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Joseph Hanauer, Part Three: All Creatures Stand in Judgment

Written by Douglas W. Jones

10th of Tamuz, 5391 ( July 10, 1631 )

The trip by cart from Grantville to a wooded hillside above Magdala had only taken a day. Seen from the hillside, the village looked large. Yossie had expected Magdala to be a tiny place, but if it had been walled, he would have called it a small town without hesitation.

After a month's rest, the old horse had recovered from the trip east from Hanau. They had followed the good road north up the broad Saale valley almost to Jena. From there, they had turned west to climb up a side valley to the broad plains around Magdala. Where the slopes of the valley had been dominated by vineyards and orchards, the plains around Magdala were cropland, with hedgerows dividing fields. Aside from the trees along the stream north of Magdala, the only trees were on the low forested hills rising above the croplands.

Yossie had hoped that they would spend Wednesday night in Magdala, but Thomas had insisted that they stay in the woods to the east. Yossie had eaten cold meals and slept under the same cart often enough on the road from Hanau, but the night had been uncomfortable. After a month living with the Adduccis, he'd grown a bit spoiled.

"Tell me again," Yossie asked, as he and Thomas ate a breakfast of cold sausage and bread. "Why couldn't we spend the night in Magdala? Yesterday, that man in Bucha said that half the Imperials in Weimar had gone north to chase the Swedes."

"Right," Thomas replied. "But I don't believe him. He also said things were so bad that honest townsmen would rob a stranger for the shirt on his back. Foragers have stripped the land, and I'll bet that we're not far behind the stragglers who burned that village we passed. Best we not tempt anyone."

As they pulled out of the woods Thursday morning, Yossie remembered how the trip had started. "Those Papist scum murdered my Maria," Thomas had said, glaring at the two Bavarians who'd been assigned to the Murphy's Run forge.

"Where is she buried?" Yossie had asked, trying to be sympathetic.

"Buried!" Thomas had barked. "Do wolves bury their prey? I saw those beasts throw my poor Maria into a ditch." His voice had faded to a whisper. "I could do nothing, I tell you."

When Thomas had asked Yossie to help bury his daughter, Yossie hadn't said yes immediately. As they drove across the flat cropland toward Magdala, Yossie thought over the advice he'd received from his companions.

A passage from the Talmud had come to mind after Thomas had asked for Yossie's help. It was reprinted in the prayer-book at the start of the morning prayers.

"Of these things a man may eat the fruit in this world while the principal remains in the world to come: Honoring father and mother, acts of kindness, timely attendance at morning and evening prayers in the house of study, providing for guests, visiting the sick, providing for a bride, escorting the dead, deep prayer, and bringing peace between a man and his fellow, but the study of Torah is equivalent to all."

Escorting the dead to the grave, of course, was the subject that dominated Yossie's thoughts. He knew that it would also be an act of kindness to help Thomas, and that it could help make peace between Thomas and the two Bavarians.

When he'd asked his sister Basiya's advice, she'd shocked him. "Thomas' daughter was killed for kiddush ha-Shem," she'd said, flatly. The term referred to martyrs who'd died for the sanctification of God's holy name.

"But she was Lutheran," Yossie had objected.

"If soldiers had come to our home because we lived in the Jewish quarter, and if they'd murdered me, you'd say I died for kiddush Ha-Shem. Soldiers did come to his house because he lived in a Lutheran town and they did kill his daughter. How is it different?"

"So you want me to go?"

"No," she'd replied. "I'm afraid you'll be hurt. But I think I'd find it hard to say no if I was a man. Please be careful."

Yakov's advice had been no surprise. "These things have no fixed measure," the rabbi had quoted, and then changed the subject. That Talmud quotation was from the same section of the prayer-book that Yossie had thought of when Thomas first asked his help. The meaning was clear enough. Helping Thomas would be good, but Yossie was under no obligation.

When Randolph Adducci heard what Yossie was planning, he'd gone over to the locked cabinet where he kept his guns and returned with an American pistol, a revolver, he'd called it. Randolph had spent that evening and the next teaching Yossie to shoot the pistol and to care for the mechanism.

Randolph's wife Paulette had said nothing, but just before they left, she'd pressed a book into his hands. It was black, with a red ribbon bookmark and a gold cross on the cover. Yossie had felt uncomfortable taking such an obviously Christian book, but he couldn't embarrass her by refusing it.

****

As they drove between the hedgerows toward Magdala, the village seemed to grow in size. The inward-facing houses around the village perimeter were packed so closely that they almost formed a wall. Many houses had outbuildings behind them, and low walls joined those, forming an outer defense perimeter.

"Who are you and what do you want?" a militiaman demanded as they followed the road between two houses.

"Until a month ago, I lived here," Thomas replied, looking closely at the man. "Heinrich, don't you remember me?"

The militiaman peered. "Thomas? The new smith? I thought they killed you." He paused, looking wary. "There's nothing left here for you. After the fire, there were thieves. They sifted the ashes for anything of value." He glanced at Yossie. "Who's your friend?"

Yossie's attention was on the village as much as it was on the conversation. The houses on the near side of Magdala were mostly intact, but on the far side of the village square, all he could see was ruin.

"Joseph Hanauer," Thomas said, in answer to the guard's question. "He's come with me from beyond Rudolstadt to help. I don't want anything from Magdala but to see that my daughter is buried properly."

"We buried most of the dead. Some were burned, though, and all we could do is guess who they were. Where did your daughter die?"

"Maria was washing clothes in the stream when they came," Thomas said, pointing northwest, toward Weimar. "I saw, well, my wife saw it all. Maria ran south, but the Imperials got between her and the village."

Yossie could sense the tension in Thomas' voice. "As God is in heaven, I tried . . . They would have killed us," he said, sputtering to a stop.

"Where did she die?" the guard asked, almost gently.

"To the west, in the low pasture."

"Then she may still be there," the guard said. "The Imperials took the cattle, so nobody goes there anymore. Go, and God be with you."

They passed the ruin of the smithy on their way out of Magdala. The fire had been so intense that the chimney over the forge had fallen. "That's where I was when they came," Thomas said, and then fell silent.

They followed a grassy lane to the west. "Maria tried to run, but the open fields offered no shelter." Thomas said. "My wife saw them first, we ran to try to help, and then . . ." He fell silent for a moment. "See the willows ahead? She tried to take cover there."

The willows grew along a shallow ditch through idle pasture land beyond the village fields. Even if Thomas had not been there, the body would not have been hard to find. The buzz of flies attracted Yossie's attention to one clump of willows, and the smell of decay hung in the air as they approached the ditch.

"Maria," Thomas whispered, and then stopped, frozen, staring.

Her body was half submerged in the ditch. She was lying face down, and her clothing covered everything that was above the water. That didn't stop the flies.

"I've never," Thomas started to say, and then fell silent again.

Yossie had no experience in such matters, but Rabbi Yakov had served for years in Hanau's Jewish burial society. "We should wash her body," he said. "Let's lift her onto the back of the cart first."

They used a bucket to pour clean water over the body, washing away many of the maggots, and then set to work dressing it in a robe Thomas had bought at Grantville's Value Market. That was the hardest part of the job, at least from a physical perspective. The body was on the verge of falling apart. If it hadn't been for the clothing, the corpse might well have come apart when they lifted it from the water. They ended up simply rolling the body onto the robe and then wrapping it up, without even trying to fit the arms into the sleeves.

By rights, Yossie knew that women ought to prepare a woman for the grave. By rights, she ought not have been left to decay, of course, and by rights the burial should have been immediate, not weeks later. Logic told him that it was better for men to do the job than nobody, but still, the work made him very uncomfortable.

"We ought to say something," Thomas said, after they washed their hands in clean water taken from upstream.

Yossie hesitated. The only prayer that came to mind was in Hebrew, a prayer for martyred congregations from the Sabbath liturgy. There was something appropriate from the funeral liturgy, but he hadn't attended enough funerals to memorize it.

"Merciful Father who sits in heaven," he began his halting translation. "Remember with mercy the saintly and the righteous and the innocent and the holy woman who died as a martyr for your holy name." Yossie paused, trying to think through the next sentence. "With love and friendship she lived and died. Faster than eagles and stronger than lions she did the Lord's will.

"Remember her, Lord, among the righteous of this world. Avenge the blood of Your servant." He fell silent at that point. The next part of the prayer was too complex to translate without pen and paper.

As Yossie came to a stop, Thomas spoke. "In Jesus name, Amen. Thank you, Joseph. Let's go."

Yossie was shocked to hear what he considered an idolatrous ending added to a Jewish prayer. Turning back toward Magdala to hide his reaction, he faced a new shock. Where the sky to the east had been clear, there was a distant pillar of smoke rising over the hedgerows.

As they rode up out of the marshy pasture into the cropland, they could see that the smoke came from beyond Magdala somewhere to the southeast. The smoke clearly rose before the more distant hills, though, so it was not more than a few miles beyond the village.

The burnt-out block where the smithy had been faced them. As they drove toward the ruins, a boy stepped out.

"Thomas the Smith?" the boy asked, and then went on without waiting for an answer. "I remember you. My father said to tell you—to tell you that there are raiders in Gottern, to tell you that they will be here next. Get away. Go south on the Blankenhain road."

"And I remember you, Martin," Thomas said. "How do we get to Rudolstadt if we go that way?"

"I don't know," the boy said. "But the raiders are coming up from the east, and we have to empty the village fast to avoid trouble. You should go quickly."

Once they made their way out of Magdala, the road south was no worse than the road up from the Saale valley to the east. There were small villages every mile or two along the road. Some were empty ruins, and none were free of signs of war.

Their view of the column of smoke to the east was obstructed only by hedgerows as they rode through the fields. At times, the hedges along the road were high enough to block the view, but there were few trees to block the distant view when their perch on the cart allowed them to see over the hedges.

After half an hour, the road began to veer west, with low wooded hills to the south. In another half hour, they reached the large village of Blankenhain. The place was as battered as Magdala, and again, they were met by a member of the local militia.

The man approached warily, brandishing a pike.

"Which road to Rudolstadt," Thomas called out, before the man came close enough to challenge them.

"That way," the man said, pointing south. He stopped and sniffed distastefully. "What's in your wagon?"

"My daughter," Thomas said, "dead a month. We're taking her to her grave. Is the way south safe?"

The man backed away a pace. "No roads are safe, but we've heard no bad news in the last few days."

"We just fled raiders coming at Magdala from the east," Thomas said. "They must have been close behind us on the road up from the Saale."

"They're probably going to Weimar," the man said. "You'd best be going on south."

The road onward from Blankenhain was better than the road from Magdala, but not as good as the road they'd followed north up the Saale valley. They were still in a land of wide fields and hedgerows, with few trees. The forested hills to the east and west were higher than the hills around Magdala, but not enough to create a well defined valley.

As they drove on, Yossie's attention slowly turned from the raiders somewhere behind to the angel of death hovering over the cart. It was not right to ignore the body of Thomas' daughter Maria. The right thing to do when watching over the dead is to chant psalms. Yossie's prayer-book held many psalms, and he knew a good number of those by heart. They were all in Hebrew, though, and he didn't dare let Thomas see text in that language or hear him chant them in their traditional form.

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 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 Christian?"

"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 cavalrymen.

"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?"

When they'd first come to Grantville from the west, Claudette Green had asked very similar questions in the Red Cross office. Now, the questions were about the recent trip Yitzach and Moische had taken west to the cattle market in Neustadt, and Yossie's trip north the week before.

For the next half hour, Bernadette took careful notes while the three of them described their trips. Bernadette's questions focused on three things. She wanted to know the names of villages, the quality of the roads and paths they had followed, and most of all, she wanted to know about troop movements.

The discussion of the road west from Badenberg to the Werra valley got into such detail that Moische excused himself to get his little book of notes. "It sounds like you're trying to make a map," Moische said, as he came back.

"Aye," John said, and then spoke quickly with Bernadette. "The Americans," he said, after she answered, "they have maps that show all the world. The problem is, the maps show roads from the year 2000, not today. They need to put the roads of today on their maps."

"Can we see these maps?" Moische asked.

John and Bernadette conferred briefly, and then Bernadette answered. "Yes, at City Hall."

After Yossie had finished describing his trip north, John spoke for Bernadette. "Our official work is done. Bernadette wants to know, Isaac and Moses, are you going on another trip?"

"Yes," Moische said. "The market is good. Tip's Tavern will buy all the wine we can get."

"Herr Mobley has a list of idle pastures around Grantville," Yitzach said. "If we can bring cattle, he will find buyers for them."

John conferred briefly with Bernadette and then turned to Yossie. "Joseph, how is work at the mine?"

"Good," Yossie said, wondering how to explain what he was doing. "We are building an electric coal saw. It uses a washing machine motor."

The saw had been suggested by the chief miner, Ken Hobbs, and Gayle Mason, the mine electrician, had done all the electrical work. Most of the machine, though, was made of iron, and most of that had been cut and shaped in the Murphy's run forge.

"What is a coal saw?" John asked.

"It is a big saw for cutting under the coal in the mine," Yossie said. "It cuts a yard deep, so that the coal above can be broken down."

"Does it work?" John asked, after translating for Bernadette.

"Almost," Yossie said. "We tried it Friday, but we need to make changes."

Bernadette and John conferred before John asked a very odd question. "Do you like your job, working at the mine?"

Yossie was not sure how to answer. "Why?" he finally asked.

"Because there is another job. The Americans say it may be more important. They want a print shop. You were a printer?"

Yossie nodded. The Americans never seemed to grasp the fine distinctions between being a printer and merely working in a print shop.

"If you want to be a printer again, you should talk to Herr Kindred."

Bernadette handed Yossie a slip of paper with the name "Kindred" printed on it in block letters and a number. "Telephone," she said. "Paulette will help. John, we must go. Joseph, Isaac, Moses, good bye."

As John got up, he smiled. "She promised me, we eat dinner at her brother's house."

8th of Av, 5391 ( August 6, 1631 )

Wednesday morning, as Yossie rode the bus up Murphy's Run, his eyes were on the new railroad tracks parallel to the road. The salvaged rails came to an end about a mile from the mine, but Yossie could see progress almost every day. He still found it amazing that the Ring of Fire contained enough iron rail to build the new railroad.

When Yossie arrived at the forge, the hearth was cold. Thomas and Karl were already there, but nobody had started the fire. "We'll be going away somewhere," Karl said, in answer to Yossie's question. "That American, Herr Koch, said so. Some kind of emergency."

Yossie was curious, but also worried by the news. Tomorrow was the ninth of Av. From sunset to dusk, over twenty-four hours, every Jew was expected to abstain from all food and drink in memory of the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Yossie didn't want to risk missing the last meal before the fast.

Soon after Fritz arrived, a large pickup truck pulled to a stop by the forge. Ron Koch and Gayle Mason got out, along with two other Americans, Jimmy and Orval. After a brief flurry of activity collecting tools from the mine shop and forge, they all loaded into the truck. Yossie and Fritz ended up sitting on tool chests in back, next to the large round tank that held the truck's fuel, something the Americans called natural gas.

The truck took them into Grantville and then south on a gravel road up a small valley and over a ridge. As they came to the top, the view ahead was dominated by the dark face of the cliffs that marked the border of the Ring of Fire.

The height of the cliffs varied immensely. The peaks and valleys of the Thüringerwald outside the Ring of Fire didn't line up with the ridges of the Allegheny Plateau inside. On the south side of the Ring, the hills outside were far higher, and one of them completely blocked the valley ahead of them.

Downhill toward the cliff, Yossie saw water. With no exit, whatever stream flowed in the valley now fed a growing pond against the foot of the cliff.

The road came down almost to water level and then paralleled the shore of the new pond. As they approached the cliff face, Yossie noticed several huge boulders that had fallen nearby. One was at least the size of a house.

It was only after the truck stopped that he saw their destination. The structure that stood close in the shadow of the cliff was a miniature version of the hoists that stood over the two entrances to the Murphy's Run Mine. Where the cage of the main hoist at Murphy's Run might have held the truck he'd been riding, this one was hardly large enough for two men.

Ron Koch gathered them around. "Amalgamated Number Eighteen was a mine south of Grantville. The main entrance was outside the Ring of Fire, but part of it is under this valley. This shaft was used for air, to pump out water and for emergency escape.

"Now, this is our only entrance to Number Eighteen. After the Ring of Fire, there was no electricity for the pumps. When we discovered that this entrance was inside the Ring of Fire, the shaft was already flooded. ...