John of the Rhine

by Margaret R Taylor

  John thought. "So the first step is to figure out why the light does that," he said.

  "Oh, yes," said Mr. Kaufman.

  John reached for On the Corpuscular Theory of Light.

  #

  When Mr. Kaufman retired that morning, John put on his straw hat against the sun and walked into town. He bought more food, then he went to the greengrocer's shop and told Milla what had happened with the turnips.

  "Did you cut them into pieces?" Milla said.

  "What?" said John.

  Milla had a crate of apples balanced on her hip as she unpacked them into a barrel. She shifted the whole affair around so she could face him squarer. "You have to cut them into pieces, John! They will never cook if you don't do that. And you have to put other things into a stew besides turnips."

  "What else should I put into it?" John said.

  "Carrots? Meat?" Milla lowered the apple in her hand. "John, did you even put salt in the stew?"

  He'd gotten it wrong again. And he so much wanted to impress Milla. He was almost ashamed to ask her the next question he had, but he felt that he must. He took a handful of eggs he'd bought from another store out of his bag. "How do you make these good?"

  Milla looked at the eggs for a long time with an expression that John didn't understand. "This isn't a joke," she said. "You don't know what to do with eggs."

  "Yes," John said. "And I really need to know."

  Milla's look changed into another one, softer, though John still didn't understand it. "You can boil them or fry them," she said. "Or you can make omelet."

  Just the word sounded exciting, exotic. "How do you make omelet?"

  "I don't even know how to explain," Milla said. She set down the crate of apples. "You stir the eggs up, then you cook them in a pan. Then you put some cheese in and cook it some more. Then fold it in half, take it out of the pan, and then it's an omelet."

  Omelet. John couldn't wait to try it. He'd forgotten about his embarrassment by the time he said goodbye to Milla that day. Armed with his new knowledge and eggs, he walked home.

  #

  Are not the Rays of Light very small Bodies emitted from shining Substances? For such Bodies will pass through uniform Mediums in right Lines without bending into the Shadow, which is the Nature of the Rays of Light. They will also be capable of several Properties, and be able to conserve their Properties unchanged in passing through several Mediums, which is another Condition of the Rays of Light. Pellucid Substances act upon the Rays of Light at a distance in refracting, reflecting, and inflecting them, and the Rays mutually agitate the Parts of those Substances at a distance for heating them; and this Action and Re-action at a distance very much resembles an attractive Force between Bodies.

  John rubbed his eyes. He and Mr. Kaufman had been wading through the books in Mr. Kaufman's collection for a week now. They made his head ache because none of them agreed with each other. Most of them didn't even make sense.

  This one that he was leaning over, for example. It said that light was made out of pieces, like tiny flying balls. But when the light from the lantern went through the two slits and came back together again, shouldn't the balls crash into each other? Why should they destroy each other? John sighed and turned the page.

  #

  First, you stir the eggs up.

  John had gotten out the best bowl in the house for his omelet experiment. He put two eggs into the bowl and crushed them with the handle of a spoon, then he turned the spoon around and stirred them up. The result was a shelly, snotty mess that didn't look like it would ever be something good to eat. He dumped the bowl out and tried again.

  The trick was the shells. John pulled one out from the pile of egg and examined it. This was definitely not something that he was going to want to eat. He'd have to take the shells away from the eggs and get the insides into the bowl.

  He held an egg over the bowl and broke it in his hand. The insides dribbled out between his fingers and dripped down into the bowl. Slime had gotten all over his hand, but the good part was in the bowl and the shells were not. He was making progress.

  Then you cook them in a pan.

  John washed the egg off his hands, then he stirred the eggs up as hard as he could, then he poured them into a pan and put it over the fire. He wasn't sure what was supposed to happen next, so he watched it. Slowly, the sliminess went away and the mix turned into something drier and light yellow. Then you put some cheese in and cook it some more. John sprinkled some crumbles of cheese on top. Now, how long was he supposed to wait? John poked it with a spoon. Nothing was happening.

  When John smelled burning, he snatched the pan out of the fire and tried to fold the omelet in half since that was the next thing he was supposed to do. But the spoon wouldn't go under it, the whole thing was stuck. The eggs had attached themselves like glue to the bottom of the pan.

  John scraped as much of the omelet as he could into the trash. It took an hour's soak in hot water and long scrubbing before he finally got the last bit of egg to come off of the pan.

  #

  Mr. Kaufman said that when an experiment failed, change one thing and do it over again. Also, expect to fail most of the time.

  As spring rose into summer, John spent many of his spare hours in the kitchen changing one thing. He beat the eggs with a fork instead of a spoon, he melted butter in the pan before adding the eggs, he kept the omelet further away from the fire. Later, he got the idea to add sprigs of a nice-smelling herb that he'd found growing behind Mr. Kaufman's house. But the omelet still wasn't perfect. Whenever he ran out of eggs he walked into town to buy more, and every time he found some excuse to stop by Milla's greengrocer shop and ask questions.

  Every few weeks Mr. Kaufman disappeared for a night or two to run an errand. He would come back with a spring in his step and a renewed enthusiasm for their experiments with prisms and bits of silvered glass that he never failed to handle with gloves.

  One day after one of Mr. Kaufman's errands, Milla mentioned that the woodcutter had discovered a deer carcass in the woods. Or rather, some parts of a deer carcass. John's stock of common sense told him not to ask any questions about that.

  His life measured in months now, and he was starting to make friends with the rest of the townspeople. He spoke to the fishermen at the docks who used to sail their little boats over him, the rail workers on the Koblenz line who sometimes came into the town to drink. He asked the woodcutter to teach him how to string traps for rabbits out in the woods and gut them, and before long he had a fine rabbit-and-turnip stew bubbling in the hearth.

  It seemed incredible to John that nobody knew he was an animated piece of river mud. He was taller than all of them, and on a day they'd hauled anchors onto the shore to clean them, he'd discovered he was stronger, too. What was more likely, the townspeople didn't care.

  #

  One day about midsummer the fishermen let John come with them in their trawl boats on the Rhine. Though John got the peculiar feeling that he was traveling over himself, he enjoyed the talk and the rock of the boats, the late morning sun glancing over the water.

  The man in John's boat dipped the oars into the water and ripples emanated out from it in glittering circles. To John's right, the rest of the fishermen's boats clustered in a herd. As they stroked their oars, ripples circled out from their boats, too. The ripples from the boats met in the water between them – and disappeared.

  John sat up straighter in the boat. Waves. Waves destroyed each other.

  John ran home that day and told Mr. Kaufman about it as soon as he'd gotten up in the evening. They added new dimensions to their experiments: water trays, wooden blocking walls, pins. Everything that they'd seen before began to add up. Light was a wave.

  Mr. Kaufman said that they would have to get to the university in Göttingen as quickly as possible to see if anybody else had seen this before. Getting there would be a problem, traveling was so difficult for him. Maybe he could see about hiring a discreet cab. If only the tr
ain lines were in!

  #

  Late that summer, some pretty blue flowers sprouted up in the clearing behind Mr. Kaufman's house. John brought them into town and gave them to Milla. She accepted them with a smile. John walked all the way home that day with a happy bubbly feeling in his chest.

  #

  The omelet sizzled in the pan. John ran his spoon around the edge to make sure that it wasn't stuck, then folded it in half. He took the pan from the fire, put a plate on top, and tipped the omelet out onto it. This one looked good. He took a fork to it. It was perfect.

  And, to his annoyance, there was nobody he could run and tell. It was the middle of the night, so Milla would be fast asleep, and Mr. Kaufman was out running one of his errands. Oh, well. John sat down at the table to eat his omelet alone. This was Mr. Kaufman's third night out, so he would be home soon.

  Mr. Kaufman didn't come back that night.

  John waited, and he waited, and by the time dawn broke he knew that something was wrong. Mr. Kaufman had never been gone this long before. He paced the dining room, then he went and sat at the base of the stairs, and he thought. And that stock of solid common sense served John again. He knew what he had to do.

  He packed the bag by the door with food and water. Then he got a sheet of paper from the workshop and left a note on the table in case Milla wondered where he was and came looking. Finally, he plunked the straw hat on his head and went outside.

  The trees towered over John's head like grayish sentinels in the late morning mist. The forest had never seemed so large before. John let himself feel daunted for a moment, then he hitched up his bag, tromped into undergrowth for a few paces, and turned left. He reasoned that if he made sure always to turn left, he would make circles around the house that spiraled outward, and that way he wouldn't miss any part of the forest.

  A deep part of John knew that there was little chance that he would ever find Mr. Kaufman out here. It was too easy to miss a body hidden in a drift of leaves.

  He went on anyway. The air had a chill to it and the edges of the trees' leaves were just getting touched with orange and red. These woods were familiar, this was the place he went to set his traps for the rabbits. He waded through brambles and over streams, going on until the sun set and it was too dark to see. Nothing.

  John sat with his back against a tree and ate a little. In the lowering twilight, the branches of the trees soughed against each other and some small animal skritched and scratched among the rocks. He tried to sleep, but he didn't sleep well.

  The next morning at dawn John got up and got back to work. By the late afternoon, he was forced to admit that his spirals weren't working. He was missing too much of the forest and the underbrush kept forcing him out of his path. He was only roughly sure that he was north of his home. He sat down on a stump with his head in his hands.

  A plume of smoke rose over the treetops.

  John sat up. Curiosity drove him on as much as anything else as he hitched his bag up and crept forward. The trees thinned out. Felled logs lay scattered on the ground, their resin sharp in the air. The earth under his feet was packed hard by boots.

  John crawled on his hands and knees to the edge of the trees. Beyond there was a city of tents, smoke from their cooking fires gray-black against the sky. He could just make out the low din of voices.

  The Koblenz rail line. Mr. Kaufman wouldn't be here, all the deer would be frightened away. And yet he remembered his master's curiosity about the modern world.

  John stayed at the edge of the forest and circled the camp. He found a clearing with the vegetation tamped down and the cold remains of a fire in the middle. Nobody had tried to scuff it out. Nearby lay a coat that somebody had dropped on the ground.

  Something had happened here.

  John waded into the ravine downhill from the clearing, pushing the brambles away from him as they scratched his arms. His foot dropped into water. John stooped. He'd stepped into a little stream that ran here underneath the dark leaves. Mr. Kaufman wasn't here. He turned to leave.

  Then John saw the wool. The corner of a traveling cloak, poking out low under the brambles. He knelt and touched it. He wanted to rush in right now and see if his master was all right.

  Remember the curtains. He wouldn't touch anything until after the sun had set.

  John climbed out of the ravine, sat on a pile of leaves, and waited. The sun sank and the shadows lengthened. Far away, the whistle at the work camp blew to end the shift. Still John waited. When the world finally turned bluish, he stood and climbed back down.

  He found the place again and parted the brambles. There was a bundle down there against the dirt, wrapped in a traveling cloak and shaped like a man. Slash marks showed through the wool.

  John rolled the bundle over and drew the cloak away. There lay Mr. Kaufman, as pale and limp as a fish. Dark burns streaked his face and hands. His waistcoat was slitted.

  Mr. Kaufman stirred. "John?"

  Something welled up in John's chest, a tightness, completely different from the feeling when Milla smiled at the flowers. And he thought, I am stronger than an ordinary man. He put his arms under that poor bundle, picked Mr. Kaufman up and slung him over his shoulder.

  It was a hard burden even for John. Full night had come on now and John could barely see. The branches and the brambles scratched at him as he went. He stumbled a couple of times under the weight, got his balance back and kept going. Mr. Kaufman didn't struggle or make a sound.

  They made it home after what seemed like a long time. John carried Mr. Kaufman up the stairs to his study and set him on the bed there, then he went around lighting candles. Mr. Kaufman lay exactly where he had been put on the bed with a look up at John like a wounded animal.

  When John went to unbutton the waistcoat and shirt, Mr. Kaufman tried to push John away, but he was no match. John pulled the shirt away to reveal the staccato of stab holes down Mr. Kaufman's side. They were livid with sunburns.

  "What do I do now?" John said.

  Mr. Kaufman grimaced and turned away.

  "Tell me how to help you!"

  Still no answer. Now John was angry. He knew Mr. Kaufman could still speak, but he seemed to prefer his own misery to getting any help. Fine, then. John had a good guess what would help.

  John hadn't checked the traplines in two days, not since he'd left the house. He got the lantern from the workroom, lit it up, and headed back out into the dark. In time he found one rabbit that was already dead, and he finished another off with a twist to the neck. He carried them back under his arm.

  John dumped the rabbits onto the bed before Mr. Kaufman. "Eat them! Please!"

  Still that listless response. John began to worry that Mr. Kaufman had lost something of himself in those days at the bottom of the ravine wrapped up in his traveling cloak. Then Mr. Kaufman shifted, propped himself up on one arm, and drew one of the rabbits near. He stopped and looked up at John.

  Finally John understood. Mr. Kaufman didn't want to be watched.

  John backed out of the room, hesitated, then he closed the door. He didn't know what to do now. He went to the top of the stairs and he sat. And he waited. Some time after that, he fell asleep.

  #

  John woke up still half expecting to find himself out in the forest leaned against a tree. He shook his head to clear it. He glanced at the door to Mr. Kaufman's study, then went downstairs and peeked around the curtains. Midday. Right. He had work to do.

  He went back out into the woods and reset all of the traps. Then he tried to burn time by tidying up around the house, but when the last stick of the chandelier had been polished twice, he knew it was time to stop. He tried to read without much success.

  Just before sunset John went back to the traps and found a rabbit there and killed it. He took it, and a candle, up the stairs to Mr. Kaufman's study.

  He felt like an intruder as he pushed open the study door. All the candles inside had burned out. The one in John's hand cast dancing shadows aro
und Mr. Kaufman's equipment. Never before, in all the months that he'd been here, had John had the chance to look at this place closely. There were maps on the walls. Maps of the world, diagrams of circles inscribed on top of a tree, drawings of a two-headed human, man on one side and woman on the other.

  John held the candle up to the bookshelves. On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. On the Legend of the Golem. The Archidoxes. John lifted his hand, about to touch the one in the middle. Maybe later.

  Mr. Kaufman lay curled up on the bed, apparently asleep. There was a small pile of bones and fur at the bed's foot. John drew closer to inspect Mr. Kaufman's skin and felt a jolt of panic when he saw that Mr. Kaufman wasn't breathing. He gripped the candle, motionless, for two of his own ragged breaths. Wait. He looked closer. The sunburns on Mr. Kaufman's face had drawn back. Maybe, for Mr. Kaufman, breathing wasn't supposed to happen.

  John settled himself into one of the chairs with the dead rabbit in his lap.

  Presently Mr. Kaufman opened his eyes. He tried to sit up too fast, then put a hand on his head and moaned. John offered him the rabbit.

  Mr. Kaufman pushed it away. "I should hunt."

  "You're not going to hunt soon," John said.

  Mr. Kaufman gave the rabbit a longing look, then hid his face. "It's a repulsive habit."

  Was that what they would have to do? Should John put the rabbit down and leave the room again? No, John decided. There'd been too much hiding from each other and it had to stop.

  "Wait here a moment," John said.

  He ran down the stairs and into the kitchen. There wasn't time for omelet, but he grabbed some bread and a piece of cheese and ran back upstairs with them.

  He showed them to Mr. Kaufman. "Look," he said. "I'll eat, too."

  He sat back down in the chair and took a bite out of the bread. And he watched. As he nibbled the bread, Mr. Kaufman seemed to be going through some fight with himself, then he picked up the rabbit. He took a fold of fur and skin by the rabbit's shoulder and ripped it off with his teeth.

  It was like watching one of the stray cats who wandered the piers in town. Mr. Kaufman worried the rabbit's flesh off in strips with his teeth. John kept bravely on with his bread and cheese, but when Mr. Kaufman tore open the creature's belly, reached up inside for the heart, and ate it, John had a hard time swallowing.