A Clearing in the Wild (29 page)

“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.

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.”