The Amish Nanny (14 page)

Daniel grimaced, saying, “Yes, but plans are well under way to put the plant in right here, and the township isn't too happy about relocating to the alternate site unless they are absolutely forced to do so by the land and property commission. That's the government agency that arbitrates this sort of thing.”

Looking down at the map, I was reminded that while, again, this was all very interesting, it was happening several thousand miles away. Leaning forward, I urged Daniel to get to the part that involved Alice and me. He pointed to the property he'd marked with a
K
, the one that had the waterfall on it.

“At issue here is the piece of land on which the waterfall is located. It has a complicated history of ownership. Originally, this property belonged to a man by the name of Kessler, which is why I put a
K
here. But then, back in the late eighteen hundreds, Kessler emigrated to America. Before he left he sold the property to his next-door neighbor, a man by the name of Sommers, who already owned this bigger property I've labeled with an
S
. When Sommers bought this land from Kessler, the two men drew up an agreement that limited Sommers' ability to sell the property to anyone else other than a Kessler in the future. I can explain it in better detail later, but why don't I cut to the chase?”

I nodded, suddenly glad that he'd taken his time getting me to this point.

“To save this important historic site and block the hydro plant, the Wasserdorf Historical Society has hired a lawyer who needs me to produce a descendant of Kessler. For an even better chance at winning this fight, we also need to bring with us a descendant of Sommers.”

At that the hairs on my arm began to stand on end. Sommers. Thanks to Lexie's search for her birth family, one of the things that had come to light last spring was that we had an ancestor by that name who had lived in Switzerland.

I looked up at
Mammi
, who nodded and said, “That's right, Ada. He's talking about Abraham Sommers, my great-grandfather. I'm a direct descendant.”

“And…” Alice added, eyes twinkling, “guess who's a direct descendant of Kessler?”

“You?” I replied, my mind racing.

“Exactly. Frannie and I always knew that our great-grandfathers were next-door neighbors over in Switzerland, and that their daughters had emigrated together with the same group of Mennonites when they came to the United States. In fact, that's how she and I became friends in the first place. When she moved here from Indiana, she specifically looked me up because of the connection our families had shared in the past.”

“What neither woman knew,” Daniel said, smiling broadly, “was that one day they would be able to save a very important place in history from being destroyed, just by coming back to Switzerland and satisfying some legal requirements of the land and property commission.”

Alice clapped her hands and cried, “Can you believe it, Ada? For the sake of preserving our history, you and I get to go to Switzerland!”

M
y head spinning, I looked down at the map again and then up at
Mammi
.

“Is this Amielbach?” I gasped. “The place he's been talking about?”

Amielbach was a Swiss estate that had been owned by our ancestors and passed down through the generations to
Mammi
. She had sold most of it before I was born, retaining ownership of only one small parcel of land and a single cottage. As far as I knew, that cottage was the home of my birth mother, Giselle, who had lived there ever since she'd given me up for adoption and moved to Switzerland soon after I was born.

“Yes, dear,”
Mammi
said, “Daniel has been talking about Amielbach.”

“Is Giselle—”

“Giselle lives in a small cottage on the grounds there. If you look on the map, you can see exactly where. I spotted it earlier, before you got here.”

Heart pounding, I looked back down at the map.

“Do you see a little square along the edge?”
Mammi
asked me. She was struggling to stand, probably so that she could come point it out. Instead, I picked up the map and brought it to her, sitting beside her on the couch.

Sure enough, there was a small square, indicating perhaps a quarter of an acre in size, that sat just inside the larger
S
property, not very far from the border of the
K
property. It was so small I hadn't even noticed it before.

Curious, Daniel came over to see what we were looking at. When he realized what it was, he went back to his papers and dug through them, pulling out a single sheet.

“Okay, here we go,” he said, coming to stand by the couch. Looking through the paper from the other side, I could see that it was covered with words in boxes, and lots of arrows in between. “That property is owned by a Giselle Lantz, who bought it about twenty-five years ago. Now, Giselle is related to you people by…” His voice trailed off as he traced several arrows with his finger, and then he stopped short, looking at
Mammi
. “Oh! I'm sorry. Of course you would know this. She's your daughter.”

He smiled sheepishly, pink splotches appearing on his cheeks.

“Yes,” she said kindly. “When I sold the property, I made sure to retain that one small piece that held the cottage, and I signed the deed over to her.”

“Isn't it exciting?” Alice added. “Once we're there, you'll probably get to meet your Aunt Giselle.”

Looking at Alice's pointed expression and hearing her emphasis on the word “aunt,” I realized she knew the truth, that Giselle was more than simply my aunt, she was also my birth mother.

During Lexie's life-changing visit last spring, I had learned that the woman who had been my
mamm
my entire life wasn't, in fact, my birth mother. Twenty-four years ago, Giselle had given birth to me and then given me to her sister Klara and Klara's husband, Alexander, through adoption. Thus, in one fell swoop, my birth aunt and her husband had become my parents, and my birth mother had become my aunt.

Since that time of discovery I'd continued to refer to her as “Aunt Giselle” out of respect for my parents, the sake of family privacy, and the knowledge that legally she was indeed my aunt. But, in my mind, I now thought of her simply as “Giselle.”

Regardless of what I did or did not call her, more than anything I just wanted to see her. Face-to-face. In person. I wasn't sure what I wanted or why it mattered so much to me, but it was a dream that had been born last spring and grown steadily ever since. Now that it looked as if it might actually happen, I could hardly believe it. Turning to Daniel, I took a deep breath and then spoke.

“I'm in,” I said firmly. “Just tell me what I need to know.”

An hour later the four of us were still there in the living room going over this complicated property situation. While traveling with Alice to Switzerland and getting to meet my birth mother were both incredibly exciting prospects, I also knew that such a trip would drive a tremendous wedge between me and my mother, one that we might never be able to repair.

And yet given all of the changes in my life this past year, I knew in this moment that I had no choice but to press forward. In a sense, I felt as though I were stopped at a busy crossroads I'd never seen before. Either I could brave the traffic and drive my buggy to the other side, or turn around and backtrack to the only life I'd ever known. Given the choice, I was ready to take the risk.

Still, I needed to understand as much as I could about why Daniel needed us to go to Europe. Once
Mammi
and I were headed home and could speak privately, I would ask her how we should approach my parents about this. But whether
Mammi
ended up being the one to tell them or I did, either way I needed enough information so that I would be able to stand firm on the other reasons for the voyage.

And so around and around we had gone for the last hour, trying to sort everything out.
Mammi
and Alice had remained on the couch, though now Alice was doing some hand-stitching as she listened to us talk and added the occasional comment. Daniel and I were at the table, and he had cleared away the maps and books and replaced them with pen and paper. He seemed to be a visual person, so he'd tried to clarify more of the details for me by using various sketches and charts and doodles. But in the end, I thought it might be more helpful to grab a pen and some paper myself and simply write down the list of facts that made sense in an order that worked for me.

I understood about the family connections between
Mammi
and Alice and the two men who had been next-door neighbors in Switzerland in the eighteen hundreds. I also understood the conflict going on currently between the township that wanted to build a new hydro plant and the historical committee who wanted to preserve an important Anabaptist site. What I couldn't seem to grasp was how dragging two little old Amish ladies or their representatives halfway around the world could possibly solve that conflict. Trying again, Daniel laid it out for me as logically as he could, and so I started my list. I wrote:

Two pieces of land, one large and one small, sat directly beside each other
.

In 1877, the owner of the smaller piece, Alice's ancestor Ulrich Kessler, sold it to the owner of the larger piece
, Mammi'
s ancestor Abraham Sommers
.

When they made that transaction, they also signed a legal agreement that would limit Abraham's options should he ever want to sell that piece of land to anyone else
.

“Stop there,” I said. “What sort of limits did he agree to?”

“We're not certain about all of them,” Daniel said, “but so far we do know that the main restriction is similar to something we have here in America, known as what's called a ‘first right of refusal.'“

“Which is?”

“A legality that works like this: If Sommers ever wants to sell the land, he has to offer it to Kessler or his descendants first. If they say they
do
want to buy it, then Sommers has no choice but to sell it to them—at whatever price was specified in the agreement.”

“What if they don't want it?”

“Then Sommers is free to sell to whomever he wants, for whatever price he can get for it.”

I sat back, thinking about that.

“Why would Sommers ever make such an agreement? It doesn't sound very fair. I wouldn't make a deal like that. If somebody chose to sell me their land, then that should be the end of it. I ought to be able to do with it as I please.”

A strange noise came from
Mammi
's direction, and I looked over to see that she was sound asleep and lightly snoring. Alice looked as if she, too, might drift off at any moment, but for the time being, she was still with us, sewing away on a fabric potholder.

“This sort of agreement can be made for different reasons,” Daniel told me, “but I believe in this case it was probably an act of kindness done by a man who could well afford it.”

My eyes widened. At least that was good to know that great-great-great-grandpa Abraham had been a nice man.

To explain Abraham's kindness, Daniel recounted a little more Anabaptist history, describing how persecution in that region of Switzerland seemed to ebb and flow over the years. What a man was allowed to do freely at one time might get him arrested at another. And though executions stopped being enforced in the late fifteen hundreds, Anabaptists were still being mistreated and imprisoned three hundred years later. In fact, Daniel said, when Abraham Sommers was a young man, his own brother had become a Mennonite and ended up having to leave the country to stay out of prison.

Although there wasn't a large number of Mennonites left in the Emmental by the time Abraham moved there, there were still a few, including his own next-door neighbor, Ulrich Kessler.

“We know that a Mennonite was arrested for resisting the draft in 1875 and imprisoned at Thun. Once that happened, my guess is that Ulrich Kessler began to fear for his own sons, who were fast approaching the age of military service themselves. In 1877, Ulrich sold his land and moved his whole family to America. He probably didn't want to leave Wasserdorf and had hopes that the climate toward Anabaptists might soften in the future. I have a feeling that's why he wanted a first right of refusal on the property, so that if he or his children were ever able to return, they could buy back their family's homestead. Really, I doubt Abraham even needed the land. I think he just bought it so that Ulrich could afford to go and carve out a new life somewhere else.”