by Celia Hayes
“You’ll be late, children,” Magda chided them. She kissed Hannah’s forehead. “There now, little one. You know it was only Opa’s fancy. It was Cousin Peter that Opa saw.” Hannah managed a wistful and watery smile. Sam hugged Magda with his own rough exuberance and clattered away, chattering to his sister and slamming the front door resoundingly after them. Magda sighed. So much put upon her every day; a hundred small tasks to begin and never any time to properly finish any of them. The parlor clock chimed gently as she looked around the door at Liesel and Vati. “I must open the shop,” she said, as they both looked up. “But if it is quiet, I will ask Marie to make up some peppermint tea.”
“Oh, splendid,” Vati beamed happily. “Just the thing! Peppermint tea with honey, and then we shall take a little walk over to Bernard’s.”
“I’d rather not, Vati,” Liesel demurred, and again, Magda thought there was almost a note of panic in her voice.
“Unless you don’t feel up to it, my dear,” Vati answered instantly, all calm and soothing reassurance. Magda went on into the shop, where Anna was just finishing the sweeping and putting away the broom.
“What was the matter with Mama?” she asked. She untied the duster knotted over her head and quickly smoothed her glossy brown hair, neatly coiled into a knot under a neat white house cap. She already had her dark calico apron tied over her dress: tidy, composed, and ready for a day in the shop. Magda’s smile flashed a reassurance that Anna, level-headed and practical, hardly needed. Magda and Liesel’s oldest daughter had always been close, being similar in temperament.
“Something frightened her dreadfully when we went to look for Vati, just now. I can’t think what, Anna—there was no one about in the street.”
“Indians?” Anna ventured. “Mama is frightened to death of Indians just now.”
Magda shook her head. “I have not seen any, of late. They do not come into town as freely any more.”
“So your bread baking is safe, Auntie!” Anna giggled deliciously, and those elusive dimples flashed in her cheeks. Boys were enchanted by those dimples, and wished to make her laugh again, just so they could see them. A solemn changeling child, Anna really looked like neither one of her parents but had taken features from each: dimples and creamy complexion from Liesel, and Hansi’s dark hair and eyes.
Magda clicked her tongue as she remembered her first face-to- face encounter with an Indian. “Walked right into the kitchen and helped himself to every loaf! A naked Comanche with eyes like a snake, and paid about as much attention to me when I told him to give them back as if I had been a bird twittering in the tree.…” She laughed to remember that day, when Chief Santanna’s tribe had been camping in the meadows by the creek, and came and went among the new settlers in Friedrichsburg as freely as any other. Still, that memory came with a little twist of grief within her breast. Carl had been living in the old stable out in back, helping Vati build the house. He had seen how frightened she had been, and he had.…
‘You must never be afraid, Miss Margaretha.’
Magda firmly closed the door on that memory. “I was only apart from her for a moment, just long enough to go around the corner. I cannot see how even an Indian could have been near enough to frighten your mother so, unless . . .” Magda took down her own apron, pausing as she tied the strings around her waist. “Anna, have you ever thought, perhaps your mother might be afraid to go outside?
“Afraid?” Anna actually giggled again. “But she is outside, and in the garden all the time. And the day before yesterday, we walked down to the Sunday house to bring back the bedding to wash. What is it about men, to never consider washing the sheets, until they are so stiff with dirt you can prop them in the corner like a plank?”
Magda persisted, trying to stay on point. “Yes, but she was with you. Today she was all alone. It was just for a minute, but she was all alone, and—”
At that moment the shop door opened, the bell on its metal spring chiming gently. “Good morning, Mrs. Schmidt,” she said by way of greeting. “What may we help you with today?”
“Good morning, Mrs. Margaretha. Such a lovely day!” Mrs. Schmidt bustled in and set her basket on the counter. She was one of Vati’s neighbors, and had been his housekeeper when Rosalie was just a little girl. Mrs. Schmidt also had no little skill as a nurse and midwife. “And after such a wonderful party yesterday for little Miss Rose, here I am surprised to see you opening at the very same time as always! I’ve brought in some honey. My boys and I gathered some pecans this week, and I wondered how much would you take for them, shelled, if we were to make the effort?”
“It depends,” Magda answered. “On whether they are sound and unbroken meats.”
“I’ll tell the boys.” Mrs. Schmidt nodded, and asked for a small measure of coarse brown sugar in exchange for the honey. Magda thought of asking her if she had ever heard of a woman being overtaken by a sudden and unreasoning terror. The bell chimed again, another customer, and Mrs. Schmidt wished to gossip with the newcomer, so the opportunity was lost. The morning fled swiftly, the hours carried away by a flood of customers and well-wishers. It seemed like hardly any time at all had passed until Hannah, Sam, and their cousin Elias came from the schoolhouse, hungry and impatient for dinner. Magda and Anna gratefully put aside their aprons and joined them at the long table in the kitchen, scoured with sand and wood-ash. They had a stout soup of beans and cabbage, and loaves of fresh-baked bread from Wehmeyer’s bakery on Main Street. That was one of the luxuries which running the store had brought to them—relief from the burden of having to make their own bread for such a large household, and not having to heat up the kitchen in summer.
Hansi, his sons, Dolph, and Cousin Peter came in from the back, disheveled and wood-dusty from loading bundles of shingles. “Almost done loading,” Hansi said. “Let your Papa have that chair, little Grete!” He exuberantly lifted Grete and sat her on his lap.
Liesel exclaimed, “You might have washed before sitting at table, Hansi!”
“Why? I’d only be getting dirty again,” he answered reasonably. He pinched her behind as she ladled soup into his dish. She squealed in surprised and slapped at his hand; oh, Liesel seemed quite recovered from her fright of this morning. Covertly Magda watched her bustling around the kitchen at the heart of Vati’s house. The big room was as neat as a pin. Polished copper pots and pans were kept over the fireplace, and bundles of herbs were hung to dry over the hearth, scenting the air with the resinous perfume of rosemary and sage. The cupboard shelves were edged with stiffly-starched crocheted lace, and laden with pottery and china. At the last minute, Magda’s younger brother Friedrich appeared, taking off his good coat and declaring how hungry he was after a morning spent inventorying a wagon load of goods arrived from San Antonio.
Magda gathered her youngest daughter Lottie onto her lap. So many children now, with the older boys back from driving wagons, and Friedrich home from the Frontier Battalion! There seemed hardly room for them all some days. Jacob and his brother George gathered with Dolph and Peter at one end of the table, and Vati beamed the length of the table at them all.
“Opa, how many legs does a spider have?” Sam asked plaintively. “Because a longlegs has only six, but it looks like a spider, and Elias says that the schoolmaster told him that it isn’t a spider at all even if it looks like one otherwise.”
“Not at the table, please!” begged Marie with a shudder.
“Eight legs,” replied Vati with great delight. “Arachnids, so they are called by naturalists, after the nymph Arachne, the splendid weaver! She hanged herself when bested in a contest with the Goddess, which is why they commonly hang from the middle of their webs!” Vati continued expounding on the insect world, to the infinite delight of Sam and the other boys.
Marie, squeamish about most crawling things, pushed her plate away. “Oh, Opa, must you?”
Liesel topped up the bowls all the way around, with an extra dollop for Peter, before sitting down at Hansi’s side, collecting
another pinch on her backside.
With a teasing grin on his face Friedrich said, “Marie, one morning out in the desert, I thought I felt something moving by my feet. I reached down and put my hand down and discovered a spider as big as my hat.” Marie squealed in horror and dismay.
Diverted, Sam asked, “What did you do with it, Uncle Fredi?
“I let it stay for the warmth! It had hair like a boar’s bristle, all over its legs! There was snow on the ground, up to my horse’s hocks, and we needed all the warmth we could get!”
Marie shuddered elaborately, and her father and brothers laughed. Magda spared a look sideways along the table at Carl Becker’s nephew. She remembered Margaret’s grand house, but he looked at home eating in the kitchen. He talked in a low voice, in English to Dolph, but at ease with the chatter of German flowing around them. He still looked gaunt, as if there were hardly any flesh stretched over his bones. What else had happened to him during the fighting in the east, besides taking his hand and half his arm, to set such a mark on him? There was a truth to what Dolph had said that very morning, that Peter took refuge here, like a hurt animal licking its own wounds and looking for no one’s pity. He seemed comfortable with the boys and Hansi. Vati regarded him with vaguely affectionate interest and made an effort to speak English to him, although Magda was quite unconvinced of Peter’s interest in the local gossip with which Vati regaled him.
Mr. Zink, who had come out to Texas with the foolish Prince Solms so many years ago, had divorced yet another wife, and been sued in court yet once again. “A coarse, blunt-spoken fellow,” Vati explained. “He had a grist-mill here for a while.”
“And I think a lawsuit has been brought against him at one time or other by everyone in Gillespie County,” Hansi added with a chuckle. He wiped up the last of the good soup with a crust of bread. “Not such a good surveyor as it turns out. Me, I think he would rather fight duels and seduce other men’s wives than pay attention to his figures. Can we finish loading the shingles today?”
“Another hour or so,” Dolph answered. “We can start this afternoon and reach the Stielers’ place a little after dark. Camp there tonight.”
Liesel went as pale as a sheet, and made a tiny whimpering sound as she sought Hansi’s hand on the table. “Oh, no,” she whispered, “no. You must not. . .”
“Never fret, dear heart.” Hansi shook his head and squeezed Liesel’s hand in reassurance as he answered Dolph. “No, I think not, lad. It’s close enough to the full moon and with those folk killed not two months ago, right here in the county, I’ll rest easier not putting my horses or your heads within bow shot of a Comanche raiding party after dark.”
“Makes you wonder who really owns these lands,” Friedrich grumbled, “when we dare not venture out after dark without carrying an armory with us.”
“Don’t say such things, Fredi,” Magda chided her brother, with a sidelong look at Liesel’s ashen face.
“Why not?” he answered airily. “It’s true enough, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but you can see how it upsets Lise,” Magda hissed, alarmed by the terror in her sister’s eyes, and Fredi’s thoughtlessness.
“Well, never mind, sister dear.” Friedrich rose from the table, still chewing on the last crusty heel of bread that he neatly scooped from the breadboard. “You need have no fear on our account, or yours. We’ve learned well the lessons about the dangers of living here. I go nowhere outside of town without a brace of loaded Colts and the lads all have something of the same. There’s no cause to fret over us, Lise—no cause at all.”
The shop bell chimed gently. Someone had just opened the street door. Magda hurriedly excused herself and hastened across the hallway into the shop, carrying Lottie on her hip. It was not a customer, but a boy from Muller’s, who kept the post office now, bringing their mail and newspapers. Now that the war was over, letters and newspapers had returned to their previous frequency and thickness—and of course, running the store alone had easily tripled the number of envelopes arriving in the mail.
Magda sat down in her little office to sort through it. Lottie, a placid and undemanding child, was accustomed to amuse herself at Magda’s feet or sit unobtrusively in her lap. There were letters for Hansi from various merchants that he did business with, hauling freight, a letter from Ulm for Vati, from his old friend Simon the goldsmith, another from her brother Johann, Friedrich’s twin who had gone to California during the war to join the Union Army. He had liked serving so well, he chose to remain. The letter was postmarked from an Army post in Kansas Territory; Magda’s heart sank a little at the sight of it. Trained as a doctor, everyone had hoped that Johann would return to Texas when the fighting ended, but it appeared now that Johann and the Army had other plans.
Magda sighed a little, and kissed the top of Lottie’s fair head. “Lottchen, I fear you will be all grown up before you ever see your uncle Johann!” She was in the habit of talking to Lottie, or rather talking to herself when in her youngest child’s presence. “And here we hoped, with the Army returning, they would see fit to send him home to us.”
“Onkel!” replied Lottie brightly, showing two new little teeth in front and only drooling a little.
There was a letter for Liesel from Sophia Guenther, her old neighbor in Live Oak. She had been Sophia Pape when she arrived as a child with her parents during those stormy first few years in Friedrichsburg. The Papes and Richters were neighbors. Sophia had married a striving and ambitious young man who had it in his mind to run a mill. And so he had, but in prospering he had moved his young family to San Antonio, just before the war. A letter from Austin, for Peter, was addressed in a child’s scrawling hand. Another one in Spanish was for her son. That one was from their old friend, Porfirio, who still addressed Dolph as “the young Patrón.” Porfirio was no doubt reiterating his promises to come and help when the property that had been taken from them was returned. Magda set the personal letters aside, and began slitting open the other ones, the ones that had everything to do with business. Quite a lot of them were in English. Well, that was what young Guenther had always said, and Charley Nimitz as well: that one must do business with the Americans as well as the Germans. Magda agreed, although reluctantly. After all, it was Americans who had murdered her husband and confiscated his lands. Once, Carl Becker had many American friends, but that was in the years before war savagely tore country and companions apart. With a single exception of their neighbor, Old Brown and his slatternly wife, only his German friends and Porfirio came and wept with her at his funeral.
There were voices in the hallway, the children returning to school. After a moment Anna came into the room, followed by her father, who said, “Good! The mail is here. Anything I should pay attention to?”
“These,” Magda thrust a thick handful of invoices and merchant circulars at them.
Hansi grumbled. “God help us, the world runs on papers now!”
“Give me the invoices, Papa,” Anna said masterfully, “before you lose any of them. I can’t tell you how much trouble we had over that one that you used to draw the plans for the new barn on.”
“You can and you have, dear little one,” her father answered, pulling up his chair with a sigh. “Several times daily, and the shortened version just now. So, what are they sending us that looks of interest?”
“Practically anything one might desire, just come in by ship to Indianola and Galveston,” Magda answered. “And to San Antonio from Mexico.” She thought that of all of them, Hansi had changed the most in leaving his few poor acres in Albeck. When she was as old as Anna was now, she would have sworn that her brother-in-law had no interest in anything but his muck pile and his ox team. The journey to America had shaken him loose, turning that plain stubborn farmer upside down and inside out. Then the war had lit an adamantine fire inside him, like the fire at the heart of a coal, a fierce ambition never to be in want or run in terror of authority ever again.
“Aye.” Hansi settled himself into his chair and lean
ed forward to take the stack of circulars from her. “They might very well desire it … but can they afford it? And can we afford to haul it up from the coast?”
“Oh, Papa, Runge & Company has received a shipment of fine porcelain dinnerware.” Anna was looking over his shoulder. “As used at the finest tables frequented by crowned heads and nobility! Mama would love showing that off to Mrs. Schmidt, and Sophie Nimitz.”
“Yes she would love that, poppet,” Hansi answered fondly. “But how much fine porcelain could we sell out here, when the trail season begins in the spring? Better we sell rope and flour and salt-meat to travelers heading west in the spring. Besides, they’d want good hard cash for fine goods like porcelain teacups, and good hard cash is something we’re a little short of … aren’t we, Magda?”
Magda nodded in agreement. “Now, game, pecans, shingles, and cattle-hides ….”
Hansi gave a great bark of laughter. “I’ll be paid in money for that load of shingles, though. Pity you can’t sell cattle in Texas for anything more than four dollars a head. I read last week that buyers in the north are paying forty and more.”
“Uncle Fredi said before the war in California, he saw them selling for a hundred,” Anna mentioned thoughtfully. “Each.”
“Aye, but they had to ask so much because they lost half the herd on the way and then paid the drovers their wages and fare back,” Hansi pointed out. “I never heard Fredi claim that anyone made a profit out of that venture, not even Little Rothschild himself. Still, a four-dollar cow and a forty-dollar market—if there were any way to put them together any closer than California I’d be interested.”
“The boys would like that, and so would Fredi,” Magda remarked, wistfully. “We did well out of pasturing cattle on our land. But we sold the last with our brand three years ago. The Army commissariat would have taken any others, if they cared to look for them.”