TEXAN SPLITFIRE

					by

				MJ Politis, Ph.D.
				mjpolitis@yahoo.com
				Copyrighted, Feb 29, 2016
				All rights reserved

CHAPTER 1

Maria stared into the pot of chili yet again as it simmered on the wood stove, considering what it would become, determined that it would be more than just a concoction of beans, vegetables and beef that would be something special.   Something that was uniquely hers.  Not merely the chili her sainted grandmother made half a century ago when Texas belonged to Spain.  Or when Maria's mother prepared the famous Fernandez chili thirty years ago when the still more wilderness than settled land Maria loved as much as hated was officially under the rule of the Mexican government.    Or when Maria's sisters took over the task of creating the most mouth watering, tongue-tantalizing mixture of home-grown beans and special spices that made the Fernandez Hacienda dining room a place where Anglos from the East could experience real Mexican food, and Tejanos from anywhere in Texas could reaffirm their Mexican roots.    

It had been an unusually hot day for November, more like July when the sun burnt or gently toasted everything and everyone under the clear blue sky. But the sun began to go down, yielding way to a cooling wind from the North that blew in through the window to her right.  The porthole to the big open in front of her soon provided a magnificent sky to the West that always fascinated Maria, and never looked the same.   The Western sky held her eye, while the aromas from the pot infused a sense of smell into her California dreaming.  “Yes,” she said to the chili that gently bubbled its multicolored vapors, penetrating her nostrils and speaking to her with a multi-lingual harmony of languages which defied descriptors in both English and Spanish.  As it did each time it spoke to her, during each of the meals she ate as a young girl, and each of the meals she was assigned to help prepare as a young woman.  “This chili isn't going to be just like Grandmother made.  And everyone else in my family made.  You never become great by being as good as everyone else.”  And with that Maria pulled herself up by her garters and took down the spices from the shelf next to the stove, enlisting the best elements of her brain, mind and senses to make a statement of greatness, short and long term.

Suddenly, a mirror grabbed hold of Maria's stare, throwing into her eyes the image of a long haired, slender, green-eyed beauty whose body represented the best elements of human biology from North and South of the Rio Grande.   Her once-white laced silk dress had been stained yellow by the sun and the dust which blew threw it every time it was hung out to dry.  But it still fit perfectly around her ample but not excessive breasts, tapering down to a small waist and artistically-shaped hips that needed neither corset nor belt to make her the envy of every Anglo whore in San Antone and Tejano in the Texas Hill Country.   Not so for Maria's sisters, whose flabby bodies appeared to be pregnant long before even conceiving their first child.  But, as their father said, “they have beautiful eyes that see the worth of a man, beautiful lips to kiss him good morning and good night, and beautiful hands that know how to keep his stomach very happy.”   As for Maria, she knew how to follow a recipe, but not how to become it.   She was as skilled in the kitchen as her father Juan was as a farmer or horseman, which is why he became a rancher who hired Black servants to tend the fields and Tejano drifters displaced from the land after the Mexican War to look after his cattle.  

Maria's ears were drawn to that herd as the coyotes started their nightly serenade, speaking to each other as to how they would nab a calf, or perhaps an old cow.   The herd  at the Fernandez ranch was three times that of any Latino-run spread, and had not been reduced by a single inch after Texas Independence was declared in 1836 by the Anglos who came in to 'liberate' the region from Mexico.   And after President Polk went to War against the President of Mexico, taking as tribute everything from Texas to the Pacific, the Fernandez ranch actually did better than it ever had been doing under Spanish or Mexican rule.  Maria never knew why that was so.  Each time she questioned her father's strategy to deal with the Anglo obsession to conquer anything or anyone Mexican, she would get, “we use our heads while trying to be true to our hearts,” as an answer.    And when pressed for an explanation for that answer, he'd laugh and say, “until the Anglos can make better chili than we Fernandez's can, they'll give us everything we need to keep their palates satisfied and their bellies full.  Because there is an magic ingredient in it that makes the Anglos, our fellow Tejanos and even the Commanches who dine with us think with clear reason.”

The story worked when Maria was a child, but she was now a woman.  The last unmarried woman in the family.  Old enough to have children of her own.   And old enough to pull her weight so that she could be married off to a man of influence who would provide a hefty enough dowry to keep the Fernandez Hacienda from becoming a share-cropper farm, and insure that her father's grandchildren all would receive enough education and smarts to survive in a world where whoever has the money makes the rules.  Be it Anglos whose had stolen land and gold from Mexico at the point of a gun.   Cherokee farmers turned businessmen who figured out how to steal money back from the US Government on land worked by Black slaves who those well-dressed Redskins owned.  Or the 'guest of influence and breeding' who was waiting in the dining room to meet the daughter who Juan Fernandez kept claiming was 'the best and most colorful of all of my daughters, who has the initiative of the son I never had.'   

Yes, Maria wanted to impress her father, in ways that he didn't expect.  No, to go beyond his expectations, somehow.   The spices in her hand, mixed with innovative combinations with the beans simmering in the pot in front of her face was an essential part of that recipe for greatness.   It was up to Maria to make her father proud, her people proud, and most importantly her sainted grandmother, who helped build the hacienda up from a wooden shack into what it was today.   And Maria into someone who could connect to the past and somehow revolutionize the future.

Part of that future sat in the dining room, in the form of Pedro Mendez, who had at least 4 names between Pedro and Mendez which reflected a pedigree going back to the glory days of Spain when the Moors were finally driven out of Iberia.   By glorious looking Christian crusaders who fought for the glory of God against the Pagan demons who called themselves Moslems.    Papa always brought home glorious men to be husbands for his daughters.  Glorious in pocket, but with inglorious minds and ugly hearts.   

From the temporary shelter of the kitchen, Maria heard her father laughing with Senior Mendez in the way men do when they hide more than what they say.  But such was the game played by gentlemen with Spanish breeding like Mendez, and self-made noblemen like Maria's father.  It had been called 'finesse' by her Maria's mother, a woman who now sat in her chair at the distant end of the table looking charming but feeling numb.  It was called 'deception' by Maria, who now yearned for an education of the Soul that went beyond the formal training she had been given by the best itinerant tutors one could acquire from Mexico City.  It was called high 'falutin bullcrap' by the woman who Maria considered as her real mother, sister and friend, who carried a bucket of water freshly drawn from the well into the kitchen.

“You best be getting' yerself to the dinin' table, Miss Maria, and present yerself as best as you can,”  black as coal and old as the hills Thelma said with a voice as gruff and honest as the desert wind.  

“Be true to yourself and you can't help but be true to everyone else,”  Maria replied in Castilian Spanish.

“Then ya best be sayin' that in Tejano Spanish,”  Thelma replied in English as she went about her tasks as the real master of the kitchen.  Checking the rice, potatoes and tortilla paddies she had prepared that complimented the Chili.   “A woman should be prouder of what's she's made herself into where she be, insteada boastin' about where she came from.”

“And what have I become?”  Maria asked Thelma, open to any answer from the woman who bought her way out of slavery, then earned her way into being the highest paid employee on the Fernandez Hacienda. 

Thelma looked into Maria's eyes then stared into her soul.   

“I know,” Maria replied, lowering her eyes before 'Doctor Thelma' could complete the surgery on her troubled and aching soul.

“No you don't,”  Thelma said.  “But you will know soon enough, child,” she continued as she turned her back on Maria and went about fixing the staples and putting them on the tray about to be wheeled into the dining room.  

Maria picked up the spices from the shelf and dialoged with the chili again.  “Sometimes making something good into something great is more complicated than it seems, but like Michalengelo said, 'every student gotta excel her teacher.' Or should anyway.”

With that, Maria went forward with the culinary experiment on the chili, hoping that Thelma would not know what her real agenda was.  But somehow knowing that she did.

“And here she is,”  Maria's father Juan said as Maria walked into the dining room with her head held high wheeling out the food cart.    “The artist wheeling out her art.  A self made woman who can do anything and everything!” he boasted to his Spanish guest.  “Cultured mind and cultured hands. My youngest and most interesting daughter, Maria, Senior Mendez.”

“Pedro,” the nobleman said as he rose from his seat, bowing with what appeared to be real humility.   “An honor to meet you,” he said as he moved the chair out from under the table to allow Maria to sit down.   

Maria bundled her dress under her legs, noticing that Pedro was handsomer than she imagined he would be.   More educated than any of the rich prospects his other sisters had been married to.  And maybe even an interesting soul.   One who was interested in her mind, but also her anatomy.  Maybe a coneuisuor of different kinds of love.  Agape, love of soul.  Phillos, loosely translated into brotherhood and sisterhood.  And Eros, love of the the flesh.   A perfect man can give a woman all three.   

Pedro took his seat again. Maria took another look at him.  His brown suit fit his body perfectly, and that body was as muscular as much as it was manicured.   His mustache made him look as dashing as any cavalry officer she had seen when visiting Mexico City, and rivaled any of the portraits of her Spanish ancestors.   And when Thelma came into the dining room to serve the meal as a servant, he conferred to her the dignity that one nobleman would give to any noble lady.  

After serving the guest at the table first, Thelma moved on to the next individual according to the rules of Upscale Tejano protocol, and common descentsy.  “Seniora Fernandez, your daughter did a superb job in the kitchen,” she said to Maria's mother as Thelma prepared a plate for the family matriarch.

Maria's mother Anna gave Thelma a wide smile from the side of her face not afflicted by the stroke that had incapacitated her ability to speak with her tongue.  Her right hand was unable to do very much more than go into shakes and shivers, which could only be controlled by tying her arms around he waist. Thelma adjusted those restraints adjusted appropriately with her usual discression, hiding the severity of Anna's affliction from her guest.   

Maria stared at Pedro's eyes as the perfect gentleman saw her mother's agony.   He seemed empathetic. But, as Thelma said of more than one broke drifter trying to pass himself off as a noble gentleman in pursuit of Juan's money or good favor, 'sincerity, if you can fake that...'
 
The Fernandez home was one where there was free discussion, between all classes of men.   But Juan was the one who usually guided the tone and topic of those discussions so that he would win any argument with any man, arranging it somehow that every woman agreed with him as well.   “Did you see that sword on the mantel?”  he said while Thelma prepared plates for Maria, then himself.  “It belonged to my great-grandfather.   Who carved a ranch out of the thick Redwood Forest of Texas in 1789, Pedro.”

“There were thick Redwood Forests in this part of Texas, Senior Fernandez?”  the young guest asked his elder host.

“Not now,”  Juan said with a smile.  A gesture which turned into a puzzled frown when he smelled the chili about to enter his mouth.   

Pedro faked a laugh, very convincingly.  And courteously.   Then he turned the conversation to something more in line with Maria's sense of humor and intellect.  “The best use of wood from cutting down any forest is of course to make paper, to make books.”  He then went on to discourse about casual topics of the day ranging from the price of cattle in Texas to the latest fashions in Madrid while quoting Cervantes, Milton and Shaekspeare with a natural ryhym that seamlessly bridged the philosophical and pragmatic aspects of human experience.   All while taking smaller and smaller bits of the chili, as his mouth was getting hotter and face paler. Chili which he kept praising with quotations from more scholars.  And a conversation that he twisted into an agenda which clearly revealed his view that the White Race was the superior one, and that it was the educated Caucasion's duty to look after the Inferior races.   Be they Black, Red or Yellow.    The key phrases said in Latin which he clearly seemed to have memorized more than knew.

Maria listened attentively, agreeing with every false, falsified and poorly pronounced quote Pedro made.  In ladylike manner she pretended to eat larger bites of the chili than Pedro did, sneaking whatever she could under the table to the family dog, swallowing without chewing whatever she couldn't.  “I believe that honesty in all things, no matter how harsh, is the basis for everything of value,” she said to Pedro rather than continuing to nod 'yes' with yet another smile.  “Surely you agree with me,” she said.   “And false compliments about anything reflects a false soul behind it, yes?”

“Yes,” Pedro replied as her pretended to like another bit of chili, which at this point had reached his stomach.  “But, my dear and perhaps naively idealistic lady, I...” he said as his stomach pushed half of the chili out his colon and prepared itself to eject the rest out of his green-gilled cheeks.  

“Got a holda the disentery from one a the coloreds who yas ran into on the stage comin into town, Senior Mendez?”  Thelma interjected  in the most ignorant Nigger tawk she would muster as she escorted the guest out of the dining room, and in several different directions, stopping each time to twist him around and make him more nauseous.  “Now. If my small, Nigerdly memory can only rememba where da privy is..  I knows just the thang for ya.  White man's medicine, so ya'll can trust it.  But as my grann-mamie used ta always tell me,” she said.  “Ya can't trust a perfect man unless ya smell the garbage inside him first,” she continued in Latin.

“Stop babbling in African jibberish, and point me to the door!”  Senior Mendez blasted out.

“Ifn you says so Sir,”  Thelma said, escorting the gentleman who entered so nobly out the door, shutting it afterwards.

Maria smiled as she heard barfs, farts and crude insults coming out of Senior Pedro's mouth, hearing within his English that he was as much American than Spaniard.
 Ugly American.  Like the Gringos who bought rather than earned educations.  The 'noble pioneers' who came to Texas in 1830 from Mississippi and 'Alabami' in search of freedom to own their own slaves, and make whatever anti-slavery Tejano who resisted such their servants.  

“This isn't funny,” Juan said to Maria as he pushed away his bowl of mostly uneaten chili, belching a lot, and farting a little himself. “You disgraced me, our family and your mother,” he blasted at Maria. “Is that not correct, Anna?” he asked his wife at the opposite end of the table.

Maria's mother answered with firm and determined 'no' with her shaking head, and a wide smile from the still functional side of her face.  And the first upward movement of lips from the afflicted side of her head.  The first such sign of  expression from that side of her face Juan or Maria had seen since the stroke so many long, painful months ago.  

Juan smiled back at Maria, pretending to agree with her.  But from the side of his mouth, to Anna, he whispered softly enough so her mother could not hear,  “Senior Mendez was a rich man, who could make this family rich again.  It takes money to buy you books, and even more money to pay for doctors to treat your mother.  Did you think about that, Maria?”

 “As much as I think about being a Doctor myself who can find cures that WORK for her, Father.  Or becoming a political leader who will keep the Anglos from stealing more land from our fellow Tejanos,” Maria countered.

“And more of our dignity,”  Juan conceded.  “But,” he continued, putting his arm around his smart mouthed, but open-hearted daughter.  “Things will get worse for all of us, very soon.”   

“As long as they stay the same, they well always get worse,”  Maria countered in Spanish, English then broken German.

“So, you are learning German now?”  Juan asked, suspiciously.  “From who?”

Maria held back her answer, knowing that if she replied, it would complicate whatever relationship she still had with her father and further complicate his world as well.  Thelma saved her, once again, as she entered the house, throwing off an apron filled with vomit and manure, tended to caring for Maria's mother, Anna, as her smile broke down and reverted back into shakes.   Thelma sung the shakes back into smiles, somehow, with an old song from the old days.  It put Anna back into a world without complications. Modern complications anyway.  

As for what those modern complications were, Juan pulled a folded up newspaper from his breast pocket and presented it to Maria.  “It's time that you read this,” he said.  “We can argue about it later.”

“So I can find out what happened two weeks ago, in a newspaper that I know was delivered her a week ago,” Maria growled.  A growl that turned into a smile when she read the headline.  “Abraham Lincoln elected President of the United States!” she exclaimed with glee. “He is against slavery.  A smart man.”

“Who will have to deal with a lot of stupid and cruel men,” Juan said. “As will we. So, please,” he continued pleading rather than lecturing to his most difficult yet beloved daughter. He took Maria's hand into his, holding it more tightly than he ever had before. “Do not do anything stupid. Promise me that you will not do anything stupid.  On your mother's eyes, and mine.”

“Yes,” Maria replied, feeling that she was promising something she could not deliver, but had to pledge in the meantime. “I will not do anything...stupid.”

CHAPTER 2

It was a battle between good and evil.   Brains and brawn.  Intellect and animal power.  But before the next and perhaps final round, the first question that had to be answered was which of the opponents was the superior species.

Theoretically, Hans Schmitt had all of the advantages in the struggle between man and horse, in all categories.  Hans was a strapping lad of 21 years, in the prime of his youth, educated by the most enlightened biologists and social scientists in Munich.  The mare was, by her teeth anyway, an eleven year old nag who always gave in to every stallion in the herd when it came to who ate first, and seldom put up a fight against any gelding who wanted first dibs at the grain pail.    Hans was had an apossible thumb which enabled him to grab hold of rope, bridles and any other instrument of restraint he could get his paws on.  The mare's head was prevented from bolting up into the air by a martingale which secured her neck in a subservient position, preventing her from twisting the rest of her body into wild gyrations.  Hans could speak in English and German, with enough Spanish to get by with the Tijanos in town and sufficient Comanche to negotiate with Indians who hated most every White Man who built the towns.   The horse spoke no human language, but her language skills were far more suited for the duel at hand.   She conveyed such when she looked at Hans yet again with her eyes, naying something that Hans understood all too well as he pulled himself off the ground after the fifth fall from the horse in as many minutes.

“So, you think you understand what I'm thinking,” he said to the mare as he wiped the dust off his trousers, and another patch of blood off his face.  “You think that you know what I'm going to do with this,” he said regarding the rope in his hidden left hand.  “Maybe you should look at this first,” he said with his right hand extending the last carrot in his pocket to the horse.   “Positive reinforcement according to the books that I have read, and will write myself one day,” he said as the mare allowed Hans to approach within two feet, then one feet, then barely an inch away.   He opened his fingers, exposing the bits of  carrots in his palm. The mare ate it slowly.  

Seeing his opportunity to be on top of the horse rather than under it, Hans edged his way to the side of the horse, then slipped behind her eyes, while her ears were directed forward, towards the carrot.  “Now, all I have to do is grab hold of the unbreakable reins my uncle made that you nearly tore into threads,” he whispered in his best Tejano Spanish bridged with his native German with as loving voice as he could muster through gritted teeth.  “You miserable, evil, malicious, piece of---”

Before Hans could say the appropriate name for what came out of the horse's back end, he was sitting in it, pushed back to the ground by the mare pushing her head against his chest, tearing apart the pocket that had contained the carrots.   Spilling onto the ground and into the mare's mouth was Hans' lunch.

“You horses are supposed to eat grass, hay and apples.  Not struddel!”  he blasted out at the mare in German, hearing his stomach growl in the international language of hunger. “But, that is alright,” he continued after wiping most of the manure of his ass, and smelling the fresh, big, wide open Texas air, recalling how stagnant the vapors one had to breath in to get oxygen in Munich when he was a young boy.   “You eat, while I talk,” he smiled to the mare, as she let him message her neck but not lay a hand on the saddle and reins.   He edged his hands bit by bit, trying to converse with the horse in Spanish, then Bavarian German, then Hoch Deutch, then finally in English.  Still, the mare would was not listening to him, moving a step forward each time he tried to calm, soothe or dominate her.  

Hans heard footsteps behind him from a heavy set man whose arythmic gait pounded the earth below his feet.  He could smell the tobacco emanating from the old man’s pipe.   The old man offered the young one an unlit pipe from his pocket.

“The tobacco makes me cough, Onkle Franz,”  Hans said in English, wiping the dust off his thin, handlebar mustache.

“The blades from those Comanche lances on the top of the hill will make you bleed, Hans” the old man said through the overgrown gray beard in German.  He pointed his nephew's attention to the hills to the West.

Hans put his spectacles on.  He could clearly see five Comanche warriors in full warpaint, armed with the best firearms available in Texas, as well as lances and tomahawks which could be wielded with more accuracy than any tempered-steel sabre.   He put the pipe in his mouth, heeding his Oncle’s warning.  But the Comanche scouting party advanced down the hill, the look on their faces made them seem to be more like a war party.

“I think they need more convincing that we are German Anglos besides these pipes in our mouths,”  Onkle Franz said to Hans, in German.  Loud enough for the leader of the scouting party to hear him.   But by the looks of things, perhaps these Comanche had been tricked by other non-German Anglos who had learned that Germans, the ONLY White men they trusted, were told to smoke their pipes when working their fields so that the raiding parties would bypass them.  

The scouting party appeared to be a raiding party now, particularly the way they looked at the horses in the Schmitt ranch corals.  The stores of grain in the barn.  And the  women in their reading group in the kitchen, who were advised by old Onkle Franz’ thirty-year old wife to keep reading the Alegory of the Cave from Plato's Republic in German rather than English as a ‘language lesson’.  

“So, it seems that the White Texan slave owners and Indian slayers have learned that if they speak a little German, they can convince these noble first inhabitants of this land that they are us.  I think our brown skinned visitors, and hosts, need more convincing,”  Franz said to Hans from the side of his mouth as he smiled at the leader of the war Party, a fire-crazed ‘elder’ no more than five years older than his 21 year old nephew.  “With your special skills,” he continued, while offering the young ‘chief’ a sausage sandwich from his pocket.  Which smelled foul to the Comanche buck, who seemed more concerned with ideology than material goods.  

“We are Germans! From the land where the sun rises in the East.  Who hate soldiers who tell us what to do, and think, as much as you do!” Hans said to the Indian in Comanche, with a cordial smile and what he hoped, and prayed, was in good enough diction.  “We were just trying to convince this mare that listening to a man makes her life better for HER than yelling at him.   You know how women are.”

The angry frown on the head Comanche’s lips broke into a wide and friendly smile.  He leaped off his horse, and approached the mare.  With a quick, decisive action he grabbed hold of the reins, then stared straight into the mare’s eyes.  The hell bitch’s ears went back, and she arched her muscles preparing to rear up and kick the Indian’s teeth down his throat.  But before doing so, the fierce warrior gently blew into her nose, kissed her snout and caressed her neck.  As soon as her ears went back into listening mode, wiggling back and forth at mid position, the Comanche brave threw himself on her back, prodded her forward with ‘go, please, my darling’ in Comanche, and then in his best German.   After a nervous buck forward, she proceeded at a walk, then a trot, then she put her head down, preparing for a flat out run.  With a gentle tug on the hackamore, and some circles to the right and the left, she settled into a lope, then a trot, then a gentle walk, each step according to her rider’s command, and her agreement to such.

The Comanche leaped off, offering the reins to Hans.   

“No, you take her,”  Hans said to the brave in Comanche as he ran his fingers over his thin, overgrown mustache, something Hans had grown on his face to the best of his biological abilities since it was required of every Red Blooded Texan cowboy.   “And you,” Hans said to the mare, in Spanish, knowing that she had probably heard more Mexican Spanish than Texan English in her life.  “Why when I do those things that this Comanche gentlemen did do I not get the kind of results that he did?  And why did I continue trying to do them?”

“Because sometimes you have to try really hard at doing something you will always be bad at, so you can get better at doing other thing?”  Hans heard from behind him, in a woman’s voice, in English.  “That’s what your Onkle Franz says anyway,” Maria, the only Tejano in the women’s reading group continued, in grammatically-incorrect German with a warm, proud smile.

Hans opened his mouth, prepared to politely correct her German, but a grunt came out of his mouth instead, courtesy of a sac thrown into his stomach.  

“We should share what the land gave to us with the brothers and sisters who we are sharing it with,” Onkle Franz said in German by way of explanation  after throwing the sac of  potatoes, onions, sausage and bread to his small framed, built for reading and writing rather than roping and wrangling nephew.  “Each gives according to their ability, and takes according to their needs,” he said to the Comanche brave in English.   Then rehearsed Spanish, which the Indian did not comprehend.

Maria translated Onkle Franz's well intended, scholarly jibberish into understandable Spanish.  The brave nodded his head, seeming to understand it.  Maybe.

“She means that---”  Hans interjected, in Comanche.

“----I know what she said, and what she means, probably better than you do,” the brave replied, to Hans, in Comanche.   He looked at the food, then threw it onto the back of his horse, pulling out an ornately-decorated leather sac.  He instructed his Brown Skinned subordinates to each contribute a portion of their jerky into a leather sac for the congregation of German women.  When the children emerged from the house, the chief-in-training instructed his men to toss some more etables and a few decorative Comanche trinkets into the sac.   “An investment,” he said to Onkle Hans, in his best German.  “For our children”.   He turned to Hans and Maria, who were now exchanging grimaces with each other.  “And both of yours, who will be grateful for your surviving each other and accepting each other for who you really are,” he continued, in Comanche.

With that, the young brown-skinned Comanche leaped on his horse and galloped away, hooping and hollering with pride, defiance and joy.  Maria and Hans smiled at each other, exchanging unspoken proposals and terms for such.

“Your children,”  Onkle Franz said in German to Hans as he came between his nephew and Maria.  “Consider how their grandparents insist on how they will be raised.  As Catholics.  Superstitious people who fear God rather than love their fellow man.”

Hans looked at Maria, surmising that she did not hear, nor understand what his well meaning Onkle had advised, rather than preached.   As if on cue, Franz' wife invited Maria in for another reading.   Maria went along with Frau Schmitt's request.  Protocol after all, Hans thought.  As was what had come out of Franz' mouth.  Franz put his bearlike arm around the lad's small shoulders, leading him to the printing press in the barn.  A printing press which was kept under blankets covered with a pile of hay and old manure when not in active use.  

“We have to print another edition of OUR newspaper,” Franz said proudly to Hans.  “Made on a press that you built, and with words that you are better at writing than I am.  We both have to continue your father's Mission of ending cruelty, ignorance and slavery with words, far more powerful than swords.  And since you, my dear lad, are far more skilled with words than swords, it is time for you to take his place on the barricades.”

While tending to the daily chores of cleaning the press, writing copy, and loading new versions of 'Freiheit Jetzt', translated into 'Freedom Now' for the Anglo readers and Spanish for the Tejanos, Hans listened to his wise yet verbally-challenged dyslexic Onkle tell more stories about the old country.  How Hans' father died on the barricades in Hamberg fighting the kings and capitalists back in 1948, each tale getting taller, more unbelievable and impossible to live up to as the years went on.  Ironically, tales about fighting for freedom and Truth which made Hans' life as his Onkle's only 'son' more confining, and infested with lies which were amplified each time Hans applied critical reasoning to ascertain their source and validity.  Yes, Hans knew that his father's past was 'glorious', but the more stories he heard about that glory, the less he believed them.  And the more he wanted to use the freedom his father had presumably died nobly for to just be left alone to be a cowboy in Texas.  An American Texas.   On a ranch where he could write his own books, if he WANTED to.     Yes, the freedom to do what he, and Maria, wanted to do.  But the natural linguist, scholar and more talented constructor of printing presses than he wanted to be German immigrant knew that there was one thing very American, besides breaking horses, that he was bad at---Competition.   For money, land, space and the hand of a woman he wanted, and maybe needed.  And feared that he probably loved.  Whatever that beyond-intellect emotional phenomenon was.

CHAPTER 3

Some things came hard to Jake Johnson, others came easy.  For better, or worse, the easy things were the ones he was asked to do most of the time.  And what he was rewarded for doing.  And, on many occasions, teaching.  One of them was how to throw a rope from a running horse onto nervous stray calves.  “It's easy,” the 24 year old cowboy said to the rider next to him while moving the herd from the fall high plains pastures to the low lying winter grazing grounds by the river.  “With yer right hand, ya grab hold of the rope and twirl. It with yer mind ya 'think' it towards the direction of the calve.  And out of the corner of yer eye you look at the calve, not lettin on that you can see him.  Then ya sort of sing to the calf to quiet his nerves, and focus yers.  Like this.”

Jake sang 'Dixie' like it was a National Anthem, really wishing he was in the land of cotton, which Texas was clearly not.  At least the Hill Country around San Antone which was settled by his mother when she was a young girl, he was a baby, and his father was a patriotic Texan who couldn't afford slaves back in Alabama.  But Jake's father was determined that his wife would be able to acquire enough 'hand help' to make her life easier and enable his three sons to not ever have to work with their hands.  Unless of course if they wanted to not work with their hands.  

According to his mother's account of her sainted and deceased husband,  Jake was every inch a Johnson.  From 24 years-colorful Jake's chiseled chin acquired from Scottish-Irish rebels who fought against the Crown in the Revolution back in 1776.  To the muscular physique of  his Viking ancestors who conquered Ireland before there even was a Scotland.   To his thick, black hair and brown eyes from Injun royalty back in the French and Indian War.   To a singing voice that had a hypnotic effect on cattle he wanted so calm down, women he wanted to seduce, and fellow cowboys he wound up making envious.  Seeing the latter, he stopped singing, putting off matters bovine until he tended to affairs more human, and humanitarian.

“Maybe ya can sing this calf into being more cooperative and friendly with some German tunes?”  Jake said to his fellow outrider, and closest friend.     

“Or make him more irritable,”  Hans replied.

“Your Uncle said you was related to Beethoven,” Jake said.  “The secret son of old Ludwig's immortal beloved.”

“A fairy tale he told me to make me keep practicing the violin,” the 21 year old Hans said as if a 90 year old man on his deathbed, dying of regret.  “Till I drove him, my aunt and the cows as crazy in the head as I was dead in the soul.  Though I tried and strived to be otherwise. And as for singing---”

 “----Anyone can sing.  Ya just gotta connect yer heart to your tongue, and let it come out natural like. Like...this.”  Jake gave voice to a Ode to Joy, replacing the German that he couldn't remember with some English words and a few made up Germanic sounding ones.  

Jake somehow got Hans to stop lamenting, and begin thinking.  Then feeling. Then singing.  Singing in a kind of harmony that was honest and sincere.  But very off key.  Off key enough for the calf to get irritable again, heading into the bush in the hope that he could nuzzle his head against a bush to clog his ears, or bash his head against tree trunk to silence his brain. The horses under both riders put their ears back in outrage, in preparation to throw off their riders.  Clearly irritation would yield way to non-cooperation between man and beast, Jake took matters into his own hands.   Before the smiling and seemingly happy Hans could bastardize another stanza of his presumably musical Revolutionary father's favorite tune, Jake put hand to rope, rope to calve, and calve to horse.  By the time Hans bellowed out in excruciating tone the lyric 'All Men Become Brothers', Jake had pulled the calf out of the brush.   Something easy.  Fixing what made him run into the bush was something else.

“Full thickness laceration on the lateral aspect of the femur that has become purulent, with parasitic infestation,” Hans noted after he tried to do a Comanche leap off his horse, winding up cutting up his own arm in the process.  

“Looks painful,” Jake added, not letting on that he understood as much about what Hans had said as the calf did.   A calf that had the strongest muscles in the herd, the smartest brain, and the kindest heart.  A heart that probably made him more trusting of the coyote that bit a hole in his leg than he should have been.  “We gotta save this one,” Jake said to Hans.  “He's real valuable.”

“To you or whoever wants to buy him?”  Hans said as he examined the wound.  He took out his medical kit that he always kept his saddle in case he encountered any 'friend, foe, or stranger' in need.  A condition that Hans said was imposed on him by his Uncle from his father, a Doctor who died trying to save wounded Revolutionaries fighting 'kings and capitalists' in Europe back in '48.

Jake knew what kings were from stories about his grand-pappy who fought with General Washington, and figured that a European Capitalist was a varment that resembled Yankee fat cat Carpetbaggers who tried to set up factories in Texas.   And in their spare time did their best to fence in the big open into feed lots that would put independent ranchers like Jake and his family out of business.  Then offer them a steady salary if they decided to become cogs in their machines.   Jake didn't know a whole lot about how the cattle industry worked, his older brothers living in Austin taking care of most of the business affairs of the family outfit.  But Jake did know cattle. And the first rule of managing cattle is to let whoever is best at the job to do it.  Like letting Hans, who was as awkward with cattle as Jake was with numbers, sew up the calf.  While Jake looked up at the ridge, noting a wolf with fresh blood on its snout.

“If I can't deliver her an intact calf, I can bring her a fresh wolf pelt,”  Jake said, after which he raised his rifle to his shoulder and put a shot squarely between its eyes.   

“Who's her?”  Hans asked as he managed to pull together enough skin to close up the wound, then sewing it up with the fastest pair of medical hands Jake had ever known, but was sworn to tell no one about.  For reasons Hans never gave him.

Jake admired Hans work, pressing the issue one more time.  “If you had any brains, you'd become a doctor.”

“And if I had any balls, I'd become something else,”  Hans replied.

“Which would be what, Doc?”  Jake said with a smirk, prouder of the work Hans had done than his friend was.

“Someone who would like to know who you're giving away your best calf to,” Hans said. “Without telling your brothers, or your mother.”

“A Tejano,” Jake confessed.  

“Mexicans marrying Anglos.  I heard there was a law against it.”

“Worst than a law.  A 'moral imperative',” Jake replied, proudly using the latest high faloutin word he had acquired an acquaintance with.  “But Maria says that any student worth his salt has to become better than his teacher, and any son or daughter worth the placental juice that spawned them educates the older generations about what's really right or wrong.”

“Maria?”  Hans replied, with the kind of voice he never heard from his German born compadre.

“Yeah.  Maria Fernandez,” Jake answered.  “Who ain't taken yet.  Is she?”

Hans answered with his fingers, grabbing hold of the surgical tools tighter than he ever put them into a fist.  Hans never put his fingers into a fist, Jake noted.  Maybe  that was his problem.  But Hans never let a question go unanswered.  “With the exception of the slaves who work on the plantations, and the ranches.  And the Indians who get killed because they want the land back that the plantation owners stole, it is a free country.  Maria is free to like whoever she dares to,”  he said, staring into space, and the frustration behind his eyes.

“And love whoever she wants to,” Jake found himself saying.  Informing Hans rather than consoling him.  But even though Jake was better at killing wolves than healing injured calves, he did share one code with Hans.  Jake did have a heart.  A heart that understood Maria's more than Hans ever could.   More than anyone could, for that matter.    

Hans absorbed himself in the work at hand, fixing the calve up as good as new with stitched under the skin which made the wound close up like it had never been opened.   “You better get that wolf before the coyotes drag it into the brush,”  he said to Jake from the corner of his mouth.  “The last thing this world needs is more killing.”

“Unless it's in the Cause of keeping Texas independent from Yankee kings and Capitalists,” Jake felt like saying, recalling the topic of conversation two nights ago at the family dinner table, when him, his mother and his two visiting brothers dined on hard-earned, honestly-obtained home grown beef.  “And as for slavery, give the Coloreds freedom too early and they will starve, come back home begging to be part of their Master's family again, or  beat their plows into swords and use them against each other, after they use them against our sisters and mothers,”  Jake felt like pointing out to Hans.   A prediction that came true more than once on Texas ranches and Alabama plantations taken over by Northern investors with more ideas than practical smarts in their heads according to the stories in newspapers not owned by money hungry Abolishionists. And stories passed down to him by his Pappy, older brothers and mother.   Jake felt like educating Hans about how the world worked outside the books he read, and the ones he wanted to write, but he kept his yapper shut.   Common sense said that history would teach Hans what the world was really like, soon enough.

Anyone with any common sense knew that if the War that some folks were talking about ever happened, it would be over in a month.  And Texas would remain undefeated because of its grit and untouched because it was so far away from everywhere 'civilized'.  A fact legislated by the forces of Nature, verified by historical facts and deemed to upheld by the will of the Almighty Himself.  A loving but sometimes firm Task Master who Jake loved, respected and served.  In contrast to the Freethinker Germans and the Pagan Comanches, who served themselves, or the ideas that their mortal minds came up with that their pride converted into 'Promethian Visions'.  Visions that had no place in the kind of Texas that Jake's father died for at the Alamo.  But, they too would see the Light, according to the Heavenly Father's timetable of course.

As Jake rode his horse up to the dead or dying wolf, he thought about the War to come.  And how he would have to prove his loyalty to his family, the Great State of Texas, his father, and to Maria, whose anti-slavery, anti-American, Tejano roots maybe went deeper than he bargained for.

CHAPTER 4

The third snow of winter decided to stay, leaving a layer of white powder over the ground which a month earlier had been layered with multicolored leaves, and a month before that, hot, dry earth that would burn the flesh off even the most hardened barefoot ranch worker, or Comanche visitor to the Fernandez hacienda.  Her grandmother's shawl around her shoulders, Maria sat on the front porch, turning the pages to the final chapter of the book given to her on the occasion of her 21st birthday.  A first edition, bound in hand crafted leather.  “So,” her father Juan said as he sat down next to her.  “How do you like it?”

“It is different,” Maria replied with tight lips, unable to find the right descriptor.   

“They are called mysteries,” Juan smiled as he eased himself into the rocking chair, then lit up a thick cigar laced with special weeds that eased his tensions and increased his appetite before another lunch being prepared by Thelma, who somehow redefined and improved the Fernandez family cookbook with each new dish she prepared.  “You are supposed to figure out who did the murder.  Smart readers always can figure out who did the murder before the last chapter.  They can figure out the Right answer,”  Juan said to Maria as the ethers of the special weed in his cigar untied the knots in his chronically worried mind.

“And wise readers want to know the Truthful answer,”  Maria growled as her eyes rapidly processed the words on the page, guided by a finger that moved down each paragraph with lightening speed.  “But as I approach the last chapter here, I can tell you the 'right' answer. The one the writer tells me I have to figure out to be 'smart'.”   She closed the book shut before finishing it, then held her head up high. “The butler killed the Master, because he was having an affair with the servant who the butler wanted to have as his wife,”  she announced proudly before enduring a read of the final chapter. She placing the book as far as she could from her on the table next to her.  “Now, to read something where the ending is up to us rather than a writer who thinks himself to be superior to the reader,” she said, taking into her hand the newspaper that just been delivered by Thelma's son, a Colored youth who was too slow in the head to make it on his own as a free Negro and too soft in the heart to leave his mother and the Tejano family that made him feel welcomed, no matter how many times a day he failed at the simplest of tasks at the ranch.  

After reading the front page headline, Maria wished she hadn't.   Juan looked over at the article.  “Sam Houston stands up against Texas joining the Confederacy!”  he read, shocked by the news.

“But the assembly in Austin voted for succession, 161 to 5.  And voted him out of office.  Into a well deserved, and comfortable retirement',” she read of the first President of the Republic of Texas.

“General Sam will never retire,” Juan said, pulling himself away from the happy land that the cigar smoke had delivered him to. “And he will stand up for what it right.  Like he did for us Tejanos when he treated us as equals during the fight against Santa Anna in 1836 when we were fighting for our freedom from that Napoleonic bastard!”  

“Then let the Anglos from the United States treat us like scum in 1846 when they invaded Mexico, so Texas could join the Union as a state,”  Maria pointed out.

“General Sam did his best,” Juan said, apologetically.  “And he knows that the best thing for Texas is for it to be part of the Union.  A view held by the Germans.  ALL of the Germans, here anyway.  Freethinker and no-thinkers.  And as for his, our and the Germans' opinion on slavery---”

“---A complicated issue with complicated moralities according to Jake Johnson,”  Maria suggested.

“A simple indignation, according to anyone with an open heart, OR thinking mind,” Juan asserted.  “This is real life we are talking about, not a courtroom or a Freethinker's reading circle where you have debates where you play act as if you are someone else and----”

“----Who told you I was attending the German Freethinkers' reading circles?”  Maria interjected.

“I have few real friends, my dear,”  Juan said as he gently put his hand over Maria's about to be clenched fist.  “But many allies, and associates.”

“And potential enemies?” Maria said motioning Juan's attention to the guests inside the house behind them.  All clad in gray uniforms of different design, but the same insignia.  Three times the number of visitors she had seen entering the FRONT door.  “Confederate Anglos who came here because they enjoy Tejano chili cooked by a Colored cook?  Who they will treat like a slave, while they treat us like servants!”

“Our friends, and neighbors,”  Juan said regarding the All-Anglo non-German assembly of guests.  “Willy Jackson, who still buys our cattle for top dollar.   Tom White, whose father fought side by side with me and General Houston at San Jacinto against Santa Anna.  Isaah McDonald, who has more friends in the legislature in Austin than you have books in your room.  Doctor Marcus Jones, who delivered two of your sisters and kept you from dying of the croup when you were seven.  Reverend Halston who---    

“----came here to try to recruit you, and me, into their 'Fight for Freedom'?”  Maria shot back, with the same furocity that her mother did, before the stroke drained the life out of her.

“Or assess if we are against their Cause, most probably”  Juan replied, with an uneasy smile.

“And are we, against their Cause?”  Maria shot back at her father.

Juan took a long deep breath of cold Texas air, then let it out slowly as he gazed into the big sky in front of him, while becoming lost in the empty space in front of his eyes.  “Texas is a long way from Richmond, and Washington.  And if we remain neutral, that will be our greatest victory.”

“There is no way to remain neutral in a War, even if it is brief one,”  Maria barked back.

“I was able to keep us neutral during a long one, back in '46.  The War between the Presidents of the United States and Mexico,”  Juan said, after which he took in another puff from his cigar, holding it in his lungs.

“Which started the War within yourself,” Maria pointed out. “Which you lost the first day you started fighting it.”

Juan let the smoke out of his lungs, as well as any hopes of living in the happy place it usually delivered him to.   Despite the potency of the specially formulated tobacco, his nerves were agitated, his stomach in knots, his appetite for food gone.  No matter how well Thelma cooked it.  

Maria, feeling to be more like a wife than a daughter, placed her hand on Juan's forearm.  “I'm sorry,” she said.  “I know you did whatever you did, and are still doing, because you think that it best for me.”

“Which I will continue to do,” Juan said to Maria firm, resolute and unapologetically as he pulled himself up from the comfort of the rocking chair and planted his feet firmly on the porch floor, then looked through the window at the guests inside.   “I had best make myself look presentable,” he said as he straightened his tie in the reflection of the glass.  “As should you,” he said with his back turned as he entered the house, leaving Maria the task, and pleasure, of greeting the next two guests who pulled into the yard pulling a wagon on which there was another gift for her birthday.

“Alexandro!”  she yelled out with glee as the gift was off loaded by one of the drivers.

“Was gonna get him to ya sooner, but the former wearer of this coat had other ideas,” Jake said regarding the best calf in his herd, and the wolf pelt wrapped in ribbon he held up in his left hand.

“What happened?”  Maria screeched when she noted the stitches on her new pet's leg.  

Hans let go of the halter around the calf's head, after which it trotted over to her, with only a slight limp.

“He was near death, or worse, and Doc Hans here saved him,”  Jake said.  “Just like he saved my brother's paw when she got tangled up in that wagon accident, Willy's Jackson Johnson when he stuck it into the wrong whore, and your---”

“---Thank you!”  Maria said to Hans, giving him a bear hug. Which made him feel more uncomfortable than grateful.

“Each gives according to his ability, takes according to his needs,”  Hans said, forcing his hands to wrap around Maria's back as tightly as she embraced him, no less and no more.   “And I need to keep my medical abilities private!”  he grunted to Jake with angry eyes.

“Whatever you say, Doc,” Jake smiled as he tried to moved Hans' hands from the small of Maria's back to her ass.   A gesture which Hans seemed to appreciate, but declined to accept.  

“It was Jake who killed the wolf that injured him,”  Hans said.  “Jake saved Alexandro from being killed and the other Alexandros in the herd.”

“Yes, of course,” Maria said, embracing both of the boys, as they were becoming men.  “This is the best birthday present anyone has given to me.”  And as Maria saw it, it was.  Here were two young men who fed her in different ways.  And as it was a day of both turmoil and celebration, she made a request from both of them.  “You know what I would like most?” she said as she embraced Alexandro.

“Whatever it is, you got it,” Jake said with a gleeful smile and upward motion of his chiseled chin.

“An honor and a pleasure to provide it, whatever it is,” Hans added with a courtly bow.

“What I want most, is for you, Hans to complete that novel you say you are writing, that you said was inspired by me,”  she smiled.

“They are scribblings, notes,” Hans mumbled. “Fragmented thoughts that---”

“---are more connected that you're supposed to know.  A book that makes the reader find his or her own truth instead of rewarding puppets for figuring out the 'correct' answer,” she said with a warm and affectionate smile.  “Inspired by---”

“---music, which I will not sing, but leave it to someone who can,”  Hans said as he took the wolf pelt and put it over Maria's shoulder.  

“It's...beautiful,” Maria said.  

“As is the song about how we got it,” Hans said, as threw a harmonica to Jake from his pocket.

“I can't sing if I'm playing,”  Jake said.

“But you can if I play,”  Maria added, taking the harp into her hands, then setting to playing an old Tejano tune that had been in the Fernandez family for at least three generations.  

As for lyrics, Jake improvised his own, telling the tale about how the wolf tore open Alexandro's leg, how close to getting a bullet into his head the calf was, and how nobly and smartly Doctor Hans saved him.  Everyone seemed to like to musical interlude, including Alexandro.   The orphaned calf with the smart head, big eyes, and prematurely large testicals who according to Jake's bean-counter, suit-wearing, banker older brother had been killed by Comanches  months ago.  Snuck out of the herd by Jake under their upturned noses.   It was a happy occasion shared by all, then joined by an uninvited and well dressed guest who snuck in behind them all.

“So, you saved this calf from an injury that bad?”  said Doc Cole Jones, now Captain C. K. Jones, CSA, his worn out tweed suit with the elbow patches  replaced by a clean and pressed Confederate Uniform. He examined the repair job Hans had done on the calf.  “This is an incredible piece of doctoring.  The best I've seen in a dog's age.  Who did this?”

Hans pointed to his horse, hitched behind the wagon.  But Jake, then Maria, pointed to Hans.  Hans was not happy about it

“He's saved a lot of human critters too,” Jake said.  

“Yes, I know,” Doc Jones said.  He turned to Hans.  “People who you help have talked.”

“And what did they say?”  Hans replied.

“That you're a brilliant self-taught doctor, but an idiot for not boasting about it.”

“He has his reasons,”  Maria said. 

“I'm sure he does, but, there's gonna be a whole lot of need for what he's got,”  Jones replied.

“And each gives according to his abilities, right Hans?”  Jake said.  “And great Docs make a whole lot more money than enthusiastic cowboys who lose more arguments with horses than they win.”

“Being a Doctor is my heritage, but not my calling, and because of my heritage...”  Hans said, then remained silent.

“...He's keeping his Doctoring skills a secret.  Which maybe should be kept secret,”  Maria concluded.  “Right?” she said to Jake.

“Don't make sense but, it suppose it does, Right Doc?”  Jake said turning to Jones.

“I'm afraid it is too late for that,”  Jones said.  “Sorry about that, Son,” he continued to Hans.  He then stepped aside, making room for a Confederate Major who Maria, Jake and Hans didn't recognize.  

“So, where's this genius doctor who taught himself medicine, Captain Jones?”  the elogantly dashing elderly Major inquired.

Jake pointed to Maria.

“He wears dresses when he ain't doin medicine, Major,”  Hans said in his best down home Texas good ole boy diction. 

“If you do son, that's your business,”  the Major said as he looked at Hans with a stern, gruff voice and a painfully familiar military bearing.  The kind that Hans recalled from the Old Country when he was an orphaned and sibling-less boy of ten, fleeing with his Uncle across ten Principalities that had been taken over by the Kings' armies after the People's revolts had been mercilessly crushed.  “But it's my business to see that our wounded heroes fighting for your family's freedom here in Texas get the best medical care possible.”

“There may be a problem with that,” Jake said, pointing to the writing on the medical kit which Hans always kept on his saddle, or his person, wherever he went. 

“Zu helfen alles Freunden, Fienden und Fremden gleich,” Maria said in perfect German.

“Which means, 'to help all friends, enemies and strangers equal like, with the same care, intensity and brain power',”  Jake translated.

“While never carrying a gun, not killing another man,” Hans asserted. Proud of his 1848 heritage. Proud to be the son of a father who died fighting for freedom, compassion and Enlightenment on the barricades.  Proud to die in the same way, by the sword of this Confederate Major in the same way that his father was put to death by a non-thinking, brainwashed, gruff, puppet of a Capitalist master.  A master who perhaps was the devil himself, if indeed Satan did really exist.  

“That may cause a problem, Major,” the once independent Doc Jones informed his now superior officer.   

“A bigger problem for his Dutchie Unionist family.  Who I'll hang as spies, or traitors if this protege young Doctor decides that he's too good to save lives of those willing to fight for the Cause.”

“I'll fight in his place,” Jake said.  “There ain't no one better at shootin', trackin' and rustlin' when there's good call for it.”

“Unacceptable,” the Major replied.  “The Confederacy needs horses and beef more than it needs cavalry officers, and according to what I've been told, you have more cattle and horse sense than anyone West of New Orleans.”

Jake looked at Doctor Jones, who apologetically gave him that 'I spilt to beans about it so you can ram the can up my ass afterwards' look.

“Besides, someone has to stay behind and protect our women from being turned into squaws by raiding Comanches,” the Major continued, proudly putting his hand on Jake's shoulders.  “And keeping Mexicans from coming over the border and taking the land back that we acquired from them back in '48.   Legally.”

“After you held a knife at the throats of our Tejano lawyers and their children, you piece of shit,”  Maria said to the Major, in Spanish, with a warm Seniorita smile.  “Which means, in English---” 

“---That Jake will do his duty here, while Hans will do his duty wherever he's needed,” Jones interjected to the Major.  “While we partake of the best cuisine south or north of the Mason Dixon Line inside.”

Jones was somehow able to get his boss inside, leaving Maria and her two potential suitors outside.  Natural protector Jake, who yearned to be worthy of his father's legacy by going to war, who was told to stay home.  And natural pacifist Hans, who would soon be in uniform in the service of an army that was eager for blood, and glory that was fighting for a Cause his anti-slavery father would have never supported.

CHAPTER  5

“It's not as if I'm going to kill anyone,” Hans pointed out to the man wielding the dull axe against the rock hard log of wood.   “And I'm under the command of Doc Jones, not the Major, or Captain Duff.  And the agenda on my father's medical bag says that it is in the service of friends, foes and strangers alike,” he explained.  But to no avail.

The wielder of the axe directed every but of his anger into the wood, and his silence.   His   face turned redder, the blisters on his hands breaking into bleeding cuts that coated the axe handle.   Still, the log would not give way, despite the cracks the old man pounded into the wood.   

“Onkle Franz,” Hans pleaded, grabbing hold of the axe handle before his heavily-breathing Uncle's heart would reach 200 beats a minute and an inevitable final halt.  “You know what these Confederates will do to you, your wife and my young cousins, if I don't pretend to join them. And I am pretending to join them.”

“The way you are wearing that uniform says differently,”  Franz growled back, then grabbed back the axe and resumed battle with the log.  A struggle between man and wood that was as futile as Hans' attempt to convince the old man that he had joined the Confederate Army to spare his family harm, and no other reason.  

But to be fair, Franz was right to think the worst of this situation.  Hans self observed that he was holding his head high, and arched his back rather than hunched it.  Just like the soldiers in Europe who were just 'following orders' when they massacred men, women and children who protested against the kings and capitalists who were enslaving those soldiers as much as the civilian serfs.  But, such was necessary.  

Captain Duff, always grumpy and potentially angry Scotsman in civilian life, sat mounted on his horse just outside the gate of the Schmitt farm, backed up by five well armed militia Confederates.  No doubt there to be sure that Hans didn't have second thoughts about his 'voluntary' decision to join the Cause, like every other red blooded, courageous and righteous Anglo in the Hill country.  Or perhaps Duff hoped that Hans would give him more than his services as a doctor in training who could instruct his medical teachers in the field more than they could ever learn from the books, due to Hans' having learned his skills from his father, and continuing them with his genetics.  

The whereabouts of Franz Schmitt's printing press were still a mystery to any Anglo and even most hard core German Freethinkers. That press was not five feet from where Hans stood.  In the barn where Hans himself kept it operating, and wrote most of the anti-slavery, pro-Union, pro-Tejano copy, correcting his Onkle's grammer and toning down his expressive language before it went to press.

“Best be saying yer goodbyes, quick there, son,” Captain Duff commanded Hans from atop his horse. “You'll be back home with your family in three months, tops,” he promised.

“Corporal Schmitt has no family,” Franz yelled out to Duff. 

“He does with us,”  Duff announced.

“With ignorant slave holders who've sold their souls to the Devil, doomed to an eternity in hell after inflicting hell on innocent civilians on earth first,”  Franz barked out, his angry eyes looking at the still disobedient log which he persisted in doing battle with.

 “I thought that you godless Freethinkers didn't believe in the Devil,” Duff barked out, then sat back on his horse and broke into a big, wide condescending grin under his mustache. “And I heard that you believed in using yer 'intellect and reason' to split a log instead of defying the laws of nature when Mama Nature says that some things that she made were not intended to be broken by an old man who should be settin' on the rocking chair instead of---”

The attempt of the younger patriarch to humiliate the older one was stopped by Franz finally splitting the log, then throwing one of its splints in front of the Captain's horse.  The steed reared up, nearly tossing its handsomely clad rider into the late winter mud.  
“You and your Imperialist Oppressor henchmen get off my land!”  he commanded, after which he pulled out his shotgun from behind the woodpile, pointing it at Duff's head.   “Schnell!”  he barked out.

“That means now,” Hans translated, gently.

“You too!” Franz commanded Hans, with tears in his eyes and anger in his parched throat.  “Now!”

Hans turned to his horse, a gelding given to him by Doc Jones.  A gentle and perhaps noble steed named 'Hippocrates' by Jones. 'Hippo' by the slow witted, brain dead new recruits who the old Doc, and now Hans, were sworn to keep alive once the bullets started flying.  In a war which, according to the recruiters, was about protecting Texan families from Yankee strangers, who now were deemed enemies.  Compassion gone selective, once again.  Family first, everybody else both last and expendable. The primal pathology in the collective human mind which, maybe, Hans could convert into Universal Compassion for all equally, and without restraint.  Somehow.  So he hoped, and prayed to a God that he established dialog with after a decade long break in communication.

CHAPTER 6

As Jake saw it from atop his horse, it was a good year for cattle.   By rough count of it, nine out of ten cows now had a healthy calf, and by the way the bulls seemed to be conversing in the shade of the brush by the river, outside of the perimeter set up by the protector cows in the herd, they seemed pleased with their progeny inside the circle.  Jake was as well.  Most of the cattle in the collective herd had his brand on them, the healthiest ones anyway.   The grass had grown high, and it looked like it would be a bumper year for cattle.  A banner year for beef.   Still, Jake knew that the Good Lord only looked after herds that were looked after well by the man responsible for them.  And that He looked after those who helped others, those others being either man or beast.

Everyone who knew Maria knew that she was as horrible a cook as Hans was a cowboy.  Worse when she had a chuckwagon rather than a kitchen to work with.  But she insisted on coming out to help Jake do his thrice-a week cattle check, and insisting on feeding him lunch afterwards.  There wasn't much that could make vegetables, meat and beans not taste like palatable stew, but somehow Maria managed to bring out the worse flavor of every ingredient she put into the pot simmering over the campfire.

“Something wrong with the stew?”  she asked Jake as he struggled to get the first spoonful down his throat and not let it exit his mouth in a projectile barf.

After an enforced swallow that threw the putrid ball of mush down into his unsuspecting belly, Jake turned to her and said. “I musta eaten too much dust on the lower sixty.  Sorta coats the mouth and ruins the taste of anything that comes in between yer teeth.”
In order to save his intestinal tract from being irreversibly torn apart by whatever Maria cooked, and she seemed to enjoy eating herself, Jake threw the lion's share of his canteen down his gullet.  Just in time for Maria to load up his plate some more.  “You said you liked turnips,” she smiled.

“I used to, till today,” Jake felt like saying, but didn't.  “Thank you, kindly,” he related with words, and a bow.   With a forced smile, he stared at the overfilled metal bowl in front of him and prayed for rain, hail, snow or some kind of wolf to come out of the brush that he could do battle with in defense of Maria, while feeding the stew to that furry invader's comrades so that they would never think about coming into any campground occupied by two legged inhabitants again.  But, there were some things you just did for love.   Like letting the woman you have the deepest affections for think that she had a talent for cooking and a refined palate.   Or maybe Maria had other motives, as she ate the stew with expressions of nothing but pure delight.  

But there was something on Maria's hands that worried Jake more than the fact that they were paws that should not be allowed within ten feet of a stove.   As soon as he looked at her blackened fingers and cuticles stained dark as tar, she provided him with an answer.

“Ink that spilled on my hands when I was writing a letter to my aunt in Mexico this morning,” she smiled back, very quickly.  “It will wash off in a few days,”

“Printer's ink stains yer fingers all the way down to the bone, if ya don't take care of it as soon as it spills on ya,”  Jake said, having noted the same scent and pattern of black stain on Hans' hands when he was operating his Uncle Franz's newspaper.  An Abolishionist publication that was frowned upon well before Fort Sumner was fired upon.  And which now was outlawed.

 “More stew, or more water?”  Maria smiled, trying to change the subject.

“Maybe some of them horse-sized torillas you got rolled up in yer saddlebag?”  Jake said as he got up and helped himself to one of them, unrolling it and reading the headlines.

“Heavy Southern losses at the Mannassis 'victory' followed by carnage in every corner of Virginia, the Carolinas and now Tennessee,”  Maria read.  “Which is fact.”

“True enough, but what's below it is conjection, Maria,” Jake noted.

“You mean conjecture, Jake.”

After an angry sigh he replied, “Opinion!  Like it reads here.  'The War for Southern Freedom is a lost cause, not only because it upholds the right of rich Confederates who own slaves to not go to war, but because it tries to keep alive the immoral and illogical belief that White, American males are the most superior subspecies, and the most intelligent.  But, as sure as the God within every man requires, this War will lead to nothing short of destruction for---”

“----anyone who is stupid or cruel enough to fight for the Confederacy,” Maria shot back, pulling the paper away from Jake. 

“Or anyone dumb enough to join the Yankee Army?”  Jake growled back.  “That's fighting for Northern Industrialists, and a 'Union' that till allows slavery in three of it's states.”

“Yes,” she conceded, turning away from him, then grabbing hold of her horse's reins.

“Or anyone dumb enough ta not know it was a woman who wrote what's in here,” he said regarding the newspaper, his hand gently on her shoulder, kindness in his voice as he continued to read the editorials and reports bearing the names of several German men as the writers.  “I can't say I agree with what yer saying here Maria, but you write it so convincingly.  And truthfully.”

“Truthfully as I see it,” Maria asserted.  “And believe it,” she continued, throwing her leg over the horse's belly.  “I have rounds to do to serve my people, and you have cattle and horses to deliver to yours,” she continued with tears running down her eyes.

“That we do, Maria,” Jake said, keeping his tears locked up inside his troubled heart.  “But there is something you should put in the next issue of that 'newspaper'.  So as to make these men who are writing them more convincing as men.”

“Begin with saying that White American MEN think they are superior rather than white American MALES, I know.” Maria said.   “When you read it, I noticed my mistake.”

“And two other mistakes!” Jake barked out, grabbing hold of the reins with his fist, and Maria's stare with his eyes.  “One, is that love is more powerful than politics. Or should be anyway. And maybe the Freethinkers who wrote the original articles that you edited should remember that.”

“Yes, you are right,” she replied.  “And my other mistake?”

“Thinking that I can protect you, yer Freethinker friends, and yer Tejano family forever,”  Jake said, letting go of the reins and any hope of life returning to normal, even if the Confederacy won the war, and the peace afterwards.  “And if you want to tell me how I've been protecting you already, I can....”

Maria didn't linger long enough for Jake to elaborate.   Better that she leave angry, and terrified, Jake thought.  Maybe she would go back to her books, or if she was smart, convince her father to move her, and her entire family back to Mexico.  She would live longer that way.   And, once she saw through the lies the Freethinkers inflicted on her, she would come back to him.  An inevitability as certain as good grass making for great cattle. And Southern valor winning over Northern greed.  And that the Texas which Jake's father died for at the Alamo wouldn't be enslaved by any Carpetbagger invaders, be they from North of the Mason Dixon Line, South of the Rio Grande, or anywhere else.

CHAPTER 7

It took longer than usual for Maria to deliver her newsprint-covered 'Tortilla's' to shops, farms and shacks where Tejanos and Germans tended to their afternoon duties.   And it took a few extra diversions at the Anglo-run General Stores where she replaced the abundant copies of the Confederate-funded Free Hill Country Herald with the Freethinker newspaper that tried to pass itself off as an Anglo journal with its special section on cattle prices, Carolina Plantation recipes and cartoons lampooning Sugar Coated city-slickers.    

Maria's most effective, but certainly not favorite, diversion was to ask any and all male company in the store to help unload the sacs in her wagon, or to give her horse a lesson in manners so it would be safe enough to ride home after eating too much loco week on the trail.  While the men were away helping the Tejano girl who knew how to be Whiter than any of the Anglo women in town, the wives of the men would gossip, mostly about Maria, and always far enough away from 'the uppidy Tejano pagan Jesabelle' for Maria to place the real Free Hill Country Herald's with the counterfeit versions that had fooled many a reader into thinking that they were the real McCoy.   As for the stolen copies of the real Herald, they made good padding for Maria's ass when she was, according to her father Juan anyway, riding the perimeter of the ranch to collect flowers, read sonnets and write poetry under the shade of the cottonwood trees.   They also made good asswipe for the privy, which was very necessary when the Anglos in town who fancies themselves cooks insisted that she sample their culinary wares, and advise them as to how to spice it up or sooth it tastefully into the still-famous Fernandez Family chili.     

It had been a long day of batting eyelids at gullible men, and building up self esteem of wannabe Anglo cooks, and Maria was glad to be home.  Until she saw what home looked like as the late afternoon sky started to give way to sundown.   Grey coated men were everywhere, rounding up everything and everyone not in uniform.  The female Tejanos and Coloreds were being loaded up into one wagon, every male who wasn't White Anglo into another.  Every horse, cow, calve and bull had been herded into the coral, which was now slotted off into smaller sections,  Alejandro evaded the cowboy Confederates, after he had apparently jumped over one of the rails, the splinters of which stuck to the Confederate States of America tag that had been stapled into his ear.  

“What's going on?”  Maria asked Thelma.

“Necessary relocation of stock and personell, Senora Fernandez,”  C.D. McCrea, now Lieutenant McCrea explained to Maria as a matter of plain, emotionally detached procedure.

“Where are you taking them?”  Maria yelled out to McCrea.

“Somewhere they can be of better use than here, Miss Maria,”  C.D.  McCrae replied, as tight-lipped about what CD stood for as he had always been about how he managed to live high on the hog while his business partners could barely afford bacon. 

“A better place if they think about what's best for them, and their families,” a younger Lieutenant with dark brown hair and steel blue eyes replied, referring Maria's attention to a cart in front of the wagon containing all the men acquired from the ranch.   From which a Corporal offered every man in the wagon a uniform, with a stack of currency attached to it, bearing the likeness of a smiling Jefferson Davis. 

“My father pays all of these people with REAL food, REAL housing, and REAL money,” Maria shot back.  “And with respect.”
 
“It's an opportunity for advancement,” the young Lieutenant said, drawing Maria's attention to two men who took the offer, one Tejano and another Black.  That Black was Thelma's mentally-retarded son, whose mother pleaded for him to not trust the recruiter who offered him a sandwich, a cigar and a shiny new hat.   “Maybe you'd consider an opportunity for advancement fer yerself,” he suggested.  “Just like Hans Schmitt did.  I hear tell he's doing real good as a doctor, and could be doing real great if he had the right nurse with him.”

In the chaos of it all, Maria found herself considering the deal.   But the rustle of the Free Hill Country Herald papers, designed to 'boast local Confederate moral' with all manner of lies about the War, rubbed against her skin, awakening her back to Perspective.  But a perspective that had to adjust to a battle of heart and brains against an armada of guns and swords.  “If I consider your offer, I have to talk to my father first. Where is he?”  she assertively requested, of McCrea.

“He' in 'discourse' with Captain Duff,”  the semi-literate younger Lieutenant said, boasting perhaps the only word associated with higher learning his thick, full of himself head could comprehend. “Which, maybe you could help alucidate.”

“Where are they discoursing?”  the multi-lingual Maria asked, for the moment avoiding the impulse to correct the good ole boy's mispronunciation in the only language he was probably fluent in.    

“Come this way,” McCrea interjected.

“And in the meantime, be gentle with that bull calf!”  Maria insisted regarding Alejandro as he was being dragged into the pen, rifle butts pushed into his flank and hindlimbs.  “Alejandro is very....”

“Special, I can see that,”  McCrea said.  “And we'll take that into consideration.”

McCrea directed his men to woe the bull calf into the pen with a bucket of grain, stolen from the barn of course, rather than being pushed in with a rifle butt or the bayonets his men were about to use.   Maria was escorted by the younger Lieutenant to the house.

Juan was at his usual 'discourse' place on the front porch, where as a gentleman who knew what it was like to be a rancher, he sported a bandana around his neck.  It was appended by a necktie now, made of the best quality rope available in the Hill Country.   In front of him was his wife, similarly strung up to the roof, one kick of the stool away from meeting her maker.  

“So,” Captain Duff said, helping himself to another puff on Juan's coveted 'locoweed' cigars.  “It would give me the greatest pleasure if you provided to me the name of the other Union spies in this county, or failing that, the traitors who published this Union propaganda that is dishonoring our brave soldiers and lying to their beloved families here at home,” he said pulling out a copy of Maria's version of the Hill Country Herald, and another publication written in both German and English. “Whatever you've done, I have the authority to pardon you for it.

“I don't know anything,”  Juan said through a bloody mouth vacated of three teeth, doing his discoursing from a standing position, a rope around his neck.  “And she doesn't either,” he asserted, looking towards his daughter Maria.

“Maybe she does, maybe she doesn't,” Duff said as he threw an intense stare at Maria, sizing her up. “But maybe her Ma can tell me,”  he continued, referring Maria's attention to her mother, Anna.   Hidden inside the doorways.  Who was standing on a stool, her hands tied behind her.  A noose around her neck, loosely, for the moment anyway.

“My mother is sick, and has lost the capacity for speech!”  Maria blasted out, rushing in to take the rope off Anna's neck, pulled back by two Confederate soldiers whose visors hid their faces from her view.

“But this fine Tejano Seniora ain't lost the capacity for reason, and incription,” the young Lieutenant offered, pulling a pencil and sheet of paper out of his pocket.

“She doesn't know anything either!” Maria insisted, being overcome with an unexpected sense of calm, and plan.  “But if you need someone to hang, or discourse with today, I'll take her place. And his,” she continued regarding her dumbfounded father.  And regarding her despondently sick mother, who came back to reality with the first sound of her voice Maria had heard in four months.  

“Nnnnooo..nnooo...” her mother said from the functional side of her mouth as drool poured out of the side that still couldn't move.  Then she muttered something in Spanish, that Maria could not understand.

“What did she say?”  Duff asked, coming back to something resembling reason.

“That she wants us to untie her hands,” the young Lieutenant said with a wide smile, pointing to Maria's mother's wrists as Anna struggled to get loose.  With motions that were more movement than shakes.  “So she can write down everything we need to know. To save Confederate lives,”  he continued.

The young Lieutenant who Duff seemed convinced of his ability understood muffled Spanish strided over to Maria's mother, doing the honors of untying her with his knife.   “My name is Edwin. Edwin Lily, Senora Fernandez.  And your Papist Catholic name is----?”

“---Anna,” Maria's mother slurred out of the side of her mouth, while relieving her 'liberator' of his pistol, pointing it at his head.  This time with more shaking than steady.

“I don't thing that is a good idea, Senora Anna,”  the young Lieutenant informed the old woman with a smart assed grin.  “Unless you want me to kick aside this stool you're standing on so this rope chokes the life out of your traitorous, lying body.  Is that what you want now?”

Anna nodded 'yes', dropping the gun onto the floor.

“No!” Maria screamed, held back from ripping Lily's eyes out by Duff.

“Si, Maria,”  Anna pushed out of her mouth with the last of her strength.  “Por favor.”

“Our job is to get information, not to help old women with nothing to live for kill themselves,” Duff said. “And if we kill her, SECOND Lieutenant Lily, the information she knows about every traitor and spy in the Hill Country will die with her.”

“Exactly, you assholes,” Anna slurred out, in English, after which she grabbed hold of the pistol with her left hand.  Then a stick with the other, which she used to knock the stool out from under her feet.

Anna shot at everyone who tried to cut her down.  Captain Duff, who had orders to create no unnecessary political incidences.   Then, Second Lt Lily, who felt entitled to be a Major at least in this new Army that was probably financed by his father's money.  And Maria, who finally broke loose from Duff''s 'protective' grasp.   

Sadistic as  life was, the bullets from the revolver didn't hit Maria.  The last of them grazed Juan in wrist of his writing hand.  A hand that never wrote a single 'traitorous' word against the Anglos who took over the Republic of Texas after its liberation from Mexico and the State of Texas that was now part of the Confederacy.  

Anna was still alive.  From the neck up anyway, as Maria held her head before it hit the hard floor.   Time would tell how much damage the rope and the fall from the rafters had done to Anna's already, according to the ordained Priests and Comanche shamans, demon-possessed body.  As for Maria, honor required that she took to the cross that others would be crucified if she didn't fess up to the crime of doing the right thing in a very wrong world.  A plan which was abruptly postponed by loud gun shot, then the rider atop a horse that had just galloped in announcing himself.

“I suggest that you gentlemen move away from the ladies, and the gentleman,” Jake advised holding the business end of a shotgun at Duff and Lily.  

“And who are you to interfere with legal, and morally necessary military business?”  Lily       barked back.  “We're doing this to protect our families.”

“And I'm holding this gun on you, Sirs, to protect mine,”  Jake said. “My future father in law who I request that you cut loose from that rope you have around his neck, gently, and respectfully now.  My future mother in law, who should be given the best medical care available, at the Army's expense, and my future wife, who---”

“---is not a spy, or a traitor!” Juan asserted as the rope around his neck was removed, according to Jake's instructions, by Duff.  “Tell them you aren't a spy, or a traitor,” he commanded his daughter. “Swear it on everything you consider holy, and sacred.”

“On your eyes, and my mother's heart, I swear,” Maria said to her father, raising her hand.  Unable to hold the truth from him, but knowing she had to hide it from everyone else.  Including Jake, who inserted his gun back into the scabbard on his saddle, dismounted, then gave Maria a loving hug and a kiss that had no lies to it.  

“I love you girl, you do know that don't you,”  Jake said to Maria.

“I know,” Maria replied.  “I love you too,” she replied, wanting to believe it. Forcing herself to believe it.  And  maybe really believing it.  Then  not believing what she saw in front of her eyes when Duff got back on his horse.

“Corporal Johnson,”  I can postpone acquisition of your in-laws' employed personnel and other property, but I have to bring back some gesture of their voluntary cooperation, Duff said, very much as a Captain.

“A small gesture, I suggest, Sir,” Lily said, after which he aimed his revolver at the coral, and fired two shots.  “There ya go, roast Alejandro for everyone tonight.  We'll cook him at our camp, ya'll can come for supper if you want,”  he smiled at Maria, her mother, father, and Jake.

Maria's jaw dropped. As did any hope of the War East of the Mighty Missisip not finding its way to Texas, or even Mexico.

CHAPTER 8

Doc Jones' medical mind became more learned and pragmatic in the War against Norther Agression than it ever had been in Peacetime, or during the War against the President of Mexico.   His sense of smell had become sharper than any hound, and he could see tinges of jaundice, palor and hyper-effusion faster than anyone else in any hospitals he graced with his presence.   But without use of his right hand which lay amongst the dead in the Pennisula Campaign, he was helpless to do anything about flesh that metal had torn assunder. And without his right eye, eaten by the crows when he was left for dead at Fredricksburg, he couldn't differentiate between a deep artery and a superficial vein.   Fortunately, the forty-years-over-experienced Doc from Austin had a protegee whose hands were better than his had ever been, and a medical mind which was far more expansive, on its way to becoming brilliant.  As long as Hans Schmitt remained well behind the lines and protected from Yankee snipers and bushwackers who on all too many occasions found their way into the field hospitals which kept changing location, depending on whether the Blue Bellies were being pushed ahead by President Lincoln, or pulled back by their Generals.

The newspapers Hans had read between amputations, sewing guts back into slashed open abdomens, and burns that went down to the bone reported that the War was going well for the Confederate Cause.   But the hospital supply situation said otherwise.  Sutures made of manufactured silk and catgut had been replaced by horse hair.   Shortages of ether, chloroform and morphine for anesthetic gave way to liquor donated by rich Southern gentlemen, then rockgut made in backwater stills.   Uniforms from soldiers who had died in the morning's surgeries were used to dress the wounds of the lads who came into the medical 'holiday camp' in the afternoon.  Often without taking into consideration that those who departed this life that morning were afflicted with all manner of communicable diseases from simple small pox to cholera.   Enlisted boys in gray who lost an arm or a leg were sent back up to the front, until they came in again for extraction of another putrid and mangled limb.  Officers were given the rest of the month, or year, off and allowed to go home to their families.  Yankee patients were shipped off as soon as they could hobble or be carried by their comrades to Prisoner of War Camps.   Blacks caught in the crossfire between Blue and Grey got special treatment.  

One of those dark skinned patients looked at Hans as the young doctor prepared to remove a musketball from outer layers of his leg and a slice of schratnel from his right arm that had reached the bone but not yet sliced into any arteries or veins.  An easy procedure if done immediately.  A futile one if he waited another half hour or if the twenty-five year old Black man with more intelligence behind his eyes than Hans' father, and more heart than Maria was moved, was forced to limp away.  
 
“This one can wait,” a gruff Officer with more for brawns than brains and a very White face barked at Hans.  “You know the rules, 'Doctor Schmitt',” Captain Holmes continued.  “Our wounded first, because they're family.  The enemy wounded second, so we can get back our own in the prisoner exchange I hear is gonna take place.  Niggers who work for us third.  Niggers who ran away from the Masters who fed them, clothed them and invited them into their family last.”

By the angry look in the Black patient's eyes, the latter was his category.  

Holmes motioned for his goons to move the Black man, but Hans put his frail and 'girly' hands over the thick, muscular blood-soaked forearms of the orderlies. “If I repair this Negroid man's arm and leg, I'm restoring a Southern Man's property, and doing right by his family,” he offered.

“He's got a point, Captain,” one of the goons said between tobaccie chew spits.  “This one's worth at least---”

“----Ten minutes of my time, Captain!”  Hans insisted.

“Without any of my hospital's chloroform, whiskey or rockgut, Doctor,”  Holmes barked back.

“Deal,” Hans said as he instructed the goons to move his patient gently to the operating table.  “Where's Doctor Jones?”  the young German idealist who had become an old cynic in less than three months asked, noticing the man responsible for his being here, for better or worse.  That man, who had yapped to him last night about medicine, discoursing about philosophy and reflecting about mortality, had still not shown up for morning breakfast, or surgical duties afterwards.

“Your colleague who you went to medical school with in Atlanta?”  Holmes said, still believing Jones' story about Hans' formal medical training, and non-European education.  “Not sure.”

Holmes was diverted by an incoming rider who exhausted himself and nearly killed his horse.  Upon entry to the 'hospital', he dropped on the floor drenched in sweat the moment after he delivered a note into the Captain's hands, and no one else.  “Finally, I get to do something important!” Holmes boasted, putting down his stethoscope and grabbing hold of his sabre with his left hand as he opened the note with his right. “I'm being permitted the honor of slicing up some Yankees on the battlefield instead of having to patch up hamburger meat here,” he said. “I'm allowed to enlist ten volunteers to join me in carving up some Blue Belly roast. Any takers?”

There was no shortage of orderlies, nor Confederate patients, who volunteered.  Holmes picked the ones with the strongest bodies and meanest eyes.   “One good thing about War is that it clears away the rif raf,” Hans commented to the runaway slave who was still being guarded by one of the remaining goons.  “I'm cursed with hands than can heal but can't kill,” he continued as he picked up his forceps and scalpel, preparing for the first extraction of metal that had invaded the runaway's flesh.  “But what I'm going to do is going to hurt.”

“You and me both,” the black-as-coal-skinned man smiled back to Hans, after which he grabbed hold of Hans' scalpel and cut his left wrist down to the bone, then the femeral artery between his legs.  “Tell Masser that his property says to go fuck himself!” he said as his final statement to the world, and the goon who tried futiley to hold back the gushint river of blood pouring out of him. 

Hans did what he could to try to save his patient from the jaws of death, but, as always, he found himself working hardest in causes that were against himself.  Against his idealogy.  And against any prospect of himself being alive inside himself.  Indeed, he had become dead inside.  And not so much because he had become numb to human suffering in his unending crusade to end it.  But because whatever life inside of him had been killed in other ways.  A fiddler in the hospital informed him, with his music, that the last nail was about to hammered into Hans' coffin.  

The Company fiddler, who played more like a violinist, had a repertoire which went from  the ever popular 'Lorena' to the most obscure pieces of Mozart and Beethoven, and numerous other composers from the more Civilized, and more tortured, side of the Atlantic pond.   According to his prescribed and necessary duties, he had been playing since dawn.  When Hans first heard Corporal Jackson play countless numbers of lacerations, amputations and gut resections ago, he felt the life in the music and in himself.  But now, even though Hans recognized that the small framed, heavily muscular Carolinian was playing brilliantly and beautifully, all he could feel was nothing. It was just sounds.  Not even notes.   Hans looked at the eyes of the dead, who were still waiting for someone to cover their eyes, and saw himself as one of them.  Then saw another man being brought in.  An Officer in a Confederate uniform that was more rags and blood than cloth.  

Hans rushed over to help the officer, looking at the mess that had been made of him below the neck. Then he heard the last words from the person whose neck was still attached to the body, barely.  “It's a lost cause,” Jones said to Hans.  “Finish me off quickly so I don't wake up unable to do anything below the neck. Please!!!”

“I'll do my best to---”

“----go home!”  Jones barked back with a voice drowned in his own blood.  “To take care of your Freethinker families!   They are the only families who can save anyone else's families now!”   

“---But,”  Hans protested.

“Promise me!”  Jones said as he laid his hand onto Hans' shaking arm.   “My effects are in my saddlebag.  For you and you only!” 

“Yes, I'll---”

Before Hans could retort with another half promise based in truth and sincerity, Jones died.   Whatever Doc Jones knew, it was important.  Hans was bombarded with the realization that to save himself, the patients in this hospital, the patients in every other hospital, the world, and himself, he had to get his ass back home.  Before it was too late.

CHAPTER 9

It was just another mid summer day at the Johnson ranch, for the cattle anyway.  Jake's mother, who, with the exception of still living in the glory days of 1837 between her more closed than open ears, turned sick in the body for the first time since Jake remembered.   As the son who remained at home, Jake was most responsible for taking care of her now.  The man of the house and the family now.  With-his-never-sick-a day in her life Ma in bed yelling at the darky slaves for this and that, and at the ghosts when the darkies had the good sense to be on errands elsewhere, Jake Johnson was free to make ALL decisions as to how the place was run, finally.   Jake's three new cowhands herded another twenty head in from the spring pastures, well ahead of Johnson ranch schedule, for slaughter and salting to be shipped off to feed the good gentlemen in gray though the best blockade runners available.  

“Fine looking cattle,”  Captain Duff commented to Jake as he worked out the numbers on the ledger his brothers left him when they headed off to Austin to take their duly elected seats in the new, pro-Confederate legislator.  “Yeah. Fine looking cattle there, Mister Johnson,” he continued.

“Finer looking men herding them in,”  Jake boasted proudly, lightly puffing in the vapors on a large cigar while sitting on the coral fence.  

“A bit dark in the complexion I'd say,” Captain Duff replied.  “You think they can be trusted with fast horses and loaded guns, in these dangerous times when whoever ain't with us is probably against us?”

“Tejanos are better at getting the most out of a horse than an Anglo, better shots when a cougar or coyote has a mind to snack on a calf or two for lunch, and----”

“---master cigar smokers,”  Duff commented regarding the Fernandez brand stogey in his hand, the second that he had smoked down to the nub.  “Warms up the belly and eases the mind,”  he continued, his eyes becoming watery.  “Maybe more cooperative or vulnerable in a business deal?”

Jake did his best to not let on about Juan Fernandez's favorite trick with regard to luring in gruff and uncooperative Anglos into fighting less aggressively for their own benefit in a business deal. Then again, good ole boys when they became fat cat men always discussed  business over a glass, or bottle, of whiskey.  “All is fair in love and business, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” Jake said with a smile, after which he took in a large puff of the mind-easing stogey and let it out, slowly.  “But as for what's fair in War,” he continued, putting down his cigar.  “Any word on who burnt out the Fernandez spread?”

“Comanches most likely,” Duff said, helping himself to a fistful of dried jerky Jake had brought out to him from the house.  “Though Lt. Lilly said it was Mexican bandits pretending to be Injuns,” he continued, seeming to be honest about it.  “I hear that Juan Fernandez is fairing well in San Antone after the attack.  His wife's being looked after by the best doctors we could find,” he continued.  “We took up a collection at the Baptist Church to help them out.  So that Fernandez cooking could live on, and in consideration of Maria being engaged to be your wife.”  Duff struggled to swallow the home cooked trail food.  “A wife I heard who favors the library, more than the kitchen,”  he said as he politely spit out the jerky-nut bar, offering it to the dog, who sniffed his nose at it.  “I trust she favors the bedroom, Jake,”  Duff inquired.  

“The parlor, for now,” Jake replied with a tight lipped smile.  “Her customs.  My choice.”

“For which you will have many happy years of marriage,” the old man assured the young one.  “And speaking of marriage,” the recently widowed Captain said regarding the woman sitting next to Maria on the porch on the other side of the coral, both of them reading books, sharing jokes between them about them.  “Who's the beauty with the naked wedding ring finger?”

“Maria's sister,”  Jake said by way of explanation.  “Who's already taken!” he quickly added before Duff could continue with his 'dream wife' fantasies, as was his very necessary and sincerely conducted habit after his beloved and loved wife was taken from him by demon diptheria, sadistically leaving him in perfect health throughout  the course of that usually communicable disease.

“Lucky man who gets her,”  Duff said of the Seniorita next to Maria.  

“Lucky man indeed,” Jake replied, a multitude of secret agendas behind his eyes as he took another swig of water from his canteen.  Self observing that he had become one of those people who kept more to himself than he said to others.  The kind of varment that his lawyer brothers had become. The kind of vermin that the Yankees were all about.  

“And speaking of lucky,” Duff replied, pulling out a sac from his saddlebag, handing it to Jake.  “You've been promoted, unofficially, to Seargent.  “In the Texas 33rd Cavalry.  I informed the tailor in Amerilo of your proportions.  I hope he got them more right than wrong. If it's too big in the shoulders, I'm sure you'll grow into them.  You are Frank Johnson's son after all.  Defender of the Alamo.”

“It's fine,” Jake said, opening up his uniform, noting that it was indeed three sizes too big in the shoulders, a bit tight around the chest.  “Very fine!” he exclaimed with pride, imagining himself at a final stand against evil like his father did.  An honor-infused death which would enable him to live forever in the eyes of his family, countryman and, God willing, children he would have with Maria.   “But I thought you needed me to provide beef and horses to the Cause.”

“We do,”  Duff said, looking over the stock of cattle in the coral.  Then the ten Mustangs  in the paddocks that Jake had educated into being ridable steeds after three days of schooling under his kind yet firm tutilage.  “But we also need you to keep an eye on what's going on behind the lines, when not wearing this uniform.”  
 
“Bandits, Outlaws and Comanche trouble again?”  Jake said, pulling out his Colt Revolver.  “Rustlers?  I've shot my share of them all.  Brought them all in to justice.”

“Who you dutifully delivered to the judge alive,” Duff replied with an admiring nod.  Afterwhich he moved closer in towards Jake and spoke with a lowered volume infused with intensified caution. “But there's a more dangerous kind of threat upon us now than just bandits and renegades, Jake.  Headed up by Fritz Tegenger.”

“Fred Tegenger?” Jake dismissed with a condescending laugh.  “Old fart German miller who married a 14 year old girl who grew into a wife who's giving him more trouble than he can ever give us.”

“That pacifist Freethinker is being called Major Teneger now, Seargent Johnson,”  Duff directed with a gruff voice and an index finger pointed directly at Jake.  “And that 'Union Loyal League' of draft dodgers they call a social club is probably a band of Union spies.”

“They're egghead bookreaders who don't know as little about how to spy as Maria knows about cooking,”  Jake mused.

“Armed bookreaders who get more firepower every day, according to what's being sold in our General Stores, and the firearms that aren't in theirs,”    Duff growled back.  

“Maybe they're arming themselves to protect themselves from Mexican bandits, or Comanches,”  Jake pointed out.  

“These Germans are closer to the Mexicans and Tejanos than you are with Houston'” Duff replied, pointing to the quarterhorse-mustang cross named after the first President of Texas.  An equine companion Jake grew up with, and now rode 6 days a week, even though he had a string of other more muscled, younger and better looking mounts he could use.    “And as for Comanches, those Red-skinned savages are best buddies with the Germans.   Those heathan savages spared and even fed the Germans while they were on the warpath with us, scalping, raping, burning and killing my family, and yours.”

Jake recalled the stories about how his mother's brother died at the hands of the Comanches, after he had been skinned, scalped and relieved of his fingers, as an example to any other Anglo soldiers who dared ride into their territory uninvited.  And how Jake's aunt was taken captive, killing herself soon after she was liberated by the Rangers.   Those stories scared him as a boy, and horrified him as a young man.  Jake's gut felt that there was a score to be settled, despite his mind giving some creedance to Hans and Maria pointing out that the Comanches were here first.   But before Jake could try to put together again the past, plotting his revenge as a man who had skillfully wounded many other men, but killed no one, Captain Duff put a rolled up piece of heavy paper into his sweat-soaked hands.

“This paper signed by the President of Texas himself gives you permission to be administrator of Martial Law wherever you see fit, Seargent,” Duff said.  “To do what is necessary to neutralize any bandit, outlaw, spy, draft evader or Comanche who poses a threat to the safety and well being of Texas,” he proclaimed. “And the obligation to report, and do everything in your power to apprehend the most dangerous enemy to our families and way of life,” he continued, as if reciting the Lord's Prayer.

“Dangerous enemies such as women with no talent for cooking, who think that the food they try to serve to their husbands won't kill them?”  Jake said, while looking at Maria on the front porch, being given a cookbook by her female friend. 

“Deserters,”  Duff stated, firmly.  “Especially ones with connections to spies and traitors.”  With that, the Captain gave Jake an envelope from his breast pocket, got on his horse, then led his men out of the ranch.  Taking with them more than their unexpectedly high quota of livestock for eating and animals for riding.  But no owned slaves for laboring, nor employed Tijanos for enslavement, a courtesy afforded to Jake due to his father's sacrifice for at the Alamo.

Jake looked at the Confederate currency in the envelope, a stack of hundred dollar bills adorned with Grecian beauties on the sides, a railroad locomotive in the middle and eligant caligraphy which even the most hardened Puritanical Yankee couldn't help but respect, and admire.  Then he looked at Maria's sister, admiring her dress.  Yes, it was time to have a talk with the woman, and Maria.  

Both women were more preoccupied with each other than Jake.   Something that frustrated Jake and seemed to be a source of fun for the two women, who muttered to themselves in German.

“So,” Jake said to Maria's 'sister'.  “Was ist los mit diese...what do you call it?” 

“Kleid,” Maria answered.

“'Dress', in English,” Hans replied from underneath the bonnet atop his head.  “A necessary diversion for me to come town and listen to what men here really are talking about and doing, and to deliver this to you, in person,” Hans continued, pulling out Doc Jones' saddle chest from under his skirt, handing Jake a carefully sealed packet bearing his name. “It was a dying request trusted to Doc Jones to see fit that it was carried out.  That he entrusted to me to carry to you, and you personally.” 

“Or maybe it was a lie made up by some of your literary creative 'freethinkers' who say they're dedicated to telling the truth,”  Jake replied, not believing the words reaching his eyes. Eyes red with anger as well as welling up with tears of betrayal.  “And this red ink splotched around the scribblings---”

“----is real blood,” Hans assured Jake, wanting to put his hand on Jake's shoulder but not doing so.  “Spilled from human bodies.  More blood that you've ever seen in any cattle slaughterhouse.  A human slaughterhouse run by the devil himself.   Satan is everywhere, laughing at us as he kills our bodies and sours our souls.”

The way Hans spoke of the Good Lord's adversary told Jake that the bookworm who had been too intellectual to take anything in the Good Book seriously had left the library, and would never be able to find his way back to it again.  

The letter read:

Son,
Doc Jones says that I have a day left on this earth, given the wounds I got courtesy of three musket balls in my belly and the cancer he discovered in my inerds after he pulled out the lead.  Maybe if I ducked to the right instead of the left, the yankee bullets woulda killed the cancer.  A joke.  Probably my last by the way I'm pueking up more putrid flesh of my mouth than air.   But there is a thing that I can't joke about no more.  And some things that you should know about me.   

Your Ma says that I died at the Alamo back in '36 with Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and, as he always insisted on being called, 'Colonel' Travis.  Truth is that I got out, taking with me some of the gold that we were there to protect.  Not a lot of gold, but enough to take care of a woman who I loved at the time who your mother never knew about, and now you do.  I was young, stupid and infatuated with Lorena.  And like the son of a bitch I am, I let myself love her and the family I had with her more than you, or your mother.  Turns out, she didn't love me back nearly as much.  Life's like that, son. The one you love most always loves someone else more, until the end.  A letter I got as soon as I got here to South Carolina that reached me said that Lorena and everyone I sired with her got butchered by Comanches two days after I left.  Now I only have a few hours left, about to face my Maker due to fighting too hard for another lost cause.  Maybe dying for the pipe dream the politicians in Richmond call the Confederate States of America, or the illusion of a United Union the Yankee bluebellies who I killed are dedicated to gives us good favor in the eyes of the Good Lord.  

I don't know if it's right, or honorable, to tell your mother that I love her now more than I ever have, and ever loved Lorena, truth be told.  I DO know that a  man's gotta stand and die for something, but whatever it is that you're dedicating yourself to, don't let it be my memory.  

With respect and what I'm told is the deepest love,
Franklin Benjamin Johnson

“There was some of this in the box with the letter too, Jake,” Hans said, handing over two bags of gold dust, and a pocketful of mixed currency gold plated coins.  “Medical bills are expensive these days, and gold is a lot more reliable than Confederate script.  Now that the mint in New Orleans is in the hands of the Union Navy.”

“The War's just escalated, it ain't lost!”  Jake insisted.  “We can outlast any Yankee invaders, and the Blue Belly 'liberators' are invaders!  Taking everything they want from us, including the honor of our Southern women, givin' nothin' back to the Coloreds who they say they're liberating---”

“---While letting slave owners in Kentucky and Maryland keep their human property, I know,” Hans conceded.  “But someone has to say 'enough' to all of this.”

“Maybe it should be President Lincoln,” Jake suggested.  “Who's losing more men every day than we are.  Two of them to one of ours!”

“Or Jefferson Davis,” Hans growled back through a whisper, so as to keep his real gender and identity secret from two of Duff's enlisted men who seemed romantically interested in him.  “Who is President of a 'country' that has less industrial supplies combined than New York State alone.  According to the New York Herald.”

“Or WE can stop it,” Maria gently suggested, laying one hand on Jake's forearm and the other on Hans'.  “If enough people refuse to fight, the fighting stops. Everywhere.”  

 Jake thought about it.  Then another idea to resolve the issue overcame his bombarded mind. “Maybe we can flip for it,” he said as he pulled out one of the coins from his newly delivered inheritance, not caring what currency it was.  He threw it up in the air. “Heads, you Unionists all go back home to New York or Berlin.  Tails, we give the Yankees all of our Niggers and let ourselves be slaves in the factories they set up in Dixie, Texas and...”  Jake's preoccupation with his mouth robbed him of his natural agility of hand.  The coin hit the floor of the porch, then slipped down between the buckboards.  A hog that had escaped being penned in with the pigs destined to become Confederate Army bacon swallowed the coin.

“Guess we'll have to wait till he shits it out to see who won the coin toss,” Jake mused as the hog ran into the bush, heading West.   He felt himself dreaming about what lay in that direction, an old dream that he shared with Hans, and Maria.

“They're is no fighting in California,” Maria suggested with a warm and affirmative smile.  

“California” was a word that always made Jake dream big.  Bigger than any dream he had for Texas.  A place where you could re-invent yourself.  And be yourself.   A place where Maria could be herself too.  And a place where Hans, even if part of himself was connected to the dress he was wearing as a necessary disguise, could be himself too.  A place where maybe reverse polygamy may work.  A man could have two wives in Utah, so why couldn't a woman like Maria, who had more love in her than any one man could share, or handle, have two husbands?  Husbands who are also best of friends.  But this was Texas, a winner take all place, even if the competitors in the game didn't want to play.  

One of the unwilling officiators in that game came up behind Jake.  “Southern hospitality requires that your lady guest not sit so long out on the porch without some liquid refreshment,” Jake's mother said as she personally brought out a tray of fresh squeezed lemonade, offering it to Hans.   Her now frail arms shaking, her feet barely strong enough to keep her 98 pound febrile body errect.  “Sometimes we ladies have to inform our gentlemen abut what's right and proper you know.”

Hans nodded 'yes' with a smile as he took the glass and sipped it, hiding his face as much as he could. Thelma, thankfully, came out of the house three sips later, escorting Jake's mother back to her sick bed before she had to be carried there.  

With Jake's mother safely inside, Hans looked up at the sun, allowing its light to illuminate his hairless face, and now old, cynical eyes.   Jake saw in those eyes someone he never knew.   A friend who would become an enemy soon, or maybe was one now.  But a new protocol had emerged in Texas, and as Jake envisioned, everywhere else in the once United States of America in such situations.   “I propose a toast,” Jake said as he took a glass from the serving tray and gave it to Maria.  Then took one himself.  “To honor. The kind that has nothing to do with glory,” he continued, having been fed that phrase from the brain that was always created when he, Hans and Maria got together.  A shared brain that would never speak so openly, warmly or honestly, ever again.  Or not for a long, long time anyway.

CHAPTER 10

Franz Schmitt's pile of firewood was nearly two stories high, on a hot July when it made more sense to worry about bushfires than keeping enough kindling around to keep the wood stoves stoked, or stockpiling wood for a cold winter that seemed lifetimes away.  But taking out his anger with his axe on logs that did nothing to him beat venting his frustrations on his wife and children that tried to do everything for him, which was not the case for so many American Texans.  One of those children stood in front of him in the form of a clean shaven man wearing a wide-brimmed sombraro.  

“You look different,” Franz commented from the side of his mouth between pounds at the wood.

Hans felt the smooth skin where his mustache had been prior to his self-appointed departure from the Confederate Medical Corp.  “No hair on my upper lip,” he said by way of comment for it all.

“No hair on your legs, arms or chest either, so I've been told by others who recognized your face underneath those bonnets,”  Oncle Franz related, as coldly in tone as the baking sun was above was hot.
 
“Necessary, so I could hear what the Confederates here are saying about you, us and the Tejanos, Oncle Franz,”  Hans explained, waiting for some kind of answer.

From Franz, nothing.  No 'I have no nephew'.  No 'you stopped being one of us the day you put on that Confederate uniform'.  No 'if you joined the Cause to maintain slavery to protect me and my family, you should have asked us first about it'.  Not even a 'so, what did you find out that is so important for you to come here, bringing the Home Guard with you to hang you for desertion now and burn us out later.'

“Alright, the 'how' of it then,” Hans said as he edged his way as close as he could to his estranged Oncle.  “Maria and I go into a General Store where the men in grey and the ones who want to be in gray are talking, or drinking, or finding ways to waste the day as effectively as they can.  Maria, showcases her legs, breasts or gift of making a man start an argument with her about politics that is usually reserved for other men.  She leaves, and then the men talk about the uppedy Tejano woman, the women they have to go home to, and the Germans who Maria discretely mentioned in passing.   When I pass by them, as a 'made to be seen but not heard woman' and pay for the goods I need at the counter, they talk louder.  It is amazing what men will say when they are in the presence of a woman who they think is helpless, simple and insignificant. And do you know what I heard them say?  Besides the fact that the reward on my head for deserting the Cause has gone up.”

From Oncle Franz, louder chops, with no change in beat or rhythm.

“And since you asked, I will tell you,” Hans said, wiping the sweat off his brow, daring to expose his head to the son, and his face to whatever bounty hunters may have followed him.  “The Confederates are done boycotting Freethinker stores.  Charging Germans triple for any supplies they need from their stores.  And burning out ranches that don't voluntarily donate to the Cause.  No, what they want from us are men who will take a loyalty oath in public, put on a Confederate Uniform and take up arms in the War against Northern Aggression.  And if those men don't come in willingly, they'll come and get them.   And no jail this time.  A bullet in the head for the lucky.  A rope for the unlucky.  A funeral for their widows and children.  Even the children who they've disowned.”

Hans absorbed what he just said, then waited for Franz to do the same.

“When?”  he asked, still not yet looking his prodigal nephew in the eye, finally putting his axe down.

“That I don't know, but you should have Fritz Teneger call a meeting.  Find a way to leave here, with our families.”

“Not with our families, but with these,”  Franz replied, picking up his gun.  A new model,  far more eligent in design and probably deadly in execution than anything in the standard Confederate arsensel.  “You do know how to use these?” he continued.  

“That I do,” Hans replied, grabbing the weapon from Franz's hands.  He took apart the weapon with speed, rhythm and determination, the put it back together again, with cold eyes and an assertive heart that had become as dead as it was determined.   He aimed the weapon at Franz's picture of Jefferson Davis posted on the wall of the barn that had once housed his printing press, that devise of education and persuasion in ruins.   After slipping on his spectacles, Hans shot two rounds straight between the eyes of the arrogant Confederate President.  “Any questions?”  he concluded.

“So, you DO know how to use this,”  Franz concluded with a mixture of pride, and regret as he took the weapon back into his hands.  “But have you used it on anything living, Doctor Hans?”

“To save hurting men, and women, from painful deaths,” Hans related.

“And to defend yourself from a man who is trying to send you, or one of your Comrades to an early and painful death?”  Franz challenged.

“Have you, Oncle Franz?”  Hans asked.

“Back home in 1848, it was about fighting with our brains, not our brawn,”  he related.  “But this is a new country with new necessities.”  
 
“Including me going back to town in my dress?”  Hans asked.  “To get more information.”

“As long it is a necessity, and not a habit you have learned to like,” Franz replied, cracking a smile.  “You are doing all of this as a necessity, aren't you?” he continued.

Hans enjoyed seeing his Oncle smiling at him, or for that matter, smiling at anyone.  That smile turned into a fraternal grimace before Hans could formulate a witty answer to his question.  

“Just see that Maria's new husband-to-be is not pulled into all of this,”  Franz warned.  “I know that she is free to choose you, Jake or both of you as her husband, but what we're about to do is dangerous.  And better that she hate you while she is still alive, than love you as a ghost.”

Hans didn't need any examples for his Oncle Franz to demonstrate his point.   His almost aunt Elsa in Hamburg was still alive, thanks to Franz telling her that he was in love with someone else.   Elsa was not one of the bold demonstrators who were killed at the People's barricades when the soldiers opened up with musketball, cannon and sabres.  Unlike Hans' mother, who dies in her husband's loving arms.   

“So, you are with us for good now?”  Franz asked his nephew.

“'Good' has become...irrelevant,” the once 'above all do no harm' Hans replied.  What it was replaced with, he didn't know, but would soon find out.

CHAPTER 11

The Treueder Union meetings were usually held in the back forty of Fritz Teneger's farm, open to anyone who wanted to discuss Freethinker Philosophy, which was translated into English for those who did not speak fluent German.    This gathering was held in the bluffs between two rivers which had now become streams, guarded from up top by renegade Comanches, including as the new chief, the leader of the hunting party who had visited Franz Schmitt's farm, and the young brave with the Ancient soul declared Maria and Hans very married, or marryable.  

The beer and sausage wagon that was customary at the Trueder meetings was now a cart filled with weapons.  More weapons than Maria had ever seen in one place.  And all of the conversations she heard were now in German, between men.  And there was only one non-German speaker among them, for whom a very worried Fritz Teneger translated everything important.

“So, why is John Samson, who doesn't understand a word of our language, being told all of our secrets?”  Maria asked Hans, who seemed to be more preoccupied with the mechanics of the new rifle issued to him than her.

“Because he knows the country better than any German,”  Hans said.  “And he's the only non-German who we can trust.   The Comanches have an official policy of letting the blue and gray coats kill each off before they try to take back their land again.   And not all of the Indian chiefs can be trusted either.”

“And you can't trust the Tejanos, who are more expressive about their hatred for the Confederacy than the Germans are?”  Maria challenged.   “Who have been burnt out, gone missing, imprisoned or put under comfortable protective custody as long as they confine their conversations to Greek philosophy, chili recepies and----”

Maria felt Hans' sweat-soaked hand on her mouth, then her head hitting the dirt.   Hans put herself in harm's way between her and the russlting in the bushes behind him.  He aimed his rifled towards the intruder.  “Are you sure you weren't followed?”  he whispered to her in German.  

“Only by your father's ghost,” she replied.  “Who maybe decided to come back with four legs, fur all over his body and a tail.”

Maria pointed Hans' attention to a mother doe, followed by her young calf.  A calf with expressive, kind and innocent eyes that seemed to speak to Hans in one of those languages that he said he could feel but not understand.    “If that was one of the 33rd Texas Cavalry, I'd would have shot them, you know.  A necessary action to save the Collective.”

“Even if it was Jake?”  Maria challenged.  

“Only to incapacitate him, temporarily,” Jake replied, putting down his rifle.  “And in the meantime, you'd better get back home before Jake know you're missing.”

“Jake,” Maria laughed. “My fiancee,” she continued as multiple emotions competed for domination of her troubled soul.

“By love, or necessity, so that your family won't be run off to Mexico, jailed, or hung?”  Hans noted.  “I heard about your mother's death.  She's in a better place now.”  

“And my father taking trying to put a bullet into his head to join him?”  Maria informed her other beloved.  

Hans looked at her with shock in his eyes.

“He's as bad a shot as I am a cook,” she mused.  “The doctors say he has a chance of surviving.”

“And if you told me, I could be SURE that he doesn't die!”  Hans growled back.

“Which is why I wanted to keep it private,”  Maria said. “Also, to prevent  you from being seen by the wrong people.  For your protection.  Like maybe you didn't tell me about this Freethinker meeting because you wanted to protect me?”

“Who told you where we were?”  Hans asked.

Maria pointed to the Comanche brave atop the bluff guarding the entrance to the camp.  He waved back, with a warm smile and a gesture with an open left fist, the index finger of his right hand going in and out of it.  Then demonstrating the coital action of penis entering vaginal with his hips. 

“Tell him that we haven't been intimate, in that way, anyway,”  Hans said from the side of his mouth to Maria as he waved to the Brave with an all is well smile.  “Does he know that you and Jake may be intimate in that way?”

“If he did, he'd have to kill Jake,”  Maria said.  “He thinks that you and me are the best match.”

“And what do you think about that?”  Hans asked, looking straight into Maria's face.  “Or, feel about that, Maria?”

Maria looked away, the thoughts and feeling about that ultimate decision she would have to make one day bubbling behind her eyes.  How could she separate them?   All things considered, Jake understood her heart.   And he demonstrated his loyalty to her by risking his own family's safety by taking care of hers, and was willing to kill for her.   Hans understood her mind.  He made her work harder between the ears every time they talked, and was willing to die for her.    Maria then self-observed herself thinking whether it was smarter, or more noble, to have someone willing to die for you, or someone willing to kill for you.   She could feel an answer that would incorporate and maybe combine both options when she heard Fritz, now Major, Teneger, say loudly to all 80 discoursers in the camp.  “It is time to gather, to take a vote.”

“A vote to do what?”   Maria asked Hans.

“Something that I have to do, and you shouldn't, and can't,” Hans said, laying his hands on her forearm.  “The women and children stay behind, and will be sent for later.”

“Why?”  Maria asked.

“Because if it's done any other way, none of us will be alive,”  he replied. 

There was something in Hans answer that said it was accurate, and sincere.   And to enforce such, a Comanche brave came up to Maria, asking Hans a question in his First Nations tongue.  A three volleyed conversation ensued which Maria could not understand until the last words, spoken by the brave in Spanish.

“I take you home now, Maria. Hans will send for you later,”  the brave said.

“IF I want to go home, or be 'sent for',”  Maria, who came armed only with an open heart, said to the brave with a rifle over his shoulder, a pistol on his hip, and a knife strapped to his waist.   

Maria rose up and hugged Hans.   She searched long and hard for the right words to say, perhaps the last words she would ever convey to her other beloved while still on God's earth.   But before the words could come out, Hans was called by name.  “Ya,” he said.  To a proposition he did not tell Maria about.   He scribbled some notes on already word and diagram filled piece of paper, and slipped into her pocket.  “For later, as it becomes safer, for all three of us,” he whispered to her as he embraced her tighter than he ever had.
 
Hans let Maria go just as she was about to hug him even tighter, saying 'yes' to the plan and proposition formulating in her own head.  But the Brave, mounted on his mustang, gently pulled her away, placing the reins of her horse into her hands.   

As Maria rode away from the camp, and out of the bluffs, she felt something watching her.  A wind blowing through the cottonwood trees, perhaps.  Or something that had followed her.  Most ghostlike than real.  Then she heard amidst the wind, the voice of her father saying something to her in one of those languages that she could feel but not understand.  “I'm alright now,” it seemed to say.  In the same warm, assuring tone, that Maria's mother's ghost seemed to say to her a few days earlier.

True, it was a hot night, and dehydration can play tricks on one's mind.  But Maria allowed herself to believe in illusions for the moment.  They were as necessary as the special weed in her father's cigars that he smoked every time he needed to make a difficult deal, or survive one one that was inflicted on him.   In a world where deals were becoming more inflicted than self-created.

CHAPTER 12

The night was hot enough to make the crickets chirp louder than Jake could remember.  But the tense silence was even louder at his deceased father's, and now ailing mother's, spread.  Particularly as he heard the kitchen door open and addressed the dusty, tired and sweat-soaked arrivalee who drenched her parched throat with a quart of water, then dipped a wooden bowl into a pot of cold beef stew that was more filler than meat. 

 “Where were you?”  Jake asked Maria from his chair at the table.

“Out doing life-assigned errands,” Maria replied as plopped her ass three feet away from him, a distance that felt like 30 or 300.  “How was your day?”

“I was out, doin' survival-required errands,” Jake replied, looking once again at the pile of plated coins and gold dust in front of him that he had confirmed as being real that morning in town.   “Interestin' outfit you chose to do your errands in,” he commented regarding the trousers and shirt Maria had put over her usually more femininely-attired body.

“Riding is easier in trousers than tresses,” Maria replied, her mind focused on filling her gut with stew, before saying Grace or even crossing herself like the other Papists did.  Very unlike her usual refined, warm-hearted and sometimes too uppedy to be understood dinner conversation.   “Easier for you to do business dressed like that than as yourself, Seargent Johnson?”  she continued.

“LIUETENANT Johnson,” Jake replied, looking at the Confederate tunic sleeve stripped of stripes, the shoulders appended with newly-given insignia.  “Easier ta make better deals in town striding into the bar dressed like this than slobberin' in like just plain Jake,” he related.  “With the new, and necessary, war measures, everything's gettin' either more expensive to pay for, or impossible to get.  Even harder ta barter for.”

“And that money in front of you, is what you got from making easier barters?” Maria inquired, looking straight into Jake's eyes, allowing him to answer any way he wanted to, or had to.

After smiling back at her, with eyes that held back more secrets than he had ever held back from her, Jake looked down at the gold plated coins and authentically-verified gold dust on the table.   “Sometimes ya stumble into money that the law says ya should have, but the Good Lord says ya ain't entitled to,” he said by way of explanation for the gold his father Frank left to him as his last will and testament. Gold that had been stolen from the Alamo, by a coward.  Or an infatuated fool who abandoned his Comrades at the fort, and his wife and child at home for what he thought was love of another woman.  

“So, what are you going to do with that gold that 'accidently' found its way into your hands?” Maria asked, clenching her fist hard around the spoon so that she would not blast out another political comment about the necessity for 'war measures' to be more vigorously inflicted on Union sympathizers or neutrals than Confederates.   

Jake wanted, and maybe needed, to tell Maria about where he got the gold, and the low life who he had worshiped as a saint that stole it.   Normally Maria would listen, and have something smart, and appropriate that would make him see things in a clear and honest way.  But clear and honest was the last thing that had happened between Jake and Maria since the final toast with Hans when he returned home as Maria's sister.  And it was not only about being on opposite sides of the war.    It would be easy for Jake to hate Maria, and politically useful as well.  But one thing got in the way of all of that.  Jake still loved her, more than he loved anyone else.  And she seemed to love him. Which made all the more painful the next thing out of Maria's stew-filled mouth.

“You and Sally DeVries have a good picnic today between deals?”  she asked, calmly.  “And a good roll in the hay afterwards?  Your mother said you two got together last week and were---”

“---You know that my Mama's mind went sour on her since the diptheria hit her, and that she's livin' in a reality that ain't real!”  Jake barked back.

“So, you're inferring that you may be in love with someone else.  One of your own, as your Mama calls her,”  Maria continued in a calm, controlled voice, helping herself to one of the rolls on the table.

“No. Or course I ain't!  There ain't nothin' between me and Sally DeVries except the pipe dreams her Pa and my Ma  have about dancin' at our weddin'!”  Jake protested. He arose from the table and paced around the kitchen, aroused at every level possible.  “Why would you even think of askin' me if I'm in love with someone else!!!”  he exclaimed, pulling the busquit out of Maria's mouth.

“To see how you'd respond,” Maria smiled.   “Love and hate are the same thing, and the opposite of love is indifference.”

“Which means?”  Jake blasted back at Maria.

“That there's still hope for us,” she said, taking his shaking hand gently into hers.  Then kissing it.  “I do love you, you know.”

“It'd be a good thing if you could show some respect for my family then,” Jake replied.  “Like keeping your word and taking care of my Ma instead of going out on errands.”

“She didn't seem to want my company,” Maria replied after an angry sigh. “And besides, Thelma is better at cooking for her and listening to her lies like they were truths than I am,” she smiled back. “Speaking of which, where is Thelma?  I didn't see her on my way back from....”

“---From where?”  Jake interjected.  

“Necessary errands,”  Maria replied, tight lipped.

“Errands that are gettin' harder to stop you from doing,” he replied.   “My job of protecting you is gettin' harder.  And yer makin' it impossible.”

“I see,” Maria said, overcome with what first appeared to be a full stomach.  Then a head full of hell fire that could put out by eighty days of the kind of floods the the Good Book told about.  “I'll make your 'job' easier.”  Maria got up from the table, retrieved her burrowed Stetson, and stormed out the door.  She baracaded it from the outside.

By the time Jake pushed open the door, Maria had packed up a fresh horse, ponying the one she came in with.  “Where are you going?”  Jake said, armed folded. 

“California, in the end,” she replied.  

“With Hans?”  Jake pressed.

“With anyone who wants to come with me,” she replied.  “Anyone who has the good sense to know that the only ones who win this war are the people who have the brains or balls to leave it!”

“You're not going anywhere on that horse,” Jake said.

“Because this probably 'legally-acquired according to war measures' steed has a Confederate brand on its ass?  Like maybe the one burnt into your thick head?”  she replied, preparing to mount the steed.   “Tell me why I shouldn't leave and never come back, Jake.”

“Because, Maria!”  Jake blasted out.  “That horse is---”  

“---YOUR property, Lieutenant Jake?!”  Maria continued, pounding the rest of her gear onto the saddle of the most muscular horse in the coral and most intelligent eyes. 

“Because that animal ain't ready to go where you want to take it,” he replied, gently.  

“I say where I go, and Nobody else does,” Maria blasted out as her last word. 

Before Jake could grab the reins, or a clear perspective as to what he should say, Maria mounted the horse, prodded it on with the spurs she had taken from the kitchen wall, and got taken for a ride that was more up and down than forwards.   After holding on for two bucks, the horse decided that rearing was the best way to free itself of a rider who had not been educated as to the protocol the horse had just been taught.

After several expressive curses in Spanish, and a few she had learned in German from the Freethinkers, Maria pulled herself up onto her aching knees. 

“This mare doesn't take kindly to spurs,”  Jake said by way of explanation as he tried to help up, an action that she preferred to do on her own steam and in her own time.  “Otherwise, she's a good horse.  Who's yours,” he said as he handed her the reins when she finally regained use of her feet.  “As long as you give me back what's mine,” he continued, pointing to the spurs on Maria's ankles. “They have sentimental value,” he said by way of explanation, not telling her why.  

Maria pulled off the spurs left to Jake by his father, threw them on the ground, then kicked them into a pile of manure.  Jake felt the impulse to say something like 'appropriate, given the shithead who wore them once', but he kept silent.  There would be 'One more secret between us ain't gonna hurt anymore than I'm hurtin' now' he thought, but didn't say.   

Maria seemed to think the same as she repacked the riding horse.  “There's still room for you to come with me,” she said to Jake.  “California's got lost of elbow room.  And opportunities.”

“So does Texas,” Jake replied.

“For your people, not mine, not anymore,” she said. 

Maria walked then trotted away from the ranch.  Jake felt his heart fall apart.   And not only because Maria was heading to California without him.  Maybe after the War he would see her again.   A war in which he would probably see his even closer friend Hans  from the opposite side of one battle line or another.   Jake looked up the sky to plead his case for what he yearned for most.  “Lord, if you can't make Maria and Hans see the error of their political folly, please protect them from the bullets that will be fired at them.  Especially if it's from my gun.”

“You're best rid of them both,” Jake heard from a voice in his past.  The bearer of such walked up behind him, slowly and deliberately, then laid her ice cold hand on his shoulder.  “Maria's no good for you, and even if she was, how would you raise the youngins?   Sure as Jesus I won't see my grandchildren bein' raised by no Papist Mexican,”  Jake's mother continued in a voice that was not only free of a death-rattle, but saner and sounder than it ever had been.

Jake couldn't believe his eyes when he saw his ailing mother, a breath away from death's door, standing on her own two feet, holding her head up high, wearing the apron that had been her trademark during the lean years after 36 when she could barely hire a mule to assist in her labors, the acquisition of Colored slaves being economically unthinkable.

“You were dying,” Jake said to her, 

“I just might be, and probably am,” she said, with her death voice again.  “But in the meantime, with the little time the Lord gave me as a reprieve, you come inside and let me cook you a proper supper inside.  More tasty and nutritious than what Thelma, well meaning Colored as she is, thinks is good cooking.   While you clean up this mess out here.”

Jake's mother walked, then hobbled, back into the house.   Jake cleaned up the mess left behind by the bucking horse.  Everything the mare had busted was fixable, one way or another.  Except for a crumbled up letter in Hans' handwriting, that Jake surmised fell out of Maria's pocket.   He dared to read it.  He wished he hadn't.

“What's that you're reading, Jake?”  Mama Johnson inquired.

“Nothin' Ma,”  Jake said as he crumbled up the letter, and stuck it into his tunic pocket.  It would be the first of many other lies he would tell himself, his mother, and everyone else who had the misfortune of still being in his life, God help them.

CHAPTER 13

Sixty-five German Freethinkers accompanied by John Samson assembled on August 1, the year of other people's Lord 1862 at Turtle Creek, just outside of Dallas.  A place not very populated with people, but generously endowed with water and trees on the waterbanks to hide whoever had arrived.    Hans cooked a pot of beans under one of the trees for someone he never thought he would be preparing food for three weeks earlier.  A very valued diner indeed, whose review of the 'biochemistry that you eat' mattered more to him than he ever thought possible.

“So, it is beans, stew of chili?”  Franz Schmitt asked his nephew.

“That depends on your perspective,”  Hans mused, offering him a coffee-tin filled with the brew.   

It took three more coffee cups worth of tasting for the old man to give the young man his opinion.  “It loses everything in translation, but whatever it is.  It is very very good.”

“WAS very good,” Hans said as he put his own tin into the pot, finding it nearly empty.  

Oncle Franz smiled, then laughed.

“So, what lesson am I supposed to learn with this joke of yours?”  Hans inquired, hearing as well as feeling the emptiness of his stomach.

“That you should not judge your own work by someone else's opinions,”  the old man informed the young man as he got up, then gave him two suasages and a chunk of cheese from his saddlebag.  “Your turn to eat now,”  he said. “And my turn to talk.”

Hans filled his belly with much needed food, while listening to his Onkle Franz blabber on in Hoch Deutch, then Bavarian.   The old man waxed poetically about heroic tales of Hans' father in the 1848 Revolutions against the tyrants in Europe.   And accurately, so it seemed.  Hans finally accepted his legacy of following in his father's footsteps, until his Onkle informed Hans about what he would do in the fight against Slavery in America, with a particular that he did not take kindly to.

“I didn't join you here in this exodus from the Conscription in Texas to join the Union Army in New Orleans,” Hans protested.  

“And you can stop the evils of slavery by writing about it in that book you are writing!”  Franz blasted back at him.  

“My father wrote many books that changed people's minds,”  Hans replied.  “No... He wrote books that REVOLUTIONIZED their spirits!”

“After he fought in those revolutions, my dear, deluded Comrade,”  Franz related.  

“By saving lives of his fellow revolutionaries, and even some tyrants, and some of the tyrants' soldiers,”  Hans pointed out. “According to the stories YOU told me about him!”   

“And getting himself killed,” Franz growled back.  “But, we can have that discussion when we get to Mexico.”

“Where Maria will be very helpful in getting us food, shelter and, boats, for whoever wants to sail to New Orleans to join this First Texas Union Cavalry which---”

“---Maria is joining us in Mexico then?”  Franz interjected, shocked and angered.  

“She'll connect with us en route to the the Rio Grande,”  Hans replied.  “Soon after we go through Urdale.”

“What else did Major Teneger tell you about where we were going, and how?!”   Franz asked his nephew with angry eyes, and a suspicious  heart.  “Or more to the point, what did you tell Maria?”

“That I love her,” Hans replied.  “In a letter to be read by her only.”

“A prediction which I hope is accurate,”  Franz said. “For ALL of our sakes.”

“I trust Maria more than I trust you, Major Teneger, and myself,”  Hans said.

“Yes, I do too,” Franz conceded.  “Or should.”

“So, there are no more problems between us, Oncle Franz?”  Hans inquired.

“That depends on what you wrote in that letter to Maria,” he replied. “And if you promised her that you would let your children be baptized as Catholics who are trained to fear rather than question God.”

“And if I did?”  Hans inquired. 

Franz thought long and hard, then finally provided his answer.  “We'll have to initiate a war of ideals and ideas against the Catholics,” he smiled.  “While of course questioning our own views of the world while doing so.  But in the meantime,” he continued, reaching into his saddlebag, hiding what he retrieved inside his shirtsleeve. “Some sacrificial schnops for both of us, as we invite the God WITHIN and not above us, join us.”

It was a bottle of 126 year old brew from the family Schmitt's very private cellar.  The only bottle that was spared being destroyed or stolen by the soldiers in the Old Country when they sacked the farms owned by every Schmitt they could find. A bottle that Onkle Franz kept on the mantel over the fireplace of his Texas home, to be opened on the day when Hans grew up to be 'a man who was equal to his father.  Nay, for the day when Hans would surpass his father'.   The schnops had a kick to it that put Hans' spirit into a place his brain didn't recognize, and his spirit embraced.  A toast which perhaps was more appropriate to have with Maria, but which had to be taken now.  For reasons his mind celebrated, but his spirit feared.

CHAPTER   14

Maria had one stop to make on her way to meet up with the Freethinkers.  It was out of the way, but then again, her life had stopped being a logical straight line from A to B, now converted now into a convoluted curved path or possibly a vortex.  But all vortexes lead to one place, ultimately, in the end.   She looked at the marker on one such place.   

“It's the best I could do,” she said to the marker, leaning on the shovel she had just used to dig the graves.  “I know you wanted to be buried on your own land. Our ancestors' land.  But the law now has something to say about that. And as for cemeteries, it's hard enough to get permission to bury a Tejano in an Anglo cemetery.  Impossible to be allowed to bury a Union sympathizing Tejano with a Union activist daughter,”  she continued.

Maria took off her hat and placed it on the board into which she had carved her father's name with the knife he kept at his side since the 1836 stand against Santa Anna at San Jacinto.  She felt the resharpened blade of that stabbing instrument, and converted it to a cutting impliment, separating her three foot long braid from her head at its base.   She transected it in two, then gently tied it around the wooden cross bearing her father's name.  The other half of her thick, braided hair she wrapped aroung the T-shaped slab of wood marking the resting place of her mother.  “It's the best I can do,” she confessed to both of them, with tears in her eyes.  “I'll write to my sisters and tell them what happened, and maybe they will be allowed to give their last respects.  Unless this plot of desert grows something valuable on top of the ground or someone discovers something cashable under it.  Or the Comanches decide that they're in need of clothes and don't mind the smell of dead flesh on them,” she continued.  “But, please know that your grandchildren will know who you were, and what they should be.”

Maria normally would have said Via con Dias, but 'go with God' seemed so irrelevant.  If the Creator to whom Maria said grace before every meal at the Fernandez hacienda was indeed Alive, He was sleeping. And if He was awake, He was possessed by the the devil.  No other explanation fit a world in which doing the right thing always produced the wrong results.  

Maria lingered as long as she could, then heard from behind her the call of the World.  Or perhaps the Call of Hope, emerging from humanity rather than any angelic saint or divine spirit.  “It's time to go,” an Anglo atop a quarter-horse mustang cross asked her. 
 
“Something that every Tejano should have expected to hear from every Anglo, and eventually does, at the point of gun, when his or her land becomes valuable,” Maria replied as she looked over the land in each of the four directions that had belonged to Mexico for five hundred years, before her people were 'liberated' from Santa Anna by Sam Houston et al.   Then auctioned off bit by bit to Anglos after the American President went to war with the President of Mexico in 46.   “Half of what is your country was part of my country.  Including California, which maybe still allows a Mexican or Tejano to achieve the American Dream.  Or so I hope anyway,”  Maria informed the heavily-armed Anglo ranch-hand.  “Do you think we'll ever get any of it back?”  she asked the Texan with the blue eyes, blonde hair and overgrown mustache.  “Would any of you give it back, or share it with us?”  she inquired of the two Anglos to his left, and the smaller two Anglos to his right.  

“I wasn't of the mind ta consider that possibility, we wouldn't be riding with you,” the Head Anglo said.  “But it's well worth takin' into serious consideration.”

That pledge fell far short of the ideal realm the Freethinker Germans had in mind, but it was better than any other promise a Tejano woman could get in Confederate Texas.  So, with that, Maria mounted up, and looked at the sun to determine which direction to go in.  And where to lead the Anglos who decided that it was in their best interest to throw in with the Freethinkers than their fellow Anglo Confederates back home.  What those reasons were, and how they found Maria, was irrelevant.  They seemed honest, and if they were not, they would be turned into sausage meat by the Freethinkers, or the Comanches looking out after their German bretherin.

 Maria had lost the map and letter that went with it ten bucks and five falls ago.  But her sharp mind remembered every detail of the route the Freethinkers were going to theoretically take.  And ingrained in her heart forever were the words from Hans heart, along with the promise at the end of the letter saying, in Spanish, 'it is time for us to make your California dreaming a reality.  And if we get to that Eden, by the God inside us, we will create it.'   Hans' Spanish grammar was as poor as Jake's German, but such made it all that special.   

As for the Anglos with her, they were Texas good ole boys one and all.  “Houstonites”, they called themselves, taking on the name of the deposed Governer of Texas who was removed from office for his objections to slavery as well as refusal to sanction his beloved State's entering into the Confederacy, and a War they would inevitably lose.   Maria considered the irony of it all.  A Tejano woman leading Anglo men in a Revolution within a Civil War?    It was an optimistic Unitarian Freethinker Vision infused with hope, but believing in others beat believing in nothing at all.   The latter most probably being the cause of self-induced death of Maria's beloved father, whose spirit she was determined to resurrect from purgatory, somehow. 

CHAPTER  14

Jake Johnson somehow managed to keep his cattle herd, and those he was put in charge of, growing during one of the hottest and driest summers on record.  If beef could be smuggled through the Yankee blockade, or cattle herded into Southern cities under siege East through Arkansas,  the Cause would never go hungry.   But sending out green horses before they were ready, or working old nags that were best fit to put out to pasture, or re-conditioning lame steeds that should be put out of their misery was another story, that was another matter.  As for horses for the growing number of recruits in the Texas 33rd Cavalry, Jake was strongly of the mind that if you volunteered yourself to be a gallant soldier atop a horse, you should also provide your own horse.  After all, horses are bigger targets for bullets, cannon balls and sabres, and never get asked if they want to risk their lives for the Stars and Bars or the Red, White and Blue.  But, Lt. Lilly had other ideas. Ideas that were being listened to around the kitchen table while Jake was hard at work outside the main ranch-house trimming the feet of yet another 'legally acquired' horse whose hoofs had overgrown so much, that he feared they were foundered underneath.

“Sorry, son,” Jake said to the horse as it flinched when he pressed his pinchers into the frog. “Yer coffin bone's rotated and slipped.  Your other leg is worse.  I can try to do some corrective shoeing, which may fix it.  That is IF you got another last hurrah in ya to cheat the reaper.”

Jake listened to what the long in the tooth old horse answered with his eyes.  

“I understand,” he said, as he stroked the steed's once thick and now thinnly muscled neck.  “Yer tired of livin' and maybe scared of dyin', but I hear tell that good souls get reincarnated inta lucky ones, like maybe next time yoo bein' owned by a man who's worthy of bein' called human, and humane.”  Jake pulled out his pistol, giving the horse the option of accepting the lead inside of it.

The horse blatthered out a 'yes' with his tongue, then turned his head towards Jake.  

“Alright then,” Jake said, holding back the tears from coming down his hard, weather-beaten face.  Collecting himself, he grabbed hold of the reins.  “I'll just discretely lead you out to the back forty, tell whoever thinks they own you now that you made a run for it and---”

Before Jake could offer any other words of comfort or explanation to the horse he found himself loving almost as much as his own, a voice from inside the main house called him in. “Lieutenant Johnson, front and center, now!”  Captain Duff yelled out through the freshly-opened window.   

Jake had never heard Colin Duff scream like that.  And when Jake walked into the kitchen, he felt every set of eyes around the table looking at him like they all wanted a turn beating his ass raw behind the woodshed.  

“What's going on?”  Jake asked a disappointed Lt. McCrea, a smirking Second Lt. Lilly, and finally his mother.

“Your mother found this in your uniform pocket, when she got out of her sick bed to do YOUR laundry,”  Duff growled, showing Jake the crumbled up letter and map Hans had given Maria, which he picked up after she had been tossed from the horse she burrowed from him on her way to a permanent departure.  “You wanna explain it?”  he said, throwing it into Jake's chest.

“I don't know,” Jake replied, picking it up of the floor and pretending to read it for the first time.  “My fiancee must have dropped it on when she---”

“---went off to join the Union Army, and took five of my best ranch-hands with her!”  Duff screamed at the top of his lungs.   “We suspected that the Freethinkers were collecting arms, many of them not their own, and that they were going to join the Union Army in New Orleans.”

“Or maybe forming a guerilla group right here to bushwack us, or form themselves into an Army with new recruits along the way to wherever they're going. An Army that's gonna take over Texas!” Lilly offered.

“Eighty Dutchy Freethinkers in farmer overalls against eighty thousand Texan Confederates in uniform who---”   Jake mused, stopping himself after noting that once again his mouth yapped out more than he should have.

“And you know there are eighty Freethinkers in the 'Treurer von Union'  because?”  Lilly inquired, casually blowing smoke from his pipe into the tense and hot air.   

Jake remained silent, caught with his pants down and all of the cats out of the bag. 

“Maybe, out of respect to your father Frank, who died at the Alamo so we could have this conversation here, we should let Lieutenant Johnson have a lawyer plead his case at a proper Court Martial,”  McCrea suggested to Duff.  

“Or prove his innocence and loyalty by joining us in apprehending these Freethinker farmers,”  Lilly offered.

“And the Tejano bitch who probably put them on the warpath against us, and who no doubt told Captain Duff's best ranchhands Union lies with her demon possessed Papist Mexican tongue,”  Mama Johnson offered.  “She's got the power of a witch, ya know. And has to be contained.  Along with that Dutchy deserter Doctor who tried to pass himself off as Maria's sister.”  

Before Jake could figure out how his Mother could see through Hans' feminie disguise when no one else he know could, including himself, he heard his old freind's name spoken by a new enemy.

“Hans Schmitt?”  Lilly said, taking out a black book in which the names of the most wanted were penciled in, with blood-red ink.  

“Deserter who left his post.  Coward who abandoned the Cause for a woman he thought he loved.  No lower varment in God's creation lower than that,”  Mama Johnson blasted out, with no tinge of rattle in her lungs, and no intention of dying till she reached her 90th birthday.”

Jake stared at his mother, yearning to tell her the truth about her sainted husband.  The man who she set up as a standard for all other men.  The man whose love for her kept her alive for so many years.   All Jake had to do was to show his mother the letter her 'dear hero' Frank wrote as his last will and testament and the hell-fire brewing in her toxic soul would be put out forever.  Along with, of course, any goodness the old woman may have in her.  

“Somethin' you wanna say to all these gentlemen?”  the elderly woman who Jake now saw as simply an old hag smiled at him.  “An apology, or perhaps a proposal for how you can redeem yourself for your moral miscalculations and inaccurate perceptions?”

“I take them to you, and you bring them all in alive,” Jake said.  “Let the courts deal with them, legal like.”

“Our exact intention,” Lilly smiled.  “Correct, Captain Duff.”

“Indeed yes,” Duff said.  “Lieutenant McCrea will be given a hundred men.  You, Second Lieutenant Lilly, will be under his command.  And you, CORPORAL Johnson,” he continued, looking at Jake, while tearing off the officer's insignia on the uniform.

“Will earn those bars back as soon as this is over, correct Captain Duff?”  Mama Johnson said to the recently widowed gray-haired, battling her eyelids at him with an inviting smile.  “As a favor to me,” she continued as she showed the old man a look at her still young bussum.  “And a tribute to my departed but never forgotten hero, Frank Johnson,” she said as she poured apple cider into four glasses, insisting that everyone drink.  Most importantly, her prodigal son Jake.  

“To, Captain Johnson,” she said by way of toasts. “Mayor Duff, and Captains Lilly and McCrea.”

The cider tasted as sour as the smiles of Jake's fellow officers were wide.  Without having been in the War, Jake had already had enough of it.  And now, he was forced to be instrumental in its continuation.   “Maybe I should have shot myself along with that horse,” he lamented, silently.  “But where there's life there's hope,” he prayed, to a God he hoped was still listening.  And on whatever side of the War that was Right.

CHAPTER 15

The sun set on a warm August 9th and left behind a hot night in its wake.  The moon was full, the crickets sung loudly on the generously wooded banks of the Nueces River.   It had been a long, but leisurely sojourn for the Freethinkers on their exodus to Mexico, and beyond, with not so much as a saddle-sore to make the journey uncomfortable.   Nothing had impeded their progress, and even the coyotes kept their distance from the camp they set up.   Major Teneger was grateful to the Comanche braves for their escort, but asked then demanded that they go back home, so they wouldn't get pulled into another unnecessary war with the Anglo Pale faces.  

For the over-principled men who drank, talked or ate too much that evening, it was time to sleep. For Hans, it was time for reflection.   As was the custom and necessity of philosophers of old, he distanced himself under a low-lying cottonwood tree several stone's throws from the people he was writing about and who inspired him.   At 1 AM, according to the watch left to him by his father, he had finished writing another three chapters in his book.  Insightful ones, according to the best of his perceptions, a process of channeling the Truth of it all rather than formulating it.  His wrists were tired.  His eyes were seeing two or three pencils in front of them. And his mind needed to find a few more natural bridges to pull together the fragmented thoughts going through his soul.  A surprisingly contented soul.

But long periods of contentment were inevitably interrupted by unexpected incursions of challenge.   A large bear-like man with a thick, full beard stomped in behind Hans, taking his seat on a rock next to him.  He helped pulled out two thick cigars from his pocket, offering one to Hans.

“No thanks, I need to keep a clear head,”  Hans replied to the man who was more bear than human regarding the 'happy weed' infused cigars Maria had taken from her father's secret stash on her way to the Camp.  “But, thank you anyway, Herr, eh I mean, Major, eh...I mean Herr Major Teneger,” Hans said with a respectful bow to the man who organized the exodus, and maintained the Freethinker community for the last decade in a land of no-thinking slave-owning Texas yahoos.

“Please, call me 'Fritz',”  Teneger said as he pocketed one of the cigars, enjoying a much needed break from his labors and worries.  “From what Maria and your Uncle told me, you are more deserving of being called 'Herr' than I am, Doctor Schmitt,” Teneger replied with an even more subservient and respectful bow.  “A Doctor who serves friends, enemies and strangers alike.”

“Someone who would like to,” Hans said.  “As long as they give me enough time to write about their souls.  And that I don't have to do it wearing ANY kind of uniform.”

“Sometimes, uniforms are necessary,” Teneger said. “As are wars. Such as when we have to struggle against Texans, whose Congress requires, by law, that they have to give special approval for a slave owner to liberate his property, and if that enlightened slave owner doesn't agree to it, that property goes up for public auction to the highest bidder.”

The first image of someone who would be afflicted by such in Hans' mind was Thelma, and her son.  Who had been bought, then liberated a moment later, by Juan Fernandez, during the very past days when the business-smart Tijano was to cajol more money out of the Anglos than they had stolen from him.   And Thelma's son, all heart and no brains who had the misfortune of being built like Hercules.   Maybe Thelma stayed on with Jake, who kept his word to treat her like an employee rather than a slave.  Or maybe she was on the run to Mexico or Canada herself, if she was smart about it.  

“Yes, Herr Doctor Schmitt, despite all you have seen and done, you are better at seeing the world as it should be than than knowing how how it is,” Teneger offered as a grandfather, older brother and friend.  “A gift, that someone has to have, and give to whoever is able to receive it,” he smiled, sadly.  Knowing that he would not be able to be one of its recipients.   “But it is your choice to join the Texas First Union Cavalry when we reach New Orleans.  And that Tejano 'lad' who accidently ran into us two days ago.”

Hans took in a deep breath, preparing for another lecture from Teneger regarding his rule of having only men on this exodus.   “Maria proved herself to be as brave as any man here,”  Hans said. 

“Yet hardly able to pass herself off as a man, despite the haircut she gave herself on the way here,”  Teneger.  “To tell the truth of it all, you were more convincing as a woman than she is as a man.  And if you decide to trade genders wherever you wind up, it might be an interesting experiment.  Certainly not one I would condemn or judge.  But as for others...”

 “I know, the last taboo,” Hans mused, recalling how he had learned to derived some enjoyment from the deception of the necessity of his posing as a silent woman amongst very vocal men while collecting intelligence information for the Freethinkers as a the deserter that the Confederates wanted most of all.  “Something on the agenda in the next century after we convince people in this century that there is only ONE human race, and variations in skin color say as much about what is on the inside as whether a brown, black or white horse is better to ride on, rope from or race with.”

Horse talk led Hans to think about Jake, the most natural horseman he ever knew, or would ever know.  

“You're thinking about your old friend,” Teneger noted.

“Our new enemy, so Maria tells me,”  Hans replied.  

“A plague that has afflicted us all,”  Tegener added, holding back more details about the particulars as was always his way.  “But one which will be treated and cured after the Confederacy is defeated by the Union.”

“Or crumbles on itself, from the inside?”  Hans offered, and asked.  “The Union Navy blockade is doing more damage to the Confederacy without firing a shot than any of Lincoln's armies on the ground.  So I have heard, and seen.”  

“Or hoped,” Tegener replied.  He looked at the woods, and the quiet of the night, taking a final puff of the cigar.  “You know what they say about quiet.”

“It comes before a lot of noise?”  Hans inquired.

True to Hans' intuitions, the quiet was interrupted by voice behind him that shattered any semblance of bucolic bliss.  It aroused Tegener's peace of mind as well.

“Maria's singing gets more expressive when she has too much schnops,”  Teneger said regarding the Tejano's off key bantering of German songs sung in Spanish, merging into Spanish songs sung in German.  “But as long as we assign her the job of singing and teaching us to sing in Spanish, it takes her mind off cooking.”  

“True enough, Fritz,” Hans said, feeling uncomfortable about calling the Freethinker he admired and respected most by his first name.   Then he felt liberated about it.  Even more so when Fritz went back to camp, leaving Hans with Maria.  But with one problem.

“I brought you something to eat,” Maria said to her beloved, offering him a generously topped tin plate of beans, meat and assorted legumes that glowed in the moonlight. “Which the company cook prepared,” she assured him.  “I thought you would be hungry,” she said as she nuzzled next to him.  Far more passionate than ever before.  As if the goddess Venus has possessed her soul, asked to do so with a gold-plated invitation.
“Eat, please,” she said with a breath loaded with German firewater, her fingertips caressing his forearm then chest.

“Maybe you should eat something too,”  Hans said, recalling that the easiest way to dull the unleashed destructive passions of a drunk or divert such into slumber is to fill their bellies with food.   

“We play first, then eat,” Maria whispered into Hans' ear as her fingers reached their way to his navel, then the regions underneath it.  Regions that were aroused, despite his mind knowing that this was the wrong time for what he had been yearning for ever since he set eyes on Maria.  Wrong for her as well.

“Maybe we should just get some sleep,” Hans said to her, gently putting his hand on the penile erection which was emerging.  

“Maybe you should get some fun into you,” Maria said, offering Hans a drink from the bottle.  “Here, Doctor Hans.  Medicine prescribed by nurse M...M......who am I now?”

“Someone who I love too much to take advantage of,”  Hans replied, looking at the lost look in her smiling face.

“Someone who cut off her hair for you!”  Maria said, running her finger through the three inches that was left of her topknot. “Who cut off my hair for ALL of you!”  she screamed out into the woods, her smiles of delight turning into tears of grief.  “You, father,” she said to a burst of wind that popped up behind a misquite bush.  “You, mother,” she weeped to the branches of a cottonwood tree that swayed in the gentle breeze. “And you, my husband, who tried to save them both and save me, but refused to save yourself!” she blasted out at a very real figure of Jake, holding a pistol in his hand.

Hans raised the business end of his rifle, aiming it at Jake.  Jake pulled out his revolver, pointing the barrel at his old friend.  Maria put herself in the middle of them both.   “So, who's gonna have me?”  she said, bottle in hand and mind somewhere else.     

“You, you, you,” she repeated, turning to Jake, then Hans, presenting each of them different faces of the demon possessing her tortured soul.   Around and around she turned until dizziness took over her brain, and her soul was blessed with unconsciousness.  She fell to the ground like a stone, snoring away in what seemed like a tortured nightmare far worse than anything she had seen with her earthly eyes.

“Maria comes with me, and you go with them,” Jake said to Hans, motioning to several other uniformed Confederate soldiers.  All armed to the teeth.

“And my Comrades?”  Hans asked.  “Who were your friends.  All of your friends!”  he continued.  “Starting with Fred Teneger, whose mill produced most of the bread that kept  you and your families alive during more than one cold, lean winter, and hot, drought summer.   Richard Eisenstein, who told you that the Comanches would leave you alone if they heard you speaking German instead of yapping in what you intentionally under-educated good ole boys call English, and gave you corn pipes to smoke so they would bypass you when they went on the warpath.   And my Onkle Franz Schmitt who gave your youngin's books to read, and shoes to walk to school in?   And---”

“---New world and one that don't take kindly to deserters,”  Hans heard from behind him in a whisper, from a grey coated officer hiding behind a tree, hiding himself from his men on the other side of what could erupt into a battle-line at anytime.  A line that had Maria smack in the middle of it.  

“I'm not going to drop my weapon, Lieutenant Lilly,” Hans informed his captor.  “It's the only language your people seem to understand now.”

“I'm not asking you to drop that rifle,”  Lilly whispered through a smirked. “I'm requiring that you fire it.  At my men.  That is an order.”

“And start a battle when there doesn't have to be one?  No,” Hans said.  “I am done fighting.”

“Maybe so, maybe not,” Lilly said, after which he shot one bullet towards Maria, an inch from her freshly shorn head.  Then another five at the trees in front of his men.  Then ran back behind his lines.  “You heard them, boys.  These Pacifists are soldiers.  Out to kill us.”

“Your mind says 'no', but your cannon says 'yes',” Maria smiled with numbed eyes.  And a numbed soul that had to deal with loss of a mother, father and fiancee, all within a course of two days.   

HANS had seen aftermath of war, but not in combat. Courage overtook him, as a reflex that he didn't think he had.   He fired his way forward, pulling Maria back behind a clump of trees.  She was alive, dreaming about something far more pleasant than the shootout.  And the war that had now emerged between Hans and his fellow Freethinkers.  From the camp, assisting Hans, despite his pleas for them to cease fire, were ten, then twenty, then over forty Freethinkers, shooting back at the Confederates. Joined by the Anglos from Duff's ranch who, despite doubts about their loyalties, were just as adamant at fighting their way to Mexico as the Germans.  

The thin clouds over the moon gave way, adding more illumination to the affair, giving combatants on both sides a clear view of their targets.  
 
Hans self-observed himself dragging the wounded to safety as he shot back at the Confederate lines, providing cover for his own escape.    Not so for a third of the other Freethinkers who fled once they experienced gunfire.   Those who were most boastful about the value of courage over compassion were the first to flea.  Including someone Hans didn't expect.

“Oncle Franz!  Take cover!  Hold your position!  Fire back!”  he yelled out to his Oncle, whose trousers were wet and whose back was turned to the enemy as he ran away.  Whose legs carried him as fast as he could, but not fast enough.

Hans had seen people shot in the back before, mostly officers brought into his hospital who had been wounded by their own men.  But never had he seen man lose his capacity to stand on his own two feet, then his capacity to see what was going on, then the bulk of his cranial matter, which splattered onto a tree with the final shot that did him in.

Teneger yelled out commands to the remaining Freethinkers, now outnumbered 2 to one.   His experience on the baricades in Europe served him well.    Hans' father's pocketwatch recorded the 'skirmish' as a half hour stand off, which sent the Confederates running.  Those that still had functional feet and breathing bodies that is.  

“Bring the wounded back to camp!”  Tenager commanded.  “All of them,” he said, noting three Confederates who had been wounded.  One of them being their leader, Lt. McCrea.

“Like hell you will,” McCrea blasted out, shooting at Hans and two other Freethinkers who ran into no-man's-land to save him.  Rescuing McCrea from the best surgeon on either side of the battlefield was none other than Jake himself, pulling  his commander onto a horse and galloping him safely behind 'the lines'.  

“Your friend will definitely get a promotion for that,”  Teneger commented.  “A brave man. Who we will have to neutralize in a few hours,” he continued, looking at his pocketwatch, seeing that a bullet had shattered it, saving his life in the process.  “Herr Doctor Hans, what time do YOU have?”

“Half past Apocalypse,” Hans replied.  While supervising evacuation of the wounded, his eyes encountered the book he had been writing for the last three years.  The pages were soaked in blood.    As was his soul, particularly when he took note of the two corpses behind a tree where he though he had merely fired warning shots.  “Suppose I should have worn my spectacles when the gunfire started, Jesse, and Marcus,” he said by way of apology to the two Confederate soldiers who he knew as the peace-loving stable owner and the best piano player in the Hill Country before they had put on the Grey.   

CHAPTER 16

“So, two dead, ten wounded,”  Lt McCrea said through flinches as Gillian Roth, tailor turned reassigned to being a surgeon, sewed up the five inch hole in his arm that had been made to extract out a half-inch diameter bullet.  

“Three of those wounded captured, 'Sir',”  still SECOND Lt. Lilly informed his commanding officer.

“And being treated for their wounds better than I could be, no doubt,” McCrea replied as he looked as what was left of his right arm.  “No offense intended, Corporal Roth,” he related to the man who saved him from dying and, so the uni-dextrous McCrea hoped, amputation of his fighting, writing and drinking limb.

“We have to counter attack, Sir,” Lilly insisted.  “And with me in command now, I'll---”

“---make matters worse,”  McCrea said as he asked a newly enlisted 17 years scared private whose name nor face he knew to hand him a his tunic, sabre and pistol.  “We counter attack at dawn.”

“Before dawn, I would suggest, Sir,”  Lilly offered.  “They're no more than one hard days' ride to the Rio Grande.  And as any experienced trail boss knows, it's easier to herd a hundred head of cattle than go chasing strays.”

“And how many strays do we have, Lieutenant Johnson?”  McCrea asked Jake.  

“Twenty two, maybe three,”  said, thankful for being reinstated as an officer serving an Army he still believed in.  “Harmless civilians, mostly.”

“Spies, traitors and potential Yankee sabauteurs,” Lilly barked back.

“Who you, Lieutenant Johnson will pursue tomorrow at first light,” McCrea commanded as he limped over to his saddlebag to retrieve a fresh bandana, hoping the scratch in his leg was not on its way to becoming an abscess.  “While you, Lt. Lilly, assist with the assault on the Germans' camp at dawn.”

“An hour before first light would be better,” Lilly said.  “It worked at the Alamo.”

“Which means that you don't know who you're shooting at,”  Jake asserted.

“We're supposed to be shooting at anything that moves,”  Lilly asserted.  “By State Congressional order!”

“And keeping alive anyONE who surrenders,” Jake barked back.  “According to the Principles of Honor.”

“And the Lieber Code,”  McCrea pointed out to his subordinate who was already putting his Captain bars on his shoulders.  “Which says that prisoners are to be treated humanely.  And not killed because they cause excess trouble or present transportation problems for us.”

“The Lieber Code was made up by a German, gentlemen,”  Lilly pointed out.  “A German working or Abraham Lincoln.”

“Who still has thousands of our boys in Yankee POW camps!”  McCrea barked back.

“Hundreds of thousands, according to what Hans told me, when we were still talking,” Jake added.  

Lilly felt cornered, and finally conceded defeat.  “It seems, gentlemen, that you have employed reason into your discourse regarding our discussion, and projected unravelling of the malestorm before us,”  he said with the demeaner of a Harvard Graduate New Orleans professional gambler.  Using, no doubt, using half of the high fallutin vocabulary that he learned with the express purpose of luring in a better class of hooker, or converting over-educated women visiting San Antone to be so.  

But as long as McCrea could still stand, bark and throw his paternalistic hell fire stare into your soul, Lilly could be handled.  After all, cruelty was something that emerged from ignorance.  And McCrea was as smart as they came in the Confederate Army.  But not as smart as Hans and half of the egghead Germans who still were armed with the best rifles and revolvers available in Texas, and had now been pushed to use them.  With Maria in the crossfire.

CHAPTER  17

Maria took to the make-shift barricades in the outflanked Freethinker camp, its walls made of tilted over wagons, hastily cut down trees, and dead horses.   Armed with a rifle, and most importantly the clear need to use it, she wondered why she was there in the first place.   There were of course the obvious contradictions.  Fighting against conscription by shooting those whose job was to enlist those who refused to be enlisted.   Supporting a President in Washington who supported a Union dedicated to freedom, unless portions of it citizens wanted out of said Union.  Struggling to stay alive when the only thing you really wanted to do was to die, and join your ancestors in the afterlife.   But, there was a strategy to it, or at least a methodology.  And one based in logic.  

Logic and experience proved that Maria, aka Mario for the history books or Major Teneger's roll call list, was a better shot than most of the men around her. Theoretically, if Maria put enough bullets into the legs or arms of the approximately 100 Confederate soldiers who had surrounded thirty or so Freethinkers, they would flee the field or be incapacitated on it.  The latter would be treated by Hans.  The former would bugger off back to good ole boy country with second thoughts about trying to enforce conscription on any White man, or slavery on any Darkie.  Maybe even making them think twice about the consequences of shitting on Tejanos.    As for Lt Lilly, one well aimed shot at his testicals would take the sand out of him, as well as insure that his defective biology would not be passed on to any next generations.

“So,” Maria told herself as she braced for the attack she heard coming from behind the cottonwoods at her station on the barricades.  “This is what the 1848 Revolutions were like for Hans' father in Europe against the oppressive Kings and Capitalists.  And 1836 was like for my father when he made a stand at San Jacinto against Santa Anna, the Napoleon of the West.   This is my chance to prove to myself that I'm making a stand here against whatever is about to come over that ridge in ten seconds.   Whatever it is, I've been rehearsing for it my entire life.  And when you rehearse it enough times, you---”

Maria's baptism of fire interrupted the discourse between her ears, then produced an effect for which she was neither prepared, nor accepting of.   When the first bullets flew over her head she ducked.  When the second volley of lead came over, she cowered.  By the time she heard the rebel yell from the Confederates, she was in a fetal position.  Everything was out of control.  She couldn't move her arms, or legs.   Then she couldn't feel her own skin.  Till something, or someone, dropped on her head, knocking her out.  

Maria woke up to a bright light shining in her face.   The warm, soon to be hot, Texas sun unfortunately.   Even more unfortunate was what she saw from behind a thicket of brush in what had been the Freethinker's Camp.   

Their commander had bandages around his arm and leg, barking out orders between winces of pain from the back of one of the  wagons that the Freethinkers had used to transport books, food and weapons.  Those weapons were now strapped on the backs of the Confederates, or aimed at the former bearers of them.  

“These wounded are to be properly cared for,  Lt Lilly,” the commander told his subordinate.  “As soon as you repair the other wagon that these prisoners were using, it is to be used to transport them to the nearest doctor.”

“Of course, Lt. McCrea,” Lilly saluted back.  

“And after that, to a judge, not a hangman!”   McCrea barked out through an excruciating scream after trying to move his leg so that the enlisted wounded with him would have more elbow room.  

“Understood and appreciated,”  Lilly replied back to McCrea, with a subservient tone that indicated his defeat as an adversary.   And perhaps education as a man.   Which reversed itself as soon as the wagon was out of view.  

Maria recalled the last time she saw the face of demonic possession.  That black day when Lilly had conscripted her favorite bull calf, Alejandro, into the Confederate Army, determining that he was more effective as a corpse than a breeder.   “So, gentlemen,” he said to his men with eyes that turned blood red.  We have been ordered to take care of these wounded properly,” he said as he looked over the recumbent and still very much alive bodies of the wounded Freethinkers, whose identity Maria could not ascertain.   Particularly when the eleven wounded survivors of the assault were pulled up from the ground, gagged, blindfolded, and tied them against the nearest trees. “And it is our Christian and patriotic duty to oblige such.  Starting with, hmmm...who should we put out of his misery first?  I think that the most appropriate man to do this is...yes, you, Corporal not yet officially Lieutenant Johnson,” he said, handing a revolver to Jake.  

“None of you men wanna  do this,” Jake said to his fellow soldiers.  “I've known most of ya'll all my life.”

“Or maybe you don't, know they that is,”  Lilly smirked.  “Jackson, prisoner number one!” he barked out.  

A young private fired one shot into the first prisoner's head, the second into his heart.  His body hung over the rope.   

“Now, collect your appropriate trophy from this Yankee blue-belly spy, and now dead member of the Texas First Union Cavalry,”  Lilly said, throwing Jackson a knife. “Recalling what happened to your brother at Shiloh when he tried to surrender to the Blue Coats.”

After a growl of rage, the private grabbed hold of the Freethinker's hair, and carved off his scalp.   Lilly led the rest of the pack in a rebel yell, as Private Jackson removed an ear, the tongue and finally the testicals.  

Lilly turned to Jake, the only member of the pack who didn't join in.  Lilly handed “Now, Corporal and hopefully soon Lieutenant Johnson, I think it appropriate for you to dispose of the next prisoner,”  he said while handing over the revolver he had given to Jackson.  “It appears that his wounds are beyond repair, and as we all know, a quick death is preferable to a long, painful one in such situations.”

“He's got a flesh wound on his left leg, an a slash on his arm that stopped bleeding, and don't look nor smell like it's infected,” Jake said. “Sir.”

“I beg to differ with respect to that medical opinion, Doctor Johnson,” Lilly said.  After which he put a bullet into the prisoner's left knee.”

“I won't do it,” Jake insisted.  “I won't kill him!”

“Then I'll have to, slowly,” Lilly said, pulling out his knife, inserting under the blindfold, and twisting it into his eye.  “We're doing this to avenge our brothers who died in battle against the blue bellies.  Our sisters who got raped when they invaded our homeland.  And our wives who---”

Before Lilly could spread any more lies, or truths, about the cruelty done to fellow Confederates East of Texas who the stay at home Texans in his detachment considered family, Jake put a bullet into the Freethinkers brain.  Then another into his heart.  

“So, you are one of us now, Lieutenant Johnson,” Lilly said with a courtly bow. 

“This has ta stop!” Jake insisted.  

“And it will, soon enough, Sir,”  replied, after which he shot prisoner number three in the belly, then number four in the chest, then went down the line.   One, then two, then all o the men under his command joined in the kill.  Each seemed to enjoy it.  Particularly when they extracted biological souveneers from their dead and sometimes still living prey.  Proclaiming 'Remember this battle or some other one', from places Maria didn't recognize.     Their clean, very white faces became red with blood.  Maria's face turned red with rage, until a hand drenched in blood grabbed hold of it.

“You're alive, that's good,” Hans whispered as he kept her from getting up. “We have to get out of here,” he continued, pulling her on the ground to three horses hidden in the nearby bush with his left arm.   But it was his right arm that concerned Maria most.

“What happened?”  she said regarding the limb that the uni-dextrous Hans used for putting defected flesh back together and formulating cures for the human soul with a pen afterwards.  

“I got shot in the arm,” Hans said through mad laughter by way of explanation of the blood soaked limb that swung from his shoulder, as he threw Maria on top of one of the horses.  “Maybe if I shot myself in the arm before I was drafted into the Confederate Army, they wouldn't have taken me.”

“But, we have to do something!”  Maria said, looking at the eleventh prisoner as he was finally put out of his misery.   Then saw his corpse being piled up on a heap, that was about to be set ablaze, using the books the Freethinkers had brought with them from Europe back in 48.  And the manuscript Hans had written which he planned to put into print once it was finished.   “What are we going to do?”  Maria insisted.

“Do a re-write of the book, once the three of us get to Mexico,” he said running towards a pair of legs sticking out of the bush.  “Or rather, the two of us,” he said sadly, noting that the Freethinker he had rescued from capture had just died.  

Hans pulled himself on top of his horse, ponying the spare mount.  “We ride, now!”
 
“But Jake!”  Maria said, looking back at the pile of soon to be burnt bodies, being celebrated by every Grey Coated soldier except one, who knelt at the burning pile of flesh and crossed himself, like the Catholics do.  He looked toward Maria, maybe seeing her with his tearfilled eyes, or maybe wanting to.  “What about Jake?”  Maria said.

“He'll have to figure his own way out of this,” Hans replied, after which he slapped Maria's horse in the ass, then spurred on his own.

CHAPTER 18

Along the way to the Rio Grande, Hans saw the bodies of nine other Freethinkers.  All were dead, left for the buzzards.  Maria said a prayer for each of them. Hans buried them as best as he could.    Thanks to intervention of the God within and perhaps above him, crossing over the Rio Grande was easy and ominously uneventful.  Living on the other side was harder than expected, particularly after Hans sat down to write the accounts of it all as the summer of 1862 gave way to the a cooler than normal fall, and a harsher than expected winter.  The penmenship in his left hand was horrible, as was the speed of writing with it.  He dictated what he could of his impressions about life, Texas, the War, 1848, to Maria.   Finally, the last chapter of the book was done.  

“So, it's finished,” Hans said told Maria as he looked at the sun setting over the Western horizon from their humble hut that she somehow converted into a hacienda for whoever came to visit.   

“No it isn't,” Maria pleaded with him.  “We still have to go to California,” she continued, with tears in her eyes.

“And we will,” Hans said, gently stroking her enlarged belly. “Wherever you and Juan go, I will be there too,” he said though breath that was more rattle and blood than air.  

“I'm not going to let you die!” Maria said.  “Who is going to take care of me and Juan?”

“Him,” Hans said, looking up to the sky.  “Or if He won't, Juan's uncle will,” he continued, looking towards Jake.   A down home Texas good ole boy who had taken to wearing sombreros rather than Stetsens.  Who had burnt his Confederate uniform a month ago, offering Hans and Maria a gift of gold plated coins and dust.  “It takes money to build a dream, especially in California,”  Hans noted.  

“It's all gonna go towards writing books that tell the truth about Texas history,” Jake insisted.  “No matter whose mother gets heartbroken, and what family name gets tarnished.”

“Yes, the truth,” Hans said as he looked at through the window.  “That we finally make peace with.”

With that, Hans heard the voice of his departed heroic father welcoming him to the place where all Revolutionaries go to keep fighting.  And winning.  A voice he heard not from the wind, or the silence, but from the womb of his beloved wife, as the fifth month of her pregnancy came about.  All according to the schedule of nature, and the Will of God, and the Promethian determination of man, and woman.