by Mark Gimenez
"We're gonna climb that?"
Directly in front of them stood a four-hundred-twenty-five-foot-tall pink granite dome jutting out of the earth like the round tip of a granite iceberg. The above-ground portion comprised one square mile, the underground portion one hundred square miles. It'd been there a billion years.
Eleven thousand years ago, the first human climbed the Rock. More followed: the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca; the Indians, first the Tonkawa, then the Apache, and finally the Comanche; and then the Texans. Officially known as "Enchanted Rock" because the Indians believed magical spirits inhabited the caves in the granite, it's now a state park.
Beck's mother had first taken him up when he was five. The Rock was her special place; her body was buried on the homestead, but her spirit lived on here. They had climbed to the summit many times and had sat and talked, mother and son. She had spoken of life and love and the land. Beck had often looked at her and thought how beautiful she was; he knew now that she had been only in her late twenties. Her skin was red from the sun, her hair blonde from her German heritage, and her hands rough from working goats all her life. But her heart was as soft and gentle as the warm summer breeze.
After she died, Beck had hitched rides out. When he turned fourteen and started driving off the homestead, he came out once a week, sometimes twice. He had climbed the Rock over two hundred times; the last time was the day before he had left for Notre Dame. But by then, his heart had become as hard as the granite. Now his son's heart had been hardened by life.
"That's a big rock," Luke said.
But Beck saw the sense of challenge in his son's eyes.
"Let's do it."
They were wearing sneakers, shorts, tee shirts, and Chicago Cubs caps. They each packed a bottle of water. It was a hundred degrees, but a fresh breeze always blew out here, and there were at least fifty acres of open land and a thousand trees for every human being in the Hill Country. There was no smog, no concrete reflecting the heat, no brown haze hanging over the farm-to-market roads, and no heavy industry dumping pollutants into the air that trapped the heat like a blanket.
There was only the land.
They walked through a gazebo that had been added since Beck's last visit and onto a crushed granite trail. Small granite blocks served as steps up a path wandering through the native grasses, cacti, mesquite, and oak trees, and massive blocks bordered both sides like a granite gauntlet. Beck pointed to the yellow blossoms of the cacti.
"Prickly pear."
Beck's mother had educated him about the Rock's ecosystem. He could distinguish a live oak from a post oak from a blackjack oak; a Texas persimmon from an agarita shrub; bluestem grass from grama grass; rock squirrels from fox squirrels. Farther up the trail, Beck spotted a gray creature darting into the underbrush.
"Look, Luke, an armadillo."
They soon arrived at the mushroom rock, a granite boulder shaped by weathering into the form of a giant mushroom. It marked the base of the Rock, where the tree line ended and the dome turned barren like the hairline on an old man's bald head. They stepped around the mushroom rock and began the ascent. The grade steepened so they leaned forward for leverage; the wind quickened. Beck turned his cap backward so the current didn't sweep it up into the blue sky where two black turkey vultures circled overhead in hopes of a fat rodent or a fallen climber.
They climbed around sheets of granite three feet thick and fifty feet long that had sheared off and slid down the dome like sheets of ice down a glacier until friction had finally halted their descent. They stepped over small patches of cacti and fairy sword ferns sprouting from fractures in the granite face and granite blocks on which lichens had taken root and spread out like a nasty orange-and-yellow rash. Luke's young legs were taking the climb with ease; Beck's surgically repaired knees throbbed with each step. When he was eighteen, he had run the Rock.
By the time they made the summit, they had sweated through their shirts. But the wind at 1,825 feet above sea level soon dried them. They drank the water and took in the view. Luke's head turned in every direction and his eyes were alive; for a brief moment, he was that adventure-loving boy again. He pointed northeast. Over on Turkey Peak two climbers were standing on the summit with their arms spread like Rocky Balboa.
Beck turned in a circle, a 360-degree view of the Hill Country. Smaller granite hills—Little Rock, Freshman Mountain, Buzzard's Roost, Flag Pole—looked like Rock wannabes; across Echo Canyon over on Little Rock huge granite chunks hung on the side of the rock as if daring gravity to pull them down. The distant ridgeline stood in sharp relief against the blue sky. The water of Moss Lake glistened in the sunlight.
Beck's office in Chicago had been on the forty-second floor, four hundred twenty feet above street level. He could stand at the floor-to-ceiling window and see nothing but man—his buildings, his cars, and his pollution. Now he looked out and saw the land before man. Only the narrow ribbon of black asphalt that was Ranch Road 965 snaking through the terrain evidenced man's presence. The land was as it had been.
He saw what the Comanche had seen; he inhaled the same untainted air, and he felt the same sun on his face and the same hot wind against his body. And he felt the same about the Rock: it was a sacred place. He felt his mother's spirit, and he thought of his wife: Annie would have loved this place.
Vernal pools, small pits in the granite where rain water collected and a few hardy plants like cacti and yucca survived, dotted the summit; the pits were bone dry and the patches of plants smoldered. A lone dead oak tree that had grown in one vernal pool stood guard over the summit. The wind had sanded its bark smooth, and the weather had given it a silver sheen. Shallow furrows wound their way down the dome, cut into the granite by rainwater running off the Rock over millions of years. They sat down, and Beck saw the life fade from Luke's eyes; he knew his son's thoughts had also returned to Annie.
"It sucks," Luke said.
Beck reached over and put his arm around his son, a man in a boy's body. A mother's death will age a boy.
"Luke, after my mother died, I came out here and ran the Rock to burn up the anger inside me. I'd run all the way up here and I'd stand all alone and I'd scream and cuss—"
Beck stood.
"Stand up, Luke."
Luke stood.
"Now scream."
Luke shook his head.
"Go ahead, son, scream. We're the only people here."
Luke shook his head again, so Beck spread his arms and screamed: "Ahhhhhhh!"
Luke was looking at Beck like he'd lost his mind. Maybe he had. He screamed again. It felt good, just as good as it had felt back then.
"Scream, son. Get it out."
But Luke refused, so they sat again. Beck said, "I'd sit right here for hours … trying to figure things out. To understand why life isn't fair. But I know now there's no figuring it out. All you can hope is that your mother's life had meaning to your life, otherwise her life was wasted. I look at you and Meggie, and I see her. Up here, I feel my mother's spirit. She lives on in me. Luke, your mother's spirit lives on in you. You just have to let yourself feel it.
"But if you keep up like this, you'll drive her spirit out of you. Don't do that, son. Keep her inside you. Remember her in the good days, before she was sick, at your games cheering like a crazy woman when you got a hit or scored a goal or nailed a jump shot. She loved to watch you play. Because that's who you are, Luke. You're an athlete. And she's still watching you. Make her cheer for you again, son."
Luke leaned his head into Beck's chest and cried; his son's tears wet his shirt. Beck had tried and failed to find his peace on this Rock; he hoped his son could find his here. When they stood to head down, Luke surprised Beck. He screamed.
"I hate you, God!"
"Luke, hating God won't make it any better. I know that for a fact."
In April of 1842, the great Comanche war chief Buffalo Hump stood atop the Holy Rock on a fine spring day and surveyed the glorious land laid out before him.
Buffalo Hump and his brave warriors had first killed the Lipan Apaches, and then the men, women, and children at the Misión Santa Cruz de San Saba, and finally those Spanish morons who had wandered about the land searching for the legendary lost silver mines of Cerro del Almagre that had so captured the white man's greedy imagination.
Then the Texans had come also with dreams of silver, and he had killed them. Even Jim Bowie of the long knife had come to search for the silver; Buffalo Hump had admired Bowie and so did not kill him. But the Mexicans did, at the Alamo.
Buffalo Hump's bravery had earned him the right to stand atop the Holy Rock nearer his father, the sun, and to bask in his father's glow. Buffalo Hump felt proud, for this had been his vision and it had come true: all that his eyes could behold now belonged to the Comanche. He knew it would always be so.
But he couldn't know that an ocean away, Prince Frederick of Prussia and twenty other German noblemen meeting in a castle at Biebrich on the Rhine were at that moment organizing the "Society," officially known as the "German Emigration Company," with the intent of establishing a new German state in the Republic of Texas through mass emigration. It would be called "Germania."
The Prince had read about Texas—the vast unsettled land, the natural resources, the Enchanted Rock, and, of course, the lost silver mines—and, like so many men before and after him, Texas had captured his imagination. The Prince and his noblemen soon became the first out-of-towners to be duped by a Texas real-estate speculator. The Germans paid $9,000 to Henry Francis Fisher for a half-interest in the 3.4 million-acre Fisher-Miller Land Grant located north of the Rock between the Llano and Colorado Rivers—sight unseen. They relied solely on Fisher's word.
That was a mistake.
Fisher had promoted the land as paradise on earth—water, timber, wildlife, fertile soil, silver mines—but failed to mention one minor drawback: the land sat right in the middle of Comanche territory. And, truth be known, Fisher didn't even own the land; the Republic of Texas was giving it away for free to anyone with the guts and guns to settle the hostile land.
But the Germans paid their money and came to Texas. They established settlements at New Berlin, Solms, Nockenut, and New Braunfels on the Comal River east of San Antonio. But they never got all the way to the Fisher-Miller grant. So in 1846, the prince sent Baron Ottfried Hans Freiherr von Meusebach to Texas with strict orders to settle the land he had bought. The Baron arrived in Galveston and traveled to New Braunfels; from there he departed with one hundred twenty German settlers for the Fisher-Miller grant. Sixteen days and sixty miles later, they arrived in the Pedernales River Valley, halfway to their destination. His people were sick with cholera, so the Baron decided to settle there on ten thousand acres where two creeks joined the Pedernales. He named his new town Fredericksburg.
Buffalo Hump became angry at the sight of white men on Comanche land; so, in accordance with his strict anti-immigration policy, he promptly raided and killed many of the settlers (cholera and Comanche being the two most common causes of death among the Germans). After enduring a year of Comanche raids, the Baron led an expedition to meet with Buffalo Hump and the other Comanche chiefs; normally, the Comanche would have killed and scalped the Baron, but his red hair and beard captivated them. They called him El Sol Colorado—the Red Sun. The Baron proposed a peace treaty: in return for an immediate cessation of war parties, the Germans would give the Comanche $3,000 worth of presents in Fredericksburg. Buffalo Hump might have been a savage but he wasn't stupid; he signed the treaty and took the gifts.
The Comanche became Fredericksburg's first tourists.
Seven thousand Germans immigrated to the Hill Country of Texas; over half died in the first year. They never settled the Fisher-Miller Grant land. The Society went bankrupt. Prince Frederick's dream of a German state in Texas was never realized. And to add insult to injury, the Texas legislature refused the Germans' request to name their new county Germania; instead, it was named Gillespie, after a soldier who had died in the Mexican-American War. But through it all, the Town of Fredericksburg survived as a close-knit community of Germans isolated in the middle of Texas.
It wasn't the same town today.
Twenty-four years before, Beck Hardin had left a rural Main Street lined with pickup trucks and German businesses. Today, Main Street was about as rural and German as the Lexuses lining the curbs and the city slickers strolling the sidewalks. If Austin was the high school buddy who had packed on the weight, Fredericksburg was the ugly duckling who had undergone an extreme makeover—from a down-home goat ranching town to a high-falutin' tourist trap.
They had stopped in town on their way back from the Rock for lunch and were now caught in buckle-to-butt sidewalk traffic. The tourists had apparently come for the parade and stayed for the long holiday weekend. Now, walking again among the tattoos and thongs on Main Street, Beck's greatest fear as a single father rose in his thoughts like a recurring nightmare: Was he mother enough to raise Meggie alone? He didn't fear raising a son alone: Luke was a male; he was a male; ergo, he could raise Luke. (Or so he hoped.) But Aubrey was right: he didn't have a clue about girls.
Before Annie had gotten sick, they had gone to several football games at the high school in Winnetka. He had been shocked to see affluent teenage girls dressed like high-class call girls—breasts and butts, thighs, torsos, and thongs, all bared to the world; but he had been completely unconcerned about Meggie dressing like that when she was a teenager—because it wasn't his problem. It was Annie's problem. Raising a girl was a mother's job.
But now Annie was gone, and it was his job. Now it was his problem. So Beck Hardin would do what he had done for the last twenty-four years whenever he needed an answer: he would hit the books. He would read about raising children. He would learn about girls.
Just past the brew pub, they turned down a narrow stone path between two buildings. Twenty paces in, the path opened onto a grassy courtyard with a fountain and chairs and a two-person metal bench under shade trees where several people sat reading beside an old rock water well that was now a wishing well. The noise of Main Street seemed distant.
On the south side of the courtyard stood a restored two-story limestone house with beveled-glass doors and a sign that read: BOOKED-UP & ARTFUL and COFFEE BAR. Tables and chairs sat on porches up and down; an outside staircase led to the second-story porch. Books were visible through the first-floor windows. They went inside. Luke walked over to the sports section of the magazine rack, and Beck to the checkout counter/coffee bar. On the counter were three "Death Notices," single-page obituaries of locals who had died the preceding week. Death Notices had been hand-delivered to Main Street businesses back when Beck was a boy.
Behind the counter stood an attractive woman wearing narrow black-framed glasses, a black tee shirt, snug Lee Rider jeans, and red cowboy boots with black toecaps; she had long legs, lots of red hair, and silver-and-turquoise jewelry. She was sticking price tags on a stack of books.
"I need help, please."
Without looking up the woman said, "Spiritual, mental, or physical?"
"Parental."
She now turned to Beck and gave him a quick once-over. He nodded at the espresso machine.
"And I need caffeine."
She stuck her hand out. "Judge Hardin, I presume."
"You know J.B.?"
"Everyone knows J.B."
"Well, I'm just Beck."
"Jodie Lee." She had a strong grip. "What's your pleasure?" She quickly added, "In regards to caffeine."
"Small nonfat latte."
She turned to the espresso machine. "So you're the prodigal son." She grimaced and glanced at him. "Sorry. J.B. and I, we've talked a bit, probably too much. He started the winery right after we opened, came in and bought every book I had or could order about winemaking and growing grapes."
"And he doesn't even like wine."
"Hector does."
Beck tried not to stare when she bent over to get milk out of a small refrige
rator. When she came back up, she answered his unasked question.
"We go out every year for J.B.'s last harvest party."
"You and your family?"
She pointed at the ceiling. "Janelle Jones. My partner, the artist upstairs. And our kids."
"When I was here, there wasn't a bookstore or an art gallery in town."
"One bookstore, six galleries now. Western, European, American, contemporary, Southwestern … we had an African art gallery for a while, but that was pushing the envelope."
"Maybe just a little."
"But we've got writers, artists, movie stars living here now … Tommy Lee Jones lives out north. Madeleine Stowe, she was in Last of the Mohicans—she lives on a big ranch south of town. Lynda Obst, the movie producer—she did Sleepless in Seattle—she lives out west. G. Harvey, the western artist, he lives in town. Robert James Waller, he wrote Bridges of Madison County—"
"I saw the movie, with Clint Eastwood."
"He lives here."
"Eastwood?"
"Waller. He comes in and signs his books."
"Dale Evans was born south of here."
"Who's Dale Evans?"
"Roy Rogers' wife."
"Who's Roy Rogers?"
"How old are you?"
"Sorry, we don't know each other well enough." She handed the coffee to him across the counter. "First one's on the house."
"Thanks. Twenty-four years, the town has changed."
"Ten years and it's changed. When we first got here, only food was Dairy Queen or Wiener schnitzel. Now we've got cuisine—Navajo Grill, Herb Farm, Lester's on Llano, three or four other high-dollar places. And you can get aromatherapy, lypossage, salt rubs, Aqua-Chi foot baths, Reiki, Chakra balancing …"
"In Fredericksburg, Texas?"
"He is so hot."
Beck turned to the young voice behind him. A pretty teenage girl with red hair had walked up; she was reading a magazine.