by Eric Flint
It was a late February Friday afternoon when the crew rode the wagon filled with firewood into town. Estes Frost, the experienced logger Chad had hired as his timber-cutting boss, would pay the crew its wages after the firewood wagon was emptied at the lumberyard.
"I'm home!" Chad unwrapped his woolen scarf before taking off his now-roomy insulated jacket. He had spent the past five days at the logging camp near the edge of the Ring of Fire. Not all of the extra forty pounds had come off his six-foot frame but he had a lot more muscle. Chad always had been the type of boss who didn't mind getting his hands dirty or in this case, wielding an axe. In the woods over the past several months, his rounded salesman's face had transformed into one with chiseled features, accentuated by a neatly trimmed full beard.
After hanging up his coat, Chad turned to see his short, fair-haired wife enter the hallway. His mouth fell open in shock. "What in the world happened to you?"
A huge black and blue bruise covered Debbie's right cheek and around her eye. She gave a crooked smile. "Tried to break up a fight at the Center yesterday. Caught an elbow. Doesn't hurt. Much." She gave a short chuckle and then started laughing. "Then your mom was there and oh, my God, took charge. She, Nancy Reardon and Aunt Sandra held a mock trial right there for the two women." Debbie shook her head as if in disbelief and then grimaced.
"Had to do with a converted Maytag wringer. One woman stole it. The other woman, a laundress, had paid for it by prostituting herself for two weeks. Imagine how much fun that must have been." Debbie's lips tightened and then she spoke again. "Apparently there are absolutely no wringers for sale at any price."
Chad sighed and shook his head. "What we take for granted." Then he gave a snort of laughter. "My wife, the five-foot, hundred ten pound bouncer." He lightly stroked around her bruised cheek. "Better give your mom and sister a call before they see you at church and jump to conclusions."
Debbie's lips tightened into a pucker and went to the side of her mouth. "Yeah. Aura Lee would love to believe it. I'll tell them to check with Aunt Sandra."
"Where are the girls?"
"Missy's in her room studying and Gertrude's at a dress rehearsal for a school play. The first showing is today but we've got tickets for tomorrow. Missy's got a date tonight. Make you think of anything, big fella?" Her mouth was slightly open in a smile and she ran her tongue across her upper lip.
"Hmm. I think after a long soak in the bath and supper, I'd like nothing more than a good night's sleep. It's hard sleeping in those stacked bunks." He answered with a bland face and slightly arched eyebrows.
"Why you!" Debbie laughed and pushed the much larger Chad against the wall. "If you think for one minute that I'm going to let you get away with that, you've got another think coming."
Chad covered her shoulders with his hands, his fingertips extending to massage her upper back. He gave her a teasing smile. "How soon is dinner? If I take a nice bath but not too long, do you think Missy would notice if we just happen to be in Chip's bedroom for oh, an hour or three?"
Debbie giggled. "Oh, really? You have some of those little blue pills squirreled away? I've heard about you lumberjacks and your long straight logs. We're having beef stew and it's in the slow cooker. I was already thinking along those lines."
Before dinner and again in the evening didn't quite catch them up but there was always tomorrow, Chad thought as Debbie snuggled under his arm. An idle thought came to him. "Honey, when were wringers invented?"
Debbie opened her eyes. "What? Well, not yet. Might be in the encyclopedia. Why?"
"It occurs to me that if one laundress in Grantville is willing to . . . you know . . . for one, then there must be one hell of a potential demand out there."
"What are you talking about, Chad Jenkins?" Debbie propped her head on one hand and looked at him in the dim light.
"We've pretty well logged out the valleys that are going to be flooded over the next few years. I'll bet I could start a company to make wringers. There have to be some in Grantville I can base one on. Sheds, barns, like that."
"I think Mom still has one back in a corner of the barn."
"Great. Now all I have to do is convince her to let me borrow it."
Debbie's mouth made a tight O. "Ooh, yeah. And she likes you so much . . ."
* * *
"Like hell you will, Charles Jenkins!" Vera Hudson snarled. She never used foul or abusive language but for Chad, she'd make an exception.
"Aw, come on, Vera! All I need to do is take it apart, get the measurements and tolerances. Then I'll put it back together. One of my old mechanics will do it, not me, I promise. I'll even make certain it's working properly before I bring it back." Chad looked at his diminutive mother-in-law, then back at the dust-covered wringer and washing machine in the barn. It had been built sometime in the twenties or thirties, he figured because it had a gasoline engine attached. The electric lines had come out here in . . . He couldn't remember, but it was well before he'd been born.
"I said no and that's final. Don't think you can get around me by talking to Willie Ray, either." While her daughter Debbie might have forgiven Chad for his affair years ago, Vera never had. Or would, Chad thought. Willie Ray was smart enough to stay out of it.
"Tell you what, I'll give you a share of all the profits. Just like you owned the patent." Chad thought desperately. Vera was being so unreasonable! It wasn't like he'd sold her a lemon at any time. Come to think of it, they'd bought from Trumble ever since the episode with Noreen.
"Do I have to go inside the house and get the twelve gauge?" Vera set her jaw.
"No, I guess not." Chad sighed. He turned away from the barn. "Tell Willie Ray I said hi." Chad started walking down the driveway to the main road. Well, as Rev. Jones said in his sermon the other day, when God closes one door, he opens another. There has to be another operable wringer somewhere in town. They couldn't have junked all of the old washers! It seemed like all the really old ones had been scrapped in metal drives during WWII.
Then he brightened. Mom would know who still had one!
* * *
Two days later he received a call. "I hear you're lookin' for an old wringer washer," the old woman's voice said. "I got one in my shed iffin' you'd come out to look at it."
An hour later, covered with cobwebs and dust, Chad finally got the wringer-washer out. It was heavy but the weight was almost all from the oak wood. It was like moving a barrel on a wooden stand with a raised arm sticking out. Not enough metal to scrap.
Carmela Matheny had to be in her eighties, he estimated. Face wrinkled, body bent over and dependent on a cane to keep from falling over. "It's exactly what I was looking for, Mrs. Matheny. How much do I owe you?" Chad reached to pull out his wallet.
"Fifty percent," she croaked. "Fifty percent of all your sales and I want it on the first of every month."
Chad grinned and put away his wallet. "Well then, ma'am. I figure this is going to take a while. If you've got tea inside the house, I'll brew some for both of us."
"No, you ain't." Carmela's response was acerbic. "Anybody makes tea, it'll be me. This way." She gestured with the tip of her cane towards the screened-in back porch. "Don't you try helping me up the steps, neither. Wouldn't let my kids do it and I ain't about to let you." She gripped the galvanized steel pipe handrail with her free hand. "I may be old but I'm still spry enough to get around. Folks think that just because you're old and crippled up with arthritis, you ought to be living in a nursing home. Humpf! My mind ain't that far gone yet."
Once in the kitchen, Carmela put some water on to boil. "Ain't seen you up close since, must be 1960. Your mama brought you to the Kennedy rally."
"Sorry, I don't remember." Sales were all about patience. And knowing when to close. "How do you know her?"
"She didn't tell you? Well, I reckon not. We're cousins. Our mamas were sisters, two of the Williams girls." The water began boiling. Carmela turned off the burner and dropped two teabags into the pan. She brought it over to the table and set
it on a hot pad. "You like sugar?"
"No thanks, Mrs. Matheny. Learned to drink it without."
"Hmm. Reckon I'll have to get by with honey when this runs out." She stirred in a scant teaspoon of sugar from the pink plastic container. "Bet you never heard of the Williams girls neither, have you? Thought not. There was five girls. Anna, Bethany, Charity, Deborah and Esther. No brothers, so that was the last of that line. There's some Williams around but they ain't no relation. The Williams girls are why you're related to 'most everybody in town."
"Anna now, she was the oldest. She married Harold Stearns, that's Mike Stearns' great-grandpa. My mama was Bethany and she married an Atkins. Charity married Joshua Reardon, Phil Reardon's pa, but she died before they had any kids so he married Nina Curtis, as I recall. Deborah married William Hudson, Willie Ray's uncle and Esther, the baby, married Joe Newton, your grandpa. They're all gone now. Folks always joke about how West Virginians always marry kinfolk. In your case, it was hard not to."
"That's interesting." Chad set his cup down. "Mom probably has it all down in her genealogy records but I never took much of an interest."
"Well, you should. Talking about your mama, she used to be the wild one. Took after her fiddlin' papa, I expect. My little brother, Tommy, and her used to run around together." She stopped, coughed and dabbed at her eyes with a dish towel. "Tommy never got off Omaha Beach." She sniffed and wiped her eyes again. A moment later she cleared her throat and resumed. "She always swore she'd never get tied down by any man. I figured some boy would change her mind after the war. Course, your ma went from being a wild girl to as straight-backed and upright a woman as you can find after she married your pa. Reckon having a kid right off the bat can make some real changes in you." There was a knowing look in her pale blue eyes. Yeah, she'd counted the months.
"Oh, just to give you fair warning, Grandpa Williams was a horse-trader. I used to go around with him when I was a girl. I ain't going to be as easy a touch as that lumber yard boy, even if you are kin."
* * *
"You gave her how much?" Debbie's eyes were wide with amazement.
"Twenty percent of the profits," Chad answered glumly. "How she got me to agree to that number is beyond me. It was like she could read my mind every time I made a counter-offer. At the end, I thought I was doing well to hold her down to that number. Her husband probably never had a chance against her in an argument."
"What did she give you other than the wringer-washer?"
"Well, she said she thought she might have an older one her mom used around somewhere. That and some other things she brought in from the farm after her mom died. She said she'd look a bit and I should come out to help her do it. I think she just wants me to clean out the shed behind her house."
"Wouldn't surprise me." Then Debbie gave him a crooked smile. "Bet you could have gotten a better deal from Ursula Mitdorff."
Chad smacked his forehead. "Arrgh! Totally forgot about her. Damn!" He shook his head. "But I did learn you and I are kissing cousins. And we're related to the Stearns and the Mathenys as well. Almost to the Reardons. Huh! Mike Stearns and me. Who woulda thunk?"
"Well, it does explain why neither you or Mike gets the better of the other in making a deal. So how long do you have to pay that royalty?"
Chad sighed. "To her, until she dies. After that, I pay it into a trust that gives half to help support her daughter-in-law until she dies. Sylvia's got M.S. From then on it's split between her grandkids. The other half will go to support war orphans during their education. It stops twenty years after the war's over. She says she'll have it written up by tomorrow and I'll take it to a lawyer. I can live with it."
* * *
Two wooden rollers. Six gears. Spacers. All on the workbench in the service garage. Along with four bearings, several pieces of wood, housings for each side to hold the gears and bearings, a bent iron bar used as a spring and a long iron arm with a wooden handle.
"What do you think?" Chad asked his former lead mechanic. Bob Szymanski now had a nice little nest egg from the natural gas conversions and was gainfully employed by the Mechanical Support group.
"No problem to assemble them," Bob answered. "In fact, it's dead easy. Your problem's going to be getting the gears, spacers and the iron bar. Forget bearings, they're impossible for years. The rollers, distance separation and handle can all be made of hickory or another tough wood but the gears? For that you're going to need some machining. You might be able to make cast gears out of iron, one by one. Then cut the cogs with a file and match them up with the other cogs on the other gears." Bob rubbed his forehead with his palm. "I sure wouldn't want to, though. The down-time blacksmiths are supposed to be pretty good. You might give them a try."
"Thanks, Bob. Could we, I don't know, stamp them out?"
"Me? Nope. Anything I could stamp would bend every which way. But I'll bet a down-time blacksmith could hot stamp your gears out of cast iron. He'd finish them with a file until they're just right. If it was a master blacksmith, all he'd really need is to see how the thing works and he'd be ready to go to town."
"That's what I'm afraid of." Chad gloomily chewed on the corner of his lower lip. "I want him to be making them for me, not himself."
"Aw, come on, Chad, lighten up." Bob grinned. "You never made cars, did you? Your job's always been to sell the product, not make or fix it. Give him a share of the biz and that'd get you past all the guild problems at the same time."
Chad smiled as what Bob said sunk in. A broad grin spread across his face. "By George, I think you've got it! Now what I need to do is get some well-seasoned hickory and oak. Then find a good blacksmith. I don't really want to get him from Rudolstadt. The Count's just a little too sharp as far as I'm concerned and might start asking questions. I'll check with the refugee center to see if there's a blacksmith who hasn't gotten gobbled up by USE Steel and isn't already too busy. If not, Chip will know if there's a master or journeyman blacksmith in Jena who lost his forge because his town got destroyed. All he'll need is metal. I think we can scrounge some from USE Steel. They're talking tons. We won't need much, at least not in the beginning. Probably never."
* * *
"Dad, I've got the perfect guy for you. I asked a blacksmith here in town who would be willing to relocate. He suggested Ulrich Dauer. The guy's an absolute genius. I watched him do things with iron you wouldn't believe. Trouble is, he knows it. Absolutely zero people skills and is an insufferable ass, which is why he hasn't been accepted by the local guild. Lost his wife and later his forge when his town was destroyed. He's got an apprentice he abuses and travels to work in nearby small towns like Cosberg or for minor nobility. They won't let him set up a forge in Jena.
"One thing you should know. This guy's an absolute suck-up to nobility. Worse than some Americans I could mention. Joachim talked with him. Told him you had even more money and land than his father, which may even be true. Anyway, he talked to me like I was the Emperor's son.
"Let me know if you want me to discuss a deal with him. Regards, Chip"
Chad refolded the letter and smiled. Not only an insufferable ass but was also desperate to associate with nobility? Piece of cake.
* * *
"Honey, I'm going to be hiring a blacksmith for the wringer business and I want to impress him, like we were nobility. A 'von Grantville' evening. So the best china along with the kind of meal only you can prepare. I want Mom, Missy and Gertrude to dine with us as well."
Debbie looked at him warily. "Do you want us to go formal, too? The dress I wore to the national sales awards dinner fits better than it did then. I'll talk with your mom."
"Great. The girls, well, as good as we can get them. Can't have you seen in the kitchen, so we'll . . ."
"Let me handle it, dear. You just worry about where to put him up."
* * *
"Herr Dauer?" The short, strongly-built older man with a mustache looked towards the speaker. Chad had gotten Veit Kruger, one of Gertrude's teenage German
admirers to meet the smith. At the look from Dauer, Veit went on. "Herr Jenkins has arranged for you to stay in a private house with your apprentice." The sturdy adolescent apprentice was struggling with the smith's heavy work chest.
"If you will follow me? It is a short walk." Veit gestured to a small house two blocks away. "Herr Jenkins has provided what is called a 'dolly' to transport your chest." Veit pushed the dolly toward the apprentice. "Your apprentice can follow us."
Once inside the small two-bedroom house, Veit demonstrated how to turn the lights on and off as well as the toilet, sink and shower. "There is a kitchen here but no cook or maid. This was the home of a widow who died recently. Do not insert anything inside or allow water to enter these small double slots you see here." Veit pointed at the electrical outlet. "They can be most dangerous if not understood. If you accept Herr Jenkins offer, they will be explained at a time convenient to you."
"When will I meet Herr Jenkins?" Dauer's voice was stiff.
"I will come for you an hour after sundown. You will be dining with the family of Herr Jenkins, a great honor." Veit had been coached to answer that way.
