Old Kaethe sniffed as she poured some very thin beer for her husband, Rudolph Vulpius. The wife of the head of Frankenwinheim's village council doubling in her role as the wife of Frankenwinheim's tavern keeper.
Kaethe gave her husband a toothless smile. He had been a good catch forty years before, when they married. Even the fact that his family had at some point Latinized the name from Fuchs to Vulpius indicated that Rudolph had some pretensions to social standing in the village. All things considered, he'd stayed a good catch throughout the four decades that followed the wedding.
"It will be hard for these `uptimers' to be worse than the Swedes were last winter." He smacked his stein down on the table with a thump.
That seemed to be the only consensus the village had reached so far.
Constantin Ableidinger, the school teacher, tipped back precariously on his three-legged stool. He was a stocky man, bullnecked, broad shouldered, with straight black hair, brown eyes, and a dark olive complexion. "When do you expect Tobias to get back from Bamberg?"
"Today, perhaps. He's a reliable boy." The mayor was justifiably proud of his oldest grandson.
"If we're lucky, he'll bring more information. I sent some money with him, to buy pamphlets and newspapers for sale. We shouldn't just read the free things that the uptimers are handing out."
The mayor frowned. "Das Erfolgreiche Dorf," he snorted. "Why do we need foreigners to tell us how to make a village successful? We could make our village successful without their advice. Which, I would like to point out, we never asked for. We know what we need. In fact, before the damned war, we had most of it. A bell in our church tower. Now melted down by the soldiers. A bridge across the creek. Now with its timbers taken for firewood by the soldiers. A stone-lined ditch from the spring on the hill, so we had water here and the boys and girls didn't have to spend half the day going up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Which we can probably have again, once we get the ditch cleared out. They ruined that just for the meanness of it."
"At least we have the free pamphlets," Ableidinger pointed out. "When the Swedes burned the schoolhouse last winter, they burned most of the books we had with it. The ones that weren't in my cottage, anyway. So I'm using these `hand-outs' for the children to read. Some of them are pretty good. The one they call Die Wochentliche Bauernzeitung is the best, I think. Apparently these uptimers have an organization called a `grange' that's been publishing this weekly newspaper for farmers for almost a year up in Thuringia. We've only gotten a few issues, so far. Mostly old ones. It has articles on farming, of course, but also woodcuts and jokes. Stories for fathers to read to their families in the evenings."
The village pastor frowned. "Very few of them are edifying." Otto Schaeffer didn't find many things to be edifying, once the members of his flock had completed their perusal of Luther's Shorter Catechism. Which, he thought, they should peruse much more regularly than most of them did.
Ableidinger shook his head. "They aren't biblical or classical. But some of them are really funny. Especially the woodcuts, the `cartoons.' One of the issues introduced `Peter Baufaellig.' He makes me think that maybe we'll be able to understand these uptimers after all. The introduction said that there were woodcuts about him in a newspaper about farming uptime. The head of this `grange' read about this `Peter Tumbledown' when he was a child. Every village has a man like that now. I guess every village still had one then. The one who doesn't oil his harness, who lets his hinges rust, who doesn't fix the leak before something inside is ruined."
"Materialistic," the pastor proclaimed.
"Fixing things that need fixing fits into `render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," Ableidinger said stubbornly.
Kaethe frowned. She, along with most of the women, thought the village was lucky to have Ableidinger as its teacher, even if he wasn't local. His family had been Lutheran refugees out of Austria who had settled up around Coburg. He wasn't an easy man, but he kept the children disciplined and, most of the time, interested. That wasn't easy. Energetic and vigorous, at least when the melancholy didn't seize him. Moody, when it did. In that case, there wasn't much to be done except wait it out. And feed the boy, of course, if his father forgot to. Matthias was a good boy, well worth a few bowls of soup or porridge.
Kaethe knew that Pastor Schaeffer wasn't as pleased as Frankenwinheim's mothers and grandmothers were. She also knew one main reason why. It wasn't just that the teacher—who was, of course, also the organist back before the soldiers had smashed the organ, as well as the sexton and the clerk for the village council, since no one could reasonably expect a man to survive on what a village schoolteacher earned, much less feed a family—had lived in the village for years before the new pastor came and knew the people better. It was that he had been to the university at Jena, just like the pastor. He had finished the arts curriculum and started to study law before he was thrown out for getting a baker's daughter pregnant and marrying her.