But Isaac’s departure for eleven months to fight in Eastern Washington had stopped those plans short. So she stayed here on Whidbey. Dutiful. Waiting.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
After breakfast, as she scrubbed the frying pan clean, she again thought about the disruption to their lives that their participation in the Palouse expedition of General Steptoe had imposed.
It was frustrating. She and Isaac had outfitted an entire company of men, even supplying some of the poorest with shoes and weapons. The government, by the verbal oration of the territorial governor, Stevens, had promised to compensate them for their patriotic service, but no payment had come, and it had already been over a year since that bloody affair. It was a disgraceful abrogation of a promise, she believed.
It wasn’t that they were poor. She still had something left from the sale of her property in Olympia she inherited after the death of her first husband. Isaac was paid well for his legal and tax-collecting work. They had claim to over a square mile of prime fertile farmland bordered by waterfront. They had hired hands farming it and were selling the beef and produce to the military and to every ship that came by way of Bellingham or Port Townsend. The narrow slice of land they owned controlled easy ports to both sides of the island and the straits that reached down to Seattle, up to Canada and out the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Pacific.
It was just that they had to work all the harder now because the government hadn’t paid its debts. They were barely beyond a break-even, despite all the projects underway. And whatever Isaac had seen on that expedition had changed him and their relationship.
The prominence he had attained from that expedition - he was widely regarded as a hero now - had gone to his head - not as it might have with other men, as it would most certainly done with her first husband, who was prone to arrogance.
Isaac, instead, had become almost recklessly ambitious and frantically impatient. It was as if he were trying to get everything done immediately - as if he believed his time on this earth had been foreshortened somehow.
And the enormous amount of extra work they had taken on as a result, put them even farther apart from each other, it seemed.
She called Sarah into the house.
“Sarah, I will need you and Jacob to go to Missy and Ben Crockett’s and then over to Doctor Edwards. Give them their mail that arrived yesterday. And ask if either of them will want to order a side of beef. We will be butchering next week when Isaac returns.”
From the window, she watched Sarah mounting the mare, and after pulling Jacob up behind her, slowly trotting off to the neighbors. Jacob’s dog, Rowdy, followed.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
The stove was getting cold. Emmy stepped down to the back yard and picked up an armful of wood from the pile next to the barn. She would need to chop some more alder - enough for a week at least. Isaac had left without finishing that task before he set off that morning.
That prompted her to think again about the balance within their relationship. Something else irritated her when she thought about the cost of Isaac’s participation in the Palouse war. When he was away, she had run the farm in her own way. She enjoyed the challenge and had done quite well by it, increasing the production even without the hired hands and farmers he had taken with him.
Now that Isaac was back on this side of the Cascades - as he, his family and everyone else, it seemed, expected - she had stepped to the rear, and returned to the subservience of a wife. She had done so, whether she agreed with his actions or not, as she had been taught was her duty.
And it was her sense that Isaac hadn’t even noticed that she had carried everything on her back in his absence, his risky gambles that she squared, as well as the new, more certain projects she had initiated.
On his return, Isaac had picked up everything as if he had been in charge all along. He moved her aside, took over her projects, like completing the huge, long landing dock on their waterfront property so that deeper draft vessels could off-load without fear of grounding during all but the lowest of tides. That dock immediately increased their income. Substantially.
But despite their near-prosperity and the pride she had in Isaac’s various accomplishments — their accomplishments — she felt like something had been taken away from her when he returned.
And, during her worst of times, weathering the depression she felt in this time of year - a forlornness, magnified so intensely by the dark dampness of the region — she wavered in her resolve to endure. When she was again alone - as she was now, managing all of the business projects and caring for her family as if she were a single mother, she had to fight an enormous, perplexing frustration.
Despite recognizing that brewing hard feelings was a useless exercise, she feared she was starting to resent him.
It was on days like this that she faltered, wondering whether she should feel sorry for herself, or blame herself for not protesting some of Isaac’s foolish risk taking, or let herself drift away from a hard love. It was on days like this that she wondered whether she should delude herself and pretend that the potential rewards of future prosperity might actually outweigh the loneliness she knew she easily could fall prey to on the worst of days.
Recognizing that, she reminded herself that long ago she had decided she would avoid indulging in either delusions or negative feelings about others.
And the prosperity wasn’t all that
