Elizabeth nodded. “I was over to see them yesterday. We’ve been going through the girls’ things and we had some more dresses for them.”
George nodded and looked out the window to where Jimmy was plowing. “I heard. Tilda is finally adjusting to the situation and starting to really take charge. I haven’t had to actually do anything except run the plow for a week. She’s doing everything.”
“She’s worried about her husband. And you,” Elizabeth said softly. “She told me that you were overdoing it.”
“I’m not overdoing it, Beth. I’m just doing what I can to keep what’s mine.”
Elizabeth frowned, but nodded. “Just don’t kill yourself, George. Those people need you.”
“I know, Beth. And you know what? It’s a good feeling. A very good feeling.”
* * *
George’s health problems were a secret that he carefully kept from Anna and Tilda. He made regular trips into town, riding the tractor since the gas for his truck had been siphoned off by that pirate Sterns and his men for the army. Doctor Adams kept track of his blood pressure and coagulation factors, substituting one medicine or another when his prescribed medications ran out.
Anna’s father hovered near death for weeks. The damage that had been done to him was slow to heal, but eventually it did, and George was introduced to Jurgen Braun.
Jurgen listened in silence to what his wife and daughter had to say about the man who had taken them in. He was reluctant to stay in George’s house, fearing the debt that his family was accumulating with the obviously rich man, but found that he had little choice in the matter. He was free of the doctors, but still so weak that he could hardly stand on his own.
The planting was done long before Jurgen joined them. Seedlings were sprouting and George joined Tilda and Anna in the fields, hand weeding the tender young plants. It was a chore for George’s back, and as often as not he spent his evenings cuddled up with a heating pad.
Jurgen was in the guest room that George had tried to get Tilda into, and Tilda had finally moved in with him. That still left just three of the six bedrooms occupied, and George soon had other boarders as well.
After the Battle of Badenburg, or the Battle of the Crapper as it was irreverently called, he was joined by four more families, and Anna moved in with her parents. The men who joined George and the Brauns were all farmers who had been pressed into service with Tilly’s mercenaries. The women were their families and camp followers. George shook his head at that, but kept his peace. Strange times made for strange arrangements. The big farmhouse that George and Mary had rattled around in started to seem mighty small with eleven adults and thirteen children crowding it.
George’s pastureland was also pressed into service. The army had captured horses and oxen along with the men, and an assortment of other farm animals that ranged from chickens to goats and pigs. The chickens were scrawny things compared to the birds that had come through the Ring of Fire with the Americans. The pigs and goats were, well, pigs and goats. George’s new boarders quickly cobbled together pens and a chicken coop from supplies that had been lying around the barn since before George and Mary had bought the place.
The barn was cleared of its decades-long accumulation of junk, often yielding odd treasures. The people who had owned the farm before George and Mary had been real farmers. Buried among the clutter and junk were farm implements that the Germans understood. Good steel shovels. Steel rakes and hoes. A scythe with a broken handle. Old tack, with its leather brittle from age and neglect. The men and women tsk-ed at the state of George’s tools, but kept their mouths closed. Tilda and Anna had told them of the wonderful machine that could plow a whole field in half a day. If George could let good tools rust this way, it must be a wonderful machine indeed.
The Brauns’ farm was also being tended now that there were enough hands to tend it, and soon George found himself not being allowed to do anything but drive the tractor. It was still his chore because he was the only one who knew how all of the attachments worked, but the men and women who were living in his house insisted that it was more than he should have to do. After all, he was their host, and they saw it as their duty to tend to his lands while they lived under his roof. He was also just about the oldest person that any of them had ever met, and they were genuinely concerned about him.