Adelsverein - The Gathering - The Book Locker

Adelsverein: The Gathering
There is no one’s army would want a decrepit old clockmaker! But
the boys — yes, they would want Friedrich and Johann in a few years,
if it came to pass, and I won’t have it. There is also the fact that
business has not been good. So many factories, so much
mechanization of things, so much change! And they will change,
whether we wish to change or not. There will be new rules and
repression of so-called dangerous thoughts brought down upon those
of us to dare to think about such matters! What to do, Magda, what to
do …”
“It is advised to take all that you can in a cart and sell the beasts
that pull it at the port,” Hansi answered decisively from the other end
of the room. Startled, Magda and Vati looked up. Liesel’s husband
stood in the doorway for a moment, with Anna in his arms, half
asleep. “And take apart the cart, and ship it with all your goods, since
a good one may be hard to come by in the wilderness.”
Magda regarded her brother in law with considerable surprise;
how long had Hansi been thinking the same things as Vati? He strode
across the room and sat himself down on the bench next to Magda,
settling Anna in his lap so that she curled up, sucking her thumb.
“Anna couldn’t sleep, and Liesel was nursing the little one,” he
added half-defensively, but he looked levelly at the two of them, all
diffidence and talk of the muck pile set aside. “I heard you talking, so
I came downstairs.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, before Vati finally
asked, “How long have you been thinking about emigration, Hansi?”
“A while,” he answered readily, and there was firmness in his
voice, and in his answer to Vati that Magda had never thought to see
in Hansi. He wasn’t impulsive; there was no dash to him. In a
thousand years he would never do anything that his neighbors and
family hadn’t already done before, but there it was. He had been
thinking long and seriously about emigration for that was the way
Hansi did things. “Go with us to Texas.” Hansi savored the words,
much as Vati had, and continued, “Everyone is talking about it in
Albeck these last few weeks. I thought about going myself, first
before we married. Then I thought about the two of us going together,
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