The Amish Nanny

by Mindy Starns Clark

  The courtroom was good sized, as large as an Amish living room back home, but not exactly cavernous, as I’d expected. Bright and sunny with tall windows along one side, the back of the room held three short rows of seats, and Ms. Holt directed us to sit in the first row. Moving forward, she set her briefcase on a table in front of us.

  At the other end of the room, facing us, was a large, curved desk, with seating for five. The center seat was elevated, and I assumed that was where our judge would sit. The room also held two podiums at the center and desks along each side, though all were empty.

  Once the judge entered and the proceedings began, I found my nervousness fading the longer I sat there. Standing at one of the podiums, Ms. Holt presented our case well, I thought, though her Swiss German made it difficult to follow completely, even with Daniel quietly translating most of what she was saying for Will and me. I was a little uncomfortable with how heavily she stressed what had happened to Alice yesterday. I supposed she was trying to play on the judge’s sympathies, but her description of the “poor old Amish woman” who had come all this way “risking her very life for this cause” seemed a bit heavy-handed and was not altogether true. Though Alice had indeed risked her life by coming here, we hadn’t known that at the time. It wasn’t as though she’d boarded the ship unsure if she’d ever return home.

  When the lawyer got to the part where she would tell about the page from Abraham Sommers’ business journal, she gave the actual journal over to the judge and then returned to the podium to read the relevant passage in German from a photocopy, out loud, giving the date of entry as May 22, 1877. As she read Abraham’s own words, I understood a good portion, but thankfully Daniel whispered a rough translation, saying:

  I want it documented for the Lauten family, the Kessler family, and my own descendants that I have bought the property adjacent to Amielbach from a man named Ulrich Kessler for the price of 80,000 Swiss francs. In conjunction with the deed transfer, Ulrich and I have also signed an agreement intended to help preserve this property for the potential return of him or of his descendants. Primarily, our agreement stipulates that I may not freely sell this property elsewhere unless I first offer it to Ulrich or his oldest living descendant for purchase. The notary has filed the deed with the land register of the Canton of Bern and has provided me with the appropriate transfer of ownership papers. I have retained the related agreement myself, preferring not to have its contents available publically, and have put it in a safe place, one that offers more privacy than the land registry office.

  The judge gave back the actual journal, trading the lawyer for her photocopy. She handed the original back to Daniel and then went on to present, item by item, many of the other documents we had reviewed in her office. She finished up by reading several excerpts Daniel had given her from Abraham’s letters. Obviously, Ms. Holt was trying to paint a picture of a kind and generous old man, one who had lost his daughter—the only light of his life—to emigration, thanks to the persecution of the Mennonites.

  “Let this persecution end now,” she finished, speaking strongly and dramatically. “Let these good and decent people bring history full circle. As demonstrated by the documentation entered here today, I present to you a direct descendant of Abraham Sommers,” she turned and gestured toward me, “and a direct descendant of Ulrich Kessler.” She gestured to Will and then turned back to the judge. “Your Honor, it is our desire that the paperwork we have been able to provide the court, along with the presence and cooperation and petition of these two people here, will clearly convey the appropriateness of your decision to clear this title once and for all, fulfilling the agreement first struck more than one hundred and thirty years ago between their ancestors. Thank you.”

  By the time she sat, Daniel looked as though he wanted to applaud.

  The judge then asked a lot of questions, and at one point he spoke both to me and to Will in English, clarifying some of the facts of our family history. He also questioned Daniel and Herr Lauten about other miscellaneous details. When it seemed as if things were wrapping up, Ms. Holt reminded the judge of our need for an answer by this Friday at three p.m. at the latest, thanks to the time limit imposed by the land and property commission. Though he seemed a little irritated to be given a deadline, he said he would take that into consideration.

  Before ending the session, he and the lawyer had one last exchange, but neither Daniel nor Herr Lauten translated for us until they were finished and we were dismissed.

  Moving out of the room and into the hallway, I asked Daniel what he’d said there at the end. His brow furrowed, Daniel replied, “That as much as he appreciated the families’ efforts in coming here and the presentation of such a clear and ample paper trail tracing the heritage and related events, he was not optimistic about being able to give a ruling in our favor unless we could provide the one piece of paper that would make all the difference: the agreement itself.”

  Once outside, we parted ways with the lawyer, who urged us to keep looking and promised to give us a call as soon as we got our ruling. After that we all trudged to the parking lot, where both Oskar and George were waiting for us. A very exhausted-looking Herr Lauten climbed in with Oskar for a ride back to Amielbach, and the rest of us got in with George, who drove us to the hospital.

  There, we all went inside and found Christy and Morgan in the room with Alice. They wanted to hear everything about our morning in court, so we recounted the main points, ending with the bad news that our prospects did not look good.

  We all brainstormed for a while, the words from Abraham’s journal ringing in our ears, that he had put the agreement “in a safe place.” What sort of place would he have considered safe? That was the question of the hour.

  Eventually, Will seemed to grow tired of the entire matter, saying we had tried our best and now it was up to the courts.

  “God’s will be done,” he added, “whether His matches ours or not.”

  The matter at an end for now, he moved closer to Alice and asked if the doctor had made rounds yet for the day. She said that he had, and that he’d told her that although she was doing a bit better, she still wasn’t well enough yet to be discharged or travel home.

  “He said it could take a few more days for the fluid to decrease enough for that,” Morgan added.

  Will’s expression was grim, but Daniel actually seemed pleased.

  “I’m hungry,” Christy announced to no one in particular, but I realized as she said it that I was hungry as well.

  Will wanted to stay with Alice, but the rest of us trooped off to the cafeteria for something to eat. On the way we fell back into brainstorming mode about where the agreement could be, and then a suggestion from Daniel opened up a whole new realm of possibilities.

  “Abraham said he’d put the agreement in a safe place, one that would offer ‘more privacy than the land registry office.’ “What if the safe place was some other kind of office? Somewhere that a document could be legally filed but then wouldn’t be so easily accessed by the public?”

  “You mean instead of the land registry office he filed it with the property tax office or something like that?” Morgan asked.

  “Well, think about it,” he said. “Government offices, private libraries, archive centers, church historical preserves—there are all sorts of places a man might consider safe but also somewhat private for storing an important document he would want to preserve for future generations.”

  We tossed around that line of thought as we got our food, chose a large corner table, and ate together. On a paper napkin, Daniel wrote out a list of every possible entity we could think of where a man of that era could have stored an important document. He crossed some of them back out, narrowing things down, and finally we had a short list of possibilities. Then he grabbed another napkin and mapped out the most efficient route we could take to explore them all.

  Given that we had both George’s rental and Morgan’s car for transportation, I thought we should divide and
conquer. But I was outvoted by everyone else, who wanted to stick together, especially because we all needed Daniel to lead the way. Thus, while George got on the phone to arrange for a van and driver, and Daniel consulted a map for our exact route, Christy and Morgan and I headed back to Alice’s room to bring Will a sandwich and tell them where we were going.

  I thought Christy might want to stay there with her daed, but she was eager to tag along on our treasure hunt. With a smile and a hug, Will urged her to do so, saying he wanted her to get the very most out of the time we had left here, especially if we were heading off to visit more of the sites we’d been wanting to see anyway. As we left, I found myself wishing that Will were coming too.

  The van was a lot roomier than either of the cars had been. Daniel and Morgan sat in the middle seat with Christy and me in the back and George up front with the driver. Daniel pulled out one of Abraham’s journals, saying he wanted to go through it again to look for clues in light of this new theory. As he did, Morgan clapped her hands in delight, saying, “I love this sort of thing.”

  “The first entries are all business…” he said, paging through them quickly.

  “Can I give it a try?” Morgan asked, reaching for the journal.

  “Wait,” Daniel said, pulling a pair of white cotton gloves out of his backpack. “Wear these.”

  “You are such the geek,” she teased, taking them.

  Christy gave me a funny look and chuckled. I remembered she’d been asleep when Daniel had worn gloves the night before to read the letters.

  He turned around and waved another pair in her face. “All serious archivists carry these with them.” He grinned, happy as could be.

  Christy asked if he had any more, and he ducked his head down and then popped back up with a third pair. She slipped them on her hands.

  Morgan flipped through the first pages of the journal and then said, “I’ll start here, where the narrative begins.”

  “When he hires Caspar Lauten?” Daniel interjected.

  She nodded. “Yep, right there, at the Cas-par,” she said, drawing out the name so that it sounded like “at the Casbah.” Then she laughed, and I marveled at how much more comfortable she seemed with all of us.

  “Okay,” she continued. “The next one is December 2, 1895.” She quit speaking as she read and then lifted her head. “The gist of it is that he’s worried about the finances of maintaining the property. He feels he made a mistake in hiring the young man to help, but he knows he can’t do it alone. He writes that Caspar came across some of his old carvings and encouraged him to sell them and make some more. He’s sure he could generate some income that way, but he feels too old to take up carving again.” She read a little more. “This is a couple of months later. It’s about Elsbeth.” Morgan looked up with a questioning look on her face.

  “That’s his daughter,” I explained. “My grandmother’s grandmother.”

  “Got it.” Morgan pointed a white gloved finger at the page. “Anyway, he writes that every day he mourns for Elsbeth, even though it’s been eighteen years since she left. He thinks of her children—all twelve of them—and if she’d stayed how fulfilling his life would have been. He feels as if God, by leading Elsbeth away, paid him back for his…” She paused and then sounded out, “Überschreitung?” She glanced at Daniel. “What’s the translation on that? Do you know?”

  “Transgression,” he said. “Sin.”

  Morgan glanced back down. “‘By taking you away from me, God has paid me back for my sin.’ Huh?” She didn’t say anything for a moment but then glanced back at me. “What sin is he talking about? What’d he do that was so awful?”

  I shook my head, as this was the first I’d heard of it. I looked to Daniel, but he just shrugged and said, “I didn’t run across anything like that in the letters. He never mentioned any big sin.”

  As we continued along the road, I thought about that. I’d been picturing Abraham Sommers as a kind and good and generous man. Obviously, if he had some big unconfessed sin, some dark and mysterious Überschreitung as he called it, then the picture was a little more complicated than I had previously imagined.

  I only hoped that his big sin had nothing to do with the agreement we were trying so desperately to find.

  THIRTY

  We rode along in silence for several minutes. Christy seemed enthralled with the archivist gloves on her hands and kept flicking her fingers around and up and down. Daniel had his nose buried in his dictionary, probably double- and triple-checking the word Überschreitung to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. Morgan was leaning forward over the journal, reading intently.

  Finally she said, “Abraham sounds kind of bitter. Though I guess more with himself than anyone else.” She read some more. “Caspar seems to be helping though. It’s Caspar’s idea to rent out rooms during the summer to attract people from Zurich, Bern, and Lucerne. And Abraham starts carving again. He writes it isn’t as good as when he was younger but it has its own style. He received a commission to carve a bench for an official from Zurich. He’s hoping it will lead to more government work.” She was silent again and then said, “And he’s started going to church with Caspar. Not to the Mennonite group—” She looked up again. “But to the chapel in the village. He says it’s good to be hearing the Word, regardless of who reads it.” Morgan’s voice changed. “So what’s his story? Abraham was Mennonite?”

  “I don’t think so.” I’d never heard anything from Mammi to indicate that.

  “Amish?”

  “Probably not with a place like Amielbach. It was his daughter who was Plain,” I said.

  “And there were no Amish left in Europe by Abraham’s time anyway,” Daniel said. “No, Abraham was affiliated with the Reformed Church, at least at the time of his death. I’m not sure if that was the case throughout his life, although online I found his birth recorded in the Swiss Reform Church registry in Frutigen.”

  Morgan turned back around. “I’ll read one more and then it’s Daniel’s turn.” She was silent for a couple of minutes and then said, “He says he sold one of his old carvings to a priest in Zurich who had seen the bench he did earlier at the university.”

  “Ah, the University of Zurich. They have a variety of archives,” Daniel said, happily adding it to our list. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could find the agreement and the carving there?”

  I agreed but knew the chances were highly unlikely.

  “I’m getting carsick,” Morgan said. “Translation and riding in a van don’t mix.” She handed the book to Daniel.

  While he read, I focused on the landscape straight ahead of us. The Alps rose up like giants, even at a distance—stone faced and capped with snow. Rugged and jagged. Breathtakingly beautiful.

  Morgan groaned after a while. “Daniel, you’re supposed to translate each entry—not read the entire thing to yourself.”

  He didn’t look up as he spoke. “There’s a lot of stuff in between entries. The price of wood. Taxes. That sort of thing.” He made various notations on our napkin list and then put it aside and began to translate some more. “This one is dated August 13, 1896. It was a good summer. They rented five of the rooms and took in some income. He says he’s had a letter from Elsbeth and he worried about her health with so many children to take care of, plus the farm and her husband, Gerard. He asked her to send a couple of her sons to stay with him and mailed the letter that morning.” Daniel’s head popped up. “I saw the actual letter last night. This is so fascinating.”

  I hoped more puzzle pieces would come together soon. “Did Elsbeth send her sons over here?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “She wrote that none of them wanted to come. She asked Abraham to come to America to visit them though.” Daniel’s head popped up again. “That fits in with his letters too.”

  His head was back down over the journal. “He also says he attended church regularly through the summer and planned to meet with the priest soon.”

  “Maybe he wanted
to talk to the priest about what he did to deserve God’s wrath,” Morgan offered.

  Christy yawned. I could only imagine how bored she was with the translation of the journal.

  Morgan poked Daniel. “Hey, schoolboy,” she taunted. “What else have you got?”

  Daniel closed the first journal. “Lots more info about his finances through 1897.” He put the first journal in a resealable baggie he pulled from his backpack and then opened the second one.

  The Alps were back in sight, and much closer. I watched them until Daniel started translating again.

  “He’s been doing more carvings. Boxes. Headboards. More benches. He mailed a couple of his boxes to Elsbeth, including a very special one.”

  “What’s the story on that?”

  Daniel shook his head. “Dunno. That’s all he wrote about it.” He read some more and then said, “Things are turning around. He almost has enough money saved for his trip to the United States. He’s thinking about the Kessler family and hopes to be able to visit Marie too. He’s packed the paperwork she needed.”

  I groaned. “What if he planned to take the agreement with him? It could have ended up in any number of odd places.”

  “Or not,” Daniel countered, jumping right back into the translation. “He’s made arrangements with Caspar to stay on the property and has drawn up papers so that when he dies Caspar can continue managing the place for Elsbeth until one of her children or grandchildren returns. Caspar is to pay the taxes and maintain the buildings and grounds. But then Abraham’s health worsens and he’s not sure if he will be able to make the trip.”

  Daniel explained that the next several entries were full of financial information about the estate, and it looked as if Abraham was trying to get everything in order. “The last entry was written on May 4, 1898. Abraham says he poured out his heart to Elsbeth in a letter and finally confessed to her his great sin, his Überschreitung.”

  “Do we have that letter?” I asked.