A Clearing in the Wild (10 page)

Father Keil’s sermon soon stripped away our dreamlike reverie. He talked of change, of needed change. He spoke first of literature, not biblical verses, telling us that
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
was a book that caused consternation and would swirl the world as we knew it and this was as Daniel said and John wrote and there would be a terrible war between good and evil and it was our duty to prepare and to protect our families.

It seemed a convulsive text to preach on Christmas Day, harsh words disgorged to pit against tender skin prepared to dwell on charity and love, on God’s gift of grace and precious treasures already opened on Christmas Eve, and the peppermints and fruits that would follow with
Belsnickel’s
good cheer. I hoped that Christian wasn’t taking our leader’s dark words too much to heart. I wanted nothing to intrude on this sweet new beginning promised earlier that morning in my husband’s arms.

The dance later brought friends to talk with Christian, and I was included in the Giesy gathering of sisters-in-law and their chatter. No one raised the issue of Christian staying with them until we built a house, so I assumed our time apart had erased that plan. I served with
Frau
Giesy and smiled quietly at jokes made about my one day bringing forth a baby as Mary soon would. For me it marked a recognition of my married state, a recognition I felt I’d never truly had.

We heard the pounding on the front door early the following
morning. My father answered, but it was my mother whose “Oh, no!” sent chills through me. Christian slept, and I eased myself from beneath his arm, pulled a quilt around me, and slipped downstairs.

“What is it, Papa?” I asked.

“It’s Mary Giesy. Her baby comes too soon,” my mother answered as she grabbed for her cape.

“Should I come with you?”

“
Ach
, no. Your father takes me. You tend to your husband and your brothers and sisters should they wake.”

But before I could fix potato pancakes for the household, my parents returned. My mother yanked at her bonnet and tossed it in a heap on the table, something I’d never seen her do before. Jonathan looked up in surprise. Catherine’s eyes brimmed with tears. I shushed the little ones. My father took her cape and shook his head at us. She pulled at her soiled apron, couldn’t get the bow undone, and when my father attempted to help, she slapped at his hands, and then he turned her to him and held her as she sank against his chest and wept.

“I could do no ting,” she said. “No ting at all.”

“You did what you could, Catherina. It is all we are asked to do.”

“But his words,
Herr
Keil’s words. I have never heard such a ting, to say that the baby died because of some sin of the parent. Why does he say such tings?”

“The words are biblical,” my sister said, her voice soft.

“But are the words meant to bring Mary relief when she lies with her body having given all that it can? Those words have no comfort, and they cannot change what is. The baby has died. Now the parents are asked to bear guilt as well as grief?” My father stroked my mother’s back. She pulled away from him, looked at his face, tears wet upon her cheeks. “I don’t understand this, David. I don’t. Biblical words like these … out of all he could choose … no. These are not the words our
Lord would say, not when He so loved children. He would grieve with Mary and Sebastian, not prolong their pain.”

She left us then, but I could hear her quiet cries from behind their bedroom door.

By mid-January, our leader called us all together for a major decision. Women were told to gather too. “There is free land in Oregon Territory,” our leader told us. “If we claim the land and live there before the end of 1855, we can each have 160 acres that could start our new colony. Married couples can claim twice the amount. Scouts I send, as Joshua did, send them into this foreign land. They will spy for us and bring back the word, and then we will all go, those who wish to leave here and be in a new protected place where the trials of the larger world will not intrude. No one will be forced to leave, but many will wish to. I wish to,” he said, “when the right place is found. These spies—nine I send—will leave with no wagon, only their horses and pack animals. As soon as it is spring here, no later than April. They will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, be good servants who will save us in the end.”

“Is this necessary?” Karl Ruge, the teacher, dared to ask. “You’ve moved so often, and this is Bethel, a place of worship. We have been here not yet ten years. Are we in such danger?”

“Our young people fall from our ways,” our leader told him. “Parents have been letting them grow up in a blasphemous and unspiritual life. It is time we found a new place where government does not wish to interfere with us and where the rules are not yet so bogged down in political mud that we can still make paths through to homes of our liking. No one will care if we have communal coffers from which we draw to take care of ourselves. No one will question how we conduct our business. No one will be lured into sinful ways.”

I wondered how the new recruits that Christian had brought back
with him would take this. They’d uprooted their families, and while they had no homes of their own yet, they were settling in, finding out about the charity of this colony. Most stayed at Elim’s second floor. None wanted for food or clothing or shelter, and each found work to fill their days, even through these winter times, and so had already begun to feel a part of who we were at Bethel.

I wondered what Christian thought with his efforts to find new land south suddenly set aside. Would he see his efforts as failures? It might be a high price to pay as I saw it. But if he had failed, then he’d be unlikely to be sent out so soon again.

Our leader narrowed his eyes at Karl. “We will miss the coming storm if we go to Oregon Territory, while those here in Missouri will be in the center of it, mark my words.”

Silence filled the church, a place I now thought our leader had chosen for special reasons. Usually our gatherings were at Elim, not in this sacred space. To defy him here, to disagree with the way he saw the world he’d define as blasphemous, would take strong courage.

“Who do you send, Wilhelm?” my father asked. “There are many willing to follow you and to trust in your vision as we have before.”

Our leader nodded appreciatively at my father as he began. “Joseph and Adam Knight. Good brothers. They will go. Stand, please,” he said. “Adam Schuele. John Stauffer and John Hans Stauffer, father and son. John Genger.” I looked at John Genger’s wife. She sat straight as a knife. Each man stood slowly, and I wondered if this was the first they’d known of our leader’s choices. I looked down the aisle at the women in their lives. Stunned looks crossed their faces. The weight of future separation formed lines to their eyes. I felt my own heart begin to pound. “Michael Schaefer Sr., George Link.” I counted.
One more to name
.

My father hadn’t known who would be called to go; at least I didn’t
think he’d been planted to ask the question of our leader. But now I looked at him, and he chewed his lower lip, perhaps in disappointment that his name had not been called, perhaps in hopes it wouldn’t be.

“And one last,” our leader said. My father looked up, expectant. “Christian Giesy.”

I jerked my head toward Christian. He bent over as he stood. He would not look at me, but I knew he heard the silent “
No!
” screaming from my speechless throat.

I should have known, and I suppose my heart did know before my head, and that was why it chose to pound as I watched those men stand. Did their women feel as I did? A blend of pride and pout, a disappointment for us while carrying honor reflected from our husbands and sons.

Adam Schuele had located the Bethel property with my father; he’d been sent out before but never quite so far and to such a wilderness. None of them had ever been gone so long. It would be at least a year, more likely two, before they returned. My father’s mouth drooped; my mother patted his arm. She looked relieved.

“You’ve given enough,” I told Christian later in our room, my voice a whisper so as not to let my parents hear. “Doesn’t our leader see that these separations are not good for families? Why does he insist we find a new colony now?”

“We’ve grown closer with our separations. You said this yourself.”

“Do you want to leave Bethel? You bring people to it and then you leave? What must they think?”

“They didn’t follow me,
Liebchen
. They followed their hearts. Their belief in God brought them to this place. They won’t harbor anything against me. Why do you?”

I tried pouting, but he pressed my lower lip with his finger and smiled.

“I’ll go to him,” I said, “and tell him you must stay home now and that we will start our family.”

“
Ach
, you talk like a
Dummkopf
,” he said, throwing up his hands. “You can’t change this, so you must accept it.”

“
Nicht jetzt.
”

“Yes, now,” he said. He raised that one eyebrow that I’d come to see as a warning for me not to press too far.

I flopped on the edge of the bed, arms crossed. “He wants me to endure the pangs of childbirth as my wage of sin. So he should let me have time with my husband … so I can later suffer.”

A sad smile crossed his face. “How you talk,” he said. “A mix of stubbornness and spirit. May it one day be converted into faithfulness and strength when you grow up.” He turned away from me and didn’t see my mouth open in protest. “It is an honor to be selected. We won’t be gone long. Only a few months out, and then we find the land, and then we come back.”

“But when you find the perfect spot, won’t someone need to remain there to hold the land until the rest of us can arrive? Who’ll stay?”

“The leader will stay, I would guess,” Christian said, but he wrinkled his brow as though he hadn’t thought of that before.

“And who leads?”

“Wilhelm hasn’t settled on this yet. We all meet and make plans, all the men and those chosen to go. We know what we look for. Isolation. Good timber for homes. A mild climate without hard snows. Fertile soil for our farms. Maybe a few settlers there so we will have others using the gristmill but not so many people that they poke into our business. We’ll find such a place. Already people coming back from the gold fields say Oregon Territory is where the real treasure is, all that free land.”

“All that is claimed goes into the colony,
ja?
”

“As at Bethel and Nineveh. It is our way.”

“My father would go in your place if you asked him,” I said. “He looked so disappointed when our leader failed to call his name.”

“Emma.” He turned to me as he sat at the side of the bed. “This is not something you can control now. I will go and I will come back, and you will continue as you have until we travel out together with the colony. Then we’ll begin our life.”

“I want to start our life together now,” I wailed. “People don’t always come back. Something could happen to you.”

“Last year more families traveled there on wagons than ever before. They have new lives there, new chances.”

“We have no need of new lives. This is a good life here in Bethel if I could ever begin it with you. If there is something wrong, we can make it better. Our leader can solve the problem that sends us on our way. I’ll tell him so.”

“Not one word of your protests to Wilhelm. Not one word. Your interference in this might cause him to prevent my going, my doing the work I’m called to do.”

It occurred to me only then that perhaps Christian had the wanderlust, that quality of some men who never settle in one place, who are always seeking other hills to climb. His preaching and recruiting gave him reason to roam. He might never stay at home even if we had a child of our own. I felt a chill go through me.

That momentary insight changed the way I looked at him, altered how I thought he saw our marriage too. Like a woman riding on a pillion behind her husband, we traveled the same road but arrived at our destination with very different views. We had different hopes, it seemed, save that we each said out loud we wished a family.

That’s what I’d have to focus on, then, making sure we were together no matter where he chose to go, so we could begin this holy work
of raising children. I’d either have to convince him to remain here while others headed west, or that he should take me with him.

Routine laboring in the colony continued without change through spring. Only the chosen men spent extra time with our leader making plans; only the wives and daughters and mothers of these men moved between pride at their men having been chosen and their own trepidations at being left behind. At least Christian remained with me in my parents’ crowded home. At least I could watch his morning ritual of pushing-ups, even if the rest of the day I felt more like a sister and daughter than a wife.

The colony would provide for all the families while the men were gone, that was not a concern. But seeing them go, not being sure if they’d come back or when, that’s what troubled, I suppose, as it had women who watched their whaling husbands set to sea or waved a last good-bye to the backs of soldiers as they marched away. We’d memorize their profiles, the outlines of their backs, and cling to these fading memories long after the taste of their last kiss had dried upon our lips.