by Celia Hayes
Peter nodded, sick at the pit of his stomach. Which one of them might it be? Willi or his sister? Or another captive? The Pedernales men had brought word of the war party before a careful search had been made. They might have killed or taken others. No one might know of it for days, until someone noticed birds circling in the sky, or found a straying horse, or realized that someone expected to be at a certain place was not present.
It was not the body of a man or woman. Rather it was a mare which one of the Pedernales men recognized as his own, having been stolen by the raiders.
“Went lame, would be my guess,” Dolph ventured.
Peter wondered, “And they cut it open and left innards all over the place, for what reason?”
That the Indians had killed a lame horse rather than let it slow them down argued that they knew they were being followed. “Our dust trail,” Dolph explained. “They’ve been watching their back. And they cut the horse open to eat. Of what they wanted to eat, you really don’t want to know, Cuz.”
“So, they know we’re after them.” Peter handed back his cousin’s canteen, and Dolph nodded. “Now we have to move even faster,” he said, and so they did. They pressed on, infected by urgency. The horse-kill had been fairly fresh; they were closing the lead. Their own horses were tired, but Peter thought that spirits were good.
In the afternoon, storm clouds began piling up along the north-western horizon; an iron grey band that grew into towering mounds of white clouds. Peter did not like the look of it. Lightning flickered within the cloud and arced to the ground, a split-second flash of white light, and a grumble of thunder that sounded like distant artillery.
“Hurry!” shouted Captain Inman, waving his arm at the horsemen following after, two and two, three and three. Their horses lengthened stride into a gallop, an exhilarating scramble over broken ground, a heart-pounding race against nature as the rain threatened to wash all traces away. The wind blowing against their faces, tossing their horses’ manes, brought the damp smell of rain on thirsty soil. They pressed hard as the storm-line swept down upon them. The sky darkened, the very air seemed to take on a queer, twilight tinge. And then the rain came—first a wispy grey veil, hanging from beneath the clouds, then in silvery sheets, and finally in torrents that hit the ground and splashed up as mud. Within a few moments they were soaked to the skin, water running from their horses in rivulets, but they pressed on at a gallop. Finally, Guillermo and Dolph halted at the top of a small hillock, with the empty plain spreading all around, the patter of rain falling into small streamlets under their feet. Guillermo spoke, sounding infinitely sad, yet philosophical.
Dolph translated, “The trail is gone. He can follow it no farther.”
“That’s it, then,” Captain Inman said, softly as was his way, “I am sorry, boys. There’s nothing more to be done. We’ve lost them.”
The other men caught up, some of them cursing bleakly under their breath—not for the wetting they had received, which would make for an uncomfortable ride as well as a cold night—but for the fact that it had destroyed the trail, beyond the skill of any man to follow. If Hansi Richter’s face was wet, none could know if it was from tears or from the rain. His children and their captors were gone, gone like shadows into the Llano country.
“Mama,” asked Sam with intense interest, “is it true that Auntie Rosalie has been scalped?” It was the evening of the day after Rosalie had been found and brought back to Vati’s house. He had cornered Magda in the upstairs hallway. She was holding a plate of Sophie Nimitz’s good ragout, well cut up so that Vati might be tempted into swallowing a few bites. Sam and Hannah and their cousin Elias had come home from school to a house suddenly disarranged, disrupted and turned upside down, filled full of women murmuring sympathetically in the parlor and kitchen, and suddenly absent of men—older brothers, uncles and cousins.
“Yes, it is true, Sam,” she answered.
Most disconcertingly he brightened with intense interest and asked, “Might I see, Mama?”
“No, you may not!” she snapped; honestly this taste for the gruesome in small boys! Oh, but Sam was not so much the small boy who had been entranced with tales of the Emperor Napoleon and military glory. He was near as tall as she, and imbued with Vati’s fearless intellectual curiosity. She marveled at how that quality had seemingly leaped, like lightning-fire from tree-top to tree-top across the gulf between.
“Mama,” he asked again, staying her as she was about to go into Vati’s room. “Opa is going to die, isn’t he?’
“Yes, Sam-Love . . .I am afraid so.” In this house of secrets, it was about time that someone was honest. “Doctor Keidel has always maintained that there is very little chance of his recovering.”
“Well, everyone dies,” Sam answered, with something of Vati’s own intellectual detachment. “Like the poem of brave Horatius at the bridge: ‘Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the gate: ‘To every man upon this earth, Death cometh soon or late.’ Opa knows. I don’t think he minds too much, Mama.” Her son looked particularly earnest. “It’s just that we will miss him terribly. And that’s the hurtful part.”
“Yes, Sam,” Magda sighed, “that is the hurtful part—knowing how you will miss them.”
“Like we missed Papa,” Sam ventured, and Magda’s eyes filled suddenly. Seeing this, Sam hugged her clumsily but with care to avoid tipping the plate in her hand. “Don’t cry, Mama,” he promised bracingly, “I am here, still, and I will be for a good long time.”
“I am sure of that, young man.” Much comforted, she kissed his forehead, grateful that her son had not asked any more about his Aunt Rosalie.
“Such a strange time it was,” Magda later mused to her daughter. “Sometimes I did not know if it were day or night, or what day it might be. There was no meaning or rhythm to the hours. I came downstairs once, and found Captain Nimitz wrapped in his overcoat, asleep on the parlor chaise, and in the kitchen Herr Pastor Altmueller and Mrs. Schmidt were drinking coffee and arguing over the proper time to set out garden vegetables.”
“Rather like the hospital,” Lottie agreed. “If it weren’t for the sound of reveille or retreat from the parade ground, I would not know if another day has passed.”
Night and day, days and nights and hours flowed past with hardly a ripple to differentiate them save for the necessity of a candle, as she and Anna attended to the needs of their patients. At irregular intervals someone, usually Mrs. Schmidt, presented her with food and insisted that she eat. Magda obeyed, it being too much trouble to object; for all that it tasted like sawdust and ashes in her mouth. At wider intervals, she would obey similar commands to lie down and sleep, most always fully clothed and on top of the bedding. Sometimes she woke at night to find Lottie and Hannah, in their nightgowns, curled up next to her. She found such comfort in their trustfulness and the ease of their quiet breathing.
Anna ate and slept as little she did, sometimes only at her word; for they wanted to be sure that one of them would always be available. In this effort, Magda was given aid from an unexpected quarter. Sleeping fitfully, and hearing voices from the room where Rosalie lay, she rose from her pallet. Downstairs, the parlor clock chimed three strokes for the hour. She opened the door softly and Liesel glanced up from where she sat beside the bed.
“Anna looked so very tired,” she said. “I told her to lie down for a while and I would take her place. Our little Rose rests easier if I sing to her. The baby rhymes . . .those soothe as they ever did, when she was small. She is fevered and becoming worse.”
Magda came into the room, studying Liesel with wary care. She appeared as loving and careful as she ever did with her children and Rosalie; as if the hysteria she had shown in the parlor when Hansi told her about the children had all been an evil dream. Nothing in her face or demeanor hinted at how she had withdrawn to hers and Hansi’s chamber, weeping uncontrollably and refusing all comfort. This was indeed Lise herself, as she had ever been; but the little worm of fear and distrust in
Magda’s heart still niggled. Lise had always either been on top of the tower or down in the deepest cellar. When Hansi broke the news to her of Grete and Willi being taken, she had withdrawn farther into the cellar than she had ever gone before.
“Doctor Keidel will come in the morning,” Magda mentioned. “He said we may give her a few laudanum drops if he is delayed on his rounds.” Rosalie moaned, fretfully, her body moving under the covers as if she could not rest easily. “Do go on singing to her, Lise. Give me that basket of lint and I will change her dressings.”
Magda turned back the covers, then recoiled at the sight underneath and from the putrid odor which rose from the lance’s wound. Dark blood mottled the nightgown and pooled on the mattress around Rosalie’s hips. “Hand me a towel, Lise, quickly! She is losing the baby!”
If it were to do with childbearing, at least Liesel could be relied upon to keep her head. Liesel rested her hand on the slight rise of Rosalie’s belly; her lips moved silently as she counted and counted again. “Close together,” she murmured. “Not long now. Poor little love, never having had a chance. If Mrs. Schmidt is still here, I think you should fetch her now.” Magda hastily put a towel underneath Rosalie’s thighs, in a vain attempt to contain the blood and matter that came out of her in a regular trickle.
By the time she came up the stairs again, with Mrs. Schmidt puffing heavily as she followed, it was all but over; the half-formed infant slipped out of Rosalie in a gush of blood and clotted tissue. It hardly looked human to Magda’s eyes, more like a small skinned rabbit with delicate little hands instead of paws, and a face that appeared more like a monkey. It was also too soon to tell if it would have been a boy or a girl. Mrs. Schmidt wrapped it in a clean cloth and took it away.
Days later, Magda thought to ask her what she had done with the tiny corpse. “I took it over to the Hunters,” the old midwife answered sturdily, “and asked them as they were laying out Robert Hunter, to put it in the coffin with him. It seemed the right thing to do, putting their child in the same grave.”
She and the children went to Robert Hunter’s burial. They stood with a knot of women in the graveyard, while the wind whipped their black skirts this way and that, and bowed the flowers growing up through the grass in ripples like waves on the ocean. She tried her best not to think of Robert and Rosalie after their wedding, dancing, in each other’s arms and looking at each other as if there were no one else in the world. She tried also not to think of that other burying, when she stood with the children by her husband’s grave and knew that if it were not for them, she would have willingly lain down beside his coffin and let the mourners shovel earth over them both.
Afterwards, when she returned with the children and Anna, she saw Liesel in the parlor. Her head was bent over the bolt of white lawn, the very same cloth they had intended for making clothes for Rosalie’s baby. Liesel deftly sent the shears angling this way and that, but the stack of cut dress pieces lying next to her elbow on the parlor table were not for a child, but for a woman. Their eyes met and Magda realized the garment was for Rosalie; a dress to be buried in, white for a bride, white for a shroud.
In the following days, other women came to the house, girls who had been Rosalie’s friends or older women who were Magda’s and Liesel’s. They came to console and sit in the parlor with Liesel, weeping and sewing together.
From then on, she and Anna burned sweet herbs in the sickroom, for the smell from the suppurating wound soon became nearly unbearable, even if they opened the windows to the fresh air during the day. Only once did Rosalie seem to be anywhere near rational consciousness, and that was after Robert Hunter was buried, two or three days following her miscarriage. Shortly after sunrise, a towering line of thunderclouds blew in from the northwest, grey as cold iron underneath but shining as white as spun cotton on their crests. At midday Magda turned from closing the sickroom window against a sudden squall of rain outside, and the bright spring day turned suddenly as dark as twilight.
“Magda?” Rosalie whispered pathetically from the pillow. Her poor bandaged head turned to follow as Magda drew the curtain closed. “Magda . . .it hurts. Everything hurts.” Magda sat down, swiftly taking up Rosalie’s hand in hers, and stroking her forehead. Such care that needed to be taken, when there was hardly a place to touch her which wouldn’t cause more pain!
“I know, dear heart,” she answered, wrenched by the look of utter bewilderment in Rosalie’s purple-pansy eyes. Tears leaked out from their corners, trickling down and back into the bandages around her head. “Doctor Keidel is coming soon. There is a potion he is giving you, something to take away the pain. You’re safe at home. Liesel and I are taking care of you.”
“Robert.” Rosalie moistened her fever-cracked lips. “Where is Robert, Magda?”
“They took him to the Hunters to be cared for,” Magda answered, with perfect truth. That answer seemed to content Rosalie, for she closed her eyes for a moment.
“The baby . . .what of the baby?” she whispered, just when Magda thought she had begun drifting away into half-consciousness again. “I can’t feel him moving any more. And it hurts in my middle, Magda.” She wept again.
“Shush, Rosalie . . .little lamb . . .everything is going to be all right soon,” Magda crooned. “The baby is being taken care of.” She talked, soothing and comforting talk, every word of it a lie—whilst praying for Doctor Keidel to come and soon with his little silver case of syringes and vials. She raged inwardly against the Indian raiders who had brutally violated and tortured her sister, seemingly on an impulse, the same casual unthinking gesture of someone squashing a beautiful butterfly.
When Doctor Keidel finally came, she took refuge in Vati’s room. Sheets of rain washed against the windows and the lamp flame flickered in the wayward draft from the open door.
“R-r-r-ain,” Vati stammered, fighting a gallant and losing battle against those muscles that no longer obeyed his mind.
“A spring storm, with thunder and lightening,” she agreed. “I fear it will shred the last spring petals from your pear tree, Vati. Shall I read some more to you from Uncle Simon’s letters?”
He moved his head in the way that had come to mean assent, but there remained a question. “S-s-m-lll,” he got out the mangled sounds with no little effort, and Magda realized with a cold feeling in her stomach what he meant. The odor of putrefaction may have clung to her clothes, or was now so strong as to waft from the other room. Having been breathing it for some hours, she was past noticing it—but not so for Vati.
“There is a dead rat, somewhere in the garden,” she answered, steadily. “Or in the storeroom, perhaps. I will have the boys look for it tomorrow.” She began to read, for he seemed content with that explanation. The rain fell with a sound like pebbles on the roof and against the glass. Presently she saw that he dozed and when Sam came in bringing Vati’s dinner on a tray, she had him set it aside for a little. She did not wish to disturb him, and so she dozed a little herself, while outside the rain lessened.
“Mama?” That was Sam’s voice, and she opened her eyes, startled to have drifted into sleep. The room brightened as the clouds moved past, casting moving patterns on the scrubbed oak floor and the pale bed sheets. Vati’s head lay tilted to one side, as if he had been looking out at his beloved pear tree and fallen asleep. She saw first that the storm had indeed knocked loose most of the pale petals to the ground beneath. Rather than appearing as a cloud of white blossoms, the tree now appeared mistily green, adorned with the first tiny new leaves of the year. “Mama,” Sam ventured again, and his voice sounded unsure, even a little shaken. “I think Opa is gone.”
“No,” she answered at once, and unthinking, “He is right here. Vati?” But there was no question once she looked again. There was a difference in the very look of someone who was alive, and someone who was not. Without making any fuss, or asking that any fuss be made of him, he had slipped away between one breath and the next, without a sound. His flesh was still warm, elastic. Sam hel
ped her take away the pillows that had propped him up and they laid him flat and composed his hands to lie over his chest.
“I suppose I should go and tell Mrs. Schmidt and Pastor A. now,” Sam ventured. “And Auntie Liesel, too.”
“Wait for a little, and let me tell your aunt first,” Magda said. Inwardly, she dreaded telling her sister that Vati was dead. Liesel might withdraw so far into her dark, deep cellar that nothing would coax her out. Also, she might go into one of her hysterical fits again, which Magda didn’t think she could endure. “Let us open the windows and let in the fresh air—the air here always smells so wondrous after a good rain.”
Mercifully, it was Pastor Altmueller who appeared first. Kindly and ever-composed in the face of grief, he held her hand and Sam’s and said a brief prayer that seemed to be meant more for Magda’s comfort than for Vati’s benefit. Vati had long insisted on being a free thinker, in spite of two decades of friendship with Pastor Altmueller.
“I shall notify Captain Nimitz, of course,” he added, “and see to the necessities. One would wish for your brother and Hansi to return at this moment, when you have such need of their support and familial affection—especially if they manage to free the little ones. You are in my prayers, my dear Margaretha—as much and more as you ever have been.”
“It was most curious, Lottie,” Magda mused, “that I was able to maintain such composure—I think I had already done my grieving for him beforehand. Once your Opa had left us, I had already accepted the loss to us all. But your Aunt Liesel reacted precisely as I feared. She was inconsolable, incapable of leaving her bed. Mrs. Schmidt remained with her and with Rosalie for the duration of the funeral.” Magda laughed, but it was more like a short and unamused bark. “Only on one occasion during the war—the War Between the States, Lottie—and of late in this dreadful epidemic, or when old friends were carried off by extreme age, was I required to attend on three funerals within the space of a week!”