by Celia Hayes
The journey was tiring enough that eventually he slept for real, during the last miles into the hills. He woke to a land of rolling limestone hills, quilted in green and gold. Meadows of autumn grasses and wheat fields, some in harvest and some still luxuriantly long, were stitched with oaks and rivulets of clear green water. Cattle grazed in the river-bottoms, or stood switching their tails in the shade. Once there was a herd of sheep, drifting across a distant hillside like a ragged cloud. The steeples, rooftops and chimneys of the town ahead were embedded in more green trees, like raisins in one of Hetty’s sweet rolls. The coach bumped and swayed through a creek crossing, and there they were: the houses of Friedrichsburg closing in on either side, pretty little plastered houses like New Braunfels.
The coach crossed a single wide street and pulled up next to a sprawling ramble of bigger buildings, set in a garden of roses and green vines growing over standing pergolas.
“This is the Nimitz place,” cautioned the stage driver. “Last place in 2,000 miles for clean sheets and a good meal.”
“And a hot bath,” added one of the debarking passengers. Peter jumped down, and scanned the street. It looked like a big town; not as large as Austin, but large enough that it might take some time to find Carl Becker’s family, or someone who knew of them. He took up the grip with his things and followed the others back along the street. A huge tree overhung half the road and a stable-yard. Beyond was a large bathhouse; even in late afternoon there were plenty of bathers making use of it. May as well get a room, and spend the next day searching town.
The hotel owner, Captain Nimitz, was a wiry, fair-haired man of middle age. His eyes looked as if he was accustomed to viewing things farther away than the scattering of dusty visitors in his tidy hotel lobby. He seemed a jolly sort, welcoming his guests in German and English. Some of them seemed to be well-acquainted, from the laughter elicited by his remarks. After Peter engaged a room for the night, he ventured the question uppermost in his mind. “I’m looking for some kin of mine—the family of Carl Becker.” Captain Nimitz looked at him quite skeptically, and Peter hastened to add, “My mother was his older sister. She’s dead now, but her friends all thought that Uncle Carl’s family was living here in Friedrichsburg, or nearby.”
“You’re very much in luck,” Captain Nimitz exclaimed. His whole mien had changed to one of genuine rather than professional welcome. “They are here right now, around in back. The wedding is tomorrow, you see. When I first saw you, I wondered what suddenly put young Dolph in mind! The two of you look like brothers. If they’re finished loading dishes and gone already, I’ll send you after them in the trap.” He turned and called into a doorway behind the hotel’s simple desk, “Bertha, komen sie hier, bitte,” He rattled off what sounded like directions to the pretty girl who emerged from the back room like a doe emerging from the woods and added, “I’ll see that your bag is put into your room, if you care to leave it with me.”
“Komm,” whispered Bertha shyly. She led Peter down the hallway, past the counter, past what sounded like a busy taproom, through a kitchen just as busy, and out the back of the Nimitz Hotel to a yard with a hitched wagon standing in it. Two young women and a small girl about Horrie’s age hovered around a pair of young men carrying a heavy wicker hamper between them. The men lifted it with much effort into the back of the wagon. Peter waited by the back door and, as they came back for a second load, he saw that one of them was the German teamster lad who had given him a ride, weeks ago. The other had to be his cousin Dolph, grown nearly as tall as his father, with something of the same self-contained look and the same clear blue eyes. The girl, Bertha, said something in German to the two women, and they turned towards him, curiously.
Peter stood dumbstruck, for the taller of the two was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in the flesh, a veritable goddess with a riot of red-gold curls around a perfect, heart-shaped face and eyes as dark as morning glory flowers. He could not help himself, staring at her and searching for something to say for one long moment. It did not escape him that his cousin and the others noted this with amusement, as if it happened often. Well, of course it did, he chided himself.
He tore himself away from contemplating the glory of her eyes, as his cousin Dolph gravely observed, “Cousin Peter? Peter Vining? It is really you? Been a while, hasn’t it?” Dolph’s eyes went very briefly to Peter’s empty sleeve, as if it was noted but as something that did not matter very greatly. He spoke briefly, a quiet murmur in German to the others, evidently explaining who he was, before he continued in English. “This is my cousin Jacob—he says you’ve met already— Cousin Anna, and my Aunt Rosalie, and my little sister Lottie. I don’t think you have met them at all. What brings you into Friedrichsburg?”
“Long story,” Peter answered, still unable to look away from the beautiful woman. Aunt Rosalie? Whose kin was she? She looked as unlike Uncle Carl’s wife as it was possible to be and still be female, and she was scarcely his own age. The little girl clung to her hand, neither bashful nor bold. Oh, the child was one of the Beckers all right; blue eyes, the color of the sky and hair so fair as to be nearly white. “I just got back from . . .from the east and thought I’d look for you. I was told that my mother thought you’d been left in a bad way.”
“Not so much,” Cousin Dolph shrugged, guardedly. Hetty was right; he wasn’t one to give much away. “We’re doing all right now. It’s a bit scrambled at the moment, with the wedding tomorrow.”
“Our little Rose is marrying her brave soldier boy,” the other young woman explained, the one to whom he had paid hardly any notice, while the beautiful Aunt Rosalie blushed. “We have hardly enough plates for the multitude, so Mrs. Nimitz is lending us sufficient.” She spoke English with a decided accent; a tiny woman with skin as pale as cream, and sleek brown hair. Anywhere else but next to Miss Rosalie, she would have drawn every male eye.
“I think my heart has just now been broken,” Peter bowed gallantly over Miss Rosalie’s hand and then Miss Anna’s, “to know that Miss Rosalie has been here all this time, and now it is too late. Her husband to be is one very lucky man, but at least I have the chance to admire both of you!”
“From a distance,” Miss Anna observed, tartly. Peter thought that Dolph and Jacob exchanged a look of amused commiseration. He quickly dropped Anna’s fingers.
“I’d ask you to supper,” Dolph said, “but that the house is in such an uproar—I think it would take a buffalo stampede to get any notice tonight or tomorrow.”
“I don’t wish to be a bother,” Peter replied. “I’ve a room here for tonight, and no hurry at all to be anywhere else. There’s no taskmaster standing over me, these days.”
“Good for you,” Dolph said. He looked at Peter with one swift summing-up glance. “We’ll have nothing but cold meats and dry bread for supper tonight! Everything is for the celebration tomorrow—but you’ll come to it, of course.”
“I will, if Miss Anna will save a dance for me,” Peter answered, boldly. He thought that Cousin Jacob shook his head in mock dismay, just as the little girl plucked at Miss Anna’s skirts. She ventured a question in German but Peter had no need of translation. She was looking at his empty sleeve just as Horrie had. Cousin Dolph looked a little embarrassed.
“Tell her it was to save on the cost of shirts,” Peter said.
Before Cousin Dolph could do so, Miss Anna opened her eyes very wide and replied, “Think of what you could save at the shoemakers if they had cut off one of your other limbs!”
Peter laughed in unfeigned delight. “A practical woman who keeps accounts,” he said. “My mother would have liked that, Miss Anna!”
“She does keep accounts,” Cousin Dolph remarked, “for the store.” He hesitated as if he had just had a thought. “And the business in freighting that Jacob’s father runs.” He spoke in German to Jacob, and the two of them took up the second hamper of dishes and set it in the back of the waiting wagon. “Might I stay and talk with you, Cousin? We can go around and s
it in the hotel garden for a while. Have you ever been to Captain Nimitz’s place before now? He claims that it is the equal of any in Texas. Jacob and Uncle Hansi will come back and talk business for a while, if you don’t mind.”
“Not a bit of it,” Peter answered. He saw with a faint pang of regret that Miss Rosalie and Miss Anna were already taking their leave, as Jacob capably gathered up the reins. A long-limbed brindle-colored hound dozing underneath the rear axle roused itself and sauntered over to Dolph, who absently petted the top of its head.
“Anything for a bit of peace and quiet,” Cousin Dolph observed. “This is m’dog, Pfeffer; means ‘pepper’ in German.” He whistled for the dog to follow, and led Peter around to the side of the hotel, opposite the bathhouse and stables, where roses and the last of the summer hop-vines hung from rough cedar pergolas and tables and benches scattered in the shade underneath. “And you can tell me of your real purpose, Cousin.”
“Do I need one?” Peter asked, as they sat down. Pepper settled at their feet, underneath the table. The two of them sized each other up in silence, and Peter had the unsettling thought that there was appreciably more to Cousin Dolph than one might at first think. He couldn’t be much more than seventeen, if that, but he bore himself with such an air of capability that he seemed older. According to Hetty he had gone off in the last year of the fighting with Colonel Ford’s company of boys and old men. Probably saw a fair bit of the old elephant, Peter thought. He had the look of someone who carried responsibility and kept his own counsel. For himself, Peter found it curiously comforting to look across the table at his cousin and see the likeness and temper of Uncle Carl, or Horace and Johnny and Jamie, to see that and know there were still those of his blood alive in the world.
“Most men have more than one reason for doing what they do,” Dolph answered. “The reason that they tell everyone and the real one.” He gestured unhurriedly at a white-aproned waiter who appeared in one of the doorways leading out from the taproom into the garden. In a moment, the waiter appeared with a pair of tall stone-ware mugs.
“Let’s just say that the home hearth no longer appeals,” Peter said at last. His cousin sank a few gulps of beer and regarded him skeptically over top of his mug.
“And . . . ?” he prodded gently.
Peter continued, “As a former Reb, I can’t do much of anything. I’ve been advised by a practitioner of the medical arts to work in the outdoors, at nothing too strenuous; plenty of fresh air, so the man said. You offering me a situation, Cousin?”
“I might,” Dolph replied. “You know much about farming?”
“Not a lick.” Peter shook his head. “And I thought you all had lost your land, anyway.” That brought up another uncomfortable thought. Uncle Carl’s wife would have no reason to look kindly on a fighting Rebel.
“We did,” Dolph answered with utterly calm and unshakeable assurance. “But I’m going to get it back. I’m not sure how, but with the war being over, it’s just a matter of time until I do. And I’ll rebuild the house and go home. They didn’t burn all of it, you know; just the barn and the outbuildings. It was my father’s house, his land, and I will have it back, one way or the other.”
Peter drank of his own mug; he found his cousin’s certainty rather unsettling. “It must have been something prime!” he ventured and his cousin nodded.
“Rich bottom land, in the valleys,” Dolph answered, as if he savored the taste of the words, as if he was looking at it instead of Captain Nimitz’ beer-garden. “Oak trees on the hills and cypress along the river.”
“Someone just might beat you to it,” Peter said. “Some rich man with connections might have taken it up already.”
“No,” Dolph shook his head. “It’s deserted—too dangerous for anyone to take a family to, the way the Indians have been raiding again. I’ve kept my eye on it. I thought of just going out and living on it alone, never mind it being upright and legal-like, but my mother and Uncle Hansi need help with the business. I’m just biding my time, hauling freight.”
“Sounds no worse than anything else,” Peter observed, and his cousin smiled, the same serene and confident smile that had been his father’s. After some moments of companionable silence, he was bold enough to ask the foremost question on his mind, “How will it set with you, and the folk hereabouts, that I took for secession and served in the Texas brigade?”
“War’s over now,” Dolph answered curtly.
“That’s not the answer to the question, Cuz.” Peter watched as Dolph looked down at the table between them, drawing his finger through a ring of spilt beer. “Everyone knows about the secesh lynch mobs, and how the military governor looked the other way. How will your mother take it—me working at your farm, knowing that your father and I had words, before it all began? Or was she a secessionist, like my brother’s wife?”
Dolph shook his head, and answered as though he were thinking it out very carefully. “Mama loved the farm because Papa loved it. And she was for the Union because it was what my father believed in. She was a stranger to this country; she took his word on matters like that. It’s Waldrip and the Hanging Band that she hates like poison, and not because they were secesh. That was just the excuse they used to murder Papa.” When Dolph said the name Waldrip, his face had looked hard and grim. Seeing Peter’s confusion, he added, “He was a low-life horse thief and troublemaker who used to live close by our place, once. He and Papa had words—nothing to do with the war—‘cept that when everyone went off to fight, the ones that stayed behind here in the Hills were scum like Waldrip. I don’t believe Mama cared two pins about secesh or Union, otherwise.” A renewed smile broke like a sunrise on his face. “After all, Mama’s brother, Uncle Fredi—he enlisted in the Frontier Battalion at the very start and I joined up with Colonel Ford’s company. You could say we both wore the grey if we’d had any uniforms at all!”
Peter acknowledged the truth of this with a short, grim chuckle and Dolph continued, “Aunt Rosalie’s man that she’s marrying tomorrow? He was in Terry’s company, up to the end. My other uncle went out to California and joined the Union Army and Opa was mad for abolition. So make of it what you will, Cousin Peter—but it’s over now. Papa said once that slavery was like a boil and once it was lanced, all the pus would come out, and things would start to heal. Me, I don’t propose to start picking at scabs. I got better things to do.” He drank a good few swallows of beer and Peter did likewise, reflecting that his young cousin had an astonishingly level head—sober and impartial, more like that of a professor of fifty than that of a boy only just beginning to shave.
That was good beer, too; no wonder the Germans were inordinately fond of it. He set down his tankard and asked, “So, what do you plan, Cuz?”
“To ask Uncle Hansi if he’ll take you on, for now. If you can’t drive one-hand, you can handle a double barreled shotgun, can’t you? Some places, Uncle Hansi likes to carry an extra man, someone to stand guard beside the driver.”
Cousin Dolph looked beyond Peter, nodding cordially at three men who had just come into the garden by the street gate, and stood looking around for someone: Cousin Jacob had returned with another boy who looked about Dolph’s age, and a burly dark-haired man with shoulders like a bull-buffalo. At first the man looked like just another thick and hard-working Dutch farmer, but this Uncle Hansi had a shrewd spark in his eyes. His demeanor commanded instant attention. Peter found himself standing up as if in respect to a senior—which Uncle Hansi undoubtedly was.
“Good day,” he shook Peter’s hand, briskly. He spoke with a thick accent, but fluently enough and serenely uncaring of the fact that to Peter, he sounded like a comic Dutchman. “Hansi Richter. Our house is a madhouse today. We come to Charley’s for peace and quiet. Maybe there will be a brawl over a chess game or some other matter. Will still be more restful than home. My nephew told Josef you might like to work. I know who you are, one of Becker’s nephews. You have the look, indeed. Rudolph has spoken for you. No need for that. He w
as a friend to us.” At his uncle’s elbow, Dolph winked broadly and lifted his tankard again. His uncle added, “You will come to the wedding feast tomorrow. I will send the lads if you do not come willing.” The big man’s face brightened and he exclaimed “Aha! Charley! Four more!” He lapsed into German with the hotel proprietor. They sounded like very good friends.
So this was the formidable Anna’s father, Peter realized; they had the same forthrightness, as well as the same dark eyes. Jacob and the other boy brought up more chairs, and they settled around the table, beaming expectantly at Peter.
“You said you wished to admire and dance with their sister tomorrow,” Dolph explained, with much amusement.
He laughed when Peter answered, “Do they have any apprehensions about my attentions towards Miss Anna?”
“Not about your attentions to her,” Dolph began to cough as a mouthful of beer went down the wrong way. “About what she might do to you!”
“An untamed Kate?” Peter asked.
His cousin grinned. “You’ve no idea.”
Chapter Three: Endings and Beginnings
Magda Vogel Becker had been three years a widow and four months a storekeeper for the enterprise that she and her brother-in-law Hansi Richter had started out of spoils left from the defeat of the Confederacy. Each morning she took refuge from a noisy kitchen full of her children and those of her younger sister, Liesel, in order to go over the morning accounts. Between breakfasts, early chores, and children collecting their books for school, she could not do accounts anywhere else but in the little office behind the store that had been her father’s workroom. She sat with her books, pens and ink bottle at a small table under a window that looked out into the garden. Hansi had promised to buy her a proper desk, but—like a typical man—he kept forgetting that promise.