She thought about Jacob and Sarah’s dawdling this morning and their response to her chiding. Where did her children get their blue eyes? she wondered, as she rode back down to the house. Where did they learn to wear expressions that made them appear as if the things they saw just disappeared inside their heads and stayed there unprocessed? It had to be from their fathers’ lines, the Terns and the Evers, because she had no recollection of blue eyes on either side of her own family. And as smart as he was, it was Isaac’s habit to sometimes keep things unprocessed in his head.
“Patience, Woman…I’m mulling it over” he would respond when she challenged him at times to make a decision on business matters.
But was it “mulling” or rather, really his excuse for procrastination? She again laughed to herself, thinking about their dissimilarities.His hesitancy. Her directness.
His blue eyes; her brown ones.
She, herself had always been told that the intensity of her own brown eyes burned deeply into every person with whom she interacted, as if she had the ability to disinter a person’s buried emotions with a single focused stare. She had always assumed that was because she had been told as a little girl that dressing down someone with your eyes was a rude habit. And so, minding her elders, she had taught herself to take in everything about a person without wandering her focus up, down, or around the way others did when they bothered to pay attention to something or someone.
And that had become useful, she realized, because she had always believed everything was important in its own way and therefore valuable, with bits and pieces to store away for understanding later as necessary. Everything.
Isaac had said he was smitten from the first time she did that to him. But she didn’t understand that because she had just been looking at his soul and she thought “smitten” was a funny word for anyone to use when regarding her.
As she drove the buckboard back to the house, she looked over the high bluff on which it stood, to the sea below.
What was out there that she couldn’t see?
She hoped Isaac was taking care of himself.
Chapter Two
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Isaac
To Bellingham. Adjudication. Knifing over some native’s cut fish nets. Citizens want a hanging, for God’s sake.
— Isaac Evers Diary, October 1st, 1857
Isaac smelled its sweet smoke several minutes before he saw the colors of the fire. Cedar and firs; a late summer forest flare-up, caught in the tall trees crowding the shoreline in the distance. As he and Sam pushed their way closer to it, up the late September coast, paddling from Whidbey Island toward Bellingham, the salty air burn-reddened his cheeks and the smoke wakened him fully again.
He inhaled deeply. The big Northwest giants carried so much more pitch than the evergreens he had known in Ohio, so when they burned, the smoke was pungent - like a perfume, almost. He had always liked that. Indians thought the trees were sacred, he mused. Perhaps that was one of their reasons. He inhaled deeply again.
It wasn’t a big fire. The constant drizzle kept the fire from turning into a big one, he thought, not like others he had seen over the years. Autumn five years ago had been dry enough that it took two months for the fires on the peninsula to burn out. But the trees were wet now from a steady, damp, disappointing summer. That had ruined half of his harvest.
He hated the rain as much as Emmy did. He often wondered whether the mold he found on everything at home caused the dark green in the forest canopy, too.
He hadn’t expected it to be so when he moved west for his life’s big chance. He had heard this rocky sound was clean with life and land was virginal and free—harder than in Ohio and Missouri, but in a different way. More people to mourn his losses and mark his milestones back there, but more things to test himself against here. Now, it was the land itself, and the natives of this region - damned childlike to him - that he always seemed to be protecting. Or fighting.
But, as he thought about it, he had no regrets. He’d made his name here, marked the land as his own.
Paddling slowly as he watched the fire on shore, he almost forgot the weariness and ache in his shoulders and neck. Shoving off in the darkness after a long night at home had become harder each time, he realized. But he couldn’t complain. He had accepted the job.
They had to get north quickly because he had to try the case at the Bellingham mill and get back southwest within six days to preside over another one in Port Townsend. Going along the coast by canoe with Sam, a competent but taciturn traveling companion, was the fastest way, if the weather was with them.
He hated leaving again. Too many things to do back at home. Emmy was fighting a fever, and he knew she might lose this pregnancy, too. She hadn’t seemed to take as well after the quickening this time. He wondered whether the two recent failed pregnancies, both early losses, meant she might not keep this one also. He didn’t know about these sorts of things.
He was pleased that Emmy had kept her figure, as hard as she worked, and it surprised him she had gotten sick again because she carried herself so ferociously in all she did, and moved so fast in this world. She had always seemed unstoppable, and no matter how tired she was, she seldom complained. He knew when he returned from this adjudication chore, he’d find she’d been working long hours doing a hundred tasks, doing many things he didn’t pay much attention to but needed to be done.
She was so blessed full of fire. That
