The Ram Rebellion(150)

Meyfarth stood watching. He had furnished the auditors with temporary quarters the day that they arrived. Now they were standing impatiently outside the doors of considerably more spacious ones. The Special Commission on the Establishment of Freedom of Religion in the Franconian Prince-Bishoprics and the Prince-Abbey of Fulda was preparing to wind up its work and return to Grantville with its wagon load of accumulated paper.





Well, two wagon loads. The commissioners should have left the first week of September. However, Phil Longhi's prediction of the need for a wagon and team to transport paper had turned out to be inadequate. Paul Calagna had only budgeted for one wagon. When they started to load, they had to scrounge around for a second wagon and team to transport the paperwork that their efforts had generated. Finally, however, the teamsters were bringing out the last crates and barrels.





Relations between the two sets of officials would have been more strained if the special commissioner who provided inadequately for its transport needs hadn't been Willa's son-in-law. As it was, Estelle and Maydene had bowed to the need to be understanding about the delay.





It was Meyfarth's opinion that the uptimers' theories about administration and the way it really worked among them in practice were far from the same. Ties of blood appeared to be as effectual for them as for the down-timers.





The three women were talking in English about what happened to Willard and Johnnie F. in Bamberg the month before. The five men were talking in German about what happened to Herr Thornton and Herr Haun in Bamberg. It seemed as though everybody in Würzburg was talking about Bamberg.





Meyfarth had to do some serious thinking about Bamberg. And some serious praying. He would schedule it into his daily routine.





After Willard Thornton recovered from the flogging, he went home to Grantville. Not permanently, but the bigwigs in the LDS church there wanted to hear from his own mouth what had led up to it.





Johnnie F. Haun, after introducing Noelle Murphy to Frau Kronacher, just went back to work. Harvest time was not the right season for an ag extension agent to be lollygagging around as an invalid. He pulled his "hearts and minds" team together and sent them out into the villages to demonstrate improved techniques in hand threshing. He would love to have them demonstrate threshing machines, but there weren't going to be any threshing machines in Franconia for a long time yet. There were, however, easier and faster ways to separate the grain from the chaff than beating it with a flail.





Johann Friedrich Krausold found it difficult to work with these uptime women. He had a clear vision of the duty of an auditor. It was to make sure that the government received every Pfennig in dues, taxes, and labor services that was coming to it, while preventing local administrators from siphoning any of it off into a project of making their private fortunes.





The women had no objection to that. Indeed, Frau McIntire showed an admirable concentration on tracking down graft and corruption, wherever it might be found. She told him that before the Ring of Fire, she had been a "data input clerk" for the Fraud Division of the "IRS." This Internal Revenue Service would be well worth a man's time to learn about. When he advised her where, in a given Amt, the siphoning would most likely be occurring, she burrowed into the records until she found it, documented it, and drew up a report on it. Krausold did not yet clearly grasp what a "data input clerk" might have been, but he found her descriptions of the internal culture of the "IRS" fascinating. Their conversations were most illuminating.





But Frau Fodor! She had another vision in addition to this auditing assignment, apparently formed by her background in her husband's "small business." As she went around from Amt to Amt, she constantly told merchants and artisans, farmers and landlords, ordinary subjects, that they should be careful not to pay the government one more red cent than it was entitled to by law.





Frau Utt was, if anything, even worse. It appeared that she had for some years of her life worked for a corporation whose whole purpose was to minimize the tax obligations of the government's subjects. With handbooks from this "H&R Block," she conducted seminars, after her regular work day, designed to teach ordinary people to understand the "rights of citizens" under the tax code.





There was no doubt that their ideas were contaminating the four trainees. Krausold couldn't do anything about it. Under the terms that Herr Bellamy had established for this project, he was the auditors' subordinate.





He could, however, collect his grievances and send reports on them to the proper duke of Saxe-Weimar. To Wilhelm Wettin, as he was calling himself now. He also complained a lot to Johann Matthaeus Meyfarth who could, as a fellow down-timer, be expected to understand.