Anna's Crossing: An Amish Beginnings Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

down and up. Anna’s grandmother gave her a patch to wear on her good eye to make the lazy one work, but nothing helped. Felix had perfected a way to get even with Catrina: whenever she talked to him, he would act flustered, as if he didn’t know which eye to look at, which made her all the madder.
    Catrina Müller was the only blight on this trip.
    No. There was one more. His worry about his mother. She was quiet and sad and would eat hardly at all. And she was always tired. She would sleep the day away if Anna let her. When she was awake, there was fear in her eyes, fear of the far-off. Felix did what he could to cheer his mother up, but nothing seemed to help. Anna said that being reunited with his father was the only thing that would help his mother. But that was still a long time away.
    Tonight, Felix stayed up practically all night long picturingwhat lay ahead. First, he considered the other side of the world: America. It was hard to have an idea of what it would be like—in his mind, the world he knew in Ixheim kept fanning out around him. So he would shift his imagination to the world nearly at hand—the sea journey. He saw himself high in the crow’s nest on the ship, shielding his eyes from the sun with one hand, searching, searching, searching for the first sign of land. He spotted pirates and whales, and the captain praised his keen eyesight. He shimmied down the long poles, just like the other sailors did, and climbed the ropes like a monkey. Even better, he saw himself behind the big wheel in a ferocious storm, saving the ship from running aground.
    All winter, Johann had read stories of sailing on the high seas, spinning tales and igniting his imagination of what the journey to the New World would be like. Whenever he thought of Johann, dozens of times a day, his stomach hurt. When he had something he wanted to tell Johann and had to remind himself that his brother wasn’t here anymore, his head hurt. When he thought of all that Johann was missing, his heart hurt.
    One thing hadn’t changed. Felix would see his father at the end of this adventure. He imagined his father—a big, tall man with a long salt-and-pepper beard—waiting on the dock for their ship to sail in. Felix would spot him first, naturally, and gallop down the gangplank into his arms, stretched out wide for his son to run into them. Everything would be all right again.
    Almost everything.

3

    June 29th, 1737
    There were so many rivers here, fast-flowing streams in a hurry to wind around the city triangle of Rotterdam and spill into the sea. Anna trailed along in the line of Amish who followed Christian Müller, and remembered that Johann had told her on a cold winter afternoon that Rotterdam was once nothing but a small fishing village. “Now it’s the main access from Europe to England.”
    And now to America.
    Anna had never been to a city. She had never been anywhere but her small German village. Now, standing on a rise that overlooked Rotterdam, looking out at the great hulls of ships in the harbor, the tall buildings that impaled the smoke and steam and heat haze, listening to the cacophony of shouting people and squeaking chains, she didn’t know whether she found it beautiful or frightening. It was a much bigger world than she had thought possible.
    Today, at long last, they were finally going to board the ship and set sail for the New World. Georg Schultz had been surprisingly true to his word. Yesterday, their household belongingshad been placed in the hold of the ship for ballast as Christian and Josef Gerber and Isaac Mast counted everything.
    The only belonging Anna cared about was her rose, wrapped carefully in burlap that she moistened with water each day. This rose would not be kept deep in the ship’s dark hold. She kept it with her, in a basket by her side, at all times.
    As they left the tent city to head toward Rotterdam’s harbor, Anna noticed a group of women drenching their dirty linen in the river and slapping