Kornwolf (34 page)

Owen continued by finding the Lime Street Jacob Speicher's family tree: a slender paperback that didn't look promising. It spoke for itself on the opening page: “How My Father's Life in Mechanics Gave Birth to the Speicher Ford Dealership,” by Jack F. Speicher, senior president. The man was a Lamepeter car salesman …

Having determined as much, Owen picked out an empty table and had a seat. He placed the unabridged volume in front of him. Squaring off, he fixed his gaze on the cover. He opened to page 610.

As expected, he came to a genealogical tree, as represented here in the literal: vertical lines and horizontal dashes connecting minuscule blocks of dense, almost microcalligraphic print, each of which indicated a given member's name, date of birth and address. It made for extremely rugged deciphering. Owen had already strained his eyes to their limit before something caught his attention—but not the name of Jacob Speicher. First, he discovered (amazingly not overlooking) one Ephraim Elias Bontrager, b. July, 1975.

There he was again. There was that crazy kid who had charged the Sprawl Mart wagon—the kid who was now in court downtown …

According to the chart, he was the son of a Benedictus Daniel Bontrager, (b. 1946–) of Bird-in-Hand (who must have been the one arrested for trying to burn down the gym that afternoon) and Maria Elanore Speicher Bontrager (1951–1975) of New Holland … Panning to the left horizontally, Maria Bontrager, b. Speicher, was seen to be one of three children born to Devon Speicher (b. 1927–) and Emma Louise Stutzman Speicher (1928–), both listed as current residents of Birdseye, Ohio. From right to left, it read: first, Maria, then Aaron Daniel Speicher (1953–) of Cedrick County, Iowa, and last, Jacob Ezekiel Speicher (b.1952–).

That was it.

Returning his attention to the diagram, Owen was overwhelmed by the family's size: Jacob Speicher had seven uncles and at least forty cousins, all of whom were represented as tiny, floating, sometimes overlapping blots of information—each wired into a larger, darker, overhanging penumbra of forebears. Even when limited solely to the patriarchy, tracing it back more than three generations without the aid of a magnifying glass presented a lengthy, exhausting task. As well, the volumes contained very little or no biographical information. Most important, Owen didn't have enough time. He returned to the card catalog.

After a good deal of flipping, comparing and ruling out names by date of birth, he settled on two of four possibilities, both in the form of family studies: the first compiled by a Katie Speicher of Turbon, Indiana, from 1968: “The Speicher / Mueller Connection,” which, it turned out, traced a parallel (not directly related) branch of the namesake back to the purchase of a ninety-acre land deed in Chester in 1807 … The second was dated 1930, and compiled by an Elton Abraham Speicher (b. 1870–). Following his reference number, Owen opened the book to page 17, and there, discovered that Elton Speicher had twenty-five grandchildren, among whom, of seven siblings in the eighth and youngest generation, was a Devon Speicher, b. 1927, of New Holland.

That was Jack's grandfather. Devon of New Holland.

Every lead continued to score …

Elton Speicher, one of seven children born to John Speicher (1832–1910) and Catherine Shiffer Speicher (1845–1907), was raised on the family's 243-acre estate in Old Conestoga, outside of Stepford. Their house had been built in 1759 by Elton's great-great-grandfather, Johann Speicher (1731–1810), and had remained in family hands ever since. Back through the years, it had hosted a good many operations: from cider production / orchard farming under John and Catherine Speicher and family, to a dairy farm under John's father, Jonah Speicher (1800—?), and mother,
Ella (b. Lutz), to a sawmill under Jonah's father, Deacon Baltzer Speicher (1764–1850), who had started as a blacksmith in carriage repair, but later followed in the path of his father, Johann, an architect and carpenter by trade.

In 1759, Johann had purchased the land and erected a two-story house on the banks of the Conestoga River. There, he settled with his younger brother, Meldrick, and his infant half-sister, Josefina, who was under the care of his widowed grandmother, Susan Bechtel Speicher (b.1680), all of whom had survived and been misplaced by a random attack of “savages.”

This was the last of a once-great family.

Heinrich Speicher (b. 1680) had succumbed to pneumonia during the transatlantic voyage from Rotterdam to Penn's Woods. His grandparents, Amos and Gwendolyn Speicher (b. 1635 and '37, respectively), had grown up in the town of Landau, in the Rhine/Palatinate region of modern-day Germany—one of the earliest havens for fugitive Swiss Anabaptist refugees. The colony's settlement had been fraught with peril. The second half of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which, in the end, would claim over 40 percent of Germany's population, had devastated most of the area. Catholic and Protestant forces had plundered the land, razing and killing, continually. Then, with the signing of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which forced all citizens of Germany to declare a religion—even though the choices were restricted to Catholic, Lutheran or Reformed on penalty of exile, imprisonment, torture or death—the Anabaptists, lumped in with the Huguenots, Walloons, Witches, Muslims and Jews, were branded “sectarian,” i.e., heretical: enemies of both the church and state. Such persecution, adding to the already untold misery of warfare and plunder, would then lead to seasons of plague and famine. All over Germany, once-fertile homesteads were pillaged by hordes of starving indigents.

This was the world in which Amos and Gwendolyn Speicher had grown up. For their children, the hardships would only continue—through the War of the Palatinate, during which the region was laid to waste again, through a pestilence that claimed
several family members, through hunger, lawlessness, murder, religious persecution and untold miseries plaguing the “
God-awful shadow of Europe
”—a shadow which they would eventually escape at the beck and behest of William Penn, but only after twelve weeks of “
living hell
” on a charter ship across the Atlantic, during which not only Heinrich Speicher, but two of his children, one of them newborn, would die of pneumonia and be tossed overboard—followed by seven “
beastly
” years of servitude in a labor colony (a “
hive of malfeasance, evil and shame
”) before ending up on a farm in the borough of Northkill, where at least they could practice their worship legally, only to lose the property and half of their family during the Seven Years' War …

In her diary's final entries, Susan Bechtel Speicher (d. 1761) lamented a lifetime of woe. She looked to her coming death and to meeting her maker with weary and wavering hopes—hopes that, as Jacob Amman taught, she and her kin had been chosen to suffer, thereby securing their place in eternity. In eighty-one years, she had lived through greater turmoil, adversity, fear and sorrow than anything faced, in the narrator's words, by all but “her fugitive Swiss forebears.”

Of course, those forebears weren't listed here. Susan's maiden name was Bechtel. The chances of finding them elsewhere, Owen had to assume, maybe wrongly, were slim. But her husband's ancestry, the peers of those fugitive Anabaptists, had been recorded—although in ever-diminishing detail the farther back in time they stretched. Notwithstanding the lack of firsthand accounts predating 1690, Elton Speicher's historical recap of Anabaptist survival in Europe upheld the narrator's claim as per even more wretched adversity faced by their forebears. During a time of famine, Amos's father, Emmanuel Speicher (1614–1653), had been shot along with sixteen “accomplices” for stealing and eating hay from the city. All but nine years of his turbulent life was spent tending the fields between warring armies.

His father, Joseph Horace Speicher (1584–1657), was among the earliest Anabaptists to flee Switzerland, and to settle north, in the
Rhine/Palatinate. Having escaped persecution in Bern, where most of his family had been disinherited, jailed, tortured, killed or driven out, he wound up in Landau. There, as the Treaty of Westphalia hadn't pronounced his people “sectarian”—
yet
—he joined the small, devout community of Anabaptists, the Troyer Colony—named for Deacon Hanz Troyer. Joseph Horace Speicher had worked as a farrier (a smith who shoes horses) by trade. He had lived on a sizeable plot of land that was shared between several extended families. In 1610, he married a woman described as “having escaped persecution in Bedburg prior to joining The Order.” That woman (b. 1587) was listed as Clara Ava Stumpf.

Owen was already moving to push himself back from the table the moment the door behind him swung inward, sounding a buzz.

He fell off his chair with a terrified start. His head hit the backrest. He rolled with the impact.

Freezing, a middle-aged woman appeared in the doorway, looking down on him fearfully.

He
must
have been The Chosen One.

The woman stepped back. She looked ready to run.

Owen got up, spewing bitterly. “What do you
want?
”—more shaken than angry.

Braced to flee, she spluttered, “It's … our …”—steadily edging into the stairwell. Owen noticed her hairnet. Jesus.

She worked for The Prune. She was a Mennonite.

He rubbed his head in humbled annoyance. “Have you got something to say?” he asked.

She trembled. “We're closing in fifteen minutes.”

He looked at his watch. It was 7:15 …

She was already gone when he looked again.

Still rubbing his head, he picked up the chair.

Everyone plays the fool.

Sometimes.

He returned to the Speicher log. Again, the name leapt out at him: Clara Ava Stumpf (1587–1622)—just as he'd dared to imagine it might, yet even more unexpectedly, somehow.

Owen wiped the sweat from his brow. He took a deep breath and continued reading.

The Troyer Colony Roster, printed in full in the study's closing pages, confirmed Clara's—and one other Stumpf, her mother, Helga's—church membership. Both women had been baptized in 1608. And both had come from the town of Bedburg.

The overall portrait of fact, conjecture and myth was now coming into focus.

As a documented fact: Peter Stumpf, or Stubbe, was executed in Bedburg.

As a myth, he was a bloodthirsty werewolf.

Conjecture provided for three possibilities:

One: the condemned had been innocent, and therefore a victim—effectively lynched by an ergot-blown, psychotic horde of Protestant villagers: someone whose case, for reasons unknown, presently lived in inordinate infamy.

Two: the condemned had committed mass murder: a sixteenth-century Jack the Ripper, of sorts: a frenzied libertine / sexual predator / cannibalistic degenerate sentenced to burn at the stake for his crimes.

Or Three: Peter Stumpf had, in fact, been a “bloodthirsty werewolf,” a devil, a Blighted One … Which would have meant that, as much as Owen cherished regarding the age of Luther as one of wholesale paranoia, at least one case in an estimated thirty thousand executions was
not
fully innocent.

Fact: by parish record, his daughter and mistress were put to death along with him.

Fact: no mention was made of the child allegedly begat by Stumpf and his daughter, nor of the sister with whom he'd engaged in “carnal, unholy relations daily.”

Fact: Clara Stumpf was born in the town of Bedburg in 1587.

Fact: Peter Stumpf was beheaded in the town of Bedburg in 1589.

Fact: the town of Bedburg was located in the province of Westphalia, forty miles north of the Rhine/Palatinate's border.

Conjecture: Helga of Bedburg was actually Peter Stumpf's sister and concubine.

Conjecture: in the wake of Peter's arrest, Clara Stumpf, as an infant, was smuggled out of Bedburg by Helga, her aunt.

Conjecture: lucky to escape with their lives, they took to the forests as wandering fugitives.

Fact: Helga and Clara Stumpf were baptized in Landau in 1608.

Fact: they were listed as having evaded persecution in the town of Bedburg.

Fact: Landau was set in a wooded stretch of the Rhine/Palatinate region.

Deduction: as fugitives, Helga and Clara, the latter under the care of the first, had wandered the woods of the Rhine/Palatinate hiding from church and state authorities.

Fact: in light of their situation, as well as existing political, religious and economic conditions in Germany, the Anabaptists, specifically, would have provided both Clara and Helga Stumpf with their clearest, if only, sanctuary. Both would have been baptized as adults. Both would have married and changed their names. And both would have then assumed the guise of pious Anabaptist wives.

Fact: Clara Stumpf married Joseph Horace Speicher in 1612.

Synthesis: three hundred fifty years later, a member of their fourteenth generation of descendants, Jacob Ezekiel Speicher, ran amok in Pennsyltucky—whether in jest or outlandish earnest—reviving belief in an ancient “curse,” a phenomenon known as “The Time of the Killing,” while spawning, at once, a new urban myth—and passing it on for reenactment …

Question: but passing it on to whom?

Answer: someone within the family.

That was Jack's excuse, wasn't it? “Family matters”?

Owen stopped.

Family matters?

He looked at his watch.

Damn it.

He should have gone to the courthouse …

He looked at the pile of books on the table. He would just have to come back for them later: he'd never be able to sneak them past The Prune without busting a seam in his trousers. As much as he hated to leave this material out in the open where someone might find it, he just couldn't bring himself to steal it … Besides which, the footsteps now coming down the stairs sounded unmistakably male: probably a janitor fetched by the stammering middle-aged woman who worked for The Prune.