The Plum Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

important they were to her family’s survival. Vegetable scraps, fruit seeds, hard rinds of cheese, half-eaten crusts of bread, every leftover morsel was fed to them, especially when the ground was covered with snow or frozen and unyielding to chickens scratching for bugs. Christine and Maria cried when Mutti butchered a baby goat to feed the family, but they ate it anyway, because they never knew when there’d be meat on the table again. On weekends, people came out of the cities to barter with the farmers, trading their prized possessions—clocks, jewelry, furniture—for a dozen eggs, a slab of butter, or a scrawny chicken. Christine had even heard stories about city women being forced to search garbage for leftovers to feed their hungry children.
    Thinking of this, she suddenly remembered how lucky she and her mother were to have steady jobs at the Bauermans’, and a quivering shadow of anxiety passed through her. Her Vater, Dietrich, was forced to search for a new stonemason job every time one was finished, so his income level changed from month to month. In the past few years, there’d been less and less construction. For weeks at a time, he could do little more than hunt for rabbits, or plow a farmer’s field in exchange for a burlap bag of old potatoes or a bushel of sugar beets Christine’s mother could boil down into syrup to use for sweetener. There were more mason jobs in the large cities, but even if he was lucky enough to get the work ahead of a hundred other men, it took nearly all his pay to ride the train there and back.
    This past year, Christine knew that her part-time wages had made a difference in her family’s life, buying a crate of apples or a wheelbarrow full of coal. What if Isaac’s parents let her go just to keep them apart? What if they let her mother go too? She slowed, wondering again if their class difference would be what mattered in the end. But Isaac had promised her that it wasn’t important. More than anything, she wanted to believe him, so she pushed the thought out of her mind and walked faster.
    Now, a block from Kate’s house, she looked down at her shoes, hoping they hadn’t gotten too dirty from her hike in the hills. It’d taken her parents over a year to save enough money to buy them, and she’d only had them for two months. Her mother wouldn’t be happy if they were scuffed up and grimy. Her previous pair had been on her feet since she was thirteen, until her toes hung over the worn sole and the seams gave out. The new shoes she had on now were the same practical, high lace-up style everyone wore, but she loved the feel and look of the shiny black leather. As happy as she was to have them, she still felt bad having to pass down her “worn-down-in-all-the-wrong-places” shoes to fifteen-year-old Maria, who’d have to wear them that way until the shoemaker came to repair them with his miniature hammer and polish-stained hands.
    Realizing that now, along with everything else, she had to clean and polish her shoes too, Christine started to run, remembering that she wanted to tell Maria, at home helping Oma care for six-year-old Heinrich and four-year-old Karl, about Isaac as well. As it was, Christine barely had time to tell Kate about the kiss and the invitation, and she was hoping to ask if she could borrow another dress before rushing home to change and clean up.
    Kate’s three-story house sat at the very edge of the sidewalk, sandwiched between two equally large stone houses, pink-and-red geranium petals from six green window boxes speckling the cobblestones out front. Christine looked up, hoping to shout through an open window, but the red-painted panes were pulled closed. She knocked on the door and stepped back, running her fingers and thumbs over her long braid again and again, like a spinner twisting wool into yarn.
    After what seemed forever, the door opened, and Kate stood there, smiling, in a ruffled peasant blouse and blue dirndl, the bodice and hem