Chapter 17
The Farmer's Daughter and the Traveling Salesman
In those days with the roads rutted and washed out by the first hard rain, unless expanding their routes and/or enjoying being stuck in the mud, traveling salesmen didn't stray and venture out much further than a few miles past the city limits. There were plenty of farms bunched together near the towns that they didn't have to travel too far for them to sell their wares. Yet, with money in short supply, farmers were a hard sell and salesmen had to travel further out to new territories to make their quotas. While returning to their home base to resupply, whatever was left in their wagons they sold to the city's residents at discount prices. Those who needed goods waited to catch the traveling salesman on the way back while hoping that what they wanted was still on his wagon and at a reduced price.
Based on the motto that if it wasn't broken they didn't need a new one and if it was broken they could fix it, the farmers that lived further away from the city had grown accustomed to being self-dependent and self-reliant. Using the handed down tools that their father's and grandfather's used, they preferred the old, worn things to the new, unproven ones. Anything shiny, fancy, or new fangled wasn't for them. Educated consumers who relied on their commonsense, they weren't much of the shoppers and preferred making the things they needed instead of buying what they didn't have and certainly didn't need.
Farmers traveled to Munich every other month to load their wagons with all the supplies that they needed and that they couldn't make themselves. As if squirrels loading their nests with food for the long, difficult snowy season, so long as they had the money, farmers took two wagons to town to get them through the winter. The only time they changed their routine and made an unscheduled trip to town, was when something broke that they couldn't fix or was when someone was hurt and they needed a doctor. Farmers could fix mostly anything but sometimes even they had to relent, order from the catalog, and wait for months until what they needed was shipped from the factory in Berlin, Frankfurt, or Heidelberg.
A long way from home, Otto's horse slowly pulled his wagon loaded wagon. Careful where to put his spokes, he didn't want to break an axle this far away from town. When he spotted Rachel in the distance, he changed his course and nudged his horse in her direction. Acting oblivious to him, she was outside sweeping the front porch. Only, as soon as she saw his wagon, hoping he'd stop and talk, so lonely that she'd even talk to his horse, a game she played, she ran outside while pretending that she was too busy sweeping to notice him. He continued moving his horse and wagon forward nearly up to the front steps before she turned to acknowledge him and before he began talking to her.
With her long, lush, chestnut hair, rosy cheeks, and shapely figure, having already traveled miles without seeing anyone, no doubt, the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, she was a sight to behold in the morning light. When most women he's seen her age are bursting with a baby on the way and surrounded by a brood of dirty and unruly kids, or are too obese from overeating, by the mere sexy sight of her, she made his jaw drop and his cock harden.
Normally up before the light of dawn, Olga was still upstairs sleeping, after being out in the barn most of the night again. Having gotten a late start, her father and brother were somewhere out in the fields working and wouldn't be home until lunch. If she wanted it, she had hours to be alone with a man she didn't know. For the first time in her life, as if a woman left alone in a shoe store, she was alone with a man she had never met before. Shocking for her to dare talk to him without her father and/or brother there as her escorts and protectors, she was wicked in her desire for a man, any man, even him.
"Hi, how are you?" He climbed down from his wagon. He removed his hat and looked skyward, when she didn't answer. "It's going to be a hot one today. I don't remember a summer this hot," he said looking at all of her as if she was standing there naked.
"Hi," she said resting her hands, her chin, and her opinion of him on the top of her broom handle.
"Is your husband around?"
He drank her all in as if she was a cold beer on a hot day. He looked all around her. Twitchy and fidgety, he appeared dangerously nervous. He appeared overly anxious. He appeared sexually interested.
Having never been with a man when alone before, she was unable to read the signals that she needed to tell him to leave and to be on his way. Only, in the way that he was looking at her, it would take the business end of a shotgun for him to leave. Generally not answering questions, especially personal questions posed from a stranger, she answered him anyway.
"I'm not married," she said looking at him as if he was a potential husband, while wondering if he was married.
He was good looking enough, older than her brother but younger than her father. Wearing his best city clothes, his clothes were different from the dirty overalls her father and brother wore every day. Used to being alone, other than being with her immediate family, it was a real treat to have someone to talk to, especially someone from the big city. Telling her that it's too dangerous for them to take her there, a place she had never been but always wondered about, when her father goes to the city, he goes alone or with her brother. She figured they got drunk and paid whores to sleep with them, probably the reason why they never took her along with them.
"As if my horse was on a mission to take the road least travelled and to put my life in a new direction, it's enchantingly odd how I found myself in close proximity to you. Here alone with you in this vast farmland, a wilderness of plowed fields punctuated with cow pies, occupied by more animals than people, this is a serendipitous meeting, indeed."
Not sure if he was complimenting her, making fun of her, or insulting her, he talked fast and funny with words she didn't always understand their meaning but figured out when he used them in his sentences. Unlike her home schooled father and dimwitted brother, he was educated, cultured, and sophisticated, where she wasn't. They didn't educate women in the way they educated men back then. Yet, regardless of her lack of formal education, she was holding her own in the conversation. Taught by her mother, unlike her brother and her father and unlike most people of the period, as if reading and writing was a secret language available only to the rich, she was able to read, write, and cipher.
Watching his movements and paying attention to his darting eyes, she could tell that he had a rough side to him. No doubt slick, he was as crafty as the fox her father has been trying to catch, before he eats anymore of their chickens. Now that he's here standing in front of her, obviously, this was him and certainly he was the one, the type of man that her father warned her about.
Fast with his mouth, he was probably just as fast with hands and fingers too. It was men like him, men who cheated farmers out of their money, when they paid them cash money for a deposit never to see him again. Wise country folk, as their barometer to someone set out to steal from them, no one but a criminal would stray this far away from the city. It wasn't safe for man, woman, or beast to travel these roads alone, especially in times so desperate after so many men were displaced by machines and out of work.
These were desperate and dangerous times. Carpetbaggers and scallywags littered the countryside preying on hick farmers. Then, in the way that Robin Hood controlled Sherwood Forest with his band of merry men, there were the murderers and thieves that lived in the Black Forest just waiting for someone to travel unescorted through their domain.
Nonetheless, what comes around goes around and even though these dishonest salesmen were intent on stealing from farmers, these were the type of men who were preyed upon too. These were the type of men who suddenly went missing, their pockets emptied and their horse sold and wagon and wares stolen while vultures cleaned their bones of all evidence of them. If she figured him for carrying a gun, she'd be right. Between snakes and varmints, the four legged and two legged kind, everyone carried a gun back then, a pistol, a shotgun, and a rifle.
"Who owns the farm?"
"My father."
Suspicious of strangers and taught not to volunteer information unless asked and even then taking care what to say and when to say it, even though she was eager to have a conversation, she divulged very little.
