The Texicans Page 7

  “We made our way from the ship in Galveston, but had to leave the women and children behind in San Antonio, to be sent for later,” he said. “I bought the land and will choose how it’s distributed. I’ll build a town right here on the banks of this river. I don’t expect to become rich, but I certainly don’t think I’ll find myself poor. Settlers are as plentiful as air in Alsace, yearning for I know not what. Different lives, ease, comfort. I warned the most enthusiastic of them that there would be hardships, but not too strongly, for to dampen their spirit before they left their homes would have served no purpose. But I do reserve credit to myself for luring even the most wary to come with me.”

  Castro ate slowly and dabbed at his mouth occasionally with a large white handkerchief, which he removed each time from his vest pocket and then replaced. In his well-cut suit with its satin lapels, Castro looked important enough to be president of Texas. And there was hardly a speck of dirt on him. Only the cuffs of his white shirt, sticking out of his coat sleeves, had a few spots on them.

  “The crossing was severe,” Castro said. “Sickness aboard ship took some lives, and when we landed in malarial Galveston, those who were weakened the most from the long sea voyage grew feverish and died. Whole families. I blame myself. I didn’t intend for them to languish there in such a port, where the fog is thick with sickness and death, but they had gone on ahead, and since I was delayed in Paris, I could not warn them to leave for the grant immediately. My responsibility is great, and they complain that I abandoned them to their fate, when the truth is that there were papers to be signed for the land grant, finances to be arranged, colonists to recruit, or there would be no settlement. I left my wife and two sons behind and finally sailed for America, but by the time I arrived, half of those I had sent on ahead were gone. Disappeared. Evaporated. Like kettles of water left on the stove to boil too long. Some dead. Some too frail to travel any further. A few had lost faith that I would arrive at all and headed for Houston or California. Some just wandered away. One man, a butcher from Rheims, drowned in Harrisburg.” He sighed. “The difficulties I have faced in bringing even this small group to Texas cannot be appreciated by ordinary men.”

  A young girl sat on a crate closer to the fire, crocheting a blanket, dipping the bone hook in and out of the line of green yarn. She was the youngest Alsatian in the group, Castro told Joseph. Sixteen years old. An orphan. She was covered in heavy black cloth. Shawl, blouse, long full skirt, hat. All in black. Even her shoes, the toes of which she had burrowed into the mud, were black. Every time Joseph thought he might see the girl’s face, she turned her head, and the multi-tiered hat, which resembled nothing so much as a fluttery bouquet of moths’ wings, dropped down against her cheek like a veil.

  “And what of you?” Castro said. “What brought you to set out for Texas by yourself? Surely, it was more than merely a yearning for adventure.”

  “My brother Isaac died in San Antonio and I’ve come to settle his affairs.”

  “Will it make you a wealthy man, the settling of your brother’s affairs?”

  “It will be my good fortune if he left no debts for me to pay. My brother was an enthusiastic businessman but not always a prudent one. I have no hope of wealth.”

  “You are unusual in that. All men have hope of wealth.”

  “I believe all men have hope of experiencing life to the fullest. It’s a dream that some keep tight inside them and never pursue.”

  “And have you pursued your dreams?”

  “I have done what I wanted to do. Trapped beaver in the valleys of Missouri, taught Latin and Greek and mathematics in a boys’ school in Independence, and have managed not to let any man tell me I had to be in one place when I longed to be in another. I’ve trusted no one, have not been one to cultivate friends, have kept my plans close and my possessions closer. I should not have stopped for the slave, but circumstances overcame me. I could easily have survived if the man had left me my pistol, but without game to sustain me, I would certainly have ended up as food for the wolves. And so you find me, without even a horse to get to San Antonio.”

  “Yours are not the only plans that have been disrupted,” Castro said. He glanced at the girl. “Katrin’s brother August died of fever in Galveston soon after they arrived. Katrin herself almost died of it. When my wife and sons arrive from France, she’ll live with us. Maybe one of my sons will marry her. There aren’t many girls for young men to marry in Texas.”

  The girl kept crocheting, grimacing slightly as she pushed the bone hook back and forth through tiny loops of yarn.

  “It’s your good fortune that you encountered no Indians,” Castro said.

  “Not a one. If there are any, they’re as rare as penguins.”

  “I saw quite a few corpses as we traveled here from Galveston.”

  “Killed by Indians?”

  “Some by sickness, most by Indians.”

  “I’ve seen no Indians,” Joseph said stubbornly. “I don’t doubt that there are a few who are angry enough at the white man’s encroachment on their lands to kill—but my opinion is that the settlers spread the stories so as to keep others from coming and taking the land.”

  Katrin looked up from her crocheting and suddenly Joseph could see her face clearly. Patches of yellow hair, fine as a baby’s, curled at her forehead. And what he had thought was a smudge of dirt on her chin was really a little brown freckle. She had a sharp nose and full lips, and the way her round cheeks glowed in the firelight reminded Joseph of polished river pebbles. Separately her features were acceptable. Putting them all together, she wasn’t particularly pretty.

  “My brother August,” she said to him and reached inside the pleated bodice of her black dress and pulled out a locket that hung from a thin gold chain. A dark curl was pressed against the chin of the pale-eyed boy in the portrait inside. “All the hair from August fall out from the fever before he died. Mine, too. It start to come in now, but very thin and ugly, and I think maybe never it will be the way it was. My hair was so thick, and August was always saying it was better to look at than my face. August was good to me. Sometime I cry when I think on him.” She snapped the locket shut and let it drop back inside the bodice of her dress and resumed her crocheting. She had the ball of yarn tucked inside the sleeve of her dress and yanked at it every once in a while to free up a strand.

  “Do you obey the dietary laws?” Castro asked Joseph. “I note you have left the pork on your plate untouched.”

  “I don’t obey any laws. I just don’t eat pork.”

  “I’ll ask Tomás to prepare a fried egg, then. The eggs are fresh, laid by our own chickens this morning.”

  “I’ve eaten five biscuits. I’m quite content.”

  “I promised you a meal,” Castro said, and he called for the cook, a short, flat-faced man wearing a beaded strip of leather around his forehead.

  “You don’t like my stew,” the cook said to Joseph.

  “I enjoyed the cornbread biscuits,” Joseph said, “but I don’t eat pork.”

  “A hungry man eats whatever is cooked for him,” the cook said and walked away.

  “I hired Tomás in San Antonio,” Castro said. “A very good cook, but surly. Is your objection to pork based on health considerations?”

  “It’s based on habit.”

  “I have another meaning in mind. Perhaps I am not sufficiently plain spoken.”

  “I believe you to be very plain spoken.”

  “Then permit me the indulgence of inquiring further of you—and I don’t mean to question you too closely, or cause you embarrassment, but I confessed my Jewishness to you, and I wonder—and of course, only if it does not violate some personal reticence of yours— are you also a Jew?”

  “I’m not embarrassed or reticent, and yes, I am a Jew.”

  “That comforts me.”

  “I have heard that said before, and the sentiment mystifies me. I find you no different in my eyes since your confession than before.” “The comfort I take is
not in any exclusivity, but in a sense of communion. You and I must be the only two Jews on the Texas plains.”

  “And the others that you have brought with you?”

  “Some are Lutherans. But most, like Katrin, are Catholics. One in my position must accept all kinds. Mexicans, Alsatians, Lutherans, Catholics. I try to deal with everyone in the same fashion. My Alsatians are simple, uneducated people, with little understanding of people unlike themselves. I eat pork without hesitation and do not pray or wear a beard, and I try to conform my appearance to theirs, where possible. Have you ever been to Alsace?”

  “I was born in Poland, but remember none of it. My brother Isaac said they hate Jews in Poland even more than they do here.”

  “It is my opinion that it isn’t Jews the gentiles object to as much as the peculiarities of Jewish life. Strange dress, strange food, strange rituals. I take it you are not a religious man.”

  “I never think of religion. My brother Isaac was religious and as a boy I tried to please him in that regard. I don’t know exactly what it is that makes me say I’m a Jew. At times I even forget that I am. Pork was served regularly at the boarding house in Independence, and I regularly declined to eat it. I realized that pork was the only thing left to remind me of my Jewishness, and so I suppose I will continue to refuse to eat it. I tried it out of rebellion as a young man. I purposely sat down to a meal of bacon and pork dumplings. I wanted, I suppose, to prove to myself that Isaac didn’t have complete control of my behavior. I couldn’t eat it. I couldn’t get it down.”

  “Were there many Jews in Independence?”

  “I knew very few. I was the only Jew at the Independence Missouri Boys’ School. I was well received and respected as a teacher, although I never hid from anyone the fact of my lineage. It was the first thing I revealed. I wanted no whisperings behind my back.”

  “We had Jews in Alsace,” Katrin said. “August sold the jewelry from our dead mother to a Jew for to pay our passage, and he cheat us. He give us too little. August said Jews always do that.”

  “I remember once in Independence,” Joseph said, “I was with Isaac and someone said something about Jews, and I can’t even remember what it was, but I remember Isaac saying to me, ‘If I were a fighting man I’d fight right now,’ and I was younger than Isaac, and stronger, and so I fought the man. I remember the way the man’s face looked with the blood running out of his nose.”

  “She’s only sixteen,” Castro said when Katrin began to cry. Joseph said she wouldn’t be crying if she hadn’t said what she did, and he moved away from her and Castro and went and sat by himself near where Tomás was putting the remains of the food into covered tins. Tomás murmured something in Spanish that Joseph didn’t understand. Then he put the last tin away and rolled a cigarette.

  “I’ve been a devoted user of tobacco since I was fourteen,” Joseph said.

  Tomás reached inside the pocket of his overalls and produced a small packet of tobacco and a bit of cigarette paper and handed it to Joseph.

  “Castro thinks Mexicans are cattle,” Tomás said in English. “When he’s through building his little town, he’ll let us loose.”

  Joseph rolled the tobacco into the paper and stuck a twig into the campfire to light it. “I’ve never known any Mexicans.”

  After supper one of the Alsatians brought out a fiddle and started to play a catchy tune. Katrin sat on the tongue of one of the carts, bouncing in time to the music, frissons of yellow hair sparking from beneath her bonnet. The blanket-wrapped Mexicans, who had been working on the shelters since early afternoon, cutting reeds and sorting them for size, then standing them up and tying them together, appeared not to need to rest, but worked steadily except for when they stopped to eat, and then they ate sitting in the mud and had a good time laughing at stories that Joseph wished he could understand. Castro passed around a bottle of cognac, letting each of the Alsatians take a sip right from the bottle. He held the bottle out to Joseph and Joseph put it to his lips. When he gave it back to Castro he asked him why he wasn’t offering any to the Mexicans.

  “Disease,” Castro said. “They are an unhealthy lot. Good for laboring, but wherever they are sickness goes with them. It would be best if you reserved your friendship for the Alsatians. I assure you, not all of them think unkindly of Jews. They followed me here. They listen to my instructions and are content in my company. As for Katrin, she’s a young girl and doesn’t understand. I invite you to stay with us and let us prove our goodness to you.”

  “I have business in San Antonio.”

  “I’m sure your business in San Antonio can wait. Your brother is a dead man, after all, and has no pressing needs.”

  “That may be, but his business partner expects me. And as for staying here, I have no money for land. The forty dollars I brought from Missouri galloped away from me two months ago.”

  “I’ll lend you what you need, just as I have the others.”

  “I don’t take money from anyone.”

  “It will be a loan. Surely, you have no objection to a loan of a farm of forty acres, plus a lot in town for your house to start you off. Plus the use of oxen and ploughs and seed, and until you’re self-sustaining I’ll feed you at my expense. All you need do is cultivate the parcel I lease to you and in time buy it from me. A teacher of mathematics will be valuable to me. You can do my accounts and act as my deputy when I’m away. For that I’ll give you twelve dollars a month and a horse. What do you say to my proposition?”

  “I will have to think about it.”

  Joseph glanced over at Katrin. Just looking at her gave him an unpleasant feeling. And as for the others, Castro may have lured them to Texas with stories of riches to be had, but he wasn’t going to be able to persuade all of them that ownership of a piece of sun-bleached, dried- out, bog-filled land was an improvement over what they had had in Alsace. Already some of them looked uneasy, and Joseph could see the beginnings of disappointment in their faces. It was as if they didn’t know where they were or how they got there. Most were speaking German, but some, like Castro, were speaking English, and Joseph could catch snatches of complaint as they huddled around the campfire.

  “Have you ever thought of marrying?” Castro asked.

  “Never.”

  “You say that most emphatically.”

  “I mean it most emphatically. A man with a wife and family is obligated to them. I’ve been determined to live my life without obligation.”

  While they were talking a bolt of lightning cracked overhead, and the Alsatians scrambled beneath the wagons. The Mexicans dropped the reeds they had gathered and covered their heads with their blankets. A glaciate wind howled over the river. Then the rain started. Heavy, torrential and cold. It quickly overflowed the river and turned the campsite into a swamp. Joseph huddled with Castro and Katrin and three other Alsatians under one of the wagons. Castro had the bottle of cognac with him and he kept giving Joseph little sips, and even Katrin took a drink, and when she fell asleep Castro covered her with his own coat, and he and Joseph talked about ancient Greece and Rome, and Castro told Joseph that Alsace had been a part of the Holy Roman Empire for seven hundred years, and then he said he intended to bring more colonists to Texas than Stephen Austin ever dreamed of and that he didn’t know how Joseph would get to San Antonio without a horse, and Joseph felt a little drunk by that time, and their voices began to blend into one, as steady as the rain, as even as a thread spooling gently out of its bobbin, and finally Joseph told Castro there was no use arguing about it any longer, that he thought he’d accept his offer and stay a while.

  “In the morning I’ll send some men to go after the slave who robbed you.”

  “I don’t want anyone going after anything.”

  “But he has your belongings.”

  Joseph took another drink of cognac and wiped the rain from his eyes.

  “He can have them,” he said.

  8

  Castroville, Texas

  JOSEPH LAUGHED OUT
loud when Castro told him he was naming the town after himself. Castroville. He didn’t laugh because of the name—Henry Castro was arrogant enough to have named all of Texas after himself—but because, with all Castro’s regal airs, the town was so miserably common. He thought Castro would have saved his name for something bigger, something on the scale of Galveston or Austin, not on an afterthought of a town on the banks of the Medina River. Why, the town was hardly even a town yet. Castro’s stone house had snug walls and a plaited-tule roof and sat right in the middle of the main street across from where the church would go when it was built, but all the other houses were made of rough-hewn logs barely chinked together tightly enough to keep out the rain. And the single path through town was more like a swamp than a road, so that wagons and horses sank and rose like ships on the ocean.

  Tomás and the rest of the Mexicans left Castroville when the last log cabin was up and Castro’s stone house was finished. Castro said he was happy to see them go, and now when they passed through town, the Alsatians acted as if they had come to rob them. Joseph had even heard some people say the Mexicans were going to join the Indians and take Texas back.

  Castro, true to his word, gave Joseph one of the log houses to live in and appointed him the town treasurer. He gave him no money to treasure, merely a set of account books that Joseph kept filled with expenses Castro incurred in his travels from Austin to San Antonio and back to Castroville, recruiting colonists. He hadn’t yet returned to Europe to find more Alsatians willing to come to Texas. There was a steady stream of settlers arriving in Texas on their own, and all Castro had to do was travel around the countryside and gather them up.

  Joseph thought the job of treasurer a useless one, something that Katrin, as dumb as she appeared to be, could have accomplished, but every time Joseph told Castro he wanted to leave, had to get to San Antonio and see Cyril McCorkle about Isaac’s affairs, Castro would persuade him to stay. My wife is ill in Galveston, Castro told him in May, and I have to retrieve her. He was gone until late June. Joseph was ready to leave for San Antonio when he returned, but now Castro’s wife Amelia, who was fat and cheerful and looked to be twenty years younger than her husband, begged him to stay until her sons arrived. They hadn’t arrived by July, but it was summer, and Castro said Joseph should wait until the weather cooled some before he headed for San Antonio. In September Joseph told him he was leaving, and Castro asked him to stay until his sons, who had been delayed in Paris, arrived in October. Castro’s sons did show up, but in November, and they stayed in Castroville only long enough to pronounce it an uninhabitable place before they headed for Austin. Joseph said he was leaving in December, and that was all there was to it, but Castro departed for San Antonio at the beginning of the month—something about securing financing for another parcel of land—and made Joseph promise he would stay until he returned, which Castro said would be no later than January, and certainly no later than February. Castro returned in March and suggested that Joseph stay until the worst of the cold snap was over. By this time Joseph was beginning to like living in Castroville, and so he said all right, he’d stay until spring.