The Seventh Etching

iUniverse, Inc.

Chapter One

Nelleke loved the sound of the cock crowing. It meant light. It meant morning. Always the first awake, she leaped up that day, slipped on her wooden shoes, and ran outside to the privy. Her pet goose waited for her and greeted her with a loud honk that roused the rest of the family. Nelleke opened the lid of a barrel and tossed him a fistful of grain. While the goose pecked at his morning meal, she gently caressed his white feathers and spoke to him softly.

"Some people eat geese. I won't eat you, Langenek. Never. Ever. Even when I'm `one hundred years old,' I'm gonna still feed you every single day."

A lavender butterfly flew in front of her, almost landing in the yellow ringlet that fell out of her white cap down the middle of her forehead between her large, alert eyes. She laughed and chased the delicate flapping color to the edge of the pond, then watched it continue over the water where she could not follow. Even though she was still lured by the pond's mysteries, she would no longer touch it even with the toes of her shoes. The memory of the pond's frightening, sharp taste was still strong. She began to gag as if that taste were again filling her nostrils and throat, smothering her. For those few moments last summer she had felt like a lost fish caught and dragged down by green slime.

Another honk from Langenek reminded her that the amount of grain her small fist could hold was never enough for him. She ran back to the barrel where the goose stood stretching out its neck toward her, demanding. She reached into the barrel with both hands and simultaneously threw out two more fistfuls, one way in front of Langenek, the other behind him, then amused herself watching him search.

`One hundred years old,' she thought, and then ran inside, calling.

"Aunt Griet. Aunt Griet. How old was your mother when she died?"

Griet was sitting up in bed trying to coach her infant toward her breast. Beginning with the first feeding every day, this was a mother/ child struggle that had begun ten months before. Frans did not root like other babies or like piglets or kittens or lambs for that matter. He fussed and complained. He showed little enthusiasm for porridge and mashed berries either, even mixed with honey. In contrast to his robust, ravenous two-year-old cousin, Jacob, Frans was thin. He seemed to have no muscle strength in either arms or legs. And now Griet was pregnant again.

"Aunt Griet. How old was your mother when she died? She was my grandmother and I want to know."

"I don't know, Nelleke. Around twenty-five probably," Griet answered just as Frans finally latched on.

"How old was my mother? The same age?"

"I think so."

"Around twenty-five then?"

"Get Jacob dressed, Nelleke, please."

"Well, she had dark eyes. I know that much. Eyes like mine. I have her eyes. That's what people say. So does Jacob."

Frans broke off from the weak sucking and turned his head toward his lively cousin. With her constant motion and chatter, she was always more interesting to him than anything else.

"Look, Nelleke. You're distracting him again. Get Jacob dressed, I told you."

Nelleke knelt down beside Aunt Griet and Uncle Johannes's tall bed. Then she poked her head underneath the bed into the space where she and Jacob slept. Stretching out her arm, she felt a little boy leg, a leg she loved for its sturdiness and for the warmth it gave off during the cold winter nights. She reached inside the wool stocking covering that leg and moved her fingers down to the bottom of the foot. Jacob pulled away, rolled out from under the opposite side of the bed, and ran teasingly away from his sister, round and round the one large room the family shared. Twirling the stocking, Nelleke ran too. When she caught Jacob and delighted him with insistent tickles on the bottom of that one bare foot, their joint giggles filled the room.

Aunt Griet propped Frans between pillows and began readying breakfast – ale and plain bread. Nelleke pushed open the shutter, letting in some welcome light. She could see Uncle Johannes in the barn milking their two remaining cows and pouring the milk into large earthen jugs for transport. They could no longer spare any milk for butter or cheese for themselves she had heard him say. He took every drop to the market to be sold.

The early autumn air was cool, but Nelleke would never let a few shivers keep her inside. She banged the house door behind her and began balancing on the long wooden planks that led to the barn. Uncle Johannes had put them there to make a path through the mud last spring, but the planks had sunk in places. Nelleke enjoyed seeing how far she could stretch her legs in order to step only on the wood, avoiding the dirt.

She stepped inside the barn with its familiar mixed odors of hay, fresh milk, sweaty cow, and cow poop. Uncle Johannes said to call it by its name, manure. He had already cleaned the barn, but the odors lingered. Nelleke passed rows of empty stalls until she came to where Uncle Johannes sat on a stool with his face against a cow's side, pulling rhythmically on its teats.

"May I taste the milk, Uncle Johannes? Just a little bit?"

"Just a little bit, Nelleke. In a minute."

Nelleke walked over to the piles of hay. In the farthest corner, she gave several exploratory kicks before she located her secret sack. Recently, she had noticed that an animal had been chewing on it. She gave the sack a hard kick before she felt assured that no mouse or rat was using her sack for breakfast feed. Only then could she play her favorite game. She closed her eyes and reached deep into the sack, feeling the stones inside. She chose one, felt its size and weight, turned it over in her palm and tried to picture it.

She guessed that the stone she held was the flat white one with the gray stripes in the shape of a cross. It was the one she had found before, turned up by Uncle Johannes's plow in the center of a field maybe one year ago. She pulled her hand out of the sack.

"I was right, Uncle Johannes. I guessed it. See?" she said, running to show him. "This is the one."

"How many do you have now, Nelleke?"

"Twelve. Want me to count them for you?"

"No, that's okay. I believe you."

Uncle Johannes had taught her to count, but he was too busy to listen to her counting them every day.

"Do you think I'll ever get a hundred in my collection Uncle Johannes? Is a hundred the highest number in the world?"

"Just about."

Uncle Johannes moved the stool and bucket over to the second cow and began milking.

Nelleke sat down in the hay and poured out the sack's contents on the barn floor. Recently, since people had learned that she collected stones, they had been giving them to her. Her favorites were the ones Mrs. Kist gave her last Sunday after church.

"Here, Nelleke, I found these for you," she said as she tucked them into Nelleke's palm. Three clear, rounded stones, each the size of the tip of her thumb. At first they looked exactly alike, but now Nelleke could tell one from the other. One was slightly flatter. One had a jagged side. One had a tiny blue dot.

"What shall I name the sister stones, Uncle Johannes?"

"Up to you."

"I know. How about Liesje, Femke, and Antje?"

"Nelleke, breakfast," Aunt Griet called.

Nelleke returned all the stones to the bag, twisted the top, and tucked it back into its hiding place. She used to play with the stones inside on the floor of the...