"Walter's name is Jenkins; so we will not even have to change the letter head; and since he clearly deserves it, it is my privilege, on behalf of myself and Emmanuel Onofrio, at this time, to invite Walter to join the triumvirate as one of Grantville's Greatest Philosophers."
Emmanuel Onofrio turned to his co-judge Pastor Green. "He should have asked me first before sticking me with that title! Now, since he announced it before the world in the way he did, there is no way I can turn it down with out being ungracious or looking like I do not approve of Walt getting the title."
Green looked at the old man he had co-opted to be a judge on the strength of his Masters degree, his forty years in education, his irreproachable reputation and the general respect of the community. The Baptist pastor laughed a light chuckle and then used some inappropriate language. It being rather out of character for the pastor's public persona, but completely on the nail head for the occasion, he said, "Sucks to be you, don't it?"
"What will Jimmy do if someone else comes along that deserves the title, too?"
"Knowing Jimmy," Pastor Green said, "I suspect you will end up with a four person triumvirate."
At first silence filled the gym from one basketball hoop to the other, just like when Jimmy answered the last question. This time, the silence blossomed into a full blown roar of approval.
****
Arrested Development
Virginia DeMarce
February-May 1635
The organ at St. Mary Magdalene's in Grantville moved into the opening strains of "Glory Be to Jesus." Dennis Kovar poked an elbow into his cousin Dominic Grady's ribs. "I love this hymn. It's just so gruesomely gory," he whispered.
"Yeah," Dom whispered back. "If we absolutely have to serve at vespers during Lent, all that blood dripping out of severed veins makes it better."
"Isn't that supposed to be 'sacred' veins?"
"Whatever."
After the service, Father Athanasius Kircher eyed his acolytes. Three hundred seventy years of progress between his own day and the Ring of Fire had not done much to improve the cultural level of pre-adolescent altar boys.
"Tomorrow," he said.
The boys looked up.
"The regular acolytes at the St. Elizabeth's chapel at the fair grounds are both down with tonsillitis. Since Dennis and Dom's families have up-time bicycles that they can use, I want those two to serve at the chapel tomorrow evening. Father Stanihurst will be hearing confessions in English after vespers. Wait and come back to your houses with him. I don't want you out after dark without an adult."
"Aw, hell. Who's serving here, then?"
"What is the proper answer, Dominic?"
"Yes, Father Kircher."
"That's better. Florian, you can serve here tomorrow, and . . ." Kircher looked around the room. ". . . Pete." He pointed at Florian Drahuta, originally Schott, and Peter Bartolli, originally Hunyadi, two more down-time children who had been adopted by parish families."
****
"So here we are," Dom said. "Stuck at the fair grounds. I'm sooo hungry. I can't believe how hungry I am, and it'll be forever before we get back home for supper, since we've got to wait for Father Stanihurst."
"Why wait?" Dennis asked. "I was thinking that I'd just sneak out."
"Father Kircher said to wait. 'Yes, Father Kircher.' Ya, you bet'cha, Father Kircher. How does that song go. 'Yes, your majesty' something, something else, your majesty.'"
"We have the bikes. We can just leave."
"What do you bet that he told Old Stanihurst that we'd be waiting. Nothing escapes Father Kircher. He's like one of those elephants who never forget. Why did the Jesuits have to assign us a damned genius for a priest?"
"Father Stanihurst's not really old," Thomas Bu?leben said. "More like thirty than eighty."
"What's the difference?" Dom shook his head. "What did the hippies used to say? 'Never trust anybody over thirty,' I think it was."
Dennis laughed. "Then, like Dad says, they all got to be over thirty. Like Tom Stone. Now he's got to be eighty, at least."
"I'm going to starve before I get any supper."
"You can't be that hungry."
"I can," Dom insisted. "I am. I'd eat . . ." He waded through his mental catalog of legendary up-time horrible foods, most of which he had never personally enountered. "Well, I'd eat sushi. Or . . . spinach souffle. Or . . ." He reached for more practical experiences-things he had actually seen since his arrival in Thuringia at the advanced age of eight years. "Or that awful stuff that the Scottish guy who married Rachel Tyler fixes. Or . . ."
"I've got food here," Thomas said. "Not a lot. I think that Caspar Engelhaupt stashed some, too."
"Where?"
"You can eat mine if you pay me for it, but you can't eat Caspar's. He has tonsillitis so he's not here and he can't give you permission."
"Maybe if I left him some money, too . . ."
Dennis shook his head. "Not without permission. If he's here some evening and hungry, he can't eat money."
"Hell."
"That's the way it is."
Dom looked up in disgust. "You know? One of these days, if we keep acting like each other's consciences, we'll end up what my grandma calls 'well-behaved.' Okay. What have you got, Thomas?"
"Bread. It's pretty stale. Some raw turnips, pretty wrinkled and dried up. Carrots, the same. A little cheese, but it's probably as hard as a rock by now."
Dom reached into his pocket and pulled out a small jar. "Anything's good if you put enough salsa on it. I'll take them. How much? And where'd you hide it?"
****
Dom wormed along on his hands and knees, following Thomas. "It's dusty back here," he whispered.
"Well, that's the reason I made my hidey-hole back here. The cleaning ladies never come. What's the point in putting my food someplace where they'd find it? They'd just toss it out. Or eat it themselves."
Dennis smothered a sneeze. "Where are we?"
"Getting food," Thomas said.
"That's what we're doing, not where we are," Dom answered. "We're behind the confessionals. This is my Robinson grandparents' old house. When they got sick and moved in with Mom and Dad, they gave it to the church to make a chapel at this end of town because the refugee center was right next door, way back when Grantville was full of refugees."
Thomas turned his head back. "Is that why it's so weird for a church?"
"They pulled out the inside walls to make space for the altar end and the nave. That's why it has two-by-fours here and there out in the middle to prop up the roof beams. What's the sacristy now used to be a breakfast nook next to the kitchen. The carpenters walled in the old screened porch to make this side section where the confessionals are. That's why the roof slants down. They bought old booths second-hand from some other church that was getting new ones and they turned out to be too tall to go all the way to the wall, so there's this space behind."
Thomas grinned. "Handy, isn't it?"
Dennis stuck out his tongue. "If you're really into sneaking into the sacristy, climbing under a table, and squeezing through the bottom half of what used to be a door that won't open all the way any more."
"We're here," Thomas whispered. "Now be quiet, because Father Stanihurst will be coming into the booth any minute. When I figured out that the back and sides of the confessional and the top and front of the bench inside it made a nice, solid, empty box, I sort of borrowed some tools, cut me out a little door in the back, put on a couple of strips of leather for hinges, drilled holes in the little door and the back so I can tie it closed with another strip of leather, and like the magician says, presto. Just be careful to hold the door up, so it doesn't scrape on the floor when you open it."
He collected his money from Dom. "If any food disappears from now on, I'll know who to look for. I'm taking this money home to Mutti." He slid sideways past Dom and Dennis, squirming out the way they had come in.
Dom stuck his hand in the hole, fishing around.
Su
re enough. Bread wrapped in old, much re-used, waxed paper. Shriveled vegetables. He dusted off two carrots, handed one to Dennis, and opened the salsa, but before Dennis could take a bite, Dom put a hand over his mouth.
"Wha . . . ?"
Dom shook his head and pointed at the booth.
Something scraped. The door at the side. Now Dom waved his other hand frantically. Father Stanihurst was in the confessional and they were truly trapped. They didn't even dare take a bite of carrot or bread. They were too crunchy. He might hear them.
Dennis nodded.
A slightly different scrape. That was the curtain at the front of the booth closing, the wooden rings sliding along the wooden rod. They were stuck-and about to breach the sacredness of the confessional. They couldn't squirm away without getting caught, not even if they managed to get their shoes off. If they could hear curtain rings on the rod, Father Stanihurst could certainly hear their belt buckles and shirt buttons on the floor.
Dennis gave Dom the look that meant, "This is the sort of thing that Grandma says we could go to hell for."
Dom nodded.
****
The only way out was how they had come in. The other two booths, in use by priests hearing German-language confessions, went all the way to the far wall.
Dom curled up and started sticking his finger in the salsa and sucking it off. He stuck the jar out at Dennis, silently offering to share. Dennis stuck his finger in the salsa, licked, and stuck it back in.
". . . richtig und aufrichtig, wenn auch nicht gesetzlich." A man's voice, speaking German, came from the booth next to the one where the food had been hidden. "Diese verdammten Juden . . ."
The time period for confessions ended. Penitents and priests left the booths. Dom swept the carrots back into the hidey hole as fast as he could, tied the leather strap while Dennis crawled out, and made a run for it, trying to see who had been in the middle booth talking to Father Bissel for that last session. Father van de Enden had been in the last booth, next to the far wall. They managed to be in front of the chapel with their bikes by the time Father Stanihurst came out.
****
"It was a woman confessing to Father van de Enden," Dennis said the next afternoon after school. "Vrouw Mariekje who's married to that Dutch market gardener who put up all the greenhouses out by the grade school. It was Mrs. Drahuta in with Father Stanihurst. That means that the guy who thinks it's a good idea to burn down the Jewish church has to have been the dumpy man who crossed the street just when we got our bikes out of the rack. I don't know who he was. I've never seen him at St. Mary's, but maybe he goes to the chapel all the time."
"What do you think we ought to do about it?"
"I don't think we're supposed to do anything about it," Dennis said. "Confessions are secret."
"They're secret for priests," Dom protested. "I don't think that the 'seal of the confessional' applies to people who were sitting behind the booth just trying not to die of starvation. And he didn't say okay, exactly. 'Right and just, but not legal.' That's what the guy said-that it's right and just to attack the synagogue. It can't be. For one thing, the day care center's just across the street and a lot of little kids could get hurt. If he knows it's not legal, then he ought to know that it's not right, either."
"I dunno." Dennis got up and stuck his thumbs in his pants pockets. "It's not legal to be a Catholic in England. Father Stanihurst told us about that. But it's right." He paused. "Isn't it?"
"I expect so." Dom leaned his bike against the wall. "Yeah, it's got to be. It's always right to be Catholic, but that doesn't mean that other folks don't have a right to think the way they do. At least, that's what Dad says."
"I don't think we ought to say anything to anybody," Dennis concluded. "For one thing, we'd have to admit that we were behind the confessionals, and we'd end up in a million gazillion gallons of trouble ourselves."
****
Nicholas Smithson, otherwise known as Father Nick, realized that if adults ever gave up, it would take only one generation for the world to revert to barbarism. Or, at least, to revert to a worse level of barbarism than it had already attained in the Germanies of the 1630s. Wherefore, he now taught the English-language CCD classes for ten through twelve year old children at St. Mary Magdalene's in addition to his research and all the other extra work that came with the Lenten season.
He paused just outside the door of the classroom. Most of the kids were already here-the English-language class included not just up-timers and foster children of up-timers, but the offspring of meandering down-time English and Scots Catholics, an occasional Pole or Bohemian, a few Italians, a sparse representation of French and Walloons, and even a few German children from intact families who had decided that they would rather speak English all the time, or at least as much of the time as their parents would let them get away with it.
"That's just gross," Maria Pohl was exclaiming.
Father Nick paused a minute to place her. Oh, yes. The stepdaughter of Ingram Bledsoe, the up-time piano manufacturer.
"Gross, gross, gross," Ottilia Halbach chanted.
He had to agree with her assessment.
"Naw, it's not," Aloys Carroll answered. "It's got to be divine planning that Affenfleisch has exactly the same number of syllables as monkey meat. That's got to mean that God really wanted it to be translated."
"Yeah," Thilo Scharfenberg yelled. "Gro? like great. Go, God, go!"
Father Nick flinched.
He had a map on the wall of his office. A map with up-time, plastic handled, stick pins in it. He'd borrowed a box of them from Colette Carroll, Aloys' adoptive mother.
Aloys had kin in Silesia and Bohemia both, but neither family had objected when his soldier stepfather had been killed in the Battle of the Crapper and his mother had signed adoption release papers before dying at Badenburg the same year.
Colette insisted that Aloys and his half-sister keep in touch with their blood relatives, which meant that there were pins in eastern Silesia, western Bohemia, and closer by in Schleusingen where the German translation of Greasy, Grimy, Gopher Guts had shown up.
Then there had been the clandestine priest who had been turned into the English authorities, barely made it to the coast, and ended up dropped off at Danzig when he really intended to head for the English College in Louvain. Picking up the son of a minor Polish noble to accompany to France, thus managing to pay his way, Father Mulhollin had stopped off in Grantville to see Father Stanihurst. The boy was with him, of course. There was now a Polish translation of the song, known to be in at least three Jesuit collegia in the Commonwealth.
And a Latin translation in Louvain. That had already spread to Salamanca and Venice.
Aloys was saying to one of the other students. "Bet ya' can't put it into French. It's the wrong kind of language."
"Can, too," Blaise answered.
"Ugh," his sister Jacqueline said.
Thilo threw an eraser at her.
Father Nick squared his shoulders and walked into the room.
****
"I'm worried about those two boys," Father Nick said to Father Kircher after CCD class. "Dom Grady and Dennis Kovar. They sat quietly through an entire CCD class. No interruptions, no mischief, no inappropriate comments, no expressions of desire for the gruesome and gory. The only thing either of them asked this week is that Dom had a question as to why confessional booths down-time have curtains in the front, when they didn't up-time."
"I sent them out to serve vespers at St. Elizabeth's last week," Kircher answered. "Maybe they're coming down with whatever germ was causing tonsillitis there. What did you tell them about confessional booths?"
"Before I could open my mouth, Thilo Scharfenberg announced that it's because down-timers like it that way and there are a lot more down-timers than up-timers-even in Grantville now. By the time I managed to quell the resulting dispute, they all had to leave for junior choir practice."
"Maybe next week. What would you have told them?"
/>
"Pretty much the same thing, I'm afraid. The Council of Trent isn't that far in the past and Vatican II hasn't happened. With the Holy Father's current troubles . . . and Tino Nobili on the church board . . . well, the confessionals have curtains."
****
Two of the proudest new recruits to the SoTF National Guard, Otto Bu?leben and Melchior Engelhaupt, led out their companies under the watchful eyes of the sergeant. Moving out into the road, almost without thinking, they broke into the fine marching song that they had learned from their younger brothers.
"Und ich, mit keinem spoon."
Jessica Hollering, the commander's adjutant, watching from the sidelines, shuddered, wondering how she could feel so old when she wasn't much past thirty. Most of these kids they would be sending out to fight in the next campaign-the one that everybody pretty much knew would be coming next summer or fall-weren't more than a half-dozen years older than she had been when she learned that song. All by itself, she thought, it would ensure that in Amideutsch, "spoon" was going to substitute for Loffel. Not to mention that the German version inverted "french-fried eyeballs" into "fried French eyeballs."
"Doch habe ich ein Stroh!"
The companies peeled off towards Bamberg.
****
No matter what Dennis said, Dom thought he ought to at least find out who the dumpy man was. At that point, he realized that no matter how many Hardy Boys and Great Detective books you've read, actually detecting something is a different matter. First, he'd need an excuse to go out to St. Elizabeth's again. Well, he could go collect the food. After all, he'd paid Thomas for it and hadn't been able to eat it for fear that it would crunch.
Once he got there, maybe he could just ask someone. "Do you know a dumpy little man who I don't know?"
That didn't seem very precise.
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