The Grantville Gazette - Vol 3 Part 12

Henny and I think it's time for the reverend maybe to say a few words over them?" He smiled hopefully.

"If I had ten dollars for every time I've played "Restore Thy Brother" since we landed in this century,"

Inez exclaimed, slapping the back of her hand to her forehead like a silent movie star, "I could pay for all the interior refurbis.h.i.+ng of the church by myself."

"Aren't you happy to see them restored?" Henny asked. She was prepared to continue exploring this philosophical line of thought, being noted among everyone who knew her for extraordinary thoroughness, but first an extended family appeared from the left and then the Reverend Wiley appeared from the right.

From the left, three exuberant children charged Guy, yelling "Hi, Mr. Russell! Good morning, Mr.

Russell! Thanks for coming, Mr. Russell!" From the right, the Reverend Wiley solemnly shook hands and said, "G.o.d's blessings upon you, Deacon Russell."

They all proceeded into the church, where, within the next hour, amid a congregation of Guy, Henny, and Anders, a few up-timer church ladies, miscellaneous miners and steelworkers with their families, a few catechism students whose parents had sent them early on the presumption that an extra sermon never hurt anyone, and one man whom n.o.body else recognized, the latest addition to the family of Heinrich Eichelberger and his wife Catharina geb.Kraemerin, emerged from the baptismal font with the improbable name of Guy Angus Eichelberger. Improbable, of course, if the hearer didn't know that his G.o.dfather was Guy Angus Russell.

Occasionally, Enoch Wiley made an effort to be jovial. "Well, Deacon," he asked after he had shaken hands all around, gotten the stranger, whose name was Istvan Janoszi, to sign the guest register, and seen the Eichelberger family on its way in possession of a neatly filled-out certificate, "how many G.o.dchildren does that make this year?A round dozen? The kindergarten teachers should have plenty of little Guys to go around in five years or so."

"Ah," Guy muttered, seriously embarra.s.sed. "Since January, it can't be more than four. The rest were last year. It's the school, ye know. The children come to know me, so I come to know the parents. With the refugees' lives being so overset, no aunts and uncles or old neighbors to stand as sponsor, they look to choose someone who has found a place in the town."

"Enoch," his wife interrupted. "Guy's friend is Anders van Aelsten. We have another family to regularize and restore to fellows.h.i.+p.Two children, with a baby due."

"There's a wee problem," said Guy. "His woman screams if she's made to come within four walls."

"Then," replied the reverend, "thingsare perfect. G.o.d moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform, Deacon Russell. Bring them tomorrow. The weather should be fine again. We shall dedicate the new building at the early service, even though it won't be"- he paused and looked at the partially completed walls and uncovered roof rafters- "quite finished. Once the dedication has been completed, I'll perform the wedding right here, in between the old church and the new walls." When it came to restorations to fellows.h.i.+p, Reverend Wiley's philosophy wa.s.strike while the iron is hot .

"We'd better," said Nurse DeVries to Anders, "stop at the Bureau of Vital Statistics and get you a marriage license on the way out to your camp." The Bureau of Vital Statistics was open on Sat.u.r.day in Grantville. For that matter, it was open on Sunday. The inhabitants of the town kept its staff very busy.

"Inez, do me a favor, will you? Phone the hospital and tell them that the appointment that I scheduled forthis on-call s.h.i.+ft is going to keep me out all day and not where I can be called."

"Enoch can call them," the minister's wife answered. "I'm going with you."

Anders van Aelsten was rather confused. His English was still limited, but it was good enough for him to realize that a man who had come looking for a midwife was about to be handed a marriage license.

Instead?Also? He was far from sure.

One thing, he knew. "First. I find Barbara. She is at the shopping. Miklos and Ilona are with her. Then we go."

They walked out of town on the highway, to a gravelled road. They followed the gravelled road up through the hills to a dirt road. They followed the dirt road to a path. They followed the path for quite some time. It took them forty-five minutes, but the others were catering to Guy's gimpy leg. The rest of them could have done it in a half hour.

Anders displayed his home proudly. At some point, early in its construction, it had begun with a wagon bed. "To think," he said to Nurse DeVries, "someone had just gone off and left it that way, hanging off the edge of the road. Just because it had almost splintered in half when a wheel came off and it fell. I was so lucky. n.o.body had taken it for firewood yet when I came by."

He had hauled each half of the wagon bed up to his camp by fastening sledge boards to the underside, and carefully fitted the two pieces back together, splicing them and putting piles of stones underneath to hold it some distance off the ground to keep the wood from rotting. For the first few weeks, in the summer of 1631, the whole family had slept in that, with a canvas draped over the top on two stakes when it rained. They had already had the canvas.

But time had pa.s.sed, and as Anders counted out paydays, additions had arrived. The wagon bed itself now had three walls about eight feet high. Two of the walls had been topped by wedges, so the extra-large overhanging roof slanted and the water that fell on it, when rain came, went into gutters and then into a barrel.

Barbara glowed with pride as she showed off the barrel. It was wonderful to have a man who made a roof and a barrel to collect water, instead of making a yoke with buckets so his woman could carry water from the creek. It really was. In rather broken Platt, she told her visitors so.

Anders continued the tour. As an annex to the wagon bed, which now contained three well-stuffed straw pallets, not to mention, on the little girl's mattress, a neatly folded bright yellow acrylic blanket, he had built another three-walled shelter, placed at right angles, also with a slanted roof and a barrel beneath the low edge. For that, he had bought a-well, a something-that he had seen in an open shed in someone's back yard. Neither Guy nor Henny had the slightest idea what it might be. Inez knew: the grain bin and spout from a late 1940's Case combine. In any case, the grain bin, with one of the metal sides cut off and placed across the top, was now set into a base of rough fieldstones and had become a cooking stove, with the spout serving as the flue. It was, Barbara said, quite the finest arrangement she had ever had. It was wonderful.

The four walls problem?The fourth wall of the wagon bed shelter was a loose flap, made of the canvas,now folded three layers thick. Yes, it could be warmer in winter. But cold was better than having the demons seize upon his woman and cause her to scream so. Anders was firm about that. He had fenced a kind of courtyard, on the other two sides, so the wind did not blow the flap too badly. One fence, as high as the walls of the sheds and with an overhanging roof, protected their woodpile; the other was waist-high.

Switching to High German, Anders told Guy that he had told Barbara that the courtyard was for the safety of the little girl. And that, too, was true. But it was open to the sky and one side of it was low enough that Barbara could easily jump over it if ever even three walls became more walls than she could bear. Even though it had a nice gate, still, gates could be locked. Locked gates were frightening. His woman could jump the fence if she needed to. She was not locked in.Ever.

Guy was favorably impressed.

Henny DeVries was inclined to denounce the whole thing as scandalous. Before she could open her mouth, though- "I," said Inez Wiley, "have seen worse.Far worse.InWest Virginia.In the twentieth century."

Nurse DeVries kept her mouth shut.

"We can't possibly take responsibility for delivering a child under those circ.u.mstances. It's unsanitary. It's hopeless. There's no lighting. There's no backup. What if something went wrong during the delivery?"

Henny DeVries was in full oration as they hiked back to town.

"If it comes to a pinch," Inez Wiley said, "I'll deliver the baby up there in the camp myself."

Henny stared at her, aghast.

"You don't know me, Henny. You and your husband haven't been here in Grantville all that long. I was born Inez McDow. I'm the youngest of eight-Ma was forty-three when I was born. She was born in 1900, she lived until 1987, and she was still delivering some babies up in these hollows when she was eighty. She started helping her own ma when she was just a girl. Her ma was born just a few years after the Civil War. I started helping her when I was fifteen. That was 1958 or thereabouts. I kept on helping her till she quit-or was put out by the licensing requirements. Ask any of the older people in this town how many of them were delivered by Millie McDow. Just ask them. When you get to the younger ones who were born out in the country, after 1965 or so, ask how many were delivered by Inez, really, with Millie just sitting there giving directions. You'll be surprised."

Inez stopped in the middle of the road and took a deep breath. "Youdon't know us, Henny. I don't want to hurt your feelings, but, honestly, you don't. You and your husband had lived in Grantville for ten years before the Ring of Fire, but you'd never been to our church. The first Sunday you came, you were still 'Mr. and Mrs. DeVries' to everyone else there." She paused. "I don't want you to think that we're ungrateful for what you're doing-you, or Dr. Nichols, or any of the people who just got caught up in this by accident. But it's not the same as if you were from here."

"How long does it take to 'be from here'?" Henny asked.

She was feeling a little embarra.s.sed. It's true," she thought to herself. We-Arie and I-hadn't becomepart of this town. Although there were no Dutch Reformed churches at all in this part ofWest Virginia , we didn't go to the Grantville church. We attended a different Presbyterian church inFairmont -one that was more, well, I don't even want to think, 'upscale.'A little more cosmopolitan.A little more in line with our tastes and interests. A lot less, I guess I have to admit, hillbilly."

"Well." Inez had continued talking while Henny was thinking. "Well-probably about eighty years. That is, your grandparents were here, or came here. Your parents grew up going to the schools and churches around here, and making friends. You did, too. And your children did, or are doing, the same."

"Oh."

"And you know how it all fits together. Do you have a picture of the town in your mind?A map? Not how it's laid out on the ground and how the buildings look, but how it really works?"

Henny shook her head.

Inez picked up a stick. Drawing in the dirt, she started with what, for her, was the center of the world. "

Here'sus, the old members at the Presbyterian church." She drew a circle. "And here are all the other old-timers, no matter what-Church of Christ, Methodist, Baptist, and such." These circles all overlapped the first one. "Then there are the Catholics." This circle overlapped the others a little bit, but most of it was outside the remainder of Inez's drawing, which was starting to look like the production of a child who had gone wild with Etch-a-Sketch. She stared at it and muttered, "What I wouldn't give for a nice, new, box of sixty-four different colors of crayons."

She drew a couple more small circles, out on the edge, unconnected. "We've always had some people who came and went, who weren't part of it. Don't think that I'm just talking about Tom Simpson's parents. There's that guy Mike Stearns brought in about computers.The people who were working on the new company that was going to start up. Thosekind of people come and they go. At least, before the Ring of Fire, they used to go. Now they're stuck here. And even though I try to think charitable thoughts about them-they look at us the way the n.o.blemen around here look at their peasants.Ignorant, unwashed, chickens to be plucked."

Inez looked down at her shoes. "But we need those guys. We need every single person in this town. No matter how much some of them despise the rest of us. Even if they don't think we're real people.Even if we have to put up with being humiliated to get what they can do. We've hired the construction firm guy to do the remodeling on the church.Because he can do it. He's put a business together. He has the know-how and he has the people."

"Humiliated?"

"I'm not saying that you would say these things, Henny.Or a lot of the other outsiders. But nothing happens in a small town that doesn't get back to other people. After Silas, and Guy here, and the other deacons went to Bob Kelly's office and signed the contract for the remodeling deal-after they left, he griped that he'd been reduced to taking a job from a 'committee of fundamentalist rednecks.' Shelby Carpenter was working there. She heard him, and don't think that she didn't enjoy repeating it.Big joke on the blue-noses, and all that. He's not," Inez continued, "nice." This was possibly the harshest criticism she could formulate.

Then, suddenly, she smiled. Standing in the spring afternoon's sun, she looked ten years younger.

"Deacons!" she exclaimed. "I just knew that I'd forgotten something! Guy, I know that you had to miss the meeting yesterday afternoon and you were already gone when Enoch tried to call you today. Wehave the most marvelous news!"

"It did occur to me," Guy said, "that the minister seemed a wee bit perky this morning. Did the church inherit a fortune?"

"Gordon Partow came back fromJena with the man fromGeneva ." Inez looked at Henny. "Gordon is Andy and Grace's boy. You did know that Gordon had gone toJena with Mallory Parker to teach English, didn't you?"

Henny shook her head.

"Well, Gordon'salways been a good boy. But Andy's so ambitious and it's practically driven him mad that Gordon was sort of aimless, but he'll be fine now that he's aimed. During this colloquy thing the Lutherans had, Gordon met this Mr. Cavriani and told him how worried he was about our church not having anyone to take Enoch's place when-well, when the time comes, as G.o.d has ordained that it will come to all of us in due season. Mr. Cavriani said that Gordon should go toGeneva . Just think: the city where John Calvin himself lived and taught!To study. To be prepared, ordained, and sent back. He's going. Mr. Cavriani says he can work part time in his company's office to pay his way. He's sending him with a letter of introduction to his partner. If Andy decides that Gordon's just been sort of, well, incubating a divine calling without realizing what it was, they should get along fine from now on."

Inez drew a deep breath. "They came to the joint meeting of the elders and deacons to tell us about it.

We were just sitting there with our mouths open. Then Charlie-Deacon Vandine-you do know him?"

Henny agreed that although she did not know Gordon Partow, she had met Deacon Vandine several times.

"Belva was there, sitting in the back of the room, waiting for Charlie so she didn't have to walk home by herself after work. Charlie looked at her. She just gave a sort of half-smile and nodded. And Charlie said, 'We'll go, too. I'm fifty, but that's younger than Enoch here. The church is growing fast. I'll just stay long enough to get what I absolutely need.A minimum. Then we'll come back and help Enoch and Inez.

That way, Gordon can stay long enough to get the whole kit and kaboodle."

Inez had turned her attention back to the overlapping circles. "Now, here you've got all the college kids who were at Rita Stearns' wedding." She drew another circle on the outside. "They're working hard, but they aren't really mixing, mostly. If you look at them, the only one who's matched himself up with a local girl is the Totman boy-he's engaged to PrisBerry ." She drew a narrow loop, connecting this outlying circle with the main set. "Some might say that Laforrest up at the high school married a local girl, too, but he married Kristen Elias, and Dr. Elias isn't really quite from here." Next to the loop, she drew a small circle, overlapping both the main one and the college students. "Dr. Elias came from out of town, but he practices with Dr. Sims, who is from here. Kristen and her sister grew up here. You might say that they're on their way to being from here." She thought. "And the Curry girl married Laban Trumble." She drew another narrow loop. "But he died." She drew an "X" across that loop. "Aside from that, they're pretty much marrying one another. I talked to Mr. Cavriani about it. He says that it's like the Italian families fromLucca inGeneva . They've been there for seventy-five years, but they're pretty much still marrying each other."

Inez looked hopefully at Henny. "Do you see, sort of?"

Henny nodded. To herself, she was thinking the she'd only seen Inezas a frumpy woman who took minutes at church meetings and plunked out hymns on a tinny piano, Sunday after Sunday. She hadn'trealized, not at all, that if Inez had been born to an affluent family in a mid-sized city in Michigan, instead of to a dirt-poor family in a dying town in Appalachia, she could have, maybe would have, ended up as a chief intelligence a.n.a.lyst at the CIA. Not the kind who listened to chatter from satellites.The kind who put it all together and briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Anders van Aelsten and Barbola Harczy, the "right" spellings having been determined by the Bureau of Vital Statistics, were married the following morning- as Andrew Alston and Barbara Hershey, since when the clerk asked, "Do you want those names in German or American?" as flatly as pre-RoF she would have asked, "Do you want fries with that?" Anders had expressed a preference for American. The deacons had hauled the piano out the front door of the old church building and onto the stoop, so there was music for the ceremony. Inez chose, "Guide Me, O Thou GreatJehovah " to start the ceremony and "O, That the Lord Would Guide My Ways" to end it. She didn't want the guidance for them: she wanted it for herself. In between, she played, "Restore Thy Brother" once more.

Since the first agonized cry from a subscriber-"Ouy you not write ouat I ouear? You write ouat ozzer brides ouear?"-Beryl Lawler had developed a completely standardized form for the reporting of weddings in the society column of theGrantville Times . She had a flying squad of young women and high school girls in each congregation who took notes. When Susan Hardesty turned these in to the newspaper office, Beryl rested her forehead on her palms and moaned.

The groom wore olive green cargo pants and a red-and-brown plaid s.h.i.+rt. The bride wore a pair of orange maternity slacks topped by a long, full, boat-necked, black-and-white striped, tee-s.h.i.+rt with three-quarter-length sleeves. They exchanged halves of a coin. Official witnesses were Deacon Guy Russell and Mrs. Henny DeVries. The couple was also attended by their children, Miklos and Ilona. The groom, formerly with the count of Mansfeld's military unit, is employed at the mine. The bride is at home.

After church was over, Inez sat with Barbara and Henny on a bench outside the Bureau of Vital Statistics while the minister and Anders filed the record. She found out, in a conversation mediated by Henny and by Miklos, who was otherwise chasing his little sister around the parking lot, that Barbara was really a rather sociable woman. She found the isolated camp, although it was far preferable to being seized by her demons, rather lonesome-and a little frightening when she was there alone all day with the little girl. She had preferred her years of living in the train of a mercenary army, where there were other women to talk to, and other children about. Weatherpermitting, she walked into town with the little girl at least one day a week in order to see friends she had made there. If "The Zoning" would permit it, she would much ratherhave a place to live in the town. But it wouldn't, so she was prepared to make the best of things.

She hadalso, it turned out, picked up a small amount of English."Yard sale," at least."Bargain."And, "cute." She delivered herself of "cute" quite emphatically as she admired her daughter, all dressed up for the wedding in a little pair of chartreuse capri pants and a chartreuse-and-white checked gingham top with a machine-appliqued daisy on the front, her hair held out of her face by two plastic barrettes.

Barbara called Ilona over and demonstrated what she hoped to find at a "yard sale" most of all.Her current heart's desire. She pulled Ilona's hair back."Pony tail maker."

Inez made a deal. She had pony tail makers at home. All but one of her granddaughters had been left up-time, but the pony tail makers that accompanied their pa.s.sage through life, strewn around theirgrandparents' house, she had just gathered up two years before, tossed in a drawer, and forgotten. If Barbara would come to her for a prenatal check-up each week from now on, when she was in town, a pony-tail maker would be her reward.

"You can do it, or someone else can do it," Inez said firmly to Henny, "in our garage.With the door up.

Stop fussing about privacy. Anyone who stares in at a woman having a prenatal just has a dirty mind. I'll clean the garage."

Seventeen teenagers cleaned the Wileys' garage Monday afternoon. They scrubbed it with lye soap and sand; then hosed it down. It hadn't been so clean since the day it was built. It had a dirt floor, but that couldn't be helped. It was packed down hard. They swept it and threw a layer of sand on the top.

Nonetheless, Inez was glad that none of the fancy nurses came to do the prenatal the next day. Darla Bowers, the retired practical nurse who "helped out" in Dr. Adams's office, was "from here." She understood about garages with dirt floors and cabins in the hills. She had been born in one ofthose herself, a few years before Inez. She and Inez had gone to the same one-room country school together: Darla had been the "big girl" a.s.signed to see that the first-grader Inez managed to walk safely back and forth. They were, in fact, cousins. Moreover, she had been born Darla Wild, and was a sister-in-law of Edith Wild who was going off toPrague to take care of Wallenstein.

Of course, it wasn't reasonable to expect people like Henny DeVries who weren't "from here" to know any of that-any more than they knew the other connections that kept Grantville's people in touch.

Darla suspected that Barbara was closer to delivery than Anders had thought. The first week, though, she agreed that she could go back to the camp.

"No, I definitely do not think that it would be a good idea for you to try to do a psychiatric evaluation."

Inez was staring at Henny with horror. "Yes, I know that she gets seized by demons and starts screaming if she's closed in. But she can live with that. Her family can live with that. What good would it do if you stirred them up?"

Henny sputtered.

"She doesn't speak much of any language that you speak. You don't speak any language that maybe she can talk just fine. Do you know Bohemian? No. Do you know Hungarian? No. Anders isn't even sure that what she spoke as a childwas Hungarian. I remember when our boys were over in that Kosovo place. It seemed like every time we listened to the news, there was some other language inEastern Europe .Serbian?Albanian?Chinese? Who knows what she speaks?" Inez knew Grantville very well.

Past the borders of her native county, much less her native country, her grasp of geography became considerably shakier.

"We ought to try to do something," Henny protested. "At least fix her up to the point that her family can live in a decent, heated, house. What are they going to do with that poor baby, next winter?"

"Whatever they did with Miklos and Ilona," Inez responded pragmatically. "What do you want to do?

Parade her in front of everyone who shows up in town speaking some language that we don't know, asking if they recognize the words that she says? If someone does, keep him here for a three-wayconversation about psychology? You don't have any medicine to give her. Let sleeping dogs lie."

Inez suspected, however, that Henny wasn't inclined to let those napping pooches alone. She talked to Darla. Darla talked to somebody else whom Edith had met while nursing Wallenstein after his surgery.

That somebody asked around among various political and business agents, the "men in Grantville" who represented potential allies and enemies, trading partners and rivals, and found one who was fluent in Hungarian. He agreed to talk to Barbola Harczy, later Barbara Hartzi, and now Barbara Hershey, to find out whether Magyar was, in fact, her native tongue.

"Oh," Inez said happily. "I've met him. He's come to church a couple of times."

After the second check-up, Darla didn't want Barbara to go back. If only she would stay in the Wileys'

garage until after she had the baby, Darla begged, then if the baby should need a.s.sistance, they could take the little one right to the hospital. They couldn't do that if she was up at the camp. They promised to leave the garage door open. They called Anders at work at the mine. They called Guy Russell at the school. They even called Henny DeVries at the hospital. Barbara insisted on going back home. School was out. Miklos would be there. He could run to call Inez if anything happened before the next week.

"At least," Inez said, "stay here long enough to talk to the man who speaks Hungarian. You and Ilona can walk back up with Anders when he gets off."

"Hungarian?Why?"

"Anders said that you were Hungarian, he thought. Wouldn't you want a chance to use your own language again?"

"Not send me back?" Barbara started to panic.