Wild Indigo Page 13

  Anna Johanna had, after all, been at pains to copy her all morning.

  “I was thinking about a deerskin dress like the ones I used to wear when I lived with the Indians.”

  Dripping wet, Anna Johanna stood up in the water. “For me?”

  After the midday meal, Retha sorted through a pile of dusky deerskins at Brother Bagge’s store. Like a bee sampling nectars, Anna Johanna danced around her, always returning to her favorite site, the hides. Retha knew selecting a hide would not be difficult. No matter where the animal’s wound was, she could cut the small pieces of a little girl’s dress around it. But Retha took her time, cultivating Anna Johanna’s eagerness to pick out a special hide and giving herself time to master a new and growing resentment.

  While they had been eating, Brother and Sister Ernst stopped by. Again. Certain now that Jacob had directed them to watch her, Retha chafed at their surveillance, his lack of confidence, her own mortification. How was she ever to become mother to Jacob’s children if he would not give her the chance? She flipped through the hides without seeing them.

  He would get an earful when he got back.

  After selecting a hide, she let Anna Johanna bundle it up to carry home. But it was too heavy for a child. Retha draped it over her arm.

  Halfway home, she stopped at the Ernsts’ cabin, deciding on the spur of the moment to confront her friend. The front door was open to the heat. Retha entered, called, and sniffed. They were boiling tallow. In the summer. That was unheard of. Following its faintly rancid odor, she walked through the cabin and out to the backyard, Anna Johanna tagging along shyly.

  Eva Ernst scrambled up from a log bench where she had been sitting next to several white, dripping, greasy lumps. “It’s too hot to mess with tallow,” she said, her plain, flushed face damp from tears. “It won’t form for candles.”

  Retha patted her hand consolingly, unwilling to remind her absentminded friend that tallow candles were made only when the weather had gone cold.

  “I am so much better with children,” her friend added, sniffling into her apron.

  “You could use tallow lamps,” Retha suggested gently.

  “I know, I know. But I broke our lamp. I meant to be so smart, making these. We have to have them. Samuel comes in at all hours of the night.” Eva made a hopeless gesture that swept her small yard. “The Sisters didn’t teach us everything!”

  Retha nodded sympathetically. “I’m finding that out.”

  “Is it what you hoped for?” her friend asked eagerly, her eyes suddenly alight.

  Confused, Retha shrugged. She had hoped for love, but only Eva seemed to have found that. “It’s too soon…I…my husband—Eva, I don’t know how to say this.”

  In private they dropped the formal address Moravian adults used and spoke as girlhood friends.

  “You can tell me.” Eva encouraged her with a smile.

  Retha shook her head. She couldn’t bring herself to accuse her husband of having her spied on, or her friend of spying for him. She tested the greasy tallow. “They might harden in the cellar.”

  Eva fingered the fat lumps. “How practical you are.”

  Watching her friend painstakingly mold the lumps into candles, Retha worked up her resolution. “Jacob doesn’t trust me with the children, does he?” she blurted.

  “Retha! No. Of course he does.”

  But Retha thought her friend looked guilty. “I want you and your husband not to visit us while Jacob is away.”

  “But we want to. We love the children. We know them.”

  “But I don’t. And this way, I never will.”

  “You will in time. There’s no hurry.”

  “Perhaps not. But I want to be alone with them. Then you would not have to bother with all these visits.”

  “It’s no bother,” Eva insisted.

  Suddenly her friend’s insistence on helping made Retha feel like a coddled child. “Eva, please. How else can I get to know them? I have to show Jacob I can be their mother.”

  Eva concentrated on arranging an uncooperative lump of tallow on the plate. “We’re supposed to visit you every meal,” she admitted softly.

  Retha’s resentment turned to a sharp and painful anger.

  He should have told her.

  But he had not. She recalled his gloomy demeanor after the wedding night and felt more confused than ever. He had even been angry at her for comforting Anna Johanna. For reasons beyond her understanding or control, he was not willing to give her a chance. Did he fear for his children while they were in her care? Was he trying to protect them from her?

  Jacob was, after all, a protective man. Her heart warmed as she remembered his hand on her arm, protecting her from the Redcoats. Still, he had no cause then, as he had none now. The only other time had been the night he had found her as a child, dark with filth and stealing from the Moravians’ communal stores. But who had he been protecting then? Her, or his community? She had fought him wildly. After that, for a while, everyone mistook her for a dangerous Indian. A few still did.

  Perhaps Jacob did.

  Jacob, and Eva and her husband, too. That was it. None of them trusted her with the children because of the years she had lived with the Cherokee. They trusted her to dye their clothes and do the laundry, but not to be a mother.

  Angry clear through, she rose from the log bench and faced her friend, who at this moment seemed like a false friend. “I want you to stay away from supper tonight.”

  Eva’s thick brows frowned with indecision. Her expression only reminded Retha of every doubtful look that had been cast her way since the night Jacob Blum had caught her for a thief. Old outrage over injustice arrowed down her back.

  “If I decide to scalp them, I promise I’ll ask your permission.”

  Later that afternoon the boys clattered into the house, dashing from school to escape an ineffectual spatter of rain. The cut-out pieces of Anna Johanna’s deerskin dress lay on the kitchen table. Retha watched Nicholas and Matthias spot it and exchange knowing glances.

  “We don’t need leggings,” Nicholas said stiffly, shrugging out of his rain-spotted vest. “Especially not in summer.”

  “Father already has riding gaiters,” Matthias informed her bluntly, placing his vest on a peg beside his brother’s.

  Retha went on guard. How to respond to her stepsons’ challenge? Both curious and critical, they were clearly testing her. This would be her chance to establish herself as their new mother. Not quite sure she was adequate to the task, she remembered Rosina Krause in charge of the Little Girls and Single Sisters and squared her shoulders.

  “She’s making me a deer dress!” Anna Johanna, who was playing on the floor, poked her head above the table’s edge.

  Matthias approached the hide and touched it with keen interest. “An Indian dress?”

  Ignoring the hide, Nicholas gave Retha a look of disgust.

  Retha checked herself. She had not thought how others might respond to her rather novel measure.

  “You can’t do that,” Nicholas said with authority.

  “Of course I can,” she answered. But his tone surprised her—and her own upwelling of anger.

  Withdrawing his hand from the deerskin, Matthias hung his head. “We’re already a laughingstock.”

  Retha grabbed a rag, lifted the lid on the pot of beans, and stirred. She needed to sort this out. Just who did Matthias think of as a laughingstock? Surely not himself, he was merely thin. Or his brother. A bona fide troublemaker attracted attention, but no one laughed at him. He had to mean his sister, because of her dirty dress.

  She felt a pang of sympathy for the poor child. Anna Johanna was just old enough to catch their meaning. Surely, Jacob wouldn’t allow the boys to say such things to her face.

  Nor would Retha. The beans had thickened nicely. She hoisted the heavy pot onto the table and told the boys to sit down. They sat, and she stood over them, feeling right and angry and anxious at once.

  “You had better expla
in what that means.”

  Nicholas glared, but Matthias wouldn’t meet her gaze.

  “Matthias?” she prodded the one she judged more likely to answer.

  He huddled against the table, his lips shut tight.

  “Nicholas? What’s this about your sister?”

  “It’s not about her,” Nicholas said, still glaring.

  His father’s indigo glare. Retha met it and was struck with sudden, unwelcome knowledge, like the lightning that hadn’t brought rain. “It’s about me.”

  “We didn’t ask to have a squaw for a mother,” Nicholas ground out.

  In her heart, Retha almost felt old scars tear. Old prejudices bounded to life. Squaw baby. Squaw wife. Old hurt throbbed anew. Now the children would feel it, too. She wondered if Jacob had realized the taunting would begin again. She certainly hadn’t. She knew children were cruel but had convinced herself that her tormentors had all grown up. Clearly, new ones had taken their place. For her new family’s sake, she struggled to recover her forbearance, once acquired at such great cost.

  “I was never a squaw, Nicholas,” she managed to say calmly, ladling beans into redware serving bowls and carrying them to the parlor table. He was still glaring when she returned. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Naught happened,” he snapped.

  Matthias laced his fingers in a pious gesture and set his hands on the table. “’Twas Thomas Baum—”

  “’Twas naught,” Nicholas cut him off and stood in stony silence. Retha recalled doing the same in front of Sister Rosina. Telling tales was worse than taunting.

  And Retha was sure he had been the one more injured by the taunts. She reached inside for wisdom, for heart’s ease. “Sometimes people don’t know any better, Nicholas. It hurts them more than it hurts us.”

  “It didn’t hurt,” he said.

  But he looked hurt, she thought, the exact same way his father had. She probably had a better chance to help the son. “We can’t stop them from saying things, but we don’t have to believe them.”

  Nicholas rolled his eyes. “You grew up with Indians.”

  “Yes, I did, and I loved them very much.”

  “You loved Indians?” Matthias sounded incredulous.

  “My Indian family was very good to me,” Retha said, passing out plates and pewter utensils for the boys to set the parlor table.

  Nicholas hung back, but Matthias, amidst a clatter of tableware, wanted to hear more about the Indians. With relief, Retha told of her life with the Cherokee, stories the Little Girls used to relish. Matthias did, too. But Nicholas joined them at the table with evident displeasure, sitting at attention like a soldier but refusing to meet her eyes. Matthias piously offered to say grace, then picked at his food, asking for more Indian stories. Nicholas scorned the stories, but Retha noted that his appetite was unimpaired. He wolfed all of his two handfuls of limas and a pile of bacon and bread.

  Perched on a stool by her side, Anna Johanna copied her, as she had done all day. Bite for bite, bean for bean. At least, Retha thought, flattered by the imitation, she had made some headway in winning over one of Jacob’s children.

  Matthias lined up a row of beans on his plate and looked up. “Did you have an Indian name?”

  “I did indeed,” she said slowly, noticing that Matthias was eating one bean at a time. No wonder he was skinny. “They called me Wanders Lost.”

  “I got lost,” Anna Johanna perked up. “In the meadow—”

  “Why did they call you Wanders Lost?” Matthias overrode his little sister’s chatter, much more interested in pursuing exotic Indian names.

  “They said, which I don’t remember, that they found me alone near a cabin in the woods. Wandering, and lost. That’s how they name children, by something that’s happening when they’re born,” Retha explained, changing the subject. She rarely let herself think of her Indian name. It reminded her of being lost that second time and losing all again.

  Nicholas, who was sulking, flashed his sister a wicked grin. “You’d be Rats in the Cellar.”

  Anna Johanna’s face crumpled in confusion.

  “Nicholas!” Retha said, rushing to her stepdaughter’s rescue. All she needed was one child sulking, another pining, and a third in tears.

  Nicholas feigned innocence. “But there were rats. Father and I were trapping them the night that she was born.”

  Retha stifled a smile at the image of her large, dignified husband scuttling in some cellar after rats. “Anna Johanna,” she assured her, “they’d probably have named you Starry Night.”

  Anna Johanna smiled shyly, placated. “I like that.”

  “I’d be Born in a Wagon,” Matthias announced proudly.

  Retha blinked. She knew so little of her new family. “In a wagon! Were you?”

  “When we moved here from Pennsylvania.” He giggled. “But I don’t remember.”

  Nicholas snorted at his brother’s silly joke.

  “And what would you be named, Nicholas?” At this very moment, Retha thought, they could have named him Smoking Musket.

  Defiant, he shook his head. Obviously, he wouldn’t admit to wanting to join in this game.

  But Matthias kept it going, shoving his nearly full plate away. “Did you have an Indian mother?”

  “You might say that. I lived in an Indian family, and they treated me like the other children.”

  “Did she have a name?” Anna Johanna whispered.

  “Singing Stones.”

  Anna Johanna let out a contented sigh. “Pretty. Can I be Singing Stones?”

  Retha tapped the tip of her nose. “You can be anyone you wish, sweet potato.” Both boys groaned.

  After everyone but Matthias had cleaned their bowls, Retha set out a bowl of blackberries.

  Matthias waved them off impatiently, even though he seemed to look at them with longing.

  “There will be that much more for the rest of us, Matthias,” she teased him, starting to relax a little in spite of Nicholas’s refusal to join in.

  Her joke fell flat. While the others ate, Matthias steepled his fingers and studied them. “What should we call you?” he asked abruptly.

  “‘Mother?’” Anna Johanna whispered in a tremulous voice.

  “No!” the boys spoke as one, and exchanged a glance. They had discussed the matter, Retha was sure of it.

  “We called our mother ‘Mother,’” Nicholas announced.

  “Of course you did,” Retha said, taking a deep breath. “I suppose you could call me Mother Retha.”

  “No,” the boys said again.

  Then Nicholas stood up and leaned forward, his hands flat on the table, almost as tall as his father.

  “Not ‘Mother,’” he said, defiance tightening the line of his shoulders. “You’re not our mother. Our mother’s dead.”

  Their mother was dead, Retha acknowledged that. But where did that leave her? She now served in Christina Blum’s stead, and they would have to call her something. She had to propose that something right away. Thinking again of Sister Rosina in charge, she matched her militant stepson’s pose and stood him down.

  “I am your father’s wife, and I will be a mother to you. You may call me ‘Mama’ or ‘Mama Retha.’ Or ‘ma’am.’”

  Nicholas twitched with indignation.

  “I like ‘Mama,’” Anna Johanna said.

  Retha smiled down at her, grateful for large favors from small people, and then addressed her older stepson. “Sit down, Nicholas, and finish your meal.”

  Nicholas glowered, and in his expression, Retha glimpsed his father. Nicholas might well grow up to be as handsome and powerful as Jacob, but he was neither yet. He was mounds of food running up to height and awkwardness. None of it yet formed the taut self-command that marked his father as a man to reckon with.

  Still, the son’s anger swamped the room. Retha was shaking. It seemed that she had won some war of words, but she had never felt less adequate to a task. Perhaps Jacob’s insistence on the Ernsts�
� help had not been a matter of distrust. Perhaps he had been wise, knowing his own children—and not knowing her.

  But at this moment, she was on her own with Nicholas, who stood resentfully. She said a silent prayer that he had more respect for his father than he had shown for her.

  “Nicholas, you honor your father by setting an example for your brother and sister. Sit, and finish your meal.” Retha watched his face as the discipline of young years battled with his own wild will. She had fought such battles herself as she strove to become a good Moravian child.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said emphatically. Though one hand fisted, Nicholas took his seat.

  Exhausted at the end of a long day, Retha stripped to her summer body linen and dragged herself to bed. Luckily, despite her rudeness to her friend in the afternoon, Brother and Sister Ernst had walked with them to Singstunde for the evening song service and kept them company in the Saal. Luckily, too, Eva’s forgiving disposition diffused Retha’s tension, and Brother Ernst teased Nicholas about tripping on his lower lip until Nicholas had to smile. Most luck of all, heavy clouds brought darkness early, so Retha hustled the children off to bed before another incident could occur.

  Jacob’s bed was still newly crisp and inviting. Its cornhusk mattress crackled as she settled in alone. But not without an overwhelming sense of his presence. It had shadowed her all day, as if he were watching her, evaluating her, quick to prod, correct, protect. He had become her conscience, and her critic.

  She slipped into the bed, weariness deepening as she listened to the crickets’ heated chirping. She wanted to be a good mother to Jacob’s children, to be for them the mother she had lost not once, but twice. She wanted to care for each one of them equally—ragged Anna Johanna, pious Matthias, defiant Nicholas. No matter how difficult mothering half-grown boys was proving to be.

  She wanted to do so without anyone’s help because she had always made her way. If she could do it on her own, they would seem—would be—her own family all the more. But getting all three of them to accept her as their mother was going to be very, very hard. She pulled up the sheet, then flung it off. The bed was hot, and she was frustrated and confused, for Jacob had sent help in the persons of the Brother and Sister Ernst.