by Celia Hayes
Practical words. Peter wondered now just how much strength it took to hold to such generous thoughts and words. His mother was a strong woman. She ran her household like a general at the head of an army and always had, but now she had buried two husbands and three of her sons lay far away in hasty graves dug into the soil of a wheat field in distant Pennsylvania. Which was irony if you like, for that was where Alois Becker and his kin had come from, all those years ago.
A general at the head of an army; well, he was done with armies and generals now. He had his certificate of parole from the Union Army tucked into his near-empty haversack to testify to that, and an empty left shirt-sleeve pinned up above the elbow to prove it also. He twisted his shoulders under the blanket-roll and the faded grey uniform jacket slung over his shoulder, shifting the sweat-making burden just a little. His trousers were military issue, but also worn to colorlessness. They had been light blue once, taken off a dead Union cavalryman, but good stout cloth at that. Peter hadn’t much cared for taking clothes off a dead man, but he and his brothers were tall and fitting garments hard to come by. By the last desperate year of the fighting he had gotten to be a lot less particular.
At the top of the drive he paused to catch his breath and rest for a moment, sitting on one of the great stones that set the gravel drive apart from the trees and the meadow below. He was thinking it was very strange there was no one about the place. His mother’s house—he could not think of it as anything other than hers—had always been as busy as a beehive, a bustle of boarders, visitors and Doctor-Papa’s patients, his friends and his older brothers coming and going at nearly all hours. Now hardly anything moved at all, save a light breeze stirring the tree leaves. The window shutters were tightly closed against the midday sun, patterned with a shifting shadow-brocade of leaves. Nothing stirred. The home-place was as somnolent as an old dog, curled up and dozing in the sun. Well, he didn’t much mind a quiet homecoming, but the unaccustomed silence sent a prickle of unease down his back. Still, Peter told himself, the war had changed a lot of things; why should he expect his mother’s house to be immune?
He hitched up his blankets and haversack again and climbed the steps to the front door, his footsteps echoing hollowly in the covered porch that ran the length of the house. But when he lifted a hand to try the door, it was locked, and that was a surprise to him. Never, since Austin had become a settled and safe place, had Margaret Becker Vining’s door been locked during the daytime.
He rapped tentatively with his knuckles on the panel, and called, “Hello! Is there anyone at home?” No answer came from within. He sighed and came down from the porch; may as well go around the back to the stables and the kitchen yard.
There must be someone about, he told himself. The door brass was as polished as it had always been and someone had scythed the grass under the apple trees not long since. He followed the graveled drive around the side; oh yes, there was a drift of smoke coming from the kitchen chimney at the back, and the smell of food cooking. He paused abruptly as he came around the veranda at the side of the house, for there was someone watching him with wary blue eyes. A small boy had half hidden himself behind a white-painted turned-wood post and a brightly glazed urn full of geraniums, and stared at Peter as if he were something rightly to be feared. At least someone was around, Peter thought with relief. Several of the French doors on the lower floor stood open to the light breeze that fanned the shaded side of the house. The child wore a black knickerbockers suit, much disarranged with dust, which Peter thought with sympathy must have been uncomfortably hot for the boy.
“Hello there,” Peter ventured tentatively, and tried to gauge the child’s age. Not ever having had much to do with children, he guessed about four or five years of age, and the round little face bore some slight resemblance to his own. Maybe this might be Horace’s boy. His older brother had married Miss Amelia Stoddard in a splendid but hurried wedding, during that breathless interval between Lincoln’s election and the firing on Fort Sumter. He had got a son on her, before the Vining boys all went to join Hood’s Brigade. Flushed with the excitement of great doings, they were. No one could tell them any different, although one had tried to warn them about what they were getting themselves into. Peter remembered Horace’s quiet happiness at hearing of the child’s safe birth. Where had they been when the letter caught up to them, and how long after? He made himself smile at the child and added, “Are you the only one about, then? I’m Peter. I would be your uncle, I guess.”
The child’s mouth rounded into an “o” of astonishment. Without a word, he turned and scampered into the nearest door, crying, “Mama, come quick! There’s another sojer outside!”
A woman’s impatient voice answered from the dim room inside, “Oh, Horrie, don’t shout like that. Be a good boy! I expect he’s hungry. Tell him to go around to the kitchen and ask Hetty for something to eat.” That was Amelia’s voice, weary and not sounding so sweet and tinkling as she always had when she spoke to Horace’s brothers. So that must be Horace’s son and a damn cold welcome from his sister-in-law, Peter said to himself and shrugged wryly. He’d always thought Amelia to be a bit of a shrew, for all her finishing school prettiness. No reason for the boy to recognize him as family, since he hadn’t been home in four years.
The boy Horrie appeared in the doorway just as Peter hitched up his blankets and haversack one more time. “Mama says to go around to the kitchen,” he said somberly.
Peter answered, “So I heard.” He didn’t expect the child to hop down from the verandah and follow after him, but the boy did, as cheeky as a sparrow once curiosity overcame his fear.
“Are you really my uncle?” Horrie questioned, breathlessly. He had to take four steps to match two of Peter’s as they strode around towards the kitchen yard and the stables.
“If you are Horace Vining Junior, then I am,” Peter answered.
Horrie looked dubious. “Mama calls me that when she’s angry,” he ventured, with an air of someone making a confession. He craned to look up at Peter as they walked, adding “But most everyone else calls me Horrie. You don’t look much like Gran-Mere’s pitchers of you. You have a long m-m-m’stashe. Are you sure you’re my uncle?”
“Positive,” Peter answered dryly. “Hetty will surely tell you so, and so will your Ma and Daddy Hurst.”
“If you say so,” Horrie conceded. And then with the frankness of the very young, he asked, “What happened to your arm?”
“A big piece of Yankee lead happened to it,” Peter answered. “And there was nothing to be done but have the surgeon cut it off before the gangrene set in.”
Horrie’s mouth rounded into that “o” of astonishment again. He seemed torn between sympathy and curiosity when he asked, breathlessly. “Did it hurt?”
“Not much,” Peter answered, which was a lie. It had hurt like the devil, and he was still plagued by phantom pains; pains in his hand and wrist, and in the forearm that was gone. How he could feel pain in a limb that wasn’t there any more was a mystery to him, and also to the kindly Major McNelley, although he had told Peter it was not, as he put it, an “unknown phenomenon.”
Peter thrust away a memory of amputated limbs, piled up like shucked corncobs by the field hospital after one or another of the battles in Tennessee; and the sound of men screaming under the surgeon’s saw because there was no laudanum, nor even any whiskey. He was one of them, at the end. No, he couldn’t speak of that here, not to Horace’s little son, or Miss Amelia. Maybe to Mama; Mama was uncommonly strong-minded for a woman. She had heard tell of practically everything in her time, no frail little magnolia flower like Miss Amelia.
Horrie looked up at him, with a child’s open sympathy already writ plain on his face, and a touch of boyish hero worship, too. “I’m glad you’re home to take care of us, Uncle Peter,” he said and then he dashed ahead of Peter as they rounded to the back of the house. The sprawl of outbuildings, the stables and the smokehouse, the summer kitchen and the woodshed—all were bakin
g in the summer noonday. A single horse dozing in the pasture beyond the stable switched its tail moodily; that and the boy running ahead were the only things moving. Behind them, Amelia anxiously called for Horrie again, but he had dashed up the stairs to the back porch and flung the door open with a crash.
“Hetty, Uncle Peter is here and Mama says you’re to give him sommat to eat!”
From around the side of the house, Amelia called faintly, “Horrie! Where are you going? Who is that?”
Peter followed his nephew into the old winter kitchen. It was the room in the oldest part of the house, dominated by the enormous fireplace, where Alois Becker had finished out his last sullen and defeated years raging at the fate which had taken away his wife and sons. Now it was the domain of Hetty, his mother’s Irish cook and aide-de-camp in the business of running a boarding house. The fireplace had long since been stopped up and replaced with a patent iron stove. Once the kitchen had been as familiar to Peter as it now evidently was to Horrie, but Peter felt awkward, an alien and a stranger. He hesitated in the doorway until Hetty looked over her shoulder and dropped the skillet she was lifting from the stovetop with a ringing like an iron bell.
“Oh, ‘tis himself at last!” Hetty cried incoherently. “Oh, to look at you! What have they done! Hurst, ‘tis the young master himself, creeping in like a beggar . . . oh the wickedness of it all! Hurst, take his things!” and she swept him into an embrace, which he suffered gladly. This was more like it, and he gave himself over to much-anticipated enjoyment. Hetty wept like a fountain and fussed over him, while Horrie jigged with excitement.
Daddy Hurst beamed all over his dark African face and quietly divested him of his haversack, canteen and blankets. “Oh, seh, seh! Such a sight for sore eyes you be, now you set yoursef down. We ‘bout gave up hope of you, Marse Peter. Hetty, give the po’ boy a plate w’ some proper supper on it, he sho’nuff ‘pears like he needs it mor’n you or me.” He patted Peter on the shoulder with enormous affection—that shoulder with a whole arm still attached to it—though he had to reach up a good ways. The old man seemed terribly moved for all that he tried to sound so stern to Hetty.
Daddy Hurst had been his mother’s coachman and man of all work for as long as Peter could remember. Technically a slave and owned by old Mr. Burnett, Daddy Hurst had worked for wages in Margaret’s household for years. Peter could not remember a time when the man had not been there, gnarled and brown like a chestnut, patient and stern with him and his brothers. There was nothing the least servile about Daddy Hurst. Peter supposed he was a free man now, although what difference that would make he could hardly imagine. But it was enough that he was still here, he and Hetty both, wrangling over the reins of authority.
Predictably, Hetty fluffed up like a banty hen. “And who do you think you are to be giving orders? Listen to him, the black heathen savage that he is!”
“Give the po’ boy some food,” Daddy Hurst scowled. Just loud enough to be heard, he mumbled, “Po’ shanty-Irish trash.” At the stove, Hetty muttered some obscure Hibernian curse in his direction and Daddy Hurst made a warding-off gesture. Watching this familiar by-play between old and fond adversaries, Peter felt something tight and hard within him loosen. Oh, yes, he was home, and Hetty and Daddy Hurst still feuded.
He noted that there were two places laid at the long kitchen table. At distant ends, of course, which was only right . . .but still. Peter wrenched his mind away from the thought that they were like an old but contentious married couple. That wouldn’t do at all.
Hetty set out another place, as Horrie chimed in, “Isn’t it grand? I saw him first, you see!”
“You hesh up, child,” Daddy Hurst chided him.
Amelia stepped into the kitchen, rounding the door from the hallway, her voice raised in annoyance, “Horrie, if I have said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times, a proper young gentleman should not consort—oh!” Her delicate fingers went to her mouth, in a pretty and dramatic gesture.
The voices of her son, Hetty and Daddy Hurst rose in chorus, “It’s Uncle Peter, Mama!” Horrie had no compunctions about shouting, “Didn’t you see him? Ain’t it grand?” He had gone over entirely to admiration of his uncle, it seemed, standing at his feet and looking up worshipfully.
“Isn’t it grand,” Amelia corrected him, and her own eyes overflowed, very prettily. But then, Amelia always did things very prettily. His brother’s wife was as delicate as a porcelain flower, and widow’s weeds made her appear elegantly frail. She reached out her hands to Peter, saying, “I am so terribly sorry for this poor welcome, Brother Peter, when we had been looking for your return for so long! You must forgive us—Horrie, child, please, remember your manners.”
“No matter.” Peter kissed her hand with a flourish and said, “I am glad to be home, Miss Amelia. I’ve no complaints about my reception. It was my fault for not sending word to you all.”
Amelia dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, as she appeared to take in Peter’s appearance for the first time. “Oh . . . your poor arm,” she said mournfully.
Peter replied with wry humor, “Look at it this way, ‘Melia—what it’ll save on the making of shirts. I’ll only have to pay for a sleeve and a half, now. Think of the money I’ll save.”
Which was exactly the wrong thing to say for Amelia’s tears redoubled and Hetty exclaimed in horror, “Oh, sor, how can you make such light of it? What would your dear sainted mother say?”
“I’m sure Mama will get out her account book and work out the savings to the penny,” Peter answered lightly. “I have no doubt of it.” It annoyed him, that Amelia and Hetty made so much of the loss of his arm. It wasn’t something that he wanted to dwell on, and he wished that people would not notice it. He couldn’t bear the look of pity in their eyes when they did. He thought that Daddy Hurst would be at least a little amused, but instead the old man looked nearly as weepy as the women.
Something was wrong, he realized. Horribly wrong. At last, Daddy Hurst whispered, dolefully, “Marse Peter . . . you don’t know?”
“Know what?” Peter asked, although in his heart he thought he already knew. “What’s wrong, Daddy? Where’s Mama?” Amelia began to sob in earnest and so did Hetty. Horrie looked in bewilderment from her towards the other adults, and Peter absently patted his nephew’s head.
At long last, Daddy Hurst answered, in tones of deepest compassion, “I’se sorry to be the one telling you, Marse Peter. We buried Miss Margaret in the East Avenue burial ground three weeks ago. Miss Amelia, she did write you a letter.” He shrugged helplessly as Peter stared at him in shocked disbelief. “She was that sick, Marse Peter, but she jus’ didn’t want anyone to know. You know how Miss Margaret was . . . a proud woman.” To Peter’s horror, it looked as if Daddy Hurst might join the women in weeping.
No, it couldn’t be, he told himself, in that first shock of disbelief. Margaret Becker Vining Williamson was vital, strong, a force of nature. As irresistible as one of those Texas thunderstorms which swept in and lit up the night sky for seeming hours with incessant bolts of lightning, tossing the branches of sturdy trees and bending the grass against the ground. An indomitable monument before whom strong men made obeisance and lesser women gave way; imperious and intelligent, worshipped, feared and loved in about equal measure. She had been here before Austin began, when the capitol was a scattering of hastily constructed, ramshackle buildings just east of the river, a friend and hostess to everyone who mattered over the three eventful decades since. Death would not presume… and yet her last living son acknowledged to himself that it had. Daddy Hurst and Hetty would not be grieving so. Her house would not be so empty, so dreadfully silent, were it otherwise.
Peter did not recollect how he came to find himself in the room which his mother kept as the family or private parlor, sitting in the chair which had been his stepfather’s favorite seat, with his head bowed to his remaining hand. He supposed that Amelia had led him there, for she was fluttering and fussing over him, Horrie st
aring like a basket of owls, and him feeling as stunned as he had been when a Yankee bullet smashed his wrist during the fight at Rice’s Station early in April. He’d been foolish and not quite taking it in, the blood and the mess and him staring and thinking it wasn’t really real. This was his own left hand; he must be able to move his own fingers. And now, his mother must be alive, with her particular and enduring mixture of practicality and affection.
But no; his left arm ended now in a scarred stump a couple of inches below the elbow. He had begun to deal with the limitations and all the tricks and strategies that a one-handed man must learn or work out for himself, to cope with the world and the tasks that it asked of him. He would have to deal with his mother’s absence. He had not realized until then how much he had counted on Margaret’s cool and common sense, an anchor in a world where everything had come adrift, gone sour, flown apart.
Amelia was talking at him, sweet fluttery nonsense, while Daddy Hurst hovered in the doorway. After some considerable time, he made his voice to work, asking in deceptively calm and level tones that they leave him alone for a bit. They did just that, Amelia shooing out her son. Horrie left with seeming reluctance, looking over his shoulder as his mother chided him in her implacable soft voice. The quiet of Margaret’s parlor settled around her youngest son, as lightly as motes of dust swirled in a narrow blade of sunshine which had managed to slip between the drapes.
Nothing much was out of place in the room, although it seemed not to have been frequented much. Margaret’s desk was closed, her account books neatly lined up on the shelves above the desk. Her sewing table and mending basket also seemed empty. Always, her basket overflowed when he and his brothers had been about. The hinged cover of her beloved piano was drawn over the ivory keys. It had been a Christmas present and wedding gift to her from her second husband, whom Peter and his brothers had always called Doctor-Papa.