"That was the year I broke my nose at the demolition derby."
Tina Marie Hollister pointed to the knot. She'd never bothered to have it repaired. Never had the money, to tell the truth. Probably wouldn't have bothered even if she'd been rich.
Kitty Chaffin looked across the desk. The personnel office of the State of Thuringia-Franconia would be hard up without Tina Marie. Her oldest son, Ray Lafferty, had married a German girl, Christina Zuehlke, up at Wismar last year. It had turned out that Christina had two unemployed older brothers with Latin school educations who would be willing to work for SoTF personnel in recruiting down-timers. Brothers from up north on the Baltic coast. Brothers who didn't have cousins, godsons, sons of godfathers, or in-laws of cousins all over central Thuringia. All of whom needed government jobs. Or wanted them, at least. If Kitty could have hired subordinates from Madagascar, she would have considered it a good deal.
Even so, sometimes the sheer raucousness of the other woman got on Kitty's nerves. Not that she was that much older than Tina Marie. Maybe twelve years. No more than fifteen. Tina Marie would be fiftyish to Kitty's sixtyish. Maybe not quite fifty. She could look it up in the files here in the office if it was ever important.
Right now, the younger of the two Zuehlke men was looking at Tina Marie a little dubiously. They hadn't objected when Christina had married Ray Lafferty. At that point, up in Pomerania and Mecklenburg, the devastation had been so bad that they'd been happy enough that their sister had just found a husband who could afford to house and feed her.
Of course, that was in Wismar. Before they met Ray's mother.
But now, with regular jobs, their middle-classness was coming through. Kitty thought that it was hard to get much middle-classier than Johann Friedrich and Dietrich Zuehlke.
It was hard to get less middle-class than Tina Marie. She hadn't explained just what a demolition derby was, but Dietrich Zuehlke clearly realized that it wasn't a sedate music recital. He suspected that it was closer to a bear-baiting.
"It is not easy, Pastor Kastenmayer." Dietrich Zuehlke sat uneasily in the minister's study in the rectory of St. Martin in the Fields Lutheran church.
The church itself sat, almost as uneasily, just outside the borders of the Ring of Fire. While wanting to provide religious services to the many refugees of his own faith, Count Ludwig Guenther of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt had concluded that they were capable of walking far enough to attend sermons delivered on land that was clearly still his own.
"All of us are living in her house," Zuehlke continued. "Frau Hollister's house. Given the situation with space and rents in Grantville, this is unavoidable."
"All?" Kastenmayer had seen Zuehlke with a group of other people at services, but there hadn't seemed to be so many of them.
"The house has three sleeping rooms. If, as Frau Hollister points out, you count the one that she made out of a side porch when her sons got to be noisy, rambunctious, teenagers."
"How many people?"
"Frau Hollister and her youngest daughter Carly Baumgardner in one room. Her daughter April Lafferty and my half-sister, Anna Sartorius, in the other. And on the 'porch' there are three sets of beds. My brother and I have one set. Frau Hollister's younger sons Vance Lafferty and Garrett Baumgardner have the second. The third—that depends on who is in town. Sometimes her son Ronnie Baumgardner. Sometimes my half-brother, Jacob Sartorius, when he is not in classes at the university in Jena. Sometimes my stepfather, Lucas Sartorius, since he is in Erfurt on business and comes down to visit us. The only family members who do not live there are Frau Hollister's oldest son Ray Lafferty who married my sister. Her name is Christina. They are up north still, in Wismar."
Pastor Kastenmayer thought. "These 'bunks' are two-level beds, set upon posts?"
Zuehlke nodded. "Frau Hollister sold off her up-time beds with box springs and mattresses, replacing them with down-time made bunks with rope slats and horsehair mattresses. She says that she gained, thereby, spare funds to pay for April's apprenticeship. That is another issue, apprenticing a girl to an artisan's craft. Plus, she has a couple of canvas cots that can be set up if they are needed."
"Where?"
"There is space for them in the two rooms used by the women. The rest of the house isn't all that big, either. A living room, an eat-in kitchen, and a bathroom. Which is a luxury, certainly. As is the natural gas heating system. Anna says that if we return to Wismar after this summer's campaign is over, presuming that the Swedes win the war, of course, she will greatly miss the natural gas 'range' in the kitchen."
Kastenmayer smiled. "And the refrigerator?"
"Refrigeration isn't a big worry up on the Baltic and North Sea coasts." Zuehlke's expression was quite serious.
Dietrich Zuehlke was always quite serious. At the age of thirty, he was a responsible sort of person. Responsible in a way for his older brother Johann Friedrich, who tended to lapse into frivolity and facetiousness if someone didn't keep an eye on him. Responsible for his younger half-sister and half-brother.
Jacob, who was just eighteen, was at the university in Jena most of the time, so that was a minor problem. But, Dietrich explained, he worried about the influence of Frau Hollister on his sister Anna, who was just twenty-three. Even more, he worried about the influence of nineteen-year-old April, now Christina's sister-in-law, on Anna.
Above all, he felt responsible because, under his influence and because of his urging, his stepfather, Lucas Sartorius, had come to Grantville for several visits.
"It is my fault," Dietrich said. "I practically dragged him down to Grantville so that he could see where his stepsons were working now. To show him that, given a reasonably stable interval in this eternal war, we are not wasting the money he spent on our education."
To Grantville, where he had fallen under the spell of this Jezebel.
Frau Hollister, in whose house Dietrich was necessarily living.
"When can we expect the shipment to arrive?" Dennis Stull, Grantville's civilian head of procurement at the USE's main supply depot for Thuringia and the rest of the central Germanies, had been impatient for two weeks. He hated evasions. He expected a lot of them this morning.
"Never." The tall man seated opposite him—Lucas Sartorius was his name—reached across the desk and handed Stull a letter. "This came in yesterday evening from our firm's factor in Luebeck."
"Never?"
"At the direct orders of Emperor Gustavus Adolphus, all of the grain shipments we are managing to bring out of the Baltic are being diverted to supplying the armies in the north."
"Just how does he propose to feed the armies in the south? At Ingolstadt? In Swabia?"
Sartorius leaned back. "May I suggest that the king, ah, the emperor, is in the north himself and sees the need there directly."
"Is this some version of 'out of sight, out of mind'?"
"A universal proverb, more or less. In the same category as, 'there's no use in crying over spilt milk.'"
"I don't intend to have Baner foraging in Franconia. We have enough problems going in Franconia with the Ram Rebellion. And while I have no doubts at all that Horn has been foraging through Swabia just as ruthlessly as Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar has been foraging through Swabia, I'd really like to try to keep it within reasonable limits."
"So that, if he prevails, there will be something left in the region for you to govern?"
"Or for Gustavus Adolphus's allies to govern. Parts of the region, such as Wuerttemberg, are Lutheran."
Sartorius turned from political speculation to business. "You do realize that no firm has a great deal to offer right now. This year's crop of Polish grain is still in the field. It will be months before it can be harvested and transported to the Baltic ports. During my career, I have traveled as far as Koenigsburg regularly. Sometimes farther, up to Finland. Arranging exports and imports, contracts and sales. Every year, my main stop was Gdansk. Danzig, the Germans call it. I am not giving you an excuse. It is a fact. The only thing any factor can hope to find for the rest of this summer is grain that someone has, as you say, 'stashed' because he was hoping for a higher price. 'Hoarding' is what we call it."
"Well, then." Dennis steepled his fingers together, his elbows on the desk. "Found any good hoards lately?"
". . . absolutely outrageous," Dietrich Zuehlke finished.
Lucas Sartorius looked at him rather mildly. "Tina Marie and I merely went out for a pleasant evening at the Thuringian Gardens. Had a few beers with friends."
"And finished it off in her bed."
"It's not a bad bed," Sartorius said judiciously. "A little narrow and involving some hazards with the upper bunk. Overall, though, quite comfortable, and the absence of bedbugs is particularly delightful. I plan to take several containers of this DDT with me when I return north."
"You should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself. My mother. . . ."
"I was faithful to your mother," Sartorius said. Well, reasonably. She never knew anything to the contrary. Finland was a long way from Wismar, after all. "But she has been dead for two years."
"The horrible example she is setting for Anna and April and Carly. . . ."
"None of whom were home. April and Anna were still at the Thuringian Gardens, with their own friends, when Tina Marie and I decided to leave. There is no reason for either of them to come into Tina Marie's bedroom in the middle of the night. Carly was having a 'sleepover,' which should—should—have guaranteed us a quite adequate level of privacy. If you had not chosen to follow us home."
"I am not here voluntarily."
Ludwig Kastenmayer looked at Lucas Sartorius. He'd seen a lot of men like this during his pastoral career. Not bad men, in the sense of being evil. But not precisely well-behaved, either. Men whose commitment to the Ten Commandments left something to be desired and who, although they appeared for church on Sunday, tended to leave for the tavern before the sermon started. "I guessed as much."
"I'm not, either." That was the older stepson.
"You do realize, Hans-Fritz," Sartorius said, "that you may be excused."
"No you may not." Dietrich glared at his brother.
Jonas Justus Muselius would probably have smiled if he hadn't been more concerned about certain looming communications problems.
Sartorius, who had apparently decided to be difficult just for the sake of being difficult, or possibly mischievous just for the sake of being mischievous, was speaking Low German—the Plattdeutsch of the northern flatlands and coastal regions.
Neither Jonas nor Pastor Kastenmayer spoke the Platt. They spoke the Hochdeutsch of the Saxon uplands and the southern mountains.
This wasn't a matter of the dozens of variant dialects of the central Germanies. These were, really, two different languages.
Jonas felt certain that Sartorius could speak High German just as well as his stepsons could. After all, he was doing business in Erfurt. The man was just being contrary. Still . . . He got up and wandered over to Kastenmayer's book case.
"What are you looking for, Jonas?"
"The Bugenhagen translation of the Bible." Jonas pulled a volume out of the cabinet, tucking it under the elbow of his bad arm. "If Herr Sartorius prefers to speak Platt, perhaps we can deal with unfamiliar words by comparing passages in Luther's translation to the same verses as rendered by the good Doktor Pommer for our northern colleagues."
Kastenmayer nodded, his eyes glinting with amusement. He looked at Sartorius again. "Since the topic of this meeting is your association with Frau Hollister, who certainly does not speak Platt, how do you, ah, communicate with her?"
Sartorius twitched his nose. "Verbally?"
"Yes." Kastenmayer's tone was firm. "In which language?"
"English. Or High German. Or a mixture of both. Usually a mixture of both."
"Great," Jonas said. "I'll call Gary Lambert."
"If I'm going to be hauled up before the Inquisition, Kitty, I want you to come along."
Kitty fiddled with the paper clip container on her desk. "They're Lutherans. I'm pretty sure that Lutherans don't have an Inquisition."
"They have something called a marriage court. An Ehegericht."
"How are you getting involved in a marriage court?"
"If. Just if, mind you, Lucas Sartorius thought he might possibly want to marry again . . ."
"You have to be a witness to his good behavior or something?"
"They're sort of wondering if I'd make a suitable bride for a respectable businessman."
"You understand," Sartorius said to Tina Marie. "I didn't want anyone saying that I hadn't done right by my wife's sons from her first marriage. So I sent them to Latin School and in a lot of ways I don't regret it. They are Beamter now, with government jobs. Working in the office with you and Frau Chaffin. It's a lot less risky than being in business for yourself. They probably won't get rich, but they probably won't go bankrupt, either. Or be jailed by an angry Swedish commissary here because the king of Sweden's aides up north diverted a grain shipment from Erfurt to Oldenburg. In other ways, though . . ." His voice trailed off.
She made a small, encouraging noise, designed to keep him talking. Overall, she found it easier listening to German rather than thinking up sentences to say in it.
"It's all those pastors and would-be pastors they have teaching in secondary schools," he said. "That's the problem. The boys turned into prudes. Especially Dietrich." He patted her shoulder. "No need to worry that Christina will be like that when you come up north to Ray's and meet her. She didn't go to Latin school. She's a jolly girl and likes a dirty joke as well as the next person."
"That's good," Tina Marie said into her beer. "Sehr gut."
Actually, it was very good. It certainly changed the slant she'd been getting on her daughter-in-law from the Zuehlke boys.
"She's likely to want to stay in Wismar. Not come here to Grantville to live. Christina is very attached to Wismar. She won't leave it unless she is forced to. I made her go away in order to complete her education. After she finished the municipal school for girls, I sent her to my sister in Koenigsberg when she was fourteen. My brother-in-law was a grain factor, too, with headquarters there. She stayed for four years and then another two years in the household of a friend, a factor in Danzig, before she came back to Wismar to nurse her mother in her last illness. Didn't like being away."
"She probably wouldn't have liked staying home, either. After all, she was a teenager. Think of how April and Carly gripe at me."
"Entirely possible. In any case, she's a good bookkeeper and well-trained to be the wife of a merchant. I'm glad that Ray is a brick mason when he is not serving in the military. There's no stone up on the coast, but a big market for brick. I've made it my business to investigate the new brick making techniques being used here in Thuringia. Once this year's campaign is over, perhaps your army will discharge him. There's a fortune to be made in brick, all the rebuilding that will have to be done."
Tina Marie nodded and finished her beer.
"Would you like another? Or would you rather . . .?"
She grinned at him. "Get lucky? I'd rather. Let's go?"
"The year I met John Lafferty and married him was one of the best years of my life." Tina Marie looked at Pastor Kastenmayer and stretched her arms over her head, pulling the tight tank top so high that it showed a couple of inches of belly. "I was what he liked, back then. I'm from Texas, originally. I'd finished high school in Brownsville—well, I'd just barely scraped through—and come to San Antonio looking for a job. Got on a commercial landscaping crew—office complexes, malls, things like that. John was the foreman. I was nineteen. Skinny as a rail. Thin face, narrow shoulders, narrow rib cage, flat as a pancake in front, not much hips and what I did have low, widest at the thighs. Every girl John ever dated looked like that. He just went for the type."
"So I got pregnant with Ray, and pretty soon I didn't look like that no more. Instead, think of a pear on stilts. Then I had him—Ray was born, I mean. That was down in San Antonio. The doctor said I ought to breast feed him, which made me soft and squishy on top as well as soft and squishy in the belly from being pregnant. Which sure didn't impress John. So he brought me here to Grantville, dumped me off to keep house for his dad. Dave Lafferty, that was. Vance's middle name is after him. Dave was crippled up with emphysema. He and Linda Lou, John's mom, had been divorced since 1953 and she stayed out in California. John just dropped me here and went to Toledo. Got a job in Toledo and didn't show his face again for five years."
Kitty took a deep breath, thinking of Tina Marie when she came to Grantville. Thin, scrawny, tanned, rough-spoken, and boyish. About as far from soft and squishy as a woman could get. Even when she'd been pregnant with her sixth kid, Tina Marie had looked like a goal post with the football fastened onto its middle with duct tape.
Pastor Kastenmayer gave Tina Marie one of those "keep going" nods.
"I honestly didn't mind keeping house for Dave. He wasn't that bad. But it wasn't a barrel of laughs, either, and John didn't send money all that regularly, so I figured that I'd better get a job. Got on the loading crew at the discount appliance warehouse in Fairmont. That's where I ran into Zane Baumgardner—at a country-western bar over in Fairmont. He was from Grantville, but our paths hadn't ever crossed here."
She smiled. "Okay, Zane was quite a guy back then. I went out with him a couple of times. Over to the 250 Club, mostly. He was like that song that Faron Young used to sing on the jukebox. 'I want to live fast, love hard, die young, and leave a beautiful memory.' Too bad he didn't die young instead of ending up as a drunk up in the holler with the Murrays and Bateses. He'd have left a lot more beautiful memory if he had. Even Cheryl Ann divorced him last year. It takes a lot for a man to be worse than Cheryl Ann Bates is willing to put up with."
Dietrich Zuehlke was frowning.
So was Gary Lambert.
"By 'went out with him a couple of times,'" Kastenmayer interrupted, "do you mean what people call 'a couple of dates'?"
"Well, not official dates. More just hanging out." Tina Marie looked at Gary Lambert for help. He and Jonas started mediating and interpreting cultural differences.
"Hey," Tina Marie said. "What I mean was that I didn't just fall into bed with Zane right away. Though he'd have been happier if I'd been willing to. I actually left Ray with Dave for a few days and took the Greyhound out to Toledo to see what was going on with John. He was running another landscape crew and he'd bought an up/down duplex. Housing several of the illegals he'd brought up from Texas in the upstairs apartment, which brought in enough to cover the mortgage payments. And downstairs, living with another woman. Doris Motylewski was her name. She lasted longer than most of his girls—had enough sense never to get pregnant, so she never got soft and squishy. She eventually dumped him, but that was seven years later. A year after I divorced him and she figured out that he still wasn't going to marry her. She found a guy who was willing to marry her and walked out on John. Every time he came back to Grantville after that, he had a different girl with him. John got older, but the girls he brought stayed the same age."
"Oh." Gary Lambert was looking a little embarrassed.
"Anyway, I figured that what was sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, so I came back and told Zane that I was willing to see it his way. Which is why I had Ronnie a couple of years later. I put 'Lafferty' on his birth certificate. I was still married to John and keeping house for Dave, after all. Ronnie is a Baumgardner, though—we went to court later and had it changed. A year after that, Zane lost his job in the mines here. He went out to Wyoming to work in the strip mines. I'd have gone with him if he'd asked me. But, hell, he didn't ask me to go. That would have been 1980, I guess. We had a big fight about it. Not the best year of my life by a long shot.
"Dave's health was getting a lot worse, so I wrote John and told him that he needed to come back home. He didn't move back, but he did show up occasionally, which I guess was better than nothing. I got Vance and April out of those years and it seemed like every cent that I could make had to go for baby sitters and baby food and disposable diapers. If old Dave hadn't had the house and his disability payments, we'd have been sunk. So eventually I went out to Toledo to see if I could get some child support, this time lugging all four of the kids along. Just to find that Doris was still living downstairs in that duplex with him. That's when I divorced John and put in for child support. He never forgave me for that support order. Not never."
Both Jonas and Pastor Kastenmayer frowned.
"Anyway, in '85, Zane came back from Wyoming and we picked up with each other again. This time, he married me. And we had Garrett and Carly. Right after Carly was born, he started drinking heavy. Then a couple years later, in '92, he left me for Cheryl Ann Bates and I divorced him, too. By that time, believe me, he was no loss. But his parents took it ill and they tried to take Ronnie and Garrett and Carly away from me. It was mostly his mother making the fuss. Horace just went along with her. I was an 'unfit mother,' Mildred said. That's why I stayed in Grantville, really. The court in Fairmont let me keep the kids, but if I'd tried to move away from Grantville, Horace and Mildred would have been right back to their lawyers. So I took office courses at the Tech Center and moved from loading crates in the warehouse to shuffling papers in the office. More ladylike, even if it didn't pay as much. The kind of thing that impresses a judge or a social worker. I got to the point where I could pretend that I was a lady pretty well. At least long enough at a stretch, even though I'm really not at all the lady type. Mildred will tell you that, if you ask her.
"Then John sued for custody of Ray. Tried to get custody of Ray, even though he'd never paid a speck of attention to the boy."
"Ah," Dietrich Zuehlke said. "Did he request custody of Vance and April as well?"
Tina Marie stuck her chin out. "Nah. He wasn't that sure they were his."
Her answer seemed to hang in the air.
"Well, neither was I. At least not as far as April's concerned. Vance is his. I wouldn't have given him David for a middle name, for John's father, if I hadn't been sure of that. I just named April after the month she was born. I figured it was kind of neutral. No point in naming her after Linda Lou or after my mom, anyway. They both cut out of our lives pretty early. Plus Mom was named Philena, which isn't the sort of thing anyone ought to do to a kid."
Kastenmayer nodded. "I see."
"Face it. John was really just mad that because I moved out of his dad's place, Dave had to go into the nursing home for a year before he died. To pay for that, along with his Medicare, he had to sell the house, so John didn't get a thing when Dave died. John was totally ticked off about it. Dave didn't hold a grudge, though. He told me to go ahead and divorce John. Said it was good riddance to bad rubbish."
Dietrich Zuehlke inserted a comment. He didn't precisely say that around the time of April's birth she had been acting as a whore. But he certainly implied it.
Tina Marie shook her head. "I may have slept around a bit back then, with John in Toledo and Zane in Wyoming. I'm not going to lie to you about that, but it wasn't ever for money. Never with a guy I didn't actually like. The most I ever got out of an evening was a meal in a nice restaurant. Like that Italian place in Fairmont. You know. High class. The kind of place you can wear a dress and heels and feel okay, because other women are wearing them too."
She stood on her toes, picked up Pastor Kastenmayer's wife's shawl that was lying across the high back of a bench, draped it across her shoulders, and swished.
"Not that I owned all that many dresses. I didn't need them, the way I lived. I was lonesome. Taking care of Dave Lafferty and the kids plus commuting to work at the warehouse in Fairmont wasn't any picnic. A girl wants to have some fun."
She glared at Dietrich Zuehlke. "And I never took a cent of welfare, either. Not food stamps or WIC or anything. I paid my own way."
"Er." Ludwig Kastenmayer cleared his throat. "What did your pastor have to say about this?"
"Pastor?" Tina Marie frowned.
"Preacher," Kitty and Gary Lambert clarified simultaneously.
"I don't go to church. Never did." Tina Marie shook her head. "Ray and Vance and April are Church of Christ. A friend of Dave's used to pick them up on Sunday morning and take him and them to church with her. After he died—that was in '86—she kept taking the kids. The Baumgardners—Horace and Mildred—were Baptists. Well, Mildred still is. Horace died two years ago. But the church threw Zane out on account of the drinking, way before the Ring of Fire, so Ronnie and Garrett and Carly haven't ever seen any reason to join up. Me, I'm just not the Holy Roller type."
Gary Lambert's explanation of "Holy Roller" turned out to be beneficial to Tina Marie's cause—at least from Pastor Kastenmayer's perspective. He could only think highly of a woman who, however lamentably uninstructed in the creeds, nevertheless avoided the temptations offered by heterodox sects and cults of various types. This led into a digression on the place of snake handling in Appalachian religious culture.
Kastenmayer found it fascinating. He was already familiar, of course, with the more routine and mundane aspects of up-time religion, such as that the Baptists eschewed infant baptism but somehow expected their children to become believers as adults. Just out of a clear blue sky, with no catechism classes.
"That's not exactly how it works," Gary said. "Or not exactly how it's supposed to work. If this Mildred had been a responsible grandmother, she should have been picking Ronnie and Garrett and Carly up and taking them to Sunday school. So they'd be propagandized into joining when they were old enough. Like that friend of Dave Lafferty's did for the other three. Sounds to me like she was just being a grinch."
"Thank you for assisting us this evening," Sartorius said to Jonas and Gary as they walked into the high school library. "I thought it was important for Tina Marie to understand just how far away from Grantville my work normally lies."
"I am not grateful," Dietrich commented. "I consider it to fall more into the category of 'aiding and abetting a crime.'"
"Let's just find the globe," Gary looked around with a bland, mild, expression on his face.
"Here." Jonas moved to the right from the entryway. He turned the globe. "This is Grantville, now. Right about here. That would be Wismar, about here. The globe only has the names of the cities that were largest up-time, so Wismar isn't on it. But here's Gdansk."
"Remind me again why we're here." Tina Marie was impatient.
"I don't want you to be unhappy if you go with me. My first wife was very attached to Wismar. It was her home town. So I left my household there, even though most of my work was in ports farther east and I was not able to return home as often as I would have preferred. You need to see how far you will be from your home."
"One inch. One piddling little inch from Grantville to Wismar if you measure it on this map." She snorted and turned the globe. "Look at this." She put her finger down. "That's Brownsville, Texas. This is just about where Grantville came from in West Virginia. That was four times as far. At least. That doesn't even count crossing the whole ocean and skipping over France for us to get here." Her fingernail traced a path. "What's Wismar like?"
Dietrich Zuehlke emitted a simultaneously hostile and wistful-sounding, "Flat."
Gary Lambert laughed.
"All these hills make me sick. Really sick. Your Doctor Adams said that the word is 'claustrophobic.' Not enough sky; not enough horizon; not enough room, not enough space, not enough flatness."
"Flat?" Tina Maria looked at the globe more closely. "Flat like Brownsville? With a river?"
Sartorius assured her that all the Baltic ports had in common that they were flat, with a river.
She stared at the globe for a minute. "I wonder sometimes if anyone left up-time ever gives me a thought any more.
"Your parents stayed in Texas?" That was Gary Lambert.
"I'd been in foster care a dozen years before I left Brownsville. Which doesn't mean that I don't miss the Rio Grande. Mom came around now and then until I was twelve or thirteen. Then she just sort of dwindled away. I didn't know whether she was still alive or not, even before the Ring of Fire. If she died, nobody told me. Maybe she just left town, looking for something better. Never did know my dad. Mom said that he smashed himself up in a car accident when I was just a baby. Well, drag racing, to tell the truth. He spent a long time in the hospital and then died. I've been gone from there a long time. Never kept in touch. Nobody to keep in touch with." She started singing softly:
Remember me when the candle lights are gleaming,
Remember me at the close of a long, long day.
It would be so sweet when all alone I'm dreaming
Just to know you still remember me.
"Well," she said. " None of the rest of you probably ever heard that old chestnut, anyway."
"I have," Gary Lambert answered, leaning his elbows back against the encyclopedia shelves. "It's a Bob Dylan song, isn't it?"
"He might have sung it, but it's way older than that. Probably ten years older than me, even. I learned it from a Willie Nelson record, I think. T. Texas Tyler sang it, too. I suppose the only person left up-time who might ever give me a thought is John Lafferty. Not that it's likely that he will." Kicking off her flip-flops, she started to waltz by herself in the small open space between the library entrance and the tables:
The sweetest songs belong to lovers in the gloaming,
The sweetest days are days that used to be.
The saddest words I ever heard were words of parting
When you said "Sweetheart, remember me."
You told me once that you were mine alone forever
And I was yours till the end of eternity.
But all those vows are broken now, and we will never
Be the same except in memory.
A brighter face may take my place when we're apart, dear,
A sweeter smile, a love more bold and free.
But in the end, fair weather friends may break your heart, dear.
If they do, sweetheart, remember me.
Remember me when the candle lights are gleaming,
Remember me at the close of a long, long day.
Just to be so sweet when all alone you're dreaming
Just to know you still remember me.
Tina Marie's dance slowed to an end. She rubbed her hands against the back pockets of her black denim jeans. "Scotty Wiseman wrote it, back when the National Barn Dance was broadcast out of WLS in Chicago." She straightened her shoulders. "Wash that all out in the laundry, will you, guys? Just forget about it. I'm really not one bit the sentimental type."
She turned back to the globe, Sartorius looking over her shoulder.
"The point is that Wismar's not that far away."
"It's a beautiful song," Jonas said to Gary Lambert and Ronella Koch that evening. "A little melancholic, but lovely." He looked rather wistfully at Ronella; then looked away. "I believe that I will translate it into German."
"They can't mean it." April was horrified. "They can't really mean for her to go off with him and leave us behind."
"Considering that they just told us so," Hans-Fritz said, "they probably mean it. Look, we're not that bad."
"But we've always been able to count on Mom."
"Don't be stupid," Dietrich said. "She's a totally unsuitable wife for my stepfather. It's absolutely shocking for her to plan to leave you here, sharing it with Hans-Fritz and me until Ronnie and his fiancee get married. We aren't even really related."
"If you don't like it, there's nothing to keep you from moving out."
"April, that's rude." Ronnie shook his head.
"Well, then, if he doesn't like it, then I can move out. Live with my boyfriend. Maybe he thinks that's less shocking."
"You don't have a boyfriend," Vance pointed out.
April shot a hostile glance at Dietrich. "If he pushes me, I'll find one. If I need to."
"Mom's not going right away." Carly looked at Anna. "That's right, isn't it?"
Anna nodded. "Not until some time in the spring."
"So we don't have to panic right away, do we?"
Ronnie hugged her. "We don't need to panic at all. Someone will think of something. If Mr. Know-It-All there would just stop sticking his oar into the water."
"If Grandma hadn't sold her house after Grandpa died," Garret said, "we could move in with her."
April's expression was sour. "You and Carly could. The odds that she would have me are zero percent."
"Well, she did sell her house," Hans-Fritz said. "So that's not one of the things that you need to worry about."
"Easy for you to say."
"Well. If nothing else works, I guess I could find somebody and get married myself. I'm the oldest, after all."
Carly stared at him. "But Hans-Fritz, you're not in love. You're not even dating."
"No. But I have a government job and live in a house with indoor plumbing. Trust me, Carly. In a pinch, I can put out word that I'm looking for a wife and have one in a month."
Garrett stared at him. "Would you really do that for us?"
"Hey, kids. I may not be as conscientious as Dietrich here, but I'm not all bad. I'm about the age I should be thinking of getting married. Lucas was good to us. If he needs a favor from me, I'm willing to pay him back."
"Yes. It is quite true. All that remains is to set a date for the wedding." Salome Piscatora nodded her head firmly.
"I can't believe that she's even thinking of marrying him." Mildred Baumgardner pointed at Lucas Sartorius with her fork. "Or that he's thinking of marrying her, for that matter. She's a horrible woman. An unfit mother. But if she takes off with this, this—this German, Garrett and Carly will have no mother at all."
"She isn't an unfit mother." Kitty Chaffin gestured with her cup. "She never was. She fed them. She kept them clean and sent them to school looking neat. She never once left them without a sitter. And you know that yourself. If it was otherwise, you'd have brought it up in court when you were trying to take them away from her."
"You. What do you think?" Mildred turned to look at Salome.
The heavily pregnant wife of the Lutheran minister took a sip of the boiled milk in her cup. "It is not my place to have an opinion. I do know that under the laws of the church, her first husband was left up-time and will be considered dead. Her divorce from the second husband is valid, since he both abandoned her—that is desertion—and committed adultery. Those are Biblical grounds. We do not have as many divorces now as you up-timers have, and only those two grounds exist. But Frau Hollister's divorce from your son, gracious lady, is valid under our laws."
Kitty wasn't ready to let go of Mildred's other allegation. "She's always kept a close eye on all her kids, and they've all turned out just fine. Ray and Ronnie are in the military. Doing well. Ray's still up north and Ronnie's been detailed to the Mechanical Support Division. Ray's married. Ronnie's dating Megan Collins, who is a real nice girl. Vance is military too—a radio operator up in Erfurt. April's out at the mine, apprenticing to be an electrician. They all got their high school diplomas. Garrett will graduate from high school next year and go into the military, too. Carly's grade are good. What more could anyone ask?"
"Custody of the kids," Mildred said. "Considering that they're the only grandchildren I have."
"You're in the assisted living center," Kitty pointed out. "Because of the walker and all. It took three of us to get you down to the café this morning. Salome and him and me. It was one thing back when Horace was alive, but how could you possibly take custody of those kids now?"
Sartorius listened to them talk, twisting his goatee.
"It won't be hot on the Baltic coast," Lucas Sartorius said. "Not in the way you describe this Brownsville. I'm afraid that you will find it cold. Cold and damp."
"You do have fireplaces, don't you?"
"Yes. But mostly they burn peat rather than wood or coal."
"Anna will go back with us. She says that in spite of all Grantville's attractions, she would rather be with you than with her half-brothers, 'given how stultifying they are.'" Tina Marie laughed. "That seems to be her favorite word right now."
"But not your daughters."
"April says that she can take care of herself."
"Can she?"
"Why not? She'll have my house to live in. Megan can move in too, once she and Ronnie get married. Vance and Garrett will be home most of the time. In a pinch, we could ask Ronnie and Megan to move up the wedding a few months. Have it before we leave. There's no reason they can't."
"So?"
"No matter what, she's staying to finish her apprenticeship. I sort of doubt that there are many jobs for electricians in Wismar anyway."
"Which leaves the question of whether Carly goes or stays."
Tina Marie bit her lip. "She stays. I want her to finish high school here."
"Can April take care of her? Does she have the time? Or the will?"
"I don't really want to risk that. April doesn't have the time. Or the patience."
"Her father?"
"Impossible."
"So?"
"If Dietrich tries to come all fatherly on her, she'll just fight it. Rebel. She wasn't even three when Zane left. She's never had a father telling her what to do and she's not used to it. I cry every time I try to think about leaving her behind."
"Perhaps there is a solution."
Tina Marie raised here eyebrows.
"Move the grandmother into the house with Carly and April. With them, plus the boys, plus Ronnie and Megan, she does not need an assisted living center to take care of her. They can easily carry her up and down the steps to the street. Shop for her."
"That means that Mildred wins, I guess."
"You are giving them up to go with me. Can you tell me honestly that you would not feel better to have their grandmother with them?"
"I can't. But I sure wish that I could."
"Perhaps she will be so demanding of attention and keep Dietrich so busy that he will not have the time to exasperate April and Carly."
Tina Marie finally smiled. "If Mildred has to be wished off on somebody . . . Well, Dietrich deserves her if anybody does."
"I'm giving her custody. For a year. Carly's willing. So is Garrett. If they can't get along, all of them together in the house, we'll know by the end of the year. If they don't, I'll have to think again. I had a long talk with the child welfare people."
Sartorius smiled. "I have a feeling—an omen perhaps—that the plan will succeed."
Tina Marie turned to him. "I have a feeling—an omen perhaps—about marrying you. I'm not one bit the superstitious type, but they do say that the third time's the charm."
"Pastor Kastenmayer could have done more to prevent this marriage," Dietrich Zuehlke complained to Kitty Chaffin.
"Well, maybe. But after I got to know your stepfather a bit, I figured the two of them were a pretty even match. Maybe the preacher thought so, too."
"It all worked out pretty well, I thought," Hans-Fritz said with his usual amiability. "At least, I didn't have to get married right away. Although now that I have the idea in my head, I may do something about it fairly soon."
Kitty grinned. "Who's the lucky girl?"
"I don't know yet. But what April said about a boyfriend sort of got under my skin. That if she was pushed, she could find one. I can probably find some pretty girl who's interested in me." He smirked at Dietrich.
"Go to work, guys." Kitty threatened them with her paperclip holder.
"I sort of doubt that anyone at the city hall could tell you how to get there," Ronella Koch said. "Why don't you try the post office. All the people who deliver mail have to know their routes and there's one that goes out that way, into the holler."
So Pastor Kastenmayer made his way to the post office and requested a favor. Bernita Walsh obligingly agreed to get the mailman on the route to write out directions, even though she just had to ask why anyone in his right mind would want to talk to Zane Baumgardner, given that he'd devoted the last dozen years to drinking his life away.
Kastenmayer looked embarrassed. "Not only is he a lost soul, but a lost soul with a German surname."
"What difference does that make?"
"It is obvious. Some time between 1630 and 2000, some place between Germany and your West Virginia, the Lutheran church, as Gary Lambert would put it, 'dropped the ball' in regard to this family. Until now, I have let my parishioners go out and gather in freshly cut sheaves, as in the case of the young men who will be confirmed in April."
"Oh," Bernita said. "Yeah, I'll be there. One of them's my brother."
"Ah. Which one?"
"Lew Jenkins."
"Sabina Ottmar is a fine woman."
Bernita pushed her hair back from her face. She was so tired all the time these days. "I sure hope so. That's what I'm counting on."
"I have limited myself to instructing the candidates for confirmation when they were brought to me. I have merely placed the grain in storage, if that is the correct way to phrase it. I have not acted as an evangelist. But perhaps I should be a missionary. Although I may not succeed in restoring this man Baumgardner to faith and sobriety, at least I will try."
Bernita looked at him. "Good luck," she said. "From everything I know about Zane, he's not at all the religious type."