Steemjammer: Through the Verltgaat (5 page)

Chapter
5

another cousin heard from

“Six bushels of ‘maters,” said the burly man in the sweat-stained tee-shirt and denim overalls.
Tomatoes
. Born near the West Virginia border, he spoke with a strong mountain drawl. “Sev-‘n-a-haif bushels of cukes.”
Seven and a half bushels of cucumbers
. “Sixty haids of green lettuce, fo’ty of red. Five bushels of mixed summer squarsh, eight dozen aigs.”
Squash and eggs
. “Nine quarts of goat cream, and a large sack of toadstools.”

As worried as the Steemjammer kids were, it’d been easier to busy themselves with chores, as they had little idea how to go about finding their missing parents. Over the weekend, they’d spent a lot of time searching for a secret door, the possibility of which intrigued Giselle.

When that got tiresome, they hunted wild mushrooms, picked vegetables, collected eggs, and ran several days’ worth of goat’s milk through a separator to get cream. On Wednesday they loaded their wagon, hitched the horse and went to a country market a few miles up the highway.

“Those are good mushrooms,” Will protested.

“I’m sure they are, son,” said Mr. Carter, the burly store owner. “But if even one’s pizen,”
poison
, “there goes my bizness. So, whatcha need today?”

Will rattled off a list that included pickling salt, flour, cracked corn, and other items of food and hardware. Mr. Carter wrote it down.

“Don’t forget frozen herrings,” Angelica said. “And hot dogs. I love hot dogs.”

“Okay,” Will grinned. “The usual fish order and three pounds of hot dogs.” Remembering that she loved something else even more, he added: “And eight chocolate bars.”

Angelica fist-pumped. Mr. Carter said they had a balance left over for next time, and Will signed for it.

“How’s your dad?” the store owner asked.

“Vanished,” Will blurted truthfully and then seized up. No one should know, so why had he said that?

“Huh?” Mr. Carter said distractedly.

“We expect him back soon,” Giselle told the man.

“Fine. Sorry, I gotta take this.” He took a vibrating cell phone from his pocket. “Jimmy’ll bring your stuff right out. You kids take care now.”

Angelica pulled tall grass growing nearby to feed the horse, while Giselle stared at her shoes, preoccupied. Will had made her a new pair the night before. They felt comfortable, but their colors and seams didn’t match. His own pair looked even worse. The shoe-making machine of Beverkenhaas was hard to master.

A truck full of alfalfa bales rumbled past, smelling like summer and making Will wonder if he’d be cutting hay alone that year. No one cared that they took grass from the vacant lots around Beverkenhaas, but it was going to be hard without his dad.

“Oh, look, children,” called a female voice. “Amish kids! Look at their big horsie and their homemade clothes. Aren’t they adorable?”

A bronze-skinned, athletic lady in a white tennis outfit and huge sunglasses came over with her two young children.

“Do you speak En-glish?” she said to Will very slowly.

“Ick kan Dutch spreken,” he answered jokingly.
I speak Dutch
. Realizing how this might have been misleading, he felt compelled to add, “And English.”

“Honey,” the lady called to her husband. “Come meet these nice Amish kids.”

“What’s ‘Amish?’” Angelica asked, but no one seemed to hear.

“Can we sit on your wagon?” the lady said, lifting her small children into the seat without waiting for an answer. “Oh, you have to take our picture!”

She thrust a complex digital camera at Giselle, who backed away in consternation.

“It auto-focuses,” the lady explained, pushing it into her hands. “You’ll see the picture you’re taking on the screen. Just push the button.”

While the lady and her husband posed next to their children with wide, gleaming, professionally whitened smiles, Giselle looked uneasily to Will and Angelica, holding the camera like it was a dead rat.

She narrowed her eyes warily. “Is it supposed to do this?”

The screen flickered radically, and it popped. A puff of black smoke came out, and she handed the ruined camera back to its owner, who gasped.

“I’m sorry,” Giselle said.

“It’s okay,” the lady said, trying to remain calm. “All you did was hold it.”

“I know.”

The lady’s face got stuck somewhere between “what the heck?” and “huh?” Thankfully their order was brought out, and the Steemjammer kids got in their wagon and left.

“What’s ‘Amish?’” Angelica repeated.

Will speculated that it meant someone with hair issues. Giselle just wished people would stop handing her electronic devices. This was the third one she’d broken that month.

***

On the way home, Angelica stood on the wagon seat, holding onto her brother’s shoulder with one hand and slinging rocks at fence posts with the other. THWACK! A crack shot, she rarely missed. Tucking another rock snugly into her leather sling, she spun it to the side, faster and faster. Because of her hair, she couldn’t use the standard overhead method, but that didn’t hold her back. With a snap of her wrist, she sent another rock flying.

They stopped at a dead tree that had fallen in the ditch and cut it into logs with a bucksaw they kept under the seat. Using a pulley and rope, they hoisted the timber into the wagon bed, which sank on its creaking iron springs from the weight.

Going down a narrow, country road, they collected “windfall” or limbs that had come down. The boiler consumed a tremendous amount of fuel, but they always found plenty of free wood to load into the automatic feeder, which could keep the firebox burning for several days.

“Want some?” Angelica said, breaking off pieces of chocolate and handing them out.

They were already on the second bar. Will knew he should have stopped her, that they needed to start pacing themselves. Autumn was near. After the apple harvest, the cold would shut down their garden. Then, there’d only be eggs and cream to trade.

In winter, his dad’s boiler repairing talents were in high demand, and that was when they got their best trades - except now he’d vanished. With their animals and steam-heated greenhouse, they wouldn’t starve. But when machines and tools started to break, Will had no idea how he’d get parts needed to fix them.

Stop worrying
, he thought.
Maybe Dad will be there when we get home.

As they slowly passed a cornfield, an overly large shadow on the ground caught Will’s attention, and he looked back. What he saw made no sense. A somewhat short but nevertheless menacing man wearing a leather cap with goggles hovered in mid-air, reaching at them with his hand.

Instinctively Will put an arm in front of his sister and drew back his fist, but the strange man smiled big and gracefully turned his reaching hand into an exaggerated wave. Furthermore, he wasn’t floating. His other hand grasped a rope ladder that descended from a
dirigible
that’d slowly and silently drifted up behind them.

Angelica gasped when she saw him and tried to say: “Rasputin!” She was so startled, however, that the word came out as an unintelligible squeak.

The man’s shiny green coat boasted a double row of brass buttons, decorative gold stitching, and epaulets on padded shoulders. With pale blue eyes, a pencil moustache and a pointed goatee, he could’ve stepped out of a photo from 1890.

“My young cousins!” he gushed with an English accent and exaggerated friendliness. “How wonderful to meet you at last!”

“Cousins?” Angelica asked.

“Why yes, I’m your father’s first cousin, Marteenus Steemjammer Skelthorpe.”

Will narrowed his eyes. “If you’re family, why were you peeking in our windows?”

“Peeking? Oh, that. I was merely trying to see if I had the right house. I’ve been looking for you for years.”

“Why don’t you speak Dutch?”

The man smile disarmingly. “My word, you’re suspicious.”

“So you don’t speak any?”

“Ya, Ick kan Dutch spreken. I also speak a little French and a smattering of German.”

He took off his cap and bowed his head. The children gasped as dark red kinky hair popped out. Three strong symmetrical cowlicks made it swirl over the top of his head and shoot straight out to the left almost a foot.

“Why haven’t we met you at family reunions?” Giselle asked, sensing Will’s suspicion.

“Your father hasn’t told you about me? No, of course he hasn’t, but there’s much I could tell you about
him
.”

“I don’t like how you were sneaking up on us,” Will challenged.

“A surprise, dear boy. I only meant to – whoops!”

A change in the wind began carrying him off.

“Regretfully I must tend to my airship,” he said with forced politeness. Pulling an envelope from his pocket, he dropped it. “Be a sport and see that your father gets that. Until we meet again, adieu.”

Scurrying up the ladder, he slashed a hanging rope with a shiny knife. A brown ballast sack full of sand fell to the ground with a thud. The airship, an oblong beige gas bag perhaps 150 feet in length, rose into the sky. From the gondola they heard a steam engine clatter to life as it began to spin a large wooden propeller.

“What a creep!” Giselle said.

Will craned his neck to watch the airship speed away. “He can’t really be our cousin, can he?”

“He has ‘Amish’ hair,” Angelica observed.

Will scowled. “I should have grabbed him and made him answer some questions!”

The girls stared at him wide-eyed. He took a deep breath and looked down. Obviously they hadn’t seen the green-clad man reaching for Angelica, which Will was sure he’d been doing.

“I’m not certain,” Giselle said delicately, “but I think that would have been ‘against the law.’”

“Yeah,” he begrudgingly admitted.

Kidnapping his sister and taking her away in an airship would have been illegal, too, he thought, but not wanting to upset them, he dropped it. Hopping down, he picked up the letter.

“Open it,” Giselle urged.

“No,” Angelica said. “It’s wrong to read other people’s mail.”

“If Dad’s back when we get home,” Will said, “then we hand it to him. Otherwise, we read it.”

***

Giselle hadn’t wanted to even think about her situation earlier. It stressed her too much, but as they neared Beverkenhaas, she decided to tell them what happened to her father, Deetricus Steemjammer. Henry’s twin brother, he was younger by about twenty minutes, and Will and Angelica called him Uncle Deet.

“It happened last week,” she said, staring at the slowly passing scenery. “The sleeping boat had sprung a leak. Mom was off sewing for people, and Dad sent me to the junk boat to get some tar. By the time I got back, he was gone. Vanished.”

She and her parents lived in a brightly painted cluster of houseboats in Muddy Creek Bay, off Lake Erie. The sleeping boat housed their bedrooms, while their junk boat, fashioned after the Chinese sailing vessel of the same name, was used for storage. The living boat had a parlor, dining room and galley or ship’s kitchen. The steam boat not only towed them around, it housed their boiler. When anchored, a network of pipes ran from it to their other vessels.

“Did it sink?” Angelica asked.

“No,” she said. “I figured Dad was busy below decks, so I patched it. But when I looked around, he was gone. I did hear a weird splash, but it was too far away from the boats to have been him.”

A stray thought caused Will to frown. “A splash? Know what that makes me think?”

“He didn’t fall in!” his cousin said defensively. “And even if he did, he’s a really good swimmer.”

“I don’t think he drowned. I meant that creepy guy and his airship.”

“Huh?”

“What if he kidnapped your dad, and the splash came from him cutting the sandbag so he could get away?”

Giselle furrowed her brow skeptically. “Is that even possible? He didn’t look that big, so how could he have carried my dad up a rope ladder?”

“I guess it was a dumb idea,” Will admitted. “What did Tante Yvette say?”

Their
Aunt Yvette
was Giselle’s mother.

“Not much,” she said bitterly. “They never tell us anything, except annoying little fairy tales to keep our minds busy. Don’t you hate it?”

Will wanted to nod. Part of him did hate it, but he was loyal to his parents and preferred not to criticize them. Angelica seemed relieved he didn’t answer.

“Anyway,” Giselle continued, “Mom’s totally freaked out. She detached the steam boat and went to Buffalo. One of her cousins lives there, and she thinks he might know something. I told her I’d stay with you and ask Uncle Henry to help. But now this.”