“’Tis rusty. I’d forgotten much of it. I’ve forgotten most everythin’, until you came along.”
She had to touch him. She lifted her hand, at the same time that he reached for it. He kissed her palm, and then her wrist, where her pulse beat. He laid the back of her hand against his cheek. His smile was so tender and fragile, it hurt to look at it. “What I’ve learned of love, of life, I’ve learned from you.” He breathed out a sigh. “And now I need t’give the watch to Schultz.”
“Do you think there’s any chance he will be satisfied with the watch alone?”
“No chance at all,” said a voice at the door. They turned to find Georg Schultz at the doorjamb, standing spread-legged with his thumbs in his breast pockets, smiling to show off teeth that were yellow as corn. He reached out to snatch the watch from Bairn’s open palm and dangled it in front of his face. “But I’m delighted the little thief finally confessed his crime.”
“Schultz, I know yer not a man discouraged by conscience, but are you truly so hardhearted? So greedy fer gold that you’d break me family apart?”
“It’s not personal, Bairn. It’s just money. Quite a bit of money. That reward will set me up for . . . ,” he snapped his fingers, “. . . for life. I won’t have to work another day. No more tiresome ocean voyages.”
“And Anna?”
“What about her?”
“You’ve ne’er thanked her for savin’ yer life, even after you manhandled her like a drunken schoolboy.”
Georg Schultz bowed before her. “Danke sehr.”
“That’s not enough. Would you take so much from a woman who’s shown you only kindness?”
“Why should the fate of a ship’s carpenter make any difference to her?”
“Because we love each other. We plan t’marry.”
Anna’s teeth caught her lower lip and she stared at Bairn in disbelief for several seconds. She felt a lump gathering in her throat. She swallowed, but the emotion could not be gulped away. They had talked long in the night, but it was never about their future, only their past. It seemed too dangerous to assume they would be together again.
Bairn slowly turned to her with a sober expression, a streak of red running up his high cheekbones. “If she’ll have me, that is.”
Startled, she replied with the first words that came to her mind. “She’ll have you.”
“Bah!” Georg Schultz said, dismissing them with a wave. “Your heart belongs to the sea, Bairn. You could never settle down and become a farmer with those Peculiars.”
Bairn looked at Anna and smiled. “The sea can’t love you back.”
The Neulander considered their plight for a long moment, then held a finger in the air. “I’ll make a bargain for you two lovebirds. She can sail back to Rotterdam with you for . . . free! . . . and I’ll watch over her in Ixheim while you are . . . incapacitated.” He gave a lusty grin to Anna and smiled broadly when she shuddered.
“A devil’s bargain,” Bairn growled.
Just then Schultz was clutched by a spell of coughing that doubled him over and he sat down on an upturned nail keg. When the coughing passed, he was winded.
Bairn stared him down. “Schultz, do you mean to tell me that Anna gave you back yer life, after you treated her so badly, and you cannae give her back hers? Are you truly so heartless? So selfish as that? So greedy?”
A poignant silence fell.
“Ja. I am that selfish and that greedy.”
“I don’t believe anyone is without conscience, Georg Schultz,” Anna said. “You’re a man driven by your appetites, but I don’t think you would have rescued Bairn from Otto Splettshoesser if you were entirely without mercy. I believe that, given the opportunity, you will choose good over evil.”
“My dear, you can’t teach a devil to be an angel.”
“Schultz!”
Their heads snapped at the sight of Captain Stedman at the door, looking peeved. Felix was right behind him. Georg Schultz jumped to his feet.
“Schultz, I have a German passenger, a Christian Müller, who is waiting in my Great Cabin, greatly distressed. He said you had sold off most of their goods in Rotterdam to purchase new goods in lots of dozens.”
Bairn looked at Anna with a question in his eyes. It’s true, Anna mouthed.
Schultz licked his lips, stalling for time. “I only did it to help you, Captain. The new goods would be packaged tightly and require less space in the hold. More room for you to bring goods from England.”
“At the time did you inform him that those new goods would be confiscated and sold by the Philadelphia port authorities? Because there is a customs officer in the hold right now, requisitioning all the Rotterdam purchases. Importing new manufactured goods, other than from England itself, is forbidden by English law.”
You could have heard a pin drop. Georg Schultz’s mouth moved and moved before a sound came out. “I’m sure I told him all that. Christian Müller does not speak German. Or English.”
“Anna translated fer ye,” Felix offered up in his dreadful accent.
Georg Schultz’s face colored, but he smiled amicably. “Who can remember every detail? It was months ago.” He batted his hand in the air at Felix like shooing a pesky fly.
Captain Stedman narrowed his eyes. “Apparently the captain of the ship is to be heavily fined for breaking the law.”
Purple-faced, strangling for words, Georg Schultz backed up a step. “Just a simple misunderstanding.”
The captain lifted his chin. “Schultz, come with me to the Great Cabin and explain yourself to the passenger. Bring your purse.”
Schultz’s smile was gone, and a crease appeared between his thin eyebrows. “My purse?”
“If you ever want to work on the ships again, you will make a full reimbursement to Christian Müller.”
“A full reimbursement?” His voice rose to a squeak.
“And you can explain yourself to Otto Splettshoesser.”
“Otto Splettshoesser?” Bairn asked, his face suddenly blanching.
“Aye,” the captain said. “The customs officer.”
“Otto Splettshoesser is not dead?” Bairn thundered. He turned toward Georg Schultz, his fists bunching as he took one menacing step forward. “All these years, you had me thinkin’ he was kilt?” Bairn advanced on the retreating Georg, whose mouth was pursed tightly while his eyes blinked rapidly in fright.
The little galley seemed to crackle in the silence before a storm, when the very air seemed to disappear, until the little man practically wilted.
Georg Schultz gave Bairn and Anna a weary, defeated, bleary-eyed look. “I suppose the watch will suffice for the baron.”
October 8th, 1737
It was an ever-widening world for Anna König. The day was flawlessly clear, and seagulls scolded from an azure sky as the German passengers filed off the ship. On a day like today, with the sun bright overhead and the weather cool and crisp, the water still and calm, it was hard to imagine how perilous the crossing of the Atlantic had been.
Anna’s thoughts spun backward to her old life, on the far side of the sea to the little sheep farm in Germany. She remembered the day of Johann’s death, of saying goodbye to her grandparents for what she suspected—and they knew—would be the last time she’d see them. Her head rattled with the events of the Charming Nancy, to the wild beauty of the endless sea, to the seaman Decker, to the storm that cracked the beam, to the slave ship and those thirsty and tragic souls, to poor Lizzie, to nearly losing Felix and Bairn to Georg Schultz. Her thoughts turned to meeting Bairn, to finding him in the most unlikely of places.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, and she would never understand the mysteries of why.
Anna almost didn’t feel the touch of a hand on her shoulder, so light it was, so tentative. Afraid even to breathe, she turned her head and looked into Bairn’s face.
“You look cold. There’s some winter in this wind.” He took her free hand and chafed it between his, his gaze soft on her face,
a sweetheart’s caress with his eyes. “I was lookin’ for you. What were you doin’ up here on the bowsprit all alone?”
“Praying.” She gazed into his eyes and smiled. “For you. For me. For all of us.”
“Good. Prayers seem t’make a difference, though I cannae pretend t’understand why.” Bairn passed a hand over his whiskers. For a wisp of a second he looked like the boy she remembered. Focused. Intense. Now, strikingly handsome. Never in her wildest imaginings would she believe that he was here, standing in front of her, loving her. And yet, another part of her, deep in her soul, had felt an inexplicable bond with him from the moment she met him.
Felix waved furiously to them from the crowded upper deck of the ship, now a marketplace. He cupped a hand to his mouth and shouted, straining to be heard. Buyers had come on board to haggle and bargain with redemptioners, mostly Mennonites, over how many years of labor they owed in exchange for their passage debt. Only after accounts had been paid could the passengers go ashore.
“Look! Look!” Felix laughed gaily. “There is Papa!” He pointed to the crowded, chaotic dock, filling with cargo, casks, longshoremen, and pods of ponderous Germans who had come to meet their friends and relatives. He ran to grab Dorothea’s hand and hurry her down the gangplank. Decker’s dog barked and trotted on Felix’s heels.
“There! There is your father, Bairn.” She pointed to a tall man who towered above the others.
“My father,” Bairn said, his voice breaking a little over the words. She saw his knuckles go white as his hands gripped the rail.
Jacob Bauer bolted to the base of the gangplank to meet his wife and son, arms opened wide to scoop Felix up.
Beside her, Anna heard Bairn inhale a deep breath, and it was plain that he was as eager as Felix. “Does your father look the same to you?”
“His hair and beard are mixed more with gray than brown now.” Bairn swallowed, breathed. “But he holds himself tall and straight, just the way I remember.”
“Tall and straight like you.”
Anna watched the surprised look on Jacob’s face as Dorothea showed him the infant in her arms. Then she realized she was telling him about Johann, because she saw Jacob still, and wrap his arms around Dorothea for a long, long time.
Felix ran halfway up the gangplank, skirting around passengers, and waved to tell them to come down.
“Let’s wait,” Bairn said, putting a hand on Anna’s shoulder. “Let’s give them this moment to grieve Johann.”
“Are you ready?” she asked. “Ready to be reunited?”
His eyes met hers and they were no longer cold, no longer hard. Eyes, eyes, she thought. There is no forgetting eyes. These were the clear gray eyes of the boy she once knew.
“Aye. Nay.” He shook his head. “How do you tell a mother and father that their son is nae dead but alive? That a boy has a brother, after all?”
“By letting them see that you are changed, but the same.”
Anna looked back over her shoulder with a strange feeling of parting, a tenderness for this old wooden tub. The ship had taken care of them and brought them safely across the ocean. She would actually miss the Charming Nancy. It was an odd feeling to care about the ship, one she didn’t expect, similar to the sad feeling she got when she closed the cover on a book. She had finished with that part of her life and would begin a new book.
A chilly cross-course breeze circled around her, lifting her capstrings, pushing away the now familiar stale smells that hung about the ship. She thought of how often sea wind had refreshed and renewed her. She would never miss the stench of the lower deck, but she would miss the cleansing bite of tangy sea air. And she looked forward to the familiar and pleasurable scents that awaited her in Penn’s Woods: earthy scents of soil and trees and horses.
Bairn turned to give her a hand to climb down the forecastle ladder and said, “Why such a solemn look? Dinnae you feel happy t’leave?”
“I am,” she said. “I’m happy to leave. And a little sad. But more happy than sad.”
Her gaze traveled lovingly over him and stopped when she saw his father’s red mutza in his other hand. It was a quietly miraculous moment, Anna felt, one she’d never forget as long as she lived. She had thought, twice, they would be forever parted and now they had it all again, their lives, their love.
Bairn draped his father’s red coat over his arm and bent down to pick up the rose basket. “Did you ever know where I found this rose?”
“I thought it was wild. I assumed you dug it up on a hillside.”
“Nay. It came from the old baron’s garden. He was quite a fancier of roses. I dinnae think he would miss one. Mayhap me brothers and me are not so very different. Always helpin’ ourselves to the baron’s treasures.” He grinned, eyes sparkling in a way that reminded her of Felix and Johann, both. With the other hand, he gripped Anna’s hand tightly and they walked the deck of the Charming Nancy for the last time, down the gangplank to join their family.
Discussion Questions
In the beginning of the story, Anna struggled to leave the past behind. We meet her as she is digging up her most precious rose to take along to the New World. To her, the survival of the rose was a symbol of the survival of her people. Now that you’ve discovered why this particular rose was so important to her, what do you think this rose truly represented to her?
Context is key. Have you ever not recognized someone if you’ve seen him out of context? It might seem unlikely that Bairn didn’t recognize his own mother, but eleven years had passed, and in his mind she was still a young woman, pleasingly plump, with russet-colored hair. On the ship, she was thin and gray from sickness and sorrowing. But how could a mother not know her son? Dorothea thought her son had died, a boy at the age of eleven. She would never have expected an English-looking sea carpenter, complete with a long hair queue and bushy whiskers, to turn up as her missing son. Why is context so important to memory?
Usually, Amish fiction has a rural setting, a reminder to the reader that she is escaping to another world. This story had no such reminders. It took place almost entirely on a ship. Even seasons weren’t relevant—though weather certainly was. Still, it was a challenge to create tensions in which the Amish showed a better way to respond to life’s trials without the usual props. It stripped away what draws us to and distracts us about the Amish (such as a simple farm life) to show their depth and commitment to faith in their responses to crises. Challenging, and inspiring. If you were taken out of your ordinary setting, what would identify or set you apart as a Christian?
Anna wanted Bairn to see that faith could keep a person, as well as a church, in the world but not of the world. When Anna and Christian offered to provide water to the slave ship, what were your initial thoughts? Did they waver when day after day went by and no rain appeared? What did the water symbolize to Anna? To Bairn?
God is often slow, but never late. Why is that? What was happening, spiritually, to Bairn during this drought on the ship?
Let’s consider the water from a different angle. What could be a metaphor for the water in your life? And what could be a metaphor for the slave ship? Could you, or should you, offer your water to the slave ship?
Anna believed that God wouldn’t bring them this far if He didn’t plan on delivering them. She never wavered from that conviction, even as she started to suffer the effects of severe dehydration. Did she mean that God would deliver them by providing water? Or did she mean something beyond physical provisions?
There were some gruesome details in this story. The shark with Decker’s body in it, for example. The horrific smells of the lower deck mingling with the bilge. The tradition of throwing a dead mother and her living child into the sea together. (A vivid account of ship mortality in 1750 is given by Gottlieb Mittelberg in his published Journey to Pennsylvania. In it he wrote that if a woman died in childbirth, the dead mother and the living infant were both thrown into the sea together. [Also documented in Unser Leit, page 271.]) You might be surprised t
o learn that those gruesome details were true! Have you had an event in your life in which fact was worse than fiction? (I have! A couple of them. But I’ll save those for a book club discussion.)
One of the themes in this book is a basic question: Can I trust God? Bairn struggled with it. If we’re honest, most of us do. Anna said, “We think of trusting God by relating it to our circumstances. Trust is much more than circumstances. Much, much more.” What do you think she meant by that?
Bairn believed in God, but a mercurial, unpredictable one. Understandably! He was only eleven years old when he was essentially abandoned, orphaned, and left to his own survival. Do you think God did abandon him for a season? Why or why not?
Another theme in this book was broken expectations. Bairn had endured many failed expectations of God. His despair and disappointment caused him to give up hope that God had any regard for him. In another scene, Anna said, “Our story is not meant to be read by itself.” What do you think she meant by that—and how would it be applicable to Bairn?
During the drought, Anna was confident that God would provide water to them, though there were no rain clouds in sight. The situation on the ship grew dire, worse and worse. Anna might have been desperately thirsty, but she did not lose hope in God. “Broken expectations shouldn’t make us give up,” she said, “but look up.” Describe a time in your life when God did not meet your expectations, at least not in the way you had planned. Looking back on that time now, what are your thoughts about your expectations and God’s response?
Bairn said that Anna and Felix and the other passengers “lived loved.” And he did not. What do you think he meant by that? What difference does it make to you to “live loved”?
Eleven years later, Bairn had a miracle of his own—an amazing coincidence that his mother and brother were on the Charming Nancy. What does that reveal about God’s timing?
What was the most interesting historical detail you learned as you read this story?
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