by Celia Hayes
“What of our son?!” Hansi demanded. “What of our Willi—your letter said that he had been brought into the agency months ago! Where is he, what have they done with him?”
“Ah,” Fredi finished chewing and swallowed a great mouthful. “Well, that’s the thing, you see. He’s been at Ft. Sill for months, with all the rest of the band that he was with. At first, they didn’t even recognize him as a white man. It seemed that he managed to stay in the background, never letting any of the soldiers take a good close look at him. Couldn’t keep that up for long, though; presently someone noted he had grey eyes and light skin. They took him to the agent, Mr. Lawrie Tatum—the Indians call him Bald Head. He’s the man in charge of the Comanche Agency.” Fredi chewed and swallowed the last of his breakfast. “Look, can we go back inside and have something more to eat while I tell you the rest? He had him cleaned him up a bit, cut his hair . . .Johann wrote that it took half a dozen soldiers to hold him down for a bath, he fought like a wildcat the whole time.”
“That does not sound like Willi!” exclaimed Liesel. “He was always so good and biddable.” Suddenly her face was shadowed by doubt. “Could it be truly our boy and not some other child? Might they have made a mistake? Perhaps our son has been claimed by some other family!” She appealed frantically to Hansi, who set his arm around her.
“No, they are certain of it,” he responded at once. “I have letters from Agent Tatum, outlining all the particulars. Johann also made a journey to Fort Sill to confirm such details as could not be expressed in letters. They both questioned this boy very closely. It was not Tatum’s fault that when he wrote to me, we had already departed for Germany.”
“All these months!” Liesel lamented. “We thought him dead for all this time, yet he was alive!”
Magda met Anna’s eyes, knowing they shared the same thought; that the exertion of travel and their arrival home might be pushing Liesel from the heights of her tower. Liesel continued, “And why did he not recollect who he was, tell his proper name to this agent?”
“I’ll take the boys upstairs,” Anna murmured to Magda. “I am sorry, Auntie—I have so little patience for Mama, when all my attention is bent towards my own children!”
“Take Lottie and Grete also,” Magda answered in the same tones. “I do not think it can be good for her to be reminded anew.”
Meanwhile, Hansi was reassuring Liesel yet again. Magda and Anna had heard him patiently repeating almost by rote what he had read in letters forwarded from Mr. Tatum in Kansas and from Johann, so many times during their journey home. “We are certain of this, dearest. Do you not recollect that Willi was born with a strawberry mark on his back, just under his shoulder blade? This boy has an identically shaped scar in that same place. He remembers some German but no English. He also has some memory of Friedrichsburg and of living with many other children in a house that sounds like your father’s house. He said also that he was taken captive along with his younger sister. It can be no other, Lise!”
“In any case, the lad arrives with an Army supply train at the end of the week.” Fredi dealt out that information as if slapping down a playing card. “If he does turn out to be the wrong one, you can always send him back.” There were times, Magda reflected, that she still wished that she could just turn her younger brother over her knee and smack him, as she had when he was a small child. This was one of them; a man full grown and responsible, with all the blundering tact and manners of one of his own cattle.
“It’s our lad,” Hansi quickly reassured his wife, who wavered on the edge of tears for one fraught moment. “I am as sure of that as I am of anything. You should write to the other lads, let them know that their brother is about to return home, eh? What about a party, Lise? One of your splendid parties to welcome him home—to welcome us home! What about that, hey?”
And that was all it took to restore Liesel’s high spirits, although Magda’s apprehensions were not relieved. She feared that Liesel, in wondering if this boy found among the Agency Indians really was her son, had inadvertently hit on a very real consideration, only to be jollied out of her apprehension by Hansi. As Magda settled back into the little guest cottage that evening, she pondered once again how long it would take for her sister to cope with the knowledge that her lost child had not remained a child. And how long before Willi would be able to claim his former life, after having been among the Tribes for so long? Seven years old, Magda thought; surely that was of an age enough to retain something of his upbringing, memories of the love and affection lavished on him by his parents and Vati! Hadn’t Vati often quoted that grim old Jesuit scholar who said, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man?”
Breathlessly they waited for news of the Army supply caravan, drawing closer day by day. Indeed, several of Hansi’s wagons were among them. Hansi had importuned one of his teamsters to send word by messenger when once they approached San Antonio. It was Fredi who brought word of their actual arrival, in the dusty plaza before the rambling old citadel ruins. He had been fretting impatiently and whiling away the days at the Vaudeville Theater and Saloon until he could return to the Live Oak ranch with a clear conscience and commence the spring round-up and branding.
He came pounding up the gravel drive, shouting, “The wagons from the north are here! They’re just coming down the Salado Creek road!” It was but a moment for Hansi and Peter to put on their coats, for they had been expecting word all since sun-up. The barouche was already waiting under the porte-cochere. Liesel had been fluttering around the house all morning, alternately getting into the house maid’s way as they prepared a bedroom for Willi, and pleading with Hansi to take the barouche and follow the road north, to meet the wagons bearing her boy somewhere along the way.
Magda caught up her shawl, looking around the door into the parlor. Anna lay on the chaise, with her small portable writing desk balanced over the bulge of the new child, writing letters for Hansi.
“We’re going now, Annchen,” she said.
Anna closed her eyes wearily. “Take Harry and Christian,” she begged her aunt. “They are eaten up with curiosity—I have explained a thousand times that Willi will not be dressed as an Indian. In the next hour I would have to explain it a thousand times more. What is it about children, when they don’t get the answer they want, they think that asking the question yet again will get them a different answer?”
“Human nature,” Magda replied. She had never had much difficulty in getting Harry and Christian to mind. She had the advantage over their parents of seeming stern and grim, and relatively impervious to childish charms. She made them behave, sitting quietly between herself and their father, opposite Hansi and Liesel.
“They say that the railway will reach here within two years,” Hansi remarked jovially as they rolled towards town. “What a difference it will make for us! Think of how we walked from the seaside, or rode in ox-wagons! And now, it’s just a matter of riding the iron horse for a day or so. What times we have seen, Lise!”
“Do you think we are fully prepared for such miracles?” Magda asked.
Hansi laughed, a hearty and knowing laugh. “I hope so—for I have been advised to buy property within and just without the city! Won’t it be handy, to own warehouses and stock corrals close to where the railyards will be!”
“Didn’t waste your time in Kansas, did you?” Fredi called from where he rode alongside the barouche.
Peter laughed as well, when Hansi replied, “Once the railway is finished with a town, everything changes. It connects to the rest of the world, which might be a change for the worse, but mostly for the better. Once the railway comes, there are no more wildernesses, unless it is beyond the sound of a steam whistle. When things change, we must change also.”
But what of those who do not wish to change, Magda thought, those who cannot change and cannot bear to see the world changing around them—what fate is theirs?
They came out into the plaza in front of the sprawling old Citadel, the disused mission chap
el with its stone façade arched like a bedstead. Columns twisted like lengths of barley sugar framed a pair of empty niches where statues of saints would have stood. Magda wondered which patron saints would have rested there when it was a church. It was decades since it had gone from that to becoming a barracks and then a warehouse. Carl Becker had fought there as a boy volunteer with the Texian militia, before he and his brother Rudi went away to the Goliad citadel with Colonel Fannin’s garrison to guard the road from the coast. Porfirio’s father had died here, early the following year, as one of Colonel Travis’ artillerymen. Then it had been a bastion, filled in at the altar end to serve as a platform for cannon. Now it was a warehouse, and on this day the plaza and the old churchyard before it become a vast wagon park, deep in churned mud and horse dung. Blue-clad soldiers bawled orders at each other, snapped whips and reins over the necks of their team animals. Crews of laborers had already begun to empty out the wagons. How on earth to find one young civilian among all this bustle?
“We need to find the man in charge,” Peter suggested quietly to Hansi. “Look for the one with the most gold on his shoulders.”
Hansi stood up, then scrambled up onto the seat, shading his eyes. “Over there,” he said, with satisfaction, “three or four of them—one of them has to be our man.”
He had his coachman drive as close to the knot of gold-laden officers as he could, angling close between the heavy drays and ambulances. Fredi rode ahead, his horse threading an easy way through the controlled chaos in the plaza. There were a handful of women and children among the soldiers, travel-worn and very weary. Magda’s spirits rose; so Willi would not have had to travel with the soldiers, perhaps he would have accompanied an officer’s family, traveling in what spartan comfort an ambulance might provide.
Once close enough, Hansi cupped his hands and shouted, “Colonel—Richter, here! I’ve come for my son! The boy sent by Agent Tatum and the Butlers from the Agency school! We were told to expect him today! Where is he—the Indians stole him away ten years ago this spring and his mother and I have wanted him home every day since!” Hansi’s voice carried easily over the raucous shouting in the plaza; not for nothing had he been a teamster himself.
The man with the most ornate braid and the most gold on his shoulders turned abruptly towards the sound of Hansi’s voice. He spoke a few words to the man at his side and came up to the barouche with the lounging, slightly bowlegged stride of a man who spends most of his time on horseback. “You Richter, the cattle man?” he asked tersely.
Hansi answered, “Yes, yes . . . but of our son? Where is he? You have not let him get captured again, have you?” Hansi added, with a heavy attempt at humor.
Magda could not quite read the expression on the officer’s face; a curious mixture of relief and much-tried exasperation. “No such luck, Mister Richter. We’ve got your boy, and you’re welcome to him.” He sketched a salute, adding, “I’ve sent Sgt. Donnelly to fetch him and his traps.”
“Thank you.” Hansi leaned down from the barouche to offer his hand. “This means so much to us! I cannot begin to tell you how grateful we are, for all you have done!”
“You’re welcome. I’ll make a list, directly,” the colonel added. Magda looked in much puzzlement towards Peter, who seemed amused.
“What did he mean by that?” she whispered.
Peter answered, “It sounds like Willi has been quite a handful.”
“There he is!” cried Liesel, clutching Hansi’s arm as a soldier with a great many stripes on his jacket sleeves appeared from between two wagons. “Hansi, there he is! Our boy!” She sprang up, hardly waiting for Fredi to slide down from his mount, or the coachman to leap down from his seat, to open the barouche door and help her to the ground. She shook off their hands, and flung herself at the wiry boy whom the soldier led towards them. She enfolded him in a frantic embrace, crying out endearments, half sobbing as she stroked his face.
Magda, helped down by Peter, stood back a little, watching warily. Yes, it was indeed Willi, although his face was bonier, more angular. His hair was darker than it had been as a child, and cropped brutally short. Magda saw two things almost at once—that his expression was perfectly controlled, almost rigid, as his mother wept over him, and that one wrist was tethered by a length of clothesline to the wrist of the soldier who led him.
“Aye, here he is,” the soldier explained cheerfully, as he took out a knife and tactfully slashed through the tether at his own wrist. “Just a bit o’ precaution, y’see. He’s a bit of a lively one, this lad of yours. He tried a runner three or four times before we crossed the Red River, so we had to put him in restraints, y’see, sor.” He handed the end of it to Hansi, contorted his pug-Irish countenance in a deliberate wink, and added, “I recommend you keep a good hold on your end, sor, so I do. Here’s his bits o’ things. Sorry, those heathens did not leave him with very much. Lord bless him, the Army could not give him very much more.” He handed over the rough gunny sack which he carried over his shoulder. By the way he handled it, there was not much inside. He sketched a salute and walked away, although he watched over his shoulder. Other soldiers were also watching, with mild interest. Hansi looked down at the gunny sack and the clothesline in his hand with an expression of mild puzzlement, before he enfolded both Liesel and his son in a rough embrace.
“Oh, Willi,” he said, his voice rough with emotion. “We came after you, as God is my witness. We followed the tracks until the rain ruined the trail. Then I hired a man to search for you as I could not! I promised your mother that I would find you and Grete, and bring you home—can you forgive me that it took this long? They told us that you were most likely dead and I agreed with them, but your mother never stopped believing, never stopped hoping.”
Magda’s heart sank, for Willi’s face remained perfectly blank, as if he had schooled himself to show no emotion at all. Did he not understand? Magda wondered. Could he have forgotten the language that he spoke as a child? Grete had been mute at first, or so said Fredi. But she had recovered her speech within a few months, as if she had never put it out of her mind entirely. Surely, Willi had not forgotten everything!?
Hansi stood back after a moment, still quite overcome, holding the weeping Liesel in his arms. The boy stood alone, his face absolutely still. Magda’s heart was quite wrenched by the memory of the last time she had seen him, the day that Robert Hunter had driven his trap away from Vati’s house. Willi had waved happily from the back of Robert’s trap and his sister stood up on the seat as Rosalie held the back of her dress—an unbearably poignant memory. Robert was buried in a closed coffin, so brutally mutilated he had been, and it sickened Magda still to recall Rosalie’s abused body and the long torture of her death bed. Grete—perhaps Grete had been least damaged of them all.
Magda touched Willi’s cheek with a delicate touch. “Willi, little one,” she whispered, “do you remember me? Auntie Magda?” It seemed to her that something lit in his eyes, something far back, like a tiny light at the end of a long dark hallway. He nodded briefly and she continued, “We have missed you so much, Willi. You would not believe how much has changed. Hannah—you recall Hannah? My daughter, who played with you? You could not say her name properly, you called her ‘Nannie’ and so that became her pet name among the family. She has gone to be a nun. Your sister Anna, she is married to our cousin Peter; the two little boys are hers. Your brother Jacob is married, so is Marie. Vati—your Opa, in whose house we were living? He is dead. Your father is a rich man—they call him a cattle baron. He lives here now. Will you come with us? We have so longed for your rescue. Your mother was driven nearly mad with sorrow. Willi, dear heart—do you understand? Will you give me some sign that you understand?”
The boy nodded again. His lips moved very slightly. “Auntie,” he said, almost experimentally. With that she had to be content, for he did not say anything more, even as Hansi and Liesel urged him into the barouche. That was when Magda saw that he was lame; he walked with a limp and a lurch
for those few steps to the barouche. She recalled what Grete had said about his leg being broken while riding an untamed horse.
Willi sat as rigid as a stump between his parents, through the short drive to Hansi’s mansion. Liesel’s hands fluttered like butterflies. She could hardly keep from touching him, holding his hand, exclaiming over his rough clothes, and how very thin he appeared. Harry and Christian exclaimed excitedly, asking a million questions, while Peter and Magda could but watch, as if an audience at a play.
“Ma’am Becker, he does not look anything the age he is supposed to be,” Peter murmured quietly. “He is very spare of flesh—if I were to note him in passing, I would say that he barely appears older than twelve or so.”
“He is the same age as Horrie,” Magda answered in the same low tones. “You are right—he does not appear anything close to that age. Which I think may be a relief to my sister; she thinks of him as a child still. But that he did not have enough to eat, among them! What hard use they gave to their slaves!”
“Ma’am Becker,” Peter ventured, with much care, “I do not think he was a slave. I think he was one of them. It was told to us, by the Apache tracker, that he would be tested by his captors. If he was weak, he would be killed, or perhaps ransomed back. But if he was strong, they would keep him and make him a warrior.” Peter took up the oddly-shaped burlap bag from the floor of the barouche, experimentally feeling the shapes within. Magda caught a sudden flare of alarm in Willi’s eyes. “It feels like a quiver and a bow, with one of their shields. I think those would be his, Ma’am. He was a fighting man among them and the Army let him keep his side arms—they’re very generous that way,” Peter added with a twist of cynicism to his voice. He set the burlap bag on the floor again. In an infinitesimal way, Willi relaxed, although he continued to watch them warily.
“You should not say any of this to my sister,” Magda warned.
Peter whispered, “No, I would not ruin her joy. But that he remained among the band, long after they were removed to the agency, and he did not make himself known as a captive? That would indicate that he did not think of himself as such.” Peter sat back against the cushions. “He was such a dear little chap, Ma’am. He followed after us, after Cuz and me. I recollect that so very clearly.”