Benny stopped playing, leaned back, and stretched his arms. “Hi’ya, Ed. Meet Minnie Hugelmair. Minnie, this guy here is Ed Piazza. If anything happens to me, head for Grantville and ask for him. Play something—keep ’em entertained.” He handed his fiddle over to the girl.
As Minnie started a skipping rendition of “Wildwood Flower,” Benny said, “Y’know, Ed, if you felt like it, you could radio down to Grantville and ask someone to bring me up my autoharp when they’re coming. Dave and Doreen have got the key to my bedroom. It’s in there. I rented out the rest of the place. We’re doing pretty good here. I think we’ll stay to the end of this foofara, so there’ll be time for it to catch up with me.”
“Sure, Benny, I can do that. People go back and forth every day, so it won’t take long.”
“Minnie should do real good on the autoharp.” Benny studied his calluses. “It might be that you’ll be hearing from her ex-boss. I helped her run away.”
“Might be?”
Benny grinned. “I don’t guarantee he’ll figure out that I’m the one who helped her. He didn’t seem to be the sharpest knife in the drawer. I expect he’s more likely to think it was a young guy who wanted to put his hand up her skirts than an old guy who wanted to put her hand on a fiddle bow. But anyway, he was as mean as a generous skunk and she’s better off working for me, even if she was indentured to him for another three years.”
“Where were you when you, ah, provided this assistance to a damsel in distress?”
“Minnie wasn’t distressed. Minnie was mad. He’d promised to pay out her wages yearly and went back on the bargain—said that according to the law, he didn’t have to pay until her indenture was up. She only stole what he owed her—not a pfennig more. Well, I watched to make sure that’s all she took. Left to herself, she can be a lying little sneak, but what can you expect? She’s the first real, live, foundling I’ve ever come across. I thought that was real interesting. She’s going to be the best fiddler I’ve ever taught. Oh, the other? Somewhere up around Halle, on the other side of the river. I’d hitched a ride on a barge.”
Somewhere up around Halle, on the other side of the river equaled Saxony. Mentally, Ed moved the concept of possibly needing to bail Benny out to a slightly higher rung on his ladder of priority items for the Department of International Affairs.
Waving to them both, he picked up his beer and joined Cavriani, who had acquired two bratwurst as well as a beer, plus two of Ed’s staffers for company. Ed joined them happily. Among the advantages of being a Roman Catholic “personal observer” at a Lutheran conference was that he never had to sit among the head table guys when the topic was theology. They only needed him when the subject veered into politics. Behind him, he could hear that Benny was handling the fiddle again. Minnie started to sing “Coal Miner’s Blues.” By the time the lunch break was over, they’d made it through “Bury Me Beneath the Willow” and a bilingual version of “When the Roses Bloom in Dixie Land.”
They had also attracted a new audience that Ed recognized—the delegation of Tuebingen theology students. Minnie started to sell music again, while Benny treated them to “San Antonio Rose.”
* * *
It was hard, hard, hard to go back to Professor Osiander, who, when they slid into their seats a few minutes late, was announcing that: “Christ, who is the purest bridegroom of His church, does not share His love, as expressed in the sacrament, with those who have vain and blasphemous opinions.”
Osiander explained the rationale which had led the Tuebingen faculty to this conclusion in the most minute detail, with frequent references to the Concordia Triglotta, throughout the afternoon. He defined “church” and he defined “sacrament.” He defined “vain” and he defined “blasphemous.” He advanced comparative instances of usage of the words in the Bible, both in Hebrew and in Greek, along with variant translations into Latin and German.