The Long Road Home Romance Collection

by Judi Ann Ehresman

  Sophie jumped up and down. “D-don’t forget about the s-snakes and the d-dead woman.”

  So those stories were told, along with the wise mother of the wagon master who let Phillip and Catherine ride with Sophie so we wouldn’t be truly left behind by the rest of the wagon train.

  “S-swimming in the r-river and the s-storm. Tell it!” Sophie was excited to relive the trip that now seemed to her just an adventure.

  “You tell it, Sophie,” I said.

  In her stuttering way, Sophie told it and added on the telling of our crossing the ferry at flood stage. She ended the story by saying that I was verrry b-brave to cross the r-river.

  “Sophie,” I said, “I didn’t know you thought I was brave.”

  “L-lux told m-me,” she said simply.

  “And who is Lux?” Mutter asked.

  How could I answer? My wonderful friend who had taken me to the dance? The person who sent shivers up my arm simply by holding my hand? The man who encouraged me to stretch my mind and use my intellect?

  Vater spoke up. “He is a young carpenter who built our table and built this snug shed for the winter, not for us of course, but for Baya. He is also building a house for Oma Gunkel.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember Anna Gunkel. Wasn’t she a strange one? The one you said helped you on the trail.” Mutter was obviously reaching back in her memory for events before her long illness.

  The telling and re-telling went on and on with the pace gradually slowing as the candle sputtered out and Sophie fell asleep in the middle of a stuttered sentence. Mutter nodded off during a telling until finally Vater took the blanket from her lap and placed it on the floor, making a bed against the chilly night. I crowded onto the covers piled in the corner next to Sophie and turned my back to my parents. With a feeling of contentment, I went to sleep hearing my parents whisper lovingly to each other.

  During the night, wind whipped trees and rattled the door, lightning flashed, and crashing thunder made the thin walls vibrate. Rain pounded against the shed. The air turned even colder, and Spanish-hearing Baya kicked the wall next to where he was tethered, saying in any language, “I want my shed back.” Little rivulets of muddy water crept under the door, snaking their ways on the floor to where Mutter and Vater had been sleeping. When the cold water touched their blanket they began to scramble, ending up crowded onto Sophie’s bed, fitting spoon fashion with me, yet spilling arms and legs from under the edges of cover. In my half-awake state cramped in the bed, I closed my eyes only to see the terrible fire, playing each scene over and over.

  When we looked out the door at a soggy daylight, we were silent and numb. All we could see was mud and the liquid ashes of our home seeping into the muddy ground. Around the edges, looking like blobs of cold gravy on a plate, sat soggy piles of unidentifiable objects.

  Finally, Mutter spoke. “We will find a way.”

  Couldn’t she see the desolation? Didn’t she understand the shattered work of the tired, thin man standing next to her? With winter upon us, what could be the way? A churning took hold of my hungry stomach. What way was she talking about?

  “W-what w-way, M-mutter?” Sophie clutched at Mutter’s waist as we stood peering out the shed door.

  After a long time, Mutter turned from the door. “Don’t look out there. Look in here. We have each other. We have a roof.” She gestured heavenward. “Thank You, God. We will all find a way.” She fixed her determined gaze on each of us. “The beginning is this: First food. Emil has sent money. We buy food. Then we take care of ourselves. Warm clothes from somewhere in these piles or from a store. Then while it’s raining we plan our new house. Then we figure how to build it.”

  Baya’s renewed hoofbeats against the wall reminded us that he had needs, too. Vater said, “I’ll use the packing crate lumber to build a lean-to for Baya, and it can cover the firewood Herr Schmidt brought, as well as the hay.”

  “Tether Baya opposite the firewood, or the hay will be gone by dark. He is one greedy horse,” I said.

  Chapter 18

  But before the words were out of my mouth, a clatter of wood startled us. Lux, covered by a big black coat and a dripping, wide-brimmed hat, pulled a team to our shed and began unloading scraps of wood. That finished, he came inside carrying a basket from which he unloaded a coffee pot. “Sorry, it’s not real coffee, but it is hot, and Oma gave me sugar for it. She sent bread, too. The Kesslers sent some of Wilma’s butter. My neighbor, Andine, sent you a jug of honey. She needs the jug back, please, when you’re finished.”

  Sophie ran to hug Lux. “O-oh y-yuk, y-you’re wet.”

  “Mutter, this is Lux,” I said.

  Surprised, Lux stopped unloading the honey. “Pleased to meet you.” He shook her hand. “With all the excitement about the fire, word of your arrival hasn’t gotten around. This is a strange welcome, but you are definitely needed here.”

  Mutter rested her hand on Lux’s arm. “Welcome to our shed, Lux. I understand you built it just in time for the fire. Thank you. And thank you for the food, and…just everything.”

  “You’re very welcome, but I need to quit dripping more mud and water on your floor. I intend to build you a lean-to for Baya and the firewood.”

  “It’s entirely too wet for you to work outside, Lux,” I said.

  He met my eyes. “All the more reason to get it done. It’s way too cold for Baya. How would you feel about having the lean-to over the front door, sort of like a porch? You could have the stove under cover. Rain or shine, Carlos says he will be over to clean your stove and get it set up in a dry place. Is the front a good place for the lean-to?”

  “An excellent idea, Lux. Herr Schmidt also brought a hammer, so I can help you.” Vater reached for the hammer by the door.

  “You eat first, Sebastian, while I get started. Remember that this is scrap lumber, so the lean-to won’t be beautiful, but it will serve its purpose.”

  Into my mind popped the picture of Oma’s house at Indian Point built of scraps of lumber by Karl, who knew nothing about building. I giggled as I pictured the lopsided door tall enough only for short Oma.

  “What’s so funny, Rika?” Lux wanted to know.

  “I just remembered a lopsided door built of scrap lumber at Indian Point. It was short, and the door was shaped like Oma.”

  Lux laughed. “That would be a challenging shape. No comparison here. This won’t even have a door.”

  Mutter had seen the Indian Point house, too. She stifled a laugh. “And I understand this young man is a real carpenter. Down there, we were all amateurs.” Mutter tactfully didn’t mention that Karl had been the builder, for which I was grateful.

  We ate breakfast to the sound of thumpings and poundings and yells for Baya to move out of the way.

  “A very strange horse, but a very nice young man,” said Mutter. “How did you meet him?”

  “He accidentally met us. When we crossed the Guadalupe River coming in to New Braunfels, Vater wasn’t there, and Lux brought us to the house. He has helped us a lot,” I said.

  Sophie piped in. “H-he is s-sweet on R-rika.”

  “Well, Sophie,” Mutter asked, “is Rika sweet on Lux?”

  “Y-yes, I t-think s-so.” Sophie helped herself to a bit of butter with her finger.

  “Sounds to me like lady talk coming up,” said Vater. “I’m out of here to help Lux while you decide about him. If I were you, I wouldn’t talk too loud.” He grabbed the hammer and stepped out into the rain.

  Mutter pointed her finger at Sophie’s nose. “Sophie, this is lady talk. If you are big enough to be a lady, you are big enough to keep secrets. This talk stays between the three of us. Do you understand?”

  Sophie was wide-eyed with surprise. “I’m b-big enough.”

  “Promise?” I asked.

  “Y-yes. P-promise.” She held up her hand as a pledge.

  “Now,” said Mutter, turning to me, “tell me about Karl.”

  “That’s hard to do.” The words stuck in my throat
. “He may be dead.”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Adam Haddenbrock came in from the country saying that a scouting party was killed by the Comanches near Fredricksburg. I think he was in that party.”

  “So sad!” exclaimed Mutter.

  “H-he w-wanted Rika t-to go w-with h-him. Y-you’d b-be d-dead now, too,” declared Sophie.

  “Is that true?” asked Mutter.

  “Yes. He did ask me.” I apologized for him. “He had no idea what he was asking. He just wanted me to run away with him.”

  “Such a foolish request, Rika. Not responsible at all,” Mutter said.

  For some reason I felt the need to defend him. “He spent all his money on our wagon, oxen, and Baya, so when he got here, he had nothing. He hated working at regular, boring jobs, so he wanted to escape to an adventure.”

  “Taking a young woman into the wilderness with a group of men is still not a good idea, Rika. It was a reckless request,” said Mutter.

  “It was because he loves me.”

  “Has he said so?” Mutter asked.

  “No, but he said I was special, and he kissed me twice.” I could feel myself blushing. “Once at Spring Creek and the other time when he left here with the scouting party. Both times it took my breath away. And I felt all tingly.”

  “And both times he abandoned you,” Mutter murmured.

  “That wasn’t it at all,” I said defensively. “Karl is special. Or Karl was special. I wish I knew if he is alive. He must be. He must be.”

  “Hang on to that hope. He seems indestructible. Now, tell me about Lux,” Mutter encouraged. “Just call it a mother’s curiosity.”

  “H-he looks at h-her with m-moon eyes,” Sophie declared.

  I rolled my eyes at my sister. “Lux is a friend,” I explained. “He built our table and this shed, and he is helping Oma build her house over in Comaltown. He brings me books and discusses them with me. He values my opinion. He says I am smart. And he stood up for me when Vater wasn’t nice to me. And…”

  Mutter interrupted. “When he what?”

  “V-vater was m-mad at Rika for l-leaving you, and h-he said R-rika w-was s-showing off,” stuttered Sophie.

  “Showing off?”

  “S-singing t-too l-loud. S-she w-wasn’t. Everyb-body stopped s-singing to l-listen,” said Sophie. “S-so R-rika went home with Oma.”

  Mutter expelled a long breath. “My, my, my, a lot has happened to all of you.”

  “L-Lux t-took R-rika t-to the d-dance, and s-she wore the s-secret shoes.” Sophie covered her mouth. “O-oops. T-that w-was a s-secret.”

  “My dear, everyone has a secret. That one slipped out, and I will pretend I didn’t hear,” Mutter said. “So, is Lux a good dancer, and was the party fun?”

  “Yes, it was fun, and, yes, Lux is a good dancer, but toward the end of the evening it felt like my knees turned to jelly.”

  “Attraction! A fun sign. Enjoy it.” Mutter smiled. “Are there any other young men in your life?”

  “E-engel a-a-and K-kurt,” Sophie added helpfully.

  “And they are…?” asked Mutter.

  I explained Engel with the flapping wing imitations after his mother hen and how Kurt helped Oma and helped me at the same time. I told her he had given me a cap and that we danced on the dirt floor in Gonzales.

  “So you and your charms have been busy in my absence,” Mutter declared.

  “Not charms, Mutter. I was a strange-looking girl on an even stranger-looking horse and a dirty, tired girl needing help. Engel and Kurt were kind.”

  Mutter pursed her lips. “No doubt smitten, also.”

  Smitten was a new idea to me, and I had to take time to soak it in. During the trip, I had thought of myself as a grimy, demanding person, not a young woman with prospects. Mutter had a new point of view, but I didn’t agree with her.

  “Not smitten at all,” I reasoned. “They both knew about Karl. They are just important friends.”

  “Enough talk about men. Sophie, come sit on my lap. We need to tell Rika something.” Sophie climbed on Mutter’s lap, and Mutter whispered something in her ear.

  “T-thank y-you, R-rika,” Sophie said.

  “For what?” I asked.

  Mutter cleared her throat, seeming to choke back emotion. “For doing something extremely important. Keeping me alive until Victoria, making the long trip on your own, taking care of Sophie—for all those things, thank you. You did something important and you were very courageous.”

  “I just did what I had to do,” I said calmly. I felt my heart beat faster. I was thinking that during most of the trip I had resented what I had to do.

  “It was more than having to do it. You learned to cooperate with life. That was a hard lesson.” Mutter smoothed Sophie’s tangled hair.

  “Yes,” I replied, having no idea what she meant. Cooperate with life? Wasn’t it just getting along? Most of the time it meant putting one heavy brown shoe in front of the other.

  “And I understand you have become the model Housefrau.” Mutter said it as a compliment. “You’ve learned to cook and clean and do all the house chores besides feeding Baya. Sebastian says you never complain.”

  “Everyone makes sacrifices. The best I could do was take care of the cooking and cleaning. At first I hated it. Now Housefrau is merely something I need to do. Besides, I tried complaining that I couldn’t go to school, but it got me nowhere. I may still complain about that. I have other ambitions besides being a Housefrau.”

  “All in good time, Rika. Anyway, we thank you for all the sacrifices you made for us, don’t we, Sophie?” Mutter nudged Sophie, who nodded.

  Appreciated at last, I felt pleased and important. Becoming a guardian, wagon master, and Housefrau had changed me forever, and the change felt good. After a minute I could say it sincerely. “Both of you are welcome.” And they were, but I had just told them I had other ambitions, and neither had asked what my ambitions were.

  Noisy hammering and sawing on the other side of the wall began again, and we quit trying to talk and set to work reorganizing the shed so we could sleep more comfortably. As we worked, a sadness danced around me because no one understood about my music. It was more than ambition. My head was so filled with music, it felt like it would explode and crack like a gunshot. High, clear singing came out of my mouth at the strangest times. I stopped in the middle of moving the trunk. The music had me; I didn’t have it. As long as I lived, I’d be malcontent unless I could sing and compose music. Had Bach felt this way? Beethoven? Mozart?

  I longed to talk to Oma Gruenwald, who told me that I was exceptionally smart and deserved a good education, who had seen to it that I was trained in music and math. She must have known that a smart woman in a man’s world would have to struggle. Even in New Braunfels, a land of new freedom, only a man could collect the day’s ration of meat, and Lux and Vater earlier had laid down their tools and set off in the middle of the morning to buy rations and get our meat. My role in the community was very disappointing, yet at the moment, I was buoyed by Mutter’s appreciation and admiration.

  Sophie and I spread out half-ruined linens that had been stacked around the cinders of our burned-out house. Damp, black ashes stuck to our skin and hair, and the smell of charred wood stung our noses, making our eyes water. Sophie’s blond hair turned gray with black streaks, and her face looked peculiar with sweat streaks in the black. I pointed to her face and laughed. She pointed at mine and giggled until more tears streaked down her cheeks.

  “Y-you l-look f-funny.” Sophie pointed to my hair.

  “Not as funny as you do, Sophie. Your mouth has a white rim set in your black face. We are so funny!” Fits of laughter took over. Every time we stopped laughing, another spell broke us up.

  “It may be funny, but I’ve never seen you looking worse,” said a voice behind me.

  My knees went weak, and my heart pounded wildly as I recognized the voice and spun to face him. “Karl!” I raced toward him, arms outstretched for
a hug.

  Karl ducked away from me. “Whoa up there, Rika. You’re a mess, and I just had a bath and put on clean clothes.”

  “Sorry,” I said while I tried to absorb my rejection.

  Sophie ran to Karl and impulsively threw her arms around Karl’s waist, the part of him she could reach. “I-I’m g-glad!”

  “Sophie,” Karl said sternly, “you’re getting me dirty.” He pushed her away, then said softly, “I’m glad you’re glad, Sophie.”

  Sophie raced inside the shed, calling, “M-mutter, M-mutter, c-come s-see! C-come s-see!”

  “Oh, Karl, I thought you were dead. I’m so happy to see you.” I tried dusting off some of the ashes that covered me, but it was futile. Reluctantly I stood at a distance.

  “The Comanches also thought I was dead, so they left me behind. I was lucky they didn’t want my scalp.” He paused, looking down at the polished toes of his boots, the memory obviously painful. “Only two of us survived.”

  “I’m sorry for the others, but I’m so glad you are all right.”

  Karl inspected the ashes of our house. “Looks like the house is dead. What happened?”

  Sophie danced ahead of Mutter coming from the shed. “M-my f-fault.”

  “There’s no blame, Sophie. It was an accident,” I said.

  Karl walked the perimeter of the soggy ash pile, carefully avoiding anything that would get him dirty. He stood tall and straight, still wearing the now faded and worn but starched and ironed uniform of his German state, probably his only clothes. “There’s a stove in there,” he declared. “Anything else?”

  Sophie’s sooty hand grabbed Karl’s scrubbed clean hand and dragged him toward the back of the shed. “T-there’s B-baya.”

  “The contemptuous horse?” he exclaimed.

  Something in the way he said it made me clench my fists. Baya was a trying horse, even disgusting, but one that had carried me miles and miles through heat, cold, and rain. Every morning when I carried his water, he applauded my singing with a nudge to my arm. I could tell by the nudges that he preferred opera to German folk songs. Perhaps he was becoming domesticated. He had even quit biting the buttons off my blouse. Oh, dear, I thought. I actually like this horse.