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Nepomuk’s heart passed through a scalding shame. He thought he was being named as the father. Immediately he was ready to argue that at this late date, what with his two remaining married daughters to think of (not to mention his wife, Eva!), how could he declare himself Alois’ father? These excuses, however, did not reach his mouth. At the last instant, he realized that Alois was only asking for Johann Georg to be named as his sire. Whereupon—old men being as ready as young girls to move on the instant from one extreme of emotion to the other—he was furious at Alois. His own son did not want him, Nepomuk, to be thought of as the father. It took another moment to recognize that Georg, having married Maria Anna, was the only one who could be used legally for this venture.
    In a farm cart pulled by two old horses, he journeyed with Alois and Romeder and two neighbors who had agreed to serve as witnesses all of the miles from Spital to Strones, then farther on a few miles to Döllersheim, all of it close to a four-hour journey on a narrow meandering carriage road impeded by many fallen limbs and a few uprooted trees, but still reasonably free of mud on this October day. (With mud, it might have taken eight hours.) On arrival, Johann Nepomuk came face to face with the particular priest he had no wish to remember. There he was, a very old priest now, shrunken in stature, yet still the priest who had scolded him for traffic with the vulva of a mare.
    This recollection was shared by the two men, even if there was not the smallest shift of expression between them. They were all present for the business at hand, Alois, Nepomuk, Romeder, and the two witnesses who had been brought along from Strones. Since none of them but Alois knew how to write, the others signed the document with an XXX. They said they had known Georg Hiedler and that “in their presence and repeatedly” he had admitted to being the father of this child. The mother had stated the same. They swore to that.
    The priest could see that, legally speaking, very little was correct. Each of the witnesses’ hands had shaken with a good bit of godly fear as they put down an XXX. One of them, the son-in-law, Romeder, could not have been five years old when Anna Maria died. Of course, she would have told all to the five-year-old! Moreover, Johann Georg was also long dead. Given such a dubious case, a more careful proceeding would be appropriate.
    The priest did what he had been doing for years—he certified the paper, even as he kept smiling with his old and toothless mouth. He knew they were lying.
    He would not, however, insert the date. On the yellow page of the old parish registry of June 1, 1837, he crossed out “Illegitimate,” put Johann Georg’s name in what had previously been the blank space, and smiled again. Legally speaking, the document was shaky, but it did not matter. Which church authority in Vienna would challenge such an alteration? The word was to encourage certified fatherhood no matter how late in life it arrived. Already in some districts of Austria, illegitimacy was up to forty births per hundred. Of that forty, could even half be free of one or another unmentionable family matter? So the priest, disapproving of these loose procedures even if he was bound to accept them, chose not to inscribe his own name. If it ever went wrong, he could disavow the paper.
    Then he spelled each of the witnesses’ names by choice, inasmuch as there was no agreement on orthography from province to province—one reason why Hiedler eventually became Hitler.
    Now that Alois had his new name, he decided to stop off for an hour in Spital rather than continue on immediately in Nepomuk’s cart to the railroad station at Weitra. The change from Schicklgruber to Hiedler was sufficiently agreeable for him to feel an upsurge in the happy region below his navel. This was, he knew from long experience, one of the gifts his