Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine #6

in America! A marriage between the handsome, penniless Wolf and the tall, some might say plain and very wealthy, Sweet Water.

With Wolf’s departure, I see a bigger portion of farm work falling on my shoulders.

We have one poorly paid hired hand, Pablo Martinez, and he’s no youngster – just shy of thirty. Pa believes in hard work and not paying for it. “You, your brother and mother,” Pa has said nearly every day of my life, “need to earn your keep; nothing is free in this world.”

Wolf and Sweet Water met last summer after my brother’s high school graduation.

He worked in the oil fields of the Osage reservation on the odd Sunday Pa let him off the farm for church. Wolf had his own form of worship. Like most girls, Sweet Water fell for my brother. He quickly surmised that the water flowing through her land was sweet all right, scented with oil. The black gold my father sniffed after all these years rushed like liquid ingots into the hands of his son.

My Pa, Richard Schultz, traveled from Wismar, Germany in 1919 to Mexico to make his fortune in oil. He found fate if not fortune. Pa, with no prior experience of love (some might say no present one either), fell headlong into a quagmire of passion and got married.

She was a young bitty girl named Estella, delicate as a whisper with skin white as cream, hair black as onyx and dark brown saucer-shaped eyes. Her photograph sits right on our mantel as if she was a long-lost relation. Pa said her beauty was not meant for this world.

She died in his arms within a year, her lungs filled with fluid, her forehead burning with fever.

Pa pieced together the broken bits of his heart, scabbed over with bitterness, and returned to Germany. There he met a stout German woman named Frida – not likely to die from fever or from a kick in the head by a bee-stung horse – which happened right here on this farm. Ma and Pa traveled across the Atlantic, landed in Corpus Christi, Texas, worked the oil fields and finally settled in Oklahoma. They didn’t find oil on their land, just acres of dirt. Pa named his firstborn, a son, Wolfgang, a good German name. He insisted that I be named Estella after the ghost that had drilled a black hole in what was left of his heart.

Like a good German, Ma believed in obedience as much as Pa believed in hard work. I wish that horse had kicked some sense into her. Now it’s 1939 in Ponca City, Oklahoma and I am a stout, sixteen-year old dough-faced German-American girl, with the unlikely name of Estella Schultz, about to be the sister-in-law to an Osage princess. God bless America!