Widow Walk

by Gar LaSalle

  But, as he thought about it, he had no regrets. He’d made his name here, marked the land as his own.

  Paddling slowly as he watched the fire on shore, he almost forgot the weariness and ache in his shoulders and neck. Shoving off in the darkness after a long night at home had become harder each time, he realized. But he couldn’t complain. He had accepted the job.

  They had to get north quickly because he had to try the case at the Bellingham mill and get back southwest within six days to preside over another one in Port Townsend. Going along the coast by canoe with Sam, a competent but taciturn traveling companion, was the fastest way, if the weather was with them.

  He hated leaving again. Too many things to do back at home. Emmy was fighting a fever, and he knew she might lose this pregnancy, too. She hadn’t seemed to take as well after the quickening this time. He wondered whether the two recent failed pregnancies, both early losses, meant she might not keep this one also. He didn’t know about these sorts of things.

  He was pleased that Emmy had kept her figure, as hard as she worked, and it surprised him she had gotten sick again because she carried herself so ferociously in all she did, and moved so fast in this world. She had always seemed unstoppable, and no matter how tired she was, she seldom complained. He knew when he returned from this adjudication chore, he’d find she’d been working long hours doing a hundred tasks, doing many things he didn’t pay much attention to but needed to be done.

  She was so blessed full of fire. That always gave him hope. She was the home. More and more, he had started to realize that he just tended the fire.

  He was staring at Sam’s back, and it took Isaac, as full of Emmy as he was, four full strokes to notice that Sam had stopped paddling. Getting his bearings, he figured. They had covered about forty-five miles, still far south of Bellingham now but passing several reef net setups. So there were Lummi nearby. Strange that their nets weren’t being tended, which meant either the fishing was bad, odd for this time of year, or they’d gone ashore for some other reason.

  His eyes weren’t any way as good as Sam’s, or of any of the other natives he knew, so he had to cup his hand to his forehead, squinting to see the source of the smoke on the beach. It wasn’t the trees alone; the remains of cabins—white-washed settler cabins—were on fire at the base of the small forest fire.

  They drifted without paddling and watched for a few minutes until Sam grunted and pointed to a spot on the beach about a half mile north of the cabins. Isaac started to protest then saw what Sam was watching.

  It was a long boat. Northerners.

  It rested high on the beach not far from the cabins. Medium size, high gunnels, large enough to hold fifteen or sixteen. Isaac couldn’t make out the markings from here, but a raiding party, almost certainly. The boat was unattended, so that meant the cabin folk had likely fled into the forest and the raiders were hunting them.

  Isaac felt for his musket but kept his eyes on the long boat. Wished he’d brought more powder than what he thought he would need for hunting and bear. Wished Pickett and the federals would finally get their steamer gunboat stationed up here to help put a stop to this type of butchery. If the Brits had gunboats, why couldn’t the Oregon territory get one for its citizens?

  They had to make their decision quickly. If they turned to run against the incoming tide or put up their sail to tack against the wind . . . they couldn’t outrun a long boat. They had to reach shelter.

  Without waiting for Isaac to react, Sam set the pace, fast and smooth and Isaac knew what he was thinking. No time for talking it over. If they moved swiftly, they might make it to the shore undiscovered then wait for the raiding party to leave. No time for anything but hiding, as had the settlers, hopefully.

  Isaac chided himself as he rowed. Should have known who the cabins belonged to, being the appointed tax collector and circuit judge for the region. But settlers were showing up all the time nowadays, drifting up from the gold fields in California or coming overland from Missouri and the Midwest; too many to get to know anymore.

  The folks in those cabins had found themselves a smooth-stoned beach and built a place close to the salmon and clams. “When the tide goes out, the table is set,” they’d likely heard. They had settled onto the beach and gotten lazy, typical for whites. They didn’t know northern raiders had never really stopped their slaving runs. You just didn’t hear about them as much because so many natives had died of measles and smallpox north of the Vancouver Islands.

  But the raiders hadn’t changed their ways, and new settlers brought a lot of useful things with them that drew thieves out from their protected coves—Kwakiutl, Tlingit, or Haida, likely. Sam would know. His Salish tribe had to fight them all the time. Headhunters all, he’d said.

  Isaac and Sam pulled up on a short spit that jutted out just far enough that a casual look up the beach wouldn’t reveal them.

  Sam was out of the boat and up to the crest before they landed. As cautious as Sam was about everything, Isaac had never seen him scared this much, and his quiet, crouched movements told Isaac that Sam was close to panic.

  Faster now, Isaac secured the boat and joined Sam. They could see the long boat and part of the closest cabin, still smoldering.

  “Haida…Raven markings. Maybe ol’ Black Wind, hisself,” Sam whispered.

  That sent chills down Isaac’s spine. He had heard about Black Wind for years. Everyone had. But no one knew if the infamous Northerner predator was real or a myth. Isaac decided he didn’t want to find out. He tried to push himself into the sand to lower his profile.

  It was getting dark. Isaac looked behind him and saw the little beach wouldn’t give them much protection if they had to fight, and the flat between the cabins and where they hid, covered by brambles right up to the tree line, would make it difficult for him to detect anyone trying to flank their position.

  Sam would have seen that too. Even if they had reached the spit unobserved, if the Northerners headed out moving with the tide, they would pass right by the spit. It all depended on what they brought out of the burning forest.

  If their boat was full, they wouldn’t stop. They would stay away from Bellingham where he was headed and likely keep their heading west of Whidbey where he and Emmy lived. They’d just slip back up north quietly through the small islands and up past Vancouver—if their boat was full. Otherwise they would continue looking for plunder — and captives.

  Still three hours until complete darkness. Isaac wondered if he would be tested before the night was over. The Bellingham trial for which he was to be the judge would have to wait. Isaac knew God would be presiding over this one.

  Chapter Three

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Emmy

  Emmy unhitched her mare from the buckboard and as she led her old horse to the front yard, she looked out again at the cold gray water of the sea below the bluff. A low-lying fog hovered over the strait, obscuring the lights of the small settlement surrounding Fort Townsend. For a moment, she thought she saw a long black object in the water - perhaps large enough to be a vessel - a fishing canoe? A long boat? - But the fog hid it almost immediately. She shivered, thinking about what the appearance of long boats would mean.

  She remembered that five years ago, as later recounted in the Colonial Herald, a Northerner raiding party descended on a Lummi tribe settlement near the Bellingham mill. The Lummis, always resourceful, frequent victims of Northerner predatory raids, had practiced a strategy to defend themselves. The visibility on that day happened to be good. The Lummi saw the marauders approaching well in advance. As the Northerners left their long boats and moved through the woods towards what they thought was a sleeping village, Lummi warriors, hiding high in the woods’ evergreens, descended and then destroyed the unguarded long boats on the beach. They then surrounded the small war party and killed every Northerner warrior.

  But that much-celebrated v
ictory had been an anomaly. The war party had been small, with less than twenty men in two long boats. The Lummi had seen the predators and had been prepared, Emmy knew. She had heard many stories about the Northerner predations of native tribes and isolated pioneer settlements. Like the one in which she lived. Her home was undefended with Isaac gone. The blockhouse that Isaac was building on the bluff was still unfinished.

  The fog cleared enough that she could see across the strait. No craft on the water.

  She went back to her chores, trying to put that out of her thoughts.

  As she, Sarah and Jacob carried the bushels down to the cellar bins, she watched how each of her children approached the chore. Sarah, she knew, would carefully separate the bruised apples from rest, put them in a smaller basket, then, before her stepbrother could escape, hand it to him with instructions.

  Sarah did exactly as Emmy predicted.

  “Little, Brother, please take this to the kitchen so mother can use them,” Sarah said to Jacob, who was already heading up the cellar steps to play outside.

  Emmy shook her head, smiling to herself. Sarah was like her, she realized, and, in his impulsivity, Jacob was so much like his father, Isaac.

  That made her think again about Isaac. Now that he was back on this side of the mountains from the inland war with the aborigines, she had found herself searching his soul again. What was it that was different about him now?

  He had changed, but she wasn’t certain fully how yet. He seemed sadder and resigned, somehow. Whatever he had seen east of the Cascades when he had led his volunteers to fight the Walla Walla and the Palouse tribes had stooped his shoulders a bit, too.

  It didn’t seem fair to him, she thought. Isaac came back commissioned as a militia colonel, but he had traded something precious for that rank.

  She felt it in so many ways, when sleeping next to him and even when they had the privacy to be intimate, when the children were over at his brother’s home. It was in his hands and all up and down through his back now. They had never before been stiff and tentative like that, before he went east. His intimacies were vacant and roaming, during those private moments, it seemed. The private moments were further and further apart.

  And later, awakening with him gone, she knew he was wandering the shore on moonlit nights again, coming in before dawn, but then getting up out of bed early, throwing himself at this job or that obligation, never saying no to any task, official or neighborly. It was as if he were filling every second with work so that he didn’t have time to ponder. If he “mulled,” using his own word — he didn’t understand the necessity of truly thinking something through. Isaac jumped into projects, but was terribly indecisive about completing them, she realized. It was if he had become a gambler, trusting instinct and luck instead of real deliberation and discernment to weigh a project’s worth. More and more, it seemed he needed her to manage his “inspirations.” Was she perpetuating his impulsivity by aiding him in his projects? Or was that what she was supposed to do as a married woman - be an accomplice in an unequal partnership?

  She picked a half dozen eggs for a late breakfast for the children. It was already almost seven o’clock.

  Breaking the eggs carefully, one at a time into the skillet, hearing the sizzle, she realized that her sense of loneliness had worsened after Isaac returned from the Indian war, more than when he had been on long trips doing his legal work in the first years of their marriage; more than when she was married to Sarah’s father, Jervis Ternbull, a rich husband she had hardly known; more than when she had been a young teenaged girl not that long ago in Boston.

  Emmy called Sarah and Jacob to the table for their breakfast. She watched them eat, Jacob bolting his food as usual. She wasn’t hungry, however. Her morning nausea had worsened over the past few days.

  What would happen with her third child? What would become of Sarah and Jacob? Could she give them what they needed?

  She understood that Isaac knew his long absences were not good for the children, that she wanted Isaac to spend more time with them. But he had pushed that aside. He told her he thought Jacob was just too young to accompany him, even on short trips to Olympia, and he didn’t think it safe to bring Sarah on trips either, as feisty a young girl as she was, because even the friendly people were rough. Emmy knew that most carried some ready weapon at all times, even when using the courthouse privy, so she accepted Isaac’s refusal.

  That said, Emmy reminded herself that the children needed more. She had saved enough for them to travel with her to New England last year, to meet their grandparents before they passed on, meet cousins and aunts from both sides, experience and learn the most diplomatic ways of contending with her sister, their aunt, Kathleen.

  But Isaac’s departure for eleven months to fight in Eastern Washington had stopped those plans short. So she stayed here on Whidbey. Dutiful. Waiting.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  After breakfast, as she scrubbed the frying pan clean, she again thought about the disruption to their lives that their participation in the Palouse expedition of General Steptoe had imposed.

  It was frustrating. She and Isaac had outfitted an entire company of men, even supplying some of the poorest with shoes and weapons. The government, by the verbal oration of the territorial governor, Stevens, had promised to compensate them for their patriotic service, but no payment had come, and it had already been over a year since that bloody affair. It was a disgraceful abrogation of a promise, she believed.

  It wasn’t that they were poor. She still had something left from the sale of her property in Olympia she inherited after the death of her first husband. Isaac was paid well for his legal and tax-collecting work. They had claim to over a square mile of prime fertile farmland bordered by waterfront. They had hired hands farming it and were selling the beef and produce to the military and to every ship that came by way of Bellingham or Port Townsend. The narrow slice of land they owned controlled easy ports to both sides of the island and the straits that reached down to Seattle, up to Canada and out the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Pacific.

  It was just that they had to work all the harder now because the government hadn’t paid its debts. They were barely beyond a break-even, despite all the projects underway. And whatever Isaac had seen on that expedition had changed him and their relationship.

  The prominence he had attained from that expedition - he was widely regarded as a hero now - had gone to his head - not as it might have with other men, as it would most certainly done with her first husband, who was prone to arrogance.

  Isaac, instead, had become almost recklessly ambitious and frantically impatient. It was as if he were trying to get everything done immediately - as if he believed his time on this earth had been foreshortened somehow.

  And the enormous amount of extra work they had taken on as a result, put them even farther apart from each other, it seemed.

  She called Sarah into the house.

  “Sarah, I will need you and Jacob to go to Missy and Ben Crockett’s and then over to Doctor Edwards. Give them their mail that arrived yesterday. And ask if either of them will want to order a side of beef. We will be butchering next week when Isaac returns.”

  From the window, she watched Sarah mounting the mare, and after pulling Jacob up behind her, slowly trotting off to the neighbors. Jacob’s dog, Rowdy, followed.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  The stove was getting cold. Emmy stepped down to the back yard and picked up an armful of wood from the pile next to the barn. She would need to chop some more alder - enough for a week at least. Isaac had left without finishing that task before he set off that morning.

  That prompted her to think again about the balance within their relationship. Something else irritated her when she thought about the cost of Isaac’s participation in the Palouse war. When he was away, she had run the farm in her own way. She enjoyed the challenge and had done qu
ite well by it, increasing the production even without the hired hands and farmers he had taken with him.

  Now that Isaac was back on this side of the Cascades - as he, his family and everyone else, it seemed, expected - she had stepped to the rear, and returned to the subservience of a wife. She had done so, whether she agreed with his actions or not, as she had been taught was her duty.

  And it was her sense that Isaac hadn’t even noticed that she had carried everything on her back in his absence, his risky gambles that she squared, as well as the new, more certain projects she had initiated.

  On his return, Isaac had picked up everything as if he had been in charge all along. He moved her aside, took over her projects, like completing the huge, long landing dock on their waterfront property so that deeper draft vessels could off-load without fear of grounding during all but the lowest of tides. That dock immediately increased their income. Substantially.

  But despite their near-prosperity and the pride she had in Isaac’s various accomplishments — their accomplishments — she felt like something had been taken away from her when he returned.

  And, during her worst of times, weathering the depression she felt in this time of year - a forlornness, magnified so intensely by the dark dampness of the region — she wavered in her resolve to endure. When she was again alone - as she was now, managing all of the business projects and caring for her family as if she were a single mother, she had to fight an enormous, perplexing frustration.

  Despite recognizing that brewing hard feelings was a useless exercise, she feared she was starting to resent him.

  It was on days like this that she faltered, wondering whether she should feel sorry for herself, or blame herself for not protesting some of Isaac’s foolish risk taking, or let herself drift away from a hard love. It was on days like this that she wondered whether she should delude herself and pretend that the potential rewards of future prosperity might actually outweigh the loneliness she knew she easily could fall prey to on the worst of days.