Wild Indigo

by Judith Stanton

  He grinned. “That ought to be interesting.”

  Soon geese and ducks and chickens flocked together, fish formed schools in an imaginary pond, and cows and deer and donkeys grazed on a rug, awaiting their turn at the gangplank.

  “Whoops! That’s not right.” Anna Johanna giggled, striking her forehead with the heel of her hand. The gesture, so like one of Retha’s, warmed Jacob’s heart. Imitation had to be the sincerest sign that a child had accepted her new mother.

  “What’s not right, pumpkin?”

  “Fish swim, but ducks do too. So…do ducks belong with the chickens or the fish?”

  Soberly Jacob wagged his head. “A duck is not a fish.”

  Anna Johanna’s eyes grew round. “How do you know that?”

  For a moment he wasn’t sure, and then he wasn’t sure how to tell her. “Well, did you ever see a fish with feathers?”

  “That’s silly.”

  He laughed, and they applied themselves to their task. Animals with feathers, hooves, and paws soon cued up in rows before the gangplank while those with fins swam in the imagined pond.

  Well pleased with at least one of his children, Jacob was stretching stiff muscles when a light rap came at the door.

  Checking where he had left the club, he opened it, expecting Samuel Ernst had come to say the coast was clear.

  Philip Schopp stood at street level with Matthias, looking up, one hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Brother Blum,” he began, but had to clear his throat. “Brother…Jacob. Your son—your other son, Nicholas—” Sweat beaded his upper lip. “Nicholas has disappeared.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “Disappeared! What do you mean, my son has disappeared?” Jacob’s roar reverberated under the low beams of the kitchen ceiling. In front of Retha, dried herbs shuddered on the wall. Heart pounding, she dumped an apron full of half-shelled beans into a bowl and hurried to him.

  “How could you let a single one of those boys out of your sight?” Jacob belted out. “Let alone this one. We have a hundred and eighty soldiers milling about our town.”

  Philip Schopp turned his flat-brimmed hat miserably in his hands. “May I—may we—come in?” An abject Matthias waited behind him.

  Jacob inclined his head and stepped aside, controlling his rage with obvious effort.

  The schoolmaster slumped through the narrow entry and into the parlor. Eyes brimming, Matthias ran to Retha. Touched by his trust, she held him to her side. Anna Johanna, evidently alarmed by her father’s show of anger, took shelter with her, too.

  “What makes you say he’s missing, Brother Schopp?” Jacob demanded.

  The Single Brother gave Retha an awkward sideways look. “Nicholas, um…asked to be excused, and I—I suppose he didn’t come back.”

  “You suppose?” Jacob repeated sharply. “Up to now, you have kept an exceptionally keen eye on your troublemakers, Brother Schopp.”

  The man’s long fingers worried the brim of his hat. “I was lecturing. History.”

  Jacob gave him a withering look, slammed into his coat, and headed for the door.

  Schopp extended a bony hand to Jacob’s sleeve. “May I ask where are you going, Brother Jacob?”

  “To find my son.” Jacob angrily punched out the words.

  “We looked. I, the boys and I—we checked all through my house, the Brothers House, the barn. I asked at the Tavern.”

  Jacob exploded. “Then I will search the mill. The tannery. The cemetery.”

  Retha couldn’t bear it. She had a terrible premonition where Nicholas had gone. She moved the children to stand together and stopped her husband at the door.

  “Jacob, is it possible…” She could hardly bring herself to say the thought that troubled her, to hurt her husband as she knew she would. “Last night, he said he wanted to join the soldiers.”

  The Virginia regiment had left today. The unspoken thought flashed between them.

  She saw the rage wash out of Jacob. “He went south,” he said flatly.

  “Perhaps,” she answered softly. “Perhaps he has not gone far.”

  “I think not south, if I may be so bold,” Schopp interrupted with a hitherto unplumbed humility. “’Twas the militia men billeted with you, I believe, who captured his admiration.”

  Jacob’s hand worked the back of his neck. “Sim Scaife. Another possibility, I admit. He even left late. But who will know which way my son has gone?”

  “I regret to say that I cannot be sure,” Schopp said. “If we bring the matter up at Singstunde tonight, someone there may know.”

  “No one can expect me to wait that long!”

  Retha risked laying a sympathetic hand on Jacob’s shoulder. “You cannot plunge off after him, not knowing—aught.”

  Gingerly, as if expecting a bear to swat him down, Schopp added, “She has the right of it. We must take the time to gather information.”

  “We?” Jacob’s brow arched. “He’s my son.”

  Schopp moaned with contrition. “But he is my student, and he disappeared on my watch. I will comb the town for aught that anyone might have seen. Aught that someone might know.”

  In an afternoon of few choices, Schopp’s idea seemed to Retha to be the next reasonable step. The schoolmaster left, but his earnest assurance of aid failed to comfort her. Nicholas was in the gravest danger, and Jacob would turn the world upside down to find his son, putting his very life at risk. How odd, she thought. She and Nicholas had yet to exchange a civil word, and here she was, shaking at the thought of losing him as if she loved him like a mother. Not odd, however, that the idea of Jacob chasing through the hazard-ridden countryside made her heart pound with fear.

  When they gathered in the parlor, Jacob singled out his younger son.

  “What do you know about this?”

  Matthias raised a thin shoulder in a defiant shrug.

  Jacob almost punched the wall. “I need an answer, son. Not a shrug. Tell me where your brother is.”

  Matthias gave a small, determined huff. “I don’t know where, sir.”

  “Do you know who he left with?”

  “No, sir,” Matthias said stoutly. But suspiciously, Jacob thought. Yet the boy’s innate honesty won out. “Not exactly.”

  “You must do better than that.”

  “I think he went with soldiers.”

  Jacob clamped down on his rage. He was mad enough to lift the boy off the floor and shake the truth out of him. Desperate enough. Not that such a tactic would work. He couldn’t even make this son eat.

  “Matthias, I don’t need for you to tell me that he went off with soldiers. We have guessed that. I need to know which ones.”

  Matthias squared his thin shoulders. “He said he couldn’t tell me, sir.”

  “You knew. Since when?”

  “Only since Latin. Today, Latin class was after lunch.”

  “He told you he was going—he had a plan—but would not tell you who he was going with?”

  “He didn’t want me impre—imprecated—”

  “Implicated.” Jacob bit off the word, then took a short, angry walk around the room, coming back under a full head of steam. “You are implicated, son. Listen, I am very angry with him and more than a little angry with you. You knew what he was up to, you knew he was wrong, and you stood by while he ran off. I’m surprised he didn’t try to talk you into going along.”

  “He wouldn’t let me go. He needed me to stay behind to…” Matthias blurted out loyally but then trailed off.

  “To stay behind to what? Spell it out.”

  Matthias backed up against Retha, and she shielded him behind her arms. Jacob clenched his jaw. Couldn’t she see the boy didn’t need a mother to protect him now?

  “To pray, sir.”

  “To pray?” To pray for what? For forgiveness after he had run away? Not likely.

  Rash, bold-hearted Nicholas never gave a fig for consequences. Then it struck Jacob. Nicholas had asked for his brother’s prayers because he planned to fight. R
esponsible of him, Jacob thought, giving Nicholas grudging credit for making sure his prayerful little brother had a reason to stay home. Outrageous of him, Jacob simmered, to enlist his brother’s aid in any way at all in this hot-headed, irresponsible scheme.

  Jacob gave the skin on Matthias’s thin arm a disciplinary tweak. “He wanted you to pray for him in battle.”

  “Not for him, Papa,” Matthias said proudly. “For victory.”

  “Gut Gott im Himmel,” Jacob half prayed, half cursed. “My son is headed for destruction.”

  Standing behind Matthias, Retha pried Jacob’s hand off him. “They can’t take Nicholas. He’s too young.”

  Her well-meant reassurance missed its mark. In a pinch, Nicholas could pass for seventeen, and fourteen-year-olds enlisted. As standard bearers. In the front lines.

  “Oh, but they can take him,” Jacob said grimly. “They will do so gladly.”

  “I have no news,” Brother Schopp said when he met Retha and Jacob outside the Saal before Singstunde. Some boys cheered Nicholas’s escapade, but only Matthias had been his confidante.

  Leaving her husband to canvass members of the community, Retha led the children inside and found a bench.

  A few minutes later Jacob sat down heavily. “No luck,” he said, still angry but with a new note of anguish in his voice.

  She put her hand on his, feeling the inadequacy of the only comfort she could offer.

  The choir was singing its final chorale when she became aware of someone large hulking behind her, whispering to Jacob.

  After the music ended, he introduced Cousin Andreas. Much darker than Jacob, he too was tall and powerful, and for the moment he was somber. “The new recruit was Nicholas, without a doubt, but I only caught a glimpse.”

  “They wouldn’t let you speak to him?” Retha heard the slight waver of desperation in Jacob’s voice. It was no match for the quake that struck her heart. Nicholas at risk left no doubt that her husband would gallop into the breech.

  “That was the curious part,” Andreas continued. “They would not confirm his name. Only that he enlisted.”

  After dark, Retha watched her husband head south with Andreas, he on the little tavern hack and Andreas on a great draft horse. Andreas joked that no one would have to walk this time, his humor irrepressible even in a crisis.

  Several Single and Married Brothers had argued that they should come along, threatening to rescue Nicholas with clubs and rusty muskets. But Jacob put the idea of a Moravian uprising instantly to rest. Among them, he was the one accustomed to dealing with armies. The town needed all the Brethren at home. Their numbers ensured its safety. All Jacob wanted was a certificate stating that he himself had paid the threefold tax and another dating his son’s birth. Frederick Marshall speedily prepared both.

  “You keep the children safe,” Jacob implored Retha, tucking the certificates into his coat. Then he kissed her with a resolution that shook her to her core. “I will be home soon. We will, my son and I. Be safe, Liebling. I love you,” he said hoarsely, then mounted his horse and galloped out of town.

  For the children’s sake, she curbed her joy. In this crisis, in the presence of her worried children, it wouldn’t do for her to spin about the room, breaking into an Indian maiden’s dance of celebration.

  But her husband loved her. Loved her. He had said so.

  She also hid her fears. It wouldn’t do to rail to the children about the dangers to which Nicholas had exposed himself and his father. With the recent upheavals in their young lives, they needed even-handedness, a sense of nothing terribly wrong.

  Matthias gamely tried to teach her to spin a wooden top his father had made him, but her inept-ness defeated him. After a while, upstairs, she helped Anna Johanna dress her doll for bed and say a simple child’s prayer, and tucked her in. Then she turned to Matthias’s room.

  He knelt as he did every evening, Bible open on his narrow cot, his head bent and hands tightly clasped in prayer. Flawlessly he repeated a longer version of the child’s prayer and added a request for his father’s and brother’s safety. Retha smiled, resting a moment against the doorjamb while he finished. He was such a good, serious little boy.

  Then he ended fervently, “I promise not to stop fasting ever again. Amen.”

  Retha blinked, disbelieving, peering into the dark.

  Fasting! Sudden understanding flooded her. All along, her rain-thin stepson had been fasting. His puzzling, wasting illness made perfect sense. Who would have guessed? And wherever had he gotten that idea? Moravians were more apt to feast than fast. No one would have set him such an example or encouraged him in this. She sank to the floor beside him, praying the right words would come.

  “Matthias, we didn’t know that you were fasting.”

  He jerked around, scowling. “That was my secret!”

  “Your secret?”

  “Between me and God.”

  Spinning the top was easier than this, Retha thought, at a loss for Matthias’s meaning and for her next words. “But why, son? You could have told us. You should have told your father.”

  “I couldn’t either.” He paused, his fingers knotting the bed covers.

  “Your father’s been awfully worried about you.”

  “I was doing it for him,” he said angrily.

  “You were fasting for your father?” she asked carefully.

  Matthias stubbornly tucked his head down.

  She guessed that meant yes. “You didn’t have to fast for him.”

  “I did, too,” he said, disclosing nothing.

  Biding time, Retha moved his Bible to the little bedside table where a slender taper burned. Extracting confessions from children was not her forte. After a long while, she said, “Umm. I don’t understand, Matthias. Help me.”

  With a great sigh of defeat, Matthias flung himself into the bed. “Doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t think it’s working.”

  “Ah. Just how is a fast supposed to work?”

  He muttered toward the wall. “’Twas meant to purify me. That’s what Brother Schopp said.”

  The hair on the back of Retha’s neck prickled with anger. Already Philip Schopp was not in her good graces. “He told you to fast?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Then perhaps you could explain it to me.” She reached to tuck him in but smoothed the thin summer coverlet instead. “So that I could understand.”

  He shook his head.

  “Seriously, Matthias. We have to tell your father. I would like to know why, myself—before he gets home”

  “He’s never coming home.”

  “Of course he will. He always does,” she said with a confidence she didn’t fully feel. Jacob’s wartime missions were always dangerous.

  He cast her a withering look. “My mother didn’t.”

  His mother? Retha’s mind raced to follow the boy’s leap in logic.

  “True enough,” she conceded. “Your mother died in Gemein Haus, where we nursed all the sick Sisters in the epidemic. But your father doesn’t have smallpox, and I still don’t understand why you’ve been fasting.”

  He snatched his Bible from the table, opened to the Book of Matthew—his book, she thought—and pointed her to chapter and verse.

  Which he cited from memory, flawlessly, while she read along. Jesus fasted in the wilderness forty days and forty nights and told Satan that man did not live by bread alone.

  “That doesn’t explain why you’re fasting,” she said.

  He scowled at her grown-up stupidity. “Brother Schopp says that Jesus fasted to purify his soul of all his childish sins before he started on his ministry.”

  “What sins of yours concern you, Matthias?” she asked gently, keeping her disapproval of the schoolmaster to herself. She was no theologian, but Brother Schopp had surely skewed the text.

  Matthias took a minute to reply. “Sometimes I hate my brother. And even Anna Johanna when she pitches fits. If I weren’t so bad, God wouldn’t have taken my mother away.�
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  “God didn’t take your mother away because you were bad, Matthias. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “But I promised God I would purify myself and never sin again if he would let me keep my father.”

  Retha felt the sting of hot tears. Once she would have done the exact same thing to bring back Singing Stones, to save her dimly remembered parents. Anything. What a lonely, impossible task Matthias had set for himself.

  “God won’t hold you to that promise, Matthias. He really doesn’t want you to starve yourself to death.”

  “Even if I sin?”

  “He understands we can’t help sinning sometimes.”

  Matthias closed his Bible reluctantly. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure as the sun’s going to rise tomorrow.”

  “There’s bound to be something I’m supposed to do.”

  She tilted her head and gave it a moment’s thought. “Do what you always try to do. Be as good a boy as you can be.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Well, you can keep on praying. You can ask Him to bless your brother and your father and grant them a safe return.”

  His earnest face relaxed, showing his natural purity. “And I really don’t have to fast anymore?”

  “Never.”

  A new shy deviltry lit his gaunt features. “Then, can I have a piece of sugarcake before I go to sleep?”

  On the second day after Retha’s husband left, Sim Scaife returned and posted young Calloway outside her door.

  “You!” she said, taken aback on seeing him as she and Anna Johanna escorted Matthias to school. “What are you doing here?”

  The fuzzy-cheeked private shrugged, not impolitely. “Cap’n posted me here, ma’am.”

  “For how long?” And why? She wondered grimly. Jacob’s absence, and the reason for it, were the talk of the town. Scaife must have heard. Why else had he come back? Why else post a guard? The fervent militia man would approve of Nicholas’s throwing in his lot with the Continentals as much as he would disapprove of Jacob’s intended rescue. Cousin Andreas tagging along would only remind him of yet another able-bodied Moravian whom Jacob had plucked from honorable service.