They were so different, her two. Jacob worked hard for a lazy six year old, prone to discharging his duties in spurts of blind fury, whereas his step-sister Sarah, almost five years older, was the steady one, intensely stubborn, quiet and self-absorbed so that she seldom needed any attention, or so it seemed.
Sarah protected her slower little brother in a tender, defensive way that gave Emmy some reassurance that, should anything ever happen to her and Isaac, Jacob would have someone to care for him. That could happen, Emmy knew. She and Isaac could become ill. Isaac’s first wife had died of a cancer, after all.
And out here, things happened. Emmy had lost her first husband in a logging accident. Whipsawed down.
And Emmy also knew of several settlers who had been murdered in the past year by the Northerner marauders. Some had been carried off by them. The slayings had been gruesome and cruel. The kidnapped victims, if ever recovered, told stories of terrible outrages they had endured while they’d been kept. Emmy personally had known a few of the ones who had been killed early on — spared the ordeals.
As she thought about that, she realized it was always present, that fear — the possibility of the Northerners’ sudden appearance. She had accepted that risk, of dying that way, she knew. But it was a reluctant acceptance - a resignation. It put an edge on everything, on every plan she made, every step she took.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Emmy walked to the barn, a crisp early frost holding to the grass, crunching beneath her footsteps. She had, during her childhood in Boston, loved the sound and feeling of that, but knew that here it meant that the October rainfall would start soon, and when the rain started on Whidbey, it got cold fast, the island’s winter roughly brushing aside any lingering colors of the fall; muddying it all. So, as much as she loved reminders of her childhood, the frost here was a disappointment at the same time.
She had weathered here long enough to hate the gray, drab skies that would settle in soon enough, moving from intermittent warm showers into a bitter, soggy, constant drizzle, keeping her inside the small house and, with that, inside with her fears and suspended hopes. Looking to the windows for whatever was outside.
Seeing the leaves falling, dissolving with the rain into the Northwest muck that seemed to attach itself to everything, aggravated her sense of an always-looming despair. She had lost two previous pregnancies in October just like this one. Would she lose this one too? she worried. The gloom, that depressing, weighty sadness, pulseless and leaden in its countenance, could then settle heavily onto her, she knew.
If she let it.
So pervasive was that impending winter darkness, the potential of being overwhelmed by sadness, that it forced her at this time every year to search deeply to remember the freshness of light and color. By now she had learned the value of that necessary exercise, one that would help her forbear again until spring arrived. But she still had to discipline herself better, she had decided. She had to set an example for Sarah and Jacob.
She hitched her mare to the buckboard, then rode to the orchard to pick up the apples that had fallen in the night’s wind —there would be at least a few bushels — before the deer found them. She cinched her rubber rain cape tightly to cut the wind. It always bit through the seams, however, turning her cheeks red and her fingers a faint blue.
Somehow, protected as she had been during her childhood by the warm softness and refinery of the cozy Boston hilltop brownstones, she knew she needed to learn all of the nuances of the Northwest cold seasons once and for all. It would help her outlast them. She knew she had to maintain a strong demeanor in the face of it all if she were going to continue as the respectable wife and mother that her husband, Isaac, expected. But the pain in her fingers from the cold added a bitter dimension to that discipline. She would outlast that feeling too, she told herself.
There were little breaks, little surprises before the first days of winter that brought hope, she reassured herself, as she picked the windfall around the apple trees. Assuming Isaac did not run into Northerners and get himself killed on this trip, she knew he would return in ten days with provisions from his stay in Bellingham.
She brightened a bit, thinking about more surprises that would come in right after that, when her neighbor, Ben Crockett, Missy’s husband, returned with his canoes stringing behind him from his trip down south to the Elliott Bay settlement, now called “Seattle,” after the settlers there decided to honor one of the prominent tyees by naming it after him. Ben would bring more jars and paraffin for preserves, perhaps a bolt or three of practical cloth, some cinnamon and cloves, and lots of pepper, if it lasted. So many settlers had come into the area that new provisions didn’t last long before they were redistributed across three counties.
And maybe Isaac or Ben would think to bring something pretty — sashes or soft ribbon or even tiny pearl buttons if a British or Spanish ship or a fast one from San Francisco had arrived in the Puget Sound area in the last week.
She needed so much to be complete, to make this small house into a respectable home. And she wanted the baby to see some softness and color when it came into the world. She needed another girl.
Emmy lifted the heavy baskets of late harvest apples onto the buckboard. Doc Edwards likely wouldn’t approve, even though he knew she lifted with her legs and used a
