Four Little Teeth and a Whole Lot of Talk
Fiction inspired by the history and memory of small town gossips
| Part 1 of 1 |
Release Date: April 28, 2026
Four Little Teeth and a Whole Lot of Talk
In every town there is one story that refuses to lie down and be sensible. Around here, that story belongs to the area called Devil’s Bluff and the child who, depending on who is telling it, either spoke German on the day he was born or merely cried in such an educated way that it sounded like a word.
Devil’s Bluff is not much of a bluff and even less of a devil, just a limestone rise on the south side of town where the road is always a little worse than you remember. The German settlers who came in the 1850s took one look at the crooked trees and the way the fog sleeps there and decided the name was accurate enough, so it stayed. Our people brought many trunks and more opinions from the old country, and both have been hard to empty.
The parents in this story were respectable Rhineland folk who arrived with a featherbed, a good coffee mill, and a Lutheran catechism that had seen better arguments. The husband was a careful man who counted every seed potato twice; the wife the sort who apologized to the cow if she pulled too hard on its tail. No one in the congregation could name a single wicked thing they had ever done, which of course made them perfect candidates for a scandal.
The scandal, as these things do, began with something very small: a peddler and a rosary.
He came up the Bluff one gray afternoon with two suitcases of holy objects and unholy prices. He tried a cross on the husband, who said he already had enough burdens. He tried a rosary on the wife, who, tired and heavy with child and temper both, said, “I would rather have the devil in my house than one more thing to dust.” The words went off like a shotgun in the listening air.
The peddler, who understood the worth of a good line, is said to have answered, “Then you shall have him, Madam,” with a bow worthy of a stage. By supper it was being told in three kitchens, and by Sunday it had reached the ears of every woman who owned a broom.
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A month later, when the wife’s time came, her husband went clattering into town before daylight to fetch the midwife. That was Frau Weiss, whom everyone called “Mutti Weiss” 1 when they were grateful and “that woman” when she had opinions about how often a baby ought to be washed. She had come from Germany years before with a black valise and the look of someone who knew exactly how many ways things could go wrong and still turn out right.
On that March morning, she followed him out past the church, along the frozen ruts, and up toward the Bluff, the wagon wheels complaining in two languages. She would later say there was nothing unusual about the sky or the air, which did not stop anyone from improving that detail in the retelling.
The birth itself was, by her account, straightforward. The wife labored long, the husband tried not to walk to town, and Mutti Weiss boiled water, arranged towels, and told the usual lies: “Just one more pain, Liebchen, 2 then you’ll rest,” that sort of useful falsehood. The boy slid into the world red and furious, with all his fingers and toes in their usual places.
What was not usual were the teeth.
When the child opened his mouth to protest his eviction, the candlelight flashed on four small white letters in his gums. They were not full teeth, not the sort for biting bread, but they were certainly more than any self-respecting newborn is supposed to bring along. The husband swore under his breath. The mother whispered a prayer. Mutti Weiss narrowed her eyes the way she did when confronted by anything that smelled of trouble or poor hygiene.
Now, some midwives would have crossed themselves and kept their mouths shut, but Mutti Weiss had delivered babies on cold ships and in hot attics and knew more about the human body than the men in three counties combined. She had, in fact, seen one child born with a single tooth, years before on a farm with a leaky roof. That child had grown up to be a perfectly ordinary man who drank beer and missed church. Still, four was a different matter.
As she lifted the boy to give him the customary encouragement to breathe, he let out a sound that stopped the room. It was not the thin, startled wail they expected, but a rounded syllable. The mother, pale and exhausted, later swore it was “Licht”– light. The father insisted it was nothing but a sort of dignified squeak. Mutti Weiss would only say, much later and under questioning, that it “could have been mistaken for a word by anyone with a lively imagination and not enough sleep.”
But imagination is one crop the Bluff has never lacked.
By the time the neighbor woman – there is always one – arrived with broth and curiosity, the story already had its legs under it. She saw the teeth for herself, which was more than enough. By evening, it was being said at the pump that the Devil had taken the peddler’s joke at face value and delivered himself in the form of a child with premature dentistry and a command of the German tongue.
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To be fair, our people do not need much encouragement in these matters. In the old country, a baby with teeth was as good as a newspaper headline. Some said it meant the child would be a great leader, some a troublemaker, some that he would not live to see his first Christmas. Others, stretching back to darker folktales, whispered of vampire kin and demon seed. One proverb ran: “Ein Kind mit Zähnen kommt nicht älter als sein erstes Jahr,” 3 which is a cruel thing to say about anyone born vulnerable, but superstition has never bothered with kindness.
Devil’s Bluff put its own seasoning on that stew. By the end of the week, the peddler had been promoted from damp little man with a suitcase to a mysterious figure with eyes like coals, and his offhand remark about the devil had acquired gestures, a foreign accent, and occasional thunderclaps.
Through all of this, the child himself did what most infants do: slept badly, demanded milk at unreasonable hours, and offered the occasional smile that convinced his mother he was an angel and his father that he was, at the very least, someone worth of buying boots for later.
As he grew, the teeth replaced themselves with the proper set, and for a time it seemed that the tale might wear out. The boy ran between the houses, speaking German to his grandmother and English to the chickens, which did nothing to discourage the notion that he was gifted. He asked questions that made older men shift in their chairs. He had the clear, unsettling gaze of small children and very honest judges.
When he reached five, he could recite his catechism and count his father’s coins, which, in a more practical-minded community, would have been taken as promise enough. Around here, it only added verses to the ballad. “Of course he is clever,” they said. “He came into the world already knowing how to talk.”
It might have gone on like that for fifty years – an amusing story to warm winter evenings – if not for the influenza that came one autumn and refused to leave politely. It took old people who had already made their peace and young ones who had not yet learned quarreling. In three days, it took the boy from Devil’s Bluff.
Grief is a wild animal that needs somewhere to go. In this case, it ran straight back into the peddler’s suitcase and the teeth and the half-heard word. Those who had always disliked that stretch of road shook their heads and said the proverb had been right. Those who had never quite forgiven the wife for her careless line about the devil repeated it with improved emphasis. The story hardened.
And what of Mutti Weiss? When asked in her later years, she gave the same answer every time.
“Yes,” she would say, “the boy was born with teeth. Yes, he made a sound that might have been a word. But I have also seen children arrive with six fingers, with hair down to their necks, with one eye swollen shut and the other wider than seems decent. The Lord delights in variations. We are the ones who insist on calling them signs.”
Then she would add, because she was not above a good line herself, “If the Devil truly wished to live at Devil’s Bluff, he would surely choose a more convenient address and fewer diapers.”
In the end, what we have is this: a woman who regretted a sentence, a peddler who enjoyed one, a midwife who refused to be impressed by either, and a child who lived a short, bright span between them. Also, four teeth, which is admittedly more than you expect on such a small person.
Whether he spoke on the first day or only cried in an interesting accent is something no church book can tell us. The records, such as they are, note a birth, a death, and nothing whatsoever about vocabulary. The rest belongs to the long shelf in every community where we keep the stories that say more about who we are than what actually happened.
Ask ten old people in the county and you will get eleven versions. This is simply mine.
Copyright 2026 Lori Olson White
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The inspiration behind this story
The inspiration for “Four Little Teeth and a Whole Lot of Talk” appeared in the October 10, 1888 edition of the Ashland, WI Weekly News, a newspaper I’m very familiar with as it was the paper of record for the county where my Semerau family lived. I actually came across the article while searching for information about my great-great grandma, Caroline Semerau, who’d been trained as a midwife in Danzig, West Prussia in 1873, and continued her career when she and her husband, Rudolph, and their sons, Conrad, Rudolph and Robert, arrived in Butternut, WI, in 1887. Family stories say she delivered her last baby just weeks before she passed away in 1931 at the age of 87. I never knew Caroline, but have heard stories of her no-nonsense approach to midwifery and life, so how could I not incorporate her spirit into this local-to-her story?
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End Notes
1 “Mother”
2 “Sweetheart”
3 “A child with teeth is no older than one year.”
This line! Our people brought many trunks and more opinions from the old country, and both have been hard to empty.
This is such a beautifully told reminder of how communities turn ordinary moments into lasting stories. What begins as a small, slightly unusual birth becomes something shared, reshaped, and passed along, it says as much about the people telling it as the child at its centre.