by Celia Hayes
“I remember how she did not sing nursery rhymes to Henry when he had the colic,” Lottie smiled, reminiscently. “Rather, she recited the multiplication tables to him. Do you recall when we visited Onkel Hansi’s house after Christian was born? There she was in Onkel Hansi’s study, nursing Christian, holding him with one arm as she wrote a letter for Onkel Hansi with the other hand, while Henry made paper boats out of merchant circulars at her feet.”
“I have always thought, how very happy they looked, the day after their wedding.” Magda looked into the fire, while rain whispered against the windows. “How strange and ill-omened their wedding seemed to be at first, and yet they seemed so content with each other—he sitting next to her on the wagon-seat with his pony trailing behind, showing her how to drive, his hand over hers on the reins.” Magda laughed, short and wry. “Your Aunt was frantic, of course—once she heard of this mad adventure and madder marriage. She dashed off letter after letter to me and dispatched Jacob and George at once, with a spring-wagon, to bring Hansi home. She would have sent them after Anna, as well, but Hansi put his food down. Or he would have, if he had been capable of standing. ‘I’ll have to talk sense to Lise’ he told me as they carried him to the wagon on a litter, ‘for she will be out of her mind with worry. As if our little nun didn’t have a cooler head on her shoulders than any three young misses her age! Why don’t you come to San Antonio and hold her hand for a while?’
“‘Why not indeed?’ I told him. “What of the store?’
“‘What of it?’ he told me. ‘Come in the winter, when the trail season is over. Let young Sam and Jacob run it for a while. Sam is a good, steady, reliable lad and Jacob is courting young Miss Schultz. He would, I think, like to settle down, and she helps her Papa in his store. Be a good help to you, she would.’
“‘Everything is changing,’ I said to him, ‘and I don’t think I like it much.’
“Your uncle looked at me and growled, ‘Everything changes, Margaretha. It’s to our advantage to know that, and change to meet circumstances. What would we be now—and where would we be if we had never dared to leave Albeck?’
“‘Home,’ I said to him. When the boys settled the litter in the back of the spring-wagon, your uncle looked down to me and said, ‘Well . . .you should see the fine place your boy made of Brother Carl’s place. There’s a home, if you like it.’”
“I loved it at once,” Lottie said, softly. “Was it very changed, Mama? When we returned at last?”
“It was,” Magda answered. “It was changed, but I loved it as much as ever.”
“Whose idea was it that we should move to San Antonio, to Onkel Hansi’s house?” Lottie bent her still-fair head over her embroidery frame as she and her mother talked. “I cannot recall, was it before Jacob married Miss Schultz? I thought it quite unfair at the time, as if just because he married, you should give up the store and Vati’s house to him!”
“I did nothing of the sort,” Magda answered, sternly. “Generally it is accounted a good thing not to have two mistresses in the same house! And Jacob marrying was not the reason. I fell ill of the grippe that winter and was a long time recovering. There was so much work in the store; it seemed as if those tasks were endless and never done. I felt so wearied all the time! Finally, your brothers and Onkel Hansi insisted that you and your sister and I come and spend the summer at your father’s house. Dolph would be away on the trail north, and he would take Sam with him, while we would manage the property in his absence. It would be perfectly safe, for he employed many hands and not all would join him on the trail! Then in the fall, we would go to San Antonio so that you and Hannah could go to school there.”
“That was more to comfort Auntie Liesel with our company, was it not?” Lottie asked.
Her mother nodded. “Not entirely; Grete benefited by your companionship. I think she was terribly lonely, then. Such a sweet child, but her sojourn with the Indians had left her with very odd manners and habits. Hannah had already attended the Ursuline school and had been very happy there, so it seemed quite natural that you two should join her when you were old enough.” Magda sighed. “Your Aunt was more cast down, not by Anna marrying so suddenly, but because Peter took her afterwards to Austin, to live in his mother’s house. She and your Onkel Hansi both felt her absence.”
“Onkel Hansi always had trouble keeping a secretary who could keep up with him!” Lottie giggled. “I see then . . . he trusted you.”
“I was certainly kept busy enough,” Magda answered, and Lottie giggled again.
“It seemed perfectly splendid, Mama. Those years—summers in the Hills, Christmas and school holidays at Onkel Hansi’s, or visiting Cousin Anna and Cousin Peter and Opa’s old house for the Fourth of July! But I loved Papa’s house the best. I felt as if I knew it well, before I ever set foot in it.”
“So you would, my dearest child,” Magda answered tenderly. “For you listened to us all speak of it . . . but still, it was much changed when we returned at last.”
“It seemed like a palace to me.” Lottie’s face glowed with nostalgic fervor. “An enchanted palace in a forest of flowering trees! But I had not seen a real palace, so I believe I had nothing for comparison then!”
Her mother snorted. “It was but a simple farmhouse—a palace only because your father built it for me and I loved him so very dearly! Dolph turned it into a true palace.”
* * *
Dolph was busy with organizing the spring roundup so he sent Daddy Hurst at the reins of the trusty two-horse ambulance for Magda and the children. A freight wagon, heavily laden with such things as Magda wished to take with them, had already departed some days before that blustery March afternoon. Two young Mexican riders—nephews or sons of Porfirio—also came to escort the ambulance as outriders.
“Mistah Dolph, Mistah Peter, dey take no chances,” Daddy Hurst explained with grim austerity, “’bout dem raiding Injuns. Dey inclined to b’lieve de worse . . . even if dere be plenty o’ sojers along de Santone road. We leave fust ting in de morning, Ma’am, we be dere by twilight.”
Dolph had also sent a pony for Sam, to that young man’s inexpressible delight. In the morning, Daddy Hurst solicitously handed Magda and her daughters up to the little door at the back of the spring wagon, and stowed their many carpet bags and valises in the places set aside for luggage. They had kept one of the beds with which it had been originally fitted, now piled with quilts and pillows against the cold, and a narrow padded bench along the other side. Magda wearily swung her feet up and reclined as Hannah covered her with some of the bedding. The canvas wagon cover was drawn tight against the chill.
“You look tired, Mama,” she said. Magda smiled at her oldest daughter’s concern. At sixteen, Hannah was sweet-faced and serene, as composed and curiously mature as Anna had been at that age. “You can rest all the way, if you like.”
Magda patted Hannah’s hand. “You were always happy to be going home, weren’t you, Hannah-my-chick?”
Hannah settled herself on the padded bench opposite, her head tilting thoughtfully as Daddy Hurst chirruped to the horses. “Is it really our home, after having stayed away so long?” she asked. “We were sent away before Lottie was born and she is almost nine. I have lived longer at Opa’s than my father’s house, so I wonder now, Mama—where is home, really?”
“Where we’re going, Nannie!” Lottie bounced in excitement next to her sister, whom she called by the baby name that she used when she was small and couldn’t speak clearly. “I can hardly wait! We’ve been as close as Comfort, but Dolph said then that half the inside didn’t have a roof and last year he said the bunkhouse wasn’t finished and so there was no room for us! He sounded as if he didn’t wish us to come.”
“Until it was all as perfect for us as he could make it,” Hannah said, with perfect assurance. Magda smiled at her daughters and lay back on the pillows. Hannah and Dolph had been much in conference this last year, two heads bent together above the catalogues and circulars every time
that Dolph had come to visit Friedrichsburg, if the two of them were not slipping away to Mr. Tatsch’s workshop to order this or that bit of fine furniture for the house. She felt a rush of affection for them—they were good and loving children, all those she had born to Carl Becker; all of them different, all of them loved with the same knowledgeable affection. And now they loved and cared for her with something of the same solicitude. She was so tired, so weary, so hopeful of setting down those burdens and resting for a while!
She had felt this same dreadful lassitude, the same empty exhaustion, just before Lottie was born. The Confederate Army had confiscated the farm, thrown them all off Carl Becker’s property, told them to take what they could carry and leave. Those soldiers had let them pile a few things into the ramshackle cart they hauled muck in, and hitched it to their oldest horse. This, on top of her husband’s murder, was almost too great a blow to endure for Magda; not one tragedy but the accumulation of all of them. She had withdrawn to an upper bedroom of Vati’s house for weeks.
This time, the weariness that followed upon the grippe had held her paralyzed with exhaustion. She dreaded the thought of being confined by her weakness to upstairs, like Liesel, and forced herself, over and over, to do business as she had always done. Until she fainted one mid-morning in the shop; Hansi had come roaring in like a winter gale after Sam and Jacob sent for him. “You will kill yourself,” he said sternly, “with lack of rest and caring consideration for all but yourself.”
“But the store!” she had pleaded.
“The store will care for itself in the hands of Jacob and my new daughter, sister Magda. It is no longer a delicate child demanding constant attendance.” He looked beyond her, “Besides, our interests now have greater needs than you being available to measure out half a pound of sugar for Mrs. Arhelger and dance attendance upon Mrs. Schmidt as she makes up her mind between six yards of blue calico, or six yards of red. What do you think of another store, Magda? Or more than one?” Magda thought of the obligations she had to deal with in keeping a single store, of running between the shop and the house; Hansi read the expression on her face and began to laugh. “No, not for you to run it, you silly goose! To establish it, to organize the stock and the goods, to train Sam and Elias to run it . . .and then if you like and it does well, to do it again!”
“Where?” Magda asked.
Her brother-in-law only put on his most thoughtful and speculative expression. “Well, wherever you would think would make us the most money. But only when you are rested and fit!” Hansi had promised expansively. “Go home,” he had then urged her. “Go home and rest. Potter and garden about the place that your son has reclaimed, enjoy the cool weather of the hill country! Then come to San Antonio in the fall, when the heat of the year has broken, and be useful once again. You wish for work, Magda—there is work enough! We are rich enough now to be able to pick and choose among the work that pleases us to do, not that we must to, in order to put bread and meat and milk on the table for our children!”
“We are rich?” Magda gasped. Of all he had said, this was the thing that had taken her attention.
Hansi had laughed again. “Yes, we are rich. That is one thing. But staying rich—that is another! These Yankees, they have no idea! Rest you then, Magda. In the fall when young Dolph returns to his father’s land, come to San Antonio and I will show you what work it is to remain rich!
Thinking on that, Magda pulled the covering closer, against the north wind that seeped around the edges of the wagon cover. They would be home by the end of the day at the brisk pace that Daddy Hurst set to the horses. Home, as fast as the spring-wagon ambulance and its swift, swaying passage could take them—how much swifter than that torturous plodding journey on that dreadful day when they had been cast out! Destitute, hungry and harried, with her children heart-broken and carrying their particular pets and possessions, she with Lottie in her belly and fearing that this dreadful journey might make her miscarry of that last of her husband’s children . . . ‘Take care of the children,’ he had told her, his last words to her as the Hanging Band took him away. “Be happy.’ And he had looked over his shoulder and softly sung a verse from one of the Sangerbund pieces, the prisoners’ chorus from Fidelio. How he had loved Sangerbund! How he had loved his children and her, and the place he had built for them. Now they had reclaimed and rebuilt his loving work. At last, after nine years, she and the younger children were returning.
By afternoon, Lottie vibrated like a taut fiddle string with excitement. Magda, who had dozed most of the way rocked gently by the swaying ambulance, finally permitted her to sit next to Daddy Hurst on the driver’s bench, so that she could see ahead, over the backs of the horses, past Sam and Dolph’s mounted escort.
“The shops are newer than I recall—and there are many more houses,” Magda observed, as they rolled through Comfort. “When the war was over, I thought that many might not dare return. Even the Altgelts went to San Antonio. At least the Stielers and the Steves remain. Poor Mrs. Boerner, to lose a brother and a husband both! She died, you know. In childbirth, when she heard of what had happened on the Nueces to Tegener’s company. They did not want to take the loyalty oath, so they meant to go to Mexico and join the Union army….”
“Like Uncle Johann,” Hannah nodded, somberly.
“Yes,” Magda answered. “I wouldn’t have blamed any of them for never coming back. We’re almost to the Browns. They went north, to Missouri. Their place was never much to look at!” Magda laughed, past the ache in her heart at that memory. “Your father took me to see them, when he first brought me here. I was horrified! They lived like the poorest sort of peasants, with a pig in the yard, and no glass in the windows, nothing of any kind of beauty or comfort.”
“I expect that would be theirs.” Hannah craned her head to look out the front of the ambulance, where the canvas was rolled back. “Over there, to the north of the road in a clearing between the trees. It looks like there was a stone chimney, and a pile of logs. It’s all quite ruinous, Mama.”
“And very little worse than when the Browns lived there,” Magda pointed out. “I am surprised you can tell the difference. That was cruel of me to say, Hannah-my-chick, when Mrs. Brown was the only one to have been kind to us on that awful day.” Her eyes filled, and Hannah patted her knee, under the quilts laid over it.
“I remember,” she said, simply. “I remember. We were so hungry and she came after us on the road and brought us food. Mrs. Brown had the courage to be good. It’s funny, Mama—everyone talks about such virtues, and what a wonderful thing they are, and yet, so few people actually have the courage in the face of such adversity. Isn’t it curious, they are rarely the people we have been led to expect such exemplary virtues from! She did look so funny, Mama,” and Hannah laughed, not out of unkindness, but rather fond affection, “so funny, in her ragged dress and bare feet, on the back of a mule! And she bullied the soldiers into fetching us water and to let us go slowly afterwards! She was fearless and so kind!”
“She and her husband were good friends,” Magda responded. “Your father thought much of Brown—though I could scarce think why! I was shamed that I had thought so ill of them, and yet alone of all of our neighbors . . . ”
“The spirit was with her,” Hannah said, “and made her strong, daring to walk among the lions on our behalf, trusting that they would not harm her.”
Startled by the fervor in Hannah’s voice, Magda looked at her daughter’s face, thinking—not for the first time—that there was something a little otherworldly about Hannah, as if she heard voices that no one else could hear, knew things that no one else could know.
From beside Daddy Hurst, Lottie called, “Oh, Mama, Nannie, look! There’s ever so many cows! And horses, too! Are they all ours?”
“I think so, Lottchen,” Magda answered, putting back the covers. She sat up, turning in the seat so that she could see through the front of the ambulance. “Although our property begins in another mile or so. The road was n
ever so fine before, it was little more than wagon tracks worn through the grass. There were some places where your father and some of our neighbors rolled stones into some of the low places to make a level crossing . . . but nothing so level as this.”
“Ben’ a lot o’ folk movin’ long dis-here road,” Daddy Hurst chuckled. “Not all foah de R-B Ranch, neither! Look you dere, Miz Lottie, Miz Becker! Round dat next bend, Mistah Dolph, he had dat stonemason fella put up two gateposts, to mark de road to de ranch foah stranger folk dat come dis way!”
“How very important that must make it seem,” Magda remarked breathlessly, remembering how the track to Carl Becker’s place had been marked when she first came to his house as a new bride: the bleached skull of one of those wild long-horned cattle hung from the nail driven into the trunk of an oak tree. Comfort hadn’t been built then. It was a clearing by the river and the road to San Antonio that crossed it by a ford. The Indians once had one of their skin lodge villages there and when Carl Becker first built his house and orchard, the country was wild enough that he warned her about going very far alone. But he had often said that his father’s farm had been once as wild and dangerous; his place in turn would become safe and settled.