TC47

Certainly the children themselves were inconsolable for days and weeks after their foster parents disappeared, but they came under the care of the staff at the B’nei Hannebim Historical Institute as legal wards of the Academy. There Ariel and Jael steadily prospered in mind and body.

The white parishioners of the Headwater Fellowship felt discarded by Lange nearly as much as the children did. The presence of Joshua seemed to solidify a principle of unity that faded when he left. The Stiffnecks tied their Church-mandated ponytails up into buns as a subtle act of separation from the native side. Even the self-deprecating label of Stiffnecks fell into disuse, replaced by “Bunners”. Ultimately they refused to worship with the Red Wing at all, but met in the Temple on Wednesday nights rather than Sunday mornings. Deacon Earl Warner oozed up out of the swamp to lead the Bunners, and with great misgivings Jashen was compelled to make him Elder.

Erik Zinter was one of the merry but homesick American doughboys who went into battle in September 1918 whooping with all the enthusiasm of a football team pouring out onto the field just before kickoff. Joining his team was six hundred aircraft and one hundred forty-four tanks led by Col. George S. Patton Jr, who would grow even more famous in the bigger war to come. Three thousand pieces of field artillery unleashed by the Entente side and countless bombs dropped from the air tore the landscape at St.-Mihiel into a pock-marked pigsty filled with mud.

Erik took two agonizing rounds from a Bergmann Maschinenpistole 18/1 that shattered the bone in his upper left arm. Doctors removed the bullets but the surgery was performed in less-than-ideal conditions. He developed gas gangrene while recuperating in the field hospital so his arm had to come off. Afterward Erik rode a train to Paris with a hundred other men, many in worse shape than he. The same train carried fresh soldiers to the Western Front, which over four years had become an efficient shredder of men.

Erik met a Red Cross nurse with a surname he recognized. While she changed his dressings Erik learned that Clara’s family, the Hursts, had stayed behind in Maryland while his own Zinters went first to Pennsylvania and again west. But after talking about their respective family trees for a while they discovered they shared the same great-grandmother. So they were second cousins. That and her all American girl-nextdoor good looks interested Erik. His unrelenting good cheer even after losing an arm interested Clara.

They could not talk for long but after he told her he wanted to stay in touch Clara passed along the address of her parents in Hagerstown. Their pen pal relationship blossomed into something they both thought was love.

Erik came home from the war with a bonus of sixty dollars and took a job in Headwater painting houses using his remaining arm. He laid his extra money aside for a wedding. In 1920 Erik took to the Yellowstone Auto Trail in a Model T and drove halfway across the country.

Maryland had no law against cousins getting hitched. Both of Clara’s parents thought Erik was a great kid so they wholeheartedly gave their blessing. But Erik’s own parents in Headwater were a much harder sell. Back home Erik instantly became the black sheep of the extended Zinter family for passing over a perfectly good (but horsefaced) local first cousin for an admittedly beautiful second cousin from back east. One of his aunts said, “Why, any heathen could do as much!”

In the economically frothy decade that followed even Clara found work. But by 1932 what builders there still remained found new applicants with two good arms suddenly willing to paint and Erik just wasn’t able to compete with that.