by Celia Hayes
“I remember the house being filled with flowers,” Lottie ventured.
Her mother nodded. “Since it was spring, I sent you to gather them from the woods and fields by Baron’s Creek, with Sam and Hannah and Marie, too. Poor girl, I believe that was the only day that she was permitted to leave the house, and only because your Aunt Liesel was insensible from a dose of tonic that Doctor Keidel gave her and so was unable to withhold permission. I gave your brother one of your Papa’s old revolvers, though. Troubled times,” Magda sighed. “There was no danger from Indians, not so close to town, with the trail season about to begin.”
“And Sam let us ride on Papa’s old horse, too,” Lottie added. “That was a great treat for me.”
“Yes, it was,” Magda allowed fondly. “Poor old Three-Socks! He was a great age for a horse and half-blind as well, but to Sam he was a fierce battle charger, a veritable Bucephalus.” She sighed again, immersed in memories. “My dear little Rosalie! Doctor Keidel came twice daily, towards the end. We did not tell her of Vati. It would have made no difference, for she was beyond any understanding. Her pain . . . it was dreadful, even with the drugs we gave her. She wept and groaned, begging us most piteously to make the pain go away. The only thing that calmed her in the least was for us to sing to her. All the old baby songs, the nursery rhymes. We sang to her . . .Liesel, Anna, and even Auntie Elizabeth and I, until we were hoarse. The fever burned through her, from the dreadful infection. She would not have died of it today, Lottie, but when you were a child, people died often of things that are of hardly any moment, now.”
“No one has been attacked by Indian war parties, of late,” Lottie pointed out with a flash of irony.
“True,” her mother agreed with bitter satisfaction. “Indeed, Anna and I were never able to muster much sympathy for the trials of the Comanche tribes after they were rounded up and made to stay on the reservation, although we were often lectured about our lack of fellow feeling. We were supposed to have been at peace with them, too! It was the cruelty of her death which stayed with us—she, who was the kindest, the sweetest of young girls! She had never been unkind to anyone, had never endured anything harsher than your Opa’s disapproval. She was our shining, golden child . . .and her life came to such an ugly end, all that bright promise shattered. He— Robert Hunter—had forgotten his carbine, at the house-raising dance. They came away, early in the morning, having danced all night while the children slept, and encountered the war party by chance. They had tried to steal a fine herd of horses at Burkheim’s but were baffled of that by the barking of Dieter Burkheim’s dogs. And so . . .” Magda made a sad little gesture with her hand, indicative of finality and hopelessness.
“The Indians were in an ugly mood, when they came upon them—although your father used to jest that there was no appreciable difference between that and a good mood when it came to a Comanche war party. So she died, your Aunt Rosalie and my very dear little sister. She was taken from us, as she was given, without warning. And we have never really known who she was, her parents or her origins. Only that she was ours for a time and we loved her, very deeply.” Magda looked into the fire burning in the ornate tiled fireplace and polished metal grate in her daughter’s ornate and comfortable parlor. “Hannah said something to me afterwards, which was of such comfort.”
When the whole ugly business of dying was done, they washed Rosalie’s body and clothed it carefully in the white dress that had been cut out by Liesel and tearfully stitched together by those who loved her. So, too, did those who built the coffin weep as they worked, or so Magda was later informed.
She and Mrs. Schmidt opened the windows, aired out the room, and burned the mattress contents. Even so, it was many nights before Magda experienced uninterrupted slumber there. She would be glad, at the end of summer, to move into Vati’s room with its window views into the street on one side and the garden on the other.
“Mama,” asked Sam as she and Hannah walked from the graveyard for the third time in a week, “is Opa in heaven, even though he didn’t believe in it?”
Before Magda could even start to consider the question, Hannah answered firmly, “Of course he is in heaven! Opa was very good.” Hannah looked up at Magda, her clear grey eyes as candid and honest as Vati’s own. Magda realized that Hannah had outgrown her childish timidity. It had been replaced by a quiet reserve, which she had not noted until now, much as she had not noticed how tall Sam had become. She took their hands as they crossed the footbridge over Town Creek, regretting once more how little attention she had paid to them since returning home from the coast. Behind them, Lottie toddled between her cousins Anna and Marie, and Elias brought up the rear of the chief mourners. The fresh breeze fluttered the dark veils worn by Magda and the girls. Anna had already drawn hers back from her face as soon as they left the burial grounds, declaring that she was tired of seeing everything through a black fog.
Hannah squeezed Magda’s hand comfortingly and said with perfect confidence, “And Aunt Rosalie is in heaven too, with Papa there to protect her always.”
Magda smiled a little at that, thinking of the day that Carl Becker had returned, as suddenly as a comet streaking across the sky. He had come to Vati’s house, in the first year of their arrival at Friedrichsburg, during a gathering in the garden to celebrate Jacob’s baptism. Little Rosalie had seen him lingering at the edge of that happy gathering, so she took his hand and announced, “Here he is, Vati—I found him!” Magda came out of the house with a tray in her hands, and there he was: a tall and fair-haired man, standing with Rosalie as she swung their hands and laughed up at him.
“That is a most comforting fancy, Hannah-my pet,” she said.
Hannah replied with careful dignity, “It is not a fancy, Mama. She is in heaven and Papa is there with her.” She seemed perfectly confident in her conviction. Magda realized with a sudden sense of wonder that her daughter was good. Truly good; that pure and humble sort of goodness associated with saints, not in the ostentatious way of a religious tract that was so typified by those who did good things only so everyone would notice them.
“I think Opa would find heaven awfully boring,” Sam announced. “And I’ll bet Papa would, too.”
“Heaven is not boring,” Hannah insisted, again with an air of perfect certainty. She would not be drawn into an argument over this, although Sam tried, until Magda finally told him to hush. Fancy or not, Hannah’s conviction that her Papa still watched over and protected those he loved was of considerable comfort.
And when they came to Vati’s house, Sam and Elias ran ahead, shouting that they saw horses in the stable yard. The men had returned. Magda picked up her skirts and ran to meet them. The faces they turned towards her were tired, and from the slump of their shoulders, she knew already that their search had been in vain.
Late that afternoon Peter Vining was last to use the wash-house at the bottom of the garden, soaking every bit of trail-grime and sweat from his body and changing into a clean set of clothes. Ma’am Becker had seen to him as she had seen to the others, with calm and understated affection, upon their return from the Llano. She came straight away to the stable, following after the excited children, her black skirts lifted above her shoe-tops with both hands. No tears, no questions and no recriminations. She had wordlessly embraced Hansi and her brother Fredi, and brushed Dolph’s face with a kiss as light as a butterfly’s touch.
“You look as if your arm pained you,” she said to Peter, then another light touch. “Do you wish another of my remedies, then?”
“No, Ma’am,” Peter had answered. “I am so sorry,” he began to say, but she touched his lips with a motherly gesture.
“They are in God’s hands, now,” she answered. “Dearest Vati, our little sister, her child, and Robert who loved her. You should wash now. There are clean towels in the bathhouse. We have many guests in the house. Just leave your dirty things there. We shall do the laundry tomorrow, of course.” She appeared much as she usually did, in the black of dee
pest mourning; only a little more wearied, her mind half-distracted by thoughts of the many guests in the house.
Obscurely, Peter was grateful at not having to relate any of their frantic but ultimately fruitless pursuit. The storm had defeated them and the children were gone beyond reach. There was no need for Ma’am Becker to ask any further questions; she could see it plain.
The house was full of people, some strangers to him even after six months. There had been food in plenty, laid out in the parlor for the mourners paying their respects after the funeral. It had taken some time for his mind to accept that the black crepe hung from the front door and draped over the windows was for more than the kindly old man with the thick glasses, but also for the beautiful Rosalie, the prettiest woman he had ever seen.
He had lingered behind—he was only part of the family by remote connection. The other mourners would be speaking German to him, and in his state of exhaustion, he was uncertain of his ability to cope. He supposed Hansi was upstairs, making peace with his wife over their failure to retrieve the children. Dolph and Fredi had washed hastily and dressed, leaving him to be the last in the stone-floored bathhouse.
The garden was empty for the moment, but for one of the younger girls sitting on the swing with her back to him, pushing her toes against the ground just enough to gently move the swing back and forth. As he drew closer he saw that it was not one of the younger girls, but rather Miss Anna, tiny and almost doll-like. He usually didn’t notice her diminutive size, as her formidable manner turned attention away from that quality.
“Miss Anna,” he ventured carefully—today was not a day for their usual exchange of mockeries. “I wish to extend my regrets over your loss . . .your losses.”
“Thank you, Mr. Vining,” she nodded regally. Her eyes were perfectly dry. “And I would like to extend my thanks for your own effort. I know my parents will also be grateful for them, but Papa will not think to say so for days. And Mama is too inconsolable to consider any proprieties.”
“Think nothing of it,” Peter answered, in his most gallant manner. “I will leave you then, Miss Anna, to enjoy your moment of solitude. I apologize most sincerely for intruding upon it.”
“You need not,” Anna returned, the tone of her voice most particularly desolate. “Apologize, that is. Oddly enough, I was not enjoying my solitude.”
He inwardly kicked himself for having made a poor choice of words. Touched by her obvious grief, Peter spoke on an impulse, “Then may I share your solitude with you, Miss Anna? On promise of not speaking, if that is your requirement?” By way of an answer, she slid a little to one side of the swing to make room for him. He sat down awkwardly; there was not enough room to sit together without touching, and he was almost painfully aware of her presence.
His legs were so much longer, it was impossible to swing as she had been doing. But they sat for quite some time, not speaking a word, until Anna broke the silence. “I have not been able to weep for her. It is very curious, you know. Women are supposed to cry at funerals. I cared for her for days, telling myself that I must not shed a single tear, that it would distress her immeasurably to see me crying over her.”
She did not seem to expect an answer to that, nor was there one that Peter could think to give her. Finally, he said, “It was a hard road for you, Miss Anna—and here I was feeling sorry for myself, that we could not get your brother and sister back.”
“You’ve no idea.” Anna looked straight ahead, her face still perfectly composed. “They told me once that she was my baby and I should look after her. And so I did, up to the end. Do you know how long it takes someone to die and how much they suffer, after being run through with a lance?”
“No,” Peter answered quietly, “but I’ve seen men die gutshot, after screaming in a field hospital for days. I don’t suppose it was any prettier, Miss Anna.”
“No.” Her voice sounded just a little softer, her composure somehow less rigid. “I don’t suppose it was.” They sat with their own thoughts, side by side on the swing, swaying just a little. Peter found it unexpectedly restful with Miss Anna perched next to him, as light and delicate as a bird.
“At least you were there to hold her hand, Miss Anna. At least you could do that much for her.” Impulsively he reached for her hand with his own good one.
Chapter Ten: Day of Reckoning
“It all seems very quiet,” Magda remarked on the Saturday that she and Anna reopened the store. “And so empty!” It was a week after Rosalie’s funeral, a week after Hansi and the boys had returned, empty-handed and covered in trail-dirt, on horses trembling from weariness.
“I still keep expecting to see Vati in his room, or sitting under the pear tree,” Anna agreed, wistfully. “I wish Papa and I could induce Mama to leave her room, but she will not hear of it.” Hansi had exhausted himself, pleading fruitlessly with Liesel. He had finally lost his temper and left with Jacob, taking a wagon load of goods to Kerrville. He had promised to deliver a load of cut timber to the Becker farm, where work had commenced on the house after the spring cattle round-up. Magda didn’t know if Liesel would have forgiven Hansi by the time he returned and was herself too grieved over Rosalie to care very much.
“It’s like one of those starfish,” Sam observed earnestly. He plied a broom with great energy, although Magda thought he was merely stirring the dust around. “When it loses one of its arms.”
“How is that, Sam?” his mother asked, much puzzled.
“It grows another one to replace it.” Sam scowled, thoughtfully. “Or maybe it’s one of those jellyfish things I am thinking of. It grows again into the shape it needs, even if it’s not in quite the same shape as it was before.”
“Clear as mud, Samuel,” Anna said, but secretly Magda thought her son was right. The household, her family—it was reshaping itself, like a starfish. Wearily, she wondered if the starfish, or whatever Sam was thinking of, felt pain when part of it was cut off. For they all felt pain, but only Liesel was incapacitated by it, by the unbearable absence, the emptiness in the places where Willi and Grete should have been. She had withdrawn into her deep, deep cellar, leaving Marie to cope valiantly with the household, aided as always by Mrs. Schmidt in the mornings and by Magda and Anna whenever they could step away from the shop and Hansi’s freighting concerns. She refused to come downstairs, and on many days even remained in her room.
Vati might have been able to coax Liesel to come forth, he had always been good with her; but then there was the Vati-shaped absence where he had always been, as well. Magda had the same sense that had haunted her in the months after Carl Becker’s death—that he had not really gone, but was somewhere in the house or close by. When she looked into the parlor, or out to the garden, she half-expected to see Vati there, dozing over a book with his glasses slipping down over his nose, or deep in some abstruse discussion with Pastor Altmueller.
Hansi insisted she move into Vati’s room; certainly she preferred that to her old room, which for her was marked forever as the place where Rosalie had suffered and where the miasma of death seemed still clinging to the walls. Still, there was something restful about returning to the shop, restful and yet exhilarating. All the plans they had made while in Indianola, which had needed to be set aside for Vati’s final illness, could now be picked up again and moved towards fulfillment.
Very gradually, over the weeks and months of the summer, that summer of the first full year of peace, they were able to do just that. Lottie began school that autumn, walking to the schoolhouse between Hannah and Sam, blithe and eager, with not a backwards look to Magda lingering in the shop door watching after them. Her older brother and sister had earnestly begun teaching her letters, marking out the shapes on Sam’s school slate, and challenging her to sound out the letters of the shopkeepers’ signs along Main Street. Lottie stopped asking wistfully after Grete about that time. She was a sensible and sensitive child; Magda thought that her younger daughter had worked out for herself the connection between the absence of
her almost-twin cousin, and her aunt’s withdrawal into seclusion.
There had never been any news of the children, in spite of all the letters that Anna wrote in careful English on behalf of her father: letters to the governor, to the officer commanding Federal Army troops in Texas and the territories, to the Territorial Indian agency. They received replies, expressing regret and occasionally even sympathy, but nothing more effective than that. Encouraged by Charley Nimitz, they placed advertisements in certain newspapers in Kansas and the Indian Territories, asking for information and promising a reward should that information lead to the return of Willi and Grete Richter, seven and four years of age, taken by Comanche raiders from Gillespie County in the spring of 1866. They received some reply to those, but mostly semi-literate scrawls asking for money in exchange for information.
“They are extortionists, Papa,” Anna said firmly. She burned the letters before Liesel could see them and frantically beg her husband to pay anything, anything at all, to anyone who claimed to know where the children were.
Liesel grew pale from confinement indoors, and thin—thinner than she ever had been as a girl. Hansi’s dark hair began to grow out in streaks of gray, and the skin under his eyes increasingly appeared bruised, as if he did not sleep well. When he did sleep at home, he spent those nights less and less often with his wife. Magda thought that he made the excuse of not disturbing Liesel so he could stay at the Sunday House, or in the room that Sam shared with Elias and any of the older boys who were at home.
On a weekday in November, he was in the office going through circulars with Magda and planning another buying trip to the coast. Marie came into the shop, saying, “Papa, there is a man at the door, saying he has an appointment with you!”