The girl had set straight up when Elizabeth spoke, and looked confused. Elizabeth pointed to the girl, then to the ground at her feet and repeated the three German words. “Kommen unten madchen.”
The girl was looking perplexed, but she climbed down the ladder. She shyly stepped up to Elizabeth and said, “Wer sind sie?”
That was the first calm thing that George had heard her say, and he almost knocked Elizabeth down reaching for the dictionary. “What’d she say?”
“Hold your horses, George,” Elizabeth snapped. “Let me look. Ver sind zee.” She looked, but couldn’t find the word ver. Then she looked at the pronunciation guide. “W is pronounced V. Wer, translates as ‘Who’. Sind translates as ‘are’. Zee translates as—see. Ocean or Sea. That can’t be right. Lets try sea. Nope, that ain’t it either. Sei. Looks like ‘be.’ Sie could be ‘she’, ‘them’, or ‘they’. Who are they?” George and Elizabeth looked at one another and shrugged.
“How about ‘Who are you?'” George suggested, and Elizabeth nodded.
“As good a question as any.” Turning to the girl, she patted her chest. “Elizabeth. Elizabeth.” Then she turned to George and patted his chest. “George. George.” Looking at the book, she flipped a few pages. “Was. Was? Oh, I forgot. Vas,” flip, “ist,” flip, “euer,” flip, “name. Was ist euer name, madchen?”
“Anna. Ich heisse Anna.”
“Glory be,” George muttered as he rolled his eyes toward the sky. “Her name is Anna.” Looking at Elizabeth, he grinned. “Ask her where she’s from.”
During the next hour they learned that she was from, “over there.” The men who were chasing her were, “mercenary pigs.” If they had caught her she would have been, “raped and killed.” George grew angry at that and looked back toward the south. Then the girl whispered something to Elizabeth that he didn’t catch.
“What did she say?”
Elizabeth started to open the dictionary to look it up, but stopped. She hadn’t raised three daughters and ten granddaughters without seeing that facial expression and posture hundreds of times. “George, get out.”
“Why?”
“Because there are some things that a gentleman leaves a lady to do in private.” Elizabeth glared at him and he backed away.
“Well, all right, you don’t have to get nasty about it,” he muttered as he walked away. “Bossy females.”
Elizabeth knew the Blanton farm well. She and Mary had spent many an afternoon in the garden complaining about their menfolk. She knew exactly where the toilet in the barn was, and she quickly led Anna to it. She had banished George because the toilet stall was just that: a horse stall with a toilet in it. It had been built that way because there was normally only one, or at most two people in the barn at any given time. And since it was mostly men, they usually had their backs to the rest of the barn anyway.
Anna looked at the white porcelain fixture with a mixture of awe and confusion written clearly across her face. Elizabeth almost laughed. “What did you expect, a board with a hole in it over a hole in the ground?” It didn’t bother her at all that Anna couldn’t understand her. She walked forward and lifted her skirt, then took care of her own needs first. Then she flushed the toilet and waved Anna toward it.
The girl was clearly unsure, but also clearly about to burst. The feel of the smooth, cool plastic seat was a surprise from the look on her face. When she was done, she pushed the handle and watched the water swirl away. Her eyes were wide as she turned back to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth had been busy with the dictionary while Anna had been occupied, and said, “Kommen mit mir.” She hoped that it really meant, “Come with me.” From Anna’s reaction, it did, and the two of them walked up to the house. George opened the door as they climbed the steps and ushered them through, closing and locking the door behind them. “Phone’s working, Beth.”
“Oh, good. I have to call Jimmy.” Elizabeth quickly grabbed the phone and called her son. She related the details of what they had found out about the girl, chattering a mile a minute.