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We did attend my father’s church the August after we married. I didn’t know whether to tell my father ahead of time or just appear. We decided on the latter. We joined the throng carrying baskets and tying up buggies and patting horses twitching their muscles at flies. I looked for my family who lived next door and didn’t have to ride anywhere. I didn’t see them. I waved at Nancy Osborne toward the front as we entered the cooler room. Andrew removed his hat, stomped his boots on the step, knocking off any wayward dirt, and we took a seat near the entrance.

My father’s back was turned, and by the time he faced forward, the benches in front of us were filled and I don’t think he saw us. Andrew’s dark hair was slicked down and had that little indentation formed from wearing a hat.

He fidgeted and I leaned over. “Are you nervous? We don’t have to do this.”

He shook his head. “I’m ready.”

I was so proud of him, asking about baptism and belief. A part of me understood as I never had before how my mother must have felt bringing someone to that peace. I hadn’t pressed him after we married. After all, I was the one who rushed us, the one who worried about what my father would say and truly, that he might forbid our marriage. But he didn’t and we were husband and wife now.

My father began to sing—he had a fine voice—and we joined in, familiar words to me sung from memory, as there were few hymnals. I noticed Andrew didn’t raise his voice. My father preached then, going on for over two hours. The room grew warm, and around noon, bees worked their way through open doors. Mr. Osborne, Nancy’s father, fell off his bench near the front, but no one spoke. It was a common occurrence, and it proved enough for my father to actually look out at the condition of his congregation fanning ourselves with hankies and gloves, our backs and bottoms sore from the hard benches. It was when he scanned the crowd that he saw me. I watched his face pale. But then he seemed to see Andrew too, and a small frown formed on his forehead. “We will sing ‘Rock of Ages’ and then we’ll take a respite for lunch, resuming after.” I thought it strange he would pick a Methodist hymn, and people around looked a little befuddled, but we all knew the words, just hadn’t sung them for a long time.

“Wait up, Warren,” my father boomed.

We waited for others to leave as my father strode up the short aisle.

“What are you doing here?” My father’s scowl announced a storm approaching.

“Attending church.” I spoke for us, though he had asked Andrew. “There aren’t many churches around and I’ve heard there is a fine preacher at this one.”

He harrumphed. “You are here to . . . ?” He lifted his palms out, directed his words at Andrew.

“He wants to be baptized.” I blurted it, fearful that Andrew might change his mind, might not say it.

“He can speak for himself. He certainly does in town.”

I opened my mouth to ask about that when Andrew spoke. “Sir. I’ve come to repent of my ways and ask forgiveness.”

“I’m not a priest.”

“Sir?”

“I don’t grant forgiveness. God does. Just ask and it shall be granted.”

“And you’ll sprinkle me then?”

“After some instruction. It’s not magical, you understand. This is a serious undertaking, one that says you’re committed to a new way, the only way. And consequences are greater to backsliders than to those who never choose the faith.”

Was he trying to talk Andrew out of it? And what was it my husband wanted to confess?

“I understand, sir. Shall we do this?”

My father nodded once and we returned to the front of the church that was also the schoolhouse and the meeting room for civic discussion. I picked up the bronze baptismal bowl, and as I’d done a hundred times when traveling with my father, I went outside to fill it with water. Martha saw me and came over.

“I’ll be finished in a minute,” I said. “We can talk then.”

She nodded, recognizing the baptismal bowl. I turned from her and went inside.

Andrew already knelt on the hard floor and my father was saying things over him. I saw my husband nod and heard a sob, I thought.
Is he crying?
I set the bowl down. My father still had not looked directly at me, but he dipped his fingers into the water and spoke the words he’d prayed over Timothy and Joseph at Lapwai and hundreds of others; over me and my siblings, as babies; and in Brownsville, over men and women alike. My father finally turned to me. “Will you work to help this man keep his vows, grow his faith?” It was a question with direction, that those present committed to the new congregant to nurture their faith. “Yes,” I said. “With God’s help.”

My father nodded. He wrote Andrew’s name into a book and we walked outside. In the oddest way, I felt more married than I had the day in Oregon City when we’d said our vows.

But my father had spoken to me only as a member of the faith asked to do my duty. He moved away from me, and when I called out to him, he kept walking, stopping to talk with Mr. Osborne, others cooling themselves with their hats or paper fans in the shade.

“That wasn’t so bad.” Andrew pushed his hat back off his forehead.

“What was it you confessed?”

“Things.” He looked away—ashamed? “You needn’t be bothered. I’ll be better now.” He pulled my shoulder into his, held me while I stared at my father’s back.

Within the week, while the bloom of his baptism and my father’s tolerance of my marriage was still fresh, Andrew told me he’d be going to Vancouver to get the new dog and that
from there he was going to make inquiries about buying more cattle. He’d be gone several days.

“Where do you get the money? I just wonder.” I darned one of his socks, bit off the thread. “You’re so frugal with what you allow me for household things.”

“Don’t you be worrying over money.”

“I have a good head for figures. We could map things out together.”

He turned with that glaring look he could get. “Don’t you have everything you need? More than most, I’d say. Got whole sections of one color cloth for your quilting, don’t ask you to piece things, now do I.”

He was generous about my quilting supplies. And about my sewing things for his mother and my sisters. I’d even bought needles and given them to Martha and showed her how to stitch repairs. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” I stood, brushed a smudge from his new duck pants. “I wondered if when you’re back I might take that basket to Henry Hart. I’d have to be gone a few days. Nancy and I could go together. It would be a nice outing riding my new horse.”

“Who’d take care of things here? No. I’ll arrange for it to be taken to him. You have a home to tend to, Eliza. Best you give up childish ways of riding off into the sunset.”

While he was gone, I arranged for his mother to look after the chickens and the hog and weed the garden for a day or two. She was happy to do it. “You’ll return the favor, child.” And I would. “Woman’s got to get her feet on other soil once in a while. I’ll like coming here. Quiet and cool and I make do for myself.”

She made it sound so nice I wondered why I didn’t just stay
home. But I did want to see Henry, so I rode off, not with Nancy, but by myself.

Daniel Methany’s ferry crossed the Willamette, the view taking my breath away. The current was swift, the breeze cooling on the hot August day. I liked wondering what would happen along the next mile.

It was still some distance to Forest Grove, but the landscape rolled with a copse of trees interspersed with wild roses and the sounds of summering geese chattering along the Tualatin River. Maka was a steady mount and I loved just being with this animal/companion. After the hostages were released, this landscape is where we’d come to, in rainy winter though, and my thoughts and feelings then were jumbled as the dog’s food and heavy with despair. This summer day nurtured. I spent one night at a boardinghouse and left early in the morning where an imposing clapboard building with a cupola rose in the distance. It was part of the Academy, where my mother had last taught. I found Henry sitting on a stump in a shaft of light beneath big fir trees. He sat still as a statue and the green around him looked like pictures of Eastern parks. He looked up when I called to him, stood, smiled, and gave me a long hug.

“You came all alone?”

“Yes. Alone. To bring you this.” From my saddlebag I handed Henry a cloth filled with fresh-baked goods, cheeses, a new shirt I’d sewn him.

“Andrew had a basket sent down too.”

“Did he?”
He followed up on his
word.
“I wanted to bring something myself. And see the school. They’ve built new buildings.” I turned around. “I remember the old log one.”

“Everything changes.” He picked through the basket, pulled out a hunk of cheese that he broke, handing me a piece. “You should be here instead of me. You’d shine.”

“It would have been nice if we were both studying here,” I said.

We walked the tree-lined campus of one brick building and then outbuildings where the students stayed. This place had been one of my mother’s hopes for me. Attending again would honor her legacy, but my father had changed his mind about furthering my education and then I’d married instead. “You can stay over at Mrs. Brown’s boardinghouse. You remember her?”

“My intention.”

I didn’t remember our old teacher well. But I remember after the hostages were ransomed and we were whisked to this place, she was a kind presence while I stayed close to my mother, clinging, really. This place had been a refuge. I’d attended classes; Mama taught one. Then Mama had taken ill with her coughing; my father moved us to Brownsville where we knew no one. I’d endured the trial, and my mother had died. Maybe that’s why I’d wanted to see Henry Hart at Forest Grove where we’d all been together, safe. “We’re all just spokes in a wheel,” I told my brother. “A wheel that keeps moving along.”

I had a new wheel and Mr. Warren was its hub.

I circled around his needs, just as I once had for my father. I wasn’t certain I liked the direction this wheel moved. By coming to Forest Grove on my own, I’d taken it a new direction.

The Diary of Eliza Spalding

1850

They are back, my daughter and husband. Praise God. Eliza looks as though she is in another place, her eyes distant. She is changed again. She follows orders but answers only in one or two simple words. Mr. S assures me she did not need to testify, that her answers to the lawyers were too “sympathetic” to the Indians. What strangeness is that? Mr. S tells me the Indians never confessed, that they never claimed to be the ones who committed the deeds but were found guilty just the same. All Oregon City was on edge, fearing reprisals from other tribes if the death sentence was imposed. He prayed for that, he told me. Prayed for death. Dr. McLaughlin, once head of all Hudson’s Bay and the Northwest Territory, testified he tried to warn Marcus to move, that their lives at Waiilatpu with the Cayuse were not like what we had at Lapwai with the Nez Perce, but they had waited too long to change, Mr. S reports. Waited too long.

There being no jail, Sheriff Joe Meeks held the convicted men in a locked shed. His own daughter was one of those who died of measles at the Whitman site and was never buried because of what happened afterwards. In the aftermath, he found his own child’s body and I think of this more often than is wise. How I feared for Eliza all that time.