And so on the Summer’s Day that marked his seventeenth birthday, Hans Forester limped up Dimmerthal valley to Groening-stead, that was the foremost farm in the Lower Dimmerthal.
The morning sun dazzled his eyes and heated his head, for he had no cap. His bare feet and twisted ankle throbbed with every step. He had lost on that night his home, his family, and all his belongings. He owned nothing now except for the tattered, torn and bloody nightshirt that clung to his back. He was alone in the world.
And yet as he went on, his anguish faded. Grief and fear, anger and hate drifted apart from him at arm’s length. They left behind only a dull nothing in his heart. He followed Farmer Groening and his men with no more feeling, no more hope, and no more thought than you find in a cow that walks behind its master to the chopping-block.
From time to time, he saw, one farm-hand in particular would duck his head back and sneak a look at Hans.
‘What are you gawking at, badger-eyes?’
The man seemed startled to be caught. He touched his cap. ‘Beg your pardon, Herr Master.’
‘Well, don’t gape at me like a fool.’
‘No, Herr Master, thank you, sir.’
‘Never mind Otto,’ said a bright-faced boy of 12 or 13 summers. Hans recognized him as one of the farmer’s sons, little Bertie Groening. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a soul, would you, Otto?’
‘Otto was once a clever young fellow,’ said an older man who wore the bright red kerchief of the farm foreman. ‘But then he went into the Schwarzwald once too often and his brains got addled. Didn’t they, Otto old chap?’ He spoke of the man to his face the way a man would of his hound.
‘Yes, Master Anton, thank you, sir.’
Hans kept his eye on the farm-hand after that, but the man didn’t look back again.
This man Otto, Hans deemed, was almost as old as Father had been. He was tall and lanky, even gangly, and this gave him an odd way of walking. He had a fool’s open face. Surely there could be no threat from him. And yet Hans felt there was something about the man that gave the lie to his simple looks. He had the smell of something wicken-like.
Hans walked on the far side of the road from him after that.
Soon upon a swelling of the land ahead there rose a great dark mass that Hans thought could only be the main house of the Groening-stead. But when they were near enough to make it out clearly, Hans felt his heart quail to look upon it.
For the house was a wreck. Its roof had fallen in, there were no panes in its windows, its paint was cracked and peeling. It reminded Hans of the fate of his own home and he said, not thinking,
‘We don’t have to go in there, do we?’
Farmer Groening halted and glared back at Hans. The other men fell silent. The old farmer’s squint boded ill for Hans and he was sorry he’d spoken.
Then Bertie Groening laughed and said, ‘No Hans, what are you dreaming? Our house lies on ahead.’
Hans flushed. The boy had spoken to him as though it were himself, Hans, who was the younger. They walked up the Road around the dead house and saw stretching out beyond it the rest of the Groening-stead buildings. There were half-a-dozen houses, a score of sheds and outbuildings, some barns, fenced-in yards where goats and chickens and geese and pigs were feeding. All this stood in a shallow bowl in the valley ground. The Charcoal Burners Road ran down the middle of it, alongside the biggest house that stood up shining and new. Upon its porch several women were sitting and working and gossiping. One woman stopped her work and stepped to the forepart of the porch, staring up at the band of men walking toward her. She waved and called to them,
‘Who do you have there?’
‘Hullo, Mother,’ answered Bertie. ‘It’s Hans, the Forester’s son. We found him inside a burning haystack!’
The woman stepped down off the porch and came to Hans. Mother Groening was not so old as her husband. She was broad and red-faced and her eyes were as blue as the sky. Laugh-lines wrinkled her cheeks. She bent and kissed Hans. ‘Oh you poor boy, however did that happen?’
When Mother Groening’s arms enfolded Hans, all his numbness went away and his grief and fear came flooding back into his heart. Tears filled his eyes. He pressed his face into her apron, which smelled of sugar, flour, and cocoa – like Mother’s had the day she died, only yesterday, only last night. And his throat choked and he could say nothing.
‘There now, come inside,’ she said in his ear. ‘We’ll get you clean and combed and give you a bite to eat, it’s breakfast-time at Groening-stead!’
She held him at arm’s length. Hans wiped at his face, ashamed to be seen weeping like a child.
‘Wouldn’t you like some porridge, Hans?’ asked Mother Groening.
He nodded. She held him beside her and led him up the steps.
It took Hans half an hour to get good and clean. The soot-smuts on his arms seemed they would never come out. And when at last he scrubbed away the dirt, he found many cuts and scrapes he didn’t know he had. ‘From the trees I suppose,’ he thought. His right shoulder was bruised blue where he had crashed into the wicken-soldier in breaking free from the wicken-camp. Now at last he could take time to feel his ankle properly. Hans had sprained his ankles before many times, jumping off the wood-pile and racing up the valley. It did not bother him so much now, but he knew it would be worst on the morrow as these things always were.
He dressed himself in some clothing Mother Groening had given him. It hung on him well enough and he stood without leaning too far onto his right foot.
And so at last he found himself at the long pine table of Farmer Groening’s house with the rest of the family, eating porridge and eggs and hot black bread with cream, and the cheese and sausages for which the Groening-stead was well-known up and down the Dimmerthal.
Hans had never in his life seen so much food brought together all at once. Groening-stead was the biggest holding in the Lower Dimmerthal and this mid-morning meal was the first main meal of the day here.
‘Now Hans,’ said Mother Groening, filling his bowl for the third time, ‘We must get you back home, your Father and Mother must be missing you.’
‘No they aren’t,’ he said through a mouthful of ham. ‘They’re dead.’
