Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

So, coming down the home stretch on the next book – which originally had the working title of Gone to Texas, which Blondie didn’t much like because she found a couple of others, fiction and non-  with the same title. So, when released, it will be titled Daughter of Texas, subtitled “The prelude to the Adelsverein Trilogy.” My clever and artistic younger brother, Sander, who is a freelance graphic artist, did the cover design for me, and Watercress Press, the tiny publishing bidness in which I am a junior partner will edit and publish  . . .  and print it as a POD book, since we have set up an account with Lightning Source. We had wanted to do something of the sort along the POD line for our clients, after a couple of decades of taking bids from various traditional litho printers. It’s the same old tradeoff – traditional litho, large quantities at a time = large initial up-front cost, but small price per single copy. POD/Lightning source means small print run = relatively small up-front costs and slightly higher cost per single copy.  So, Daughter of Texas will be the test run for Watercress Press.

It’s the prelude to the Trilogy, as it follows the life of Margaret, Carl Becker’s older sister, who married twice, and became an influential political hostess in Republic-era Texas – after experiencing the trials of the Texas war for independence from Mexico, to include the ‘Come and Take it’ fight, the fall-out from the siege of the Alamo, and the terrifying ‘Runaway Scrape’  . . .  all that, and she has just gotten up to her first husband. (Also explained why the Becker family got to be dysfunctional in a special way . . . )

Anyway, I was set on finishing it in time for release on the anniversary of San Jacinto Day, April 21 2011, because this spring will mark the 175th anniversary of the Texas War for Independence – which, while loaded down with bags of drama – was over and done in a flash, relatively speaking. (Can you picture a lot of people picking themselves up off the ground in early 1836 and saying ‘Whoa! – What was that which just went by? A war? The hell you say – anyone see who won?)

Small problem – I was just coming up to writing the post-war picking-up-and-moving-on part, and hit a couple of problems: the first being that I had already clocked 300+ pages, and if I wanted to do true justice to the Republic of Texas-era shenanigans – (the Pig War, the Mexican raid on San Antonio which captured the entire district court and every Anglo man in town, the Archives War, etc.) which would mean another couple of hundred pages at least  . . . written over the the next month. Plus all the necessary research – that being one of my marketing points, that I have researched all this to the nth degree. And I was out of time for all that.

Another problem: writing out Margaret’s first husband – who dies of consumption – and her romance, such as it is, with her second husband. I was struck out of the blue by solutions to both those situations, a solution which would let me wrap up the first part of her story very tidily while allowing an interesting plot twist in a book to be worked out at a later date – and to make a second book of Margaret’s life; widowhood in the town that would (on occasion) be the capitol of the Republic of Texas and later the state capitol, participation in or witness to a whole series of gripping and exciting events, plus a new romance with a male character which I would have to flesh out a little more. The second book about Margaret will be called Deep in the Heart . . .  to be available by Christmas 2011, perhaps.

Anyway, I will begin taking orders for  Daughter of Texas starting about mid-December, autographed and delivered in mid-April, just before the official release date. Links and pricing will be posted then, on my book website.

So that’s what has been going on with the book-thingy. Any questions?

It is a sad distinction, to be the first in three generations to visit France while on active duty in the service of your country, and to be the first to actually live to tell the tale of it. For many Europeans, and subjects of the British Empire— especially those of a certain age, it is not at all uncommon to have lost a father or an uncle in World War Two, and a grandfather or great-uncle in World War One. It’s a rarer thing to have happened to an American family, perhaps one whose immigration between the old country and the new allowed for inadvertent participation, or a family who routinely choose the military as a career, generation after generation. Ours is but lately and only in a small way one of the latter, being instead brought in for a couple of years by a taste for adventure or a wartime draft.

When JP and Pippy and I were growing up, the memory of Mom’s brother, Jimmy-Junior was still a presence. His picture was in Granny Jessie’s living room, and he was frequently spoken of by Mom, and Granny Jessie, and sometimes by those neighbors and congregants at Trinity who remembered him best. JP, who had the same first name, was most particularly supposed to be like him. He was a presence, but a fairly benign one, brushed with the highlights of adventure and loss, buried far away in St. Avold, in France, after his B-17 fell out of the skies in 1943.

Our Great-Uncle Will, the other wartime loss in the family was hardly ever mentioned. We were only vaguely aware that Grandpa Al and Great-Aunt Nan had even had an older half-brother… a half-sister, too, if it came to that. Great-Grandpa George had been a widower with children when he married Grandpa Al and Great-Aunt Nan’s mother. The older sister had gone off as a governess around the last of the century before, and everyone else had emigrated to Canada or America. I think it rather careless of us to have misplaced a great-aunt, not when all the other elders managed to keep very good track of each other across two continents and three countries, and have no idea of where the governess eventually gravitated to, or if she ever married.
“She went to Switzerland, I think,” Said Great Aunt Nan. “But Will— he loved Mother very much. He jumped off the troop train when it passed near Reading, and went AWOL to came home and see us again, when the Princess Pats came over from Canada.” She sighed, reminiscently. We were all of us in the Plymouth, heading up to Camarillo for dinner with Grandpa Al and Granny Dodie— for some reason; we had Great-Aunt Nan in the back seat with us. I am not, at this date, very certain about when this conversation would have taken place, only that we were in the car— Mom and Dad in front, Nan and I in the back seat, with Pippy between us, and JP in the very back of the station wagon. Perhaps I held Sander on my lap, or more likely between Nan and I, with Pippy in the way-back with JP. Outside the car windows on either side of the highway, the rounded California hills swept past, upholstered with dry yellow grass crisped by the summer heat, and dotted here and there with dark green live oaks. I can’t remember what had been said, or what had brought Great Aunt Nan to suddenly begin talking, about her half-brother who had vanished in the mud of no-man’s land a half century before, only that we all listened, enthralled— even Dad as he drove.

“He fairly picked Mother up,” Nan said, fondly, “She was so tiny, and he was tall and strong. He had been out in Alberta, working as a lumberjack on the Peace River in the Mackenzie District.” She recited the names as if she were repeating something she had learned by heart a long time ago. “When the war began, he and one of his friends built a raft, and floated hundreds of miles down the river, to enlist.”

(William Hayden, enlisted on October 13, 1914 in the town of Port Arthur. His age was listed as 22, complexion fair with brown hair and brown eyes— which must have come from his birth mother, as Al and Nan had blue eyes and light hair. He was 6’, in excellent health and his profession listed as laborer, but his signatures on the enlistment document were in excellent penmanship)

“He didn’t get into so very much trouble, when he walked into camp the next day, “said Nan, “Mother and I were so glad to see him—he walked into the house, just like that. And he wrote, he always wrote, once the Princess Pats’ went to France and were in the line. He picked flowers in the no-mans’-land between the trenches, and pressed them into his letters to send to us.”

(There is only one family picture of William, old-fashioned formal studio portrait of him and Nan; he sits stiffly in a straight ornate chair, holding his uniform cover in his lap, a big young man in a military tunic with a high collar, while a 12 or 13year old Nan in a white dress leans against the arm of the chair. She has a heart-shaped face with delicate bones; William’s features are heavy, with a prominent jaw— he does not look terribly intelligent, and there isn’t any family resemblance to Nan, or any of the rest of us.)

“His Captain came to see us, after he was killed,” said Nan,” Will was a Corporal, by that time… poor man, he was the only one of their officers to survive, and he had but one arm and one eye. He thought the world of Will. He told us that one night, Will took five men, and went out into no-mans’-land to cut wire and eavesdrop on the German trenches, but the Germans put down a barrage into the sector where they were supposed to have gone, and they just never came back. Nothing was ever found.”

(No, of course— nothing would have ever been found, not a scrap of the men, or any of their gear, not in the shell-churned hell between the trenches on the Somme in July of 1916. And the loss of Great-Uncle William and his handful of men were a small footnote after the horrendous losses on the first day of July. In a single day, the British forces sustained 19,000 killed, 2,000 missing, 50,000 wounded. Wrote the poet Wilfred Owen

“Amazing, “Mom remarked later, “I wonder what brought that on— she talked more about him in ten minutes than I had ever heard in 20 years.”
I went back a few years ago, looking for Uncle Jimmy’s combat crew, and found them, too, but even then it was too late to look for anyone who had served with Great-Uncle Will—although, any time after July, 1916 may have been too late. But there is an archive, with his service records in it, and I may send away for them, to replace what little relics we had before the fire which burned my parents’ house to the ground in 2003. But they will only confirm what we found out, when Great-Aunt Nan told us all about the brother she loved.

(Old barn at the site of Ft. Martin Scott, Fredericksburg, Texas)

We were off to Fredericksburg on Monday; Fredericksburg, Texas – a medium-sized town large enough to contain two HEB supermarkets, a Walmart, four RV parks – and two museums, one of which – the National Museum of the Pacific War – draws considerable tourist interest – and a marvelous kitchenware shop which might very well be the best one in the state of Texas. (It certainly makes Williams – Sonoma look pretty feeble in comparison.) The town has begun to develop a little bit of suburban sprawl, but not excessively so. Most of the town is arranged along the original east-west axis of streets laid out by German immigrant surveyors in the mid-1840s, along a rise of land cradled between two creeks which fed into the Pedernales River. In a hundred and sixty years since then, houses and gardens spilled over Baron’s Creek and Town Creek. Log and fachwork houses were soon replaced by tall L-shaped houses of local stone, trimmed with modest amounts of Victorian fretwork lace, or frame and brick bungalows from every decade since. Main Street – which on either side of town turns into US Highway 290 – is still the main thoroughfare. A good few blocks of Main Street are lined with classic 19th century store-front buildings, or new construction build to match, storefronts with porches which overhang the sidewalk, and adorned with tubs of flowers and hanging baskets, with shops and restaurants and wine-tasting rooms catering to a substantial tourist trade. Fredericksburg is a lively place; and I have been visiting there frequently since I came to live in Texas.

I actually have a curious relationship with the place, having written a series of three historical novels about how it came to be founded and settled. Thanks to intensive research which involved reading practically every available scrap of nonfiction about the Hill Country and Fredericksburg written by historians and memoirists alike, I am in the curious position of knowing Fredericksburg at least as well as many long-time residents with a bent for local history do, and holding my own in discussions of such minutia as to how many people were killed in cold blood on Main Street. (Two, for those who count such things. It happened during the Civil War.) And for another, of having a mental map of 19th-century Fredericksburg laid over the present-day town, which makes for a slightly schizophrenic experience when I walk around the older parts. Eventually, I may have to do a sort of walking guide to significant locations, since so many readers have asked me exactly where did such-and-such an event take place, or where was Vati’s house on Market Square, and where in the valley of the Upper Guadalupe was the Becker ranch house?

Mike, the husband of one of Monday’s book-club members is a fan of the Trilogy, and although he couldn’t come to the meeting (being at work and all) he still wanted to meet me. He had actually contacted me through Facebook a couple of months ago, for a series of searching questions about where I had gotten some of the street names that I had used in the Trilogy; many of them are not the present-day names, but are what the original surveyors of Fredericksburg had laid out. I deduced that being stubborn and set in their ways, the old German residents would have gone on using those names, rather than the newer ones. After all – when I grew up in LA, there were still old-timers who insisted on referring to MacArthur Park as Westlake Park, even though the name had been changed decades ago. So, the book club organizer gave me Mike’s work number at the Nimitz Foundation (which runs the Museum of the Pacific War) and said we should call and his assistant would get us on the schedule for that afternoon. It was my understanding that this gentleman was a retired general – OK, I thought ‘eh, another general, met ‘em by the bag-full  . . .  matter of fact, there was a general even carried my B-4 bag, once,’ (long story) but anyway, we had a block of time to meet Mike at his office – and a lovely discussion we were having, too; he was full of questions over how much research I had done, and terribly complimentary on how well woven into the story.

Mike thought ever so highly about how I had made C.H. Nimitz, the grandfather of Admiral Chester Nimitz into such a strong and engaging character – although we had a discussion over how devoted a Confederate that C.H. Nimitz really was – probably not so much a Unionist as I made him seem to be, but I argued that C.H. was probably a lot more loyal to his local friends and community than he was to the Confederacy – so, nice discussion over that. It seems that the Mike was born and grew up in the area. He and his wife (who was German-born) had read the Trilogy, and loved it very much – they were even recommending it to everyone, and giving sets of it as presents. Well, that is way cool – I’m in regular touch with three or four fans doing just that; talking it up to friends, and giving copies as gifts. Local history buffs, or they know the Hill Country very well, they can’t wait to tell their friends about it; as Blondie says, I am building my fan base. So I had a question-packed half hour and a bit; me, answering the questions mostly, and Blondie backing me up. At the end of it as we were leaving, Blondie casually asked about a few relics on the sideboard, under an old photograph of C.H. Nimitz and Chester Nimitz as a very young junior officer; a very battered pair of glasses, and a covered Japanese rice bowl: they came from the tunnels on Iwo Jima. Blondie said ‘oh?’ and raised her eyebrows. Yes, Mike had been allowed into the old Japanese tunnels; Rank hath it’s privileges – and Iwo is a shrine to Marines, after all.

After the book-club meeting – two hours, of talk and questions, and hardly a chance to nibble any of the traditional German finger-foods, an hour-long drive home, which seemed much longer. I fired up the computer and did a google-search, and found out the very coolest part. (Blondie had a suspicion, of course – being a Marine herself.) Mike was not just any general, but a Marine general, and commandant of the Marine Corps. How cool is that? One of my biggest fans is the former commandant of Marines, General Michael Hagee.

I’m actually kind of glad I didn’t know that, going in – I think we both would have been at least a little bit intimidated.