Amish Home

by Rachel Stoltzfus

  I kneel to try to pull the roots away, but they’re big, reedy and strong, and as I dig my fingers in to pry my ankle loose, my fingers only wind up getting caught. I pull them away, but one of my fingers almost snaps. The roots don’t give an inch.

  That’s when I notice that my other ankle is also entwined, roots growing over my calf and knee, pinning that leg to the damp, mossy ground.

  But ... how can that be me? I ask myself.

  The answer is plain to see when I look back at my other ankle and see more roots as they’re growing right up the side of my shin, wrapping around it. Both my legs are now bound by the roots, and with a quickly growing panic I try to yank myself free.

  No good.

  I can hear the wet, crinkling sounds of the roots as they grow over me, thicker and stronger, crawling up my arms past my elbows, past my knees and even up along my back. I can feel the strong, twine-like cables as they grow to wrap around my waist. They squeeze tighter and it hurts; I can sense a supernatural strength behind them, one that is far too powerful for me to fight.

  Yet I do.

  I tense my legs, trying to support myself and stay upright even as the roots begin to pull me down to my side, toward that mossy ground.

  Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.

  Hebrews 12:15 cannot stop these demonic plants as they continue to encase me, wrapping around my chest, my shoulders, compressing me. I can’t wrench myself clear at all now, and the roots finally tip my body over. I land on my side with a thud and the roots push up from the ground on all sides of me. Like a pit of hungry vipers, they crawl over my head, my neck, rising up from the ground on one side of me only to dive back into the dirt on the other side, sinking in deep and pulling tight against me. Those roots over my throat feel like they’re going to rip right through my flesh; I wonder what will be the first to shatter; my spine or my windpipe.

  I recall, as a warning unheeded, the words 2 Peter 2:20. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.

  My lungs do all they can, but they cannot resist the pressure against them. And every time I exhale, the roots squeeze tighter and I can’t inhale. Inch by inch, breath by breath, my life winds down. My muscles pull, brain screaming out for only last burst of energy to free myself, but I doubt that even a single external motion is visible as the roots tighten and thicken and increase in number. I’m pinned to the ground, slowly being pulled into it, digested by it, consumed.

  My last breath is just beyond my reach, my eyes closed forever by bands of thorny root. They squeeze my head, my neck, my chest, their constant pressure finally bringing my blood vessels to burst, hot pain leaking through my body as my brain crackles and pops and finally goes to black. But, it's just another nightmare, and I wake in a cold sweat, gasping for breath . . . again.

  ***

  The days roll on and I slowly regain my strength. My legs are still a bit stiff, and my back twinges with pain every now and then, depending on how I turn my body. But I’m feeling a lot better. So I continue to volunteer to help Miriam with her chores, figuring my aid will help to inspire hers later on. Anyway, I’d rather volunteer than be enslaved into the labor against my will.

  I’m sweeping up the floor while she cleans the cooking pots in the metal wash bin. I look at the broom handle in my hands, fingers craning around it.

  “Y’know, I was talking to your husband the other day, about your poor departed daughter—”

  “You’d do well not to talk on that subject with me,” Miriam says.

  “I was just going to say—”

  “You were just going to say absolutely nothing and get back t’yer chores, else I tell my Lester what kind of fool nonsense yer tryin’ t’stir up.”

  “I’m sorry, Miriam, I didn’t mean to upset you—”

  “In a pig’s eye you didn’t,” Miriam says, standing to face me. “Yer tryin; one thing and the next, gettin’ me into all kinds of trouble with my Lester with yer fool talk—”

  “I never said anything to you that I don’t believe in my heart.”

  “That can’t be true, ‘cause I know’d you got cunning in yer heart, and yer tryin’ to trick me. Now shut it up and get back to her chores, girl!”

  After a tense moment, and against my better judgment, I ask, “Did Lester get upset with you about—?”

  “Just shut cher mouth and git back to work, girl!” Her voice is sharp and shrill and fierce, and in the lingering silence that follows her burst of temper, I lower my head and return to my sweeping. That’s when I get a good look at the broom stick in my hands.

  And I get a look at Miriam, foolishly turning her back me to keep scrubbing while I stand here with a potentially dangerous weapon.

  Should I? I wonder. Should I crack this over her head and make a run for it? I don’t want to hurt this woman, or anyone. But I’m a slave here now, a captive, and from Exodus to John, the Bible urges us to rise up against our captors, to rebel and be free in the name of Yahweh, God who is Lord of all.

  “Don’t dawdle now,” Miriam says, her back still to me. “Get that broom into the crevices.”

  In God’s name, I should do it. I should marshal His strength, and protect his creation as he has always wanted us to do. I’m not happy about it, but my being here isn’t my choice, and my remaining here certainly isn’t my choice.

  What choice do I have?

  “Don’t leave the work unfinished,” Miriam warns me, unable to appreciate the irony.

  And I intend to follow her instructions to the letter. My heart starts to beat fast, my sweating palms clenching the broom handle.

  Do it, I urge myself, do it now! She won’t know, and it won’t hurt her that badly, I reassure myself, probably. Just hard enough to put her out for an hour, or a few minutes at least. Just hard enough ...

  I grasp the broom handle, imagining my process; slide the handle up so the broom part is under my hands, then swing the blunt end down onto the back of her head ...

  Now, I tell myself, now before it’s too late!

  “So yer mammy’s gone, huh? Whole family ... “

  “Seems so,” I say. “I ... I wish I had a woman I could look up to, think of as my own ... mammy, in that way.”

  Miriam looks like she wants to soften up, but her struggling smile is caught in the sad net of her hardened face. She says, “So yer a God-fearin’ type,” Miriam says, and my limbs stand down.

  “I am.”

  “And you pray?”

  “I do.”

  “Yet I ain’t seen yer do it.”

  “Um, well, I don’t make a big show of it. I’ve only been able to bend my legs sufficiently to kneel in the past week—”

  “That how you do it? You kneel?”

  I’m a little confused, but my interest soon peaks. “No ... I mean, you can. I guess that’s the way they do it in Catholic churches. But we Amish worship in our homes, we don’t have all those fancy statues or the metal thing with the smoke that the priest waves around. And I don’t have to kneel or clasp my hands to my chin or anything in order to pray. I just ... do it.”

  “Just do it how?”

  “Well, I ... I just close my eyes and let my voice speak to God.”

  “Yet I ain’t heard a peep of such talk.”

  “It’s silent, private, I imagine myself talking to God, the way I might imagine myself talking to myself. You know what I mean, don’t you? That voice of reason, or of doubt in the back of your mind? That still, small voice that guides you, soothes you, warns you?”

  “Yeah, I know’d that voice,” Miriam says, her voice trailing off. “That’s God?”

  “It’s ... it’s the sound of faith, Miriam.”

  The front door of the little shack swings open and Lester appears. As alw
ays, the first thing he finds in the shack is me, and he hits me with those cold, dead eyes. Saying nothing, he stands back, and then familiar Cab Coleson, of Westington, comes stumbling into the room. Lester shoves him further, then steps in and closes the door behind him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cab looks at me, a smile stretching across his face. “Beth!”

  “Cab! What are you doing here?”

  “I’m looking for you! I’m so glad you’re still alive; you knew you would be!” He steps toward me, arms outstretched for the kind of hug only two intimates would use to celebrate a reunion.

  And we are not intimates.

  Lester pulls Cab back with a gruff, “Easy, tiger.” He turns to me, his rifle in one hand and still trained on Cab. “You know this boy?”

  “I do ... ” I say, having to correct myself with, “at least I thought I did.”

  Lester glares at Cab with new mistrust, chewing something behind his tight, bearded lips.

  “I don’t understand,” Miriam says.

  “Me neither,” Lester says, jabbing Cab in the back with the tip of his rifle. “Start jawin’, boy; make yerself clear, ‘fore we make yer scarce!”

  Cab clears his throat, looking to each of us in turn as if he doesn’t know where to begin.

  I decide to help him out. “Where were you when I was attacked back in Westington?”

  “I was bushwhacked, passed out in my very own bed. I don’t remember much about it, but somebody attacked me from behind, cracked me on the back of the head with a wood plank’er somethin’. By the time I came to, you and your daed were both gone. They said you left town, and it was your Daed that hit me, keep me from coming with you.”

  “They knew you were going to do that?”

  Cab nods. “Guess Sebastian saw us talking; maybe somebody else was standing closer than we thought.”

  “So, you had no idea what they did to us?”

  “They said you ran off. I didn’t like the sound of it, and it didn’t sit right, but it wasn’t anything I could really challenge them on. What was I gonna say, that I knew any better?”

  “Then what’re yer doin’ out here in the woods lookin’ fer her,” Lester asks, eyes dipping shrewdly, “if’n you thought she’d run off with her pa? Not likely they’d run out thisaway.”

  “No,” Cab says, “but I gotta say, I’d a’ come off after them in any case.”

  “Why,” I ask, “if you didn’t think we wanted you to join us?”

  “Well, Beth, just because your daed didn’t want me to join you, that didn’t mean you shared his feelings on the matter.”

  I have to admit, he’s right about that. And I’m thrilled that he’d think so much of me that he’d defy my daed and come after me even after being so disabused by us, or at least by him. But the fact remains that we didn’t run off, and he thought I was dead.

  And he still came after me.

  “What made you doubt their story that we hadn’t just run off? Or else, why didn’t you follow us up to Somerset? You knew that’s where we were going, the whole town knew.”

  “I knew for sure that you didn’t run off, and that’s why I decided to search for you here in the woods, downstream of Westington. I thought, if nothing else, I could retrieve the body ... for proper burial.”

  “But how did you know for sure that I didn’t run off?” I ask.

  He pauses, looking down and then around the little shack.

  “Answer the girl,” Lester says to Cab.

  Cab clears his throat. “I, um, I came across your carriage, as Sebastian and a few others were dismantling it ... and burning it.”

  My body runs cold with dread. I’ve been clinging to hope that my daed is still alive, that I can somehow get back to him, deliver him from the hands of his enemies. Now I know I’m about to find out otherwise.

  “They’d buried the body, though, they didn’t burn it.”

  “Oh Lord,” I hear myself mutter.

  “At least there’s that, they didn’t burn it. ”

  Nausea rises up in my belly, churning, hot, acid burning, breath short. Oh no, it’s true after all ... oh Daed, no ...

  But I fight back the tears. I focus all my attention on Cab, on this moment, lest I slip away from it and lose touch with my present reality all together.

  From across the little shack, Miriam says to me, very softly, “I’m sorry, hon.”

  His eyes still on us, Lester holds up his hand and Miriam steps back. He says to Cab, “That had to be weeks ago now, maybe more.”

  Cab nods. “I couldn’t just disappear; they’d have known, followed me. You don’t just stride out of Westington, y’know. It’s not that kind of set-up.”

  “I know,” is all I can think to say, and it’s more than enough.

  Cab says, “I put a plan together, faked my own suicide, up in the woods, left a note about how guilty I felt over what they’d done. They won’t think to come looking for me here.”

  “No body?” Lester asks.

  “They’ll think I got dragged off by a bear or something. Believe me, I made it look good.”

  “You tellin’ me how good you lie don’t make me wanna trust you, boy! Your girl here tried the same thing.”

  “Excuse me,” I say, “but I am not his girl.”

  Lester says, “That don’t mean they don’t still own him, didn’t send him here, pokin’ round to see if yer still alive, send back some word or draw you into some trap, tie up the last of their devilish loose ends?”

  “Nothing of the sort,” Cab says. “Although, you not wrong about them! Not that they sent me, of course, but they are a dangerous lot, devious, and they’re plentiful too; hundreds of them.”

  Lester says, “And yer leadin’ ‘em right to us! Yer a spy, I knew it!” Lester aims his rifle at Cab, but I hold my hand out to stop him.

  “Mister Krebbs, please,” I say, “let’s hear him out!” Cab sits, frozen, his arms bent up, flattened arms facing Lester, who is only a few feet away with that loaded, pointed rifle. After a few long seconds, Lester lowers his gun, but his eyes remain fixed on Cab.

  “Keep talkin’, boy.”

  Cab says, “There’s not much more to it than that. I’ve been tracking her for almost two weeks now.”

  Miriam and I look at Lester, but he nods. “S’true, had his gear when I found ‘im, s’all out back.” He turns to Stanley and Stonewall, standing and watching from near their bedroom door. “Boys, go take a look in our guest’s bags, lemme know what ‘cher find.”

  Stonewall nods, but Stanley glares at him and gives him a little shove. They run out of the shack together, leaving the adults to speak.

  Lester says to Cab, “So, yer tellin’ me you come from a long line of these cutthroat criminals, a whole town of ‘em, but that I should trust you? And what makes you the last good man, son? How should I take that fer anything else but another bald-faced lie?”

  Cab nods. “Okay, that makes sense. And you’re right to be skeptical,” he turns to me to add, “you too, Bethany, for sure—”

  “And I intend on staying that way.”

  “But there’s really no mystery behind my life; it’s really fairly dull by Westington standards. My mother was a ... she was a girl who spent a lot of time with the wrong types of people, a runaway, got into all kinds of trouble. Daughter of a Baptist minister, actually, but that didn’t keep her on the straight and narrow. If anything, it helped her justify the life she chose, a rebellious life. Anyway, as it happens when you ride with a certain type of person, certain things are likely to happen. Bad things; very, very bad.”

  I swallow hard, able to imagine what Cab is unwilling to describe.

  He goes on, “Now, no matter how many bad choices she made, I don’t think she deserved that kind of treatment; nobody deserves it. And, once it became a ... a thing which happened more than once, my mother became ... well, defensive. Who wouldn’t, right? Anyway, one day she did what she had to do ... completely in self-defense. And she could
have gone to the law there and then, because the way things were, she would have been exonerated; I’ve always felt anyway. But she didn’t want to take that chance, and she’d heard about Westington, how it’s a haven for ... people at a certain level of society—”

  “Why don’t cher stop usin’ them big fancy words,” Lester says, “talk like a regular person!”

  “They’re all criminals, hiding out, all of them on the run; some for so long the law’s given up looking. And she was a pirate among the pirates, she fit right in. But she used to tell me, ‘Be your own person, don’t become a part of this crowd’. And she raised me that way. We spent a lot of time together and didn’t intermingle too much with others. And she read me the bible, all the time. It was the only strength we had, the thing that kept us together.”

  “That’s why you know your scripture so well,” I say.

  Cab nods. “When my mom died of cancer, I just kept getting along as best I could.”

  “My mother died of cancer, too!” I say.

  Lester shakes his head. “What a shock.”

  Ignoring him, Cab goes on, “But I’ve always been a bit of an outsider, with Sebastian and his gang.”

  “That’s why there’s that tension between you.”

  “And why they didn’t include me in a lot of these recent goings-on.”

  “They were afraid you’d betray them.”

  “And I would have,” Cab says. “That’s what I’m doing now.”

  Lester asks, “How you figure that?”

  Cab turns back to me, allowing Lester to overhear. “I know I can’t bring your father back, Bethany, but we can still bring Westington to justice. I want to take you back to Smicksberg. From there, we’ll get the Sheriff’s Department, the National Guard, the whole U.S. Army if we have to—”

  “I know’d it,” Lester says, “draw you out into the woods where those filthy animals’ll be waitin’ to cut ‘cher throat’n bury you on the spot!”

  “You can come with us,” Cab says.

  “So you can murder and my whole family, too?”

  “You choose the route,” Cab says, “how could it be an ambush then?”