Unpaid Bill

Kinney County, Texas, 1862

The August sun was hanging high on the afternoon of what was sure to be the hottest day of the year. It had to be; there was no other reason why Thweed “Dewey” Fink could sweat this much and still feel so hot.

“Mr. Fink”, he said, rising from the crate of pecans that he sat upon, knowing that his short break was over. “I thought you said gettin’ all sweaty would cool me off, but I’m wet as hell an’ I’m still hot!”

The boy spoke to the back of the man across the tent from him, Rudolf Fink, who dropped his head in playful exasperation.

“You misremember,”, he said, and then turned around, a warm smile on his face. “It makes your body less hot, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be cool. Now bitte, we must finish packing Frieda for the march.” he said, cocking his head to the donkey hitched outside of the tent. “These men aren’t going to wait for us and we don’t want to get left behind.”

“Thas’ another thing, Mr. Fink! I thought you were the boss of the store. Why come we got to come all—“

“How come.” Fink interjected.

“HOW”, Dewey said, drawing out the vowel in Fink’s correction, “come we got to be all the way out here in the heat with these soldiers. They look at me ugly, they don’t want us here. Why we can’t just go home?”

“Hmm, now there’s an idea. Say we go home, you and me and Frieda—good luck convincing Lúnda. We are many miles from Turtle Creek but nevermind that.“, Fink said, setting down a large crate in front of the boy. He sat down and the tall man, now seated, matched eyelines with the standing boy. “What do we do if we come across Greys? Sure, I have my rifle, but it is not for fighting; it is for hunting. Lúnda, feisty as she is, as she can be…”, he said, trailing off and glancing out of the open flap of the tent. There, the small woman was speaking to a few of the soldiers that she’d conscripted for brief sojourns to collect wild nuts and fruit for the camp. “… can only do so much as well. If we’re lucky, you and I would be killed before witnessing the true savagery that some of the men who support the Confederacy are capable of.” 

“Thas’ what I’m saying though. We can’t fight, we’re just walking with them an’ giving them free food an’ medicine an’—an’ everything in between!”

“We aren’t selling goods to these men like we normally would, true, but we are here to help them protect us. Don’t forget, the war is young, it may not know us—yet—but we can still know it, to avoid it.” Fink smiled, patting the boy’s shoulder. “Say we go home. We say, ‘forget these soldiers, we aren’t afraid of the Greys’, and we leave. Maybe they win the battle, maybe not. We also  mustn’t forget that these men we travel with, The Union Loyalist League, they help fight for your freedom, amsel.” he continued, cupping the boy’s cheek with one hand, “Do you think it’s really the right thing to do? Would you truly be comfortable leaving them to an unknown fate, knowing that you could have helped save even one life?”

…

Fink already knew how Dewey would answer, because the boy had a kind heart—despite the circumstances that brought them into each other’s lives five years ago, and six years since Rudolf Fink opened a tiny store in Castroville, Texas, aptly named Der Klein Lager—The Little Store. Business was steady, courtesy of the Alsatians that formed the majority of the community, and this allowed Rudolf and Lúnda Fink to live a life just a little bit more comfortable than most.

Once the doors were closed and locked, after the last mother dragged out the child crying for un brauner kandis; after Frau Gná—as the children in town dubbed her, due to her feathery white hair—has pawed through all of the wild plums Lúnda gathered, inspecting each one for blemishes, an old bird satisfied with her haul, has shambled out of the door; after Samuel Brown, the resident secessionist and owner of the town taphouse, determined to make the Finks’ business his own, has “clumsily” browsed the store with his two sons, damaging items, but never crossing a line; at the end of the day, Rudolf draws the shutters, takes a final peek outside for anything looming, as it were, and with Lúnda, cleans up the store, counts the till, and discusses the day. Their conversation, what they don’t discuss, however, always seemed to loudly hover at the back of the conversation, as though one of them might bring it—him, Siegfried—up, but the moment never would arrive. 

One evening, the two talked about whether a donkey—Frieda in particular—could be bred with a bull to produce something that could both help till the small field that remained behind their parcel of land and produce milk.

“I just believe that it could be possible—not with Frieda,” Lúnda said, eyeing her husband over her shoulder after a last minute addition, aware of his fondness of the old mule. “but perhaps another mule we purchase—you never know.”

She descended from the small step stool she used to reach the shelf behind the register, where the candies, liquors, and other valuables—for sale or otherwise—were kept. She softly clapped her hands together with a huff, ridding them of any leftover dust from the shelf she’d just finished restocking.

“My dear,” Rudolf said, his eyes scanning the windows of Brown’s Taphouse through half-closed shutters adjacent to a window partially obscured by whatever dirt and debris was kicked up by anyone passing by. “this is fantasy. Didn’t your cousin Friedrich—“. 

“Dietrich,” she interjected to correct, rolling her eyes, “he is a fool.” It was a comment she’d expected; Rudolf never liked the boy.

“Right—Dietrich—gored by your uncle’s bull, no?”, Fink continued, as he snapped the shutters closed and moved toward the door to double check the deadbolts. “Was he not trying to do something similar?”

“Dietrich,” she said, angling the straw broom she was carrying into a corner, drawing out whatever dirt and debris was wedged between it. “was trying to make a ‘jumart’ after a hearing the French speak of something similar. It’s like a golem.”

“Golem? So Dietrich wanted to make a… Monster?”

Rudolf eyed her over his shoulder, a crooked smug smile across his face.

“My love, I believe we may need—wait, can you hear that?” Rudolf froze, eyebrows furrowed. Their usual background noise—coyotes howling at a new moon, a symphony of crickets, and the chorus of miners, burning the midnight oil at Brown’s—was joined by a new sound, a vulnerable wail. A sound that was unfortunately familiar because try as one might, it was a sound that can never be forgotten. 

“It’s—no…?” Fink said suddenly trailing off and fully unsure of whether he was asking Lúnda or telling her. He abandoned the deadbolts as he rushed to the window, to the shutters, to the latch, and as though trained for years to do so, the latch and shutters opened nearly simultaneously. Staying parallel with the shutter as it opened—a cautious move in case of any ruses—Fink listened.

Lúnda, who had dropped to a half-crouch next to the counter where they kept the till, locked eyes with Fink briefly, mouthed “What is happening?”, gesturing erratically.

Rudolf responded with one finger to two lips pressed tight, then pointed to his ear as he slowly peered around the shutter to the sound of another wail.

Through the small window, Rudolf spotted a small creature, a tail dragging, stretching behind it as it slowly made its way across the dirt from the tall grass near the road leading out of town. 

“A cat? Coyote?”, Rudolf thought, squinting harder. It cried out again. 

He cupped his hands around his eyes and pressed them to the glass. He could hear Lúnda’s footsteps across the old wooden floorboards, a low, then high creak as she approached him from behind. 

Squinting harder, Rudolf could see that the creature was actually a child crawling, partially wrapped in some kind of fabric.

“It’s a child.” Rudolf said, moving to the door instinctively. He snatched a coat from the hook hanging beside the frame and rushed out of the door.

Lúnda watched from the window, cautious of the drunks that often stumble out of Brown’s as Rudolf crossed the storefront to the child, now almost nude, save for a small rag tied across his bottom; a makeshift cloth diaper. She watched Rudolf pause as he approached, his attention stolen and exclusively held by what lay in the dirt and grass beyond the child.

A dark, limp hand still held a tenuous grasp on a corner of the blanket, its owner’s lower half largely obscured by the tall grass, as the child shed the fabric like snakeskin.

The child’s short journey came to a dramatic end as he collapsed Rudolf’s feet, who squatted and began swaddling the child in his coat, his motions fluid, precise—a familiar skill from a time that the Finks both often wished that they could forget. Once he was sure that the child was secure, he slowly rose. Through it all, his eyes never left the tall grass until his back was fully to the area as he walked away. He smiled weakly at Lúnda, her eyes wide with concern, wider once she saw what he carried.

As he walked to the front door of Der Klein Lager, he thought about the duality of love and cruelty. Love, as who Rudolf could only assume was the boy’s mother, in her final moments, somehow ensured the survival of her child. Cruelty, because while he could tell that the object in the grass was a body as soon as he stepped into the dirt, his initial assumption was that perhaps some unlucky traveler, their journey delayed because of this, that or the other, was injured, but made it to town anyway—a second wind before the black. An animal attack, perhaps; the area is often dense with the coyotes and a recent spate of livestock attacks would support that theory, but the idea that anyone could survive an attack from a coyote—an animal that notoriously travels in packs—was unlikely. As he got closer, it became apparent that no animal did this, because no animal would let the child live, and no animal would murder a woman in front of her child. Murder was his best guess, because Rudolf had never seen an animal put a burlap hood over someone’s head and bash their skull in.

He’d think of the night that he found the boy every morning for the rest of his life; the flood of emotions when he found the boy who crawled out of the weeds.

…

Rolf and Lúnda found themselves falling into an old, familiar rhythm rather rapidly in the days after they’d brought the boy home. Whether the child would be a permanent fixture wasn’t a question to Lúnda, not after Rudolf recounted what he’d found the child escaping from. The boy needed a home, a mother, or a good explanation; he’d have two of the three with the Finks.

The “name” debate hadn’t lasted long. The child was visibly old enough to have a name, one that he would recognize. The problem was that there was no telling who might know what it was.

“He’s not German-born, liebe, it wouldn’t make sense to name him after Heimdallr,”, Lúnda had said at the time. “Nor should we try to name him— to make him a— well—“, she continued, stuttering to say what her lips couldn’t form. Rudolf was able to read between the lines enough to know what she meant.

“He won’t replace Siegfried, but he is a blessing— an American blessing.” Rolf would remark, examining the boy. His entire body was covered in light scratches from the weeds that he had crawled through, cherry red streaks that were now creating tiny scab ridges on his skin, and leaving white lines like thunder in their wake.

“Where we found him— where he came to me,”, Rudolf said, looking deeply into the boy’s eyes, “he was slick—wet. I thought it was blood but it was dew from the grass and the weeds.”

Lúnda cocked her head.

“No, I see your look— it’s not that.” Rolf continued. “In the Book, God declares the dew on grass to be a blessing, a bounty.” He paused, smiled, then looked at Lúnda. “Thweed, or ‘Dewey’ seems fitting, no?”

Lúnda remained silent, pondering the proposition. She moved to the crib that Rolf built to accommodate the child the day after finding the boy, joining her husband in a gaze toward the child that radiated love, if ever it were a substance.

“Hello Dewey.”, she finally said, playfully poking at the boy’s scarred belly. His laugh hit the couple like a freight train.

…

“Harlan and his boy— half ‘red’ if you didn’t know already— they had some property out that way. Acre or two if I remember it right. The boy disappeared one day though. Harlan, he came into town making a big fuss. None of us knew what he was talking about. A few days later, Barry Kerneke was running the mail out there, they hadn’t picked it up in some time. Well, he walked up to a broken down door— not the screen, the whole frame was busted to splinters! The redskin boy— was at the foot of the steps crying like n’un’s ever seen. Harlan was on the floor though, legs twitchin’, kickin’ around. Kerneke said he tried to reach the boy. Said the boy spoke ‘his language’, looked Barry right in the eye, and cut his own throat with— get this— a goddamn arrowhead. And Harlan? He looked like his head had been stomped on— ‘like a horseshoe in fresh mud’, Kerneke said.”