Schwertler Swabians (Cumberland saga)

“It was good that you came” Sig said to Blain. “What did you think of our Sabbath worship?”

“I wasn’t expecting it to be in German. I understood very little of it” Blain said, honestly.

“We are Schwertler Swabians*” Sig explained.

Blain looked at Sig blankly.

“Schwertler Swabians are ethnic Germans who migrated to Romania to farm the land abandoned by the Ottoman Empire. We left Germany to escape religious persecution and because there was good land to farm” Sig explained.

“My family left Romania in 1996.”

“How old were you when you left Romania?” Blain asked.

“I was fifteen, just a little bit older than Lliam is now and Sarah was two-years-old” Sig said.

“Sarah?” Blain asked.

“Yes. Sarah is my sister” Sig said.

"Well, shit. Wasn’t that just jolly!" Blain thought.

“Changing subjects” Blain began “I want to ask you if you would consider using fertilizer on our fields?”

Sig frowned. “We do not conduct business on the Sabbath. We will have this conversation after the sun goes down and the Sabbath is over.”

Not an auspicious start to the conversation Blain hoped to have with Sig.

That evening, after supper and at least a half-hour after the sun had set, Blain went looking for Sig. He found Sig smoking his pipe on his front porch, waiting for him.

Sig invited Blain on to the porch and pointed at the other rocking chair. It seemed like a strange place to have a conversation, outside with only a kerosene lantern for light.

“Tell me why you think we should use fertilizer” Sig started the conversation.

“You said that we are likely to need twice as much food next year. Sally said that we could grow FOUR TIMES as much corn if we use fertilizer. It seems like a no-brainer to me” Blain said.

Sig took a tug on his pipe and held the smoke in his mouth for a second or two before answering.

“Been there. Done that. It didn’t work. Tried it twice, in fact” Sig said. "Failed both times."

“How can that be?” Blain asked.

“Folks new to Copperhead Cove came up here and assumed they knew more about farming than we did. Figured they would educate us. They were smooth talkers, too. Convinced most of the others to go along” Sig replied.

“Happened in 2000 and again in 2009. Just when we needed more food the most the crop failed” Sig said.

“But why did it fail?” Blain wailed, aghast.

“I don’t know. I got more work on my hands than I can do already. I can’t go diggin’ into every little puzzle or I wouldn’t get anything else done” Sig said.

Blain knew that was true. Nobody worked harder or longer hours than Sig. Not even Blain.

“But if you feel strongly about it, I can let you have a garden plot to experiment on. It won’t be a good garden plot and it won’t be close to the houses, but it will be yours to succeed or fail on” Sig said.

“How big will it be?” Blain asked.

“Same size as all the others. About 75 feet by 70...pretty close to an eighth of an acre.**” Sig said. “Roger and Alice are getting up in the years and they can’t keep up with the ones they have. It will be a relief to them to have somebody else pick one of them up.”

“Would you reconsider if I can figure out why the fertilizer didn’t work?” Blain asked.

“I don't have time for lazy people” Sig said. “Don’t bother talking to me if you ain't finished your work. And don’t bother me if you are expecting me to solve your problems...like spending money we don’t have. You gotta have that all figured out BEFORE you talk to me. I just don’t have the time.” 

“So who can I talk to who can tell me about 2000 and 2009? I need clues” Blain said.

“That would be Sarah” Sig said. “She was here. She worked in the fields. She saw what happened. She went hungry, too.”

Sarah was the last person in the world Blain wanted to approach. His emotional state was in turmoil and he did not know how he felt about her.

As he was passing her house on his way back to his Conex, he noticed a light was on inside near the back of the house.

What the hell? If his situation was untenable, it was better to know it now than to draw it out and get booted out of Copperhead Cove in the dead of winter.

He knocked on the door.

Sarah opened the door. Blain could see that the door opened into the kitchen.

“Yes?” Sarah asked. She seemed taken aback to have him knock on her door in what passed for “the middle of the night” in off-the-grid Copperhead Cove.

“I had some questions. I asked Sig and he told me that I should ask you” Blain said.

Sarah nodded. If she was surprised by Sig bunting the questions her way, she showed no surprise.

“Lliam! You can start your studies. Sit at the table. Blain will finish drying the dishes” she said.

And that his how he found himself standing next to Sarah as she washed the dishes and he dried.

Sarah handed Blain the first dish and Blain laid the dish on the counter and carefully dried the top. Then Blain looked over at Sarah.

She was suppressing a smile. “You have to dry both sides” she informed him.

“Now what?” he asked after he had flipped the plate over and dried the bottom.

“Place it in the drainer” she said, pointing to the rack next to the sink.

Slowly, very slowly, Sarah washed each plate and dish and handed them to Blain. He was so involved that he neglected to ask his questions.

Sarah started talking about the day. Blain listened with half-an-ear.

The quarters were very confined and “cozy”. Lliam was two steps away keeping an eye on them as he studied in the light of a small LED lamp. The space around the sink was so tight that his hip occasionally bumped Sarah’s.

She talked about the gardens and the tree-clearing. She talked about the older couple and the cold that was going around the Cove. She mentioned the need to split more firewood.

At first, Blain was distressed. At first, Blain thought she was giving him work. After all, she was his “boss”. He bristled at the huge amount of work she seemed to be assigning to him.

But then he was lulled by the gentle cadance of the information and he realized that she was simply describing the work that would have to be done by somebody and she was bringing him up-to-speed on the neighbors who were not capable of putting in a full day’s work.

Blain mastering the idea of HOLDING the plate and drying it. The concept was transformative.

The tiniest seed was planted in his head that bosses do not assign work but that the work can organize itself.

As Blain dried the last bowl, Sarah asked “You had some questions?”

Blain said “Sig told me that we need to increase how much corn we grow because he expects a lot of people to want to move here.”

“I have been working with Sally and he showed me a way to get free fertilizer to increase our production. I mentioned it to Sig and he said “NO!” He said the last two times we tried it that it was a disaster” Blain shared.

“Maybe I pushed a little bit harder than I should have, but if Sally can use fertilizer and make it work, we should be able to as well” he said. “I asked Sig about details of when you tried fertilizer and he told me to ask you.”

“So, the two times the people in the Cove used fertilizer and it failed...what happened? Sig said you harvested even less corn than when you used no fertiizer at all.”

Sarah looked at him for a minute. His impression that she was tall was spot-on. Her eyes were about an inch below his...and then he glanced down and saw she was barefoot. 

“A summer storm came along and blew the corn over. It knocked it all over. After that, the corn didn’t ripen like it was supposed to. It was damp and moldy when we picked it. Even the animals would not eat it” Sarah said.

*I am very deeply indebted to Alma Boykin who kindly offered me insight into some of the nuances of Europe's tumaltous ethnic and religious history. Alma is a top-notch author and her Carpathian Campaign (example) and Empire Series (example) are likely to appeal to many of my readers. She does use "magic" in her books but as Asimov once noted, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Alma uses magic with a light hand in those series and it is not a distraction.

Alma blogs at Cat Rotator's Quarterly.

I exercised artistic license and all deviations and errors are mine.

If it helps, think of the Schwertler Swabians as being like the Harrison Ford character in the movie Witness. "Schwertler Swabians" .Equals. "Ohio Amish".

The 20th century was not kind to the minority, ethnic German populations behind the Iron Curtain. The last of them fled after the Iron Curtain dropped. The ones who survived the 20th Century did so by becoming invisible. Chameleons: Master Class.

**The agricultural lay-out of Copperhead Cove is broken up into 1/8th acre parcels with each family-group having control of approximately 20 parcels. That was done to facilitate crop rotation and work-assignments.

The woods are in the ravines that surround three sides of the Cove with the flat, tillable area at high elevation. The region where the flat starts to slope into the ravines is rough pasture, mostly endophyte-infected Tall Fescue.

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