Deborah forebore to say that lack of these wasn’t confined to those who eschewed them for piety’s sake. As Ansjie went out, wishing her a good rest, she was more than ready to slip off her dress and shoes and get into bed, the sketch pad tucked beneath the bottom feather mattress.
Enveloped in down below and above, she thought she’d never felt anything so luxurious. She meant to stay there just a little while, relaxing after the long ride, but comfort, the content and happiness that radiated through the house like Ansjie’s distant singing, sent her deeper and deeper, like snuggling into a nest.
She awoke to Ansjie’s touch and smiling eyes. “If you don’t rouse now, you might not sleep tonight,” she said. “And there are only a few hours of light left. Do you feel like walking?”
Deborah nodded, swinging her legs off the high bed to a padded stool. She dressed quickly, but before they started on their outing Ansjie showed her the toilet, a white frame building behind the stable. It was whitewashed inside, there was even a curtained window, and Deborah laughed at the thought of, for instance, Johnny’s probable reaction to such elegance, though she was careful not to betray her mirth to her hostess. As Johnny had predicted, this was indeed a world apart!
xvi
Though the Landers had their own well because of their distance from the settlement, the other families relied on a well located near the church beneath several large cotton-woods. This was a place for the children to play while their mothers visited, and here Deborah met the wife of Elder Goerz, a dour woman who regarded Ansjie with suspicion and seemed to feel that Deborah, too, was a sort to bear watching.
“She thinks everyone’s after that hulking son of hers,” Ansjie whispered as they exchanged polite farewells and moved toward the church. “I hope he finds someone to marry quick so she’ll stop watching me with eyes like boiled eggs!”
“Your other suitor, Peter Voth, doesn’t have a mother,” Conrad teased.
“And he’s old enough to be my father,” Ansjie retorted.
“I’ll just have to find Friedental a blacksmith or a doctor,” he said with a mock sigh, opening the door to reveal a high pulpit in the front center with a high bench on either side.
“The benches are for deacons,” Ansjie said somewhat airily. “More bench than deacons, but, of course, the village will grow. In the three years since we came, there’ve been eighteen children born.” She pointed out the rail where the Vorsingers, or hymn leaders, stood, and Conrad added that the building was also used as a meeting house and that he taught classes here.
“Elder Goerz schools the young ones in Bible and church history,” he explained. “Ansjie teaches penmanship, and I do the best I can with English, arithmetic, geography, and what little I’ve learned about the United States.”
“Perhaps I could help with that,” Deborah offered. “I’m no scholar, but Father—” Her voice faltered; for a little while, she’d forgotten, really forgotten, except for a shadow at the back of her mind. “Father talked a lot about our history and what caused things that’re happening now.”
“Good.” Conrad’s voice was warmly pleased. “I must discuss it with the council; I’m sure they’ll be glad. Before we left Prussia, it was agreed that though they wished to practice their religion and retain the use of German, they should try to be good Americans, too, and encourage their children to learn English. As the Territory fills up, Friedental will have closer neighbors and must prepare for that.”
Next they visited the communal barns, where the village herd was milked. The lofts were filled with hay and there was a partitioned room for separating the milk and letting the cream rise. Each family got as much milk as it needed, and part of the village business was seeing to a fair distribution of dairy-connected chores from haying to churning. Conrad and a committee had searched Missouri and Arkansas for good cows and bought the best they could locate, mostly fawn-colored Jerseys.
“As the herd increases, we’ll keep the best and sell or butcher the others,” Conrad said. “As new towns spring up, we can sell the extra cheese and butter we should have by then.”
They left the barn as the cows were coming in to be milked. Conrad introduced Deborah to the bearded men who apparently were that night’s milkers. The youngest, crimsoning, choked a greeting to Ansjie, who tossed her head and answered grudgingly.
“Poor Dietrich,” Conrad said when they were out of earshot. “You’re hard on him, Ansjie.”
“Not as hard as his mother would be if I let him get any foolish notions,” she retorted. “Have I reproached you because every girl over fifteen finds excuses to come to our house or drop by school when you’re teaching?”
She stalked down the lane ahead of them for a few minutes, but she slowed as Deborah admired the pigs. These were very clean, pink skin showing through coarse white or spotted hair. Their sod sties were neatly thatched and a hedge formed a large enclosure for them with a small stream from the creak running through it.
“Pigs are tidy,” Ansjie said. “People make them dirty by putting them in little pens where all becomes muck.” She gazed pridefully at the animals that had trotted over, squealing. “These get lots of skim milk and all the scraps of the village. In the fall, enough are butchered for everyone and the meat is divided up. We eat well at Friedental.”
“Don’t coyotes ever get piglets or chickens and geese?” asked Deborah, for every house had a chicken coop and hedged pen.
“The men take turns patrolling on summer nights, and in winter all the creatures are shut up before dark. We loose a few geese and chickens; not many.”
They walked back through the orchards, Conrad pointing out apples, cherries, peaches, pears, apricots, and plums. He touched the reddish bark of one young cherry tree. “I hope they will bear fruit this year.” His eyes met Deborah’s through the bare, dead-seeming branches. “But one must have patience. The leaves will be beautiful.”
Ansjie sniffed. “One can’t eat leaves.”
He was still watching Deborah. “No. But one can see them and be glad.”
“Not unless the stomach is filled with something else! Which reminds me that it’s time for Abendbrot! As soon as the chickens and geese have theirs!”
Supper was delicious smoked sausage, rye bread and butter, cheese-thickened cauliflower soup, and tea flavored with spice. Conrad worked at accounts till the women had done the dishes, then moved his desk chair over by the cushioned ones near the stove. Ansjie lit the three tall candles and settled in the chair beside a knitting basket.
“Won’t you sit with us?” Conrad invited, indicating what was obviously his accustomed place. “We read and talk in the evenings.”
“You read and talk,” said Ansjie. “I knit or mend.”
“I’d enjoy listening,” Deborah said. “But I’d like to have my hands busy. Is there something I could knit or mend, Ansjie?”
“Socks!” exclaimed Ansjie. “There are always needed socks! Several of the women have so much to do that they can’t keep their children’s feet covered, and so the rest of us help. We also knit for Peter Voth, who’s a widower.”
“But doing his best, poor fellow, to win a bride,” put in Conrad roguishly.
Disdaining to answer, Ansjie produced a pair of bone needles and a ball of gray wool yarn. “You could do socks that would fit you for the middle children of Lorenz Schroeder, the shoemaker,” she suggested.
Deborah set to work. Conrad opened the book. “This is one of your poets,” he said. “I like him very much. Walt Whitman—”
The needles dropped from Deborah’s fingers. “Oh, no! We—my family read, too. We were reading Leaves of Grass just the night before—”
Ansjie came and held her, stroking her hair. “There, there, mein kind!” she soothed. “Maybe it’s better we don’t read for a while, Conrad. You could sing instead or play your violin.”
“Whatever Deborah wishes,” he nodded.
Using the handkerchief Ansjie offered, Deborah managed a shaky smile. “I�
�m glad you read. It does make me remember, but it’s a good memory. Only I—I can’t hear Whitman yet.”
Conrad rose and went over to his desk. “I’ve been Englishing some of Friedrich Rückert, my favorite modern poet. I haven’t tried for rhyme, but to my mind he says some things better than anyone else has. Shall I read from him?”
“He’s sad,” objected Ansjie.
“I don’t mind sad,” assured Deborah. “Just not Whitman.”
Conrad brought back a slender leather-bound book. Slipping out a loose page, he read in a conversational tone, as if speaking to the subject of the poem:
“I have told all the bushes,
And mourned to all the trees,
And every greening plant,
And every brilliant bloom.
And still I mourn afresh,
And always anew I cry it,
And always have you meanwhile
My grief forgotten.
You are forgotten in this place
By flower and plant, bush and tree,
Only not from my heart, child,
My pain and my delight.”
Just so, thought Deborah. Just so does one cry out to earth and sky and all in between, but they move on their round. The human heart aches without an echo, except from other mortals, yet they are so often the source of grief.
Conrad read other translations then, including Rückert’s paraphrase of a mystic Persian Sufi named Rumi who had written of God in the passionate way of a lover.
The last poem was again spoken to a lost loved one, gone to earth, sun, wind, and water, joining the spirit of each, manifested in flowers, sunlight, breath, and rushing torrents, but living also in the bereaved heart, celebrated by love.
Though Deborah’s heart stirred painfully, there was relief in hearing the poet’s words, listening to what she felt spoken by Conrad’s deeply masculine but gentle voice.
“The poems are beautiful,” she said, in spite of the swelling pulse that blocked her throat.
“Rückert’s are. My renderings are clumsy, but I did them after Röslein. I wrote them out quickly, also, in French and Italian, anything to busy the mind.”
He understood. He was telling her, too, that she’d survive. Ansjie made a clucking sound. “That’s enough sadness! Play something happy on your violin!”
Deborah nodded eagerly as he glanced her a question. Getting down a case from a shelf on the warmed central wall, he took out an instrument of gleaming, mellow wood, tuned it carefully, then set it under his chin.
He drew from the strings gay, lilting, laughing tunes, trills that made the foot tap, and then, pulling a face at Ansjie, he made weird sounds like an owl hooting, punctuated with the calls of many birds.
“You played that for me when I was little!” Ansjie laughed, clapping her hands.
“Alle Vögel sind shon da,
Alle Vögel, alle!”
“All the birds are back again,
All the birds, all!”
He made the strings squeal like a pig, squeak like a mouse, give a howl like a dog’s, tricks with which, judging from his sister’s laughter, he’d beguiled her when she was a child. Then he drifted into sweet music, tender and dreaming.
Ansjie sang softly in German, then, as he played the last tune again, changed the words to English.
“Sleep, my child, sleep.
In heaven move the sheep.
Little stars are like little lambs,
The moon’s a little shepherd boy.
Sleep, my child, sleep.”
“And it’s time we did.” Conrad made a last sweep of the bow, smiling at Deborah. “Have a good night. We’re glad to have you here.”
“Indeed, we are,” said Ansjie.
She rose on tiptoes to give her brother a kiss. He returned it, then inclined his silver-blond head to Deborah, who impulsively put out her hand. “You’ve been so kind! I can’t thank you!”
“You do by being here,” he said, calm blue eyes darker by candlelight. As blood mounted to her face, he put away the violin and then made ready to fire up the stove.
That was the first night she slept well and soundly since her parents’ death, though she awoke early with the now familiar sense of loss flooding her consciousness before she remembered why, or even who she was. But after the memory, a welling up of sorrow, she remembered where she was.
The comforting warmth and softness of lavender-scented down bedding was so airy light that it felt the way clouds look. She savored this a moment, then swung her legs down, encountering first the padded stool, then the sheepskin rug.
In the dim light, Ansjie appeared to still inhabit the fluffy mound atop her bed. Quietly, Deborah carried her clothes to a bench near the stove bricks and dressed in rare luxury, not having to race to get her clothes on before her fingers went too numb to manage buttons.
There was no sound from the other room, so she took some time combing her hair, working out snarls she’d been too rushed to worry about.
Carefully opening and closing the door, she was startled to be greeted by the aroma of coffee. Conrad was already at work. As he rose from his desk, the candlelight emphasized the angles of his face, turning it gaunt, though his smile softened that impression.
“You’re up early.”
“So are you,” she countered. “Or didn’t you go to bed?”
“I did. And dreamed.”
Silence hung between them while she tried desperately to think of something light to say. It was he who broke the awkwardness, moving to the stove, getting two cups from the shelf. “Will you have coffee?”
“Please.”
He poured out the steaming brew, creamed and sugared it, then put it in her hands. “Will you come to school today?” he asked. “Or would you like a while to settle?”
“With no more than I had, that didn’t take long! I’d like to hear you teach and get an idea of the children before I start a class, though.”
“Do it in whatever way is comfortable.” He followed her gaze to the pen and paper on the desk and gave a diffident laugh. “That’s my story of this settlement, full of blots and scribbled additions. I must copy it over before I ask you to look at it.”
Deborah laughed. “If you could see the rough draft of Father’s editorials!” Of which no more, now, would be written. But the pang faded into the warmth of remembering.
Conrad said, “That glow will come without pain after a time. Instead of aching loss, you’ll have an awareness in your spirit of those you loved. It can be a blessing, not grief.”
“Can it?” The cry was wrung from her. “That might be so if it weren’t for the way they died! How can I make peace with that?”
He ached with her. From the look in his eyes, Deborah knew that, and it helped. But, just then, he didn’t answer her in words. Stepping out on the closed porch, he came back with a knee-length dark green cape with a hood, helped her into it, and put on his own gray cloak.
“I want to show you something.”
Leading her out into the dawning, after they changed into outdoor shoes on the porch, he brought her to stand among the leafless trees on the frost-covered ground, kept his arm around her outside the cape as streaks of red widened in the east, gripped the dull sky and thrust higher, casting rosy brightness on the sparkling frost, flushing the naked winter branches.
Deborah caught her breath, thrilling. In spite of herself, the familiar words sounded in her mind. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth His handiwork.”
“Beautiful!” she whispered.
“Yes. The eternal enduring best answer to pain, to horror. Why is it? What causes it? The sky is there, whatever the sins beneath it, the sun and moon, the mountains and earth, this vast prairie. When spring comes, these bare limbs will burst into flower, then fruit. Why? Who can know it?”
“It’s another question, not an answer.”
“A question is an answer that makes you find your own.” Turning, he kept his hand beneath her
arm as they walked back to the house, feet crunching on the frozen earth crust. “But there are more human answers, too, my Deborah. Moments of joy—and you will have them again. Love in its many forms. Kindness. Faith and hope. These are as real as sickness, cruelty, hate, and despair.”
“Yes, but—”
“A man named Jacob Boehme, from whom I’ll read to you some evening, put it this way: ‘Man is a hinge between light and darkness; to whichever it gives itself up, in that same does it burn.’”
Inside the porch, he helped her off with the cape. “This shepherd’s cloak is for you,” he said, unfastening the horn buttons. “It’s made from long fleece, is very warm, and turns rain. Ansjie has another she prefers.”
“Oh, I can’t—”
“You can.” He chuckled. “You’ll find it very easy when you get used to being snug.”
They changed into house shoes and entered the warm kitchen.
“Why don’t we surprise Ansjie and fix breakfast?” Deborah asked. “I can cook if you’ll show me where things are.”
“Sausage, ham, or bacon?” he asked. “Things like that are stored on the porch. So are eggs and milk, unless it gets cold enough to freeze them.”
They decided on eggs scrambled with sausage. Deborah cooked these while Conrad cooked millet, a white grain she hadn’t seen before, flavoring it with dried plums and currants, and he set the table, a task he was obviously used to.
Ansjie emerged, sniffing rapturously. “I thought I was dreaming! Getting up early to make breakfast is one thing I can’t like, though Conrad helps much by having coffee ready.”
“Then let me do it,” suggested Deborah. “I’d like to help wherever you most prefer.”
Ansjie sank into her chair, hungrily eyeing the golden eggs and crisp, bits of sausage. “You’ve found my weakness! I like running my own house, it’s much cosier, but I do like to wake up and find breakfast.”
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