The Gillespie Country Fair

by Marc Hess

  A moment later, Carel acquiesced to the seat they had saved for him and pulled Caitlin onto his lap. A wine glass was set out for him and, without the slightest pause in whatever she was saying, Jeanie reached over to pour out a thin pink rosé. Carel held up his hand and shook his head. As the ladies gushed on, Carel silly-talked with his niece, who pushed the kitten puppet into his face whenever his attention strayed to others at the table.

  Their eager topic was Thea, who had met a man through an online dating service—a recently divorced guy from an Austin suburb. “So, we’ll be seeing a lot more of you in the city,” they laughed.

  “I’ve thrown in the towel on the local dudes,” Thea told them, explaining that she had reached out to the Internet for something she hoped would be more … well, whatever it was that she was looking for.

  “Ah, yes,” the other ladies emoted, casting their blameful eyes to the local man at the table.

  Carel knew they would soon be inventing stories about him and Cora Lynn—stories that started with After all he’s done for her, or maybe He never deserved her or I can’t believe how he screwed her over. The rosé nudged their fanciful prattle toward viciousness.

  Carel ordered a beer, one of those stylish ones in a designer bottle, made by monks in Europe. Those bottles were smaller and the beer more bitter—flavorful, but not made for drinking on a hot day. You couldn’t get a Lone Star these days at chic wine bars like the one on Lincoln Street.

  He leaned back and watched how the gaggle of girls spoke to one another, so fully engaged, with their eyes continually scanning their opposites, like radar, working to drag more out of each other. He recalled how Cora Lynn would look him over like that. It made him feel like he was being interrogated, as if he weren’t doing enough for her. What more did she want from him? Carel sighed loud enough to interrupt the palaver around the table.

  “God knows I could never really connect with that woman.” Jeanie barged into his thoughts—uncanny how she seemed to know what he was thinking. “Too much makeup, like she was hiding something.”

  “Well, did you ever get a good look at her complexion? I mean she had a lot to cover up,” Gerdie teased.

  “That’s my wife you’re talking about.” Carel stopped them. “You might have enough courtesy to carry on this conversation behind my back.”

  The ladies reached for their glasses in one synchronized motion.

  Carel pressed against the back of his chair and distracted himself by rolling his shirt sleeves up in slow, deliberate folds, unable to turn his thoughts away from his wife.

  She was suffering right now. Cora Lynn was not one to spaz out or go for the drama, but she was hurt, crushed inside. He had provided the things that he had promised her: the big house, the shiny new truck, and all the status that was going to come with the money they were going to make. Then he pulled it all out from under her. Like none of it was ever real. It would leave a scar on her—he knew that. He had no idea how she would get past that. But it had to be done.

  If I lost her with the house, then so be it.

  The kitten popped into his face. “My kitty! My kitty, Uncle Carel. He wants some milk.”

  “Well, you see that man over there?” He pointed across the patio. “His name is Ross.”

  “The man with the white dress?”

  “That’s his apron, sweetheart. He won’t like it if you call it a dress.”

  “Okay. Why does he have an apron?”

  “You go show him your kitty. He can get you some milk.”

  Caitlin skipped off on her assigned mission, and Carel turned around to meet the curious stares of a table full of mothers.

  “Listen, Carel,” his sister said. “Austin could be a good place for you right now. You can come stay with me and Caitlin. This town has had enough of you.”

  “Thanks for that, sis. But, broke or not, I’m too much a part of this place to end up somewhere else.”

  “You don’t even have a place to stay.”

  “And no one likes you here,” Gerdie threw in, just to taunt him.

  Carel smirked back at Gerdie and responded to Jeanie. “I’m going out to Uncle Victor’s place. Fix it up. I’m sure the family will let me stay there as long as I make some improvements.”

  “Uncle Victor’s! Why, that place is all broken down.” She acted appalled. “No one’s lived there since Uncle Victor died. Nothing works out there. No water. No electricity. No nothing.”

  Carel scooched his chair back to leave. “I figure if a guy’s going to start all over again, it’s best to start with nothing. That way, you can find out what you really got.”

  • • •

  Standing a fair distance from the house, the outside cooker at Uncle Victor’s tumbledown ranch was the only thing that wasn’t crumbling into decay. Victor Geische and some of his friends had built that cooker when he ranched and rodeoed from his homestead off of Ranger Creek. Seasoned with decades of soot and family memories, the cinderblock trough was the size of a dining room table. It had a tin hood cantilevered with a pail of stones so that it could be lifted open with one hand. Logs of dry oak were burned down to coals on an open fire that was just a shovel toss away from the firebox—a setup that kept a fairly constant temperature for the long, slow smoking that was the defining trait of Geische barbeque.

  Carel was using the outside cooker now because the kitchen inside the house didn’t have a working stove; it was just hot plates and a microwave oven in there. The icebox was a charming antique that required a particular combination of dry ice and block ice to keep anything cool for longer than a couple of days. The house did have a spigot that ran chalky well water, but that sink was not actually inside the kitchen. The dwelling, a relic of a pioneer home, had figured into Carel’s grand plans for the Ranger Creek subdivision. This was the place where the official Texas historical marker was going to go, if he’d ever gotten one. Now he was just trying to put a roof over his own head.

  The homestead was family property. With the dreams of a big subdivision—making him the richest Geische of all time—gone bust, the family didn’t mind Carel fixing it up so he could do something more practical with the land. Like raise some Spanish goats.

  The day that Cora Lynn came back, Carel was sweat-soaked and unshaven. He was on his back, half stuck under the floorboards, trying to fix a saddle clamp onto a rusty old galvanized pipe that had been leaking for at least a dozen years. He could hear the vehicle banging its way up that unpaved caliche road for some time, but he couldn’t tell if it was a car or a truck until he heard the door slam shut. He just lay still where he was, hoping that he wouldn’t be found.

  She stepped carefully across the wary floorboards in high heels and her new hairdo. Sweat stung Carel’s eyes as he stared up at her.

  “I took that job at Crossing Creek Realty.”

  “Oh?” Carel wiggled his way out from between the warped planks.

  “I had to put a home address on the employment papers. So I just wrote down ‘Uncle Victor’s old place out on Ranger Creek.’ I didn’t know if they even had street numbers out here.”

  “You get street numbers after you get your subdivision permit. We never got that far.” Carel shook his head. “And I don’t know what’s in worse shape, this house or our marriage. What I promised you was a big slice of the pie. I really wanted to make a difference here. I really did. For you and me both. But this is where I ended up. This is all I got for you.” With the vice grips still in his hand, he waved his arm around the room. Then sheepishly he added, “Got to build it up from here.”

  “You mean to say ‘all we got right now.’” With ladylike grace, Cora Lynn stooped to her heels and leaned over top of him. She spoke softly, as if she were trying to keep a secret from being overheard, her mouth close to his ear. “Ever since I was a little girl, you know, I was planning to marry me a cowboy. Never wanted one of those pantywaist, TV types with the brushed-off hat and the shiny boots and all. But a real tough-guy cowboy with mud on hi
s boots, who might even throw a punch every now and again. I think I got me the real thing here.”

  She paused, looked back down on him, and said, “Just my luck, damn it.” She pressed her cherry red lipstick hard into his stubbled cheek. Carel rolled his dry lips onto hers, and his whole world fell into place.

  • • •

  On Sunday afternoon Carel had some jalapeño wrapped around a tiny quail breast with a strip of bacon stacked up in Uncle Victor’s cooker, next to seven pounds of juice-dripping pork butt. Off to the side he kept a pail of ice with a few longnecks of Lone Star sticking out. Up by the house, a picnic table was crowded with serving bowls covered in aluminum foil: German potato salad, pole beans, sauerkraut.

  Half a dozen cousins, Cora Lynn’s boys, and some friends had come out to help him shore up the old ranch house—just the kind of thing that the old Germans did around here. Justin and Jordan had brought out a truckload of lumber that they had scavenged from a building site as well as a whole lot of shingles bought on local handshake credit.

  Jock Ritzi, the cousin who was no good with a hammer, was banging away on the new roof beams. He stopped from time to time to holler at his kids, who were running through the dilapidated barn. “You boys! You boys stay out of there, or you’re going to get your head cut in.”

  Carel looked over the scene from his spot by the cooker and made a mental note to check the square of that frame where Jock was hammering. He raised the lid to poke at the pork butt and push at the quail wraps.

  “You keep that lid down, boy. You know that if you’re lookin’, you ain’t cookin’,” said Sheriff Otto, swaggering down the slight decline to the cooker, minding his balance. “Brought y’all some bread from Mr. Dietz. You can’t have a legal picnic in Gillespie County without Dietz’s pumpernickel bread.”

  Carel pulled a Lone Star from an ice pail, popped the top off, and handed it to Otto, all with one hand. The two of them kicked back and watched Jock’s son Josh bend down an old fence post and fall to the other side.

  “Josh! You get your rump off that fence right now,” Jock was hollering from the roof beams. Everyone could hear him, but no one figured that he would come off that ladder. “You get over here right now.” Jock’s other boys scampered behind the barn, out of earshot.

  “Funny how life just goes ’round in circles.” Otto gestured with his beer. “Just like you kids back then.”

  “Which kids?” Carel asked.

  “All y’all.” Otto looked out over the place he knew so well. “It would all look just like this. We were out there putting up that barn for the first time. That same barn right there. Victor would be standing right there where you are, smokin’ a brisket and sucking down a beer. The ladies’d be dressing the table, just like they are now. And you would be running off with kleiner Max and old Teddy Hilss’s little girl, Mari.”

  That was enough of a stroll down memory lane for Carel, but he didn’t say anything to interrupt the sheriff.

  “All three of y’all. You’d be cutting up. Always into something. And you, Carel, you were always the one who got caught with your britches down.”

  Carel preferred to forget all that.

  “That’s ’cause you were always tryin’ to get ahead of yourself.” Otto gave his nephew a slap on the back. “You should be proud that you gave it a good try, Carel. But this here land don’t let a boy get too far ahead of himself.”

  That was the bitter side of this German Hill Country legacy, and Carel knew it well. Everyone gets held in their place.

  “We’re so blessed to be able to live in a place like Gillespie County,” Otto said. “It’s good that things don’t never change around here.”

  “Amen to that.”

  Their bottles clinked together, and they chugged down their beers.

  • • •

  Willow wasn’t moving in with her fiancé like she had told her mom. She kept that secret even as they spent a weekend together sorting through the furniture, closets, and clothes bins deciding what they were going to keep and what they would be giving to St. Vincent de Paul.

  “The bank’s been calling me. Carel’s been calling me too. I’m not answering. They’ve done enough damage,” Mari told her daughter as they lugged a bookshelf off the porch. It was sweaty work, and they both knew this would be the last time they would be doing something together at this house. So they lingered and took a lot of iced-tea breaks out on the front porch.

  “Actually think I’ll like livin’ in the Sunday house.” Mari smiled. “It’s small and manageable. The first building my family put up on this place. Getting back to my roots.”

  “There won’t be any more bed-and-breakfast money coming in now that you’ll be living there.”

  “I didn’t mind the visitors from time to time, but I really didn’t care for cleaning up after ’em all the time.”

  “You worried about the money?”

  “I’m always worried about money.”

  “You can turn it into a whorehouse.”

  “Willow Geische!” Mari tried to scold while her daughter laughed. “That is the kind of thing a good mother would have taught her daughter never to say.”

  Willow dug deeper. “The way this town is changing, you never know what’s gonna be the next trend.”

  Mari sighed and took a long drink from her iced tea. When Willow stopped smart-alecking, Mari removed the small silver cross from around her neck, the cross that Willow had so often borrowed. She raised it over her head and placed it around her daughter’s neck.

  “I’m done now,” Mari said without sentiment or a tear. “I gave you all my love. Did all I could as a mother to you. You are in God’s hands now.”

  Willow held off leaving until Sunday evening, when her mother stayed after church for the weekly fellowship dinner—a solid alibi. Willow came by the house alone and tossed the last of her stuff into the black Dodge Challenger that used to belong to one of her fathers.

  There was a message from her mother on her phone, but Willow was done with news from her old life. She didn’t want anything to weaken her resolve, so she dropped her phone into the downstairs toilet and was done with it. I’m not coming back.

  Driven by an impulse—the same undoubting urge that had guided razor blades through her skin—Willow started gathering up newspapers and cardboard, she piled them up on the floor next to the stairwell and lit a match under them. She piled on larger pieces of wood—chair legs and kitchen drawers that she had pulled out and busted up into smaller pieces.

  Fledgling flames grabbed at the paper, licked at the baseboards, and filled the room with white smoke. After dumping some books on top of the struggling fire. Willow realized this was going to be more of a chore than she had time for. She scuffled out of the house and crossed the yard to the garden shed, where they kept fuel cans for their lawnmower.

  If anyone was paying attention, they would have been able to see the windows leaking white smoke. It burned Willow’s eyes when she went back in. She couldn’t get close to the flames that were scrubbing the lower walls, so she just threw the entire can onto the heap.

  A great ball of orange-red flame roared through the room, pushing her backwards and singeing her eyebrows. That should do it. Willow felt the air drawing through the kitchen door as she walked out for the last time, deliberately leaving it open and getting into her car.

  There was no need for headlights until she was a long way beyond the city limits, past the sign that welcomed visitors with its prophetic greeting:

  Fredericksburg

  An Enduring Heritage

  She was just minutes down the road, and all of that “enduring heritage” was light-years behind her. Past Harper, the next town out, and barely out of Gillespie County, she was starting to get a little antsy behind the wheel. She didn’t hear any sirens. No one chasing after her.

  Coming upon the big merge onto Interstate 10 in Junction, Texas, Willow was out of the gate, dropping into a slot on the interstate, slipping into the c
urrent of fast-moving cars and trucks, with the fading light of the Hill Country framed in the back window like the disappearing image on a postcard. The speed of the Challenger crept up of its own volition. The familiar radio stations crackled off the air, and a slow darkness rolled onto the highway until her entire world lay in the narrow cones of her own headlights. Road signs went past in a blur …

  Sonora 28 mi

  Ozona 62 mi

  El Paso 624 mi

  … with nothing in between. Five more hours of driving, and she would still be a long way from the Texas border—a long way to the rest of her life.

  KHOS 92.1, the old country music station out of Sonora, was all Willow could find on the far side of the hills. She took it on board like a hitchhiker, something that she didn’t like but that would keep her company until, hours later, it got lost in a puddle of static. Then there was nothing but that endless spackle of stars and the occasional QuickStop with its dirty bathrooms and stale iced tea. Crossing through a West Texas night was like shooting through a rabbit hole, some kind of bend in reality that needs to be breached before you can get beyond the long reach of the ones who claim they love you. Willow figured it was a drive best done at night, when the highway was cool and the anguished desolation of the Permian Basin was hidden in the dark.

  Well behind her, an orange and yellow blaze licked at the walls of her past like the flames of a baptism reaching out to wash her clean. If there was some kind of mission to all of this, Willow didn’t know what it was. She didn’t care. She was just driving.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MARC HESS has lived in Fredericksburg long enough to see this venerable and rock-rimmed German farming community morph into the chic, new-age tourist destination that it is today. Steeped in a career of magazine publishing and travel writing, Marc is the founding publisher of The Insider’s Guide To The Texas Hills and has raised his family among the Germans who cling tightly to the beauty of their heritage. Marc currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Writer’s League of Texas.