Widow Walk

by Gar LaSalle

  Further south, in a natural safe harbor, he secured western waterway passage on a small logging boat to bypass the deep and treacherous channel they called Deception Pass that separated Whidbey Island from the mainland. One day later, they landed on the flat, sloped western landing on Whidbey that Isaac and Emmy Evers had created for their flourishing businesses.

  Pickett didn’t know what he was looking for on this trip, wondered whether Emmy would be demur and slight like his first and second wives, or hardened like most of the white women whom he had encountered in the Northwest.

  How did a reputed Northwest beauty compare to the women he had met over the years: the refined, wealthy ones in Virginia; the more adventuresome in Illinois and Ohio; and the aggressive, worldly-wise women in New York? He tried putting that thought away and justified his trip with the notion of official and responsible discharge of business duty for the United States Army.

  Chapter Ten

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Emmy and Pickett

  Rain stopped for half a day. Getting cold now. New bull broke the pen fence again. Took two hours to herd him back in. Finished mending the fence by sunset. Sent offer to Bellingham Cmdr for beef supply. Isaac gone for over almost a week now.

  —Emmy Evers’ Diary, October 6th, 1857

  She was surprised when Pickett arrived, as it turned out by coincidence the very next day after she had sent off a response to his letter.

  When her neighbor’s son, Stephen Crockett, arrived at her door announcing the landing of the two soldiers, Emmy ran upstairs, quickly washed off the morning labor’s perspiration, pulled her hair into a tighter braided bun, and furtively glanced at her outline in the bedroom’s vanity mirror. As she did so, she wondered at her motivations, deciding that such attention to personal detail was really in the best interest of her employing a disarming presence for negotiating an enduring contract with a reliable client.

  Driving her buckboard to meet Captain Pickett, she determined to take measure of him against his ornate script.

  “Captain Pickett, this is quite a surprise. I received your letter last week and just yesterday sent a response to your query. I expect you and my offer passed each other out in the straits. I believe you will be pleased with our proposal,” she said, noticing with a bit of embarrassment that she was speaking much more rapidly than she usually did.

  Pickett was dressed carefully with obvious attention to detail, and she noted that he spoke with a soft and gentle cadence, less florid than his written word, but with a refined, precise selection of words nevertheless.

  “Madame,” he said, with a doffed-hat bow, “I am most pleased to hear that, and I humbly beg your pardon for not waiting to receive a response. This was the most convenient time for me to go on this excursion. The weather will get inhospitably mean in a short time.”

  Hearing this gently voiced excuse, Emmy wondered if he also spoke this way to the men he commanded and watched the quiet exchanges between the captain and his sergeant, who seemed to respect his officer’s orders. Pickett carried himself with a dignified solemnity that was unassuming at the same time.

  Emmy read a sadness that lay beneath his ornately designed ensemble. In contrast to the enlisted man, who looked as if he had slept for a fortnight in his dirty clothing, Pickett’s uniform was proper, clean, and tailored with attention to detail, from his boots to the nonmilitary-issue cape that covered his shoulders. The difference told her that Pickett gave an almost dandy-like attention to his own appearance but obviously was less concerned how the men he commanded represented him or his office.

  When she extended her hand to receive his, she felt hard yet small and carefully manicured fingers. His nails were clean and trimmed. She inhaled discreetly to sense whether Pickett used any cologne, but could discern none.

  Ordering the sergeant to drive the buckboard, Pickett accompanied her back to the house on his beautiful gray mare, and it was apparent to her that he understood how to cut a dashing figure by his canter and carry. Indeed, as they proceeded up the incline from the beach and onto the homestead, he kept slightly ahead to her right in a privileged, very visible position, so he could not be ignored.

  He dismounted and quickly moved to the buckboard to help her down, and then, as the sergeant hiyawed the horses off to the barn in the back, waited before advancing further, almost shyly, until she had mounted the steps and beckoned him into the house.

  “Come along, Captain,” she said.

  Sarah and Jacob, ever observant, were waiting on the porch stoop and watched Pickett enter after their mother. Following after him into the small, modest parlor, they stood expectantly until he noticed their presence, at which point Sarah stepped forward and asked to take his coat and cap.

  Pickett obliged and, seeing wide-eyed Jacob, winked at him, then unbuckled his field saber and handed it over to the boy.

  Jacob, duly impressed with this privilege, hefted the sword, three-quarters his own height, with a solemnity that made Pickett smile.

  The children quickly returned from their task, hovering, until Emmy motioned for them to go upstairs to their rooms.

  “Sarah, Jacob. Captain Pickett and your mother have some important business.” She turned to Pickett with an apologetic smile.

  As Sarah was about to turn away, Jacob stepped forward. “Do you ever fight the Indians, Captain? My father has. In the war east of the mountains. He’s a colonel in the volunteers.”

  Pickett knew about Isaac’s participation in the fight against Kamiakin. All the military in the region had been grateful for volunteerism after the Elliott Bay attack in the south of the Puget Sound, but the eager participation of untrained militia had caused its share of problems as well.

  After a similar attack on Bellingham a few months later, Pickett repeatedly had to intervene to rescue innocent natives from lynching by angry settlers. There were decent citizens and ones who simply made a mess, he thought to himself, and wondered into which category Isaac Evers fit.

  He squatted before Jacob, bringing his eyes level with the boy’s, then glanced up at Emmy and Sarah.

  “Well, I heard that your father is a brave man, son. We try to avoid picking fights with the aborigines. I just try to keep order up in the North Sound.”

  Emmy gave Sarah a look, and with that, Sarah took Jacob’s hand and pulled him away. “That’s enough, little brother.”

  Sarah turned and watched Pickett carefully as she guided her brother up the staircase.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Pickett remained standing until his hostess sat down on the small parlor’s one soft-cushioned chair and then, after she motioned for him to be seated, placed himself opposite her on the divan, discreetly observing her motions and mannerisms.

  It was evident to him that she was with child, although early enough in her condition that her posture and gait were not yet tentative. Emmy had finely cut lines and a smoothly curved back; sturdy but not overly broad shoulders; and strong, well-proportioned hands with long fingers, similar to the velvet- and lace-covered ones on the beauties he remembered from the cotillion ball celebrations in Virginia.

  He thought of his two wives. Sally, his first wife, born of a wealthy family and well bred, had smaller hands than Morning Mist, but both women had a brown hardness to their touch, developed from the toil necessary to get along in their harsh environs. Emmy Evers had the same type of calluses as the other women, but somehow she had preserved the gentility of motion from her well-born origin. Her handshake was strong, firm and what he sensed was an unforced confidence.

  Her face was finely featured with high cheekbones and bright, fiercely honest brown eyes that were fixed on his own in a way that discomfited him.

  Some women’s eyes, he reflected, betrayed an angry self-pity and others a naïvety that made for contempt or tempted seduction. There was none of this in Emmy’s deep brown eyes. Rather,
he found them hard to observe because of what her eyes pulled up to his own surface, overwhelming him in an instant.

  He knew from the moment he met her that she would never let him get away with a lie.

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  “So, Captain Pickett, it is apparent from the soft cadence of your speech that you are a Southerner, but not from the Deep South. I would guess the beautiful state of Virginia. Am I correct?”

  Seeing a flash of appreciative affirmation in his eyes and sensing in him the melancholia she had witnessed in others during this fall season of quick-darkening skies that followed on mellow Octobers, she nodded over to the parlor window and the slate-colored seascape below.

  “What does a Southern gentleman think of this sad green and gray?”

  He followed her wistful glance and nodded.

  “Astute, madame,” he smiled. “I would say that, to one who rode for a few but, at the same time, too many years in the Southwest and on the baked Mexican deserts, the color green has always provided a welcome contrast for me. The perpetual gray skies of the winters here, however, make one almost forget the definition of verdant and what a full palette of colors can do for one’s disposition.” After a pause, he continued, “I miss my home very much at times, particularly during this change of seasons.”

  “I understand, sir. I understand.”

  That commiseration established a bond between them, and for a few moments, neither spoke. Their eyes moved again to the window.

  Then, for a short while they exchanged in a simple, formal banter, with short forays into each other’s perspective on a variety of subjects. They discussed each other’s vision of what constituted propriety, God’s purposes, and, as well, the destiny of their young country.

  Because of his mannerisms, more than by the words he chose on the topic of political debate raging back East, she was not surprised when Pickett professed a deep disdain for slavery. She had found that, unlike other soldiers she had met, he worried for the welfare of the aboriginal inhabitants of the region.

  She heard him use the word “unwitting” repeatedly in his description of the unfortunate peoples’ response to their rapidly changing living conditions. He was particularly vehement about his condemnation of how the Brits behaved in Vancouver, which he believed was greedy, despicable, and deceptive. She sensed that he held back criticism of his own federal government, as likely he must.

  “My husband, Isaac, believes the same as you do, Captain. While he is as eager as many to see our nation’s boundaries expand, he believes we are part of a grand plan that must ultimately also include a fair outcome for all its creatures, whatever the original station in which they have been placed. That said, we have had difficult challenges, and he believes it is our burden to change all of that for the better, perhaps through faith and hard work. Perhaps through miracles.”

  As she said this, she thought about how Isaac’s brutal encounters in eastern Washington had profoundly changed him from a young man with a cornucopia of enthusiastic, albeit undisciplined, applications of energy into a pensive, sober, and phlegmatic adult who increasingly found it difficult to finish the various projects he had started.

  It no longer amused her to manage him as she often admitted to herself ultimately had become her responsibility.

  Isaac, over the past year, had developed a fear of death, she realized, that now outweighed his sense of opportunity. In the early years of their marriage, she simply had listened to his list of ambitious projects and added an ordered, practical prioritization to them so that a good number of them actually were completed.

  But Isaac was stalled now. He seldom spoke of enterprise or the future.

  Pickett responded, “As I believe I conveyed to your son, Jacob, my hopes are to keep confrontations minimized between all the inhabitants of this region. Although conduct as a warrior has been my calling, my experience has taught me that peace is always better, madame. And perversely, perhaps, it seems that assuring peace sometimes requires a stern, if reserved, intervention.”

  Emmy considered this and understood that Pickett, at least by the words he carefully chose, had armed himself for those necessities, and that, as a disciplined soldier, he likely had found a comfortable balance between self-preservation and duty.

  She wondered if poor Isaac, with all that he had seen, had it in him to fight in the same manner anymore. She wondered whether martial training amplified the appetite or, alternatively, resigned a man to the cruelties of armed conflict.

  In Pickett, she sensed the latter.

  After a long pause, glancing again outside at a brooding sky, Emmy suggested to Pickett that they inspect the cattle as a prelude to a formal proposal on price. Then, because of the impropriety of offering him lodging in her home while Isaac was away, she told him about the plain but comfortable rooms a mile away that Ben and Missy Crockett generously provided for a modest fee to wayfarers.

  Pickett thanked her for that suggestion.

  “After we inspect the cattle, I will introduce you to the Crocketts, and after you have had a chance to rest, may I invite you and your sergeant to have a meal with Jacob, Sarah and me?” she said.

  Pickett immediately accepted her kind offer.

  That evening, Emmy proved that her skills as a cook were as formidable as were her abilities as the manager of the family business.

  While she served them a dessert of apples crisped with cinnamon and caramelized sugar, Emmy negotiated an arrangement: twenty-five cents per on-the-hoof pound, by which their farm would supply the Bellingham outpost with all its beef in the future.

  Pickett seemed surprised that she offered him terms that were much more favorable than what he was paying to the supplier in Port Townsend, not realizing that the intermediary he used usually purchased the same Evers beef. Emmy knew, however, and again smiled to herself at the justice of this new arrangement.

  After the meal, they shook hands on the deal, and Emmy realized, by that gentle clasp, that she had won his trust in similar manner to how she had won over every other man with whom she had business dealings.

  At the same time, she felt sad that he was so naïve and earnest a person that he could be so easily swindled by his military peers. He was likely a very brave and noble man, but one with many gaps in his character that needed a complement to make him whole. That gave her pause and reconsideration, seeing that Pickett, like so many lonely men in this rough land, might need the help of angels after all.

  Chapter Eleven

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Isaac

  Our family and the island’s faithful flock is again spared the sorrows.

  —Isaac Evers’ Diary, October 10th, 1857

  Isaac arrived home two mornings after Pickett had departed, several days sooner than Emmy expected. Rather than rowing another four miles, he had beached his canoe on the northeastern shore, far from the docks he had built, and left the contents with the Negro who lived near the landing.

  After he rounded the area by horseback, alerting the neighbors that trouble was in the waters again, Emmy, seeing that he was exhausted and pale, helped him lie down. He slept for ten hours, barely moving during his respite. His brother, Winfield, Tom Iserson, and the Crocketts shared watch over the straits that week. He had Emmy, who knew how to shoot and did it as well as any man, take her turn.

  As a result of the predation Isaac had witnessed, the island families moved into a watch status. Two years before, the fifteen Whidbey families in five different parts of the island had worked out a simple plan so that, should a Northerner raiding party attack any one of the local cluster of cabins, those under siege would fire shots and ring the warning bell kept in each cabin. The homes on Emmy and Isaac’s plateau were close enough that a relay of shots would send the alarm quickly to all settlers who could be in harm’s way.

  In a watch, all families, including children during
the daylight, participated taking turns observing the straits, watching the water for signs of long boats.

  Three weeks into the vigil, as the fall light started to fade more quickly on the broad fertile plain, Ben Crockett spied six long boats in the middle of the strait. They were heading north. He was certain he saw captives in each boat.

  In the preceding decade, before the smallpox had devastated the Northerners’ ranks, the sight of six boats heading northward, presumably back to their homes on the Queen Charlotte Islands and northern British Columbia, would have provided little comfort to white settlers and local tribes, because it was reasonable to assume there might have been others lingering in the area.

  But the straits had been relatively quiet for some time now with fewer sightings, so it was widely assumed that increased patrolling by British gunboats was acting as a sufficient deterrent.

  No reports from any neighbors had come in the recent weeks of any other large groups of marauders. Winter was coming on quickly. It was believed that the Northerners seldom raided during the cold season. So, Isaac and the islanders relaxed a bit.

  Eight days later, Isaac left the guarding of the homestead in care of his brother Winfield, and took a small contingent of volunteers back across the sound to bury the Negro settlers.

  It was a depressing and grim journey, but Isaac reasoned it was the only decent thing to do, commenting to the few who protested that he hoped someone would do the same for him and his family if, God forbid, they ever were taken in the same way.

  Emmy, who was not pleased with his departure again, understood the decency of such a mission, but threw herself into all of the unfinished business at hand.