Cheryl Reavis (30 page)

“John Steigermann just noticed you were carrying again, that’s all.”

“Well, there is nothing funny in that,” she assured him.

“He gave me his congratulations—because here you have one on your hip and one coming, and he just wondered if I had any idea what was causing all these babes.”

“And you said?”

“Nothing much—”

“Frederich, what? What did you say!”

He grinned from ear to ear. “Oh, I said I knew what was causing them—but you didn’t!”

*   *   *   *   *

Like
The Prisoner,
this novel is based upon an obscure bit of local history, one especially interesting to me because it occurred in the community of my mother’s German forebears, who had emigrated into Piedmont, North Carolina from the Palatinate of Germany via Pennsylvania in the 1700s.

This particular incident came to light as a result of a high school class assignment that required each of us to search old church records for the “human element.” The terse account was simply this: At the end of a Sunday service, a man publicly and inexplicably withdrew his pledge of marriage to a woman of the congregation. The pastor then asked if someone else would be willing to marry her. Another man stood and said, “I will.”

Now what in the world was that all about? I wondered. I was hopelessly intrigued, and nothing would do but that I eventually create my own version of the occurrence, the “before” and the “after.” The fact that two of the old German churches and several of the early houses still exist in the area brought about an acute sense of place. My choice of a time for all this to happen was sparked by my empathy for my own great-great-grandmother, Catherine, who made the frantic trip to Richmond in 1864 to be with her wounded soldier husband, but who arrived too late.

I also used music to enhance a nineteenth-century mindset—the original soundtrack of Ken Burns’s
The Civil War
and
Rivers of Delight: American Folk Hymns of the Sacred Harp Tradition
by the Word of Mouth Chorus, particularly the poignant rendition of “Parting Friends.”

eISBN 978-14592-7529-4

THE BARTERED BRIDE

Copyright © 1996 by Cheryl Reavis.

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