A Clearing in the Wild

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  “Your father has concurred. Wilhelm has not.” I looked away. “Indeed, he knows nothing of it,” Christian said, his hand patting mine in reassurance. “I did not wish to begin that … dance until I knew you would step with me. Your father’s agreed first. Then if you say to proceed, I will approach Wilhelm. He is a kindly man despite what you may think, Emma. So I believe by his birthday celebration, we will be allowed to announce to all our marital intentions. God willing. You, being willing. You have yet to say if I can step over the if.”

  “Ja,” I said. “I agree to be your wife, no ifs. But when the engagement is complete and we have answered our leader’s probing, I hope you’ll still be pleased with your offer.”

  “He doesn’t interrogate, Emma. He asks to be sure that husbands and wives will be happy to be together for life. It is his duty as a leader to inquire.”

  “Ja, sure,” I said, knowing it wouldn’t be the last time Christian Giesy and his future wife would see the world through very different eyes.

  We completed the evening with not another word about our future. It was hardly a romantic declaration, all wrapped up in talk of civics and ascendancy. And yet wasn’t that what I’d been aching for, to have conversations between men and women, express words that did more than tease the mind? No, I’d been aching to be truly seen by Christian, to be known not as “one of the colony women wearing faded flannel and her hair parted in the center,” but as someone another might pick out from a crowd.

  Now that he had, I felt lightheaded: I might actually receive what I wanted. I’d begun to weave, and God had just handed me the finest yet most foreign of threads.

  3

  A Ring Around the Fire

  Youth claims perfect pitch and often fails to note disharmony. When I told my mother of Christian’s intentions, she smiled and held me, her apron comforting with Sauerkraut smells. “I know,” she said. “Your father forewarned me, though he didn’t tink what you might say.”

  “You never saw my interest?” I asked my father later as he drank strong tea at the head of the table.

  My father merely raised an eyebrow, his “well, well,” look, the same he gave me when as a child I asked some question about why sheep’s wool held heavy oils or when I urged him to tell me something I didn’t already know. I suppose he welcomed my inquisitive nature, knew in advance the challenge Christian’s life would have for me, both encouraging it and tempering it.

  Jonathan sounded the only sour note I heard. “What’s Christian Giesy see in you?”

  “Ach, Jonathan,” my mother cautioned. “Be happy for your sister, ja?”

  Jonathan grunted as he cut his sausage, popped a section in his mouth. “He’s a tinsmith with the gift of gab,” he said. “Think of how many girls he’s been exposed to. Why would he settle for you?” I don’t think he meant to hurt my feelings, and in truth, he said out loud what would have eventually made its way into my consciousness. But until then, I saw Christian’s interest as an answer to my prayers, as a tapestry God saw fit to stitch together: two hearts, two hands, two souls hemmed by faith.

  “Do you think Father Keil will forbid it?” David Jr. said. He held his fork midair above his egg. “There is something noble in being a bachelor, I think.”

  “Why should he?” I asked. “Papa’s approved. And Christian is beloved by Father Keil. He wants him to be happy.”

  “He didn’t think of it himself, though,” Jonathan said. “Father Keil likes to be in charge of all things. A good leader is, sister. Willie told me that.”

  My father corrected. “It’s a leader’s duty to have authority, but this does not mean power used for personal views. He doesn’t think he must order everything, Jonathan. Maybe Willie chomps at the reins the way young men do. Willie’s time will come.”

  “It will be a strange marriage with Christian leaving again soon,” Jonathan said. “That’s his way, his work.”

  “I’ll not hear any more contrary thoughts.” I put hands over my ears. “Not from you or anyone else.” I left the room.

  Christian and I agreed not to say anything outside our families until receiving our leader’s blessings. I didn’t know what the Giesy family thought of me, though it seemed that Helena was more distant in the classroom, where we helped Karl Ruge, than she’d been before. She acted more formal, but I might have been imagining that. I have an active imaginary life, which led me to wonder if Christian’s absence after New Year’s was planned or happenstance. Either way, Jonathan proved himself clairvoyant. Christian and I had had no time together since he stated his intentions. But then, he was a busy man, had always been.

  He met with our leader and the men’s council, a group of twelve who advised about the happenings at Nineveh, an offshoot colony near Hannibal, where we ran a ferry and a steam mill that powered huge textile looms. The men advised about work at Bethel too. Christian was often gone, but I felt sure he’d return for our leader’s birthday. It was always a grand affair. I prayed for patience.

  Two days before our leader’s birthday, Christian again knocked on our door, Sheppie’s happy wagging tail expressing my thoughts completely. That day, I asked Christian about what my brother and sister said. We sat at my parents’ house on a hard bench set before the fireplace while my family discreetly kept us within sight but out of hearing, my mother spinning and my father polishing a bridle to keep the leather soft. The boys stayed outside, and my sisters whispered in the rooms above us. I could almost imagine them hovering over the opening that allowed heat and sound to rise up through the ceiling. Christian had first spent an hour with my father, telling news that he’d gathered on his travels, leaving me to eavesdrop.

  Outside our great-room windows, tiny buds of crocus pushed their way up through the soil, and already robins sat on the porch rails, watching for early worms. The dog slept at my feet. Then at last I had him to myself, after a fashion.

  “What did I see in you to make me want you for my wife?” Christian repeated my question. “Your kind spirit, indeed. And your willingness to question even when there might be … consequences. These are good qualities. Necessary for learning, my friend Karl says, necessary for change.”

  I hadn’t thought of myself as unusually kind and said so.

  “Remember New Year’s Day?” Christian told me.

  How could I forget? “It was the day you asked me to be your wife.”

  “Yes, yes. But more,” Christian said. “In the corner of Elim where we gathered sat a woman with three children huddled around her. She was not of us.”

  I thought back. Yes, there’d been a woman who piled her hair on top of her head in an Apollo knot, the false hairpiece standing up behind the center part instead of in a chignon at the back as we colony woman wore ours. She wore fancy clothes, cloth with new dye, something else that made her different. The rest of us dressed in flannels or woolen dresses, clean but well-faded. New cloth was seen as a luxury we made and sold, unless one had worn out a dress and had already turned it into strips for rugs or repatterned it for a child’s gown.

  Louisa Keil, our leader’s wife, pulled her dark woolen shawl tighter around her as she knelt at that woman’s feet. She patted the woman’s knee, talking quietly to her. The woman nodded, wiping at her eyes with a handkerchief. Louisa looked up, and spying Christian and me—had I detected a frown?—she motioned us over.

  “You’re good with Kinder,” she said to me, nodding to the children. “Help them join in with the others, give their mother a bit of rest.”

  I remembered that the children’s mother wore bruises on her cheek and lip, and I assumed she was one of many women whom the colonists took in to help as they made their escapes from harsh men. Some remained and joined us; others recovered and moved on, often returning to the men who’d harmed them, a choice I never could fathom. I’d taken her children and we’d played Ring-around-the-Rosy, with all of us falling down in heaps, serenaded by their peals of cautious laughter.

  “I remember the woman’s bruises,
” I said. Sheppie’s tail thumped the floor at the sound of my voice. “I wonder at times if our offering help to such people makes us suspect to other Missourians. We colonists step into the middle of a fray, act as servants to those in need, but such work can cause resentments.”

  Christian nodded. Missouri was a slave state, but on the border with freer territories, and many people didn’t own slaves here. There’d been talk of repealing that compromise that allowed Maine to enter as a free state and Missouri as a slave. Perhaps Missourians feared our colony would harbor escaped slaves, since we rescued broken women. I wasn’t sure that we wouldn’t. Maybe that was why there’d been discussion about the colony moving again. We danced around issues, and sometimes we stepped on someone else’s toes.

  “The children, they were so frightened; so many changes.”

  “You answered Louisa’s call without hesitation. You were selfless. This is good. It tells me you can see beyond your own needs to those of others. I had seen this before in you.”

  His praise warmed me to my toes, and I vowed to give him more reason for such words, though vows among the young are often soon forgotten. “And what else?”

  “Those questions,” he said. “You ask … pointed questions, a sign your mind keeps working. Just as now, about slave and free. And you’re persistent when you want a thing.”

  “Stubborn, my father says.” I felt my cheeks grow warm.

  “Indeed.” Christian smiled and lifted my hand, placing it in his. I waited for him to give me an example that I could cherish ever after, but instead he said, “And you are beautiful,” the words a whisper. “Beautiful as God has made you without adornment. So my admiration for your form, my filling up by looking at you, watching you float across the room as graceful as a swan, causes no challenge to our need to set aside all but simplicity and what is useful. You cannot help how you’ve been formed.” With his other hand he drew his finger around the outline of my lips, an act so surprising that his touch sent shivers through me, past the chignon that gathered at my neck. I swallowed and thought of Saint Paul’s words about marriage being better than to burn, about the rocks that must surround such fire or it would flame across a field, taking everything in its path.

  My mother coughed, and he dropped his hand from my face as though he’d been stung.

  Some days later I told Jonathan that my intended saw the good in me, a loving heart. “Ha,” Jonathan said. “The man is blinded then,” but the sparkle in his eyes told me he teased.

  “By my beauty,” I told him, flipping my fingers at my ears. It was an idea still settling in my mind.

  My brother softened then. “That you are, sister. That you are.”

  My only regret from my conversation with Christian was that I wanted to share what in him appealed to me, but he never asked.

  Fireworks marked March 6, as always, it being Father Keil’s birthday. Our leader chose it as the time for our discussion of our marriage.

  It was to be a simple declaration of our intentions so that we might begin to tell others of our plans. I saw myself as a person seeking the sonata rather than the dirge. I held on to those notes now.

  I knew the rules, of course, about unions among the colonists or outsiders. Father Keil raised few objections, however, if a man became engaged to marry an outsider, as it was believed she would eventually join the colony, accept the colony’s ways, and consent would be freely given to their nuptials. She would move in with his family until a home could be built, but at least the couple could begin or continue to work without the colony having to take time out to build a house for them. The man almost always had a meaningful job within the colony already, or he wouldn’t be a Bethelite. His intended bride would soon find her place in worthy work.

  Women finding men outside created a different problem: even if Father Keil approved their marriage with the man’s intention to join us, the building of their house would take labor from other valued work: farming, the furniture factory, our Bethel Plow manufacturing, and this year, building wagons. And should the couple later choose to leave, this new man who had not contributed all his life nor had a family do so before him would require compensation, something our leader offered anyone who later settled out. Men received money for each year of service to the colony whether or not they’d brought wealth in to the common fund; married women received half of what men received for each year of service.

  Christian assured me that since we were both of longstanding families, Father Keil would have little objection to our marrying.

  We arrived separately to put off wagging tongues. I spoke with Louisa on the main, or family, floor as she mended little Aurora’s torn skirt. She didn’t ask me about my appointment. Neither did she raise her eyes when, with the arrival of Christian, I stood and climbed the center staircase to Elim’s third story.

  Once there, Christian and I sat on tall hardback chairs and faced our leader in his office. The large room served as his laboratory, too, where he grew and experimented with healing herbs. People were healthy in Bethel; few had even a sniffle. When they did, our leader offered relief with his blends of teas or things to swallow or rub to bring about cures. Many in the surrounding community even asked for his slippery elm brew or peach tree bark concoctions. They all called him “Dr. Keil,” a name that always brought a smile to his lips. It was rumored he’d once had a magical book that held healing potions, written in his own blood. But that was earlier, before he led us as a Christian colony.

  Light streamed down through the clerestory windows that from the outside reminded me of an Indian’s eyes, narrow. Those third-story openings were barely a third of the size of those on the first and second floors, and they were high above so we couldn’t look out through them to the spring beyond.

  Father Keil’s chair, on a platform behind a heavy walnut desk, would have resembled a throne if the desk hadn’t been there. Leaders in Germany lived in castles, had thrones … it was expected of a colony leader, not something meant to be ostentatious.

  Or so I told myself.

  His forearms rested on the desk, hands folded as in prayer.

  It was my first visit to this room. A single bookshelf held titles about medicines and plants. Wooden bowls and pestles perched neatly on a long table off to the side. The room felt almost steamy on this warm March morning, what with all the plants and earth readied to be set out as soon as any threat of a freeze had ceased.

  Our leader’s eyes looked tired as we waited for him to begin. I thought perhaps as this was his fortieth year, he might be weary of the celebrations of his birth and the fireworks that crackled every now and then. Men seem generally less interested in fusses made over birthdays, or so my father always said when my mother tried to do something special on his day.

  “So,” Father Keil began when the last singing hiss of a firecracker faded. “You wish to marry.”

  I knew enough to remain silent until after Christian spoke, though it surprised me that our leader already knew. Christian must have told him. Or rumors spread despite our trying to keep it quiet. Christian told him about conferring with my father and then with me and now with him, how he had prayed about this union and felt God answered after all this time his desire for a workmate by raising me before his eyes.

  “You might have talked to me first, Chris,” Keil told Christian. “It would have saved this … disharmony now, as you will surely see it.” He looked at me for the first time.

  My heart began to pound. Fear like a startled cat pounced on my chest. I hoped I didn’t whimper out loud. Our leader sighed deeply, turned back to Christian. “I see no good thing to come of this union, Chris.”

  I nearly bit my tongue through to hold my words in my mouth. I hiccupped. Both men looked at me, then Christian went on as though he hadn’t heard what our leader had said.

  “She has a loving spirit. I’ve seen her kindness. Indeed, I’ve watched her grow into a young woman of substance. Even my sister Helena comments on Emma’s good way with the c
hildren. She helps with the Kinder, so my sister sees firsthand this woman’s strengths. ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ our Lord said. Children know a person’s heart, Wilhelm.”

  “But they lack judgment, ja? Until they’ve grown. Emma is not grown, and she will bring your work down as you must pause to raise her.”

  Could smoke come from one’s ears? Could a heart explode like the firecrackers outside?

  “She will be a good mother to my children,” Christian said, his eyes lowered now.

  “But this is exactly my concern, Chris. You are nearly my age, and to begin now with a family will take you from the work you’re called to just when we need you most.” He said the word just as though it were yust, and for the first time I wished we were speaking in German instead of English and wondered why that was so on such an austere occasion. Maybe he knew I had trouble understanding English, even more to speak well in it. Did he intend to demean me before my beloved’s eyes? “You will have a woman to worry over, a family. There’ll be the need to build a house for you when you should be off recruiting.”

  He actually thought I would interfere, that I would not support my husband’s work? He didn’t know me or know my heart. I started to speak, but he held his hand up to stop me as though I were a mule pushing too close to the one in front of it.

  “Chris, you are a good man whose strength lies in your compassionate spirit toward our people and a fire that burns for God.” He switched to German now. “That fire brings new people to His way. Your life tells the story again and again to people seeking to live according to the Golden Rule, to give one’s all to God, and through that, to each other. Look whom you have brought to this colony. Karl Ruge, among others, a man of great wisdom whose practical teachings enhance our youth. He nurtures ideas of invention, just like how we solved problems when we lacked a way to bring water to the fields. Remember? You helped design the special drills to bore holes through the center of the logs to act as pipes. As inventive as the Romans and their aqueducts. But this takes a singular mind of care for others. I know this. I must keep my own family’s needs as well as the entire colony, and it is a trial, ja, a trial. One our Lord has given me, and only a strong man so anointed can endure. Now, more than ever, with the words of Daniel coming closer, telling us how human conditions will end, we need you and only you to continue as a singular flame for God, Chris, not as a man burdened with family.”