A Clearing in the Wild

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  Then Frau Giesy put her arms around me, an embrace of warmth and grace. “Christian has chosen a lovely bride,” she said, patting my back as she pulled away.

  “Nothing I take credit for.”

  “Well said,” she answered. “I will thank your parents, then.”

  “As I thank you, for giving me this good man. And for welcoming me into your fold.”

  “That we do.” She brushed at the blinker curls at the side of my face. “We’re not so fancy, though.”

  “Just for special occasions,” I said, pulling the curl back behind my ear.

  “I hope you aren’t too disappointed that you’ll be remaining in your parents’ home for a time. Until a house can be built for Christian. And for you. Here, Edna, take this last piece of raisin cake. It’s so good. Luella made it, brought it all the way from Nineveh.” She so easily wove in words of hospitality to women across the table that I wasn’t sure I really heard her other words.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We thought it best. For so long Christian has served the colony, and I have tended him as his mother and as a colony member when he returned home. That will all change in time, but for now, I’m pleased you found no objection to this plan of you remaining with your parents.”

  Christian and me living with my parents? Where? Perhaps the boys would move out into the woodshed so my sisters could take their places. It could be arranged. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I could adjust. It was one of my strengths, I decided, this ability to move across the trail, back and forth, crawling over rocks laid in the way. No one could set me off the path, at least, and I chose not to let Frau Giesy know her news came as some surprise.

  “Ja, it’ll be strange to share my room with him,” I said. My sisters would be in the room next door, my parents below us. “But my girlish things I need to put away.”

  “Ach, you have time,” she said. “There is Strudel at the table’s end,” she told Willie when he approached, raising his empty plate. “Let me get it for you.” He followed her along like a puppy. She served him, then returned.

  “He’ll stay at home until your house is built. Then you can join him. That way he can continue his work while you’ll be with what’s familiar and none of your family is inconvenienced.”

  I kept my face without reaction, pretended that this wasn’t something new to me, that my husband and I reached this conclusion together, not that he’d talked of it to everyone but me.

  “We all thought that was best, especially since he still must travel.”

  We all thought? My parents, too? Was everyone in league to keep us separated even after we’d been wed? Or was it yet another test composed by our leader to see how willing I was to support my husband’s work?

  Well, he would discover—they all would discover—when something truly mattered, I could conform.

  We did spend our wedding night at my parents’ home, and I chose not to bring up the larger issues of our living apart. I didn’t want to spoil that night. We’d planned no bridal tour, and if what Frau Giesy said was true, then this would be our only evening together for a time until I could convince my husband otherwise. We settled beneath the goose feather comforter, our bodies barely touching as we lay, eyes wide open staring at the board ceiling. He clasped my hand in his, and it felt sweaty, or perhaps it was merely mine. “Emma,” he began. Will he tell me now what I already know?

  I noticed a strange smell in the room, something from Christian’s boots, perhaps. I heard scratching at the door. Whining followed, then yipping barks until I rose, and when I opened the door, Sheppie ran in. The dog sniffed wildly beneath the bed. I couldn’t imagine what was under it, but the dog squeezed himself under the slats as Christian, standing in his nightshirt, held the lantern high. “A mouse?” Christian ventured as the dog’s tail thumped the floor, waking my parents, I was certain.

  The dog backed out with a deer leg bone, fresh meat still attached, the pungent scent now filling the room.

  “Indeed.”

  “Jonathan! David Jr.!”

  I heard my brothers laugh from beyond the wall. My sisters giggled. I opened the door and shooed Sheppie out, bone and all.

  We settled back. “Emma,” Christian began again. He lay on his hip, his arm up over my forehead, twirling a lock of my hair.

  “What was that?” I heard something swish against the window. Could it be raining? The weather had been fine. Then what sounded like hail hit the panes, followed by the rapping of a snare drum, and then the tubas and the french horns and trumpets woke up the neighborhood. The colony band stood outside our window. A charivari they called it. It was a French event that we Swiss and Germans adopted, meant to celebrate newlyweds on their bridal night. I sighed. Nothing would do now but that we invite all the musicians in and anyone else who made their way through the moonlight to our door, where they would be served wine and cakes and would chatter until they had their fill and went home. Hopefully before dawn.

  “At least your mother has cakes to give them,” Christian said as he pulled on his britches. “Or who knows what pranks they’d play on us. In some places they kidnap the bride and ask for a ransom of sausage on the bridal night.”

  “I’d make them pay you to take me back,” I said. Christian laughed. He walked to the window and waved at them, but the music didn’t stop. “Maybe they’ll make us both go with them like on New Year’s, Belsnickeling until dawn.”

  “Ach, no,” he moaned, but I could tell by the smile on his face as he turned from the window that he was pleased to be chosen for this silliness by his friends and brothers. Most men married younger than he was now, and I think it made him feel welcomed to the fold to have been chosen this, regardless of his age.

  “I hope they don’t make us go from house to house playing and eating with them,” I said. “Or we’ll never get to sleep.”

  “Ja, sleep. Or whatever else, Liebchen,” Christian said. He’d never used a lover’s name for me before. Liebchen. Sweetheart. He kissed me then, and I wished this silly charivari could be waylaid until another time. He released me, letting me go first, patting me on the back the way his mother did. I vowed then to make him love me as one who would hold me tight forever, and that one day, I’d be that lover filled up enough to step away first but not far or for long.

  “We may as well get this over with,” he said to Jonathan’s pounding on our door, the younger ones laughing and the dog yipping beyond. Even my father was thumping something on the floor. A broom handle perhaps, thrust against the ceiling.

  “Let me help you finish dressing.”

  Such a wedding night, I thought. Such adjustments I was asked to make!

  Christian set the lantern down to help me put my crinoline on. “What’s this?” he asked.

  Only then did I remember the double row of ruffles he now held, the pale cloth cascading over his wide hands.

  “Just a little luxury,” I said. “No harm meant.” He grunted. I kissed him on the end of his nose. “I choose life,” I added. “Remember?”

  5

  Sent Out

  We separated the next day. Oh, not over the ruffles. Christian laughed at those when I told him when they’d been sewn on. “That’s a good thing to do when you feel overcome by rules,” he said. NO, we separated because our leader knocked on our door early in the morning, reminding Christian of a meeting scheduled. My husband leaped from his bed, performed not seventy-five pushing-ups but seventy-six, then dressed and left. When my husband returned, he told me he was being sent out and would be gone some weeks.

  “But what of our home? What of our plans? Can I go with you?”

  “Now, Liebchen, you knew this was a part of who I am.”

  “But we haven’t even talked of where I’m to stay while you’re gone or even considered that I might go with you.”

  “Out of the question,” he said, though he kissed the top of my head. “Be restful, Liebchen. My going tells Wilhelm that our marriage will not interfere with what needs
doing here. Or wherever he sends me.”

  He assured me he would not be far away and that he’d post letters. “South,” he said. “I’m going back to the hills of Kentucky. The government leaves people alone there. Or maybe the hollows of old Virginia.” He stopped, thoughtful for a moment in the midst of pulling on his boots with the jack. “Did you know that when Virginia colonized, only the Anglican Church was recognized there? But when the Scots-Irish Presbyterians and Calvinists came south from Pennsylvania, the Virginians let them have their preachers so long as they settled in the hills and acted as a buffer between them and the Indians the aristocrats feared. Isolation served them well, and it will us too. They’re hard-working, these potential converts, and not interested in gaining wealth through owning land. They just want to lead faithful lives and hunt and fish and worship as they please and do what is right for their families. They are whom we wish to bring to Bethel.”

  “How long will you seek them?”

  “I don’t know. But you’re in safe hands here,” he said. “Taking care of each other while one is gone is another gift our colony gives to one another.” Then he kissed me soundly, picked up his valise, and left.

  Perhaps I was naive and inexperienced, as Helena suggested, but I had a sense that Christian’s leaving had been purposeful, meant to separate us. But it would not be a wedge between us unless I let it. We’d married. Our leader would one day have to come to terms with that fact.

  In the weeks that followed, I began to pay more attention to those married in our colony, how they tended their families. Frau Giesy and I often met at the storehouse, where we would pick up flour as we needed. I took more time to listen to young wives expecting a child, knowing one day I’d be there, cherishing this precious gift of life. Mary Giesy, Sebastian’s wife, wore a loose dress, but I could still see that she was pregnant. She never stopped her working, and it seemed to keep her healthy, unlike stories I’d heard of women in Shelbina who stayed in bed while their babies grew.

  I watched my parents more closely to see the tender ways my father expressed affection with a touch to my mother’s waist as she stood at the tin-lined sink washing potatoes. At night, when their soft laughter rose up through the floorboards from their bedroom, I let it comfort me, to soothe the ache of missing Christian and the humiliation of a married woman still sharing her bed with two sisters. One day, I told myself, my husband and I will laugh beneath the comforter again, just us. It will be my husband’s warmth I feel against my back and not my younger sister’s knees.

  Summer came and with it the outdoor work we all contributed to. We hoed and weeded the large cornfields that surrounded Bethel town. My father said Bethel was arranged, as in the old country, where people lived next door to one another, farmers and butchers and tailors. They knew their neighbors’ business and could also help in time of need. Even though farmers rode their carts out to their fields each day, they weren’t separated from other families by miles and miles, each living on isolated farmsteads, making their ways alone for weeks at a time. It was that way in many frontier settlements, with farmers not aware of town concerns and town people thinking they had little interest in the ways of laborers far away. They didn’t come to help when a man was injured by a bullock or when a wife had trouble giving birth because they didn’t know of the need. In Bethel, farmers rode out together to their fields and returned back each night. We helped one another. And like disciples of old, we went out to transform the world around us.

  Christian had been “sent out.” The other Bethelites who recruited in the South were all single men. I saw advantage to that now as I ached to start my life with Christian but couldn’t.

  Autumn pushed in through the steaming summer, bringing with it flocks of geese migrating south that sometimes settled in our cornfields before we could hurry them on with our shouts. Once the corn shocks were in our barns, we let the geese waddle over stubble. For me, everything seemed more vivid that autumn: the sounds of the geese calling, the scent of pork being smoked, the taste of apple cider on my tongue after a day helping with the harvest. My mother said this happened when a woman fell in love; the world seemed brighter, more intense. “Maybe I fell in love after I married,” I told her.

  “Ja, it would be like you to find a contrary way.”

  The colder nights and river fog in early morning brought bursts of color change to Bethel. Near the gristmill’s pond, the maple trees turned red and yellow and all shades in between, and reflected like a mirror in the water. I held my breath one day walking past, and Mary, Sebastian’s wife, bumped right into me as I stopped to stare. “Such beauty in this place! I wish that I could paint it,” I told her. “So I could hang it on my wall one day. The white walls of the mill a mate to the blue water—”

  “Ach,” Mary said. “You shouldn’t covet such things to hang on your walls. Only portraits should hang there or maybe your stitching.”

  I wondered if I blasphemed to think that man’s creations could enhance what God designed. Or if wanting to remember such beauty could truly be a sin.

  We Bethelites heard much about sin that fall, and our leader referenced “coming troubles at the end” that stirred his words to such frenzy at times that when I left the church I felt beaten as an egg. He’d give no date, unlike some communal leaders, my father said, who would tell their followers to prepare for Christ’s coming on a certain day and then find they had to retract and explain when the date arrived without incident. Our leader spoke of ends, but he always finished with what I suppose he thought were hopeful words, saying God would provide a way out for us, a way for His followers to begin again. I could never tell if he forecast a heavenly change or if he referred to possible political disasters right here in Missouri.

  How I wished that Christian sat beside me on the porch so we could discuss our leader’s words. I had to write instead. When Christian wrote back, I took his missives to my room, pushed the little ones out the door, and savored them, alone.

  He wrote with precise characters marching along the pages, his words providing details of what he saw and heard and even of the weather. He honored me with political talk, of how men in Carolina spoke less of slave and free than the idea that there might be aggression from the North, that one state could somehow impose its will upon another. Even men who own no slaves will take up arms against the North should they invade, Christian wrote. Most living here are as poor as slaves, but they resist ideas imposed by aristocrats, Bostonians, New Yorkers. Yankees. Indeed, for them this disagreement isn’t about slaves at all but independence, life without intrusion, something we at Bethel understand.

  But what I treasured most in Christian’s letters was that he told me how he felt, how the sound of the Ohio River gurgling in the morning while he fixed coffee over a campfire made him think of my laughter. He described the elegant elms soaring up to blue sky and that the sight of them as he rode through their cool shade reminded him of my compassionate embracing arms and the strength I would give our children one day. He wrote of picking up a walnut, saying it was the color of my eyes. He wrote of missing me. For so long I missed no one while I traveled, or so I thought. You often came to mind as I watched you grow up, Emma Giesy, and I imagined you as a loving niece who would one day find joy with a husband like Willie Keil or one of a dozen other young men smart enough to see the strength in you.

  Willie Keil? Surely Christian suffered a fever to ever imagine such a union as that.

  That you should choose me, Liebchen, and that I should at last see you as the woman you are instead of only the daughter of my friend, is truly one of God’s great gifts. An old man I am and yet not too old. But I might have passed you by if not for your eyes meeting mine on Christmas Day and the prayer I saw in them that only God could answer.

  We became closer by this separation, something I suspect our leader hadn’t planned for, and I wondered if I didn’t get to know Christian better this way than if I’d moved into his parents’ home and heard their stories about him.
This way, I learned to tell my own.

  I loved the way his words flowed across the page, and I read them again before I slept at night, hearing the low tones of his voice, feeling the quiver of my skin as I imagined his hands upon my body. I could hardly wait for his return, for then I imagined my life would truly begin.

  I prepared for another Christmas without Christian. I worked hard not to hold resentment toward our leader. It would do no good to blame another for what was, only keep me filled with irritations that would grate at my soul like a file. In his letters, Christian gave no indication of when he’d return, but I hoped he’d come north as the geese flew south. I’d memorized a poem in English called “The Night Before Christmas” that I planned to recite to him, but I’d settle for brothers and sisters and my parents as my audience if no one else. I’d stitched a special pair of gloves for Christian, helped tan the hide myself, and they were wrapped in brown paper tied with ribbon. We called the Christmas Eve gift bearer Kris Kringle now, who’d leave his gifts snuggled within the branches of the tree. Our leader said it was more American to do it this way, and he wanted anyone who might ask or wonder to know that we Germans were loyal to the country.

  It was Christmas Eve, and my father called to me to hurry down, to bring a candle so he could restart the fire. I mumbled something about letting it go out and Jonathan or David being capable of such, but I did as I was bid, only to be swung into the arms of my husband, who nearly smothered me with kisses.

  “You’re back!”

  “Rode all last night,” he said. “And through this day, which the Lord blessed with sunshine instead of snow. It is good to be home.”

  Christian brought me fruit and raisins, and when we opened gifts, he took from the branches of our tree a wooden box that had my name on it. It was a pair of woolen mittens like every other pair available at the colony store. I hid my disappointment at wanting something just for me, something purchased on his travels to reassure me that I’d been on his mind. But I soon pitched that thought, grateful he was home for this holiday. That would be his gift to me, that he’d arrived. He unwrapped his gloves and admired the special stitching. “I could have used these,” he said. “The days are cold alone in Carolina.”