After the flood my grandfather comes in a dream and says to sell the land. What is this, I ask myself? My grandfather died before it passed to me. He didn't even know about the land. But he was wise, my opa, and if there is some knowing after death, he would be the one.
"Things change," he used to tell me. "Things change. Four years of drought. Then it rains for that, or longer. Then it floods. Four, five more years of drought. The story is all there." I remember him showing me the rings on a freshly chopped cedar tree. I remember, and I begin to think of the circles of my own life.
Benno grows too old to try and run a ranch and a business too, and Fritz likes more to work with his head, I believe, than his hands. Our children are grown, with a child on the way, a child who may not choose a country life. So why do we keep the land and use our savings for the taxes that grow bigger while the crops grow smaller? It is time to change our thinking, but I know Benno will have a hard time with this, for it is not how he was taught. So I blame it on the river.
"The river is like a cat," I say one day at the lunch table.
"Sometimes it licks your toes. Sometimes when you are sleeping it sneaks up and scratches you. Three of our townspeople drowned in the flood. Could have been us."
"Mother," Fritz tells me like I don't already know, "it's the twenty year flood plain. Maybe not so good a place to build a house, but ours is still standing. It can't be too bad."
"Easy enough to say," I tell him. "It feels different when you look from the roof and see the neighbor's cow wash by. "
"With the new dams, it's not likely we'll ever see high water on our property again."
"Then it is a good time to sell," I say. "Keep a little for ourselves. Keep the cabin, even, for day visits, but no sleeping there. Not my grandchild."
Benno has not been listening. He looks up from the newspaper. "Sell the land? Who would want to sell the land?"
"I would," I say. And it goes from there.

It was Benno's idea to give the ten acres to Vera. We talked with Fritz about the part we would all keep together.
"I thought to leave my part to Vera in my will," I tell him. "Like my mother left hers to me."
"I thought to give her some now," says Benno.
"Good idea," says Fritz. "You can avoid estate taxes that way."
"It was good of you, thinking of Vera so," I told him later.
"Only fair," he said.
"Still. She should know it was your idea."
"No need for her to know."
Those two. Will they ever get over their quarrel?

Vera wants the land across from the old orphanage, where The Reverend and his wife made a home for the children. So many there were, whose parents died on the crossing. Then others, that died of the cholera, after the boats had landed. Such a long walk to get here, poor children, and the good man and his wife took them in, nursed them, fed them, gave them first a tent, then a house.
It's the story of the barnyard. The girl is there, young and soft and fresh, like bread from the oven. Benno frowns to hear the man's name, so much he disapproves, but Benno has many rules for what goes on between men and women. He is glad Vera wants the land across from the orphanage. "I don't want to look at it," he says.
"So long ago," I tell him. "Who are we to judge?"
"You're willing to forgive? You forgive," he says. "Not me."
I say young girls have their ways. Perhaps she smiled sweet at him. Asked for special favors. The Reverend Mrs, she closed the house when she found out. Took the children, the younger ones, with her and left the others for him to find homes for. He told her he would follow. Promised, some say. I say who knows? But the direction he headed was toward Mexico, to be free. Of what, we do not know, but there is always something.

When Carol Anne has the baby, everything stops for a while. Benno is in a good humor. We had wished for Fritz to marry a girl from home, with a good family we would know, but this girl can't be blamed for our wishing. It is enough that she has so much to learn. But she has Benno on her side, which is a good thing. He liked the first he saw of her, like Fritz did, I suppose. Like they say, the apples don't fall far from the tree.
After little Georgie was born I spent much time with Carol Anne and the baby and could tell she was glad for me being there, but not nearly so glad as the day Benno rang the doorbell.
She answers the door and there he stands, looking up at the ceiling beams.
"Where do you want it?" says he.
"Want what, Pop?"
"Your new swing," says he. "Can't raise a baby without a swing." And he goes to the truck and carries back a new wooden porch swing he has made in his workshop. She is clapping her hands and jumping like a little girl. They get the baby and sit down on the swing. She hums a little tune to the baby and it stops fussing. Then he picks up the tune with a whistle and her eyes light up and she hums again, like a little test, and Benno gives harmony with his whistle. Too busy he was to know our little ones until they grew to follow him around and ask questions, but I can see he will take time to get to know this little one.
"Come to Opa," he says and holds out his arms.
The baby gives a little one-sided grin and makes a loud toot in his pants. Benno cocks his ear and opens wide his eyes. "Thunder," he tells Carol Anne, and she laughs at his bad joke. I see them there together so and I am thinking the gift is a good one.
Everyone is busy with talk of land and money, buying and selling, building and moving around. I mop my floor and try to stay still, but I can't keep out of it. First, we are choosing lots, deciding who is to have what land on the river.
"It doesn't matter so much," I tell Benno. "I will not be building a house there. Not my children, either. No houses on the river."
"It's not for you to decide," he says, and I know it is true.
Here's something else. Snakes at the river. They come back in my dreams. My opa said if there is such a thing as the Garden of Eden, this is it, and the snake means we are responsible for what we know. What I know is, if you live by the river long enough, it may swallow you up and wash you away.
I was eleven when my mother married again. The year was 1918. My grandparents both passed that year. Oma went first, shriveled like a pickle and sour in her old age, and then Opa. They said he went because of her, but I believe it was the war. More than forty years he had lived here, but the homeland was in his heart and how do you go to war with your heart? During that time we had to be careful in many ways. It was not good to be speaking German on the streets. They say in other parts it was worse. Families were driven from their towns, we heard, because of their name. Some changed their names and stopped speaking German in the home. Good Americans we were, but there's no proving anything to those who choose to hate.
Mama and I came to live on the ranch of Peter Zipp, who became my second Papa. His wife had died in childbirth and left him with four little ones. He owned a ranch outside the town of Schoenberg, many acres where he raised sheep and goats, and had, as well, a Sunday house in town, which we didn't visit so much at first because of the war.
Peter was a thick man with arms and legs like gate posts. After dinner he liked to lie on the floor and put us all upon his chest, me, the largest, first, then Emil on top of me, Walter next, then the twins, Tressie and Anna. He could give a big laugh that made us all bounce up and down on his huge belly.
My Mama, who could have no more children of her own, was happy to be married to Peter, even though the seven of us stretched the corners of the little house, but there were plans to make it larger when the summer was over and the rains came. Then the well caved in and needed to be repaired and the tank went dry and Peter was busy cutting the prickly pear and burning the stickers off to feed the animals. The drought had come and we were not expecting it. Some said it was a message from God and those they went to church to pray for water.
Water. We had to be careful with every drop. Without rain to catch we hauled well water in buckets for washing. First we scrubbed the clothes, then the children, then carried the same water to the garden. Some people moved on, saying the land was no longer hospitable. We waited. The town suffered and Peter along with it. Little by little he sold the rest of his herd and finally, when the war anger died down, we moved into town. He talked of selling the ranch but Mama said no, to sell in bad times would be worse than giving it away. That year I worked for the baker in the mornings for a loaf of bread a day, and I got to go to school some days. Mama kept us clean and fed and made lace, while Peter took what work he could find. I will say this. We never went hungry.
The drought lasted four seasons. By my seventeenth year the springs ran again and the wells gave water and Peter was back on the ranch with sheep and goats and people to buy them and the railroad to take them to market. He planted corn and cotton and when the crops were good he bought more land, down along the river and moved the old cabin there, hauling it in the wagon, stones and beams.
"When the water comes high," he told us, "and it will again, we go into town. For now, we stay here, with the cool breeze and all the water we need for the animals and ourselves." Even he arranged a bucket and pulley that ran from the top of the biggest tree beside the cabin, down to the river, for pulling up water.
On the wall of the cabin Peter nailed a piece of paper with a drawing of the ranch and where it touched the neighbors to the north and to the south. The river was a thick blue line to the west and the road to town was on the east. Down the middle he drew a line and on one side he wrote in big, black letters, Johanna, my mother's name, to show it was her land. She had earned it, was what he said.

I was nineteen when Peter died. Emil and Walter brought him from the field, where he had fallen over setting a fencepost. They were only boys themselves and white with fright, after having to pull him up and into the wagon and head the horses home. There he lay, with his big red face turned the color of young plums and the eyes open but not seeing. Us standing in the hot sun, not knowing what to do.
Mother got a mirror and held it to his mouth but there was no breath. From down on her knees she shouted in his ear but nothing happened. His fingernails were blue and his pants were soiled. It was an awful sight, like a drowned cow I found in the tank once. I took one hard look and then I turned away. Huge and helpless he was and smelling bad and in my mind I was thinking how a few hours before he had been at the table eating eggs and sweetcake and telling the boys what was to be done. One is never ready for such things, but what can you do?
After Peter died we worked the ranch, my mother, the other children and me. Mama and the boys worked the land and the girls and I kept the house and garden. It was not so bad, for there were many of us, all pulling together. After a few years the boys built themselves a cabin and moved up by the road. Too old, they said, to be living with the women, and time it was to be on their own. Still they would work the land and share the profits. Me and Mama, and the girls, were left in the cabin, but not for long. Two big brothers, the Henke boys, from across the river, came courting and they decided to marry at the same time and the same place. The brothers had a mind to start a brewery in Kerrville and when that failed they started a restaurant, keeping the girls busy in the kitchen, and from that to furniture-making and finally to shopkeepers. Well thought of, they became, in time, but without the girls so lonely was our home and we had come into another drought and there was little time for visiting. Only work. I was twenty-six then and thinking of marrying myself, but who would care for Mama?
One night my step-brother Emil came knocking to the door. He had talked to the lawyer about dividing the land. This is how it went. Four parts, three hundred and twenty acres each. One part to Mama, one each for Emil and Walter, the other part to be shared by the girls. Mama and me, we were to stay in the house because that is where we belonged, he said. It wasn't half, like Peter had shown on the map, but the boys were older now and needed their own start. Mama thought it very fair.
"I will still work it for you," he said. "Grow feed and run cattle."
"Danke," I said.
He took out his handkerchief and wiped the sides of his temples and then his neck. Then he gave his head a little jerk toward the door and motioned with his eyes for me to come outside where Mama was not listening.
"What is it, Emil?"
"I'm, I'm, I'm."
Emil got stuck like that sometimes.
"Slow down," I told him, like always.
"I'm thinking," he said, "that you and I should get married, Queenie."
"Emil!"
"What's so bad with that?"
I raised you from a little boy."
"Only three years difference between us."
"Four."
"Three and a half."
I looked up at him, now almost twice my size, blond and heavy, his eyes too close together, not blinking, looking, looking to me, a good boy but not so bright, like his father, Peter, my second Papa, and I knew I wouldn't marry him, but what was I to say that would make it okay?
"No," I said.
He put his hands on my shoulders then. Sweet, fat hands of a child they looked, I thought, with the nails nibbled down to the pink.
"I'm a man now. Time to get married and you're the one."
"I'm not ready yet," I told him.
"I'll wait," he said.

When Benno and I married, Emil came to the wedding in a shirt I starched and ironed for him, but he wasn't looking in my eyes. He came so not to disappoint Mama and the girls, but he hung around the party's edges like an angry calf and drank too much beer. Even later, when he and Benno got to be friends, mending the fences and doing the branding together, Emil wouldn't come in the house when I was there, wouldn't touch my coffee or sweetcakes. What I think is he couldn't let go of his hurt, even when it didn't hurt any more.
Walter moved to California, but Emil stayed on the land and works it still. He never married and no one sees him much, though Benno sold him some insurance years back and checks on him from time to time. A hermit, he calls him, and says that's a man's choice. A nice boy, but not too bright. What can you say about someone who doesn't learn to read?

Before I know it I am an oma. Georgie is three years old, walking and talking and oh so smart, already showing me his letters, and Fritz and Carol Anne are busy all the time, planning a big, new house, and Vera is coming home to live. How quickly things change. I am thinking to give a big party for her but Carol Anne says no.
"Why not a picnic at the river?" she asks. "Fritz will invite a few couples she knows who have kids Georgie's age. You invite the Vogels and Tante Helen. We'll make it easy. Fritz can barbecue bratwurst. You do pinto beans, potato salad, maybe some sauerkraut. I'll do jello salad for the kids and I've got a bunny mold for a cake. White icing, sprinkle it with coconut and stick in pink jelly beans for eyes."
She is so excited I cannot say no, and why should I? Still, a cake that comes in a package ? I am wondering how she knows what Vera would like better than I who raised her. Who is right? I only know I am glad for Vera's coming back, for I know it means the ties are strong.