Enchanted Heart

by Brianna Lee McKenzie

  Along the one-hundred-fifty mile journey, many of the settlers in this party fell in their tracks as they walked alongside the few wagons that were lucky enough to be pulled from the mire of the muddy marshland. Marty watched in horror as the people and animals were left behind, like the tracks from the wheels, to become a permanent part of this heartless land. Stark skeletons of men, women and children dotted the prairie alongside the bones of oxen, giving the trail to New Braunfels an ominous impression to those who would follow the first wave of settlers, a pristine path of bleached bones unmistakably marking the way. Of the six thousand original immigrants, who walked alongside Marty and her family, only fifteen hundred survived the march from the coast to their new settlement, a number that the seven-year-old could not fathom, but one that she knew was less than it should be.

  But more were coming from their native land to replace those who had died and more would die on their way to the Promised Land, as they had come to call this hopeful new territory. And, like the ones who walked with her and those who had fallen in their tracks, they were all willing to risk lives, limbs and fortunes on this remarkable endeavor called the Fisher-Miller Grant.

  There was no doubt in Marty’s mind that there would be someone to replace poor Papa as she laid a cool cloth to her father’s feverish forehead. Another father or mother, a sister, brother or friend would walk that same long journey as she had, or would become ill upon arrival in this new land, as Papa had. Possibly, the next column of immigrants would survive and their bones would not show the way to the new settlement, but those people would live on to honor those who had died.

  She looked out the back of the wagon at her twin sister, Margarethe and her mother, who stumbled on a rock and was righted by the hand of her husband’s business partner Sven Reinhold. They were thin, she thought as she sniffed away the fear that gripped her heart. At least Greta had recovered from her ship sickness, as Papa had called it. But, Mama would never make it if she did not find food to eat and a place to rest her weary feet. Greta would simply die if something happened to Mama or Papa, for even though her twin was her mirror image; her sister was weak and frail.

  Then, she turned back to look at Papa, who had opened his eyes and who stared at her as if she was his lifeline. His face lit up with a smile that made her think that he was going to recover and he raised his feeble hand to catch hers in his palm.

  “Marty,” he sighed with great fortitude as he rolled his head on the pillow to face her. “You are my strong one. You have to make sure that Mama and your sister get to the Promised Land. I am afraid I won’t make it there myself.”

  “No, Papa!” Marty argued while she squeezed his large hand in her tiny one. “You’ll get better. You’ll see your new land. You have to!”

  Papa sighed again and let his head loll back on the pillow to stare at the canvas cover. His eyes followed the curving frame that held the heavy cloth in position above him and, in his mind; he equated his daughter to that sturdy metal apparatus, which seemed to be the backbone of the wagon that carried him. He moved his head back to face her and he bored his eyes into hers before he begged her, “Promise me, Marty. Promise that you will be strong and take care of your Mama and Greta.”

  All Marty could do was nod, for the tears that threatened to spill over her dark lashes seemed to halt her speech. In her faithful heart, she knew that Papa expected her to take his place in the family no matter how infantile she may appear on the outside, for her inner strength seemed to exude from her miniscule body and declare her worthiness to her father as a replacement for his capacity to bind this family together and to deliver it to the land of promise.

  Hans Hirsch patted her hand and closed his eyes again as he let out a breath of liberation. Then he opened his mouth to whisper as if he had no more energy to say it aloud, “Go on, Marty. Go to the Promised Land. Live my dream for me.”

  When the empty silence enveloped her, Marty leaned over to cry upon Papa’s barely moving chest and she promised, “I will, Papa! I will!”

  Then she kissed his forehead and looked out the back of the wagon at her poor, sickly sister and felt a tug of appreciation for her own tenacity to carry on. Yet still, there was a tiny bit of jealousy for that skinny little red-headed girl who carried no burden on her frail shoulders, no yoke of responsibility, no encumbering obligation to assume the role of the foundation of her family.

  But there was great love for her twin in her heart and she took on that role with pride and principle. Greta needed her, as if they were joined by some invisible bond where one could not exist without the other. And that bond gave Marty the drive to undertake the task of taking care of her mirror image, no matter the cost to herself.

  “Greta,” she called to the emaciated girl who stooped to pick up a flower. “You look tired.”

  Her sister skipped ahead of her mother and hopped up as Marty pulled her inside the wagon. That same cheerful smile on Greta’s ever-present optimistic face greeted her sister in the shadows of the canvas cover.

  “I’ll stay with him, Marty,” Greta said, her face turning concerned for Papa. “You should stretch your legs a little.”

  “Thank you, Greta,” Marty said with a smile at her twin sister who seemed to read her mind. She eased her thin body over the planks of the wagon gate and stepped onto the hard ground below. She almost lost her balance when tufts of Texas grass snatched at her feet when they hit the ground. But she regained her composure and watched her wagon continue to move forward while she stood on the endless mound that separated the twin tracks in the unyielding soil.

  She walked beside Mama for some time, drawing idle conversation from her in order to ease her mother’s worries about Papa. She took Mama’s hand and swung it in hers, extracting a miniscule smile on Mama’s withering face. But when Mama told her to run ahead to bring back some water, she did as she was told.

  As she neared the wagon, Marty saw her sister’s stricken face and she knew that Papa was gone. Greta had not screamed to Mama or to Marty when she had witnessed poor Papa passing away. Instead, she had crawled to the edge of the wagon gate to quietly sit and stare, as if frozen in her grief. With a tear-stained face, she blankly watched the winding row of wagons and walking people that followed her. And that was where her sister found her, clinging to the rigid boards of the wagon gate as if they could somehow give her strength.

  When Marty saw her sister’s fearful eyes, her heart melted. She scurried over the gate and hugged her fragile sister, whispering comforting words into her ear. Then she took Greta’s hand and they knelt beside Papa to pray for his soul. Opening her eyes again, Marty wondered if she should tell Mama right away or wait until dark when the wagons stopped for the night. She leaned over to cover Papa’s lifeless face with Mama’s quilt. Deciding to wait, she sat with him, remembering the long journey from Germany and then from the Texas coast that the family had taken in order to get to their new home. And knowing that Papa would never see it, she silently vowed to him as he took his final journey that she would tell him all about it when she saw him in Heaven.

  She leaned close to Papa’s ear and promised, as if he could hear her from way up there in his new Promised Land, she whispered, “I’ll live your dream, Papa.”

  “What did you tell him?” Greta asked, wringing her hands in her skirt.

  “I told him good-bye and that I love him,” Marty lied.

  Greta repeated the actions that her sister had made and whispered into her father’s unhearing ear, “I love you Papa. I won’t say good-bye. I’ll see you in Heaven.”

  That night was filled with mournful sobs from the three females who huddled in the wagon bed around the man whose dream had all but died with him. Mama dressed Papa in his finest clothes after the girls had washed his thin body, her frail hands lovingly pressing on the coat that covered his chest as if this feeble fabric would warm his cold and lifeless limbs. A woeful sigh brought tears of anguish from her heartbroken body and she fell across him, losing all tenacit
y to raise her prone frame and continue with life.

  Marty looked at Greta and wondered if they were about to lose their mother as well and if she was going to have to take care of her twin sister all by herself. The thought of carrying on, being both mother and father to a child who is the exact same age as herself made her suddenly weak with fear. But, just as she summoned the courage to undertake that endeavor, Mama drew in a breath of resolve, pulled her body erect and cleared her throat.

  “He would want us to go on,” she announced as if telling them a bedtime story. “On to the land that we were promised. He would want that, I’m sure.”

  In her mind, Adelaide wondered where else they would go except to the new land. They certainly could not go back, not by themselves at least, without an escort. Onward was their destiny and they would make that journey in honor of the man who had followed a dream that, for him, could only be realized beyond the Pearly Gates on the golden streets of Heaven. He had found his Promised Land. Theirs lay far, far away beyond the horizon that swayed with the heat of the sun and the rippling waves of the grass that stretched eager blades toward the cloudless sky.

  “Yes, Mama,” Marty agreed and remembering those same words from Papa’s trembling lips she squared her shoulders with the resolve to make it so. She looked at Greta, who had ducked her face into the collar of her blouse. “He would want us to go on, wouldn’t he Greta?”

  Greta’s sad and fearful blue eyes looked up at her while her chin remained planted on her chest as she muttered with a shrug, “I suppose.”

  “Of course he would,” Marty retorted with her nose wrinkled in exasperation at her sister’s pathetic helplessness. Then, she felt compelled to hug her sister, to wipe away the sadness that welled in her eyes. Her thin arms embraced her mirror image while deft fingers swiped away the tears in her own mournful eyes.

  “Yes he would,” Mama agreed with a nod that neither girl saw, for they had pulled apart only far enough to stare at each other in silent bonding.

  All fell silent as the night drained its darkness into the morning clouds. Before the wagons began their daily drive westward, Mama told the wagon master of her loss. But, since there was no time for ceremony or even to dig him a proper grave, he was pulled from their wagon and dropped on the ground beside it.

  Dressed in his best clothes with his Bible in his hands, he lay straight and proud, facing the new homeland while the wagon left him behind, taking with it the family that he had cherished and the dreams that he had envisioned long ago when this promise of free land without taxes or persecution had been offered to him. At that moment, the land that he would forever own, it turned out, was the five-foot-nine by three-foot patch of Texas dirt that he lay upon, but he claimed it with eternal pride.

  Marty stood beside her father for some time while the other wagons ambled past her and she cursed the people who walked beside them for being alive and well and able to go on. Her tiny heart beat wildly in her chest and her face streamed muddy tears of both anger and grief. Then, with one final kiss on Papa’s cheek, and the resolve to make his dream come true, she ran to catch up with her wagon and the only family that she had left here in this harsh and hateful land.

  And as she slowed to a walk, she vowed right then and there that she would take care of Mama and Greta and that they would never be sad again. She knew in her heart that she was taking on a task that would prove to be daunting if not terrifying, for having to become an adult at the tender age of seven was frightening in itself and having to care for a frail sister and a mournful mother would certainly take a lot out of her. But she was prepared for the mission that she had imposed upon herself and her small body seemed to raise itself three inches in her resolve to watch over the ones who needed her.

  Marty Hirsch swore that she would face any adversity, any future tragedy or heartache in order to insure that Mama and Greta were safe and happy. She vowed to Papa, if not to herself, that his vision of owning land, land that no one could take away from him and land that would require no price except the sweat of his brow, the labor of his body and the love in his heart, would be realized by her growing determination to make that dream her own.

  Chapter Three

  Tragedy seemed to be overcome by time’s never-ending journey to renew itself by bringing forth new life. While death declared war upon the settlers, they somehow fought back by creating new members to love and cherish, replacing those lost on the long journey from Germany to the Promised Land. But more often than not, the loss of a loved one seemed to loom like a dark cloud of sadness upon the grief-stricken families that made up the town of New Braunfels. Heartache had certainly not passed by the Hirsch family during the long years since they had first set foot on Texas soil.

  When Papa died that first year, Marty thought that there could be no going on without him, no walking forward and no happiness would follow her. But when she and Mama and her twin sister Greta finally stopped with the wagons and the other immigrants from Germany, she knew in her young heart that the surrounding countryside would cradle them in its beauty. And, she realized, with an uplifted spirit, that if this picturesque new locality did not heal their hearts, it would certainly heal their aching bones.

  But there was no rest for the settlers, for they needed to build shelter, homes for the weary and hearths for the freezing families in the newborn town. Everyone helped in this endeavor and everyone worked as one body, one soul and one entity until all were cozy in their own little abodes. Some were put into communal housing until smaller homes could be built for them. But by winter time, all were under roof, something that they had not experienced since their first day in the new country.

  Marty and her family were settled into a large building with two other families who had also lost the heads of their households. Each family took its own private space in the structure, which was a diminutive area cordoned off by blankets that had been hung over ropes. This overcrowded confinement was fine with Marty, for she and Mama and Greta felt quite comfortable in their small quarters inside the communal dwelling. It seemed like home to Marty and home was a word that she had longed to say in her heart and on her lips since she had left the one where she had lived back in Germany.

  That home where she had been born seemed so far away, so long ago that Marty could not recall any part of it. All of her memories, both good and bad, had been replaced by the seemingly endless ride on the rolling waves of the ocean and then the cold and wet weeks on the shores of Texas, followed by the long and treacherous walk to the town that the older people called New Braunfels. It had all been gobbled up by the boundless grief of losing Papa and the trepidation of facing this new adventure without him to guide her and to take care of her mournful family, a role that she had lovingly assumed that dreadful day on the prairie while life had passed her by.

  But life seemed to renew itself as time elapsed and Mama’s heart was somehow healed by the loving arms of Papa’s business partner Sven Reinhold. Marty did not complain about the union, for seeing Mama smiling again made her love the new man in their life, even though he was not new at all to them. Her new step-father, whom she had known since she was a baby, was a loving and dear man to her and she could not think of a more perfect man to replace her Papa in her life, if not in her heart.

  Sven built a new home for them on the land that had been deeded to him, which lay just a mile from town. Being a married man with a family to provide for, he had been granted over three hundred acres to farm. He tilled the rocky dirt from sun up to sun down until it was planted and waiting for the sun and the rain to make a crop out of it before he rode into town to rebuild the business that he and his former partner had created before their journey to Texas.

  As a blacksmith, a cooper and a carpenter Sven had been Papa’s partner in the old country. Together, they had formed their business in the little town of Wasserburg, Germany on the Inn River where they had not only forged tools and farming equipment but beautiful tin-ware and copper kettles. In his tiny new shop
on the edge of New Braunfels, Sven not only made harness rings, plows, shovels, and other farming implements, but he also fashioned ornate bowls, kettles, pots and other fine household utensils. His new business brought in enough money for him to build a bigger house by the time the twins turned fifteen. Together, the family lived in the new house until the girls became wives and moved into their own homes.

  Marty married Elias Ingram when she was nineteen, after she had studied diligently for her teacher’s certificate and after she had established a means of supporting herself if she was ever expected to do so. She loved him because of his intellectual formality and his elegant charm, which propelled him into politics and ascended them into the upper crust of society. But because he was a lawyer and spent most of his time either in court or courting political allies, she rarely saw him, which made her eventually hate the lavish lifestyle that she had married into.

  Elias had studied at West Point and Harvard University before he had come back home to New Braunfels as a stark opposite of the boy who had left his meager farm years before. And when the Civil War started, he joined the Southern Rebels because of the Confederate Conscription Law, which had demanded that all men enlist in the Confederate Army or face death and loss of lands. He left his wife, hoping that his loyalty to the South would indemnify their civic status and personal welfare, only to be killed in action a few months later, leaving Marty with more misery than she cared to combat. And as the months waned into years, her large house became lonely and empty, an overwhelming replica of her broken heart. The echo of her own voice grew distasteful and repugnant to her solitary ears in that big, lonely mansion. Many times, she found herself gravitating back to the house that Sven had built for them, where love reverberated in every room.