Chapter 16

Geesje’s Story

Holland, Michigan
50 years earlier

I can’t remember a summer that was as cool and rainy as our first one here in Holland in 1847. Everything in our cabin stayed damp and clammy all the time, including our blankets, so we tried to keep a fire burning most of the time. It was easy to do since we were surrounded by a forest. The days were gloomy and cheerless. Thick, low-hanging clouds covered the moon and stars at night, making the woods so dark I was afraid to walk to the privy alone.

Meanwhile, new settlers arrived from home every day. Cabins and lean-tos and bark huts now dotted the forest, and the settlers began clearing patches of land. At first the new immigrants lived in the communal house or in the log house that the Ottawa Indians had built on the shores of Black Lake; Dominie Van Raalte made arrangements to purchase the log house and an acre of land from Chief Wakazoo. The natives migrated to their hunting grounds farther north during the summer months and weren’t using it. When those living conditions became overcrowded, Papa invited a young, newly arrived family named Van Dijk to stay with us while they built a cabin not too far from ours. The young couple had two small boys: Arie, who was three years old, and Gerrit, who had just turned one. Food was still very scarce since animal pests continually invaded our garden, and the Van Dijks generously shared their provisions with us in return for sharing our cabin. Mama loved those two children as if they were her own grandchildren, and the Van Dijks filled a place in her heart that had been left empty after leaving my sisters and their children behind in the Netherlands.

The cool weather made it easier for the men to work during the day, but the constant rain and flooded marshland along the nearby Black River created perfect breeding grounds for mosquitos. Thick, humming clouds of them hovered around us during the day and hummed incessantly around our heads at night as we tried to sleep. Their bites created itchy welts on every patch of our exposed skin. Mrs. Van Dijk daubed mud on her children’s faces and arms to keep the mosquitos from biting, turning the boys into little mud babies. But the itching wasn’t the worst of it. We soon learned that the mosquitos carried a disease called malaria, and it struck every home in our settlement.

Mama was the first one of us to be felled by the disease. Fever and chills left her bedridden and wracked her frail body, which was already weakened by our poor diet during the winter. Mama had always been a tiny woman, but vomiting and diarrhea quickly reduced her to skin and bones. I soaked cloths in cool water to bathe her feverish skin, then fed the fire and covered her with blankets when she shivered with chills. And I prayed. How I prayed!

Mrs. Van Dijk fell ill next, and I took over her duties, as well, cooking for all the men and caring for her two small children while nursing both women day and night. “The illness is everywhere,” Papa told us. “Every home and family in our community has been affected.”

“Why would God tell us to move to such a terrible place?” I asked. Papa ignored my question. His faith in a loving God filled every inch of his soul, leaving no room for doubt to gain a foothold. Nor could he comprehend how I could ever distrust the God he knew and loved.

“We must learn, like the Apostle Paul, to be content in whatsoever state we are in,” he said. “Paul knew how to be abased and how to abound; to be full and to be hungry; to abound and to suffer need. All for the sake of the Savior he loved.”

The next day Papa fell ill, too. In spite of all his efforts to remain strong and keep working with Maarten and Mr. Van Dijk to clear the land, the raging fever toppled him like one of the huge trees they were cutting down on our property. I watched helplessly as Papa shook with chills. All around us, people began to die from malaria. Every day Maarten whispered the news to me of another death among our fellow settlers. The oldest, the youngest, and the weakest were the first to pass away.

In spite of my prayers, the illness continued to infect our cabin until every one of us fell ill, some worse than others. I seemed to have a milder case than my parents and the Van Dijks did, so I took the two children into bed with me so their parents wouldn’t know how ill they were. Every time I drank a sip of water, I made sure the children drank some, too. Maarten kept filling the wood box and fetching fresh drinking water for everyone, even after he became sick himself. In between bouts of shaking and chills, he tended the fire and tried to cook a little porridge to help us recover our strength. The people in our community who were lucky enough to stay well or who had already recovered went from house to house with Dominie Van Raalte to help care for the sick, comfort the grieving, and, when the time came, bury the dead.

I remember sitting beside Mama in the damp darkness of our cabin late one evening, listening to the rain pattering on our roof as I tried to persuade her to eat something. She looked up at me with fever-bright eyes and said, “He keeps all His promises!”

“Who does, Mama?”

“Jesus. Our Savior. He said He would never leave us or forsake us, and He’s here, Geesje. He’s right here beside us.”

“Where, Mama?” I looked all around, wondering if the fever was making her hallucinate.

“Can’t you feel His presence, lieveling?” Her smile seemed to light up the dingy cabin. I didn’t want to tell her that in my darkest moments of sickness these past few days I had felt totally abandoned by God.

“Please don’t die, Mama!” I whispered.

“I’m not afraid of dying,” she said, smiling. “I followed Him on this journey to America, and I’ll gladly follow Him to heaven if He asks me to.”

I set down the bowl and spoon and gathered her fragile body in my arms. “Don’t leave me, Mama! Please don’t leave me!”

“If He calls my name, I want to obey. But Jesus will always be with you, Geesje, just like He’s with us right now. Can’t you feel Him? This is a holy place.”

The next morning I awoke to find two men and a woman from our settlement standing in the doorway of our cabin. Maarten came over and knelt beside my bed, tears streaming down his fevered face. “Geesje . . . Geesje, I’m so sorry. Your mother went to be with our Lord during the night.”

I insisted on getting up and helping prepare Mama’s body for burial, my tears wetting her beloved face for the last time. She looked peaceful, but I had never felt such despair. Papa and I were both too weak and too sick to attend her funeral. They buried her in the ever-expanding graveyard on the hill near the new log church.

That afternoon Dominie Van Raalte returned to our cabin with medicine that had just arrived from Kalamazoo. It was supposed to cure malaria. “The entire kolonie has become a sickbed,” he told us. “I’m sorry that I’m forced to use this medicine sparingly, but I have so little to spread among so many people.”

I wanted to rage at him for coming too late to save Mama. I turned away when he offered a dose to me. “Give it to my father and the others. And the children. Their fevers are much worse than mine.” We dissolved some of the medicine in water, and Maarten and I held little Arie and Gerrit on our laps as we forced them to drink the bitter liquid.

“Why would God allow this to happen?” I asked Maarten after Dominie was gone. “How can God expect us to have faith in Him when He puts us through such hardship? We left home at His command to start a community because we longed for religious freedom. Now we’re dying in this terrible place!”

Maarten gently stroked Arie’s sweaty hair. The child had fallen asleep in his arms. “The Bible says that ‘faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’ The godly men and women in Scripture all walked by faith, and most of them never received the things they hoped for—at least not in this life.”

“Don’t quote the Bible to me,” I said angrily. “There is no good reason in this world why Mama had to die. She trusted God!”

Papa died that evening, less than an hour after reciting the Twenty-third Psalm and the Lord’s Prayer with me as I bathed his burning forehead. Over the next few days, Mr. and Mrs. Van Dijk also died, lying side-by-side on the same pine-bough bed, their hands entwined. The cart that circulated through our settlement came to collect their bodies, adding them to all the others. Maarten and I and the two children were the only ones in our cabin who survived.

“There are so many orphans in the kolonie,” Maarten told me one evening, “that the elders have decided to build an orphanage to house them all. But I think we should take care of Arie and Gerrit ourselves. What do you say, Geesje? These little ones shouldn’t be all alone. They need us.”

I readily agreed. The children had lost their parents just as I had. They needed love. Caring for them gave me a reason to go on living as I waited for Hendrik to arrive. Maarten and I also agreed to let a middle-aged widow named Mrs. Van den Bosch and her twelve-year-old son move in with us after her husband and young daughter died of malaria, too.

At last the rain stopped. The terrible summer and the plague of malaria finally came to an end. Maarten and I were sitting outside our cabin on a fall afternoon as the leaves began to turn colors, when I looked up at him and said, “I’m not sure I believe in a loving God anymore.”

Maarten didn’t flinch at my scornful words. “Even so, Geesje, He believes in you. Nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus—not tribulation nor famine nor persecution nor death. Not things present nor things to come—”

“I don’t believe that. I feel abandoned by Him. Forsaken.”

“I’ve felt that way at times, too, these past few months,” he admitted. “But it isn’t true. We’re His, and He’s hanging on tightly to us. Nothing and no one can pluck us out of His hand.”

“But where’s the meaning in all these deaths?”

“We couldn’t understand God’s purposes even if He explained them to us. Could little Gerrit understand us if we tried to explain malaria to him or tell him how a tiny mosquito caused it? When we forced him to drink the bitter medicine that saved his life, Gerrit simply had to trust us and believe that we were doing it because we loved him.”

“Where’s the proof that God loves us? Show me, Maarten.”

He didn’t reply. I’m not sure I would have listened to him if he had.

Holland, Michigan
1897

My tiny house is much too hot for me to sit inside it all day. Derk finds me on my front porch that evening when he arrives home from the hotel. “Beautiful evening, isn’t it, Tante Geesje?” he asks.

“It’s wonderful! There’s a nice breeze off the lake that’s keeping the mosquitos away.” He bends to kiss my forehead, and I smell pine trees and lake air on his clothing. “Your skin has turned very brown from being in the sunshine all day,” I tell him. “You’re starting to look like one of the Indians who used to live down by Black Lake, except that your hair has bleached nearly white.”

He runs his fingers through it making it stick up on end. “I’m hoping you have more of your story for me to read,” he says as he flops down on one of my porch steps.

I’m reluctant to show him what I’ve written. In fact, I considered ripping out the last few pages right after I wrote them and burning them in my stove. In the end I decided not to. Derk needs to know what despair and heartache look like. His congregation will ask him many hard questions someday, like the ones I asked Maarten. Derk will need to help his parishioners find strength in God the way Dominie Van Raalte helped us during that terrible time. Sooner or later, sorrow and tragedy are part of everyone’s life. Besides, I haven’t written about the greatest sorrow of all, yet.

I fetch my notebook, and we sit on my front porch as he reads it. The sun sets so late these midsummer days that the sky remains light for a long time. When he finishes, Derk slowly closes the notebook and turns to me. “So much loss,” he says, shaking his head. “It must have been hard for you to go on.”

“Yes. . . . And now you know the truth about all my doubts. They outweighed my faith, at times.”

“And yet you weathered them, like a sturdy ship battling a storm at sea.”

“What I’ve written doesn’t shock you?”

“No,” he says. “No, I’m not shocked. I nearly gave up on God, too, remember? After my mother died? You’re the reason I didn’t, Tante Geesje. You had just lost loved ones, too, and yet you told me you didn’t hate God. You said you had decided to cling to Him like a lifeboat, and you encouraged me to do the same. You helped my father and me through that terrible time.”

“There were many people who came alongside me. And taking care of you helped me with my own grief, the same way taking care of Arie and Gerrit helped me after their parents died. Our burdens are lighter when they’re shared.”

“I like the words Maarten said that came from John’s Gospel,” Derk says. “‘Nothing and no one can pluck us out of His hand.’ God held on tightly to both of us after the Ironsides sank, and even grief couldn’t pluck us out of His hand.”

I hear the emotion in his gravelly voice. I’m surprised by the tears that suddenly fill my eyes as he refers to my favorite Bible promise. No one can pluck us out of God’s hand.

“When my parents were gone and God was all I had,” I said, “I discovered that He is enough. I survived malarial fever, so I knew He must have a purpose for me on this earth even though I couldn’t see it. I kept moving forward, one tiny step at a time, clinging to Him in faith. And isn’t that the definition of faith—moving forward through the darkness, clinging to God?”

Derk rises from his seat and gathers me into his warm, sun-browned arms. “I love you, Tante Geesje,” he murmurs.

“Ik hou ook van jou,” I tell him. I love you, too.