The Long Road Home Romance Collection

by Judi Ann Ehresman

  “Use them?” I asked.

  Oma’s tone became confidential. She rose from the rocker and came near me. “Sly Otto is good with the sly horse. Gustav said to let them be sly. They can slink into the shadows together.”

  A smile played at the corner of my mouth as I wondered how it would work.

  “And Gustav says the big guy with the tall hat could be yoked to the oxen every time you come to a halting place. Let him think he is threatening you while you let him do the work. He watches you. You watch him work.”

  I laughed out loud.

  “And he said to keep what you know about them under your hat.”

  “But you don’t w-wear a hat,” declared Sophie.

  Kurt laughed. “But maybe she should. I’ll give you one of mine in the morning to help you keep a cool head.”

  We bedded down for the night in a jovial mood, but as I closed my eyes I thought of Emil and his order to stay away from the crazy Oma Gunkel and her long-dead husband and wished for Mutter to help me instead of Oma. What would Mutter do? I longed for her to hug me and help me.

  A shiver ran down my back, and tears came to my eyes. Mutter might be dead.

  Right now Gustav’s advice was nearer than Mutter or Emil. I hadn’t seen Gustav, but he made me laugh.

  Chapter 11

  During the night the wind whipped into a cold frenzy. Wondering how it could be so cold in summer, I found extra cover for Sophie and struggled to tie down the canvas wagon cover. Stinging, cold rain pelted us the next day, turning the wagon trail into boggy ruts. Mud clung to my long skirt, made heavy clumps on my underskirt, and oozed up to the tops of my brown shoes. The lopsided, wide-brimmed hat Kurt had offered saved my head and face from the pounding rain but, like a drain spout, water collected in the brim and gushed out, drenching my already wet clothes. Weighted, I could scarcely struggle along fast enough to keep up with the oxen, energized by the cooler weather.

  The wagon train halted for lunch only long enough to water the horses and oxen. We dug into our food baskets for quick food that didn’t require a fire. Baya, tethered to our wagon, trailed at the end of his rope, balking when possible until the rope had cut into his neck. Sophie fed him sympathetic words and some of her cold cornbread. By way of thanks, Baya butted her into the bin on the back of the cart.

  “I h-hate you,” Sophie shouted. “You’re a m-mean horse!”

  “He is just being himself, Sophie.” I sighed. “Brett said horses have feelings, too. He is tired like the rest of us. And see, he has caked mud all over him and the rain is washing it down in big streaks.”

  “I’m t-tired, t-too,” whined Sophie. “I m-miss M-mutter and Emil. And when will we see Vater?”

  “Soon, I hope.” I lifted Sophie into the covered cart out of the rain. The answer haunted me all the way to New Braunfels as Sophie asked over and over, “A-Are we t-there yet?” and “How m-much longer until we see V-vater?”

  “Remember, we’re watching you,” Otto whispered as he led Baya away that night.

  I watched the back of his brown suit as he pushed, pulled, and yanked Baya toward the water. They deserve each other, I thought. I felt myself smile. I’m watching you work, sly Otto, you funny little man leading my funny little sly horse.

  “I’ll help you,” growled Lucas as he lifted the oxen’s yoke out of my hands.

  “Oh, no, thanks. I can do it.” How could I sound sincere? Would he fall for it?

  There was threat in Lucas’s voice. “I am going to help you. Just you be careful with your words to anyone.” Lucas yanked the yoke from my hands.

  “Thank you. I will be careful,” I promised. He followed Otto to the creek, his big, black hat dripping water and his huge boots making a sucking noise in the mud.

  Gustav, you old dear, I thought, your advice was perfect. How could you be so wise and so dead? Clutching Sophie’s hand, I moved my exhausted body toward Oma’s wagon.

  “Are w-we w-watching them, or are they w-watching us?” asked Sophie.

  The rain didn’t dampen Gustav’s spirit when we sat huddled near the sputtering, meager fire that night. Oma said Gustav had two messages for me: He asked what had become of my lovely singing voice. How does he know about my singing? I asked myself. Then he said I could travel lighter if I would shorten my skirt and leave off my petticoat.

  “No respectable young woman goes without a petticoat,” I objected.

  “What respectable young woman walks in mud beside two frisky oxen?” asked Oma. She had the scissors in her hands and made the first cut before I could resist. When she finished, the blue skirt looked cleaner and felt lighter, and I felt giddy. I stepped out of my muddy petticoat and threw it in a heap by the wagon.

  The thought of shortening my skirt and throwing off my petticoat because a ghost told his wife it was a good idea tickled something funny inside me, and a giggle stuck in my throat until Sophie and Kurt laughed. Then the giggle escaped, and I laughed and laughed, feeling it come from way deep inside. The situation was so ridiculous that I exploded in more laughs until finally tears rolled down my cheeks. Was it relief that somewhere on this trail there might be something funny?

  It was a turning point. Laughing at the shortened skirt and the clear view of those horrible brown oxfords put things in a new light that made me carefree and daring. Reaching under my loose blouse, I pulled out the reticule, opened it, and unwrapped the satin dancing slippers and held them happily to the firelight. Only slightly damp from the rain, their satin bows and rosettes gleamed in the light.

  “One day soon there will be a place for dancing. I will be ready,” I said.

  Sophie gasped. “B-but M-mutter s-said to leave t-those.”

  “She didn’t understand,” I said.

  “B-but you dis-o-obeyed Mutter!” Sophie’s eyes grew wide in disbelief. “What will she say?”

  Could I tell her that Mutter might not be alive? Should I tell her that I had become an adult, even unwillingly in charge? Not now. Not in the spell of howling laughter. “I’ll think about it next week,” I said between giggles.

  For two days we learned about Texas weather. Every morning a slight, cold, summer rain chilled us to the bones and kept the wagons sliding in the surface mud. By afternoon when the sun came out, the mud hardened into rough ruts that rattled the tubs and hanging pans on our wagon. And the baking sun burned our skins and quickly dried the wet animals. Steam rose from their bodies, and they made low moans of protest.

  Catherine and Phillip, again riding with Sophie, thought the steam funny. “They’re on fire,” called Catherine. “Look at the smoke!” The three of them doubled over, laughing.

  “No, they’re boiling,” said Phillip. Entertained, they hardly noticed the heat.

  People called good-natured comments to each other and knocked the heavy mud off moving wheels and off their boots, using sticks that made a cheerful staccato. Suddenly the wagons stopped, and everyone turned silent. My heart pounded, and I coaxed the oxen to halt. Desperately, I looked behind us for the dreaded Karankawas, but only redwing blackbirds darted down to the ruts for insects.

  Then I saw why we had stopped. In front of a small group of trees to the right of our trail were six crude wooden grave markers. Nearby, the dark body of a woman was propped against a tree. Around her were strewn clothes, food baskets, and other personal belongings. Her wagon train had moved on without her plague-ridden body. The shock of her slumping body scared me, and I had to turn away.

  Then I knew I had to look at her. I had to know. Who was she? Why was she left here? Was she alive when the wagon train abandoned her?

  Stomach churning, I looked away again, but a strange fascination made me look back. I had never looked squarely at death. Would we end up like this? What would I do if Sophie became sick and contagious? Even as I thought the question, I knew I would never leave her. We would perish together if necessary. I rushed back to the wagon, pulled her down to me, and held her close for a long time. Catherine and Phillip jumped
from the wagon and came to throw their arms around me.

  “It’s all right,” I murmured. “It’s all right. We will stay together. I promise. I’ll never leave you behind like that.”

  “It’s h-horrible,” wailed Sophie.

  How could I console three children too young to have seen this terrible sight? Is Mutter alive, or is she also dead? What would she do if she had three horrified children clinging to her? “Find a way,” she would say. “There’s always a way.”

  I hugged the children and waited. Then I stroked their heads, waiting for inspiration. A prayer entered my mind. Help me, God. I can’t do this by myself. I waited. The air was silent, but my mind was clear to make an explanation.

  “That person has gone to be with God,” I said. “That person has no fever and no chills and is not tired and hungry. God is loving that person. There is a part of us that never dies, even when the body has no breath. It’s called spirit. That person’s spirit is with God.”

  I gulped down air to still my dizzy head. “Look, Catherine and Phillip, your mother is taking a sheet to cover the lady, and your father and other men are going with their shovels. They are honoring her body with burial, but her spirit is already with God.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Phillip.

  “I learned from my mother. And I was taught it at the church. Do you go to church, Phillip?”

  “Yes, but I never knew what spirit meant.”

  “Well, Phillip and Catherine and Sophie, this woman has taught you and me a valuable lesson.” Silently we watched, now more awed than afraid.

  The wagon train moved on. The unnamed woman had made life seem precious, too special to put into words. She had also made death seem as near to us as our skins. Everyone on the wagon train was lost in thought. The only sounds we could hear as we moved away from the new burial site were the squeaking of harness, the grinding of wheels on axles, and the gentle clinking of pans and tubs moving against the outside of the wagons.

  After our cornbread and dried vegetable stew that night, we settled back to wait for Gustav. Oma tilted her tiny eyeglasses to clean them as if that way she could see him better. Expectantly, I watched her and cast a curious look at Kurt, who grinned at me and winked. He was a ghost nonbeliever, and his grin reminded me not to take the ghost too seriously.

  Nevertheless, Gustav’s advice had been valuable. What would he say tonight about the unnamed woman we had buried? The sight and silence of her were seared into our thoughts.

  But Gustav chose not to comment on it. Oma reported that he had only two sentences: “Life is fleeting. Life is fun.”

  “Fun?” I exclaimed. “He calls this fun?”

  Sophie answered. “It was f-fun to watch the oxen b-boil.”

  “Herr Schmidt says we will get to Gonzales tomorrow. That could be fun,” said Kurt. “If there’s a dance floor, you might unwrap your satin shoes.”

  Kurt had remembered the shoes! A place for dancing was too much to hope for, but I needed to hope. “You may be right.”

  “I’d be in a bad mood, too, if I had my head tied up against a wagon where I couldn’t see anything,” Kurt said the next morning as he checked the yoke on the oxen. “Let’s tether Baya on a long rope to the side of the wagon and give him some freedom.”

  Baya thanked Kurt by butting him over on his face as he walked away. Kurt picked himself up, gave Baya a whack on the neck, and said, “You Dolt! Do that again, and the wagon train will eat horse stew for two days!”

  “S-stew you, Baya,” giggled Sophie. “S-stew you, S-stew you.”

  It sounded like a song to me. I improvised music and words.

  “Wild Baya stew,

  big enough to feed a wagon crew,

  wild Baya stew.”

  I began again, “Wild Baya stew, enough to” and stopped.

  Two things had happened at the same time.

  Sophie had joined in with sweet, bell-like tones…and she didn’t stutter. Her face glowed as she continued on and on.

  And when I stopped singing, Baya rushed to the end of his tether and nudged me with his head. He nudged again. I sang, and he quit nudging. I stopped. He nudged me.

  Baya liked my singing! And Sophie could sing without stuttering! I felt as if the sun had come up again. My spirits lifted. At least something positive was happening on the trail.

  More silly lyrics popped into my head, and I sang them, echoed by Sophie with her newly found gift of singing plainly.

  “Spanish speaking stew,

  cooked in a pot with chiles very hot,

  wild Baya stew.

  Wild Baya stew.

  A horse in a huff has to be tough,

  so we eat stubborn Baya stew.”

  We repeated ourselves until we could sing no more, but when I stopped, Baya again rushed to the end of his tether, nudging me with the tip of his wet nose. I began singing again, then stopped and broke out laughing. Was I actually singing for a Spanish-hearing horse who liked my German singing?

  The Roths in the next wagon started a medley of German songs that wafted to the front of the wagon train, and we all sang as we moved along, accompanied by the rhythm of the many pots, pans, and buckets clinking in our wagons.

  The sight of Gonzales, a small town on the Guadalupe River, brought cheers from everyone. It was rumored to have a barber shop, bakery, and general store, where those with money could replenish their supplies. And, as Kurt had told me, there was to be a dance that night.

  The town was a bitter disappointment. The war had left nothing standing except the skeletons of a few barely habitable houses into which several families crowded. There were some tents and a shell of a store with mostly bare shelves. The bakery had sold their last three loaves of white bread to someone at the front of our train.

  When Otto and Lucas came to take Baya and the oxen for water that night when we camped, I learned who bought the bread. Otto shoved a beautiful loaf of white bread at me. “Here, we bought this for you.”

  “I can’t take a present from you,” I said, in spite of the fact that I could almost taste the bread. I hoped my mouth wasn’t visibly watering.

  Lucas grabbed my wrist. “Take it, and be quiet.”

  The minute they were out of sight I ran to Oma and showed her what would be on the evening menu. She laughed until tears ran off her nose and she had to wipe her glasses. “They are watching you and taking care of your animals, and they are feeding you, and we just love it.”

  Gustav did not appear that night. We were busily getting ready for the Hopsa that I had learned would not be on a wooden floor but on packed dirt. Once more I kept my satin slippers hidden away. But I had a good time even in the ugly brown oxfords since Kurt turned out to be an energetic dancer. We won applause for our rendition of “The Pigeon’s Wing” and “The Double Shuffle,” and somehow I managed to make the ugly shoes move fast enough to keep up with him on “Wired”—that was more body movement than dancing. The one walz Kurt saved for Oma, whose cute, tubby body bounced and moved skillfully and effortlessly.

  Just out of Gonzales, the Guadalupe River we had been following from Victoria received a shallow, clear blue partner river. Into it flowed the spring-fed, peaceful San Marcos. It looked harmless, but Herr Schmidt pointed to the high dirt walls on each side and told us how floods had washed impassable baby canyons at many points. We would, he said, have to detour upstream a day’s ride to a place where the banks were low and where washed-in gravel had created a shallow-water crossing.

  The detour put a damper on the giddy expectations we had developed as we got closer to New Braunfels, but our wise wagon master had guided us safely so far, and we trusted him. Grudgingly, we set off in the hot morning sunshine.

  The day was miserable. Damp heat pressed into our skins, and the wagon wheels threw dust from the dry prairie grass into a cloud around us. Being last, my wagon was engulfed in the choking cloud, and we had to pull back to let some of it settle. To make matters worse, grasshoppers, disturbed from
the tall grass, jumped up my skirt. I in turn jumped up and down, trying to escape the scraping and stinging of their rough legs.

  Sophie, clutching Gloriana, laughed and pointed and laughed and pointed to my dance. Finally, she took Gloriana to shade under the wagon seat, and I heard her laughing amidst pretended conversations with her doll. Oh, to be young and playful again. And riding instead of walking.

  High-stepping through the tall grass disturbed fewer grasshoppers and seemed to take less effort, but by late afternoon, I could no longer lift my tired legs. Dragging my feet along, I left a mashed-down trail in the tall grass. Tired as I was, I didn’t notice the trees along the river. Just as I couldn’t move one more step, there were calls of “Water! Water!”

  With one last burst of energy, I abandoned the oxen, Sophie, and everything, and dragged my heavy feet to the water. I plunged in, clothes, shoes, and all. What did it matter? My clothes were soaked with sweat. The water was so freezing cold it felt like it burned my skin. What did it matter? My skin was already truly sunburned. I sat down in the shallows and splashed water on my face, my hair.

  Only then did I look up on the riverbank to see people lined up, laughing at me. What did it matter? I asked myself.

  With a whoop, Kurt jumped in, then Oma, then Herr Schmidt. “People first,” he called, “then animals.”

  Soon the calm, shallow river came alive with splashes and the foam of fun. Mothers clutched babies as the cold water made them catch their breaths. Fathers grabbed their children under their arms, swinging them in great splashing circles.

  As we chilled down, the laughing calmed, and with our teeth chattering and our bodies tingling, we climbed out of the water, wrung out our clothes, and stood chattering in the sunshine, waiting for our clothes to dry. It didn’t take long.

  Herr Schmidt and some of the men wandered away to begin the arduous task of guiding, pushing, and pulling the teams and wagons down the dusty river bank and across the shallow gravel bar. Each team was paused in the middle long enough for them to drink. Kurt handled the oxen for me, and, for once, a thirsty Baya cooperated.