Dom curled up and started sticking his finger in the salsa and sucking it off. He stuck the jar out at Dennis, silently offering to share. Dennis stuck his finger in the salsa, licked, and stuck it back in.
". . . richtig und aufrichtig, wenn auch nicht gesetzlich." A man's voice, speaking German, came from the booth next to the one where the food had been hidden. "Diese verdammten Juden . . ."
The time period for confessions ended. Penitents and priests left the booths. Dom swept the carrots back into the hidey hole as fast as he could, tied the leather strap while Dennis crawled out, and made a run for it, trying to see who had been in the middle booth talking to Father Bissel for that last session. Father van de Enden had been in the last booth, next to the far wall. They managed to be in front of the chapel with their bikes by the time Father Stanihurst came out.
****
"It was a woman confessing to Father van de Enden," Dennis said the next afternoon after school. "Vrouw Mariekje who's married to that Dutch market gardener who put up all the greenhouses out by the grade school. It was Mrs. Drahuta in with Father Stanihurst. That means that the guy who thinks it's a good idea to burn down the Jewish church has to have been the dumpy man who crossed the street just when we got our bikes out of the rack. I don't know who he was. I've never seen him at St. Mary's, but maybe he goes to the chapel all the time."
"What do you think we ought to do about it?"
"I don't think we're supposed to do anything about it," Dennis said. "Confessions are secret."
"They're secret for priests," Dom protested. "I don't think that the 'seal of the confessional' applies to people who were sitting behind the booth just trying not to die of starvation. And he didn't say okay, exactly. 'Right and just, but not legal.' That's what the guy said-that it's right and just to attack the synagogue. It can't be. For one thing, the day care center's just across the street and a lot of little kids could get hurt. If he knows it's not legal, then he ought to know that it's not right, either."
"I dunno." Dennis got up and stuck his thumbs in his pants pockets. "It's not legal to be a Catholic in England. Father Stanihurst told us about that. But it's right." He paused. "Isn't it?"
"I expect so." Dom leaned his bike against the wall. "Yeah, it's got to be. It's always right to be Catholic, but that doesn't mean that other folks don't have a right to think the way they do. At least, that's what Dad says."
"I don't think we ought to say anything to anybody," Dennis concluded. "For one thing, we'd have to admit that we were behind the confessionals, and we'd end up in a million gazillion gallons of trouble ourselves."
****
Nicholas Smithson, otherwise known as Father Nick, realized that if adults ever gave up, it would take only one generation for the world to revert to barbarism. Or, at least, to revert to a worse level of barbarism than it had already attained in the Germanies of the 1630s. Wherefore, he now taught the English-language CCD classes for ten through twelve year old children at St. Mary Magdalene's in addition to his research and all the other extra work that came with the Lenten season.
He paused just outside the door of the classroom. Most of the kids were already here-the English-language class included not just up-timers and foster children of up-timers, but the offspring of meandering down-time English and Scots Catholics, an occasional Pole or Bohemian, a few Italians, a sparse representation of French and Walloons, and even a few German children from intact families who had decided that they would rather speak English all the time, or at least as much of the time as their parents would let them get away with it.
"That's just gross," Maria Pohl was exclaiming.
Father Nick paused a minute to place her. Oh, yes. The stepdaughter of Ingram Bledsoe, the up-time piano manufacturer.
"Gross, gross, gross," Ottilia Halbach chanted.
He had to agree with her assessment.
"Naw, it's not," Aloys Carroll answered. "It's got to be divine planning that Affenfleisch has exactly the same number of syllables as monkey meat. That's got to mean that God really wanted it to be translated."
"Yeah," Thilo Scharfenberg yelled. "Gro? like great. Go, God, go!"
Father Nick flinched.
He had a map on the wall of his office. A map with up-time, plastic handled, stick pins in it. He'd borrowed a box of them from Colette Carroll, Aloys' adoptive mother.
Aloys had kin in Silesia and Bohemia both, but neither family had objected when his soldier stepfather had been killed in the Battle of the Crapper and his mother had signed adoption release papers before dying at Badenburg the same year.
Colette insisted that Aloys and his half-sister keep in touch with their blood relatives, which meant that there were pins in eastern Silesia, western Bohemia, and closer by in Schleusingen where the German translation of Greasy, Grimy, Gopher Guts had shown up.
Then there had been the clandestine priest who had been turned into the English authorities, barely made it to the coast, and ended up dropped off at Danzig when he really intended to head for the English College in Louvain. Picking up the son of a minor Polish noble to accompany to France, thus managing to pay his way, Father Mulhollin had stopped off in Grantville to see Father Stanihurst. The boy was with him, of course. There was now a Polish translation of the song, known to be in at least three Jesuit collegia in the Commonwealth.
And a Latin translation in Louvain. That had already spread to Salamanca and Venice.
Aloys was saying to one of the other students. "Bet ya' can't put it into French. It's the wrong kind of language."
"Can, too," Blaise answered.
"Ugh," his sister Jacqueline said.
Thilo threw an eraser at her.
Father Nick squared his shoulders and walked into the room.
****
"I'm worried about those two boys," Father Nick said to Father Kircher after CCD class. "Dom Grady and Dennis Kovar. They sat quietly through an entire CCD class. No interruptions, no mischief, no inappropriate comments, no expressions of desire for the gruesome and gory. The only thing either of them asked this week is that Dom had a question as to why confessional booths down-time have curtains in the front, when they didn't up-time."
"I sent them out to serve vespers at St. Elizabeth's last week," Kircher answered. "Maybe they're coming down with whatever germ was causing tonsillitis there. What did you tell them about confessional booths?"
"Before I could open my mouth, Thilo Scharfenberg announced that it's because down-timers like it that way and there are a lot more down-timers than up-timers-even in Grantville now. By the time I managed to quell the resulting dispute, they all had to leave for junior choir practice."
"Maybe next week. What would you have told them?"
"Pretty much the same thing, I'm afraid. The Council of Trent isn't that far in the past and Vatican II hasn't happened. With the Holy Father's current troubles . . . and Tino Nobili on the church board . . . well, the confessionals have curtains."
****
Two of the proudest new recruits to the SoTF National Guard, Otto Bu?leben and Melchior Engelhaupt, led out their companies under the watchful eyes of the sergeant. Moving out into the road, almost without thinking, they broke into the fine marching song that they had learned from their younger brothers.
"Und ich, mit keinem spoon."
Jessica Hollering, the commander's adjutant, watching from the sidelines, shuddered, wondering how she could feel so old when she wasn't much past thirty. Most of these kids they would be sending out to fight in the next campaign-the one that everybody pretty much knew would be coming next summer or fall-weren't more than a half-dozen years older than she had been when she learned that song. All by itself, she thought, it would ensure that in Amideutsch, "spoon" was going to substitute for Loffel. Not to mention that the German version inverted "french-fried eyeballs" into "fried French eyeballs."