Excerpt: The Hessian

The boys watched with wet eyes as their father, a stout man in his fifties, stumbled forward, pushed by the lender's Muscle. Wilhelm fell to his knees, crying for mercy. The gruff Muscle pulled the blubbering man to a gnarled stump and yanked the older man's hand to it, forcing it in place and holding him down. Wilhelm looked around to the uncaring crowd but avoided the wet eyes of his three sons. He craned his neck up to search for his God in the grey October sky. Nothing but the murmur of a rough wind and the angry rustle of brittle leaves answered him. The crowd watched quietly as Bernsdorf, the lender of the village and head politician/theologian approached Wilhelm.
"Please, Herr Bernsdorf, please," pleaded Wilhelm Faber, "Not in front of my boys."
"Your boys need to learn this lesson, too," replied Bernsdorf. He smiled a blackened toothy smile that seemed too large for his round, sweaty face. Bernsdorf tapped the large club on his left hand. He stepped forward, toward the struggling, stationary man and the smile vanished.
Wilhelm closed his eyes and gritted his teeth for he knew what would come next.
"Wilhelm Faber," said Herr Bersndorf, "you have been found guilty of sins against the state, and your punishment will be painful. Let this be a lesson to all. I am the voice of God, and those who disobey me, disobey the Lord."
Bernsdorf took exquisite glee in bringing down the club hard on Wilhelm's right hand. Wilhelm screamed. Two of his boys averted their eyes, crying into each others shoulders, clinging to Heinrich's chest. Heinrich watched with clenched jaw and trembled with hatred.
The club raised and dropped again and again Wilhelm screamed. Onlookers, which included most of the villagers, turned away in disgust and revulsion. They had seen Bernsdorf's cruelty before, yet they felt compelled to watch again, none lifting a finger to the drunken fool who received the punishment. Heinrich eyed the onlookers with the same rage he held for Bernsdorf. This man who claimed to be a divine mouthpiece showed, by this act, that he no more represented God than the thief who utters a prayer while picking a pocket. He knew that this man simply had no moral authority over him or his family. Only through fear and intimidation of a yielding public did Bernsdorf have power.
Heinrich whispered to his younger brothers to not look and that papa would be okay. They nodded into his chest but did not fully understand. All three bodies shook with each thump of club on the wet, mangled flesh of their father's wrist.
The club came down and down and blood spattered Bernsdorf face and clothes. The club bludgeoned through bone, muscle, and flesh, creating a mess of tissue. The club became stained with blood, and shards of bone embedded further into the wood with each pound. The screams of the victim became a weak, yet shrill, inhuman sound, broken only by sobs of immeasurable pain. Heinrich clenched his fists.
Bernsdorf backed off a step, drunk with power and ecstasy of his cruel infliction of pain. He wiped sweat from his brow and smeared a red splotch of blood in it's place. The round theocrat wheezed and huffed as if he had completed a frenzied course of coitus. Investigating the faces of the crowd for the slightest bit of compassion for the handless man, Bernsdorf puffed his chest and and spat on the ground near the crumpled Wilhelm. He turned his contemptuous gaze toward the teen Heinrich and let out a small laugh through his nose.
"Boy," he said, "pick up that trash of your father and leave."
Heinrich squared his jaw and stood in defiance.
"Morgan. Otto," said Heinrich to the twin boys, "stand tall."
"The boy thinks he is a man?"
"Do not show him your tears," Heinrich whispered. He stood up and gazed hard at Bernsdorf. The theocrat wiped some spittle off of his mouth as a nervous tick and let his right foot step back ever so slightly."
"You want the same as your father," Bersndorf said. His voice caught a bit, and Heinrich heard the fear in the fat theocrat's raspy voice.
"Hienrich," said Wilhelm, "do not."
Heinrich turned to look at Wilhlem, who slowly shook his head. His eyebrows furrowed, not understanding why his father would not exact revenge. A hand for a hand. The lesson taught by his mother and father. He did not understand. He also did not understand why Morgan suddely yelled.
Heinrich hit the muddy ground, his head swimming and his body in pain. Bright yellow and red flashed before his eyes.The world before him went away in a wash of echoes and darkness.

***

Anna wiped Heinrich's brow, mopping the sweat and dirt. The ship rolled lazily over the waves, cutting through the cold, unforgiving brine of the Atlantic. His eyes opened suddenly, widely. His dry, chapped lips parted with a crack and Anna stopped her caretaking and leaned over close to him to hear.

"Where are my brothers, Anna?"

"They are here, my love."

"Please, help me up, I must tell them something important before I die."

"You are not dying, Heinrich, you just have a bad fever."

"No, no, I am. I need to tell them something about our father. . . and about Bernsdorf."

"Heinrich, that was years ago. Forget about such things," Morgan chimed in. He stood tall over Heinrich, smiling down on him. His voice, a depp baritone, echoed through the small cabin they had sequestered for the long trip from Rotterdam to London and onto Philadelphia.

Other shipmates were around, also sick with the same fever. Some, however, did not have the luck or advantage of Heinrich and would soon be dumped over the side to prevent more disease from spreading, as well as to keep the sickening smell of the dead off of the already pungent ship. Rotting bodies on a ship bound for the colonies did nothing but fester the small confines with plague and discord.

Heinrich coughed slightly, more for effect than for actual clearing of his throat or lungs. He stared at Morgan intensely, and both young men knew that Heinrich had a stubborn streak that did not yield. Morgan sighed slightly and nodded his head, willing to let Heinrich have his say.

Morgan and Anna listened as Heinrich related his story of vengeance, and how Bernsdorf body now lies at the bottom of the Rhine, bloated from water and picked apart by the scavengers who dwelled under the swift currents. Bernsdorf had disappeared a year after the bloody incident with the boys' father, and the assumption from the village crept around that a victim of the theocrat's cruelty had dealt a swift vengeance. The villagers did not realize how rumors are sometimes true. Heinrich kept a low profile and never told a soul, although his father, broken and drunk as ever, suspected his eldest son's crime yet did nothing.

Three years later his father had gotten in trouble again, this time for standing up against the new theocrat. Bernsdorf's replacement, an effete religious snob, did not accept bribes, nor did he display the intolerable cruelty of his predecessor. The Frenchman, as the village disdainfully called him, showed himself a coward on several occasions, yet increased his power with the empire's powers by betraying his wards for personal gain. Instead of principle cruelty, it manifested as a more distant, cowardly, and oblique cruelty. The villagers who opposed the powers and resisted the sweeping reforms that came down from the highest powers of the state, being French or German depending on the day of the week where the potentates would decide who controlled what and for how long. The religious civil wars had been declared long over, but that did not stop people on thrones in far away locations from deciding who paid homage to whom.

After the jarring incident of watching his father, a music teacher turned farmer in this poor village controlled by three or more countries, lose his livelihood by a theocrat's terror, swore to never be oppressed again. Now, a mere three years since, the oppression happened once again, under different circumstances. Heinrich knew something had to be done, whether by force or by flight. After the imprisonment of his father, Heinrich became ward of his younger brothers and promised to keep them safe. Not an easy task for the now twelve year old boy, but with sporadic help from his uncles, he mastered the plow aftert heavy labor over a year, and saved what money he could, with secret plans for his family. It was the second year of his father's imprisonment that Anna came back into his life. The young girl who had helped whisk him away from the bludgeoning, a fiery brunette who knew when to act and when to not, had blossomed into quite a beautiful young woman with a sparkle of life behind the brown eyes. Heinrich always felta twinge of embarassment when Anna would visit, and would attempt to hide his dirty hands behind his back when she presented herself.

She had loved him in various ways, but never sexually until that particular bug awoke in her during her teen years, and she made it a point to visit the Faber farm on a daily basis to help take care of the brothers as well as keep Heinrich fed, clothed, and safe from harm. She walso kept his temper from exploding at the theocrat, thereby keeping him free on a moment by moment basis. One dry night in May some two years after, the fourteen year old boy could not contain his passion for the older girl, and kissed her hard after his brothers had cleared the table and prepared themselves for bed. She stopped him and softened him. Anna gently led him outside and under the stars they shared a bond of love that transcended simple carnal lust. It was in the afterglow of their sloppy and quick lovemaking that Heinrich resolved to lead his family, including Anna, to a better life elsewhere. The next day he pulled meager belongings together, including a stash of stale bread, his father's useless violin, and a collection of coins he had saved, stolen, and sequestered and began a journey on foot to Rotterdam.

The Captain of the Maelstrom took the violin and most of the money to book passage, thinking he had bottomed out Heinrich's fortune. Heinrich had heard stories about the disembarkation process, and made sure he would have enough left over to buy his way off the ship. He did not want to escape oppression in one country only to be tied to a different master elsewhere. Two months later, he found himself sick with fever, as most of the passengers had taken up with, and surely he thought death stalked the ship looking for him. He could feel the hot gaze of the reaper as it slid silently across the fecally stained boards of the deck, picking Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Dutchmen without prejudice. Heinrich would feel himself stop breathing as Death slid by, moving on to another passenger, and Heinrich would quietly thank whatever powers that saved him for another minute with Anna, his love.

Morgan and Anna nodded solemnly about the story of Heinrich's capital crime. He had murdered the theocrat and dumped the body into the rapid currents of the Lorraine rivers when he was still a boy. That sin against humanity weighed heavily upon Heinrich and he felt he must confess before his death came. Morgan and Anna silently made a pact to not tell William and that some secrets were best left forgotten.

A week passed, and so too did Heinrich's fever. The smells of the dead and dying cloyed the nostrils of all, and the trip had not been an easy one so far. The Faber men wondered if they would ever see the promise of William Penn. The prospects, as bleak and grey as this November morning on the Atlantic Ocean, seemed such a far-off reality. Heinrich looked at his wife with love and saw the sadness in her eyes of leaving her home. He slid next to her and hugged her from behind.

"Things will be okay."

"Will they, Heinrich?"

"I feel it in my bones," Heinrich said with a smile.

"I do not wish to be on this accursed ocean any longer," Anna said, more to the ocean air than to Heinrich, "I wish to be on dry land. I wish to start our lives anew."

"We will have a farm and we will raise our children how we wish. Nothing stands in our way, now."

"Are you so sure, Heinrich?"

"My wife, I could be sure of nothing greater."

Heinrich looked off in the horizon, quite unsure of what the new country would hold. He, like his wife, tired of the ocean voyage, the sickness, and the rolling of the waves. He also tired of the dead and the sick. He tired of the violence. He tired of the oppression of man on man. He sought Penn's promise of peace, of freedom from religious persecution. He looked to America to fulfill this life. The cold morning air and the freezing splash of brine encouraged the family to huddle together and get below deck. Clouds gathered and the ship headed for a strong gale. It would not be the last turbelence of their lives. . .

***