Adelsverein - The Harvesting

The end of the Civil War has left Texas and the South in tatters; broken, defeated and with it's economy in ruins. Too many of the young men are dead. Families have been destroyed, homes left wrecked and desolate. Even the frontier itself has been pushed back. And yet, there is hope in the ashes, for those who have endured and survived and have the heart and courage to begin building anew. Among them is Carl Becker's young nephew, the youngest son of his sister Margaret, who returns from service in Hood's Texas Brigade.

Adelsverein: The Harvesting - The Death of a Dream

        In late summer of 1865, Peter Vining came home from the war on foot, trudging wearily along the road from town, his eyes fixed on the line of low hills above Austin, and a rambling white house set as if ringed by a moat of apple trees on the nearest of them, the orchard that his grandfather had planted years before. Peter had not seen much familiar, passing through Austin on the road towards the swaying bridge that spanned the Colorado River. He jumped down from the back of a half-empty dray in which he had ridden those last few miles, waving casually by way of thanks to the wagon-driver, and hitched up his bedroll, haversack and canteen for one more march. The teamster who had offered him a ride was a dark-haired and bullet-headed Dutch lad, a little younger than Peter who understood just enough English to tell Peter that he was from the Hills and had driven wagons for the Army in Texas for the past two years.

       “Nicht soldaten,” he offered, shrugging ruefully and Peter let it go without comment, being only too grateful for a ride. He himself was a tall and fair-haired young man with a drooping mustache of which he was rather vain, hatless and thin to the point of emaciation. He had a pleasant and open face, square across temple and jaw but marred by a thin straight scar that slashed down across his forehead and cheek. He had the scar courtesy of a slash from a Union officers’ saber, and when he thought about it at all, was only grateful that it hadn’t cost him sight in that eye. Still, the scar pulled his left eyebrow up in a permanently skeptical expression. Like many another, he was clad in the ragged remnants of Confederate motley. The newest thing anywhere about his person was his shoes, and they had been the gift of a kindly-inclined surgeon in a Union hospital set up outside of Richmond, four months before.

       “Take them,” he had urged Peter, as he looked down over his spectacles, “After all, you cannot walk all the way home to Texas barefoot. The sulter will not miss them, after all. Take them… I would hate to see my good works wasted.”

       “I expect not,” Peter had replied and took the brogans with mixed feelings. Still, he had needed shoes, and Major McNelley was right: he couldn’t walk barefoot from Virginia to Texas, and his old boots were more hole than leather. He had come as far as Galveston with a straggle of Texan survivors, men of Hood’s Brigade and Terry’s cavalry, most of whom had been in hospitals or Yankee prisoner compounds when the fighting ended, too sick to travel homewards with the ragged remnants of their units when General Lee gave up the fight.. Peter, bone-thin and white from a bout of surgical fever following on months of semi-starvation had gotten as far as Houston, where he fell sick, fevered and shivering with the ague. The family of one of his friends had looked after him for some few weeks. When he had recovered somewhat, he had written to tell his mother that he was on his way home, but had never gotten an answer, not that he expected one, the way that things had fallen apart in the death throes of the Confederacy.

       When he was able,  he had bidden his friends’ family  goodbye and taken to the road like all the other grey-clad stragglers returning home in ones and twos, halt and lame and heartsick. It had taken some days, but folk were kindly inclined towards returning soldiers; he had not had to walk very much of the way. And now he took those last few steps slowly, along the graveled drive between the apple trees with their boughs heavy-hung with hard green fruit and thinking that he was so very glad to be home at last. It had been a long way, to the roof that his grandfather built and his mother had extended every which way ever since.

       Old Alois Becker came to Texas with his wife Maria, his two sons and a daughter, following the promises of Baron de Bastrop who was looking for settlers, back when all of Texas belonged to Mexico and the wild Indians between them. Alois built his home place on a tract of land near a settlement called Waterloo, on the upper Colorado River. When Texas won independence, and President Lamar insisted on building a new capitol there, Alois and his neighbors had willingly sold their holdings. Well, the neighbors sold up willingly; Alois Becker didn’t give a damn one way or the other. His wife and one of his sons was dead, the other gone and his son-in-law dying of consumption by then. He sold all the property but for a few acres around the home place and the orchard, and spent the last few years of his life sitting by the kitchen hearth, a lost and broken man, venting spitefulness on anyone who came within reach.

       His capable daughter Margaret ignored it pretty much, letting it roll off her like water from a ducks’ back. She was a busy woman, Margaret Becker Vining; running a boarding house to support her boys, her bedridden husband and the father who sat by the fire and stared gloomily into it.

       “You mustn’t mind your Grandfather,” she said once to Peter, when he was about four years old. “He always thought he was the monarch of his world, that everyone obeyed his slightest wish and that he could order everything to his liking. It broke his heart to find out he wasn’t, and turned him sour and bitter. Everyone that he really loved either died or went away… your grandmother, your uncles. And he can’t bear thinking on that and it makes him angry.”

       “You’re here, Mama,” Peter had answered, much baffled. “Doesn’t he love you? And Horace and Jamie and Johnny?” He was afraid of his Grandfather, who scowled at him from under great, hairy frowning eyebrows and barked abrupt commands at him in the old language. His older brothers took every opportunity to escape the old mans’ eye. His mother had sighed and smiled a wry little smile as she hugged him to her in a rustle of lavender-smelling fabric, the black widows’ weeds that she wore for the burying of her husband the year before.

       “Oh, I think he loves us when he thinks about it; he just doesn’t think about us much, Peter-my-chick. It’s the grief that makes him sad and distracted. Pay no mind to it.” Then she had tousled his hair and added, practically, “We’re stuck in the world that we are given, Peter. No use breaking your heart over what we wish we had… we’re happiest in the long run if we adapt to what we are given, rather than yearning after what has been taken away from us. I was grateful to have your dear Papa for the time I did.”

       Practical words, Peter wondered now just how much strength it took to hold to such generous thoughts and words. But his mother was a strong woman. She ran her household like a general at the head of an army and always had, but now she had buried two husbands and three of her sons lay far away, in hasty graves dug into the soil of a wheat field in distant Pennsylvania. Which was irony, if you like, for that was where Alois Becker and his kin had come from, all those years ago.

       A general at the head of an army; well, he was done with armies and generals now. There was his certificate of parole from the Union Army tucked into his near-empty haversack to testify to that, and his empty left-shirt-sleeve pinned up above the elbow to prove it also. He twisted his shoulders under the blanket-roll and the faded grey uniform jacket slung over his shoulder, shifting the sweat-making burden just a little. His trousers were uniform also, but also worn to colorlessness. They had been light blue once, taken off a dead Union cavalryman, but good stout cloth at that. Peter hadn’t much care for taking clothes off a dead man, but he and his brothers were tall and fitting garments hard to come by. By the last desperate year of the fighting he had gotten to be a lot less particular.

       At the top of the drive, he paused to catch his breath and rest for a moment, sitting on one of the great stones that set the gravel drive apart from the orchard below. He was thinking it was very strange there was no one about the place. His mothers’ house – he could not think of it as anything other than hers – had always been as busy as a beehive, a bustle of boarders and visitors, his friends and his older brothers’ coming and going at nearly all hours. Now hardly anything moved at all, save a light breeze stirring the tree leaves. The window shutters of the house were tight-closed against the midday sun, patterned with a shifting shadow-brocade of leaves. Nothing stirred; the home-place was as somnolent as an old dog, curled up and sleeping in the sun. Well, he didn’t much mind a quiet homecoming but the unaccustomed silence sent a prickle of unease down his back. Still, Peter told himself, the war had changed a lot of things; why should he expect his mothers’ house to be immune?

       He hitched up his blankets and haversack again, and climbed the steps to the front door, his footsteps echoing hollowly in the covered porch that ran the length of the house. But when he lifted a hand to try the door, it was locked, and that was a surprise to him. Never, since Austin had become a settled and safe place, had Margaret Becker Vining’s door been locked during the daytime. He rapped tentatively with his knuckles on the panel, and called

       “Hello! Is there anyone at home?” but no answer came from within, and he sighed and came down from the porch; may as well go around to the back, to the stables and the kitchen yard. There must be someone about, he told himself. The door brass was as polished as it had always been and someone had scythed the grass under the apple trees not long since. He followed the graveled drive around the side; oh yes, there was a drift of smoke coming from the kitchen chimney at the back, and the smell of food cooking. He paused abruptly as he came around the veranda at the side of the house for there was someone watching him, with wary blue eyes. A small boy in half-hid himself behind a white-painted turned-wood post and a brightly glazed urn full of geraniums and stared at Peter as if he were something rightly to be feared. At least someone was around, Peter thought with relief. Several of the French doors on the lower floor stood open to the light breeze that fanned the shaded side of the house. The child wore a black knickerbockers suit, much disarranged with dust, which Peter thought with sympathy must have been uncomfortably hot for the boy.

       “Hello there,” Peter ventured, tentatively and tried to gage the child’s age. Not ever having had much to do with children, he guessed about four or five years of age, and the round little face bore some slight resemblance to his own. Horace’s boy, maybe; his older brother had married Miss Amelia Stoddard in a splendid but hurried wedding, during that breathless interval between Lincoln’s election and the firing on Fort Sumter. He had got a son on her, before the Vining boys all went to join Hood’s Brigade. Flushed with the excitement of great doings, they were. No one could tell them any different, although one had tried to warn them about what they were getting themselves into.     Peter remembered Horace’s quiet happiness at hearing of the child’s safe birth. Where had they been, when the letter caught up to them, and how long after? He made himself smile at the child and added, “Are you the only one about, then? I’m Peter… and I would be your uncle, I guess.”

       The child’s mouth rounded into an “o” of astonishment. Without a word, he turned and scampered into the nearest door, crying

       “Mama, come quick! There’s another sojer outside!”

A woman’s impatient voice answered from the dim room inside,

       “Oh, Horrie, don’t shout like that. Be a good boy… I expect he’s hungry. Tell him to go around to the kitchen and ask Hetty for something to eat.” Amelia’s voice, weary and not sounding so sweet and tinkling as she had always had when she spoke to Horace’s brothers. So that must be Horace’s son, and a damn cold welcome from his sister in law, Peter told himself and shrugged wryly. He’d always thought Amelia to be a bit of a shrew, for all her finishing school prettiness. No reason for the boy to recognize him as family, since he hadn’t been home in four years.

       The boy Horrie appeared in the doorway just as Peter hitched up his blankets and haversack one more time.

       “Mama says to go around to the kitchen,” he said somberly, and Peter answered,

       “So I heard.”

       He didn’t expect the child to hop down from the verandah and follow after him, but he did, as cheeky as a sparrow once curiosity overcame fear.

       “Are you really my uncle?” Horrie questioned, breathlessly; he had to take four steps to match two of Peter’s as he strode around towards the kitchen yard and the stables.

       “If you are Horace Vining Junior, then I am,” Peter answered, and Horrie looked dubious.

       “Mama calls me that when she’s angry,” he ventured, with an air of someone making a confession. He craned up to look at Peter as they walked, adding “But ‘most everyone else calls me Horrie. You don’t look much like Gran-Mere’s pitchers of you… You have a long m-m-m’stashe. Are you sure you’re my uncle?”
       “Positive,” Peter answered dryly. “Hetty will surely tell you so, and so will your Ma and Daddy Hurst.”

       “If you say so,” Horrie conceded. And then with the frankness of the very young, he asked, “What happened to your arm?”

       “A big piece of Yankee lead happened to it,” Peter answered, “And there was nothing to be done, but have the surgeon cut it off before the gangrene set in.”

       Horrie’s mouth rounded into that “o” of astonishment again. He seemed torn between sympathy and curiosity when he asked, breathlessly

       “Did it hurt?”

       “Not much,” Peter answered, which was a lie. It had hurt like the devil, and he was still plagued by phantom pains; pains in his hand and wrist, and in the forearm that was gone. How he could feel pain in a limb that wasn’t there any more was a mystery to him, and to the kindly Major McNeeley also… although he had told Peter it was not an “unknown phenomenon” as he put it.

       Peter thrust away the memory of amputated limbs, piled up like shucked corncobs by the field hospital, and the sound of men screaming under the surgeon’s saw because there was no laudanum, nor even any whiskey. Not here, not to Horace’s little son, or Miss Amelia. Maybe to Mama; Mama was uncommonly strong-minded for a woman; she had heard tell of practically everything in her time, no frail little magnolia flower like Miss Amelia.

       Horrie looked up at him, with a child’s open sympathy already writ plain on his face, and a touch of boyish hero-worship, too.

       “I’m glad you’re home to take care of us, Uncle Peter,” he said then, and he dashed ahead of Peter as they rounded to the back of the house, the sprawl of outbuildings, the stables and the smokehouse, the summer kitchen and the woodshed, all baking under the summer noonday. A single horse, dozing in the pasture beyond the stable switched its’ tail moodily; that and the boy running ahead of him, the only things moving. Behind them, Amelia anxiously called for Horrie again, but he had dashed up the stairs to the back porch and flung the door open with a crash.

       “Hetty, Uncle Peter is here and Mama says you’re to give him sommat to eat!”

       From around the side of the house, Amelia called faintly,

       “Horrie! Where are you going? Who is that?”

       Peter followed his nephew into the old winter kitchen, the room in the oldest part of the house, dominated by the enormous fireplace, where Alois Becker had finished out his last sullen and defeated years, raging at the fate which had taken away his wife and sons. Now it was Hetty’s domain, his mothers’ Irish cook and aide de camp in the business of running a boarding house and the fireplace long since stopped up and replaced with a patent iron stove. It had once been as familiar to Peter as it now evidently was to Horrie but he felt awkward, as alien as a stranger, hesitating in the doorway until Hetty looked over her shoulder and dropped the skillet she was lifting from the stovetop with a crash that rang like an iron bell.

       “Oh, tis himself at last!” Hetty cried incoherently, “Oh, to look at you… what have they done… Hurst, ‘tis the young master himself, creeping in like a beggar… oh the wickedness of it all… Hurst, take his things…” and she swept him into an embrace, which he suffered gladly; this was more like it, and he gave himself over to much-anticipated enjoyment. Hetty weeping like a fountain and fussing over him, while Horrie jigged with excitement and Daddy Hurst beamed all over his dark African face and quietly divested him of his haversack, canteen and blankets, saying

       “Oh, seh, seh… such a sight for sore eyes you be… now you set yoursef down. We ‘bout gave up hope of you, Marse Peter. Hetty, give the po’ boy a plate w’ some proper supper on it, he sho’nuff ‘pears like he needs it mor’n you or me.” He patted Peter on his shoulder with enormous affection - that shoulder with a whole arm still attached to it, though he had to reach up a good ways. The old man seemed terribly moved, for all that he tried to sound so stern to Hetty.

       Daddy Hurst had been his mother’s coachman and man of all work for as long as Peter could remember. Technically a slave and owned by old Mr. Burnett, Daddy Hurst had worked for wages in Margaret’s household for years. Peter could not remember a time when he had not been there, gnarled and brown like a chestnut, patient and stern with him and his brothers. There was nothing the least servile about Daddy Hurst. Peter supposed he was a free man now, although what difference that would make he could hardly imagine. It was enough that he was still here, he and Hetty both, wrangling over the reins of authority.

       “And who do you think you are to be giving orders?” Predictably, Hetty fluffed up like a banty-hen, “Listen to him, the black heathen savage that he is!”

       “Give the po’ boy some food,” Daddy Hurst scowled and just loud enough to be heard, he muttered, “Po’ shanty-Irish trash…”

       At the stove, Hetty muttered some obscure Hibernian curse in his direction and Daddy Hurst made a warding-off gesture. Watching this, Peter felt something tight and hard within him loosen, at the sight of this familiar by-play between old and fond adversaries. Oh, yes, he was home, and Hetty and Daddy Hurst still feuded… and yet, he noted that there were two places laid at the long kitchen table. At distant ends, of course, which was only right… but still. Peter wrenched his mind away from the thought that they were like an old but contentious married couple. That wouldn’t do, at all. Hetty set out another place, as Horrie chimed in,

       “Ain’t it grand? I saw him first, you see…”

       “You hesh up, child,” Daddy Hurst chided him, as Amelia stepped into the kitchen, rounding the door from the hallway, her voice raised in annoyance,

       “Horrie… if I have said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times, a proper young gentlemen should not consort with…oh!” Her delicate fingers went to her mouth, in a pretty and dramatic gesture, as the voices of her son, Hetty and Daddy Hurst rose in chorus,

       “It’s Uncle Peter, Mama!” Horrie had no compunctions about shouting, “Didn’t you see him? Ain’t it grand?” He had gone over entirely to admiration of his uncle, it seemed, standing at his feet and looking up worshipfully.

       “Isn’t it grand,” Amelia corrected him, and her own eyes overflowed, very prettily. But then, Amelia always did things very prettily. She reached out her hands to Peter, saying,

       “I am so terribly sorry for this poor welcome, Brother Peter… when we had been looking for your return for so long! You must forgive us… Horrie, child, please… remember your manners.” His brothers’ wife was as delicate as a porcelain flower, and widow’s weeds made her appear elegantly frail.

       “No matter,” Peter kissed her hand with a flourish and said, “I am glad to be home, Miss Amelia. I’ve no complaints about my reception. It was my fault for not sending word to you all.”

       Amelia dabbed at her eyes with a lacy handkerchief, as she appeared to take in Peter’s appearance for the first time,

       “Oh… your poor arm,” she said mournfully and Peter replied with wry humor,

       “Look at it this way, ‘Melia – what it’ll save on the making of shirts. I’ll only have to pay for a sleeve and a half, now. Think of the money I’ll save.”

       Which was exactly the wrong thing to say for Amelia’s tears redoubled and Hetty exclaimed in horror,

       “Oh, sor… how can you make such light of it… what would your dear sainted mother say?”

       “Mama will get out her account book and work out the savings to the penny,” Peter answered lightly, “I have no doubt of it.” It annoyed him, that Amelia and Hetty made so much of the loss of his arm. It wasn’t something that he wanted to dwell on, particularly. He thought that Daddy Hurst would be at least a little amused, but instead the old man looked nearly as weepy as the women.

       Something was wrong, he realized. Horribly wrong.  At last, Daddy Hurst whispered, dolefully

       “Marse Peter… you don’t know?”

       “Know what?” Peter asked, although in his heart he thought he already knew. “What’s wrong, Daddy? Where’s Mama?”

       Amelia began to sob, in earnest and so did Hetty. Horrie looked in bewilderment from her towards the other adults, and Peter absently patted his nephews’ head, as Daddy Hurst answered, in tones of deepest compassion,

     “I’se sorry to be the one telling you, Marse Peter. We buried Miss Margaret in the East Avenue burial ground, three weeks ago. Miss Amelia, she wrote you a letter.” He shrugged helplessly as Peter stared at him in shocked disbelief. “She was that sick, Marse Peter… but she jus’ didn’t want anyone to know. You know how Miss Margaret was… a proud woman.”

       And to Peter’s horror, it looked as if Daddy Hurst might join the women, in weeping. No, it couldn’t be, he told himself, in that first shock of disbelief.

        Margaret Becker Vining Williamson was vital, strong, a force of nature as irresistible as one of those Texas thunderstorms, which swept in and lit up the night sky for seeming hours with incessant bolts of lightening, tossing the branches of sturdy trees and bending the grass against the ground. An indomitable monument before whom strong men made obeisance and lesser women gave way; imperious and intelligent, worshipped, feared and loved in about equal measure. She had been here before Austin began, when the capitol was a scattering of ramshackle and hastily constructed buildings just east of the river, a friend and hostess to everyone who mattered over the three eventful decades since. Death would not presume… and yet her last living son acknowledged to himself that it had. Daddy Hurst and Hetty would not be grieving so. Her house would not be so empty, so dreadfully silent, were it otherwise.

       Peter did not recollect how he came to find himself in that room which his mother kept as the family or private parlor, sitting in the chair which had been his stepfather’s favorite seat with his bowed to his remaining hand. He supposed that Amelia had led him there, for she was fluttering and fussing over him, Horrie staring like a basket of owls and him feeling as stunned as he had been when a Yankee bullet smashed his wrist during the fight at Rice’s Station early in April. Foolish and stunned and not quite taking it in, the blood and the mess and him staring and thinking it wasn’t really real. This was his own left hand; he must be able to move his own fingers. And his mother must be alive, with her particular and enduring mixture of practicality and affection.       But no; his left arm ended now in a scarred stump a couple of inches below the elbow. He had begun to deal with the limitations and all the tricks and strategies that a one-handed man must learn or work out for himself, to cope with the world and the tasks that it asked of him. He had not realized until then how much he had counted on Margaret’s cool and common sense, an anchor in a world where everything had come adrift, gone sour, flown apart.

       Amelia was talking at him, talking sweet fluttery nonsense, while Daddy Hurst hovered in the doorway. After some considerable time, he made his voice to work, asking in deceptively calm and level tones that they leave him alone for a bit. They did just that, Amelia shooing out her son who left with seeming reluctance, looking over his shoulder as his mother chided him in her implacable soft voice. The quiet of Margaret’s parlor settled around her youngest son, as lightly as motes of dust swirled in a narrow blade of sunshine which had managed to slip between the drapes.

       Nothing much was out of place in the room, although it seemed to have not been much frequented. Margaret’s desk was closed, her account books neatly lined up on the shelves above the desk. Her sewing table and mending basket also seemed empty. Always, when he and his brothers had been about, her basket overflowed. The hinged cover was drawn over the ivory keys of her beloved piano, which had had been a Christmas present and wedding gift to her from her second husband, the kindly and absent-minded Doctor Williamson. How the Doctor and his brothers and Uncle Carl had plotted, to smuggle the piano into the house without his mother knowing! And today he could have brought in a circus with a calliope and a brass band, too… and no one would have ever noticed, the house was that empty.      Peter leaned back with a sigh, absently rubbing away the ache in the stump of his arm with his remaining hand. Here he was home at last, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble of the journey. Two elderly servants in an empty house, a sister in law who set his teeth on edge and a small boy he didn’t know at all.

        His eyes fell on the little cabinet where his mother had kept her small collection of curiosities and treasures: some china figurines, a delicate arrangement of wax flowers under a glass dome, a Chinese fan carved of some sweet-smelling pale wood. There were also family portraits and daguerreotypes among them and a miniature on ivory of her first husband with a locket of his hair under glass, the father of Peter and his brothers. There was too a portrait of Horace and Amelia, in their wedding finery, and of himself, Jamie and Johnny. He smiled, defying the dull pain in his throat, to think of how they had put on their uniforms and tried to look so earnest and martial.

       Uncle Carl would have shaken his head over that, for sure. There was his uncle, also in Margaret’s cabinet of treasures. He sat stiff and unsmiling with his family, framed in an especially ornate case, his mothers’ younger brother, with his three children and that slim, black-haired woman he had married in the German settlements. They must have had that daguerreotype done when they came to Austin for Horace and Amelia’s wedding. That had been so very awkward, that visit. Uncle Carl’s wife barely spoke English at all and he was a stiff-necked Unionist, which hadn’t gone without comment, what with how high feelings had been running in the spring of 1861.  Peter remembered with another pang that he had spoken heatedly, indeed had been unforgivably rude to his uncle. His mother had been furious, and he had been rude to her as well; he cringed at the memory of it.

     Someone had draped a bit of black ribbon over the picture frame, which meant that Uncle Carl must have fallen on the field in spite of his Unionist principles. He had been a soldier too, and a ranger, one of Jack Hays’ men. Peter didn’t doubt that his uncle had taken up service, one more time. Just another sorrow, piled upon all the rest. He racked his memory, trying to remember when his mother had written to them, and what she had said when she wrote to tell them of Uncle Carl’s death. Not much, Peter thought… just a brief post-script in a letter to Horace, which he shared with his brothers. So it must have been in the second year of the fighting. Peter dully wondered where; in some great fight, or maybe some piddling little raid or ambush somewhere. Not that it mattered much; dead was dead. And the Vining brothers and their brigade had much more pressing matters attending them, at the time. Home had seemed very remote, and it’s people quite unreal, by the second year of fighting in the East.

       That depressing recollection was interrupted by someone tapping lightly on the door. After a moment, it opened and Hetty put her head around it to say,

       “Mr. Peter… Miz Amelia said we was to bring you something on a tray. We thought sure you’d be hungry, after coming all that way.”

       “I am,” Peter answered, “But you don’t need fuss, Hetty. I’ll eat in the kitchen like always.”

       “Oh, but Miz Amelia, she says that ain’t fitting,” Daddy Hurst said, from behind Hetty. She opened the door to let him pass, carrying a wooden tray and a folding stand. “You look tahrd, Marse Peter, an’ that ain’t no mistake. You jes’ set youself in that chair, Miz Hetty an’ I, we’ll fix you right up.” He set up the stand with a flourish, and Hetty proudly placed a folded napkin on it, with a setting of silverware. As she bustled out, Daddy Hurst winked broadly at him, and whispered,

       “I got me a bottle of fine sipping whiskey set aside jus’ for you. Saved it special an’ I’ll bring it later!”

       “And I’ll drink a health to you for thinking of it, Daddy,” Peter answered, touched with the care they were taking of him. The old man winked broadly at Peter, hearing Hetty call from the kitchen.

       “Jes’ you sit easy an’ rest,” Daddy Hurst advised, “Miss Amelia, she did say we was to make your ol’ room ready, air out the beddin’ an’ sech. I put yore things up there, as ever. Might I ast a question, Marse Peter? Why ain’t they no buttons on yore jacket, now?”

       “When we came into Galveston,” Peter answered, with a snort of disgust, “The Yankee provost marshal met us on the dock, and told us to cut all them Army buttons off. It was a condition of our parole, he said.”

       “My, my, my,” Daddy Hurst clicked his tongue and shook his head, seeming in commiseration, “Seems lak they didn’ want y’all to be in no doubt as to who won out, didn’ they?”

       “No, I guess they didn’t,” Peter said indifferently, as Hetty returned with another tray, this one laden with covered dishes and a tall glass of lemonade.

       “Don’t you worry, none,” Hetty added, as she set out the dishes with a flourish; a plate of ham, all neatly cut up already so that he could manage it one-handed, some little boiled potatoes and a dish of greens cooked with fatback, warm cornbread wrapped in a clean napkin, and a smaller plate with a slab of chess pie on it. “I’ll take it and find some new buttons for it, don’t you fret, Miss Amelia might not take the same care your Mama did…”

       “Thank you, Hetty,” Peter answered in gratitude, for his mouth was already watering at the good smells rising from the plates at his side. “I am forever more grateful, I’m hungrier than I ever recall being, all the time I was away. Don’t worry ‘bout that old jacket. I’m sure my brothers and I left enough clothes behind…”

       “Bless you sor, so they did indade,” Hetty adjusted the placing of the plates on the tray more to her liking, while she and Daddy beamed at him with expectant approval, “Oh, the pity of it, that you weren’t able to see your dear mither one last time! But still an’ all, you’re home at last, an’ that’s a blessing. I’ve been sayin’ a prayer just for ye, every day since we heard that your regiment was away to home, safe enough.”

       “Let the pore chile eat, Miss Hetty,” Daddy rumbled, “’Sted of tawkin’ an tawkin’ over ‘im, like one ‘o dem mockin-birds.”

       “Heathen sauce,” Hetty snapped, without any particular heat, “Don’t worrit yourself!” And she and Daddy went away, closing the parlor door after themselves, although he could hear their voices as they wrangled cheerfully in the hallway, and then distantly in the kitchen.

       So empty, the house was now. He could hear Hetty and Daddy quite well, with his nephews’ voice chiming in now and again. He ate with an appetite that revived with every bite of Hetty’s excellent cooking, and wondered what he should do next. When he had finished every scrap, even the crumbs in the napkin wrapped around the cornbread, he sat back with a sigh, replete with good food for almost the first time since… he couldn’t remember. He told himself he ought to get up. He ought to go find his sister-in-law, ask for an accounting of what his mother had left. He ought to have some notion. What was it Horrie had said, about him being back to take care of them all?

       Look after them all; that was a joke. He barely felt able to take care of himself, maimed and tired, half-starved… weak as a half-drowned kitten, after the exertion of walking up the hill and around the house. Well, Major McNelley had advised that he wouldn’t be fit for much, for quite some time. He had looked over his spectacles at Peter and advised,

       “Something outdoors in the clean air of the country… nothing terribly strenuous, mind you. Had you trained for any such profession… before the war?”

       “I was reading law,” Peter replied, and Major McNelley sighed and said,

       “You probably won’t be allowed to continue at such for a while, having been a rebel and all. Look to doing something vigorous, which keeps you out of doors. You’re one of the lucky ones, after all,” And Major McNelley had sighed again and lifted his glasses so that he could rub the tired eyes underneath. Peter laughed a bitter laugh and looked at his stump. Major McNelley had let his glasses slip back over his face and added sternly,

       “You’re young, lad. And you’ve lived through this murderous stupidity… which is more than can be said of many another. You’ve got the rest of your life and more of your limbs and faculties than most of the other poor lads in this place. Now… sort out what you can do, and want to do and go home and do it.”

       At the time, Peter had wondered if Major McNelley – fat, grizzled and by repute the fastest and most

adept operating surgeon in several armies- had ever met his mother. They both possessed the ruthless art of discouraging self-pity in others.

       Someone tapped on the door and before he could answer it Daddy Hurst put his head around the doorframe and asked,     

       “Yo’ finished, Marse Peter? Miz Hetty, she wants dem dishes, if yo’ done wid ‘em.”

       “I am,” Peter replied, and Hetty bustled into the parlor. Peter thought that he out to get up from his meal, but he still felt tired from the day’s journey in the heat of the day, and so much food had left him sleepy. And Doctor Williamsons’ chair was extraordinarily comfortable. No wonder his stepfather fell asleep in it of an evening. But something nagged at him as his eyes fell again on Margaret’s cabinet, and almost idly, he asked,

       “Hetty… Daddy Hurst: do you recall if Uncle Carl’s family came to Mama’s funeral?”

       “I don’t believe they did,” Hetty answered thoughtfully as she gathered the dishes together. “There were ever so many mourners; the church could scarce hold them all.”

       “Onliest fambly was Miz Amelia and young Horrie,” Daddy Hurst added, and Hetty sniffed, disdainfully.

       “I don’t b’lieve young madam even wrote to Mr. Carl’s wife until after the funeral,” she said. “They were left in a poor way, too. Remember, Hurst? Their oldest boy stayed for a wee while, before he went off with Colonel Ford’s company. A fine tall lad,” Hetty neatly assembled the dishes, and Hurst folded up the tray-table. “With such a look of your brothers and yourself about him, too! Miss Margaret remarked on it, so she did!  Did he not tell us that Mr. Carl’s property was taken by the Army, and Mrs. Carl and the children all had to go and live with her family?”

       “Burned them out,” Daddy Hurst nodded sadly, “Miz Margaret, she was that riled up ‘bout it… pow’ful sorrowed, too, ‘cause she couldn’t pull no strings to get that prop’ty back fo’ them, an’ then she was too sick, an’ ever’ friend she ast for he’p had too much on they plate. Miz Margaret, she regretted that mo’ than anythang elst.”

       “They what?!” Peter sat up, all drowsiness banished in an instant. “Who? That’s the first I heard of this, Daddy! Why would they have taken Uncle Carl’s land?! He had that for service with the Rangers, I remember. There wasn’t a man with better right to it - and who would do such a wrong to his family… Uncle Carl was one of Jack Hays’ men, too! Who would dare, and by whose law – some damned politicking scoundrel, I’ll be bound!”

       “Lordy, lord, I dunno,” Daddy Hurst shook his grizzled head “There was po’ful evil bein’ talked of, Marse Peter, po’ful evil… of such goings’on as most white folk would’n believe.”

       “It was the martial law, sor. They declared martial law, when General Hebert said that all the German towns were in resistance; such a to-do there was,” Hetty added dolefully, “We never knew what to believe at the time. The lad… your cousin would not say a word about it. A right cagy one he was. Miss Margaret, all she would tell me was that Mr. Carl had been murdered, and the property confiscated for his sympathies. And she could find no one what would lift a finger, for all the true men of honor were away in the fighting. All that were left, sor… were weak men using the war to score off old enemies or profiteers feathering their own nests, that and bullying lickspittle politicians. That was her very words!”

       “Miz Margaret had a way wit’ dem,” Daddy Hurst added, although he didn’t specify which he meant, and he continued with an oblique look at Peter as he capably folded up the stand and tray and tucked them under his arm. For the life of him, Peter couldn’t read Daddy Hurst’s expression; it seemed to be something halfway between genuine sorrow and a grim kind of satisfaction. “They say dat men wid masks, they come to de door, take away dis man, dat man, dis other. Dey hang dem all from an ol’ oak tree, fo’ disagreein’ ‘bout de Confederacy… dey say, dis man, he a Union man. Cain’t have dat, when our boys at de fightin’ in Virginny or some sich place, so…” Daddy Hurst shrugged. “Men wid masks, dey pay a call at midnight. Most white men, dey ain’t useta guard dey tongues like dey black folk do.”

       “No, I guess not,” Peter said. His voice was calm, but inside, a cold unreasoning rage was building in him. Curious that when Hetty quoted his mother, about lickspittle politicians and profiteers, he should so suddenly think of Miss Amelia’s father, Mr. Stoddard of Mayfield and his plantations of rice and cotton in Brazoria. Stoddard, who had been such a fire-eater for secession, had cheered the march of grey-clad volunteers and raised a toast to the Confederacy at his daughters’ wedding. Aye, he was keen to serve with Confederacy with his mouth, and maybe some of his money, but not – as far as Peter knew – with his own body. The rage sat in him like a cold lump of lead. Politicians, politicians and cowards; Peter silently damned the whole lot of them. They had roused the whirlwind of secession, encouraged it with torrents of words, shouted down men like the old General Sam Houston who counseled against it. And now, if what Hurst and Hetty had to say was true, while true men of honor paid in blood, they had spitefully beggared his own kin. And that, after murdering Uncle Carl in cold blood for being a stiff-necked and stubborn Dutchman, and unwilling to take any part in the madness.

       Peter said some words then, which had probably never been uttered in his mothers’ parlor. He recovered control of his own tongue with some effort after a moment, ruefully acknowledging the truth of what Daddy Hurst had said and realized that the old man and Hetty had quietly gone, closing the parlor door behind them. For the second time in a day, he wondered again what he should do next.