Adelsverein

by Celia Hayes

  “He’s always been like that,” Fredi said. “Wish I had thought to ask him for whiskey. He distills it himself, and after this day I think we might have done it justice.”

  “Not if we have to go up onto the roof tomorrow,” Dolph said. Peter looked after Berg, now some distance away and nearly invisible among the cedar thickets, and wondered if he was really as good an inventor as Dolph and Fredi thought. And what it would be like to have people not staring at his empty sleeve.

  Chapter Six: Indianola

  It was a matter of some excitement and no little apprehension for Magda Vogel Becker to journey forth from the house on Market Street. In all of twenty years since coming to Texas as a settler under the Verein auspices, she had gone no farther than her husband’s land on the upper Guadalupe, save once to Austin. Her brothers, her sons, her husband, her brother-in-law and many of their friends—oh, they had traveled widely, the length and breadth of Texas, to New Orleans, and Mexico, to California—even returning to Germany! Bound with household and children, for care of Vati and then by the dangers of war, she had always remained by the home hearth and been happy in the main to do so. The welfare of the shop tugged at her like a fretful and frail child. For worry over the daily care of stock, accounts and the needs of customers, she might have very easily given up this long trip of Hansi’s contriving.

  But this was the slow time, after the turn of the year and before the trail season opened. Hansi was of the opinion that they might cut better bargains among the merchants and in the warehouses of San Antonio or Indianola. It was resolved among them all that the shop could do without her care for some weeks, while she and Anna saw to purchasing fresh stock. Of late she had felt something of an urge, even the necessity, of seeing other horizons, other skies. Anna felt it even more urgently; and it was only the need to pacify her sister Liesel’s fears and worries for her oldest child that she had consented to participate in this excursion. Anna had her heart sent on going. Magda could not withdraw now, or her sister would use the lack of a proper chaperone to keep her oldest daughter close at hand.

  Magda now sat with Lottie on her lap, Anna beside her, on a bench at the back of the Nimitz Hotel, waiting for the mid-week stage to San Antonio. Hannah played hopscotch by herself on a set of squares she had scratched in the dirt nearby. There were a handful of men also waiting the stage, but they respectfully tipped their hats to the women and stood a little apart. Magda did not know any of them—Americans, she supposed, as they spoke to one another in English. She cringed inwardly at the extravagant cost of such a journey, first to San Antonio, and thence to Victoria and Indianola, but Hansi had insisted that it was actually a sensible economy. She and Anna could not be spared from the shop together for the length of time that a journey with his wagons would entail; better to travel swift and sure by the stage, and lodge with friends.

  Anna looked sideways around the edge of her modish straw bonnet. “Auntie, you are fidgeting again! You should not worry so. Mama will manage, with the help of Rosalie and Vati.”

  “I am sure,” Magda replied swiftly, but she sighed and added, “I wish that we had not heard about Uncle Simon.”

  “It was very kind of his nephew to write, and to return all of Vati’s letters,” Anna said. Magda thought again of how Vati had looked when he opened the parcel from Germany and learned of the death of his friend from the old days in Ulm. Simon the goldsmith, with whom he had exchanged letters for twenty years, dearest friend for another thirty years before that. Vati had looked like a withered old gnome. He had taken the parcel of letters into his room upstairs and not come out for several hours. When he did, it was to insist that nothing was wrong. He would dig in the garden for a while and then walk over to commiserate with Pastor Altmueller.

  “It was always Uncle Simon’s thought that Vati should do a book of his letters from Texas,” Magda said now. “And Rosalie will cheer him up, as well as make sure he does not boil his socks in the soup and leave his spectacles in all sorts of places.” Rosalie, blooming like her namesake in the first year of her marriage to Robert, had promised to come and stay with him for the duration of their absence from the store.

  “I suppose Mama will be giving her all sorts of advice about the baby,” Anna said, with another of those sideways glances. Rosalie had come flying down from her husband’s light one-horse trap and into her sisters’ welcoming arms, whispering the joyous news that she had been too happy to keep to herself for another moment. She would have a child late in the fall, around harvest time. Liesel, who brought forth all of her and Hansi’s children with the happy insouciance of a mother cat bearing kittens, was immediately forthcoming with advice—helpful, practical and reassuring for the most part.

  “It is wonderful news,” Magda answered. Almost involuntarily her arms tightened around Lottie, youngest of those given to her and her husband; born six months after his murder, the only one without memory of him and his endless kindness and patience with his children. Of such crumbs of happiness from the lives of other people was her life made of now. She wore black widow’s weeds for Carl and intended to wear them for the rest of her life. “I hope Robert is pleased just as well.”

  “Oh, you know he is,” Anna answered. “Men always are unbearably smug when their wives prove they have done the man’s part well.”

  “Anna!” her aunt whispered in shocked reproof. How did Anna know of such things—and worse yet, dare to speak of them!

  Anna just laughed and answered, “Oh, Auntie, I am twenty-three years of age! If I had cared to, I would have been married long since, with two or three of my own by this time. I know how children are begotten and how men look for pleasure in bed, and how we maiden girls are supposed to look the other way and pretend not to see what is plain in front of us!”

  “It is still not fitting that you should be so open about these things,” Magda insisted, and Anna laughed again.

  “Auntie, I am unmarried, not an idiot! Why should I pretend about these matters?”

  “It is not proper,” Magda repeated. “Really, Anna—you should be married.”

  “You sound like Mama,” Anna replied. “She is always asking me why I do not find this man or the other pleasing, and chiding me for being too particular. I thought you would think better of me, Auntie!”

  “Are you being too particular?” Magda asked, stung at the comparison. She had been the plain one, always compared—to her disadvantage—to her sister Liesel, pretty as a princess who would be lucky enough to marry her prince almost as soon as she put up her hair. She had worried about Anna, similarly overshadowed by Rosalie, but Anna seemed to have suitors and admirers enough.

  “No,” Anna shook her head so vigorously that the curls next to her cheeks and the ribbons on her bonnet bobbed. “For they all seem like boys. Like my brothers. I say something I think clever to them, and they look back at me with their mouths open like geese. All but Cousin Peter—I suppose I may call him a cousin of a sort. He at least has some kind of wit about him! But the nonsense that man talks, like water from a millrace! He cozened a pledge from me to walk by the seaside with him by promising to be entirely quiet for an hour! I can hardly believe that man to be serious about anything at all. That the Confederate Army saw fit to take him in and put a gun in his hands only proves how hopeless an enterprise that war was!”

  “But he amuses you,” Magda asked, with tenderness. “And I think he admires you, for he makes any excuse to pay his compliments.”

  “He is never serious,” Anna complained. “He teases like a boy!”

  Magda sighed, “There are men who can never say what they are feeling, Anna. He is like his uncle. He also made light of what he felt most deeply, when I first made his acquaintance. There were some matters he never could bring himself to speak of, but covered them with a jest instead. Pay little mind to the jest, but rather the matters underneath it.”

  “I would,” Anna turned her head, as if she heard something far away, “if he gave any evidence of having a
serious thought in his head at all. Listen, Auntie—there is the coach.”

  “I hope there is room enough that Lottie may sit between us.” Magda rose and called for Hannah, for now she could hear the thunder of hoofbeats drawing the heavy coach at a gallop down Main Street. In a moment, the coach turned the corner by the hotel bathhouse and the great tree that overhung the road—six powerful horses and the great box of the coach body rocking gently on its leather springs. So much swifter and more comfortable than a farm wagon, whose heavy wheels found every rock and rut in the road! The coachman’s assistant and guard leaped down at once to help Anna and Magda with their bags. The men waiting stood back and allowed them first into the coach, to take the best and most commodious places, those facing forwards as the coach traveled.

  “You shall sit next to the window, so you may see everything,” Anna promised Hannah and Lottie. “We shall travel as swift as the wind, and at the end of it we shall be in a town three times the size of Friedrichsburg and several times as old.”

  “We went on a coach once before.” Hannah bounced on the cushioned seat and tried leaning back against the head rests. She was yet too short to sit comfortably that way, and drew up her legs to sit curled next to her cousin and sister. “We went all the way to Austin, in a whole day!”

  “Shush,” Magda bade her as the other passengers clambered up, and took their places opposite, or perched on the narrow padded bench across the middle. Above their heads, the driver cracked his great whip, and they were off with a lurch and a shout. The wheels spun in a cloud of dust, left mostly behind in their speed; the coach swayed in a gentle, regular manner like the rocking of a child’s cradle, while the world seemed to whirl past the coach windows at an incredible speed: Charley Nimitz’s grand hotel, a scattering of houses on Baron’s Creek, the place where the Verein blockhouse had once stood.

  “We built a great bonfire and danced among the trees,” Magda said.

  Anna looked at her, baffled. “What are you talking about, Auntie?”

  “Remembering out loud,” Magda replied.

  The hills spun past, scattered with gnarled oak trees, patched with green pastures and ploughed fields, threaded with clear-water creeks trickling over limestone falls, all the way to the river-ford on the Guadalupe at Comfort. Passing familiar, for Magda and her husband and family had often come that way before the military governor had confiscated their lands in the second year of the fighting. She had last traveled that road riding in a decrepit cart pulled by their oldest horse, she and her children turned out with only the property they could carry. Her arms tightened around Lottie—she had been pregnant and feared that she would miscarry along the way. No, not a good memory. The stage paused in Comfort just long enough for some of the men to jump down and stretch their legs.

  “Look around, and see if we see Dolph!” Hannah cried.

  Magda shook her head. “No, Nannie-my-chick—the boys would have taken the cattle down from the hills weeks ago—they’re already far ahead of us. But at this speed we shall catch up to them in no time!” And the stage whirled away once more, the white dust boiling up behind and the road uncurling like a ribbon before them, dropping ever lower until they left the hills behind entirely. In late afternoon, when the sun lay slanted and golden across the lowlands ahead, the coach rocked and jolted through another river crossing.

  “Salado Creek!” bawled the coach driver. “San Antone, straight ahead!”

  “Oh, look!” Anna breathed. “It looks ever such a big city!”

  Magda peered over her two daughter’s heads and around Anna’s bonnet—yes, there were domes and towers ahead, patched with rusty tile rooftops, all clustered around one enormously tall grey stone spire. Thick hedges of some spiny, dark green bush lined the road on either side.

  “There are hardly any trees,” Magda observed. “I wonder what they have built it all out of?” The coach rolled past a scattering of tall stone houses, as fine as any in Friedrichsburg, with glass in every window. They were set back in tidy gardens laid about with fences, but a little farther on, the town closed in on the road. This part of San Antonio, or “Bexar” as Carl Becker had always called it, was all Mexican, low and single-story buildings, constructed out of mud-brick and burnt-tile roofs or flimsy pole houses thatched with river rushes. Doors stood open to a wide dusty plaza, and a crumbling citadel with a façade like a carved bedstead loomed over it all.

  “Surely there is more to it than this?” Anna murmured, but the coach only slowed without stopping. The wheels rumbled over a short bridge; they caught a glimpse of a deep green river, smooth and edged by tall rushes down below. “This is more like what I expected,” Anna sounded much relieved and even a little excited. “Oh, look! Are those musicians? And I have never seen so long a train of pack mules. Do you suppose they have just come from Mexico? I wonder what they have brought?”

  The coach slowed even more, for now they were in a long and broad street. From the crowds of people and wagons in it, Magda thought it must be the most important thoroughfare in town. The buildings lining it were a mad jumble of stoutly-built German stone as tidy as dollhouses, others built of timber planks in the American style and gaily painted, or plain Mexican mud-brick, low to the ground and with few windows looking out to the streets. Magda did note that some of the mud-brick establishments had glass windows set into the street-front side and a pleasing miscellany of goods on display within. The coach came to a halt and let them down in another square, smaller than the first plaza and presided over by a grim grey-stucco cathedral with a towering spire.

  “Almost as if it were a square in the old country,” Magda noted. She and Anna looked around in some apprehension, for they had expected to be met on arrival. Here they were, women alone and newly arrived in a strange town. Magda would have felt even more apprehension but for having friends here: Doctor Herff, in whose practice her brother Johann had assisted; the Guenthers, Hansi and Liesel’s old neighbors from their farm in Live Oak; and not least, the family of her husband’s old stockman, Porfirio Menchaca. Besides that, in the very bottom of her small valise, was one of her husband’s Paterson Colt revolvers, carefully cleaned and loaded and with fresh new caps on all the cylinders. Before their marriage, Carl Becker had seen that she knew how to handle it, to shoot and reload, for those circumstances when the innate chivalry of the frontier might be in rather short supply.

  There was no need for it today. Hansi Richter, stocky and dependable as always, appeared among those milling around the stage stop. Magda saw her son a little apart from the crowd, his white-blond hair a veritable beacon among the darker Mexican and American heads. Dolph was talking to a man and a woman seated in an elegant barouche. Who were they? Magda wondered for a moment. The man—a grey-haired, aged gentleman of immense dignity—had his hand on Dolph’s shoulder as if he knew him and merely detained him for a moment’s conversation.

  “Papa!” Anna shrieked happily to Hansi. And who was this standing next to him but Porfirio, grown stout and prosperous? He swept Anna’s hand to his lips with the same old gallant gesture, managing to convey avuncular affection, sincere masculine appreciation, and a roguish propensity to flirt all together. Hansi stood by, much amused. And then with perfect aplomb Porfirio did the same for Magda, enfolding her hand in his and pressing both to his heart, addressing her as “Señora Becker.” Against her will she was amused—he had been a perfect scamp of a boy, but now the propriety of his conduct and address had twenty years of practice and polish upon them.

  Upon the blood of his ancestors he had sworn an oath of vengeance on the man who had murdered her husband, the Patrón, as he had called Carl Becker. Porfirio had built the coffin, rattled his popish beads during the long vigil before burial, wept at the graveside, and sworn to the widow that her husband would be avenged. When the farm was confiscated and she and the children impoverished, Porfirio saw to it she had some money. He also had helped her brother Johann escape safely to California, where he enlisted in the Union Army.
Yes, he was one of those true friends.

  He kissed Hannah on each cheek, admiring how she had grown. “A young lady!” he exclaimed. “When shall you have a debut, come into society and leave a thousand admirers with broken hearts!? Now he took Lottie up into his arms and admired her extravagantly, “The very image of the Patrón! You were given a blessing, Señora Becker, a very generous blessing.”

  “I have always been assured of that.” Magda could have wept for emotion. “I have never forgotten your kindness to us or your help when we stood in most need of it. I think I shall never be able to thank you enough!”

  Porfirio looked at her with a serious expression and lowered his voice. “It was a matter of honor, Señora. And of the other matter,” his voice took on a steely edge, “I have not forgotten, either. My blade and his blood, sooner or later. They say he went to Mexico—it is of no moment, Señora Becker. He will return. They always return. Until then, I wait. Think of Waldrip as a walking dead man.” He patted her hand again, a dapper and prosperous Mexican merchant with his beautifully brilliantined mustaches, almost but not quite concealing the steely edge and the deadly promise of his oath. Magda shivered—yes, Porfirio meant every word. “They say,” he continued blandly, as if he spoke of the weather, “that Señor Talmadge, who opened the door to the Patrón’s enemy? That he also is dead. Is that true?”

  “Yes,” Magda answered, noticing that Dolph had managed to detach himself from the gentleman in the barouche and was making his way towards them. “He was killed in the fighting around Atlanta in the last year of the war.”

  Porfirio smiled then, a mirthless smile, his eyes as cold and dead as a predatory animal. “Good,” he said with satisfaction. He tipped his hat to Magda and Anna, kissed Lottie and Hannah once more and took his leave. He promised the hospitality of his family on any evening that they would care to accept it. Magda shivered again, for she remembered that Porfirio and Trap Talmadge had been friends of a sort, working together with her husband. It was the bottle which had led Trap to betray her husband. Knowing that, he had gone away to seek atonement and death with Terry’s Company in the fighting in the east. She felt sorrow for the man, not satisfaction.