A Clearing in the Wild

by Jane Kirkpatrick

  I hoped there would be a kind of town when we finally settled. One family named Woodard, a woman plus nine scouts, and a child hardly seemed enough to make up a town. Christian would say our community would arrive full force with the Bethelites and that I must be patient and wait.

  But then one morning in late August 1854, even this small fragile community changed.

  “Reasonably, it must be George Link,” Adam Schuele said in response to the question Christian posed that morning about who would return. “George has a hunter’s eye and can repair anything, wagon wheels especially. He can bring the others here safely.”

  John Genger was chosen along with George, or at least his name came next and he nodded. “We’ve spent what we must to secure the land, and we will depend on the bounty here for the rest. Essentials you can purchase from Woodards’ store, but keep it minimal. There’ll be little accounting needed for a time. We need to be sure to have money to bring the first group out while the rest remain at their posts, working.”

  “Perhaps you should go back with them,” Christian said.

  Andy rode on my knee, and I bounced him before looking to see who the third person chosen would be. When I lifted my eyes I saw that that the scouts looked at me.

  “You’d consider returning?” I asked my husband. He shook his head, no, and in an instant I realized I’d become complacent with my plans. I remembered my earlier vow to do what I could to get Christian to be one of the scouts to go back to Bethel, but the months across the trail and the month here at this Willapa site told me my husband’s devotion went to the success of the western colony and that required his effort here. This was his mission, his passion. He’d never desert it, not even for a season. I hadn’t imagined that he’d try to send me away.

  I took a risk. “Will the scouts return by ship?” I asked. I swallowed hard.

  “Maybe we should reconsider returning by sea,” Joe Knight said. “It would be less dangerous, perhaps even quicker.” He raised his pointing finger to emphasize his point.

  “There, you see?” I said. “A sea voyage would shorten time.”

  “Nein,” Christian said. “The expense is too great. Indeed, I’m surprised you’d suggest an ocean voyage knowing how you feel about water.”

  “I only want to be … cooperative.”

  “You raise unnecessary issues.”

  Adam Knight, his eyes cast down, waited to speak. These men were not accustomed to overhearing disagreements between husbands and wives. “Overland is best,” Adam said then. “So the Bethelites will have the latest information about the travel. Some may come back to Willapa by ship, and this is good. But to return, the expense is less to go back the way we came.”

  “It would be better if you returned, Emma,” Christian said. “This will be a harsh winter here, everything unsettled. We may need to live in tent houses. Perhaps we could find the resources, John, for fare back by ship?”

  The mere thought of me riding those ocean waves without my husband at my side churned my stomach.

  “We could consider—”

  “No, please,” I said. My husband prepared to send me back, get me out of his way so he could stay devoted to his first love and, worse, would take the idea of a trip around the Horn as suddenly legitimate.

  “It wouldn’t be good. I can help here, I can, Christian. Wasn’t I strong along the plains?” I imagined more river crossings and rickety ferries on any return trip; I imagined a long journey back in silence with men perhaps resentful that a woman and child rode with them. I imagined a ship in a windstorm with me and my son all alone. “I could stay with the Woodards. That way I wouldn’t be a worry to you.”

  “No,” Christian said, his voice nonnegotiable. “We will not impose.”

  “We’ll have to hunt for ourselves now without George’s fine eye,” Hans Stauffer said, changing the subject as he scratched that place on his head.

  “You’ve been itching to try,” Adam Knight told him.

  “Ja, now I’ll be the hunter,” Hans said.

  “We’ll all have to hunt, and we’ll all have to fell trees,” Christian said. “You see how much work there is.” He stared at me. Did he think that I would agree so he could devote his entire life to this mission, so he’d have no guilt about the conditions he asked me to live in?

  “I’ll not go, Christian,” I said. “ ‘Whither thou goest, I will go’, remember? I can be of use here. I can prepare meals. You will simply have to let me do my share.” Andy cried now. He did this at the worst times. “A child needs both his parents,” I said. “Surely this is God’s order of things. How could you even suggest separating a father from his son, a wife from her husband, when it is not necessary?”

  “I believe it is,” he said.

  The men kept their eyes from us, and finally Adam Schuele said, “Her return could be dangerous, Christian. For her and the boy. I made a vow to her father, to keep her safe. I can’t do that if she is on a horse riding sidesaddle back to the States.”

  “It’s not good for a married woman to travel without her husband, not even on board ship, not without at least another woman. These men who stay know their wives and sisters will travel with many others. What would our leader think if you sent me back among men whom I’m not related to?”

  Christian might have heard my heart pound, considering how it filled my ears as I waited, my fingers and thumbs making circles on the pads as I wrapped my arms around my son. He fussed and pushed to be set down.

  “I decide,” Christian said. “Hans and Adam and me, we remain. Then you Knights, you stay too. But in a few months, you go back around the Horn. That way we have both kinds of trips covered. Michael Sr., George, John Genger, John Stauffer, you return now. You’ll need safety in numbers; we’ll be in this isolated place, which will be our protection. A woman and child would hold you back. We will miss you men, but God goes with you. You bring our families to a good place, the place God chose for our colony.”

  “We’ll build here,” Adam Schuele added. “Our colony will keep us spiritually prepared for the end yet allow us to prepare others we come in contact with.”

  He looked at Christian, whose set jaw locked tight as a closed fist. “Indeed,” he said at last. “You’re our return scouts. You have special rewards waiting in heaven for your obedient service.” It seemed to me he emphasized obedient before he turned his back on me.

  “Do you agree that I should remain here?” I asked.

  “Obedience,” he said, “applies even to me.”

  We had a rousing send-off in the morning with prayers and a little music from Hans’s harmonica playing. “Auf Wiedersehen,” we shouted our good-byes. Christian acted not unlike our leader when he sent the scouts from Bethel, offering up wisdom and guidance, and at that moment, I was as proud of my husband as I had ever been. He forgave my challenging him in front of others. He would perhaps allow me to assist as I could. “We will all sacrifice here as you are sacrificing to return back,” he said. “Remember us in your prayers as we remember you in ours.”

  “Remember our empty stomachs,” Hans said. We all laughed, but there was truth to what Hans said. Who knew if we’d have enough ammunition to take the meat we needed? Who knew if we could build three dozen structures within a year so there would be houses for the Bethelites? Who knew if I had just made the best choice for my son and my husband?

  I slipped a letter to my parents into John Genger’s hand. He tipped his hat as we waved good-bye. Watching their hats disappear through the timber, I thought how a year from now, this would be a new place. What seemed a strange and foreign land would be familiar, and when it was filled with friends and family, it would be the delight of my husband’s heart, and I would have played a part in it. I’d been chosen to be here just as the other scouts had been chosen to return.

  My heart sang as I turned to begin my new work beside the winding Willapa River.

  19

  The Giesy Place

  We began building on the �
��Giesy place” about a mile south of Woodard’s Landing. I picked berries, dried the meat that Hans brought in, shooed away seagulls who pecked at the deer entrails, milked the goat, and while Andy slept, I chopped at slender willow branches—withes Christian called them—that could be braided into rope or used for binding while the men felled with their saws.

  The timber, both tall and stately, took days to chop through the trunks. I stood in awe of the size of the red cedar they selected first. Smaller than the towering firs and spruce, its long flat needles sagged toward the earth. The tree did not easily succumb. Both its wide girth and the sweat off Christian’s brow surprised me. I listened to the chink, chink sound of the axes making their wedge around the base of the trunk. And when the sun set, only small indentations of the axe marked their day’s work. Standing inside that forest felt as peaceful as being in the church at Bethel when our leader was absent. Light filtered through the branches. Echoes of bird calls trembled in the silence when the men rested their tools. The air smelled moist, and the forest floor acted spongy against my moccasins, the cedar liking damp, it seemed. I set Andy down and brushed away the needles and picked up a handful of soil to inhale it. Later when a squall moved through, dropping rain on us, we stood with Andy beneath weepy boughs, barely getting wet. I leaned against that dark grain of a thousand years of growing undisturbed until we came and wondered how it was we had found this Eden of our own.

  It took the men three days to chop that first tree down.

  When at last it cracked and sounds of falling splintered through the forest, Adam shouted to get back. The tree’s heaviness lingered in the woods as it sighed against another taller tree and hung there, unwilling to lie down. Sam Woodard called such trees “widow-makers” when Christian rode to get him, seeking advice. Sam offered suggestions to get it down without a death. It required skill and God’s blessing, but they accomplished the task.

  “Maybe it would be good if you looked for downfalls,” Sam suggested. “Find some not rotted. It might be easier.”

  I thought that good advice, but the men still looked for trees they felled themselves.

  By the end of the first week since the scouts had left, they’d felled two huge cedar trees and prepared to cut them into ten-foot lengths for walls. The bark stripped off easily, and Sarah Woodard said she’d seen the Indians pound the bark until it was almost like a cloth. The bark looked fuzzy with fibers floating from it. I pulled some free and found they might work as thread to repair Christian’s socks.

  The men harnessed two mules brought from Steilacoom and drove them into the forest, and while it may have seemed a good idea, and would be in time, the mules resisted pulling the logs behind them. They startled and reared and snapped ropes, and I could tell that even getting the logs to a building site could take days of wrestling them over brambles and vines into the small clearing at the edge of these trees.

  My stomach ached with the possibilities of injury, the snail’s pace of the work.

  Sometimes, if the men chopped a tree near the top of a ridge, they would try to roll it down, but the tree often hung on another tree felled by a previous storm. The men did then consider chopping and using downed trees, but many rotted in place. They wanted strong, sturdy logs to house us. Cedar, they said, would last forever.

  It took a month for the small squat hut we called the Giesy house to rise up at the forest’s edge. It needed caulking, something I could do, but the men decided this could be done later. For now, they would set a ridge pole and some cross rafters for later roofing. In time, they’d draw a canvas across it for a winter’s roof.

  “As the Israelites lived in tents to remember their harvests and all God provided, so will we live,” Christian said. The cost of bringing milled lumber from Olympia, or even from a mill Christian learned was built closer to the ocean, meant an expense so great none of the scouts felt it justified. Secretly, I thought they didn’t want to have to explain to John Genger where the money went when he returned.

  “It’ll be easier now that we know how to do it,” Hans said when they prepared to move on to build another hut.

  Adam Schuele said, “We must show that we can build in this place and live from it as we are asking our brothers and sisters from Bethel to do.”

  “The weather’s mild,” Christian noted. “By the time they arrive here next fall, we will have two dozen log homes for them to winter in. Maybe three dozen.” It sounded more like a wish than a promise.

  I couldn’t see how. It was September and we’d only finished one. At one a month we’d only have a dozen by the time the Bethel group arrived.

  “Might we stay with the Woodards when the weather keeps us from building this winter?” I asked Christian one night when we lay in a lean- to with our canvas acting as our roof. I could see the stars like white knots of thread in an indigo cloth appearing in a tiny patch of sky not covered by treetops.

  “Nein,” Christian said. “What would it look like for the leader of the scouts to stay in a soft place with feather ticks while the others make their way beneath a canvas tent? We will all stay at the Giesy place if we are unable to build where we need to, but I don’t expect that. Last year was mild, Sam said. We can work in the rain.”

  “At least we’ll be in our own place,” I said. He didn’t correct me.

  As the weeks wore on, I wondered how these men convinced themselves that they could build enough houses in time for the arrival of the Bethel group. Weren’t they counting the days and weeks and months that one small hut required, and it still needing a roof and caulking? They had to hunt for food, which took time too, and we needed to graze the mules closer to the river and give them more rest time. They looked thin from all their efforts. We’d need to gather firewood, dry more deer meat, and perhaps even fish before winter so we’d have food enough to last us.

  Once when the work slowed and I couldn’t watch any longer as they swung their axes against so noble a tree, I took Andy and walked to the Woodards’. Andy sat playing with clamshells and a knobby shell Sarah called “an oyster house.” Andy was nearly a year old, and Sarah had made a cake for him, which we ate on the porch of her house. I loved her view with a small grassy area surrounded by split cedar rails that eventually disappeared into trees. The house sat in a clearing that felt open and wide even with the darkness of the trees beyond. I could hear the Willapa River swishing its way to the sea, pulled there by the tide.

  “How long did it take you to build this house?” I asked Sarah. She brought the churn to turn as we finished up Andy’s cake.

  “It stood here when Mr. Woodard brought me to it,” she said. “We added on a room that took a little time, but I don’t know how many days the house took to raise.”

  “What does your husband say about our efforts?” I asked. I knew men gossiped as much as women, though they claimed to be above such matters.

  She smiled. “How do you know we talk of this?”

  My English had gotten better every day as I made myself use it with Christian and with the Woodards. “My husband talks with me about the world around; yours, too?”

  She lowered those dark blue eyes. “He says you Germans are stubborn, that you should live with us while you build. It is the Christian thing to do to make that offer and Christian to accept. But your husband does not do this.”

  “He gives,” I said. “If ever you have need of something, my Christian will provide it if he can. But receiving is harder for him.”

  “He is generous to his family,” she said.

  I nodded agreement, wondering what she’d seen that made her say that.

  “He names the Giesy place and says it will be for his parents and brothers and sisters.”

  I felt an envy pang, or was it disappointment? “He takes care of his own, ja,” I said. I took Sarah’s place at the churn, pounding with vigor though I didn’t know why.

  “Mr. Woodard says your plan to build right on through the winter is also a … crock full of wish. A dream, my words fo
r it,” she said. “Instead, the mud will keep you in one place. Venturing out or chopping trees will be too difficult. My husband says you should be preparing food for winter storage now. Chopping wood and keeping it dry for firewood.” She stopped my hand and lifted the plunger. “I think it is churned enough.” She finished the butter, and we pasted it into wooden molds. “Do you have candles for the winter?”

  “Some.” I thought of our lantern and how easily that light blew out.

  “Plan to stay with us. We’ll read and tell stories and sing and maybe even dance while the rains come down.”

  It had been a long time since we’d danced.

  “My husband is determined to have three dozen structures by next fall for when our friends join us.”

  Sarah nodded her head. “This is the stubborn part my husband says defines yours. You won’t be able to work so hard through the rains, and the trees … the trees demand respect and are not easily changed.”

  “You make it sound as though trees have a soul,” I said.

  “The Indians say they do. The trees give them so much—canoes and clothes and houses and tools.” She showed me a deep scoop spoon made of wood the color of my sister’s chestnut-colored hair. “Smell it,” she said, and when I did I knew it was a cedar burl. “Something that gives so much needs to be noticed, witnessed to,” Sarah said. “It gives up in its own time, giving itself as a gift rather than a taking.”

  “People are counting on us to have homes when they arrive,” I defended.

  “This forest and river land will be their home,” she said. “People here just take temporary cover inside their houses.”

  Christian’s constant enthusiasm and my commitment to be his helpmate silenced me. Even when we poled upriver in the Woodards’ boat so Christian could show me another piece of property he’d claimed for the colony, I kept my tongue about whom he built for and whether we could accomplish all he’d set to do so we could make a life here.