Grantville Gazette - Volume VII, page 24
part #7 of Grantville Gazette Series
"Dave's health was getting a lot worse, so I wrote John and told him that he needed to come back home. He didn't move back, but he did show up occasionally, which I guess was better than nothing. I got Vance and April out of those years and it seemed like every cent that I could make had to go for baby sitters and baby food and disposable diapers. If old Dave hadn't had the house and his disability payments, we'd have been sunk. So eventually I went out to Toledo to see if I could get some child support, this time lugging all four of the kids along. Just to find that Doris was still living downstairs in that duplex with him. That's when I divorced John and put in for child support. He never forgave me for that support order. Not never."
Both Jonas and Pastor Kastenmayer frowned.
"Anyway, in '85, Zane came back from Wyoming and we picked up with each other again. This time, he married me. And we had Garrett and Carly. Right after Carly was born, he started drinking heavy. Then a couple years later, in '92, he left me for Cheryl Ann Bates and I divorced him, too. By that time, believe me, he was no loss. But his parents took it ill and they tried to take Ronnie and Garrett and Carly away from me. It was mostly his mother making the fuss. Horace just went along with her. I was an 'unfit mother,' Mildred said. That's why I stayed in Grantville, really. The court in Fairmont let me keep the kids, but if I'd tried to move away from Grantville, Horace and Mildred would have been right back to their lawyers. So I took office courses at the Tech Center and moved from loading crates in the warehouse to shuffling papers in the office. More ladylike, even if it didn't pay as much. The kind of thing that impresses a judge or a social worker. I got to the point where I could pretend that I was a lady pretty well. At least long enough at a stretch, even though I'm really not at all the lady type. Mildred will tell you that, if you ask her.
"Then John sued for custody of Ray. Tried to get custody of Ray, even though he'd never paid a speck of attention to the boy."
"Ah," Dietrich Zuehlke said. "Did he request custody of Vance and April as well?"
Tina Marie stuck her chin out. "Nah. He wasn't that sure they were his."
Her answer seemed to hang in the air.
"Well, neither was I. At least not as far as April's concerned. Vance is his. I wouldn't have given him David for a middle name, for John's father, if I hadn't been sure of that. I just named April after the month she was born. I figured it was kind of neutral. No point in naming her after Linda Lou or after my mom, anyway. They both cut out of our lives pretty early. Plus Mom was named Philena, which isn't the sort of thing anyone ought to do to a kid."
Kastenmayer nodded. "I see."
"Face it. John was really just mad that because I moved out of his dad's place, Dave had to go into the nursing home for a year before he died. To pay for that, along with his Medicare, he had to sell the house, so John didn't get a thing when Dave died. John was totally ticked off about it. Dave didn't hold a grudge, though. He told me to go ahead and divorce John. Said it was good riddance to bad rubbish."
Dietrich Zuehlke inserted a comment. He didn't precisely say that around the time of April's birth she had been acting as a whore. But he certainly implied it.
Tina Marie shook her head. "I may have slept around a bit back then, with John in Toledo and Zane in Wyoming. I'm not going to lie to you about that, but it wasn't ever for money. Never with a guy I didn't actually like. The most I ever got out of an evening was a meal in a nice restaurant. Like that Italian place in Fairmont. You know. High class. The kind of place you can wear a dress and heels and feel okay, because other women are wearing them too."
She stood on her toes, picked up Pastor Kastenmayer's wife's shawl that was lying across the high back of a bench, draped it across her shoulders, and swished.
"Not that I owned all that many dresses. I didn't need them, the way I lived. I was lonesome. Taking care of Dave Lafferty and the kids plus commuting to work at the warehouse in Fairmont wasn't any picnic. A girl wants to have some fun."
She glared at Dietrich Zuehlke. "And I never took a cent of welfare, either. Not food stamps or WIC or anything. I paid my own way."
"Er." Ludwig Kastenmayer cleared his throat. "What did your pastor have to say about this?"
"Pastor?" Tina Marie frowned.
"Preacher," Kitty and Gary Lambert clarified simultaneously.
"I don't go to church. Never did." Tina Marie shook her head. "Ray and Vance and April are Church of Christ. A friend of Dave's used to pick them up on Sunday morning and take him and them to church with her. After he died—that was in '86—she kept taking the kids. The Baumgardners—Horace and Mildred—were Baptists. Well, Mildred still is. Horace died two years ago. But the church threw Zane out on account of the drinking, way before the Ring of Fire, so Ronnie and Garrett and Carly haven't ever seen any reason to join up. Me, I'm just not the Holy Roller type."
* * *
Gary Lambert's explanation of "Holy Roller" turned out to be beneficial to Tina Marie's cause—at least from Pastor Kastenmayer's perspective. He could only think highly of a woman who, however lamentably uninstructed in the creeds, nevertheless avoided the temptations offered by heterodox sects and cults of various types. This led into a digression on the place of snake handling in Appalachian religious culture.
Kastenmayer found it fascinating. He was already familiar, of course, with the more routine and mundane aspects of up-time religion, such as that the Baptists eschewed infant baptism but somehow expected their children to become believers as adults. Just out of a clear blue sky, with no catechism classes.
"That's not exactly how it works," Gary said. "Or not exactly how it's supposed to work. If this Mildred had been a responsible grandmother, she should have been picking Ronnie and Garrett and Carly up and taking them to Sunday school. So they'd be propagandized into joining when they were old enough. Like that friend of Dave Lafferty's did for the other three. Sounds to me like she was just being a grinch."
Grantville, Autumn 1634
"Thank you for assisting us this evening," Sartorius said to Jonas and Gary as they walked into the high school library. "I thought it was important for Tina Marie to understand just how far away from Grantville my work normally lies."
"I am not grateful," Dietrich commented. "I consider it to fall more into the category of 'aiding and abetting a crime.'"
"Let's just find the globe," Gary looked around with a bland, mild, expression on his face.
"Here." Jonas moved to the right from the entryway. He turned the globe. "This is Grantville, now. Right about here. That would be Wismar, about here. The globe only has the names of the cities that were largest up-time, so Wismar isn't on it. But here's Gdansk."
"Remind me again why we're here." Tina Marie was impatient.
"I don't want you to be unhappy if you go with me. My first wife was very attached to Wismar. It was her home town. So I left my household there, even though most of my work was in ports farther east and I was not able to return home as often as I would have preferred. You need to see how far you will be from your home."
"One inch. One piddling little inch from Grantville to Wismar if you measure it on this map." She snorted and turned the globe. "Look at this." She put her finger down. "That's Brownsville, Texas. This is just about where Grantville came from in West Virginia. That was four times as far. At least. That doesn't even count crossing the whole ocean and skipping over France for us to get here." Her fingernail traced a path. "What's Wismar like?"
Dietrich Zuehlke emitted a simultaneously hostile and wistful-sounding, "Flat."
Gary Lambert laughed.
"All these hills make me sick. Really sick. Your Doctor Adams said that the word is 'claustrophobic.' Not enough sky; not enough horizon; not enough room, not enough space, not enough flatness."
"Flat?" Tina Maria looked at the globe more closely. "Flat like Brownsville? With a river?"
Sartorius assured her that all the Baltic ports had in common that they were flat, with a river.
She stared at the globe for a minute. "I wonder sometimes if anyone left up-time ever gives me a thought any more.
"Your parents stayed in Texas?" That was Gary Lambert.
"I'd been in foster care a dozen years before I left Brownsville. Which doesn't mean that I don't miss the Rio Grande. Mom came around now and then until I was twelve or thirteen. Then she just sort of dwindled away. I didn't know whether she was still alive or not, even before the Ring of Fire. If she died, nobody told me. Maybe she just left town, looking for something better. Never did know my dad. Mom said that he smashed himself up in a car accident when I was just a baby. Well, drag racing, to tell the truth. He spent a long time in the hospital and then died. I've been gone from there a long time. Never kept in touch. Nobody to keep in touch with." She started singing softly:
Remember me when the candle lights are gleaming,
Remember me at the close of a long, long day.
It would be so sweet when all alone I'm dreaming
Just to know you still remember me.
"Well," she said. " None of the rest of you probably ever heard that old chestnut, anyway."
"I have," Gary Lambert answered, leaning his elbows back against the encyclopedia shelves. "It's a Bob Dylan song, isn't it?"
"He might have sung it, but it's way older than that. Probably ten years older than me, even. I learned it from a Willie Nelson record, I think. T. Texas Tyler sang it, too. I suppose the only person left up-time who might ever give me a thought is John Lafferty. Not that it's likely that he will." Kicking off her flip-flops, she started to waltz by herself in the small open space between the library entrance and the tables:
The sweetest songs belong to lovers in the gloaming,
The sweetest days are days that used to be.
The saddest words I ever heard were words of parting
When you said "Sweetheart, remember me."
You told me once that you were mine alone forever
And I was yours till the end of eternity.
But all those vows are broken now, and we will never
Be the same except in memory.
A brighter face may take my place when we're apart, dear,
A sweeter smile, a love more bold and free.
But in the end, fair weather friends may break your heart, dear.
If they do, sweetheart, remember me.
Remember me when the candle lights are gleaming,
Remember me at the close of a long, long day.
Just to be so sweet when all alone you're dreaming
Just to know you still remember me.
Tina Marie's dance slowed to an end. She rubbed her hands against the back pockets of her black denim jeans. "Scotty Wiseman wrote it, back when the National Barn Dance was broadcast out of WLS in Chicago." She straightened her shoulders. "Wash that all out in the laundry, will you, guys? Just forget about it. I'm really not one bit the sentimental type."
She turned back to the globe, Sartorius looking over her shoulder.
"The point is that Wismar's not that far away."
* * *
"It's a beautiful song," Jonas said to Gary Lambert and Ronella Koch that evening. "A little melancholic, but lovely." He looked rather wistfully at Ronella; then looked away. "I believe that I will translate it into German."
* * *
"They can't mean it." April was horrified. "They can't really mean for her to go off with him and leave us behind."
"Considering that they just told us so," Hans-Fritz said, "they probably mean it. Look, we're not that bad."
"But we've always been able to count on Mom."
"Don't be stupid," Dietrich said. "She's a totally unsuitable wife for my stepfather. It's absolutely shocking for her to plan to leave you here, sharing it with Hans-Fritz and me until Ronnie and his fiancee get married. We aren't even really related."
"If you don't like it, there's nothing to keep you from moving out."
"April, that's rude." Ronnie shook his head.
"Well, then, if he doesn't like it, then I can move out. Live with my boyfriend. Maybe he thinks that's less shocking."
"You don't have a boyfriend," Vance pointed out.
April shot a hostile glance at Dietrich. "If he pushes me, I'll find one. If I need to."
"Mom's not going right away." Carly looked at Anna. "That's right, isn't it?"
Anna nodded. "Not until some time in the spring."
"So we don't have to panic right away, do we?"
Ronnie hugged her. "We don't need to panic at all. Someone will think of something. If Mr. Know-It-All there would just stop sticking his oar into the water."
"If Grandma hadn't sold her house after Grandpa died," Garret said, "we could move in with her."
April's expression was sour. "You and Carly could. The odds that she would have me are zero percent."
"Well, she did sell her house," Hans-Fritz said. "So that's not one of the things that you need to worry about."
"Easy for you to say."
"Well. If nothing else works, I guess I could find somebody and get married myself. I'm the oldest, after all."
Carly stared at him. "But Hans-Fritz, you're not in love. You're not even dating."
"No. But I have a government job and live in a house with indoor plumbing. Trust me, Carly. In a pinch, I can put out word that I'm looking for a wife and have one in a month."
Garrett stared at him. "Would you really do that for us?"
"Hey, kids. I may not be as conscientious as Dietrich here, but I'm not all bad. I'm about the age I should be thinking of getting married. Lucas was good to us. If he needs a favor from me, I'm willing to pay him back."
* * *
"Yes. It is quite true. All that remains is to set a date for the wedding." Salome Piscatora nodded her head firmly.
"I can't believe that she's even thinking of marrying him." Mildred Baumgardner pointed at Lucas Sartorius with her fork. "Or that he's thinking of marrying her, for that matter. She's a horrible woman. An unfit mother. But if she takes off with this, this—this German, Garrett and Carly will have no mother at all."
"She isn't an unfit mother." Kitty Chaffin gestured with her cup. "She never was. She fed them. She kept them clean and sent them to school looking neat. She never once left them without a sitter. And you know that yourself. If it was otherwise, you'd have brought it up in court when you were trying to take them away from her."
"You. What do you think?" Mildred turned to look at Salome.
The heavily pregnant wife of the Lutheran minister took a sip of the boiled milk in her cup. "It is not my place to have an opinion. I do know that under the laws of the church, her first husband was left up-time and will be considered dead. Her divorce from the second husband is valid, since he both abandoned her—that is desertion—and committed adultery. Those are Biblical grounds. We do not have as many divorces now as you up-timers have, and only those two grounds exist. But Frau Hollister's divorce from your son, gracious lady, is valid under our laws."
Kitty wasn't ready to let go of Mildred's other allegation. "She's always kept a close eye on all her kids, and they've all turned out just fine. Ray and Ronnie are in the military. Doing well. Ray's still up north and Ronnie's been detailed to the Mechanical Support Division. Ray's married. Ronnie's dating Megan Collins, who is a real nice girl. Vance is military too—a radio operator up in Erfurt. April's out at the mine, apprenticing to be an electrician. They all got their high school diplomas. Garrett will graduate from high school next year and go into the military, too. Carly's grade are good. What more could anyone ask?"
"Custody of the kids," Mildred said. "Considering that they're the only grandchildren I have."
"You're in the assisted living center," Kitty pointed out. "Because of the walker and all. It took three of us to get you down to the café this morning. Salome and him and me. It was one thing back when Horace was alive, but how could you possibly take custody of those kids now?"
