Black Pearls - Louise Hawes [16]
Still smiling in between breaths on his pipe, the rat-catcher was knee-deep in the chilly water of the Weser. He continued to play the strange music and the rats continued to follow him—right into the water. They leapt with a will into the river, paddled briefly, then sank with a chorus of sharp, outraged shrieks. Soon the water was black with them, chopped to a froth with their desperate splashing. The air around us rang with the shouts of everyone on shore. Father threw his cap against the sky, and I yelled until I was hoarse. It felt grand, indeed, to see the end of those long-tailed nightmares and to have something to cheer about at last.
It was not two days later that Father went back to see the mayor. The tax collector had paid us a visit and been turned away. "The rats are gone," Father told the man, who despite his huge girth seemed reluctant to demand what he'd come for. "Why should I give you money now?"
"The mayor promised the rat-catcher," the collector said. "Only yesterday, he gave his word."
"Then he should have given his money, too." Father shut the door in the poor man's face, rubbed his hands on his apron, and returned to work. But when the blacksmith and the baker decided to complain to the mayor that he was asking for too much money, Father took off his apron again and went with them. I was not sorry to see him go. The trip to town hall would surely give me time to finish my crutch. Hobbling as I was from place to place, I missed my wooden leg!
As it happened, I could have fashioned two crutches while Father was away. I worked happily for several hours, even adding a chain of grazing sheep along the shaft. Then, instead of wondering what was keeping him, I set off for the baker's the minute I was finished. As always, the beggar children were waiting in the alley by the shop. When I came out with a loaf for Father and me and a bag of buns for them, they sent up a great hurrah and gathered around me, all talking at once. "Here, Emmett!" one boy in a dirty vest cried. "Look how skinny I am!" He opened the vest and lifted his shirt to show me his belly. "Emmett, that's nothing," a smaller boy yelled. "That pig's belly is a mountain compared to my hungry stomach." He closed his eyes and sucked in the flesh under his ribs.
The girls in the group rolled their eyes but could not keep from laughing. They weren't about to show their bellies, so they tried a different tack: "How rude these ruffians are!" a girl named Gretchen scolded. Taller than most of the boys, she was not above cuffing the younger ones when they misbehaved. "If you want a sweet, your talk must be sweet," she told them, then turned to me. "Oh, Herr Emmett," she whined in a high, thin voice nothing like her normal tone. "How kind of you to buy those buns." She bent her long frame into a deep, awkward curtsy. "May I try one, pretty please?"
But it was Ilse, as usual, who won the first piece. She stood quietly in the middle of the pack, a shy little thing in a black cape and bonnet. When I dangled a raisin-filled bun above the rowdy crew, she did not raise her hands like the rest, though her hungry eyes followed the treat. So of course, I tore off a good half of the little cake and gave it to her. "Here, fräulein," I said, bowing from my crutch. "Gott segne Dich." God bless you.
Some of these children, I knew, had parents who sent them out to beg while they themselves spent the day drinking in the Green Boar or picking the pockets of those who did. Others had been orphaned or abandoned when their parents died or were sent to jail. These unfortunates tagged along with the rest for protection. But Ilse had a mother, she always made sure to tell me, who neither drank nor robbed. "Mein mutter sie wird zu himmel gehen." My mother is going to heaven. The poor woman, it seemed, was too ill to leave her bed, and like my own mother at the last, lay