The Long Road Home Romance Collection

by Judi Ann Ehresman

  Breakfast was a joyous affair. Jeremiah announced that if Ethan and Mandy were truly sincere in their offer to let him stay until he knew what they would do, he would gladly accept. Mandy and Deidre both sighed in unison as though they had not breathed all morning. Immediately there was laughter around the table.

  When the laughter subsided, Jedediah said very seriously, “Now we are finished.”

  Everyone looked at him questioningly, since his breakfast was barely half-eaten, and everyone else was still eating.

  Ethan spoke first. “What do you mean, Jeddy?”

  “Our family is finished. Mommy and Miss Mandy have each other, Daniel and I have each other, Callie and Christy have each other, and now you and Daddy have each other. We are finished!”

  Everyone chuckled as Deidre corrected, “By finished I believe you mean completed.”

  Mandy and Deidre looked at one another quickly before Mandy spoke both of their hearts. “Our family may be completed, but hopefully it is not finished yet.”

  Almost on cue, Callie looked at Christy and spoke her first real word. Pointing her finger at her sister, she said quite clearly, “Bay…bee.”

  The laughter that followed was only a taste of what was to come!

  About the Author

  Judi Ann Ehresman married the love of her life, becoming a pastor’s wife and, in time, the mother of two sons and a grandmother. But she’s never lost the love instilled in her heart by her high school English teacher: writing.

  After her children married and started their own homes, she finally concentrated on fulfilling the dream of many years. She finished her first and second books—The Long Road Home and On the Wings of Grace—while doing freelance work for the local newspaper in Indiana. Then, suddenly, her husband’s job moved them across the country (but nearer to where the children had settled), and she began the third book in The Hand of God series—Where Two Agree.

  “I want to write good books that will stretch the reader to be all God wants her to be,” says Judi Ann. “There is enough wickedness in the world, and I’d much rather fill my mind and heart with the things that are good and true and pure and sweet, for I find that whatever I put into my mind and heart is what I become.”

  She has owned and managed several businesses, has worked as a freelancer for a local newspaper, writes a well-received, encouraging blog, and is a popular oral reader of her short stories and poetry at children’s and women’s banquets and teas. Judi Ann is also the author of The Ride and The Hidden Legacy (both OakTara).

  judi.ehresman.org

  www.oaktara.com

  THE RELUCTANT

  IMMIGRANT

  by Naomi Mitchum

  Dedication

  For my husband, Bob, and my family of Guadalupe River paddlers, whose canoes and kayaks live near New Braunfels.

  My thanks also to:

  *Dorothy Sinclair, friend and mentor, for her faithful encouragement and crystal-clear writing advice.

  *Paul Mitchum, for his focused editorial critique.

  *Texas libraries and historical archives in Port Lavaca, Victoria, Sattler, Galveston, Houston, and New Braunfels, and especially to the Sophienberg Museum in New Braunfels.

  *The Port Lavaca Historical Society for valuable information and for inviting me to view the model of a ship that carried immigrants to Indian Point.

  I would like to acknowledge the courage and tenacity of the Germans who forged a trail to and settled areas in the Hill Country of Texas. My thanks for their diaries and for historians who recorded details of everyday life.

  Chapter 1

  It was sunshine and shadow. On the day I became a Texan, I met a handsome stranger who made me feel important, left me speechless, and made the horrible trip seem almost worthwhile. But before the sun dipped into the Gulf of Mexico behind the ship’s mast, I was threatened by two ugly criminals who would become shadows in my life.

  Lifting the hem of the clean blue skirt I had saved for this exciting day, I stepped up the hatch onto the polished deck of the sloop cutter Naghel. For the first time in weeks I relaxed and walked along, listening to the soft sighing of the wind in the sails, their square, white riggings unfurled against a clear blue sky.

  Only when I found a secluded, shady spot of lashed crates of machinery did I dare open the blue reticule Oma had given me the day we left Germany. It held my two secrets. One was a red velvet diary with a little pencil stuck in the cover. Lately there had been no privacy for writing, so I took out the pencil and wrote:

  April 20, 1846

  The 75-day ocean trip that brought us from Germany to Galveston, Texas, on the sailing ship Franziska now seems like a bad dream with its bad weather, bad food, and crowded conditions. I am now four days out of Galveston on a smaller boat that is clean, the weather is good, and I am not seasick. We should be at Indian Point by evening, and I will see my friends who came on earlier ships. They haven’t seen me since I turned sixteen and started wearing long skirts.

  The diary’s musty smell stung my nose, and I was about to spread it to air in the sunshine when I heard angry voices that made me step deeper into the crate’s shadow.

  “Well, so far nobody’s noticed,” said a booming deep voice.

  “Be still, Lucas,” said a raspy, high-pitched voice. “Don’t you know the crates have ears?”

  Something sinister in their voices made a circle of fear tumble through my head. If I leave now, I thought, they’ll know I’ve been listening. If I run for the steps, they might hear me.

  “What could crates know?” the deep voice asked.

  “The crates know nothing, but I keep glancing over my shoulder expecting to see a Silesian parent hiding there.”

  “Relax. These Dummkopfs are from Bremen. They won’t know you,” growled the one called Lucas. “But you shouldn’t have falsified the records to get that teaching job in the first place.”

  “I’m a good teacher,” said the raspy voice. “Can I help it if the kids failed the tests? They should have given me another chance.”

  “That’s what you said when you got caught with the payroll in Berlin. No more chances. I told you I was watching you then, and I’ll be watching you now, Otto Mellinghoff!”

  The raspy voice betrayed his disgust. “And remember that I’m watching you, too, Lucas Beck. Part of that money from the bank in Oldenburg belongs to me. I’m the one who got it exchanged to Texas currency. I’m the one who got you on this ship, and don’t you forget it.”

  “Not likely you will let me forget, you Rabbelkopf.”

  “I want to see that money every day,” said Otto, “to make sure you aren’t putting your sticky hands on it.”

  “All right, Otto. Just don’t crowd me. I like my space.”

  Heavy footsteps came my direction. My heart pounded wildly, and my fingers fumbled with the diary, trying to clutch it tighter. I heard it hit the floor. I stopped breathing as the footsteps stopped near me, and a huge black boot kicked the diary out of sight toward the mast. I looked up into black bushy eyebrows running into each other in a frown and broad shoulders hunched for action. A scream stuck in my throat as a big, hairy hand grabbed my wrist.

  “Don’t say a word, you spy.” With one hand he kept a painful grip on my wrist; the other he drew back to hit me. “You’re dead if you tell what you heard.”

  The little man appeared behind the hunched shoulders, his small frame almost obscured. “Wait, Lucas, don’t hit her! You want to get the ship into an uproar?”

  Lucas checked the forward motion of his hand, merely grazing my cheek. I turned to flee. The vise of his big hand tightened. “Who are you?”

  I tried to think of a name, any name, of a girl back in Germany.

  “I asked you a question.” Lucas twisted his grip.

  “I–I’m—I’m Sarah Ann Martin,” I whispered.

  “Well, listen, Sarah Ann, I’ll be watching you. One word about this and I’ll enjoy feeding you to the sharks.” His tone was icy.

 
; “Not one word. Understand?” Lucas shook my arm.

  I nodded but couldn’t say anything.

  “Understand?”

  I cleared my throat. “Yes, sir.” Then I plunged into a bluff. “What’s all the fuss about? I only came out to get some sunshine. Why do you want to hit me?”

  Otto moved closer to Lucas and rasped softly, “Maybe she didn’t hear us.”

  “Of course she did. Move, girl. Get out of here and remember that both of us will be watching you all the time.” Lucas released my wrist and shoved me out into the sunshine toward the diary. “Pick it up and get out of here.”

  I groped around the halyard rope where he had kicked the diary.

  Lucas followed and growled right in my ear, “I said, get it and get out of here!”

  I grabbed the diary and ran up the promenade deck, my heart still pounding. I could still feel his hot breath and smell the rum he had been drinking. Hands trembling and my knees shaking, I sat down to keep from falling. I looked around to see if anyone had witnessed what had happened, but the deck was empty and only the gulls circling the ship chattered noisily among themselves.

  I sat there thinking dark thoughts. They could have killed me, and no one would know what became of me. If I tell, they will know. If they even think I’ve told someone, they’ll get rid of me in some awful way. I wondered about the money they talked about. Where was it? I sat on the floor a long time thinking in circles and longing for wise Opa, who would know exactly what to do and when to do it.

  “Fr-Freder—r-oh-Reeka, where are you?” My five-year-old sister, Sophie, skipped toward me. “O-o h, t-there you are,” she uttered. “I’ve b-been c-calling all over.” She was pudgy, awkward, and a general nuisance; nevertheless, her blond bouncing curls were, for once, a welcome sight. “Come back to the cabin. Mutter w-wants you to help ch-check everything in the trunk.” When I didn’t move, she said, “W-well, c-come on.”

  I tried to get up but couldn’t. “Give me your hand, Sophie.”

  “What’s the m-matter? You s-sick? You look w-white.”

  “No, I’m not sick.”

  “Well then, c-come on.” Sophie helped me up, and we went to the compartments at the front of the ship. “M-mutter says we’ll be at Indian P-point by night. Y-you think Marianne or Chris will m-meet us?”

  The feel of Lucas’s big fingers still burned on my wrist. I felt too weak to think about Indian Point so answered automatically. “Of course.”

  The cabin we shared with another family was crowded and cluttered. Mutter was carefully neat and expected us to be the same way. In the face of clutter, trouble, storms, anything hard in life, she always had the same answer: “Find a way.” So Sophie and I cleared a space in the midst of the crowded quarters for the trunk so we could help Mutter pack our belongings. Before wrapping the tissue paper around Glorianna, her beautiful doll, Sophie ran her fingers around the doll’s black wavy hair, bright blue eyes, and smiling pink lips. Then she felt Glorianna’s leather hands and fingered the pink-flowered dress with its soft, white lace.

  “W-when can I k-keep h-her?” Sophie asked.

  “When she gets safely to New Braunfels,” said Mutter. “Wrap her carefully, now, so she won’t break, and get on with sorting the rest.”

  Sophie lifted the worn leather Bible onto a stack.

  “Leave it on top, Sophie,” Mutter said. “I read it every day.”

  It was true. I’d watched her morning ritual all the way across the Atlantic. Even when she was seasick and weak every day, Mutter reached for what she called “the sustaining” book. “It helps me find the way,” she had often said.

  We sorted the rest into piles. I was thankful the cookstove and heavy farming equipment, all purchased and crated in Galveston, were lashed to the main deck. At least we didn’t have to move that.

  “Hand over the seeds and kitchen tools,” said Mutter.

  Sophie found the seeds and I handed the pots and pans and other kitchen tools.

  “Now the medicine box and recipes and sewing things.”

  Mutter checked them on her list. We continued with stacks of music and a flute and clarinet. I fingered Emil’s shiny trumpet and ran my fingers over the pebbly brown leather friendship book that my friends signed the week before we left. Next I handed over the pewter dishes for which Mutter had traded our beautiful china dinnerware.

  Mutter looked at the pewter a long time before she checked it on her list. She missed the dainty flowered china, too.

  Sophie found the blue silk family album cornered in silver and wound the music box in the back cover. The lively waltz tore at my memory, and once again the enormity of leaving Germany for an unexplored part of Texas washed over me like one of the ocean waves I had been watching. The familiar tight feeling of dread tore at my chest, and the knot in my stomach that I’d endured for days twisted tighter.

  Mutter handed me a package. “Here, put this bread and cheese in the trunk so I won’t have to carry it.”

  I did as she asked without answering, remembering our silver platter with a fat goose resting on it and dumplings in a side bowl. Now we must eat stale bread and cheese.

  “Mutter, there must be nothing in this awful land. The closer it gets, the worse it seems.”

  “We’ve been over this before. You’ve been disagreeable about it ever since your Vater decided to come.” Mutter lowered her head and crossed the music box from the list. “I know it’s hard, but you should try to adjust and…”

  But I didn’t want to hear one more time about being the reluctant immigrant who had to adjust. I’d heard it all the way across the Atlantic while we were crowded into our tight, make-believe room in the midst of the noise and peering eyes of the other 208 persons in the hold. I’d heard about it for 75 days on the dirty, sour-smelling ship Franziska, with its spoiled food and stagnant water. Plagued by seasickness due to rough weather most of the way, I had complained every day until Mutter, also seasick, had lost patience with me. Now I ran from the cabin and didn’t stop running until I reached the foredeck, where I leaned back into the shade of the deckhouse and made myself take deep breaths of the balmy gulf air.

  “There she is!” My brother, Emil, and a friend came toward me. “We’ve been looking for you.” Then he said in broken English, “Goot aafternoon.”

  Emil’s friend clicked his heels together and bowed. He stood tall and straight in the blue uniform of his German state and wore black boots so shiny I saw the sky reflected on the toes. His skin was browned and clear, and brown curly hair showed from under his military cap.

  “Good afternoon,” the stranger said in German.

  “Good afternoon,” he repeated.

  I kept looking at his sparkling eyes.

  “Goot aafternoon,” Emil repeated in halting English.

  “What did you say?” I asked Emil.

  He replied in German. “I said, good afternoon, and I said it in English.”

  “But where did you learn that?” I asked.

  “From me,” the stranger announced in German. He held out his hand to shake mine.

  “Sis, this is Karl Behrens, who comes from Oldenburg, and who learned English in only two months in Galveston.”

  When I took the offered hand, a surge of energy flowed into my arm and up to my shoulder. “I’m very pleased to meet you.” I tried not to blush, but I had a feeling my cheeks were blazing red. I made myself take a deep breath. “Did Emil tell you that we’re from Delmenhorst—only thirty miles from Oldenburg? We were practically neighbors.”

  “He told me we are all bound for New Braunfels, and that your father has been there since October.” Karl moved back into the shade of the raised forecastle to avoid the blazing afternoon sun.

  “We can’t wait to see him,” I said.

  “You’re lucky he came ahead to get things ready for you.”

  “He didn’t actually come ahead for that. You see, our little sister was so sick the day we were to leave that they wouldn’t let her onboard
ship. The money was already paid, and we couldn’t afford to lose it, so Vater came ahead while we stayed with Aunt Eva and Uncle Herman.” I suddenly realized that I was rattling on and on, and took refuge in looking down at my ugly brown walking shoes.

  “That must have been hard for everyone.” Karl smiled at me. “But you must feel joyful that you will be in New Braunfels soon.”

  Emil looked at me, and a deep, gurgling laugh escaped. “I doubt it,” he said. He had heard my complaining day after day as we crossed the entire Atlantic.

  I couldn’t bear to look at anyone. I kept looking down during a long moment of silence.

  “Don’t worry, Rika. You’ll grow to like it.” Karl was cheerful. “Here’s your first Texas present.” He pulled a small, folded newspaper from inside his jacket pocket and handed it to me.

  I unfolded it and scanned the front page. “But it’s not in German. I can’t read a word.”

  “Ah, but you will. What do you want me to read for you?”

  I pointed to the words just under the masthead.

  “That’s the motto of the newspaper. It says, ‘The Will of the People Should Rule.’ Above that it says The Galveston News.”

  “You mean they print those words on every paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think they mean the will of the people will really rule?”

  “Yes, this is a free country. It’s not just a lot of talk like the revolutionists in Germany, it’s really free.” I could hear the excitement in his voice. “I think we will all like the freedom, and we…”

  I didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. Short Otto and the tall Lucas were walking slowly toward me. Lucas still wore the rumpled black suit and messy white shirt, but he had added a tall, black hat that made him seem even bigger. Short Otto, dressed in a tidy brown suit, seemed smaller than ever beside Lucas, whose huge shadow fell onto Emil. Before I could turn to leave, Otto slid from behind Lucas, attempting to mold himself into the group.