She remembered that five years ago, as later recounted in the Colonial Herald, a Northerner raiding party descended on a Lummi tribe settlement near the Bellingham mill. The Lummis, always resourceful, frequent victims of Northerner predatory raids, had practiced a strategy to defend themselves. The visibility on that day happened to be good. The Lummi saw the marauders approaching well in advance. As the Northerners left their long boats and moved through the woods towards what they thought was a sleeping village, Lummi warriors, hiding high in the woods’ evergreens, descended and then destroyed the unguarded long boats on the beach. They then surrounded the small war party and killed every Northerner warrior.
But that much-celebrated victory had been an anomaly. The war party had been small, with less than twenty men in two long boats. The Lummi had seen the predators and had been prepared, Emmy knew. She had heard many stories about the Northerner predations of native tribes and isolated pioneer settlements. Like the one in which she lived. Her home was undefended with Isaac gone. The blockhouse that Isaac was building on the bluff was still unfinished.
The fog cleared enough that she could see across the strait. No craft on the water.
She went back to her chores, trying to put that out of her thoughts.
As she, Sarah and Jacob carried the bushels down to the cellar bins, she watched how each of her children approached the chore. Sarah, she knew, would carefully separate the bruised apples from rest, put them in a smaller basket, then, before her stepbrother could escape, hand it to him with instructions.
Sarah did exactly as Emmy predicted.
“Little, Brother, please take this to the kitchen so mother can use them,” Sarah said to Jacob, who was already heading up the cellar steps to play outside.
Emmy shook her head, smiling to herself. Sarah was like her, she realized, and, in his impulsivity, Jacob was so much like his father, Isaac.
That made her think again about Isaac. Now that he was back on this side of the mountains from the inland war with the aborigines, she had found herself searching his soul again. What was it that was different about him now?
He had changed, but she wasn’t certain fully how yet. He seemed sadder and resigned, somehow. Whatever he had seen east of the Cascades when he had led his volunteers to fight the Walla Walla and the Palouse tribes had stooped his shoulders a bit, too.
It didn’t seem fair to him, she thought. Isaac came back commissioned as a militia colonel, but he had traded something precious for that rank.
She felt it in so many ways, when sleeping next to him and even when they had the privacy to be intimate, when the children were over at his brother’s home. It was in his hands and all up and down through his back now. They had never before been stiff and tentative like that, before he went east. His intimacies were vacant and roaming, during those private moments, it seemed. The private moments were further and further apart.
And later, awakening with him gone, she knew he was wandering the shore on moonlit nights again, coming in before dawn, but then getting up out of bed early, throwing himself at this job or that obligation, never saying no to any task, official or neighborly. It was as if he were filling every second with work so that he didn’t have time to ponder. If he “mulled,” using his own word — he didn’t understand the necessity of truly thinking something through. Isaac jumped into projects, but was terribly indecisive about completing them, she realized. It was if he had become a gambler, trusting instinct and luck instead of real deliberation and discernment to weigh a project’s worth. More and more, it seemed he needed her to manage his “inspirations.” Was she perpetuating his impulsivity by aiding him in his projects? Or was that what she was supposed to do as a married woman - be an accomplice in an unequal partnership?
She picked a half dozen eggs for a late breakfast for the children. It was already almost seven o’clock.
Breaking the eggs carefully, one at a time into the skillet, hearing the sizzle, she realized that her sense of loneliness had worsened after Isaac returned from the Indian war, more than when he had been on long trips doing his legal work in the first years of their marriage; more than when she was married to Sarah’s father, Jervis Ternbull, a rich husband she had hardly known; more than when she had been a young teenaged girl not that long ago in Boston.
Emmy called Sarah and Jacob to the table for their breakfast. She watched them eat, Jacob bolting his food as usual. She wasn’t hungry, however. Her morning nausea had worsened over the past few days.
What would happen with her third child? What would become of Sarah and Jacob? Could she give them what they needed?
She understood that Isaac knew his long absences were not good for the children, that she wanted Isaac to spend more time with them. But he had pushed that aside. He told her he thought Jacob was just too young to accompany him, even on short trips to Olympia, and he didn’t think it safe to bring Sarah on trips either, as feisty a young girl as she was, because even the friendly people were rough. Emmy knew that most carried some ready weapon at all times, even when using the courthouse privy, so she accepted Isaac’s refusal.
That said, Emmy reminded herself that the children needed more. She had saved enough for them to travel with her to New England last year,
