“We can go below.”
“No. The air there. Walther needs clean air, even if it’s cold.”
“The weather on the sea is no better than back home.”
They fell quiet, lulled by the ship’s plunging and the windsong in the rigging. Johann lost track of time until Walther began to stir, his soft noises knifing through the ship’s background din. Grey light slanted from the west, from beyond the ship’s bow. “We must eat,” he said. “All of us.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said, her voice husky, near a whisper.
“You must eat, so that Walther may eat.”
He helped her up. They were nearing the end of their own supplies. Soon they would have to eat ship’s rations. They would be charged for every scrap, probably for much they never received. Without Peter, their food might go farther. The thought brought Johann shame. Peter was such a little fellow.
Johann led them down the steps of the hatch, descending into the fetid warmth of too many bodies crammed too close together. The stink hit like a slap. His gorge rose. He fought the instinct to hold his breath. He tried to take air through his mouth as he wove around people and piles of belongings that loomed in the dark, ducking his head under the ship’s crossbeams. Hammocks hung from the ceiling, some occupied, some not. Here, for once, his lack of height was an advantage.
He steered Christiane to the rear corner that they had made theirs, clinging to a shred of privacy but no more. Christiane sat with her back to the cabin, Indian-style, and let Walther wobble on his stumpy legs. A shiver passed through her as she re-draped her cape, then reached into the sack for their remaining food.
Except there was no food. She peered in to be sure, then told Johann. He repeated the investigation of the sack, finding only a cloth, four spoons, and a cup for drinking. He took a moment and breathed once, hard. Christiane closed her eyes. He sank to his knees and ran his hands twice through each of the three sacks that held the things they had taken from their chest, which was stowed away. He found only his second shirt, Christiane’s second apron and dress, a few rags for Walther. Nothing to eat. He searched through the blankets that were folded and piled, refolding each. Then he did it all again. Blood pounded at his temples. The food—cheese and biscuits and salt fish—was gone. His brain felt slow. It happened during the service, Peter’s funeral. Who could do such a thing?
Without thinking, he patted his shirt for the pouch that hung from a leather cord around his neck. Their money. Still there. He sat back on his hams and passed a hand over his face. Rage flooded through him. The Lord would be hard on such a thief. The Lord would impose His justice. That was what He did for the Israelites so long ago.
But waiting for someone else’s justice, even the Lord’s, wasn’t Johann’s way. If He couldn’t be bothered to save Peter, He would be little use for this. Johann thought of his bayonet. That weapon, plus his greatcoat and his soldier’s boots, were what he had to show for fifteen years in the army. In the high troops, a despicable crime like this would bring 500 stripes with a stout stick. Some sergeants would make the thief run the gauntlet a dozen times. Johann didn’t like the brutality of the gauntlet, but theft is a serious crime, one that undermines fellow feeling. Johann reached into the smallest of the sacks. His fingers found the bayonet’s rough metal socket. He unwrapped the weapon and slipped it into his coat pocket. He looked down the length of the great cabin, dimly lit by an occasional candle and small pools of bright where hatches opened to the deck.
Families sagged in listless groups, some in hammocks, some on the deck. A few children ran here and there, mostly for the pleasure of moving. Even for the healthy, the voyage was dreary days and nights wedged into the cabin with two hundred others. Johann’s suspicions for the theft fastened on two passengers. He had never liked their looks. They pushed in front of others and complained. He knew he should keep an open mind about who the thief was. Thieves, good ones, don’t look like thieves. Maybe, he wondered, it was a crewmember? They were a rough-looking group, living a dangerous life with few comforts. Most seemed to view the passengers with a mix of contempt and resentment.
His rage was subsiding. He had no way to find the thief. If anyone saw the theft, they should have told him by now. This wasn’t the army, and Johann wasn’t a sergeant here. He had no power to inspect the possessions of others, looking for the missing food. Food all looks alike, anyway. How could he tell a bit of cheese was their bit of cheese? He would have to leave it to the Lord’s justice. Still, Johann would keep his eyes open, see what turned up.
He rewrapped the bayonet and put it back in the sack, then took a cup to the water barrel. He drank and brought more back for Christiane. Walther was climbing on his mother’s folded legs, then burrowed into her bosom. “You keep me warm, don’t you?” she said to the baby, then drank.
The food was definitely gone, Johann said. They would have to eat ship’s rations. Hardtack plus a little salt pork. She nodded and said, “We knew this would come.”
“You must eat,” he said. “You and Walther. You must become fat and strong.”
They moved to lean their backs against the ship’s wall. He spread a blanket over her. With Walther at her breast, she fell asleep.
Until this voyage, Christiane would never have sat so boldly against him where others might see, a baby in her blouse. He had admired her sense of propriety, but that was an early casualty of the crowding on shipboard, where passengers ate and slept, dressed and performed personal acts, all under the gaze of others. In a few days, the close quarters had dissolved the habits of a lifetime.
Some of Christiane’s auburn hair had escaped from her cap and lay against her cheek. Her skin was pale in the half-light. Her smile could startle him with its brilliance, but her mouth fell into a hard set when she rested. Her face turned stony, that of a stranger. From the talk of other men, he knew he was lucky in his wife. Christiane didn’t gossip. She didn’t carp. And she comforted him in the way that a man needs a woman to do. He shook his head to stop his tears. She and Walther had no need for a weeping man.
One of Christiane’s hands shielded Walther’s head. Her hands had reddened and toughened. They were still only when she slept. She had stopped knitting when Walther first fell ill, then while Peter suffered. Johann would have to check that the knitting needles—good ones from pig bones—were still there.
Snatches of song came down through the deck. Above, at the ship’s stern, the evening prayer group was meeting. He could hear Nungesser’s uncertain tenor above the others. When Christiane claimed this spot in the cabin, they hadn’t known it would let them hear the singing. Christiane liked it. She clutched his shirt with one hand.
“Want to go up to listen?” he asked.
“No, not tonight.”
“I’ll help you into the hammock.”
“Let’s stay here; Walther can sleep here.”
It was awkward. One of the ship’s planks pressed hard against his ribs, but he stayed where he was. His breathing slowed, but he didn’t sleep. When he closed his eyes, he saw Peter fall to the water, so he opened them again.
CHAPTER TWO
†
Johann snored softly. Moaning came from halfway across the cabin, where the Drechslers nursed two children with fever. Christiane heard more pained sounds from another direction, she didn’t know from which family. She felt weak, jittery, balanced on some unstable edge, her mind roaming through dark and sad places.
It was barely one day since Peter died—or was it two? Time lost its shape in this gloomy space. However long it had been, now she could think of Peter’s name, have him in her thoughts, without reeling from the scorching flame of losing him. There was still a stab, an urge to cry out, but it didn’t consume her. It left room for her.
Her mother had warned about the sea and its terrors, its storms and its shipwrecks, its pirates and its diseases. Peter might have died even if they had never left their village, though he had always seemed strong. It was Walther who struggle
d more in his first months. Yet Walther shrugged off the fever that stole Peter away. Perhaps that meant that Walther was meant for some special purpose. She would like that.
She knew her mother prayed for them, even without knowing about the boys’ fevers. Christiane had never found much solace in church rituals; that was something she and Johann shared. She wished that prayer would help her now, or help Johann, that they might find peace for Peter wherever he was. Did he still float in the water? Had he reached the ocean bottom? Had some sea brute made a meal of him?
A sob tore through her, and she clutched the baby. Johann started. Through tears she shushed them both. She knew her thoughts were bad but what could she do? No Bible readings or pastor’s sermon ever kept away her bad thoughts.
She was with child again, she was certain, though she had said nothing about it. Before Peter sickened, she hadn’t wanted Johann to worry about her. He worried enough. She valued that. A man without worries is a fool who brings only sorrow. Yet she tried to protect Johann from some worries, ones he could do nothing about. And there was no reason to tell him this, after Peter. When this new baby’s time came, they would either be safe in America or they would be with Peter below the waves.
She dropped her head close enough to feel Walther’s breath on her face. Her mind slipped away again. She thought of having babies and then burying them. Or casting them into the sea. She saw herself doing it again and again. Peter had been part of her but then no longer, and now he was gone. She couldn’t see him now, not ever again. She wiped her face with a corner of the blanket. An empty feeling opened inside. She placed her hand over her stomach. It was too early to feel the baby. She was too thin. How many times could she give herself away to a baby, then watch what had been part of her, what she still felt to be part of her, die? How soon would there be nothing left of her?
Her mother had been rough with her brothers, angry when they did something reckless or foolish, when they treated so thoughtlessly the life that had cost her dearly to give them. “Don’t expect me to weep at the grave of such a fool,” her mother would say, as though a mother could choose how much grief she would feel when her child was gone.
It had been Christiane’s idea to go to America. Johann thought it was his. When she accepted him as her husband, she had admired his bearing, the respect he commanded as a common man who rose to be sergeant, a man with dienst. Her father had questioned the match. Johann had no land, and Christiane wasn’t bad to look at, she knew that. But she was the fourth daughter, and the dowry money had run out. Johann required no dowry. She overheard her mother say that Johann was respectable and probably wouldn’t beat her, that was enough. That would be better, Christiane had thought, than two of her sisters had done.
Christiane grew to care for Johann but to hate the army, not only because it took him away. Even when he was home, he was still in the army. Christiane couldn’t tell if the soldier’s life ground harder on him each year, or if she learned to see better the toll it exacted each time he left for a campaign of more hardship and more danger. Always quiet, he grew quieter. Christiane couldn’t bear for him to continue, to keep killing or be killed for his precious dienst. And she knew he couldn’t be satisfied living in Hesse, working on her family’s land or hired by another landowner. A man like Johann couldn’t be that way. Christiane couldn’t ask it.
When Peter came, she realized it was up to her. If she did nothing, she would watch her sons march off in the Landgraf’s uniform, like their father. They had no land. She went to find the man in the market, the one who talked about America, always in a loud voice.
He was short and fat, with eyes that never rested on what he saw. She didn’t like his looks, like a man who shortweighted grain, so she wasn’t sure she could believe what he said. They called men like him, men who recruited for America, the soul-sellers.
The soul-seller said that in Massachusetts, in the Maine district of Massachusetts, the soil was rich, the land empty, the seasons gentle. He had a pamphlet, just a sheet of paper folded down the middle, describing a settlement in Maine owned by a man named Waldo. General Waldo. It was a strange name. The paper, he told her, said that General Waldo had land for settlers who were willing to work hard to grow fat and rich.
She thought he must be lying about some of it, maybe all of it, but she had to do something. She brought the pamphlet home and left it on the table. She said nothing to Johann about it. He picked it up and read it, but said nothing. He placed it on the windowsill. After he left in the morning, she put it back on the table. He read it again that night. On the third night, she asked what it said. He told her that it offered land that settlers could work for, and only half-fare to get to America where the English were, a land called New England. People in their parish had gone to America before but always to Philadelphia. Johann was intrigued by New England. He had fought beside the English during the war and learned some of their language, or enough of it. They weren’t so bad. Their officers were better than some German officers, and they were good fighters. They did what they said. Why, he wondered, does this man trade land for our work and only charge half-fare? Is the land bad? Is it full of these Indians and bears? It’s too good to be true, this New England.
She didn’t answer. There must be something wrong, she knew, with the land or the offer or the ship on which new settlers were to sail. But it was the only way for Johann to get land. They had to go. He said he would talk to Fritz Bauer about it; Fritz knew about land. Then maybe Johann would go to the market and speak with the man who looked like he shortweighted grain. She nodded. She had been in her final month with Walther, heavy and sluggish, so Johann expected no more from her.
The prayer group’s hymn came down to her in snatches, then the deck boards creaked as the group broke up. She felt Johann start awake in the dark. He gripped her shoulder and said her name. She leaned into him. Her tears came but not the sobs. She shivered. Johann stroked her cheek, then reached to cover her with his coat. Awkwardly, he placed it over her and Walther. She hoped it would be warmer where they were going. It was still only September.
CHAPTER THREE
†
“Yes, potatoes, that’s what we’ll want to be growing.” Fritz Bauer’s tone, usually mild, brooked no disagreement on this point. Standing at the rail, he leaned down to be sure Johann heard him. The two men, both early risers, met most mornings before their wives and children climbed from the semi-consciousness that passed for sleep in the stinking cabin. The sea swells came from behind the ship, pushing it westward toward America, regular enough that even non-sailors could roll with them. A clan of porpoises danced and tumbled alongside the ship.
Johann had heard Fritz before on the subject of potatoes. Many times. His friend was a hired man in their village. The Bauers had never owned land. But Fritz had studied and thought about crops and soil and rain and sun until he knew more about them than Christiane’s brothers ever did. Johann had bristled when Christiane’s brothers mocked his ignorance of the land, but they had been right. For a soldier like Johann, a farm was a place you stripped of livestock and crops as you marched through. New recruits wasted time sniffing around for a likely milkmaid or two. Veterans concentrated on what could be eaten. Soldiering was no way to learn about growing seasons, insects, tending crops. Because his family’s survival in the new world would depend on his ability to raise food, Johann listened to Fritz and tried to remember what he said. Remembering was easier because Fritz often repeated himself.
“In the army,” Johann said, “I thought I would never want to eat another biscuit. When we marched with the English and the Scots, it was biscuits, biscuits, and more biscuits. Potatoes sound good.”
Fritz smiled. His fair hair blended naturally with the freckles across his forehead and the bridge of his nose. “What would you give today for a warm roasted potato?”
“Ach,” Johann said, his mouth watering, “I shouldn’t think of such a thing. But they will grow where we’re going?”
&n
bsp; “I think so, yes. The potato wants to be cool, not like in Virginia, which is supposed to be so hot. Where General Waldo’s land is, north of Boston, I think should be a good home for potatoes.”
“And the soil?”
Fritz shook his head. “The soil I don’t know. They say it’s the finest soil, of course, but they also say that gold coins fall from the trees.”
They stood in silence. The sea was calmer today, the wind less biting.
“And Christiane?” Fritz said.
“She is sad. It’s hard for her. Peter…” His eyes smarted.
“Ursula will be with her.”
“Yes.” Johann rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. A look of exasperation crossed his face. “None of us has enough to do. We look at the sea. We feel how sick we feel. We think about how much we have lost and imagine how other things may go wrong. It makes us weak.”
He caught a whiff of coffee from the sailors’ galley. For a moment, the acrid aroma overrode the stench from the cabin. The ship’s watch would change soon. Johann had picked up the ship’s rhythms. Five watches of four hours each, then two dog watches of two hours around sunset. Bells announcing each half-hour. The sailors, never idle, repaired sails and the ropes that held them in place, scraped and scrubbed surfaces, spread tar and grease and oil, paint and varnish. They climbed the masts to unsettling heights, let sails out and gathered them up as the captain read the restless wind. Discipline lay at the center of the sailor’s life, as it did for a soldier. To face danger, each must know what he must do and what others will do.
Johann remembered what had bothered him when he first woke up. He leaned close to Fritz and spoke softly.
“We have a thief,” he said. He picked a louse from his collarbone and crushed it with a thumbnail. It left a smear of red on his thumb. He wiped it on the rail.
Fritz kept looking at the sea. He didn’t speak.
“I’m sure,” Johann said. “There is no other explanation for what is missing. During Peter’s service, he stole food from us.”
The New Land Page 2