The New Land

by The New Land (retail) (epub)

  “Listen,” Fritz said. From below the deck came a piercing wail. “Someone is dying. Maybe old Kuchel.” The man, a smith in his home village, had to be over forty.

  “He has suffered.”

  Fritz turned to him. “What of this stealing? We are two hundred people, living like animals, with no washing, not enough food, nothing to do, plus fevers. And dying. Dying that tears at our hearts because we left home with hope. And so there is stealing. What do you expect?”

  “We cannot have thieves. This cannot be like a jungle. We’re going to America to make a new world for us, not a new world for thieves.”

  Fritz sighed. “What’s been stolen?”

  “Our food. Fish, cheese.”

  “I’m sorry. We’ll share with you, Ursula and I, but this isn’t the army and you’re not the sergeant major here.” Johann flinched inside. He had never been sergeant major. He didn’t serve long enough to rise to such a high rank. But Fritz and others in his home village had decided he had been a sergeant major, and Johann never corrected them. He would have liked to be a sergeant major. Fritz kept on. “Would you steal to feed your wife? To feed your child?”

  “I would not.” Johann’s jaw set.

  A glance at his friend’s face persuaded Fritz to change his ground. “How would you find the thief? The food has been eaten, for sure. So, there is no evidence. Will you look inside our stomachs? Better that Ursula and I will share.”

  “I thank you. For Christiane, while she feeds the baby, I accept. But the food was wrapped in a cloth that Christiane brought with us, and the cloth is gone too. It is blue and has a shell pattern. It was from her mother.”

  “How will you look for it—sneak around in the night and go through everyone’s things? What will you do if you find it? Will we have a trial? Johann, this is madness.”

  Johann turned a level gaze to his friend. “We must show that we are men. That we cannot be taken advantage of like this. And that we refuse to live like pigs, snatching food from each other.”

  Johann didn’t wait for a response. He walked over to the burly Dutchman, the bosun who directed the crew. Johann thought of him as the ship’s sergeant. To make himself understood in English, which the Dutchman did not know well, Johann spoke loudly and slowly, gesturing more than usual. The Dutchman nodded. Johann returned the nod, then went below to see Christiane and Walther.

  That evening, about half the families came up on deck for dinner. The rest stayed below, nursing others or sickened by the moderate seas of that day.

  Each family had its routine for who carried the cloth square and who spread it on the deck, anchoring the corners against the wind. If they still had their own food, the wife handed it around. If they were on ship’s rations, the husband stood in line before the ship’s cook—a small, greasy man, a stranger to soap—for a shred of salt pork and biscuits. A clerk noted each ration as it was handed over.

  Christiane and Walther settled next to the Bauers, who shared their fish. After Johann brought back the family’s rations, he overheard a man on the square next to them. He was complaining that the cabin was unhealthful. Johann leaned toward the man, supporting himself with a hand on the deck.

  “I agree,” Johann said. “We must clean it or more will die like our boy did.”

  After extending to Johann his sympathy, the man asked how they could clean. “So many are sick and weary. Do we have enough to do the work?”

  “If anything gets wet,” the wife objected, “it’ll never dry out.”

  “It won’t be easy,” Johann said, “but if we work together, we can manage it.” He explained what he had arranged with the bosun. After breakfast the next day, one person from each family should come on deck to join the cleaning party. It could be a man, a woman, or a child, so long as each could work. At the same time, other family members should bring their things—blankets and clothes and anything else—up to the deck to air out. If the items could bear washing, they could be washed, or at least rinsed in sea water. From the sailors, the work crew would get brushes, scrubbing stones, and buckets, then they would return to the cabin to scrub the flooring and sleeping surfaces. During the cleaning, the hatches and side ports for the cabin would be open to the air.

  If a family didn’t wish to participate, they could mark their space so the work crew would leave it alone.

  “There are people too sick to move,” the woman said. “If you’re washing the floor, those people, their things, will get wet.”

  “Yes,” the man broke in, “and shouldn’t the crew do that sort of thing?”

  Johann shrugged. “The crew will not do this, so either we clean ourselves or we live in filth.”

  When the man agreed to the plan, Johann moved on to the next family gathered around its cloth square, then the next. There were more objections. It was too cold. Too damp. But Johann pointed out that the days were growing shorter, and it would only get colder. Better to do it now. Most agreed. They were, as Johann had hoped, weary of the squalor and glad for something to do.

  The sea was strong the next day. Water surged over the forward deck when Mary Anne plunged into a wave, then slid over the aft deck as the prow climbed the next crest. Then a fierce rain pockmarked the water’s surface. The masts, carrying few sails in the heavy weather, creaked and groaned as they leaned forward and back, then side to side. Some passengers hung on ropes and rails, green and yellow puke streaming from their mouths. Others stayed below, wedged into corners or against posts, heads over buckets, lurching with the jolt and sway of the ship. The Mary Anne was far from a new ship. The sailors called it a tub. Johann told himself it had survived many storms and would endure this one.

  Johann, who didn’t get seasick, called off the cleaning but remained on the deck as the rain relented. He fidgeted through the afternoon, staring at the lightening sky. He should be glad for this, he told himself. A stronger wind should mean a faster crossing. Christiane stayed below with Walther.

  The next day was calm, so they started cleaning early. Johann distributed buckets with water and some with vinegar, plus brushes and sandstone rocks and sand for scrubbing. Perhaps thirty people started, most with a vengeance. There was a pleasure in scouring the grimy boards, watching the grease and filth run down the cracks and out through the scuppers at the ship’s edges. The bosun came down to ask if the passengers had what they needed. On other ships, he said quietly, the crew would do such cleaning twice a week, but they were too few on the Mary Anne.

  Hard words came from families that had refused Johann’s invitation. One woman kicked over a water bucket. She shouted at Johann, “Can’t my husband even die in peace?”

  “Of course,” he said, “but his peace will be greater if there are fewer mice and less bad smells.”

  Johann did his share of scrubbing. He hauled blankets and clothes up the hatch for washing, refilled buckets, cheered on the others. Despite his years of soldiering, he was still lithe and quick. On the main deck, Ursula used a stave to pummel clothes and blankets in a barrel of sea water and lye. Christiane, holding Walther, picked lice from the wet scalp of the Bauers’ five-year-old, Sigrid.

  “Good hunting?” he called with a smile.

  She waved him over. “You’re next. I’ve watched you scratch!”

  Heartened by the passengers’ work, Johann returned to the cabin and moved toward the rear on the left side. It was where the Reuters from Darmstadt slept. They were city people, so Johann didn’t trust them. Not that everyone in Kettenheim village was filled with virtue, but the city men in Johann’s regiment were always more likely to skirt the rules. Also, Heinrich Reuter claimed to be a cooper, but his hands said that was a lie, that he labored with a pen and his brain. The hands of Frau Reuter, a large and loud woman, might build barrels. She was directing their two children, a boy and a girl, both sturdy and florid like their mother.

  “Can I help with something?” Johann asked.

  Frau Reuter looked up from her knees, where she scraped with holystone.
“It is you who arranged this?” she said.

  “I spoke with the bosun about it, yes.”

  “You must see that everything is washed twice.” She wagged a forefinger at him. “The first time, we simply stir up the vomit and shit and the smell gets worse. Then new water, and we wash again. The second time, it begins to get clean.”

  Johann smiled. “I’ll tell everyone you said so.”

  She gave his arm a sisterly swat. “Tell them you said so. They listen to you. We must do this every week, perhaps more. We were like pigs in a sty. May the Lord bless you for this.”

  Johann lingered for a minute near her, shifting to try to gain a better view of the Reuters’ belongings. He could see a blue cloth hanging off one of the hammocks. The light was too dim to show if it was Christiane’s.

  “Ludva,” Frau Reuter called to her son, a boy of eight or so. Tucking hair behind her ear, she pointed the boy to the hammock Johann was looking at. “Take those things up. I’ll wash them.” She stood with a groan and smiled again. At a loss for a way to investigate his suspicions, feeling shame for suspecting a woman who seemed so open, Johann nodded and moved on.

  At dinner that evening, with clothes and blankets drying on the top deck, most passengers ate with good appetite. Johann’s shirt was damp from washing but no longer stiff with sweat and grime. He and Christiane ate only hardtack and water. She still picked the maggots out of the hardtack and threw them aside. Johann swallowed his down without a thought.

  “They will make you strong,” he said with a smile, “and they don’t taste any worse than the hardtack. Just swallow.”

  She shook her head and wrinkled her nose, eyes trained on the crumbs of the disassembled biscuit on the cloth before her. She put some in Walther’s mouth as he sat on the square cloth. He strained to climb up on his mother and walk, then to crawl away. His pleasure in having arms and legs brought smiles to his parents. Walther looked up into the ship’s rigging and squealed. Johann reached out both hands to squeeze his son’s middle, which produced a cheerful noise.

  “Did you look at the Darmstadt people as they were washing?” Johann asked. “They have a blue cloth like your mother’s.”

  Christiane swept the biscuit crumbs into the palm of a hand and stuffed them in her mouth. She chewed hard, swallowed some water from her cup, then chewed more. “Johann,” she said around the mouthful, “am I to dig through everyone’s clothes for you? Frau Reuter seems a decent woman.”

  “I can’t say the same about Herr Reuter.”

  “You have no reason to say that other than you don’t care for how he looks, which is something he cannot control.”

  Johann held his tongue. He took the measure of a man quickly, judging his character on how he looked and moved and spoke. People showed their character if you paid attention. He trusted his judgments, but usually kept them to himself.

  Christiane drank more water. With a finger, she dislodged hardtack from her back teeth. She reached under her apron and pulled out the pamphlet from the soul-seller in the market at Kettenheim, the one about General Waldo’s land. It was soft from frequent handling, some of the words now faint. She handed it to Johann to read in the failing light. Christiane knew it by heart, but she listened.

  Johann skipped the introduction, which described General Waldo and America, and also the rough map of the area to be settled. The sketch showed a river that entered a bay that led to the ocean. Christiane had memorized the map too.

  Using a voice meant only for her and for Walther, Johann started with the description of the settlement and the terms for the settlers. In the town, each family could place a house on a quarter of a morgen, the amount of land that a man can plow in a morning. The head of the household would own that house and lot. For farmland, each family could buy another fifty morgens outside of the town at two shillings per acre, with three years to pay. He stopped after that passage. Christiane looked over. It was so much, as much as Christiane’s father and three brothers owned among them. What would that much land look like in one piece? So long as that part was true, it didn’t matter what else was. Johann read it again, then continued.

  General Waldo would build a temporary shelter for the settlers to occupy when they arrived. He would build a church. He would provide beef and pork and wheat and Indian corn and salt, enough for the settlers to establish themselves. Each family would receive a cow and a calf and a pregnant sow, plus three axes, four hoes, a spade, and a handsaw. It was signed by General Waldo, Hereditary Lord of Broad Bay.

  “Fifty morgens,” Johann said. “On the river.”

  “It doesn’t say it’s on the river.”

  “Ours will be on the river. I will see to that.” His eyes glistened. “We’ll live there on our own. No Landgraf to take our sons, or to take our money in taxes. We will make our own way with our own hands, with the hands of our sons and daughters.”

  She hugged Walther tighter and closed her eyes. Johann’s hand was on her arm, and she felt his warmth as he leaned into her. “If I had known we would lose him,” he said, “I wouldn’t have come. Not even for fifty morgens.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  †

  “What do you mean?” Anger clotted Johann’s voice. “Explain, please.” He leaned over the wooden table to look into the eyes of the man behind it, who was pointing to an entry in a tally book. The sunlight was golden.

  “The boy was on board for more than half of the crossing, so you must pay the fare for him.”

  “My son, my son died long before the halfway point of the journey, yes? That is the dividing point. Look there,” he pointed at the book on the desk, “look in the ship’s record. We were no more than eight or nine days from port when he died. We had the funeral. It will be in the records. We have been crossing, what, four or five weeks since then. We could not have been halfway across. That is not possible.”

  Johann tapped the book with his finger. Fritz stood next to him, nodding, though Fritz knew almost no English. Their wives, each holding a child, were behind them.

  When the Mary Anne had neared Portsmouth harbor that morning, Johann and Christiane had crowded against the ship’s rail with the others. The world looked new. It smelled new, the loamy aroma of land mingling with the astringent sea air, birds calling down as they flew overhead. Christiane found the mix intoxicating.

  The voyage had seemed endless, a procession of grey days and black nights, of sickness and misery. Some days Christiane had not allowed herself to think what America would be like. Other days she dreamt of it with all her heart. Now she wanted nothing more than to rub black earth on her skin, to trace her fingertips over green leaves and dig her nails into the bark of trees, to sit quietly where the world didn’t heave and dip and heave again, where her eyes no longer scanned the horizon for deliverance. She wore a clean apron she had saved.

  Portsmouth didn’t look like much. Raw wooden buildings straggled along the shore. Farther back, the buildings were more like shacks. A stiff ocean breeze might knock them down. Above the small port loomed the forest edge, the vastness of America, where bears and wild Indians held sway, where civilization ended.

  The man and his table commanded the end of the gangplank. No one could leave the Mary Anne without the approval of this man with his grey complexion and shiny, matted hair. A guard loomed on either side of him, pistols and knives jammed into their belts. The man’s voice was nasal, his face pinched. His accent wasn’t the same as the British, but his clothes were fine, his waistcoat a black and gold silk brocade. He eyed Johann coldly as he opened a second book, the ship’s record.

  “All right, then. It says here that Mary Anne had passed the halfway point for the journey by September 14. Your son—Peter, correct? —he’s recorded as dying on September 16. So you are liable for the fare for the child. That was explained to you before you got on the ship. You must pay the fare for everyone who makes at least half the voyage.”

  “How can that be possible?” Johann said. “We left port on Sept
ember 7. Now it is the end of October. You mean that we reached the halfway point after nine days, and it took us five more weeks to travel the rest of the way?”

  “The sea,” the man shrugged. “Winds and tides. It’s the life of the sailor. Your fare comes to thirty-five pounds; thirty for the Bauers. If you don’t have the money, you must go over there.” He nodded at a forlorn group huddled at the side of his table.

  They were the ones who couldn’t pay, not even the half-fares that General Waldo had specified for his settlers. They were marooned in the New World, unable to pay to arrive and unable to pay to return to Germany. They couldn’t remove a single possession from the ship until somehow, someone paid their half-fares. Their fates would be determined by the half-dozen well-dressed men who lounged on the shore behind the pier.

  From the bosun, Johann had learned of this system. Redemptioners, the sailors called them, these forlorn ones. When all were gathered, the well-dressed men would step forward. They might pay the half-fare for a German who looked like a good worker, one with a vigorous step and bright eyes. In return, the redemptioner would sign an indenture, agreeing to labor for the well-dressed man until the half-fare was repaid. Some indentures lasted three years. Some lasted five. The work could be as light as household labor or as heavy as clearing forests.

  And what if, Johann had asked, you looked too sick or too weak to labor, so that no well-dressed man would pay your half-fare? The answer was that the captain kept you on the ship until you grew stronger or died.

  “Why, this is outrageous,” Johann said to the man behind the table, his voice rising. Walther squawked and pointed at a sea gull as it landed a few yards away. Christiane bounced the baby and shushed him. Johann burned with humiliation, standing before his wife and his son and people who knew him. “You’re cheating us.”

  The man fixed him with a sharp look and deepened his voice. He leaned forward on his elbows. “No, Herr Oberstrasse, it is you who propose to cheat us. We promised to bring you here to the New World. Here you are. Your life in America stretches before you. The terms of your passage were explained. Can you prove that you weren’t halfway across when your child died? Where is your evidence?”