A Clearing in the Wild (25 page)

Nora brought An-Gie in. She looked at my child and smiled. “
Tolo
,” she said. “
Junge
,” Nora told me in German. An infant boy. Nora motioned for An-Gie to comb my hair. I’d purchased new combs, abalone shells that the sutler kindly said he would order in for the commissary store. I showed them to her, and An-Gie turned them over in her wide brown hands, then began the gentle tugging and pulling on my hair. I felt tended and closed my eyes and hummed as she worked.

Even Captain Maloney’s somber face at dinner could not dissuade the joy I felt, showing the seated group my son, who by now had begun to share his own voice with this company. I suppose every new mother thinks her child is the loveliest and best, but I was sure of this. I set aside the ache of knowing others saw his son before Christian did.

The second morning my body felt sore in places I’d never known it to be before. Worse, my child wailed and couldn’t be comforted for long, neither by my stroking his face nor planting tulip kisses on his brow, tiny smooches opening to larger ones if only he responded. Did children normally fall asleep even when they hadn’t sucked nearly long enough? He cried until he slept, then woke to cry again. I couldn’t comfort my son, though I walked him and patted him and changed him. I couldn’t help him find nourishment at my breast.

Instead of looking plumper as I thought babies did after a day or so of living, his face narrowed. His skin felt loose around his jerking, slender legs.

I winced when Andy tugged at me and at first Nora smiled, as though this sort of behavior from an infant could be expected. But by the end of the third day when he seemed to sleep more than even attempt to eat, I somehow conveyed my breast pain to Nora. She nodded, then offered poultices of grain. She made motions that I should pump my breast, and I felt my face grow warm. This was the work of milkmaids, with goats or cows, not healthy young mothers wanting nothing more than to nourish their child.

A pale liquid, nearly clear, left my body, but even I knew it wasn’t enough to nurture a life. I longed for my mother’s wisdom of what to do and chastised Christian beneath my breath for his absence, his missing words that would bring help. Then I cursed myself for not knowing what I should have known, what all mothers surely knew.

It was
Frau
Flint who, with gestures firm and clear, her hands
cupped beneath her own ample breasts, brought out bristling behavior from Nora. Nora shook her head.
Frau
Flint pointed to Nora’s toddler and spoke. Nora dropped her eyes. They argued, at least the snapping of words, and the pursed lips in between them suggested an argument to me. Nora said, “No,” and I knew somehow that
Frau
Flint wanted Nora to nurse my baby. For some reason, this kind woman resisted, but she left and returned with a cup of milk.

Cow’s milk would rescue Andy, wouldn’t it?
Frau
Flint scowled, as though to say “a waste of time,” but Nora soaked a rag in the milk, then brought it to Andy’s mouth.

He licked, then spit up over and over again until he fell into an exhausted sleep.

Would my child starve? Could that happen? Surely not with a healthy mother and a doctor right there to advise.

Simmons brought me a book to look at while I rocked my limp child. I hoped the pictures would engage my mind on something bright and pleasant. Instead, the book had strange line drawings of an organ grinder and a monkey, a scrawny, narrow-faced primate that made me gasp instead. It looked too much like Andy.

I pushed back tears and vowed to stay alone, enclosed in my room, dipping into the cow’s milk to drip into Andy’s mouth, even though he spit it up; even though he slept now most all of the time. Some small nourishment had to reach him. Surely, my milk would drop soon. I’d hold him in my private, windowless room to protect him from what others might say while I was forced to watch my child die; I couldn’t begin to imagine what I’d tell Christian when he came back, if he came back.

Nora knocked quietly at the door and then entered. Her words were soft, and I could see she cried. She motioned that she’d take Andy, gestured she’d hold him to her breast. I’d seen Marie eat table foods, so
perhaps Nora felt her toddler could survive and her milk was better given to Andy. But then I could see the tears in her eyes and somehow knew what
Frau
Flint didn’t: Nora had not enough milk even for Marie anymore. She’d been weaning the child. She had nothing to offer. That was the cause of her tears, not her resistance to share what she had.

I would always remember that moment when I knew my child would die. Nothing stirred the air. My mouth felt dry. I understood then what our leader forewarned: not the physical pain of childbirth; not the agony of sore breasts or healing from the infant’s passage from his watery world into our own; none of that was worthy pain to redeem the sin that Eve committed. But the searing wrench of powerlessness, of being unable to tend to one’s child, to keep those we love from suffering, such was the curse of a woman’s original sin. And I’d committed it.

How I longed for Christian’s presence, to shatter all my fears, make them unfounded, reassure me that God would intervene and save Andy’s life. Could God create a woman able to give birth without bother, but who then couldn’t keep her child alive? What kind of God was that? What kind of mother was that?

I tried to remember the verses my father read about children, of God’s love for them. Our leader adored children, gave them sweet treats when he met them on the street. He didn’t talk about them much, and I wondered sometimes if he thought little ones kept their parents’ eyes from him and he was envious of their interest going elsewhere. I chastened my thoughts. I couldn’t afford to offend God by decrying one of his chosen servants.

Andy stopped smacking his lips when I brushed water against them. He looked wizened as an old squash sinking into itself.

I could not stand this, I could not!

I raged into the front parlor, paced before the window, where I watched a light falling snow. Were there no goats here? We hadn’t tried goat milk. I pawed through the books on the shelves looking for a drawing of a goat so I could show them. What was the word in English? Might the sutler know of a goat? He’d been so helpful with all of my purchases; surely I could tell him what I needed.

I grabbed my mother’s cape and wrapped it around me, leaving
Andy lying so still I leaned over him to make sure he breathed. “I’ll bring back what you need, I promise,” I whispered, then stepped outside, feeling the wet snow cold against my thin slippers.

The commissary stood at right angles to the officers’ housing and the doctor’s surgery. With my head down against the sleet, the mix of rain and snow, I nearly knocked over An-Gie. With her, a young woman carried an infant in a board. They appeared headed to the commissary. This plump and round-faced child with large liquid eyes blew satisfied bubbles from its lips. I knew what I had to do—if only I could make her understand.

The girl carried her baby wrapped in a board decorated with shells and colorful beads. I could smell the cedar wood. She never looked at me, and it was torture staring at this plump baby, smiling while my child lay motionless. Could she tell that my heart split open at the sight of a healthy, fat child?

I tugged on An-Gie’s arm, motioned toward the young girl who might have been a granddaughter perhaps or a niece. I pulled her toward Nora’s house. The girl held back, but I urged both her and An-Gie into my room where Andy lay.

I picked him up, held his face to mine to feel the small intake of his breath. Then I motioned to the girl to take him.

“No, no!” An-Gie said, standing between us. “No
omtz
. No
ho-ey-ho-ey
. No trade.”

Trade?
I knew that English word. I held Andy to my breast.
Does she think I would give my son away in exchange for hers?
I held the back of Andy’s head with my hand. He still moved, shuddered almost. “No
ho-ey-ho-ey
,” I said. “
Muck-a-muck
. Eat.” I made the motion with my
hand and lips. “
Cum’tux?
” I’d heard Nora use this word to verify that An-Gie understood. She had to understand.

What kind of mother was I to ask a total stranger to bare her breast to my infant and keep him alive? A desperate mother. A strong mother, that’s what I was, doing something I had never imagined I would do.

An-Gie spoke to the girl, who at first shook her head. An-Gie clucked her words, repeated
muck-a-muck
, and eventually, the girl laid her baby down on the bed beside the shallow impression Andy’s feathery body had left on the quilt. She opened her skin jacket and untied the strings across her chest. Then An-Gie took Andrew from me and placed the baby in this girl’s arms.

My child suckled for the first time in three days.

“
Klose
,” An-Gie said. She patted my arm.

He was weak, very weak. The girl kept touching his cheek, as though to remind him of what he needed to do to live. I heard a soft wail in between, a good sign I thought, that he could protest the delay in his eating.

Finally, both fatigued and satisfied, he calmed, his tiny fingers no longer lifting and bending like a waiting praying mantis’s, but instead resting in serenity on the smoothness of his savior’s breast.

I wept. “
Klose, klose
,” I repeated over and over, hoping that
good
also meant “thank you.” Because of these native women, we both would live, for surely I’d have died along with Andy if he’d left this world.

From the parlor window in December, I saw the scouts ride through the cedars, ducking beneath the feathery boughs, stirring up thin layers of snow that turned brown grasses into white. I counted the scouts. There were only seven.

I grabbed a shawl against the cool dusk and raced outside, Andy in my arms. He’d gained weight and felt like the watermelon he’d arrived as. My eyes scanned, seeking my husband’s. I didn’t find him.

“Where’s Christian?” I asked Adam Schuele as he tied up his mount to the hitching post. “What’s happened?” The horses’ breaths puffed into the cold air.

“Nothing happened, Emma. All goes well, though we still do not find the perfect place for our brothers and sisters in Missouri. We come back so Christian can be with you … at your time.” He looked down. “I see we arrive too late.”

“So he’s safe?”

“Christian stops at the commissary to attend to your bills, and ours. John Genger goes with him to ensure the accounting.”

I would deal with the dis-ease of those bills later. Instead, I let my rage rise. Christian might have come here first; he might have seen his son before worrying over obligations of the “mission.” Hadn’t our separation been sacrifice enough for his success?

“What do you bring us?” Adam nodded toward the bundle in my arms.

“A boy,” I said. “Andrew Jackson Giesy. The first new member of the Bethel Colony in the West.”

I held Andy up for Adam and the other scouts to see, then pulled him back into the warmth of my chest. Andy cried, and I patted his back while the men stood at a distance, nodding their heads in that way that men do with newborns, that mix of hesitancy wrapped in awe, humbled that women bring forth such lusty life and that they too had a part in it.