The Last of the Blacksmiths by Claire Gebben

Author:Claire Gebben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cleveland, immigrant, germany, ohio, emmigrant
Publisher: Coffeetown Press
Published: 2014-01-17T00:00:00+00:00

July arrived, and with it, the American Independence Day, with its sharp reports of firecrackers and marching music of parades. I spent my one-year anniversary on American soil with the families—the Rapparlies, Scheuermanns and Crollys—on a picnic, a carefree event entirely unlike the brawl of my first July 4. The month did bring the humid heat I remembered so well, carrying with it a heaviness and torpor. At times it felt as if my blood might rebel within me as it had for my Uncle Johannes. I wondered about that uncle sometimes, about what might have become of him. I never heard my aunts speak of him and was not comfortable asking.

The next Sunday, although the weather was again fine, whining mosquitoes drove me out of Kingsbury Run. As I arrived back at the mouth of the little stream, a strange-looking canal boat hove into view, riding very low in the water. Its upper and lower decks were packed with revelers. The boat was decorated as if for a Festival of the Maypole, the rails and roof entwined in greenery, flowers, and streamers. Even the boatman and mules wore wreaths of flowers. I heard German words issuing from the assemblage. Someone strummed a familiar folk song on the guitar.

“Is there a festival?” I asked the canal boatman. He looked at me blankly and said nothing, slogging past behind his mules. I plundered my brain for the English word. “Holiday?”

The man said something I couldn’t make out, so I stood like a dull ox at a fence and watched the boat pass. At the back, a group of young men were cheering and howling.

“Harm!” someone called amid the din. “Is that you, Harm?”

Fred Fry removed his cap and waved, so I could pick him out of the people crowding the lower deck. Then I recognized Singley and other comrades as well.

“Hop on!” Singley shouted.

“There’ll be no hoppin’,” the canal boatman said. “He’ll be walkin’, same as me.”

Singley did me the favor of translating. “He says you have to walk. We had trouble getting started, so the man’s in a foul mood.”

“Where are you going?”

“A picnic at Pletscher’s Beech Grove, near Newburgh.”

I hadn’t yet been to Newburgh but had heard of the German town.

“I don’t have food to bring,” I said.

“We’ll share ours,” said a female voice from the top deck.

I recognized Brigitte, the friend of Susan Fry, laughing and waving, her soft brown curls swinging loosely beneath her straw bonnet. I smiled and waved back. Singley leaned out over the water for a peek at Brigitte and almost toppled overboard. I had a hunch that Singley was sweet on her, although he’d never said as much.

Falling into step beside the boat, I resolved to join the party. The terrain beside the towpath grew greener as I went along, the boatman and I carefully dodging the episodic manure of the mules. Tall grasses draped the path, and a willow tree here and there brushed my head with its weeping tendrils. Even as

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