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Johannes was merely three years old and baby Heinrich was merely an infant, Katharina left them with their grandparents and set off after him. Just as she was leaving, Johannes took sick with smallpox and nearly died. Katharina, intent on finding her husband, left anyway, handing care of Johannes over to her in-laws, who wanted nothing to do with him. Angry with their son Heinrich for running away and with Katharina for dropping their sick son on them, they tended the boy without much enthusiasm. Surprisingly, the boy recovered, but his health was shattered. The pox had weakened his eyesight, and for years he suffered from sores, scabs, and putrid wounds, possibly because his immune system had been damaged. His hands were also deformed and he moved in a clumsy, jerky way, as if the virus had also affected his nervous system. Like his younger brother Heinrich, he was accident-prone.
    Nevertheless, Katharina found her husband. One can imagine the meeting: Heinrich the runaway, in his cups or at camp staring dully at a plate of stew, looking up and seeing Katharina, his partner in a loveless marriage, marching at him down the row of tents, so furious that electricity sparked around her head. If he could have run, he would have, but there was nothing else to do but follow her home. Finally, after moving his family to Leonberg and after trying his hand at innkeeping in Ellmendingen, he forced his family back to Leonberg and then disappeared altogether. Some said he died in Augsburg after fighting for the Neapolitan navy.
    Johannes’s mother, Katharina, née Guldenmann, was as restless as her husband. There were problems in her marriage right from the beginning. Because Katharina gave birth to Johannes only seven months after her wedding to Heinrich, all the old women in town were busy counting the months on their fingers. Certainly it is possible Johannes was born prematurely, for he was small and sickly most of his life. Kepler no doubt believed this himself. Still, one has doubts, because while Katharina was pregnant, she was regularly beaten by her parents, as if they were trying to make her lose the baby, though both mother and son survived. 4 The image of a hurried, forced marriage between an angry Heinrich, a military straight who was cold and distant, and a pregnant Katharina explains a great deal about the family’s history.
    Only a mother whose eccentricities hid a vast intelligence could imagine turning her own father’s skull into a drinking cup just because she hadheard it was an ancient pagan custom. She possessed the kind of intelligence that could either blossom into genius, as with Johannes, or fester into madness. All her life she struggled against her illiteracy. In that time, few women could read, and through the years Katharina felt humiliated that she could not even read her son’s letters and was forced to rely on Beutelsbacher, the schoolteacher, who would later turn against her in her witch trial. To make up for it, she collected herbs and mixed potions from them, and it is possible that she did in fact poison Beutelsbacher and the wife of Bastian Meyer, but almost certainly without meaning to. Her little tin jug often sat in the corner for days, unwashed and untended. Who knows what kinds of bacteria were growing in there?
    Her children were a mixed lot, however. And although Johannes’s youngest brother, Christoph, who became a pewterer, and his sister, Margaretha, who married a clergyman, turned out relatively well, the middle brother, Heinrich, teetered on the edge of insanity. Possibly a borderline schizophrenic, he was accident-prone, was constantly being beaten by other children and bitten by animals, nearly drowned, and was almost burned alive. Eventually he wandered off when his father tried to sell him, only to show up in Prague as a palace guard when Johannes was there as imperial mathematician, and then to return to live with his mother years later, much abused by life.
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