Bittersweet

by Susan Wittig Albert

  “Sam Richards?” Derek paused, his voice sober. “I heard at the general store this morning that he’s in the hospital over in Kerrville. Heart attack.”

  “Uh-oh,” Mack said softly, suddenly concerned. Sam reminded her of her father. “I wonder if—” She hesitated. “I’d better call Leatha and see if the dinner is still on.”

  But Derek wasn’t going to let her off the hook. “Even if it is, would it kill you to have two Thanksgiving meals?” He sounded amused, and she imagined one dark eyebrow quirking. “Tell you what. We’ll move ours up a couple of hours and call it a Thanksgiving brunch. How’s that?”

  Mack considered. “Well, okay,” she said. “But remember I’m on call. Want me to bring anything?” Quickly she amended, “And I’m on patrol tomorrow night, so it’ll have to be something I can pick up at the store, like a can of cranberry sauce or a box of instant rice. I won’t have time to cook.” That had been another of Lanny’s complaints during their marriage.

  “Just bring yourself. The girls and I will do the rest.” He chuckled. “Well, more likely me. I can’t seem to interest them in the fine art of cooking. They’d rather be on Facebook, or wherever it is that kids hang out these days.” He paused. “How about ten thirty?”

  “Works for me,” she said. “See you then.”

  He paused again and his voice seemed to change. “Where are you?”

  “West of 83, north of Garner State Park,” she replied. “Why?”

  “No reason,” he said lightly. But when he added, “I guess I just worry about you, out there on patrol all by yourself,” she heard the concern in his voice. “I mean, you might run into something unexpected. So I worry.”

  “That’s why I put in all those hours at the Academy,” she countered lightly. “Training for the unexpected. Don’t worry, Derek.” She bit her lip, thinking of Lanny, who’d fretted when she was on night patrol. Please, please don’t worry, Derek, she said silently. You’ll spoil it.

  “If you say so,” Derek said, dragging it out. “I know you’re trained and all that. And you’ve got a gun. But be careful.”

  “Always am,” she replied briskly. “See you on Thursday.”

  “Thursday, ten thirty,” he echoed. “Looking forward to it.”

  But as it turned out, she would be seeing him sooner than that. And it wouldn’t be Mack who couldn’t handle an unexpected situation. It would be Derek.

  Chapter Three

  Carolina buckthorn (Rhamnus caroliniana, also Frangula caroliniana) is an attractive, drought-tolerant plant that deserves to be used more widely in landscapes in Zones 5–9. The foliage of this small, shrubby tree is a glossy green, turning in autumn to a bright yellow gold and a deeper bronze. The quarter-inch berries that appear in clusters ripen from pink to red to a dark blue purple—beautiful in a Thanksgiving display. The Delaware Indians of Oklahoma used a decoction of the bark as a treatment for jaundice and as an emetic or strong laxative. The fruits of most species of buckthorn contain a yellow dye, and the seeds are high in protein. In China, oils from buckthorn seeds have been used to make soap, printing ink, and lubricant. The leaves and bark are browsed by deer.

  Yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria), is the only native North American plant (Zones 7–9) that contains caffeine. It also contains antioxidants and theobromine, the plant chemical found in chocolate. Yaupon tea was brewed by the indigenous people of the Southeast as a stimulant beverage, medicine, and ritual drink. The dried leaves and twigs were roasted and boiled into a rich, dark tea known to European explorers and colonists as “black drink.” Medicinally, a stronger decoction was drunk as a laxative and purgative, while a weak tea made from the bark was used as an eyewash. During tribal ceremonies, high-status males drank a much stronger brew as an intoxicant and purgative. Yaupon is a popular landscape shrub, and its bright red berries are attractive to birds and wildlife. It has another important asset, too. Deer don’t seem to like it.

  China Bayles

  “Native Plants for Wildlife Gardens”

  Pecan Springs Enterprise

  I had promised Leatha that Caitie and I would be at the ranch by midafternoon on Wednesday, but we got a late start. It was past one by the time we’d loaded Big Red Mama with plants for Jennie Seale’s garden and set out on our way. When we reached Wildseed Farms on 290 outside of Fredericksburg, I stopped to check on a bulk order of wildflower seed for the shop. (If you’ve never been to Wildseed Farms, do put it on your bucket list. But plan your visit for April and early May—wildflower season in the Hill Country. Wildseed’s fields are acres of scrumptious blooms, depending on the season: bluebonnets, gaillardia, poppies, cosmos, black-eyed Susans, monarda, and more. Much more.)

  Back in the van, we headed down toward Uvalde County. The hills—the people who live here call them mountains—were draped with dense growths of dark green cedar, with softer traces of color folded into the canyons. In the road cuts, layers of sedimentary rocks, the relics of ancient seas, piled one on another high into the sky. And on the heights, we could look out over a rolling landscape, brightened by the afternoon sun, with playful puffs of white clouds chasing their own shadows across the distant view.

  I’d been looking forward to the drive because it would give me some quiet, mom-and-kid time with Caitlin. Dark haired, pixielike, and small for her age, Caitie is still recovering from the twin tragedies of her mother’s accidental drowning and her father’s murder, at a time when most girls are playing with My Little Ponies. She isn’t nearly as withdrawn as she was when she first joined our family, and her aptitude for the violin has given her a new and delightful confidence in herself. Last week, for her intermediate recital, she played Bohm’s Sarabande in G Minor. I’m no music aficionado, but I was moved to tears by what seemed to me to be an extraordinary performance. She didn’t just get the notes right, she felt the music, and in feeling it herself, made her audience feel it, too. Even Sandra Trevor, her teacher, was impressed. And that takes some doing.

  Caitie is a good passenger, but her cat, Mr. P, is not. Heaven only knows how many miles that scruffy old orange tomcat traveled to get to our house, where he showed up one evening, sore-pawed and starved, and purred his way into Caitie’s compassionate heart. At the time, I tried to convince her that a cuddly kitten would be a more appropriate pet for a little girl, but no dice. “He’s just like me when I first came to live here,” she’d said, defiantly clutching the crafty, battle-scarred reprobate in her arms. “He doesn’t have any family. He needs somebody to adopt him. He needs me.”

  And that was that. Mr. P (his full name is Mr. Pumpkin) yowled from his crate behind our seats for nearly an hour before he gave it up as a bad job and went sulkily to sleep. After that, I kept Caitie entertained by pointing out the sights along the way and—as we drove down into Uvalde County—telling her some of the history of the area. “Travel is educational” is my motto.

  “All this land,” I said, pointing to the hills that thrust abruptly against the horizon to the west and south, “was once hunted by Indians—Comanche, Tonkawa, and Apache.”

  “Really?” Caitie sat up straight and looked out the window as if she expected to see a hunting party picking its way through the shrubby cedars and shinnery oak, on the trail of a deer for dinner.

  “Yes, really,” I said. “The Spanish got here first, in the 1600s, but the Indians chased them out. When Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, more settlers began to move in, which seriously annoyed the Indians and led to raids and killings and such. Meanwhile, a little farther that way”—I pointed to the east—“in San Antonio, the Mexican army under a general named Santa Anna was taking the garrison at—”

  “I know!” Caitie exclaimed eagerly. “At the Alamo! The Texans lost and everybody was afraid of Santa Anna, because he gave no quarter. That means,” she added in an explanatory tone, “that he killed everybody, whether they were waving a white flag or not.”

  �
�Bloodthirsty,” I remarked.

  “Yes,” she said seriously. “Soldiers aren’t supposed to do that. But Sam Houston had the Twin Sisters, so he beat Santa Anna at San Jacinto. That was in 1836. We learned about it in fourth grade,” she added, “but I still remember.”

  “Good for you,” I said admiringly, slowing to pilot Mama around a pair of tractors mowing the roadsides. “But who are the Twin Sisters? I don’t think I know about them.”

  “They’re two big cannons that were made in Ohio and shipped down the Mississippi to help the Texans,” Caitie replied. “But the Texas soldiers didn’t have any cannonballs, so they loaded them with handfuls of musket balls and broken glass and horseshoes.”

  “No kidding?” I said, widening my eyes. “Horseshoes? That’s amazing!”

  Caitie nodded. “But the thing is, nobody knows what happened to the Sisters. They totally disappeared. Poof.” She waved her hand to illustrate a cannon vanishing. “It’s a mystery, where they went.”

  “Sounds like.” I shifted down so Mama could climb the hill up ahead with greater confidence. “So what happened to Texas after Sam Houston beat Santa Anna?”

  “Well, after that it was a republic, with a president and an army and everything, until people decided it should be a state. That was in 1845. It was a slave state,” she added darkly. “Mostly, the slaves were in East Texas, where people grew a lot of cotton and some sugar, too. But some slaves worked on ranches. I guess they were cowboys.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Not good at all. What happened after Texas became a state?”

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “We stopped there. My teacher said we’ll do the rest in seventh grade.”

  “Well, I know,” I said, “since I’m past seventh grade.” That got a giggle out of her, and I went on. “When the Civil War broke out, Texas seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy. But some Texans supported the North, and after the fighting was over and people came back home, there was a lot of fighting between the Confederates and Unionists. Down here in Uvalde County, violence was such an everyday event that the county tax assessor had to hire armed guards, and there were a couple of years when they couldn’t find anybody brave enough to pin on the sheriff’s star.”

  “The Wild West,” Caitie put in. “Awesome.”

  “Really wild,” I agreed. “Desperadoes, smugglers, horse thieves, cattle rustlers. They liked to hide out in places like that canyon over there.” I pointed to the steep-sided canyon we were passing, opening out into a meadow along the road. “They would wait until the stagecoach came along and rob the passengers. And there were cattle rustlers, too. They were after the maverick long-horned cattle that had been abandoned by the first Spanish settlers back in the 1600s. When they gave up and went back to Mexico, they left their cows behind.”

  Now it was Caitie’s turn to widen her eyes. “They just left them? Poor things! They had nobody to feed and water them.”

  “Oh, but these cows were tough, Caitie. With those long horns, they could defend themselves and their calves against the mountain lions, so they got along just fine all by themselves. And since the range was pretty much open, if you wanted a couple of hundred cows to sell, you and your cowboys would round them up and head out for New Orleans or Kansas City. If rustlers showed up to take them away from you . . . well, there’d be a shoot-out.”

  “That’s when there were cowboys and trail drives on the Chisholm Trail.” Caitie leaned forward. “I saw it on television. The cowboys would drive the Longhorns up to the railroad in Kansas City, where they’d be shipped east.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Although the people back east weren’t real crazy about eating Longhorns. No matter how you cooked it, the meat was as tough as shoe leather, especially after the cow had walked all the way from Texas to Kansas City. And that’s where Sam’s ranch comes into the story. And Sam’s great-grandfather, Ezekiel Richards. Want to hear it?”

  “Sure,” Caitie said, settling back into her seat. “Sam is a really neat guy. But I’ve never heard about his great-grandfather before.”

  “Here we go, then. In 1872, Ezekiel moved to Uvalde County from Dallas and started a ranch on the Sabinal River—the place that Sam and your grandmother call the Bittersweet Nature Sanctuary. But just about the time Ezekiel got started in ranching, something big happened that changed everything.”

  “What?” Caitie was paying serious attention.

  “Barbed wire.”

  Caitie turned to stare at me. “Barbed wire? You mean, like in a fence?”

  I nodded. “Barbed wire came to South Texas in 1875, when a guy named Bet-a-Million Gates convinced the San Antonio city council to let him build a barbed-wire corral on the plaza in front of the Alamo. He drove some long-horned cows into the corral to demonstrate that barbed wire could contain animals as big and tough as the wild cattle. He bragged that the new fence was ‘light as air, stronger than whiskey, and cheap as dirt.’” I chuckled. “Old Bet-a-Million was pretty much right. And that was the end of the open range. The end of the wild Longhorns, too, as it turned out.”

  Caitie frowned. “I guess I don’t see—”

  “Sam’s great-grandfather bought enough of the new barbed wire to fence his entire ranch. Once he did that, he could put his own brand on the best of the Longhorns he rounded up and keep them inside the fence. Then he bought some cows from up north and added them to his herd, to improve it by selective breeding.”

  “Oh, like breeding chickens!” Caitie exclaimed.

  In her spare time—that is, when she’s not playing her violin—my daughter is a chicken fancier. She started with three Rhode Island Red chicks and three white leghorn chicks who grew into six highly productive laying hens, blessing us with more eggs than a small family can eat. (At Caitie’s insistence, we were bringing two dozen to share with her grandmother.) Then came Rooster Boy, a handsome red-feathered fellow with an iridescent ruff and a sweep of colorful tail. Rooster Boy’s first seven offspring are just beginning to display their curiously mixed red and white heritage, and Caitie has had fun speculating which babies came from which moms. Chicken Breeding 101.

  “Yes,” I said, pleased that she saw the analogy. “Like breeding chickens, except that the process takes a little longer. Ezekiel’s northern cows had more meat and fat on their bones, and the fat made the beef taste better. Breeding them with the wild long-horned animals, he got cows that were strong and adaptable and tasted better. And that was the beginning of the ranch.”

  “Wow,” Caitie said with satisfaction. “That’s a great story. Maybe Sam knows more.”

  Sam. I bit my lip, and the apprehension that had been hovering at the back of my mind all during the drive suddenly flooded through me. His surgery, followed by “complications.” I wished I had pressed Leatha for more information. What was his prognosis? Was he going to be okay? If there was more trouble, how would Leatha handle it? Would she—

  “I’ll ask him,” Caitie said, unburdened by any of these worries. She knew that Sam was in the hospital, but she had no idea how serious it was. She began digging in her pink nylon backpack and pulled out a book. “I brought Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It’s a great story, too. Is it okay if I read for a while now?”

  “Perfectly okay,” I said. I’m not exactly crazy about Harry Potter, but anytime one of my kids wants to read a book, any book, I’m all for it. I flicked on the radio and found some country music—an old Waylon Jennings song, “Ladies Love Outlaws.” It seemed to fit the territory.

  A little later, we were turning off the highway, Route 187 south of the village of Utopia, and onto the ranch road. The turnoff was marked by a large painted sign that said “Bittersweet Nature Sanctuary on the Sabinal River—A Birder’s Paradise.” Beneath that: Fishing, Swimming, Hiking. Come for the day or for a long stay, with the address of the ranch website and a phone number. A paper banner announced: Opens January
1! I was surprised by the sign, and especially by the announced opening date. Together, they gave the project a worrisome reality. If Sam couldn’t help, how was Leatha going to manage all this?

  The gravel lane was lined with the brightly festive autumn foliage of Carolina buckthorn and yaupon holly. As we drove up, I saw that Leatha—already back from the hospital—was standing on the porch of the old ranch house that she and Sam had remodeled when they were first married. The house stood at the top of a long slope that led down to the Sabinal River. Off to the right was another long, low structure: the guest lodge that Sam’s father built when he ran the place as a game ranch. Leatha and Sam had remodeled it in the past few months in preparation for their birder guests.

  Leatha held out her arms as Caitie jumped out of the car and raced toward her.

  “Gramma!” Caitie cried excitedly. “We’re here, Gramma!”

  “My little girl,” she said, burying her face in Caitie’s hair. “My dear, sweet little girl. How very glad I am to see you, baby.”

  I walked toward the porch slowly, feeling the tears come to my eyes, although you have to know some of the story in order to appreciate why. It’s rather like a soap opera, I’m afraid, but families are messy and real life is often chaotic, with love and lust and old dishonesties and deceptions all tangled together. Caitie is the daughter of my half brother, Miles, the illegitimate son of our father, attorney Robert Bayles, and Laura Danforth, his legal secretary and longtime mistress. Both are now dead.