The Grantville Gazette - Vol 3 Part 5

"Why?"

"Because when you are aHausvater , you will need to teach it to the children."

If Rahel had children on her mind, that had to be a good thing. After all, there were certain prerequisitesfor producing children. Roland snaked his arm around her waist. His hand angled somewhat upward and to the left. She didn't move away. He kissed the pointy nose. She moved a little closer, which meant that the hand could start to investigate the region where her bodice met her shift.

Roland got to spend a lot of time discussing the Lutheran canon law of both divorce (established) and time displacement (unprecedented) with Pastor Kastenmayer and Jonas Justinus Muselius, whereas the other guys in the confirmation cla.s.s just had to make the run through the Shorter Catechism. He wasn't sure entirely why. The question of time displacement and whether his wife would be considered dead if they hadn't been divorced seemed to fascinate Jonas and the minister.Pastor. He had to remember to call him a pastor. Lutherans didn't call them ministers or reverends or any other word he'd ever heard for it.

They even took him toJena to meet some really big guns in the church. He didn't see quite why, since they'd already agreed that he was properly divorced. But they kept talking about Gary Lambert. And that it would be much better to get the principle established in a case that didn't involve Lambert.

Finally he figured out that Lambert's wife had been left up-time. No divorce. And that the daughter of one of the big guns wanted to marry the guy. Which the big gun thought was a great idea, if it was legal.

What the h.e.l.l? If he could be useful to them, it was no skin off his nose.

April, 1635

Pastor Kastenmayer was taking his confirmands through the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and love.

Roland shifted from one foot to the other and wondered where patience fit into it all.

Promises to Keep: James Anthony Fritz and Maria Krause

April, 1634

Anna Krause leaped off the school bus and dashed into the refugee housing complex. "Maria, Maria.

Maria, isMagdalena home? Tante Elisabetha? Is anybody here?" "I'm here, Anna." Her half-sister, Maria, who worked the night crew at the bakery for theLeahyMedicalCenter , dragged herself up out of sleep.

Anna at fifteen.All legs and arms.Only starting to fill out in between them.Dressed in up-time clothing.

Maria couldn't remember if she had ever been so young. Or what she had been like, if she was. How could seven years make so much difference?

"I don't know whereMagdalena is,Schatz ." Maria shook out her shift. "At work, I guess. If Cora's is busy, she'll stay as long as she can get overtime."

"Franz says it would be cheaper for Cora just to hire another girl. Two at regular rates equals the cost ofMagdalena , and she's only working one and one half times the regular hours." Anna plopped herself down on a ha.s.sock.

"Weare getting the money for one and one half times the regular hours.We need every penny we can earn. Don't let Franz give Frau Ennis any ideas." Maria yawned. "Tante Elisabetha went to supervise the cleaning crew.Die alte Heiderin is sick. They took her to the doctor's office this morning."

"G.o.dmother is sick?" Anna's face clouded up.

Maria cursed herself. She should have been gentler. Anna had lost all the bounciness that had propelled her into the apartment. "She'll be all right,Pueppchen . I'm sure of it."No. I hope it, she added to herself.

Maybe she could bring the bounce back. "What were you so excited about when you ran in?"

Anna's face suddenly glowed. She pulled out a piece of paper. "Look, Maria, I won. From all the soph.o.m.ores in the school, my science project was the best. They will show it in the lobby at the hospital.

With my name on it. For two weeks. Will youcome see? I know that Tante Elisabetha andMagdalena won't have time. But it's not far from the bakery and the lobby is open all day and all night. Please, Maria. Please come see it.Just for a few minutes."

Six o'clockin the morning.Time to get off work. Maria was so tired that she thought she might die, but she forced herself to make the walk to the lobby. Anna's project was there, just as she had said.With her name on it. She stood, looking.

Softly, behind her, a voice asked, "Do you understand what she did, Maria?"

She looked back. It was the nurse from theLow Countries , coming up on those silent white rubber sneakers they still wore inside the hospital, when they had them. She shook her head. "No, Nurse DeVries. I can read the words and sound them out. But I do not know what they mean. The other marks, the bars lined up, the circles divided in pieces. Those I do not understand at all."

"It's a study about children's diseases in the villages around Grantville. Which diseases come most often to whichvillage. With this, with what she has done, walking from one village to another, taking records, using her knowledge of the local dialects to ask questions and gather information that up-timers cannot, our public health nurses can try to find out why. Why does a disease spare one village, but regularly return to another that isn't more than ten miles away? Franz helped her, but she did almost all of it herself.

The study design, the information gathering, the a.n.a.lysis. She's done a wonderful job. A lot of students five or six years older couldn't equal it." Maria turned back to the display case. She stood a few minutes more. "I can read the blue ribbon, Nurse DeVries. It says my little sister Anna is the best of all the students. Not just the best of the down-time students. Not just the best in the special program.The best student of all, in her cla.s.s, for doing this. So she will not work in a bakery. She will not be on the cleaning crew. Not in the kitchen at Cora's. I will do whatever I need. So she can be a nurse like you or Frau McDonald.Whatever I need to do. I keep my promises."

May, 1634

In the Vandivers' kitchen, Walpurga Hercher put her finger down on the next name on the list. "Take him off."

Margaretha Vandiver shook her head.

"He is a soldier. He has no house. He has a b.a.s.t.a.r.d child. No way is he fit to be a husband."

"The child, yes.That would be a problem.A big cost to him, on a soldier's pay. But the mother has married, now. To Friedrich Pflaum,Arnold 's brother, that is. You know him. And Friedrich has adopted the child. A small price to pay, old Johann Pflaum figured, for the farm that Owenna Lamb will inherit.

Especially since it is a girl."

They all just stood there a moment, thinking about the Pflaums. More than half of the arable land of the Lichstedt, the village where they lived, had gone to wherever Grantville came from, they supposed. The Ring of Fire had done that. But an up-time farm had landed where those fields had been.Owned as an allod by a man with only two children. So Friedrich Pflaum had married well. Old Johann, truth be told, had too much of a good thing, even before the Ring of Fire.Mayor of Lichstedt.Five sons, every one of them as healthy as a horse and ambitious. The other four not quite as ambitious asArnold , granted, but still ambitious. True, he had held two leases, his own and his wife's half-share. But it would have been hard for him to place all five boys as full-farmers somewhere.Now... FirstArnold married an up-time heiress, then Friedrich. Heinrich was soon to be betrothed to Deann Whitney. It was very strange that most of the up-time men had no wish to be farmers.But lucky for Johann Pflaum. With the three oldest sons farming up-time allodial land, he would have a few years before he had to think about placing Lorenz and Georg. Time, the way things were going, for him to buy up the rest of the leases for what was left of the fields of Lichstedt. There wasn't enough land to support a whole village, now. The other families were drifting off, looking for work in the new industries. Some of the Lichstedter were here in Grantville. It looked like only the Sch.e.l.lenbargers, Johann's in-laws and nephew, would also stay there and farm. There was enough of Lichstedt left for two, or maybe three, full leases. With access to up-time equipment through Friedrich, Arnold, and Heinrich, three men would be able to do the work. It wouldn't take a whole village.

"All right," Walpurga said at last. "Forget the b.a.s.t.a.r.d child. Keep, 'he's a soldier' and 'he has no house.'

How can a man with no house head a household?" "Who are we talking about?" Else Krause tried to crane her neck around Walpurga's shoulder.

"What are you still doing in here, Else? You've already said you won't be part of it. Go away and play.

Take Barbel with you." Margaretha was annoyed.

Instead of going, Barbara Conrath poked her head over Walpurga's shoulder from the other side.

"Ach, we can kibbitz. James Anthony Fritz.Never heard of him."

"What does 'seasonal employment' mean?"

"Just part of the year, I think."

"'Unemployed' is pretty plain." Walpurga was not about to let go of her view that this man was an unsuitable husband, even for a dowry-less farm girl.

"Where did youget this stuff?"

Margaretha looked very prim. "I gossip."

"How old?"

"Thirty-two.Maybe thirty-three.I don't have a baptismal record."

"Who are his family?"

"He's an only child."

"Still, he has to have parents. Are they inside the Ring of Fire?"

"Yes, here." Margaretha picked up another slate. "Mother and father divorced."

"For how long?"

"Nearly thirty years. Neither one remarried. Father, Duane Fritz.Presbyterian. He is a Certified Nursing a.s.sistant at the "a.s.sisted living" home. Mother, Garnet Szymanski.Catholic."

Maria Krause said, "Stop."

Jim Fritz had not written home, the whole time he had been in the army. His mother was not surprised.

Garnet had faced it a long time ago. There was something odd about Jim. Like Duane.

She shouldn't have married Duane. But she had never been a pretty girl. Thirty or forty years ago, she had, aside from the gray in her hair, looked pretty much like she did now.Which wasn't bad, for a woman in her fifties. It was sort of-expectable. The thick waist and st.u.r.dy legs hadn't been attractive on a girl in her teens or a woman in her twenties.

Admit it, Garnet. You panicked. Twenty-five years old. No husband, no children.Certainly noreligious vocation.

Duane hadn't been a pa.s.sionate suitor, but he had been there. Two years younger than she was.

Not-objecting, really. She had done all the things right, for marrying a Protestant. Gotten him to sign the promises, been married in the rectory by the priest. Jim had been born sixteen months later. By then, she knew it was a mistake. When they went to things at her ownfamily's , she had tried to tell herself at first, Duane was just intimidated a little by all the noisy Szymanskis and O'Malleys. That was why he went off into a corner and watched TV the whole time. But then they went to the Fritz picnic, up at the fairgrounds.His own people. He took a folding lawn chair and sat at the very edge the whole time.

Drumming his fingers on the aluminum tubing until they could leave.

Duane wasn't crazy. Not the way most people around Grantville meant it. He did a good job working at the a.s.sisted living center. He followed orders and memorized routines. He had an apartment. No one had ever called the police to complain about either noise or trash. He didn't wander around shouting in the streets. He didn't see visions or go through emotional cycles from high to low. He wasn't even depressed, in any clinical sense. But he wasn't normal. Not interacting-with-other-people normal.

Neither was Jim.

If she hadn't faced up to the truth and divorced Duane before there were any more children, she would have condemned herself as the world's worst mother when Jim grew up to be the way he was.

Stand-offish.Touch-me-not. The older he got, the worse it got-he dropped out of school because having so many people, loud and rambunctious, in halls and cla.s.srooms, abraded him more than he could stand. He had gone to First Communion. He hadn't been confirmed. Maybe she should have tried harder, but right then, working full time andeverything, just getting him through school had been all that she could deal with. Not CCD on top of it. He hadn't been to ma.s.s in, well, years.More years than she wanted to think about.Fifteen, at least.

She had sort of wondered how he ever got close enough to Owenna Lamb to get her pregnant. At least, little Andie seemed to have been spared it. She was a cute kid. The down-timers seemed to be realistic about these things. Friedrich Pflaum had invited her to the adoption ceremony at City Hall.And to dinner afterwards. She hadn't been forced to give up Andie altogether. Probably the only grandchild she would ever have.

Pflaum had invited Duane, too, but he didn't come. Jim just sent back the consent form, signed, witnessed, and notarized. No letter wishing them well. That wouldn't have been Jim, to send a letter or a note. Or even a card. It wasn't the sort of thing that occurred to him. He did what needed to be done.

The little flourishes and tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs that put the grease in the works of human relations were completely beyond him.

Thirty-one years now, as a divorced Catholic, toeing the line.With no letters from your son.It gave you a lot of time to concentrate on your career.

Garnet picked up another pile of papers to grade. Cla.s.ses in health care at theVoTechCenter were crammed to capacity. Life went on. She really wondered how Jim managed to endure army life.

Jim Fritz liked the army. Things were reliable. You knew from one day to the next what would be going on. Basic training had been unpleasant, a ha.s.sle-too many people around, almost like school. But the sergeants told you exactly what to do and if you did it, you were okay. Then, after basic, they put him here, at the supply base inErfurt . It was a really good job. If it hadn't been for the PT part of it, it would have been great. For that, and for shooting, he had to get out with the other guys. Mostly, though, he spent almost every day in this little side room off the main warehouse by himself, putting things on shelves, taking things off shelves, sorting things into bins and making lists of how many of them there were. They all had numbers, so he didn't have to worry about what they were, just as long as they were alike. Then he packed them up to send out. He had lists of how many to put in each keg or crate. Old Man Stull told him where to send them.

Dennis Stull, the civilian procurement head inErfurt for the army of what had been the New United States, considered Jim Fritz one of the best finds of his life. The man had absolutely no curiosity. He didn't care what he sorted or what the parts might be for, where they came from, or where they went.

Plus, he never went out with the guys and gotdrunk, or consorted with prost.i.tutes who might pump him.

Or, if he did consort with them, he wasn't likely to be chatty about it.

For R&D projects, Jim Fritz was the fulfillment of a security officer's dreams. Jim Fritz had a lifetime career in this man's army, if he wanted it, as far as Dennis Stull was concerned.

July, 1634

First, she had to find him. Finally, Maria went to the army headquarters and asked. The young man, boy really, at the desk gave her the address. He smirked. She guessed what he was thinking-the man already had one b.a.s.t.a.r.d and was about to have another.

Let him think.

She asked for two days off from theLeahyMedicalCenter bakery. She was surprised to discover that she had been acc.u.mulating something called "leave time" for three years. Her English hadn't been very good, back when she was hired. Since then, she had never had reason to ask for more than her Sundays, so she never had.

She walked to the base where he was, all the way toErfurt . She had gotten Ursel to use the telegraph ahead ahead of time. He knew she was coming.

He didn't know why. Some things, she thought, were better explained face-to-face.