by Eric Flint
* * *
"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 responsibl
e 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."
Grantville, Autumn 1634
"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."