The Grantville Gazette - Vol 3 Part 4

Margaretha Vandiver, once upon a time "die Krausin," looked a little defensive and said, "His sister."

"Hissister ?"

"Yes." The older woman reached across the table and tapped the name on the slate. "Mrs. Walsh, the clerk at the post office, is his sister."

Walpurga reflected once more on the utter absurdity of this custom of a woman's giving up her own perfectly good name for that of her husband (and possibly, should she be widowed, for that of another husband, and yet another-how ridiculous). It made it practically impossible to tell how people were related. Had not G.o.d himself in the Bible said that Mary was the wife of Joseph? Not that she was Mrs.

Joseph? Walpurga had no intention at all of changing her name when she married.

Margaretha was continuing. "They are good jobs, in the post office.Jobs that Germans can do. Just toread the addresses. It is easier for us to read the up-time handwriting than for the up-timers to read ours.

To sort the mail, take the mail to where it goes. These can be done by people who do not have the strength for the mines or making the roads. We need to always know when there is a vacancy.Before they put up the hiring notice.To make sure that the best people are ready to apply. These are extremely fine jobs." She paused. "And he meets what Pastor Kastenmayer asked for. He is not a constant drunkard, not a brawler, not a lazy lout who will expect his wife to support him."

"He does not have a house. He does not even have a 'trailer.' He lives in the barracks for the army. He does not earn enough to support children." Walpurga wasn't even nearly finished with her litany of Lew Jenkins's defects as a potential husband.

Rahel Dornheimer looked up, motioned with her hand, and asked, "Is he handsome? Is he kind of man who attracts women? Who has seen him?"

"He is not handsome. Not hideous; not misshapen or a monster.But odd looking. His lower face is scarred-the skin." That was Maria Krause. The whole table chimed in.

"Is he young?How old?"

"Thirty years, maybe.It is hard to tell."

Rahel asked, "Would he be kind?"

"Who can tell, with a man?"

September, 1634

"They want me to make this marriage." Sabina Ottmar looked at the other woman, who was nursing a baby daughter. "I don't want to make you unhappy, my lady. I don't want to make Herr Pflaum angry that I ask you. But I think that you, perhaps, would know."

Grantville was very like Keilhau in one way. People gossiped.

Staci Ann Beckworth, now very respectable and, by marriage, Lutheran, wife and mother, church member in good standing, looked down at her baby, then up.

"I was a fool when I was living with Lew, okay? I was wearing black leather mini-skirts and spiking my purple-dyed hair with mousse."

Sabina looked bewildered. Staci Ann detached the baby-she was pretty well done anyway -and handed her over to the other woman with a burp rag."Just a minute."

She went into the back of the house and returned with a little book. "It's my old alb.u.m. I don't know why Mom kept this." She opened so Sabina could look."Mini-skirts; that's purple dye; that's flourescentgreen dye in this one. And overweight. Ye G.o.ds, I was at my low point. I'd mostly gotten rid of this by the first time I met you." She took the pictures and left the room again. To put it back, Sabina guessed.

"That was me, then." Staci Ann looked up. "I guess, to you, I looked like a little wh.o.r.e. But I wasn't.

Lew was the only one, beforeArnold ." She chewed nervously on a fingernail. "Lew had me at my worst, see. And, yeah, he was kind.Not just that he didn't hit me. He didn't even yell at me, no matter what stupid thing I tried. He'd make a joke of it. Or just go outdoors. There's no mean streak in him."

She sighed. "Don't get me wrong. Me being me, I'm better off withArnold .For Mom and Dad and the farm and all that. Mom despised Lew. But if it hadn't been for the Ring of Fire-for the kind of kid I was then, I could have done a lot worse, and that's the truth."

"I am barren," Sabina said nervously. "I can't have children."

"Well," Staci Ann answered, "neither can Lew. His mom didn't believe in vaccinations, the stupid cow.

Mumps.Junior year of high school. And a gossip in the doctor's office told someone, so it got out. She got fired, but it didn't do Lew any good, by then. Not the way guys that age are. 'Little Lewie lost his b.a.l.l.s.' That's why he dropped out, I think, the things they said to him. He's smart enough that he could have finished, G.o.d knows."

April, 1635

Sabina looked at the line of confirmands. In an hour, she would be a married woman. With a cottage on the Booths' farm, newly built, where she would live.Where they would live when he was on leave. She had no dreams. She was marrying this man because it had been arranged for her. He was not being confirmed because she had charmed him into it. He was being confirmed because Staci Ann Beckworth had asked Arnold Pflaum to talk to him, and his sister, about being Lutheran.

Herr Pflaum had also acted as the broker for her, in making a marriage contract, along with the Booths.

It was kind of them. Of course, that was the sort of thing that a village's mayor did. Herr Pflaum had never been to Keilhau, of course; he was from Lichstedt. President of the Grange in Grantville was not quite the same, but Herr Pflaum was also a church elder atSt. Martin 's. Herr Pflaum was very young for such responsibility. But he did it well.For many more than just the people from his own village, just outside the Ring of Fire.

Sabina was not fully happy about being married to a soldier. She was aware as anyone that soldiers run the risk of being killed. Now that she finally would have a husband, which she never expected, she would rather keep him alive. But Lew had gotten used to the army during the last three years. He didn't want to change.

So be it. She would live in the much-too-big cottage by herself.

* * * Lew's sister, Bernita Walsh, watched from the unfamiliar pew. She was so glad that Lew was getting married now-that he'd have someone. She knew that she had sort of pushed him into it, after the idea came up.And after she had met Sabina. She'd been worried sick about what would become of him, ever since Doc Adams had told her about the cancer. She only had a few more months, maybe a year at most, maybe a lot less. Sabina would take care of him, now.And David and Ashley. She wouldn't mind going so much, with Sheldon already gone for nearly two years, if it weren't for the kids.

Staci Ann knew.AndArnoldPflaum.And Manning and Myrna Booth. Those were the only ones she had told. But the new cottage that the Booths had built for Sabina and Lew had two extra rooms.

Sabina would make a place for the kids.

Briar Rose: Roland Worley and Rahel Rosina Dornheimer

October, 1634

"p.r.i.c.kly pear," Roland Worley said.

"That is?" Jonas Justinus Muselius asked.

"It's a, umm, a cactus."

"And a cactus is?" Jonas' English was probably better than that of any other down-timer in Grantville, but this topic had never come up in his many conversations with Gary Lambert.

The conversation atSt. Martin 's rectory was interrupted by a hike to the high school, which had the nearest library, a visit to the World Book under the topic of Cactus, and a picture of a p.r.i.c.kly pear.

Muselius grinned. "Oh, yes. We would agree. Her name is not just Dornheimer, you know. She is our own littleDornroeschen ."

"Dornroeschen?"Roland asked.

"Th.o.r.n.y little rose." He started to tell a story.

Roland picked his teeth. He thought, he said, that he had heard this one somewhere.

They headed for the librarian's desk. Between Colleen Carson and Elias Kurtz, the answer was finally, "I don't think we have a copy, here in the high school library. You ought to be able to find one at the public library.Or at the grade school. It's a fairy tale. The English t.i.tle is 'Briar Rose'-that's also called a wildrose, or sometimes a bramble. They're very th.o.r.n.y."

Roland obediently remodeled his perception. Rahel Rosina Dornheimer was a briar rose, not a p.r.i.c.kly pear.Which didn't mean that any guy who tried to get close to her wasn't likely to get poked with something sharp.

July, 1631-September, 1632

At the time of the Ring of Fire, Roland was divorced. His ex-wife had taken the kids and moved toBeckley in 1996.Leaving him, a guy fromDenver,Colorado, in Grantville. With a job, true enough-he was a machinist, and a good one if he did say so himself. Nat Davis paid him pretty well. And a house that he could afford the payments on, given that Nat Davis paid him pretty well.And, since he'd been in, between '83 and '85, a pretty decent slot in the West Virginia USAR. All of which meant that moving would have been a real ha.s.sle, so he stayed.A perfectly healthy guy with a bank account in a town where not one of the available females really appealed to him.

Then the Ring of Fire.

Jacksonhadn't activated him. He was more valuable where he was, in the machine shop. He stayed in the reserves. In a couple of months, Nat hired a regular clean-up crew. What with the apprentices to train and all the new orders coming in, it was a plain waste of his men's time to do that.

That was where Rahel had appeared, sweeping around his machine.p.r.i.c.kly little thing.Pointy nose like a cute Halloween witch-not the big hooked kind, but the little one like his kids had drawn, two sides of a triangle.Hostile. Not picking-a-fight hostile, but just keeping to herself. The only person she ever seemed to talk to was one of the other cleaning women, older than she was, and not much friendlier. Sabina, that one was called. Sabina the Scarecrow, one of the men called her; she was all gangly and awkward.

Then Sabina disappeared. That was the first time he'd actually talked to Rahel-he asked her where Sabina was.

"She got another job.Goat dairy. She is good dairy maid. Better job than this." Rahel returned to her sweeping. Rahel was protective of Sabina. When her father married Sabina's mother, any number of people had taken it upon themselves to tell the sixteen-year-old Rahel just what had happened to her new stepsister after she was first placed into service at age twelve.Some plain; some with embroidery.

From that day onward, Rahel had never let a man touch her.

A month or two later, Rahel disappeared off the cleaning crew. By that time, Roland realized that he wanted her. The only thing that he couldn't figure out was why. He wasn't given to introspection. It never occurred to him that the fact that his ex-wife had been sugar-sweet the whole time they were dating and turned indifferent the day after she had the wedding ring on her finger had anything to do with it.

But he went looking. The new job Rahel had found was working for Irma Lawler and Edna Berry, the two elderly "plant ladies" who were no longer up to long, uninterrupted days of labor on bedding plantsand seed gathering. He'd leaned on the fence. He knew better than to trespa.s.s on her turf in that garden.

It took several months of fence-leaning on his day off before he learned much about her. Her two brothers had been killed protecting the villagers fleeing from Quittelsdorf, so now she had her father, who was seventy-five, and her stepmother, who was seventy-two, to take care of. It turned out that Sabina was her stepsister. She also worried about her widowed sister-in-law, who originally came from a different village and was in Grantville with three sons to bring up and no marriage prospects.

Roland asked her out. Rahel told him plainly that if he wanted a wife who would keep house for him, he would be doing a charitable act if he married her sister-in-law Dorothea instead. She introduced him to Dorothea and encouraged them to go out. After three tries, Roland concluded that Dorothea was a weeping drip, and not someone it would be any fun at all to have for a wife. But he did find her a job as a live-in housekeeper to old Edgar McAndrew and his sick wife, which gained him a few points with Rahel.

He thought. It would take the most finely calibrated device in the shop to measure progress with Rahel.

May, 1634

Rahel didn't like the whole idea of having the Quittelsdorf girls go out and marry up-timers as a project.

She also didn't like living in a big town, any more than Sabina had. But she needed the better money that she could earn in the city.

And if-if, mind you-she did agree to do this, she could ignoredie Krausin 's list. There was an up-timer she could marry.A much better-off one than any of those. She'd gotten to know Roland Worley pretty well. But- as she had repeated to him many times, "I'm a farm girl. I want to marry a farmer." She even said once, as she extracted herself from a more compromising position than was customary before committing herself to something irrevocable, "This is silly. It would make much more sense for me to marry Guenther Conrath, if we had the capital to buy a lease.Or Hans Guenther Hercher." Well, maybe Hans Guenther Hercher, if anybody knew where Walpurga and Lisbet's brother was, considering that he quarreled with his father when he was almost twenty and left home in a temper. He hadn't been seen by anyone in Quittelsdorf for the last fifteen years. But, surely, Roland would not be interested in such petty details as the shortage of suitable and available grooms.

By that time, he had pretty well figured out what portions of her anatomy he could approach without getting p.r.i.c.ked too hard. Advancing upon an ear, he asked, "Would they do this?"

Rahel was increasingly furious with herself. She suspected that it was very unlikely that either Guenther or Hans Guenther would ever do that.Lease or no lease. Present or absent.She was beginning to enjoy this .

July, 1634

Rahel started piling on the objections. "You would not want to be a Lutheran." She stated it as a foregone conclusion.

"I might be willing to consider it. Depending on what it involves." Roland thought that he was seeing signs of a snowmelt, but he didn't want to ruin everything by moving too fast. Not even though, the way he was feeling at the moment, he was inclined to say, "Lady, if you would just go to bed with me, I would be happy to put on a clown suit and do somersaults in front of City Hall if that's what it takes."

"Maybe Pastor Kastenmayer won't think your wife is dead."

Roland had made up his mind to marry his p.r.i.c.kly pear Rahel even if this might involve a future as a Lutheran married to a female farmer, so he went over on his next day off and did an end run by talking to the minister out at her church and the teacher who did the translations. They both agreed that it didn't matter whether his up-time wife was dead or not, since they happily ascertained that he had been legally divorced from her before the Ring of Fire-and for a reason that down-time Lutherans thought was okay. It appeared that taking the kids and moving toBeckley was "desertion" and someone namedSaint Paul had said it was a good reason for divorce. They seemed to put a lot of stock inSaint Paul .

Pastor Kastenmayer was very surprised to learn that Roland had never heard ofSaint Paul , except for the city inMinnesota . The discussion had required a visit to the library in the high school. Pastor Kastenmayer hadn't truly taken to heart Jonas' discovery that many of the up-timers in Grantville were heathen.

Muselius borrowed a book of children's Bible stories from Gary Lambert and gave it to Roland to read.

He figured that instruction had to start someplace. That seemed as good as any other.

Roland had heard of Adam and Abraham, though not in any detail.And Jesus in the manger. The rest of the stories were news to him.

October, 1634-March, 1635

"Of course you must learn it all if you are going to be a Lutheran." That was Rahel's reaction to his protest that the Shorter Catechism was really a bit much to expect a guy to memorize.