo
Chapter Twenty-eight - Anah
Chapter Twenty-nine - Anah and Jacob
Chapter Thirty - Emmy
Chapter Thirty-one - Marano Levi
Chapter Thirty-two - Emmy, Sarah and Ursa
Chapter Thirty-three - Sarah
Chapter Thirty-four - Marté, Cull and Emmy
Chapter Thirty-five - Anah and Jacob
Chapter Thirty-six - Pickett
Chapter Thirty-seven - Ksi Amawal
Chapter Thirty-eight - Jojo, Anah and Ksi Amawaal
Chapter Thirty-nine - Jojo
Chapter Forty - Emmy and Anah
Chapter Forty-one - Sarah
Chapter Forty-two - Pickett and Emmy
Chapter Forty-three - Emmy
Epilogue - Isaac, Anah
Author’s notes
Acknowledgments
Book Discussion Guide
About the Author
To the Epiphany Bringers
Dramatis Personae
On Whidbey Island (in Puget Sound,
U.S. Territory):
Emmy O’Malley Evers - Wife of Isaac Evers
Colonel Isaac Neff Evers - Prominent Pacific Northwest Settler and regional judge and tax collector
Sarah Evers - 10 year-old daughter of Emmy and stepdaughter of Isaac
Jacob Evers - 6 year-old son of Emmy and Isaac
Winfield and Corrine Evers - Isaac’s younger brother and sister
Ben and Missy Crockett - Neighbors
Tom and Rebah Iserson, Major Roberta and Thomasina Anderson - Visiting guests
Dr. Joseph Edwards - Prominent Whidbey Island physician
Sam - Salish native guide and employee of Isaac
Jim Thomas and Princess Susan - Salish natives,
Whidbey locals
In North Puget Sound, (U.S. Territory):
Captain George Edward Pickett - U.S. Army commander stationed in Bellingham
Lt. Colonel Rufus Ingalls - Quartermaster General of Oregon Territory, close friend of Pickett
In North Puget Sound, (U.S. Territory):
Anah Nawitka Haloshem (a.k.a. “Black Wind”) - Haida tyee of Raven Clan (Queen Charlotte Islands)
Little Raven - Anah’s father, aging Raven clan leader
Klixuitan - Shaman of Raven Clan
Vladimir Varienko - Captain of the Pietrevos,
a Russian cargo ship
René Marté - French-Indian (Metís) Trader and smuggler
Eban Cull - Marté’s companion smuggler
Antoine Bill - a Metís guide and interpreter employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company
MaNuitu’Sta (a.k.a. “Patient River”) - Bella Coola Nuxalk clan tyee, father of Pickett’s second wife
Na’Pen’Jo (a.k.a. “Jojo”) - MaNuitu’sta’s son,
Emmy Evers’ guide
Morning Mist - Pickett’s deceased second wife, daughter of Ma’Nuita’Sta
Marano Levi - Wandering unordained priest
Ksi Amawal - Tsimshian tribe grand tyee
Map One:The Homestead
Map Two: A Land in Contention
Map Three: The Haunt of
the Northerners
Prologue
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Emmy
When she and her husband staked their claim on this alluvial plain, they did not know it had been haunted for thousands of years, first by long-gone bottom feeders who had dwelled in the vast lake that had been scraped out by retreating, massive, growling sheets of glacier ice, and then later, when the water finally receded, also by the beasts and aborigines who had looked upon the deep rich soil as their own.
Emmy Evers found a small gray arrowhead in the first week she walked the square mile that was now theirs, hers and her husband Isaac’s, the rights to their stead conveyed on a thin piece of paper by other new settlers, ones with government-given titles. Her young children, less reverent of the land than she, would later uncover several more ancient hunting tools as they played and worked the farm. And each time she again fingered that first, sharp treasure-find, the arrowhead pried away from a clod of moist black soil, she wondered where the makers had gone…the ones who had first chipped tools like this out of flint…and why they had left the richness of this land.
And each time she felt the prick of its sharp edges, she wondered whether they really ever had left, for in the few years she owned her fertile prairie mile, she learned that spirits lingered. She sensed they walked her plowed fields on certain nights, the patterns of their visitations incomprehensible to her and other mere humans.
Seven years into her stay there, her family gave of its own, in a way she had long dreaded and forever mourned. The Northerners had visited. They were emissaries of the Dead.
Chapter One
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Emmy
He is away again. I fear the Northerners are about. I am concerned for him and for us.
— Emmy Evers’ Diary, October 1st, 1857
Dawn, almost. So Emmy pushed herself up and out of bed. She wouldn’t pamper herself, nursing a cold. Too much to do every day now.
Her husband, Isaac, had departed in the darkness without saying goodbye. They had talked enough the evening before, she supposed. But she was alone again now with her children and her work. Alone again.
She pushed herself away from that thought, too.
Her daughter Sarah was already up puttering, dawdling a bit from starting her outside chores. Jacob would have to be chided up again. She would have Sarah do that for her.
They were so different, her two. Jacob worked hard for a lazy six year old, prone to discharging his duties in spurts of blind fury, whereas his step-sister Sarah, almost five years older, was the steady one, intensely stubborn, quiet and self-absorbed so that she seldom needed any attention, or so it seemed.
Sarah protected her slower little brother in a tender, defensive way that gave Emmy some reassurance that, should anything ever happen to her and Isaac, Jacob would have someone to care for him. That could happen, Emmy knew. She and Isaac could become ill. Isaac’s first wife had died of a cancer, after all.
And out here, things happened. Emmy had lost her first husband in a logging accident. Whipsawed down.
And Emmy also knew of several settlers who had been murdered in the past year by the Northerner marauders. Some had been carried off by them. The slayings had been gruesome and cruel. The kidnapped victims, if ever recovered, told stories of terrible outrages they had endured while they’d been kept. Emmy personally had known a few of the ones who had been killed early on — spared the ordeals.
As she thought about that, she realized it was always present, that fear — the possibility of the Northerners’ sudden appearance. She had accepted that risk, of dying that way, she knew. But it was a reluctant acceptance - a resignation. It put an edge on everything, on every plan she made, every step she took.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Emmy walked to the barn, a crisp early frost holding to the grass, crunching beneath her footsteps. She had, during her childhood in Boston, loved the sound and feeling of that, but knew that here it meant that the October rainfall would start soon, and when the rain started on Whidbey, it got cold fast, the island’s winter roughly brushing aside any lingering colors of the fall; muddying it all. So, as much as she loved reminders of her childhood, the frost here was a disappointment at the same time.
She had weathered here long enough to hate the gray, drab skies that would settle in soon enough, moving from intermittent warm showers into a bitter, soggy, constant drizzle, keeping her inside the small house and, with that, inside with her fears and suspended hopes. Looking to the windows for whatever was outside.
Seeing the leaves falling, dissolving with the rain into the Northwest muck that seemed to attach itself to everything, aggravated her sense of an always-looming despair. She had lost two previous pregnancies in October just like this one. Would she lose this one too? she worried. The gloom, that depressing, weighty sadness, pulseless and leaden in its countenance, could then settle heavily onto her, she knew.
If she let it.
So pervasive was that impending winter darkness, the potential of being overwhelmed by sadness, that it forced her at this time every year to search deeply to remember the freshness of light and color. By now she had learned the value of that necessary exercise, one that would help her forbear again until spring arrived. But she still had to discipline herself better, she had decided. She had to set an example for Sarah and Jacob.
She hitched her mare to the buckboard, then rode to the orchard to pick up the apples that had fallen in the night’s wind —there would be at least a few bushels — before the deer found them. She cinched her rubber rain cape tightly to cut the wind. It always bit through the seams, however, turning her cheeks red and her fingers a faint blue.
Somehow, protected as she had been during her childhood by the warm softness and refinery of the cozy Boston hilltop brownstones, she knew she needed to learn all of the nuances of the Northwest cold seasons once and for all. It would help her outlast them. She knew she had to maintain a strong demeanor in the face of it all if she were going to continue as the respectable wife and mother that her husband, Isaac, expected. But the pain in her fingers from the cold added a bitter dimension to that discipline. She would outlast that feeling too, she told herself.
There were little breaks, little surprises before the first days of winter that brought hope, she reassured herself, as she picked the windfall around the apple trees. Assuming Isaac did not run into Northerners and get himself killed on this trip, she knew he would return in ten days with provisions from his stay in Bellingham.
She brightened a bit, thinking about more surprises that would come in right after that, when her neighbor, Ben Crockett, Missy’s husband, returned with his canoes stringing behind him from his trip down south to the Elliott Bay settlement, now called “Seattle,” after the settlers there decided to honor one of the prominent tyees by naming it after him. Ben would bring more jars and paraffin for preserves, perhaps a bolt or three of practical cloth, some cinnamon and cloves, and lots of pepper, if it lasted. So many settlers had come into the area that new provisions didn’t last long before they were redistributed across three counties.
And maybe Isaac or Ben would think to bring something pretty — sashes or soft ribbon or even tiny pearl buttons if a British or Spanish ship or a fast one from San Francisco had arrived in the Puget Sound area in the last week.
She needed so much to be complete, to make this small house into a respectable home. And she wanted the baby to see some softness and color when it came into the world. She needed another girl.
Emmy lifted the heavy baskets of late harvest apples onto the buckboard. Doc Edwards likely wouldn’t approve, even though he knew she lifted with her legs and used a plank to push the bushels into the buckboard. She knew her limits. Edwards didn’t.
She thought about Jacob and Sarah’s dawdling this morning and their response to her chiding. Where did her children get their blue eyes? she wondered, as she rode back down to the house. Where did they learn to wear expressions that made them appear as if the things they saw just disappeared inside their heads and stayed there unprocessed? It had to be from their fathers’ lines, the Terns and the Evers, because she had no recollection of blue eyes on either side of her own family. And as smart as he was, it was Isaac’s habit to sometimes keep things unprocessed in his head.
“Patience, Woman…I’m mulling it over” he would respond when she challenged him at times to make a decision on business matters.
But was it “mulling” or rather, really his excuse for procrastination? She again laughed to herself, thinking about their dissimilarities.His hesitancy. Her directness.
His blue eyes; her brown ones.
She, herself had always been told that the intensity of her own brown eyes burned deeply into every person with whom she interacted, as if she had the ability to disinter a person’s buried emotions with a single focused stare. She had always assumed that was because she had been told as a little girl that dressing down someone with your eyes was a rude habit. And so, minding her elders, she had taught herself to take in everything about a person without wandering her focus up, down, or around the way others did when they bothered to pay attention to something or someone.
And that had become useful, she realized, because she had always believed everything was important in its own way and therefore valuable, with bits and pieces to store away for understanding later as necessary. Everything.
Isaac had said he was smitten from the first time she did that to him. But she didn’t u
nderstand that because she had just been looking at his soul and she thought “smitten” was a funny word for anyone to use when regarding her.
As she drove the buckboard back to the house, she looked over the high bluff on which it stood, to the sea below.
What was out there that she couldn’t see?
She hoped Isaac was taking care of himself.
Chapter Two
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Isaac
To Bellingham. Adjudication. Knifing over some native’s cut fish nets. Citizens want a hanging, for God’s sake.
— Isaac Evers Diary, October 1st, 1857
Isaac smelled its sweet smoke several minutes before he saw the colors of the fire. Cedar and firs; a late summer forest flare-up, caught in the tall trees crowding the shoreline in the distance. As he and Sam pushed their way closer to it, up the late September coast, paddling from Whidbey Island toward Bellingham, the salty air burn-reddened his cheeks and the smoke wakened him fully again.
He inhaled deeply. The big Northwest giants carried so much more pitch than the evergreens he had known in Ohio, so when they burned, the smoke was pungent - like a perfume, almost. He had always liked that. Indians thought the trees were sacred, he mused. Perhaps that was one of their reasons. He inhaled deeply again.
It wasn’t a big fire. The constant drizzle kept the fire from turning into a big one, he thought, not like others he had seen over the years. Autumn five years ago had been dry enough that it took two months for the fires on the peninsula to burn out. But the trees were wet now from a steady, damp, disappointing summer. That had ruined half of his harvest.
He hated the rain as much as Emmy did. He often wondered whether the mold he found on everything at home caused the dark green in the forest canopy, too.
He hadn’t expected it to be so when he moved west for his life’s big chance. He had heard this rocky sound was clean with life and land was virginal and free—harder than in Ohio and Missouri, but in a different way. More people to mourn his losses and mark his milestones back there, but more things to test himself against here. Now, it was the land itself, and the natives of this region - damned childlike to him - that he always seemed to be protecting. Or fighting.