But Edwards was not at home that day, having departed in the morning for the south of the island to sit up with a young woman confined in the last stages of a first and very difficult pregnancy.
Normally, Edwards would have relegated the delivery to a competent island woman, Jenny Searing, who had a good amount of midwife and wet nurse experience. But this baby was malpositioned in its mother’s belly and just wasn’t descending as it should, so Edwards was going to try to rotate it for a head-first presentation to minimize the risk of delivering a breechling or stillborn infant.
Jim Thomas explained to the old couple that he had seen the doctor depart, carrying medical equipment with him on his Morgan filly.
They seemed disappointed with his answer, and when he asked what they needed, the couple responded with a question about whether any other big tyees like Edwards lived in the area.
Pointing toward Isaac and Emmy’s home, Thomas told them that a very important tyee lived in the house on the bluff, then went about his fish net mending.
The couple departed back down the beach.
The wind from the western strait always blows easterly in the early evening on the prairie plateau. On that evening, it kicked up earlier than usual and then settled down by seven.
Isaac was in the woodshed when the Indian couple appeared at his picket fence. His big old Labrador, Rowdy, began barking loudly, bringing Emmy to the door.
Because of the dog, the couple did not advance farther than the fence and asked Emmy if they could borrow a hammer and some nails so they could repair their canoe down on the beach. They seemed surprised when Isaac came around the house to see who was talking.
The old man, sturdily built with a hard and pock-marked face, turned his attention to Isaac. Both visitors looked at Isaac carefully from foot to head, as if measuring him, Emmy noticed.
The old woman, weather-beaten and almost toothless, repeated her request to Emmy, adding that she wanted to buy some sugar or molasses and coffee.
Emmy sensed a nervous, stilted manner in their speech and heard a dry sticking hesitancy in the man’s enunciation of the Chinook trading jargon.
Isaac paused, glancing over at Emmy, then told the couple they did not have a hammer or nails nor did they have any food supplies to spare.
The couple turned and left quietly without a word.
Rowdy finally stopped barking when they were out of sight down the pathway to the beach.
Isaac thought no more about it. Natives and wayfarers occasionally stopped, and none had ever created problems.
Emmy thought the couple was odd but turned her attention to the dinner she was preparing.
A few hours later, the guests arrived, including Tom Iserson, his wife Rebah, Major Robert Campbell, and his wife Thomasina. The company ate two full helpings of Emmy’s roast beef; shucked and cob corn; a fine spiced, late summer squash compote; warm bread with freshly churned butter; and the clove-spiked pear pies from a recipe Emmy had brought with her from her grandmother in Boston.
The major introduced some decent English port imported through San Francisco, and all partook, offering a pagan libation to the change of seasons, followed by a brief prayer of thanks to God for sparing Isaac from harm on his recent journey.
They talked about many things, including the dispute with the Brits that was heating up over the ownership of San Juan Island to the north, and the perennial congressional strife over the Negro slavery question. Campbell and his wife, originally from Alabama, expressed strong sentiment for allowing new states to determine their own rulings on that matter. Iserson, always the “wiggling Whig-turned-Republican,” as Rebah liked to refer to him, believed new states should be accepted into the union only if they agreed to be free from the evil curse of slavery.
Despite entrenched positions on the matter, and Tom Iserson’s somewhat irritating, sanctimonious pontifications, the discussion remained civil and quiet. The two sides held onto their positions, and the discussion ended as each agreed on the other’s right to disagree.
By half past ten, the Campbells begged their leave, noting they had early morning chores, including completing repairs on a roof that had started to leak in the past week. The Isersons lived too far away to trek up island in the dark, so they excused themselves to the guest bedroom in the back.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Getting into bed that night, watching Emmy pull her brush through her hair, Isaac thought about all the things he had witnessed during the past several weeks and how rapidly events changed in this world, teeter-tottering, it seemed, from pain to fortune, and how much that had benefited him and his family. If he could persist, surviving the challenges that Providence had in store, he would keep moving upward, he knew, being righteous in the presence of the Lord on his judgment day. He just had to endure the sufferings because God would balance it all.
That was the plan and the pathway.
And it was working.
Only a short while ago, he had been a penniless gold miner looking for opportunity in uncharted territory. Then, using the surveying skills he had learned in Ohio, he’d mapped out the inland lake east of Elliott Bay and later, on Whidbey, had acquired the best piece of land in the Puget Sound region.
Certainly he’d had his pain, losing his first wife, Rebecca, to a tumor that had grown in her breast and had just eaten her away in less than a year. He couldn’t watch her in those last few weeks—the seepage and smell of rot, seeing her suffering, weeping out of her mind until she just didn’t recognize him or anyone else, blind and wasted.
But he had found Emmy not long after and moved her up from Olympia where she had been stranded by the carelessness of
