Grantville Gazette-Volume XIV Read online

  As he chanted under his breath, he slowly grew aware that Thomas was doing something very similar, although louder and with German words and a Christian sounding melody. Yossie still had the Christian Book that had been pressed into his hands, and it suddenly struck him that it might do Thomas some good.

  "Thomas, Frau Paulette gave me this before we left Grantville," he said, pulling the book out of his bag.

  "A Bible, in English?" Thomas said, handing Yossie the reins and taking the book. "She is your landlord? Didn't you say she was Catholic?"

  "Yes." Yossie hadn't even dared open the book, but now, as Thomas leafed through it, he saw that it was printed in small type on incredibly fine paper.

  Thomas had complained on occasion about his eyesight, and as he held the book, he held it close, making it clear that he was nearsighted.

  "Thomas, there is a red ribbon, see what it marks."

  "The letters are very small," Thomas said. "It is in Italian letters, too." He then began to read, in very halting English. "The Lord ruleth me. I shall want nothing. He hath set me in a place of pasture. He hath brought me up, on the water of refreshment . . ."

  After a few lines, just as Yossie began to recognize the psalm, despite the strange language, Thomas stopped. "I know this," he said, and then recited the same psalm in German.

  Thomas began to work through the psalm line by line, reciting the German after laboring through each line in English. All the while, Yossie listened in wonder. He too knew the psalm. It was not part of the daily liturgy, not one that he had memorized by regular recitation, but he knew it. He would never have imagined that it would be the one passage an American Catholic would mark or that a German Protestant would know by heart.

  They were leaving the high plains, descending into a gentle south-trending valley as they studied the Book of Psalms. The fields of the plains behind them were replaced by orchards, vineyards and pastures as the land grew steeper.

  Their study was abruptly interrupted by the clatter of hooves and distant yells. The road curved around a hillside that blocked their view of whatever was happening.

  They had hardly packed away the Bible when a wagon came around the bend toward them. It was a heavy freight wagon pulled by four lunging horses. There were men running beside the wagon and more men riding it, armed with pikes and guns.

  Yossie froze. He had the reins, but there was no escape. The cart was trapped on the narrow road between a steep bank and a hedge. There was no place to pull off so the wagon could pass. The old horse stopped of its own accord as the heavy wagon came closer.

  "What do we do?" Yossie asked. He still had one hand in the bag where he'd just put the Bible. His fingers brushed the cold steel of Herr Adducci's pistol.

  "I don't know," Thomas said.

  The approaching team slowed and a man jumped off to run forward. "Off the road!" he yelled, a huge pistol in his hand.

  Four horsemen came around the shoulder of the hill at a gallop, obviously chasing the heavy wagon. Yossie's attention was on the little pistol in his hand and on and the gunman reaching for their horse's bridle.

  "I said, out of the way," the man yelled, hauling the horse roughly to the downhill side of the road and giving it a hard slap.

  The horse started, and the cart came perilously close to tumbling into the ancient hedgerow below the road. If they'd had a young spirited horse, things might have gone badly, but theirs was an old nag, sure footed, patient, and slow to respond.

  Ahead, most of the other men had jumped off the wagon to form a skirmish line facing the approaching horsemen. The air was split by the sound of gunfire, both long guns and pistols.

  "Off the road, you swine," the gunman said, raising his pistol. Behind him, a pikeman came their way.

  There was a roar, two gunshots in quick succession. The man with the pistol had fired, a loud booming shot, and Yossie felt a great jerk in his arm. The other shot had been the sharp high crack of an American gun, and it took Yossie a moment to realize that he'd fired the pistol in his hand. Neither shot had struck a thing. The jerk had been nothing more than the recoil.

  The pikeman was still coming, so Yossie held the pistol with both hands, as Herr Adducci had taught him, and fired a second time.

  He missed the pikeman, but one of the freight wagon's lead horses reared up and screamed, lashing out at the pikeman from behind before it slowly collapsed to the ground.

  Their old horse was shuffling and prancing nervously. For a few seconds, Yossie's attention was fully taken with controlling the horse. The way forward was blocked by the wagon, and their horse was hemmed in on the sides by the hedge and the fallen horse.

  By the time the horse had calmed. Thomas was standing by the cart with a pike in hand, holding back the gunman while the downed pikeman sat groaning on the ground between them.

  "Bavarian scum," Thomas said, as Yossie took the gunman's big wheel-lock pistol.

  As he looked around, Yossie saw that things had changed. Half of the men who'd been on the cart were gone, and the others, aside from the two nearest, were standing dejectedly under the guard of two of the cavalrymen.

  The other two cavalrymen had spurred their horses up the bank. One paused to reload his pistols while the other went farther up to survey the area. Yossie watched warily as the horseman above him reloaded. The man, in turn, looked down at Yossie and Thomas with a curious expression.

  "You," the man said, after both of his pistols were safely back in his saddle holsters. "You Jew, what you doing here?"

  "I am with Thomas, sir. We are taking his daughter to be buried."

  "And how comes a Jew to have a Grantville pistol?" the man spoke with a familiar foreign accent.

  "We are from Grantville," Yossie said. He was a bit surprised to be recognized as a Jew, but only because none of the local Germans had done so for a month. His clothing certainly told the story to anyone who could read the signs.

  "Prove it," the man said. "Prove you're not a lying Jew."

  "Sir, what can I tell you?" Yossie asked. The man's insulting language was no real surprise. The question, though, was legitimate, and along with the accent and bad grammar, it hinted at good news "I am Joseph Hanauer," he answered. "I live in Deborah now. I work with Thomas at the forge of the Murphy's Run Mine. I am a member of the UMWA. That is the United Mine Workers of America."

  The man stared hard at Yossie for several long seconds. "I believe you," he finally said, looking relieved.

  "Sir," Yossie began, after carefully making the little pistol safe in the way Herr Adducci had taught. "Am I right that you are with Captain Mackay's regiment?"

  The cavalrymen were indeed from that regiment. The freight wagon had been commandeered by an Imperial foraging party, half of which had fled after Yossie accidentally shot their right front horse. The Scots were fairly certain that they'd injured one of the men who'd fled. Aside from that and the dead horse, the skirmish had been remarkably bloodless.

  In short order, they set their five captives to cutting the dead horse from its harness and then unhitching the rest of the team from the wagon. The road was narrow enough that the only way to turn the wagon was by manpower with the team unhitched.

  Yossie and Thomas left the Scots and their prisoners behind at the town of Teichel. With only a three-horse team, the heavy wagon could only limp along, and the prisoners were on foot. The Scots insisted that Yossie and Thomas take the captured weapons with them, least the prisoners revolt and rearm themselves. Before they left, they told the townsmen about the dead horse. The town had been stripped, and the horse meat was likely to be enough to save lives.

  "Why did he call you a Jew?" Thomas asked, some time after they'd left Teichel.

  "Because I am a Jew." Yossie still had difficulty thinking about the battle. It had not been a big battle, nonetheless, men had tried to kill each other, and Yossie had been among them.

  Thomas looked at him for a long moment. "A Jew." He paused. "Why did you pretend to be a . . . a Chr
istian?"

  "I never did that. I admit that I never said what I was."

  "Do the Americans know?" Thomas asked.

  "You know they avoid asking about religion," Yossie said. "Remember the Miners Guild rules?" Yossie tried to remember the words Ron Koch had used on Monday when he told them they'd be working together with Catholics who'd surrendered at the battle of Badenburg. Ron had even mentioned Jews as an example, saying that they were as welcome as anyone else.

  "You never told me," Thomas said. "I knew it was something different. You don't look German, but I've seen Frenchmen who had your looks. I thought you might be a French Calvinist or something, but I never—" He shook his head. "How can you not be Christian? You seem like a good person, not one of the Pharisees who killed our Lord."

  Yossie sighed. "Thomas, this is not the place. We should not dishonor the spirit of your daughter by arguing over her body. We should be saying—" He broke off, fairly certain that tehilim, the word he had been about to say, was not German. "We should be saying songs from the Bible. We do not want to tempt the evil spirits. It is bad enough that we fought a battle while she was not yet buried and that we now carry a load of weapons with her body."

  20th of Tamuz, 5391 ( July 20, 1631 )

  "Stop, stop. You're wasting the milk! Let me finish her."

  Johnny Adducci backed away from the cow, allowing Gitele to take over.

  "Johnny," Basiya called. "Help me with the goats."

  Yossie grinned. The eight-year-old's father was Randolph Adducci's son. Johnny lived two blocks from his grandparents, and in the past two weeks, he'd made it his business to help Gitele and Basiya with the morning milking.

  The pasture now held four cows with their calves. Yitzach and Moische had completed their second trip west to the Neustadt cattle market two days before, bringing back two more cows with calves. So far, only one of the four cows needed milking. The other calves were not yet weaned.

  Yossie watched Gitele and wondered how he would ever find a match for himself. He could fantasize about Gitele, but he was an orphan with no particular stature, while she was the daughter of an educated merchant, a butcher, qualified to perform kosher slaughter and therefore almost a rabbi. Yossie turned away when he realized that he was staring, and found his sister watching him.

  "What are you grinning at?" he asked.

  "My brother," Basiya said. "After living in Grantville for over a month . . ."

  "After living here a month what?"

  "You go to the mine, and work with a woman there who dresses and works like a man. You go into town, and you see women wearing clothing that would make a prostitute blush. All that, and still you look."

  "He looks at what?" Gitele asked, still milking the cow.

  "He looks at you," Basiya answered, giving her brother a challenging look.

  "What?" Gitele pulled the milk pail out from under the cow. "I think it is time to put you to work, Yossie. Here, pour out Johnny's share and then carry this back to the house."

  "Are we paying Johnny now?" Yossie asked, as they walked Johnny to his house.

  "He is helping," Basiya said. "Besides, there are younger children in that family, and the milk will be good for them.

  "He is learning quickly," Gitele said. "Soon, his help will really matter, when the other cows wean their calves."

  "I thought you were saying that he is learning quickly, and soon we will have to watch what we say around him," Yossie said.

  "That too," Gitele said with a chuckle.

  "How many cattle can the pasture feed?" Yossie asked.

  "In the summer? By the time the calves are grown, we'll have enough. The next trip my father makes, I guess he will sell all the cattle he brings. Come winter, I think my father will sell or slaughter half of them."

  "Good," Yossie said. "I don't think I could handle more cattle."

  "Yossele, you couldn't handle just one cow. Stick to being a smith at the mine."

  "What? You don't want my help?"

  Gitele chuckled, but said nothing during the rest of the walk home.

  On any other day of the week, Yossie would have said his morning prayers before breakfast, but this was Sunday. The Adduccis always went to church on Sunday mornings, and then they went to Sunday dinner with one of their many relatives. For most of the day, that meant that Yossie and his companions could be Jewish without fear of discovery.

  The men celebrated their day of freedom by saying their morning prayers in the large room the Adduccis called the family room. Had they encountered the men at prayer, the Adduccis would have been very puzzled or even alarmed. The men wore their large prayer shawls up over their heads, but the shawls didn't hide the black cubes of the tefillin strapped to their foreheads. The black leather straps of their arm tefillin were also visible, wrapped around and around their right arms from biceps to fingers.

  "Why are we hurrying?" Yitzach said as he was about to start Psalm 30. "Let's take the time to study a bit of Torah."

  In a minute, Yakov had his large Chumash out on the bar in the family room, along with several books of commentary. "We have a double parsha to study this week, Matos-Masei," the rabbi said, turning pages looking for the end of the book of Numbers. "Ah, here."

  The Hebrew text at the top of the page was familiar, Yossie had studied the weekly Torah portions since he was a boy. "The laws of vows," he grumbled.

  "And the war against the Midianites," Yitzach said. "It gets more exciting. By the end of Masei, we'll be studying the laws of criminal evidence and a woman's right to inherit. You have a good voice, and you could chant well, Yosef, with enough practice. We'll help."

  Yossie set to work chanting the text from the last two portions of the book of Numbers, concentrating on the complex melody. He couldn't have done it very well from a hand-written Torah scroll, but the the printed text in the Chumash was punctuated with marks that indicated the vowels and melody. Even with the punctuation, Yossie needed help now and then.

  Occasionally, Yakov stopped the chant to note an interesting interpretation from one or another commentary. Sometimes, he would refer to one of the marginal notes that filled more than half of each page in the Chumash, while at other times, he referred to one of his books of commentary.

  "Abravanel has a good comment on this section," Yakov said, when Yossie reached the start of Parshas Masai. The final section of the Book of Numbers begins with a list of all the camps of the Israelites during their forty years in the wilderness.

  "Abravanel said that on Israel's road to the redemption, the Lord, praise his name, will take us back to all of the places listed here. I don't know if he means that literally."

  "If it's figurative, is the road from Hanau part of the road to the final redemption?" Yossie asked.

  "Perhaps," Yakov said. "May the Messiah come soon and in our time."

  Some time later, while they were putting things away after their prayers, Yossie paused. "Rav Yakov, that commentary you have, Is the author related to the woman the Americans call Becky?"

  "Probably," Yakov said. "Abravanel, Abrabanel, Abarbanel, the name changes from place to place, but it is one family. Rivka Abrabanel has the chutzspah that you'd expect from a member of that family. Did you know that the Abravanel who wrote that Torah commentary was the banker to the king of Portugal? Even so, these stories of Rivka's betrothal . . ." He fell silent.

  "To Michael Stearns, the head of the Emergency Committee?" Yossie asked.

  "Yes," Yakov said. "But to speak of it would be lashon ha-ra. Even if it is true, it is speaking with an evil tongue to repeat such stories needlessly. Let's get back to work."

  They had only eaten lightly before their morning prayers, so when they finally finished, their midday meal was as much a breakfast as it was a lunch. They were just finishing the long grace after meals when there was an unexpected ring of the doorbell.

  Moische went to see who it was, and came back into the family room leading Bernadette Adducci and one of the Scots cavalrym
en.

  "Moses, Isaac Kissinger, Joseph Hanauer," she began, trying to speak in German. "This is John Leslie. Please, sit on the table. John, help."

  "At the table, please," he said, correcting her. Once they were all seated, John went on, in the broken but clear German Yossie had come to associate with the Scots. "Bernadette Adducci is officer in the Grantville Police. That be what the Americans call the town guard. She tells me you three, you all traveled outside the Ring of Fire. We must know what is out there. Can you help?"