The Amish Nanny

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Isn’t it exciting?” Alice added. “Once we’re there, you’ll probably get to meet your Aunt Giselle.”

  Looking at Alice’s pointed expression and hearing her emphasis on the word “aunt,” I realized she knew the truth, that Giselle was more than simply my aunt, she was also my birth mother.

  During Lexie’s life-changing visit last spring, I had learned that the woman who had been my mamm my entire life wasn’t, in fact, my birth mother. Twenty-four years ago, Giselle had given birth to me and then given me to her sister Klara and Klara’s husband, Alexander, through adoption. Thus, in one fell swoop, my birth aunt and her husband had become my parents, and my birth mother had become my aunt.

  Since that time of discovery I’d continued to refer to her as “Aunt Giselle” out of respect for my parents, the sake of family privacy, and the knowledge that legally she was indeed my aunt. But, in my mind, I now thought of her simply as “Giselle.”

  Regardless of what I did or did not call her, more than anything I just wanted to see her. Face-to-face. In person. I wasn’t sure what I wanted or why it mattered so much to me, but it was a dream that had been born last spring and grown steadily ever since. Now that it looked as if it might actually happen, I could hardly believe it. Turning to Daniel, I took a deep breath and then spoke.

  “I’m in,” I said firmly. “Just tell me what I need to know.”

  An hour later the four of us were still there in the living room going over this complicated property situation. While traveling with Alice to Switzerland and getting to meet my birth mother were both incredibly exciting prospects, I also knew that such a trip would drive a tremendous wedge between me and my mother, one that we might never be able to repair.

  And yet given all of the changes in my life this past year, I knew in this moment that I had no choice but to press forward. In a sense, I felt as though I were stopped at a busy crossroads I’d never seen before. Either I could brave the traffic and drive my buggy to the other side, or turn around and backtrack to the only life I’d ever known. Given the choice, I was ready to take the risk.

  Still, I needed to understand as much as I could about why Daniel needed us to go to Europe. Once Mammi and I were headed home and could speak privately, I would ask her how we should approach my parents about this. But whether Mammi ended up being the one to tell them or I did, either way I needed enough information so that I would be able to stand firm on the other reasons for the voyage.

  And so around and around we had gone for the last hour, trying to sort everything out. Mammi and Alice had remained on the couch, though now Alice was doing some hand-stitching as she listened to us talk and added the occasional comment. Daniel and I were at the table, and he had cleared away the maps and books and replaced them with pen and paper. He seemed to be a visual person, so he’d tried to clarify more of the details for me by using various sketches and charts and doodles. But in the end, I thought it might be more helpful to grab a pen and some paper myself and simply write down the list of facts that made sense in an order that worked for me.

  I understood about the family connections between Mammi and Alice and the two men who had been next-door neighbors in Switzerland in the eighteen hundreds. I also understood the conflict going on currently between the township that wanted to build a new hydro plant and the historical committee who wanted to preserve an important Anabaptist site. What I couldn’t seem to grasp was how dragging two little old Amish ladies or their representatives halfway around the world could possibly solve that conflict. Trying again, Daniel laid it out for me as logically as he could, and so I started my list. I wrote:

  Two pieces of land, one large and one small, sat directly beside each other.

  In 1877, the owner of the smaller piece, Alice’s ancestor Ulrich Kessler, sold it to the owner of the larger piece, Mammi’s ancestor Abraham Sommers.

  When they made that transaction, they also signed a legal agreement that would limit Abraham’s options should he ever want to sell that piece of land to anyone else.

  “Stop there,” I said. “What sort of limits did he agree to?”

  “We’re not certain about all of them,” Daniel said, “but so far we do know that the main restriction is similar to something we have here in America, known as what’s called a ‘first right of refusal.’“

  “Which is?”

  “A legality that works like this: If Sommers ever wants to sell the land, he has to offer it to Kessler or his descendants first. If they say they do want to buy it, then Sommers has no choice but to sell it to them—at whatever price was specified in the agreement.”

  “What if they don’t want it?”

  “Then Sommers is free to sell to whomever he wants, for whatever price he can get for it.”

  I sat back, thinking about that.

  “Why would Sommers ever make such an agreement? It doesn’t sound very fair. I wouldn’t make a deal like that. If somebody chose to sell me their land, then that should be the end of it. I ought to be able to do with it as I please.”

  A strange noise came from Mammi’s direction, and I looked over to see that she was sound asleep and lightly snoring. Alice looked as if she, too, might drift off at any moment, but for the time being, she was still with us, sewing away on a fabric potholder.

  “This sort of agreement can be made for different reasons,” Daniel told me, “but I believe in this case it was probably an act of kindness done by a man who could well afford it.”

  My eyes widened. At least that was good to know that great-great-great-grandpa Abraham had been a nice man.

  To explain Abraham’s kindness, Daniel recounted a little more Anabaptist history, describing how persecution in that region of Switzerland seemed to ebb and flow over the years. What a man was allowed to do freely at one time might get him arrested at another. And though executions stopped being enforced in the late fifteen hundreds, Anabaptists were still being mistreated and imprisoned three hundred years later. In fact, Daniel said, when Abraham Sommers was a young man, his own brother had become a Mennonite and ended up having to leave the country to stay out of prison.

  Although there wasn’t a large number of Mennonites left in the Emmental by the time Abraham moved there, there were still a few, including his own next-door neighbor, Ulrich Kessler.

  “We know that a Mennonite was arrested for resisting the draft in 1875 and imprisoned at Thun. Once that happened, my guess is that Ulrich Kessler began to fear for his own sons, who were fast approaching the age of military service themselves. In 1877, Ulrich sold his land and moved his whole family to America. He probably didn’t want to leave Wasserdorf and had hopes that the climate toward Anabaptists might soften in the future. I have a feeling that’s why he wanted a first right of refusal on the property, so that if he or his children were ever able to return, they could buy back their family’s homestead. Really, I doubt Abraham even needed the land. I think he just bought it so that Ulrich could afford to go and carve out a new life somewhere else.”

  “Is there a house there?” I asked. “Or just the waterfall?”

  “There used to be a home when the Kesslers lived there. A small one. But once they were gone it fell to ruin and was eventually demolished. Now all that’s left is the crumbling foundation.”

  I nodded, trying to picture it. Had I been in Ulrich Kessler’s shoes, loving my homeland but knowing I needed to leave for the sake of religious freedom, I also might have gone to my wealthy neighbor and asked for such an arrangement. Fortunately for the Kesslers, Abraham Sommers had been willing to do as they had asked.

  “Okay, I think I really get it now,” I said to Daniel. “But how does what happened between those two men so long ago have anything to do with these ladies over here?” We looked toward the couch to see that now Alice had fallen asleep as well, the two of them both peacefully dozing away.

  Sharing a smile, Daniel and I lowered our voices just a bit.

  “As you probably know,” he said, looking at his
own notes for reference, “when Abraham died, his daughter Elsbeth inherited his home and property. Then when she died—”

  “Wait, stop there. Elsbeth inherited just the big property, the one with the S?”

  “No, both. She got S and K.”

  “Got it,” I said, adding another line to my list. “So even with the agreement, it was okay for Abraham to bequeath that property to someone else, he just couldn’t sell it?”

  “Correct. But once it belonged to Elsbeth, she was under the same deed restrictions her father had been. If she wanted to sell the smaller property, the Kessler family still retained the first right of refusal.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Okay. So when Elsbeth died, she left both properties to her daughter Sarah, and when Sarah died she left them to her daughter Frannie, your grandmother. Through all of those generations, no one ever tried to sell either property.”

  “Until my grandmother,” I said softly, thinking again of how Mammi had sold the Swiss estate she’d inherited from her mother so that she could buy the farm we all still lived on now.

  At the time Mammi had had great hopes that by doing so her two daughters could learn to live peaceably there together. Her hopes had been in vain, but at least Mammi had taken comfort in the fact that she’d been able to give her middle daughter somewhere to live, a place to start over and build a new life after giving up her children for adoption. And with a good amount of money left over even after buying our farm, Mammi had secured her future, helped our family, and blessed other members of our church community as well.

  As for Giselle, none of us knew very much about her or her life. She’d kept her communications with us to a minimum, her answers always short and to the point, responding to emails Zed had sent her way on our behalf during the last few months.

  My grandmother hadn’t ever been sure Giselle still resided in the cottage until Zed tracked her down last spring. Now that I would be going over there, I would finally be able to learn more about her and fill many of the blanks in the picture I held in my head.

  Of course, that all depended on if she would be willing to see me. I decided to pay a visit to Zed as soon as I could to have him send her another email. We could let her know I’d be coming her way and then see how she would choose to respond.

  “Unfortunately, somewhere between Elsbeth and Frannie,” Daniel was saying, interrupting my thoughts, “the old agreement between Sommers and Kessler was forgotten. When your grandmother was ready to sell her inheritance, however, it came to light. Do you know what a title search is?”

  I shook my head, so he explained that whenever a property was sold, part of the process involved looking at the deed and checking to make sure there weren’t complications or disputed issues or related contracts or other matters that could “murky the waters” of ownership. He said that most title searches resulted in a clearance, but for the occasional ones where a problem cropped up, the search was said to have come back “cloudy.”

  “When the title search was done for Frannie, she learned two things she hadn’t been told before: First, that she held the deed to two separate properties rather than only one, and second, that the title search for the smaller of the two properties had come back cloudy. We realize now, of course, that the title didn’t clear because of the old agreement between Sommers and Kessler. At that time, however, all anyone could say was that the deed had legal complications of some kind.”

  “So what did she do?”

  Daniel shrugged. “She had a choice. She could either pay to have an expert track down the problem with the deed to try to straighten it out, or she could simply sell the larger of the properties and hang on to the smaller one. After discussing the matter with the buyer, who really didn’t care whether he got those extra five acres or not, she decided to let it drop. The Realtor over there had told her some nightmare stories about title clearances, and she was afraid that she’d end up spending more on the clearance than the land was worth.”

  “So she retained ownership of the smaller property?”

  “Yes. Her lawyer set up a fund to cover the ongoing taxes and insurance on it, but otherwise she hasn’t had anything to do with it. The man who bought Amielbach, Herr Lauten, keeps an eye on the land. He makes sure it’s kept clean and has it mowed occasionally.”

  “That’s nice of him.”

  “He’s a nice guy, for sure, but in this case he has a personal interest.” Daniel grinned, and it struck me that he really was quite cute, especially when he smiled. “The waterfall is clearly visible from the main house on the estate. If you open the windows at night, you can even hear the falls as you drift off to sleep.”

  I closed my eyes, just picturing it. The image reminded me of Heidi, one of my favorite books as a child. Though Heidi’s home with her grandfather wasn’t nearly as grand as Amielbach, I was sure the beauty of the Swiss Alps from the window was the same.

  “Herr Lauten has been in the process of turning Amielbach into an inn for the last year, so you can imagine how upset he is about the hydro plant,” Daniel added. I opened my eyes, the pristine image of roaring falls and white-tipped mountain peaks shattered by the noise and sight of a power plant.

  “So how can Alice and I help stop that plant from destroying the falls?” I asked, leaning forward.

  “We had a hearing with the land and property commission, and they agreed to our petition to have the hydro plant relocated, but on one condition. Given the anticipated influx of visitors, they want the area to be developed as a legitimate historical site, with safety rails, directional signs, things like that. Even a small parking lot within a reasonable walking distance. Herr Lauten is perfectly willing to fund all of this.”

  “Okay…” I said, sure it was too good to be true.

  “What they don’t like is an absentee landowner an ocean away in possession of a murky title. Frannie is still willing to sell that land and Lauten is now eager to buy it, so if they could do that, the whole problem would be solved. The plant would be relocated upstream, and our important Anabaptist site would be preserved.”

  Pressing my hands to my temples, I tried to ward off the headache that was threatening there. “So if she wants to sell and he wants to buy but there’s an old agreement standing in the way,” I recounted slowly, “then why couldn’t somebody do like you said earlier and pay to have an expert track down the problem with the deed and straighten it out?”

  “They can, and they did. I’m that expert, Ada, and here’s what it comes down to. The only way to settle this whole thing is for a Kessler descendant to buy the property from the current owner, a Sommers descendant. This would fulfill the old agreement and clear the title. Then as soon as that happens, she can turn around and sell it to Lauten, at which point the commission’s stipulations will have been met.”

  Closing my eyes, I tried to understand, but one question loomed large in my mind.

  “If any Sommers descendant will do, though, why do you need me at all? Why not just have Giselle represent the Sommers line? She’s already living right there.”

  Daniel’s brow furrowed.

  “Herr Lauten tried that already. I don’t know how well you know your aunt—”

  “Not at all.”

  “Okay, well, me neither, but Herr Lauten says she’s pretty stubborn. He tried repeatedly to convince her to represent Frannie in this matter, but she refused even to discuss it. All she would say was that she didn’t want anything to do with her family’s legal matters, including signing any papers on her mother’s behalf. Period. No further discussion allowed.”

  As his words had sunk in, I stood, stretching my back. I heard laughter outside, so I went to the window and stood there for a long moment looking out. I’d thought I might see Will’s children, but instead it was their cousin Rachael who lived next door, playing in the garden with her mamm. For some reason, I almost felt as much kinship with the Kessler line as I did with the Sommers’. Whether that was because of my feelings for Will or
my own Anabaptist heritage and the debt I owed to their sacrifices, I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I was going to Europe to sell a piece of land and fulfill a promise made between two men more than a hundred and thirty years ago—and perhaps meet my birth mother in the bargain.

  “There’s just one more issue,” Daniel said, and from the tone of his voice, I knew it was something important. I turned and looked at him, waiting.

  “Well, two more, actually.” He chuckled nervously. “First, I want to make sure you understand that this isn’t a sure thing. Despite an exhaustive search, we still have not been able to come up with the original signed agreement between the two men. We have found enough information about what that agreement contained to present our case to the Swiss property courts—and having the two of you there could make all the difference in their decision—but I don’t want to paint too rosy of a picture here. Unless by some miracle we find that missing agreement, we have no guarantees that this plan is going to work.”

  I thought about that for a moment and then nodded, saying that if Alice was willing to take that chance, then so was I.

  “Thank you, Ada. Thank you very much. Herr Lauten still has great hopes of finding the agreement tucked away somewhere at Amielbach. But I think that’s a long shot at best. I’d prefer to take a more pragmatic approach.”

  “Do you know how much involvement will be expected of us on a legal level?”

  “Are you asking because of the Amish position about not taking people to court?”

  I nodded.

  “The dispute is between the Wasserdorf township and the historical society. You’re needed to simply clarify the situation. Alice already talked with your bishop, and he’s fine with your involvement.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, moving back toward the table and sitting down. “What’s the other thing? You said there were two issues.”

  He leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees, and looked at me intently.