Black Pearls (5 page)

There were more songs, more secrets over the years, and the laughter always bubbling between us. In the end, though, Mother was too weak even to sing. So I did both our parts, singing first the traditional version of an old favorite, like the one where the queen goes riding "all in green, green, green." Next I would sing my version, which featured all the people in our town—the mayor's wife in boots, boots, boots; Papa in sawdust, dust, dust; and Mother in fur, fur, fur. "And where will I get fur?" she asked me once, smiling gamely from her pillows.

I grinned and whispered in her ear. "You know our good neighbor's little dog, the one that keeps yapping all night long?"

Mother put her hand over her mouth, then laughed until she coughed. And coughed until I ran for water. After, she lay breathing so hard I was afraid for her. I hid my fear, but vowed never to make her laugh again.

I cannot explain how such sad memories made my fingers fairly dance over the wood. Perhaps it was because I knew I could not spend the time on this crutch I had lavished on my others. They had each been fashioned in stolen hours, minutes snatched when Father was at church or delivering furniture or running errands. Always, I had the old crutch to make do with until my new one was ready. Now, though, unless I wanted to be carried every where, I needed to finish today.

When the armrest was done, I found a pad of fleece to cushion it. I had just put it aside to work on a chest, when Father burst through the door. He was smiling, noisy and flushed with triumph. I tried to hide the disappointment that swamped me when the place was filled with his smell, his great arms sweeping across the room.

"You should have seen the crowd," he said, glancing only briefly at the chest before me. I had put just one coat of varnish on it, and the brass fittings still lay scattered on the table. I was certain he would rage about how little I had accomplished, but instead he gossiped on.

"It seems I am not the only one who wants to beat some brains into that muttonhead of a mayor! The council chambers were full to bursting. The whole town is fed up with the rats."

"Did you tell them about the footstool?" I asked.

"Yes, but that was nothing next to some of the others' stories." He hung up his cap and jacket, then sat across from me, reaching by habit for something to work on. As he grabbed a chest, I pulled my bad leg away from his glance, hiding it under the bench.

"The miller says the vermin have left him nothing to grind. And one fräulein told how her baby's fingers will not stop bleeding since those infernal pests bit its hand while it slept."

I said nothing, but put the top of my unfinished crutch under the bench as well. I had not shaped the shaft yet, so I would have to swing myself from bench to table to bed for the rest of the day. Father was sure to find new work for us after the little boxes were done.

"I thought we would have to wait all day," Father went on, "while everyone told his tale. I guess the mayor did, too, because suddenly he jabbed one chubby finger into the air and called for silence. 'Good folk,' he said, 'I have heard enough.' He leaned over and whispered to a member of the council, then raised that silly finger again. 'I will hire the piper tomorrow.'

"There surely never was such clapping and shouting. You'd think the old fool was bringing Our Savior to town. He promised to send for the rat-catcher by first light—he even offered to fetch the man himself. You should have heard the stomping and whistling at that, boy."

My father seldom used my name, and I would go days without hearing anyone call me Emmett. The blacksmith's apprentice sometimes shouted, "Hi, there, Emmett!" as I passed the smith's stall, and of course, the children outside the baker's all knew me and my soft heart. "Emmett! Emmett!" they would shriek each time I came for the seeded rolls Father favored. "Give us a crumb, Emmett! Give us a taste!"

"That will be a sight to see," Father was saying now. He had begun work on the chest, his hands moving so expertly with the fittings, he hardly needed to look at all. "I expect the whole town will be in the streets to watch the piper." He raised his eyes to me, and if I saw no fondness there, his expression was at least kind. "We shall take the morning off, boy. I would not want to miss those inky devils skittering out of Hameln."

"I am afraid I would only slow you down, Pater," I said, ashamed. "Unless you will allow me to carve a new crutch tonight?" I hated the reedy way my voice rose at the end of the question, the way my eyes avoided his.

He barely hesitated. "No need," he told me, waving my concern away with his thick, corded arm. "We will ride in the lumber wagon and have a fine view from there." Nothing, it seemed, would dampen his spirits, not even a crippled son.

Good as his coerced word, our mayor saw to it that the famous rat-catcher came to town the next day. It looked as though a puppet show or a magical healer were expected, so lined with people were the streets around the main square. Father and I, perched atop our wagon, had a clear view over the heads of the crowd: we could see the grand spire of St. Nicolai rising across from us and the pie sellers and candy vendors weaving through the throng. The children who normally haunted the baker's were now stationed behind the pastry seller, dogging his every step like pigeons waiting for him to drop some of the sweet stuff.

I was wishing I had been able to whittle a new crutch, to sneak away and buy a few squares of honey bread for those hungry youngsters, when silence fell on the square. The vendors stopped hawking, the children stopped playing, and everyone turned to look down the road from town hall. There, marching to the strangest, shrillest tune I had ever heard, a man wound his way in and out of side streets, gradually advancing toward the crowd in the square.

His flowing cape winked from red to green to blue as he moved. His leggings were a bright wheat color, and he wore a small striped cap on his head. By the time he had worked his way to the market square, I could see that his shoulders were broad and his face smiling. I could also see that he was not alone. Behind him, trailing like a long black ribbon in the dirt, were the rats of Hameln. The piper moved briskly across the square but appeared not in the least alarmed, as if there were nothing strange about being followed by an endless parade of rats.

And endless it was. Every rat from every rat hole in the city seemed to have fallen in love with the piper's music. Mice, too, had joined the swarm of small dark bodies that hurried in a steady, squeaking stream after the rat-catcher. As if his whistle pipe had taken ill and could play only in fits and starts, the piper's tune resembled nothing so much as a bout of hiccups, or the whine of wind trapped behind a thick oak door. It faded and swelled, darted and turned, but to the vermin it may as well have been church bells calling them to penance. Like the sinners they were, they rushed by the hundreds—nay, by the thousands—along Market Street past our astonished eyes.

By the time the last rat finally scrambled down the street, the piper had long since disappeared from view. But our holiday did not end there. People began to break from the crowd and rush after the rats to see where the piper would lead them. Father, not to be outdone, flicked the reins across old Patience's back and turned the cart to fall in line with the others. We rode past most of the good citizens of Hameln till we came to the edge of town and the river. And though we stopped at the shoreline, the piper and his devil's brigade did not.

Still smiling in between breaths on his pipe, the rat-catcher was knee-deep in the chilly water of the Weser. He continued to play the strange music and the rats continued to follow him—right into the water. They leapt with a will into the river, paddled briefly, then sank with a chorus of sharp, outraged shrieks. Soon the water was black with them, chopped to a froth with their desperate splashing. The air around us rang with the shouts of everyone on shore. Father threw his cap against the sky, and I yelled until I was hoarse. It felt grand, indeed, to see the end of those long-tailed nightmares and to have something to cheer about at last.

It was not two days later that Father went back to see the mayor. The tax collector had paid us a visit and been turned away. "The rats are gone," Father told the man, who despite his huge girth seemed reluctant to demand what he'd come for. "Why should I give you money now?"

"The mayor promised the rat-catcher," the collector said. "Only yesterday, he gave his word."

"Then he should have given his money, too." Father shut the door in the poor man's face, rubbed his hands on his apron, and returned to work. But when the blacksmith and the baker decided to complain to the mayor that he was asking for too much money, Father took off his apron again and went with them. I was not sorry to see him go. The trip to town hall would surely give me time to finish my crutch. Hobbling as I was from place to place, I missed my wooden leg!

As it happened, I could have fashioned two crutches while Father was away. I worked happily for several hours, even adding a chain of grazing sheep along the shaft. Then, instead of wondering what was keeping him, I set off for the baker's the minute I was finished. As always, the beggar children were waiting in the alley by the shop. When I came out with a loaf for Father and me and a bag of buns for them, they sent up a great hurrah and gathered around me, all talking at once. "Here, Emmett!" one boy in a dirty vest cried. "Look how skinny I am!" He opened the vest and lifted his shirt to show me his belly. "Emmett, that's nothing," a smaller boy yelled. "That pig's belly is a mountain compared to my hungry stomach." He closed his eyes and sucked in the flesh under his ribs.

The girls in the group rolled their eyes but could not keep from laughing. They weren't about to show their bellies, so they tried a different tack: "How rude these ruffians are!" a girl named Gretchen scolded. Taller than most of the boys, she was not above cuffing the younger ones when they misbehaved. "If you want a sweet, your talk must be sweet," she told them, then turned to me. "Oh, Herr Emmett," she whined in a high, thin voice nothing like her normal tone. "How kind of you to buy those buns." She bent her long frame into a deep, awkward curtsy. "May I try one, pretty please?"

But it was Ilse, as usual, who won the first piece. She stood quietly in the middle of the pack, a shy little thing in a black cape and bonnet. When I dangled a raisin-filled bun above the rowdy crew, she did not raise her hands like the rest, though her hungry eyes followed the treat. So of course, I tore off a good half of the little cake and gave it to her. "Here, fräulein," I said, bowing from my crutch. "
Gott segne Dich.
" God bless you.

Some of these children, I knew, had parents who sent them out to beg while they themselves spent the day drinking in the Green Boar or picking the pockets of those who did. Others had been orphaned or abandoned when their parents died or were sent to jail. These unfortunates tagged along with the rest for protection. But Ilse had a mother, she always made sure to tell me, who neither drank nor robbed. "
Mein mutter sie wird zu himmel gehen.
" My mother is going to heaven. The poor woman, it seemed, was too ill to leave her bed, and like my own mother at the last, lay patiently waiting for the coughing to stop and her pain to end.

Ilse took the cake now and, as I might have expected, tore a generous portion off to give to a squalling infant in another girl's arms. They were like a family, these orphans and runaways, a tiny family that looked after its own. I knew it was a sin, but sometimes I envied the beggar children. I had a warm bed and a father who taught me a trade, but I had no littermates, no warm bodies to jostle and nest against.

***

Father came back home well satisfied, whistling as he hung his coat and cap by the door, took up his apron, and tied it around his waist.

Though I would never have dared whistle out loud, I was whistling, too—inside, where my little beggars had lifted my spirits. The children had all admired my new crutch. Not only was it sturdy and just the right size, but the carving was surely my finest: the sweep of wings, the cut-out mountains on the armrest, and then, along the shaft, a shepherd leading his flock down from the foothills. I could not help but feel pride when the ragamuffins gathered round, touching it as if it were a relic in church. How Use had laughed as she counted the sheep and followed their tracks with her tiny finger!

I used the crutch now to make my way to our hearth, though I ran the risk of Father's making a joke of the "curlicues and doodads" with which I'd decorated it. "And what did he say, the mayor?" I asked, hooking a small pot above the flames. It was well past suppertime, and the church bells had rung twice since I'd lit the candles.

"The old fool," Father told me, bent over the last of the four chests. "He sings whichever way the wind blows."

I could not cook griddlecakes the way Mother used to, but cornmeal mush made a fine supper with roasted turnips. Not that Father would taste the food, anyway. He always ate like a human whirlwind, sucking up whatever was on his plate, belching after and stumbling to bed.

"Once I persuaded him that the rat-catcher could not very well summon dead rats back from the river," Father said, looking extremely pleased with himself, "he agreed there was no need to pay so much as he had promised.

"In fact," he added, turning the chest, applying varnish with his smallest brush, "I warrant he has decided not to pay him at all."

"But the rat-catcher worked the whole morning," I said. Father surely knew what it was like to have hours of labor go for nothing. Wasn't that why he had gone to the mayor in the first place?

He shook his shaggy head now, shoved the finished chest toward me. "Did you see me smile even once, boy, when I was fitting the lock on this box?" He stood up to take off his apron, then came to the table where I'd set out our bowls. "Do you see me asking good folk to pay me for a pipe dance?"

"But the rats, even the mice, they..."

"Those vermin were chased here by that rat-catcher," Father said. "It was all part of his plan to fleece the town."