“My husband, Isaac, believes the same as you do, Captain. While he is as eager as many to see our nation’s boundaries expand, he believes we are part of a grand plan that must ultimately also include a fair outcome for all its creatures, whatever the original station in which they have been placed. That said, we have had difficult challenges, and he believes it is our burden to change all of that for the better, perhaps through faith and hard work. Perhaps through miracles.”
As she said this, she thought about how Isaac’s brutal encounters in eastern Washington had profoundly changed him from a young man with a cornucopia of enthusiastic, albeit undisciplined, applications of energy into a pensive, sober, and phlegmatic adult who increasingly found it difficult to finish the various projects he had started.
It no longer amused her to manage him as she often admitted to herself ultimately had become her responsibility.
Isaac, over the past year, had developed a fear of death, she realized, that now outweighed his sense of opportunity. In the early years of their marriage, she simply had listened to his list of ambitious projects and added an ordered, practical prioritization to them so that a good number of them actually were completed.
But Isaac was stalled now. He seldom spoke of enterprise or the future.
Pickett responded, “As I believe I conveyed to your son, Jacob, my hopes are to keep confrontations minimized between all the inhabitants of this region. Although conduct as a warrior has been my calling, my experience has taught me that peace is always better, madame. And perversely, perhaps, it seems that assuring peace sometimes requires a stern, if reserved, intervention.”
Emmy considered this and understood that Pickett, at least by the words he carefully chose, had armed himself for those necessities, and that, as a disciplined soldier, he likely had found a comfortable balance between self-preservation and duty.
She wondered if poor Isaac, with all that he had seen, had it in him to fight in the same manner anymore. She wondered whether martial training amplified the appetite or, alternatively, resigned a man to the cruelties of armed conflict.
In Pickett, she sensed the latter.
After a long pause, glancing again outside at a brooding sky, Emmy suggested to Pickett that they inspect the cattle as a prelude to a formal proposal on price. Then, because of the impropriety of offering him lodging in her home while Isaac was away, she told him about the plain but comfortable rooms a mile away that Ben and Missy Crockett generously provided for a modest fee to wayfarers.
Pickett thanked her for that suggestion.
“After we inspect the cattle, I will introduce you to the Crocketts, and after you have had a chance to rest, may I invite you and your sergeant to have a meal with Jacob, Sarah and me?” she said.
Pickett immediately accepted her kind offer.
That evening, Emmy proved that her skills as a cook were as formidable as were her abilities as the manager of the family business.
While she served them a dessert of apples crisped with cinnamon and caramelized sugar, Emmy negotiated an arrangement: twenty-five cents per on-the-hoof pound, by which their farm would supply the Bellingham outpost with all its beef in the future.
Pickett seemed surprised that she offered him terms that were much more favorable than what he was paying to the supplier in Port Townsend, not realizing that the intermediary he used usually purchased the same Evers beef. Emmy knew, however, and again smiled to herself at the justice of this new arrangement.
After the meal, they shook hands on the deal, and Emmy realized, by that gentle clasp, that she had won his trust in similar manner to how she had won over every other man with whom she had business dealings.
At the same time, she felt sad that he was so naïve and earnest a person that he could be so easily swindled by his military peers. He was likely a very brave and noble man, but one with many gaps in his character that needed a complement to make him whole. That gave her pause and reconsideration, seeing that Pickett, like so many lonely men in this rough land, might need the help of angels after all.
Chapter Eleven
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Isaac
Our family and the island’s faithful flock is again spared the sorrows.
—Isaac Evers’ Diary, October 10th, 1857
Isaac arrived home two mornings after Pickett had departed, several days sooner than Emmy expected. Rather than rowing another four miles, he had beached his canoe on the northeastern shore, far from the docks he had built, and left the contents with the Negro who lived near the landing.
After he rounded the area by horseback, alerting the neighbors that trouble was in the waters again, Emmy, seeing that he was exhausted and pale, helped him lie down. He slept for ten hours, barely moving during his respite. His brother, Winfield, Tom Iserson, and the Crocketts shared watch over the straits that week. He had Emmy, who knew how to shoot and did it as well as any man, take her turn.
As a result of the predation Isaac had witnessed, the island families moved into a watch status. Two years before, the fifteen Whidbey families in five different parts of the island had worked out a simple plan so that, should a Northerner raiding party attack any one of the local cluster of cabins, those under siege would fire shots and ring the warning bell kept in each cabin. The homes on Emmy and Isaac’s plateau were close enough that a relay of shots would send the alarm quickly to all settlers who could be in harm’s way.
In a watch, all families, including children during the daylight, participated taking turns observing the straits, watching the water for signs of long boats.
Three weeks into the vigil,
