“Well,” Opa said, “that’s a shame. But we’ve plenty more for you to eat.”
“Opa,” she whispered, her face so close to him she could see the tufts of gray hair growing straight out of his ear, “I was b-b-b-b-baptized today.”
To her surprise, he tilted his head back and roared with laughter, hugging her closer and planting a kiss on her cheek, his whiskers as scratchy as the blanket. “Baptized, were you? In the rain? Washed clean?”
“N-n-n-no. At the ch-ch-ch—”
“What’s this ruckus about?” Oma was back from the other side of the curtain clutching a rag’s worth of linen.
“The little one, here. She says she’s been baptized.”
“A fine day it would be were that true,” Oma said, shaking out the bundle to reveal a much-patched gray shirt, big enough to fit Therese twice over. “Marta refusing, and then the priest . . .” Her words drifted into clucking sounds.
“B-b-but I was.” The fire and the blanket were doing their work, bringing both comfort and courage. “This morning. A nun f-f-f-f-found me, and took me. And they f-f-fed me and I saw Christ Our Savior on a c-cross and I asked to be baptized so I could go to heaven when I die.”
As Therese spoke, Oma let the shirt fall and drape across her hand.
“This is true?” Opa asked, loosening his grip.
“Yes, Opa. Right there in the church. He poured the water over my head.”
“And Marta?” Oma asked. “Your mother. Was she there?”
“No.” Therese felt the cold creep up again. “She doesn’t even know. I came straight here to tell you.”
“That is why you’ve come?” Oma moved closer. “All this way alone? To tell us? Your mother didn’t send you? For money? For food?”
For the first time in her life, Therese felt the weighty choice of sin. The truth might get her thrown back out into the rain, baptized or not. Flattery could get her a warm bed of her own, a bowl of whatever was simmering in the pot over the fire. And then, maybe, even more to take home to Mutti. But flattery was a lie, and even before the momentous event of this morning, she’d known lying to be a sin. Everyone knew that; even her mother told her that lying was a sin that could send you straight to hell. Hell, however, no longer loomed a threat. She could be forgiven her sins, large and small.
She took a deep breath. “Mutti—”
“What does it matter?” Opa’s interruption spared her lie. “She is here, and she is our granddaughter. You will not have your way this time, woman. Not this time.”
Later, with her belly full of Oma’s good stew and Opa’s shirt fashioned to fit, Therese told them all about the day’s adventure. Not about their empty cupboards or that sad, hollow look in Mutti’s eyes. She said she was chasing the farmer’s cart hoping to buy a carrot, because she did hope to buy food, someday. So that wasn’t a lie. And she left out the ugly words being called out just when the stone hit her temple.
“The boys play so rough in the streets.” She spoke through a great mouthful of bread. “It was Sister Heida who helped me.”
Then the story of the benevolent sister, the walk to the church, and the washing of her wound. The bread and cheese given by the brothers. Her words painted Father Bastian as a kind, loving priest, eager to baptize a new child into the Church. Surely he had been so once in his life and perhaps would be softened again in his old age.
“And Sister Heida taught me a poem about the Good Shepherd. I’ll say it for you.”
“Eat, eat,” Oma said, growing sweeter and softer with each turn of Therese’s tale. “We’ll be just like them upper folks, getting a bard’s song in exchange for a meal.”
Therese didn’t know what a bard was, and she didn’t know how to sing the poem Sister Heida taught her. Still, for the first time in memory she heard her grandmother laugh—a sound so much like that of her mother, it felt like the two women were wrapped together in the notes.
She hurried through the last bites in silence, running the words through her head while basking in the admiring gazes of her grandparents. When her trencher was empty, she took a final sip of water and moved to the hearth. Opa’s shirt puddled at her feet. The sleeves had been hastily cut to reach to her wrists and the extra fabric fashioned into a belt wrapped twice around her waist. She wished she could have asked Oma to save some for a veil. She’d seen nuns who dressed in white and others dressed in black. The color of Opa’s old shirt seemed to fall somewhere in between.
When her audience was seated with their attention focused, she began.
“The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. . . .”
The words—even though learned only this afternoon—fell from her tongue as easily as the rain, turning into the tears that flowed down Oma’s cheeks.
“Oh, say it again, dear child,” she said, and when Therese obliged, her grandparents joined her, reciting the words in a halting sync.
There was no real bed for her to sleep in, but Opa made a soft pallet close to the fire, where he felt it would be safe from jumping embers. He and Oma slept on a fine, tall mattress behind the curtain but had turned the second room in the cottage into a sort of aboveground cellar for drying herbs and storing seed.
“Didn’t need so much space for just the two of us knocking around,” he said, as if owing Therese some kind of explanation.
She stared at the small, feather-stuffed ticking—a pillow from their own bed—with the same kind of hunger that had driven her to eat a second helping of stew. Every inch of her ached with the anticipation of rest. “It’s all right,” she said, her words poking through an enormous yawn. “The floor at home isn’t nearly as nice as this one.”
Opa seemed to busy himself, especially with tucking the quilt around the ticking and then piling another one on top. “Well, here you are then. A bed for a princess, I’d say. A little one, at least.”
By some instinct, Therese padded over to her grandfather, stepping on the hem of his discarded shirt, and took advantage of his kneeling height to place a small kiss on his grizzled cheek. “Danke, Opa.” She kissed the other.
“And away from the windows,” Oma added, keeping herself at a distance. “That Dummkopf Albrecht Kirk put in new glass last week, and I swear he slacked on the seaming. I expect a leak by morning.”
“Danke, Oma,” Therese said, following the same instinct to stay close to her grandfather’s side.
Opa untied the belt of her makeshift gown, bringing the fabric to billow around her. The sensation was that of floating, carrying her onto the feathers, then tucked in by the quilt, and a final image of soft gray whiskers before she was carried off to sleep.
She should go home. Today. That’s what Therese said every morning when she woke up to the smell of sizzling sausage and the sound of Opa out in the yard, singing tavern songs to the cows because he said it made their milk a little sweeter.
At Oma’s chant of, “Hop! Hop! The sun is up!” Therese would scramble from her bed—a real one now, tucked into a corner, with four carved posts and a net of ropes beneath the ticking.
For the first three days after her arrival, the rain had continued to pour relentlessly, turning the yard into a sea of puddles separated by islands of mud. Therese watched it from the window, where Oma’s criticism of Albrecht Kirk’s workmanship proved to be unfounded. The cottage remained warm and dry in its constant state of semidarkness.
Once the rain finally stopped, its last drops cut off to silence at midday, the creek proved too fast and swollen to be crossed. Opa estimated it would be running right over the bridge, and he saw no need to take the risk to verify. So for another week, she stayed, taking a daily walk to see if the banks had receded and the torrents grown calm. Then another week, where she didn’t check anything at all.
Therese ate her fill of all Oma offered and took long afternoon naps in their immense, cloudlike bed. Opa taught her how to play das Damespiel, and they sat across from each other for hours on end, moving the little wooden disks across the checkered boar
d.
“Our Marta could beat me, you know. Your mother was a very bright girl, just like you.”
Here, Therese would hold her breath and wait for him to say more. She loved hearing stories about her mother, imagining her life in this very house. Why she would ever leave it to become the hollow, haunted woman Therese knew as Mutti, she would never understand.
In the evening there were stories. Opa transformed himself into a real, live Papa Bear, and Therese would climb up onto his lap, her head resting on his belly. She could feel the words as her mind became crowded with knights and wolves and children being devoured in one story, and killing an evil troll in the next.
And she slept, sometimes feeling the pull of it before she climbed into her bed. She might try to close her eyes and keep her mind open to hear Oma and Opa talking in the quiet as the fire died down, because more often than not they talked about her. What a pretty thing she was, so much like their Marta. What a shame she had to live so far, in such squalor, with God knew what happening all around her. What a heartbreak it would be to send her back. What reason could there be to send her back? What a delight it would be to have her here, always. Another little Marta.
On the third Sunday of her visit, Therese woke up to the promise of going to services with her grandparents. The first Sunday had fallen during the rain, and the second with roads unpassably muddy. But for the third Sunday, Oma had recovered one of her mother’s old dresses from a trunk and kept it hanging near the fire until most of the wrinkles fell out. The color was a periwinkle blue, its form simple—fitting over her shoulders and lacing up the sides. She still had no shoes, but Opa promised he would carry her on his shoulders if there was ever a place where the road was wet and sticky.
The walk from Opa’s farm to the village of Schrotmühle took just over an hour, taking them past other small farms along the way until they arrived at a neat square of buildings built out around an enormous mill. Therese viewed most of it from the vantage point above her Opa’s head, making her feel like one of the giants in the tales he told her in the shadows of the evening fire. For the most part, the roads were in a fine condition for walking—even barefoot—but she sensed her grandfather’s pride each time a new villager joined their path, remarking on the lovely sparrow perched upon his shoulder.
“This is our Therese,” he’d say, bouncing her until she laughed and clutched at his collar to keep her balance. “Our granddaughter come to visit.”
She was called a pretty thing, an angel face, a perfect little bird. And even when they asked, with a certain downcast suspicion, “And her mother?” Opa would jostle her again and say, “Her mother? She is not with us today.”
This is when Oma would jump in and ask about the neighbor’s health. If the fever had broken or the swelling gone down, or if the child was keeping food down better.
The village Kirche was nothing so large and grand as the one back home. No spires or statues or walled-in courtyard. Just a simple building with a rich, sonorous bell ringing from its single square tower. The double arched doors stood open, hosted by two boys in tattered robes. Opa bent down and deposited Therese on the ground—no smooth stones here. He took off his cap, Oma adjusted her veil, and Therese held her breath. At the threshold she crossed herself, knowing to do so because everybody else did, then placed her hand in Opa’s, not knowing where to go next.
As it turned out, there was very little to know. The church was nothing more than one great room. No benches, few windows, and a small altar at the front. Oma and Opa shuffled to find their place—toward the back, where most of the people looked like they came from farms, with tattered, patched clothing and smudged faces. The crowd divided itself to form an aisle, where better-dressed men and women walked ahead, glancing neither to the right nor to the left. They brought with them their naughty children, who pushed and giggled and pulled at each other’s hair and ears. Therese’s brow furrowed in crossness, that they should behave in the church the same as they would in the street. Behind them, at the very back, a small gathering of women dressed entirely in white, with large black crosses stitched into their aprons.
“Are those nuns?”
“Yes,” Oma said. “There is a small convent here. Older women, mostly, who cannot work as hard.”
Therese wondered if they knew Sister Heida, even though they dressed differently than she did. Sensing it was rude to stare, she turned around and fixed her eyes on the cross above the altar and the pleading eyes of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
Opa whispered in her ear. “This is your first time for Gottesdienst? Your mother never took you to the church service?”
She kept her eyes trained forward. “Never. But she is a good mother in every other way.”
Opa said nothing, only clamped his big hand on her shoulder.
The priest here looked nothing like Father Bastian. For one thing, he was thin, like he’d been wasting away inside his robe for some time. His voice was high and light—so much so that Therese found herself straining to hear him. When the congregation bowed their heads to pray, she kept hers lifted slightly, wanting to catch every word.
We thank thee for the rain that nourisheth our crops.
We pray for thy healing hand to touch our sick and dying.
We humbly come to thee as sinners, unworthy of thy grace, and yet we seek thy mercy.
We ask thy sainted Mother to watch over our families from her place as Queen of Heaven.
Amen.
“Amen,” Therese echoed, enchanted with the sound of a hundred homespun sleeves moving in unison to make the sign of the cross. She tugged on Opa’s shirt, then rose tiptoe to whisper in his hear. “God has a mother?”
“Indeed,” he whispered. “The blessed Virgin Mary.”
“Who was his father?”
Opa smiled and patted the top of her head. “So much for you to learn. I will tell you on our walk home.”
For the rest of the time, it mattered not that Therese could barely hear the words of the priest—Father Paul—because she could not understand any of them. He stood behind a tall pulpit and read from a book nearly as thick as Therese was wide. At first she thought if she closed her eyes to the distractions of the parishioners around her, she might understand more. When that didn’t work, she tried narrowing her focus to Father Paul’s mouth, trying to see the words.
Oma, perhaps sensing her confusion, leaned down and whispered, “He is speaking Latin,” as if the proclamation should suffice in quelling her confusion.
When Father Paul intoned, “Amen,” Therese followed the example of those around her and repeated the word, pleased to hear the familiar syllables, but wishing she could somehow understand the language that surrounded them. Opa seemed no more familiar, as his eyes drifted around the room, occasionally landing on her with a wink.
After a very final-sounding amen, Father Paul closed the enormous book and came to the front of the altar, flanked by the two boys from the door—one holding a plate with torn pieces of white bread, the other an ornate goblet that looked to be made of gold.
“The body of Christ, broken for you,” Father Paul said, gesturing with one hand toward the plate of bread. “The blood of Christ, spilled to sustain you. Let us join in the sacrament of Holy Communion.”
One by one, beginning with those in the front of the crowd—those of the cleanest and most expensive clothing—men and women and some children formed a line, pausing on bended knee for Father Paul to place a square of bread on their tongue, then taking a sip from the proffered chalice.
Therese tugged again on Opa’s sleeve. “What are they doing?”
“The bread and the wine represent the last meal our Savior had before he went to the cross. When we eat the bread, his flesh becomes alive in us, and when we drink from the cup, his blood becomes our own.”
Therese felt her eyes grow wide, her face stretched in amazement. The wound to her brow had long healed and was little more than a stripe of a scab, but it protested the exaggeration
of her expression.
“So, I—”
“Not you,” Oma said, sending Opa a warning glare. “It is not for children.”
Therese swelled with indignation. “But she is a child.” Heedless that it might appear rude, she pointed to a girl near her age who knelt before Father Paul before gripping the chalice that dwarfed her face.
“There are rules,” Oma said.
“But I’ve been baptized!” This she spoke loud enough to draw the attention of those around her. Some smiled, some scowled, and Oma yanked her close.
“There are things you must know and understand. It is no small thing.”
She could feel each of Oma’s five fingers, like they were buried knuckle-deep in the flesh of her arm. “Will you teach me? So that I can—” She’d already forgotten the words.
Oma’s grip softened. “Perhaps. We will speak with Father Paul and see if he—” Her voice broke off as if she, too, had forgotten what words should follow. “For now, wait here quietly. Watch Opa and me, and then we can go home.”
Home.
Therese obeyed, remaining silent in the midst of the crowd that had set itself to murmuring. She caught bits of conversation about her, nothing so flattering as what she’d heard on the roadside. Some of the same people spoke in what they thought were whispers, talking about her mother. Using words like shame and disgrace and the one she hated most—Dirne—that turned her mother into something altogether unclean.
The people here sounded no different from the people in the streets back home. Her real home. In due time they left, taking themselves to the line to receive the body and blood of Christ Our Savior.
She was fueled with questions on the walk home. Who was the mother of God, and how can she be the mother of God? And what was a virgin? And how was a virgin? And he was a little boy? And how was he a boy? And a man? And the bread? And the wine?
Opa laughed with each question before offering his answer, declaring she would make a fine priest if she were a boy and able to hold all of the answers.
An Offering: The Tale of Therese Page 4