The Outcast

by Jolina Petersheim

  I’ve been asking myself these questions for the past two days, but they have gotten me nowhere. I have to admit, though, it’s been a relief to have something to occupy my mind besides my own life’s uncertainty. Perhaps this is why Englischers spend so much time tapping on their cell phones or reading glossy tabloids. They want to watch someone else’s drama unfold; they want to watch someone else’s life crash and burn, as it takes away the heat of their own.

  I have just switched off the oven where I’m baking potatoes wrapped in layers of foil (Ida Mae set the temperature beforehand), when she comes in the kitchen and hands me her cell phone.

  I am so startled, I ask, “Was ist das?”

  Ida Mae answers, “Your mudder.”

  I feel the color drain from my face. My hands shake as I take the cell phone and look at the black numbers on the gray screen.

  Leaning over, Ida Mae taps the bottom of the phone. “It’s ready,” she says. “Just talk.”

  “Is it Leah?” I ask into the receiver, the words barely audible even to me.

  My mamm hollers, as if her voice must carry across the miles. “No, it’s not Leah! She’s out of the hospital and everything!”

  I move backward until my spine rests against the oven. I had thought she was calling to tell me of my sister’s passing. I was almost certain of it; I could feel Leah’s death reverberating throughout my body as if my mind had already received the news. The only time my mamm has ever used the barn phone is for emergencies or to cancel an appointment with a reflexology customer, so why is she calling from it now?

  “Then who is it?” I ask and swallow. “Is it Dawdy?” Although my father is physically fine, his mental capacity has diminished since the afternoon he was kicked by a horse and his brain bled, causing his thoughts to now revolve around the only subject that has ever brought him joy: horse auctions.

  “No, it’s not Dawdy!” Mamm shouts. “We’re worried about you. You just ran off without telling Leah good-bye.”

  “It wasn’t like I had a choice,” I say, my tone annoyed. “Tobias forced me to go.”

  There is a muffled sound. My mamm’s voice is lower as she says, “I thought as much. He seemed pretty upset when we saw him at the hospital.”

  “What do you mean? . . . You saw him? Are you here in Tennessee?”

  I can tell my mamm nods, because there is a long pause before she says, “Yes. Dawdy and I got down here Mittwoch afternoon. Tobias called and told us to come. He even hired a driver.”

  “How generous of him.”

  My mother clucks her tongue, whether in agreement or chastisement I cannot tell. After a moment, she says, “Are you and Eli safe there with that Englischer weibsmensch?”

  “Ida Mae’s not English or Plain. But yes, we’re safe. She’s been very kind to us.”

  “Can Dawdy and I come see you tomorrow? I’d try bringing Leah, too, but I don’t think Tobias would allow it.”

  “Don’t even ask him,” I warn. “You’ll only make it harder for her.” After giving Mamm the address, I explain, “If you have any trouble finding it, just tell Gerald it’s the Amish store in Blackbrier.”

  “I’m not hiring Gerald to drive us,” Mamm says. “He’s got no backbone.”

  “Who else, then?”

  “Your Englischer friend, you think she’d come get us?”

  “Yes. She’ll come. But—” I glance around the kitchen and the blue room to make sure Ida Mae’s out of earshot—“well, Mamm, she is a little different.”

  “And our familye’s not?” she says.

  I have to smile as I hang up. She’s got a point there.

  At first Ida Mae isn’t too keen on picking my parents up and bringing them back to her store. I have a hard time understanding why, but then I notice how she keeps staring at Eli asleep in his handcrafted cradle next to our stools and how she won’t meet my eyes when she passes the free-range eggs, warm brot, and smoked cheeses for me to bag up. To test my theory, I wait until the customers leave and say, “I’m not going back with my parents to Pennsylvania, you know.”

  Ida Mae just snorts, hops off her stool, and goes over to straighten the jars of jam. I have all but forgotten what I said when Ida Mae replies, “You say that now, but when your mammi’s here, loving on her grosskind, you’ll be saying something different.”

  “That’s not true,” I insist, remaining focused on the storage barn and swing set flyers I am restocking so she won’t see my frustration. “I won’t be going back because I’m not allowed to go back.”

  For the first time since I asked Ida Mae if she could drive my parents, she glances over her shoulder and looks me right in the eyes. “Who?” she asks.

  “Who what?”

  “Who won’t let you go back?”

  “My father.”

  Ida Mae just stands there, rough hands on aproned hips, waiting for the further explanation I am reluctant to give.

  Trying to dispel all seriousness, I shrug. “I guess he thinks it would hurt his horse-trading business with the Amish and Mennonites. That they wouldn’t want to purchase something that had contact with such a scandalous family.”

  “Hogwash!” Ida Mae fumes, leaning down for the small Mountain Dew bottle she keeps tucked in the front pocket of her apron. After spitting into the bottle—a brown dribble down green glass—she screws the cap back on, wipes her chin with her hand, and says, “It burns me up how those Amish and Mennonites sin just like the rest of the world, but they act like they’re all high and mighty.”

  “Please,” I entreat, taking a step closer to her. “Don’t bring anything like that up with my father. He—he doesn’t do so well with confrontation.”

  Ida Mae climbs onto her stool again, her miniature feet (the only thing miniature about her) tucked in the silver rungs because they don’t reach the floor. Leaning over to start the CD player again, she says, “I ain’t making no promises, Rachel-girl. If I see your dawdy talking ugly to you, I might just have to give him a piece of my mind.”

  Watching heat climb up the ladder of Ida Mae’s neck to her full cheeks, I can only imagine what a generous piece that will be.

  7

  AMOS

  Strange as it is, ever since Ida Mae picked Samuel and Helen up from Tobias’s haus in Copper Creek and brought them back to her store, she has become selectively deaf. She will leap to her feet at Eli’s smallest whimper or Rachel’s lightest sigh, but she will sit with her stone face turned to the brick wall as Helen pays her some banal compliment about the store that Ida Mae knows she does not mean.

  But Samuel’s really the cross that Ida Mae has to bear. With his bushy black eyebrows contrasted with a shocking amount of white hair, he looks just like her father, Jacob Miller, did when she left her community soon after the accident. The physical resemblance is not their only similarity; Samuel’s attitude is the same as Jacob Miller’s was too. He has no time for any ideas or comments except his own—which, in Samuel’s case, are all about the matching ponies he’s bought and sold at the New Holland horse auction over the past forty-some years.

  “Did ya know you can drug a horse in the show ring to make it look broke?” he asks the four people, counting Eli, in the room.

  Having been informed of this fact many times before, Helen and Rachel nod, but Ida Mae just stares at Samuel and then says, “Is that what you do? You sell a horse to people that could kill ’em?”

  Samuel’s brows act like an awning over his squinty blue eyes. Even with the damage to his brain, he can recognize a challenge when he hears one. “You calling me a schwindler!” he rails in his thick Pennsylvania Dutch accent, sliding thumbs between his suspenders and shirt.

  Ida Mae says, “If the horseshoe fits,” and slaps the ledger closed.

  You’d have to be blind in addition to selectively deaf to miss the tension escalating between Samuel Stoltzfus and Ida Mae Speck. Passing Eli to her mother, Rachel stands and walks over to them. “Why don’t we have some middaagesse?” she asks. “I’ve go
t some fudge pie for dessert.”

  Samuel shrugs but not before glowering at Ida Mae. “I guess we’ll esse,” he says, not willing to relinquish, even for the sake of an argument, the only thing that brings him pleasure besides his matching ponies.

  Ida Mae says, “Y’all go on back and help yourselves. I’m gonna watch the store.”

  Settling Eli on her hip, Rachel herds her mother and father out through the back of the store and mouths over her shoulder, “Sorry.”

  Ida Mae nods and, once the door shuts, sighs. It’s only been two hours since Samuel and Helen’s arrival. It is going to be a long day.

  Once the remainders of kiehfleesch and gemaeschde grummbeere have been wiped clean from the plates by Samuel Stoltzfus’s buttery piece of sourdough brot (courtesy of Ida Mae’s Amish Country Store), Helen leans forward on the table and looks at her daughter with eyes that reveal her impending words: “Why’d Tobias force you to leave?”

  Rachel knew this conversation was going to happen, but the dread of it still knocks the breath from her. “I don’t know for sure, Mamm,” she says, “but I think a lot of it had to do with that child over there.” She nods at Eli, who is being rocked in the swing that Ida Mae says she picked up at a yard sale even though the tags said it came from Walmart.

  “Don’t be smart with your mudder,” Helen says, whipping the strands of her kapp behind her neck. “Just answer the question.”

  Tired of the lies and even more tired of telling them, Rachel says, “I think he blamed me for Leah being sick.”

  Helen Stoltzfus’s thin lips snap shut. She sits up straighter in the kitchen chair. In the waning afternoon sunlight coming through the curtained windows, Helen peers over at her husband to see if he is starting to patch together the disparate parts of their daughter’s life. But the dull look in his eyes tells her he isn’t; of course he isn’t. Even before that stallion got tired of the man picking at his hooves and dented in Samuel’s skull with a casual swoop of his hind leg, Samuel never cared to pay attention to conversations concerning relationships and love. All he knows is what he needs to: his daughter has given birth to a fatherless son, and she is now living in the home of an Englischer woman who has a voice as gruff as a man’s.

  Mopping his beard with a napkin, he looks over his shoulder as if the fudge pie will appear. “Where’s dessert?” he asks.

  Rachel gets to her feet and escapes to Ida Mae’s galley-size kitchen, where she dissects the pie and slips the pieces onto plates, her knuckles whitening as she clutches the server. From this, I know that she is not yet ready to face the truth of her unresolved feelings for her father and the role they have played in bringing her to this point. But in the strange state in which I find myself, I seem to understand far more than I should.

  Rachel

  It is suppertime when Ida Mae returns from dropping my parents off at Copper Creek. The table is already set and the leftovers laid out. I know she must see the modest meal that I have prepared, but she doesn’t acknowledge it. Instead, she just hangs her jacket on the coat tree, staggers back to her bedroom, and closes the door.

  After the day’s frustrations, I have no appetite myself, but I want to keep up my end of the room-and-board bargain by making sure Ida Mae’s house remains clean and her stomach well fed. Snapping the swing straps around Eli’s waist, I turn the dial to thirty minutes and walk down the hallway to Ida Mae’s room. I knock on the door, but she doesn’t respond.

  “Ida Mae?” I ask. “You in there?” She has to be in there unless she escaped through her bedroom window, which would be some feat considering her girth, but I don’t know what else to say. After a minute or two has passed, I knock again. “You okay? You need something?”

  Frightened by her silence, I try the door handle and find it unlocked. I push the door open slowly, trying to give Ida Mae enough time to call out if she’s getting changed or taking a bath, but she says nothing. I half expect to see her buxom body sprawled across the floor with her chest barely moving. Instead, she’s just sitting on the bed with a book made from magazine cutouts in her lap.

  On rainy afternoons or days when it was too cold to play outside, Leah and I would sometimes cut out pictures from Dawdy’s old Farm Journal magazines and paste them together in a book, which we would then laminate with contact paper, stitching around the edges with Mamm’s colorful yarn. I never knew any Plain children shared our pastime, but I know this is the kind of creation Ida Mae is looking at. What I don’t understand is why this crude assemblage is causing her lips to quaver and tears to trickle from her eyes. She doesn’t look up at my entrance, just continues flipping through the pages with an odd reverence.

  “Do you feel okay?” I ask. “Want some water?”

  Ida Mae’s head pops up, the surprise on her face letting me know she hasn’t heard me enter her room or one word I have said before now. Wiping her eyes with her sleeve, she closes the book and nods. “I’m fine,” she says. “Just got a touch of hay fever.”

  “In November?” I ask.

  Ida Mae’s eyes snap with their old fire, and the familiar look brings me relief. “Yeah, in November,” she says. “You think you can’t get the crud now, too?” Sliding off the bed, she pushes the book under a pillow and straightens the quilt. “Today was hard, wasn’t it?” Ida Mae asks, her back to me.

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “And don’t you think it’s ever gonna get easy. I’ve been living away from my family longer than you’ve been alive, and I still get this ache to see them that won’t go away. Then I see somebody who reminds me of them, and all this anger comes flooding back that I didn’t even know was there.”

  “Yes, that’s how it is,” I whisper, recalling how my parents didn’t even glance down at their grosskind in my arms—the first they’d ever seen of him—but were focused on my lack of a prayer kapp. A sign, my father said, of my being brainwashed by this Englischer woman into leaving the Mennonite church.

  “What you hafta remember,” Ida Mae continues, “is that your mom and dad ain’t gonna change their ways, ’cause they don’t even know they need changing. The only reason you’re starting to see everything clear is ’cause you’re removed from it. When you’re living smack-dab in those little podunk communities, it’s like you think you’re the only people in the world. Not until you’ve left can you realize that your little community don’t even make up a corner of that world.”

  Keeping my eyes fixed on the quilt pattern on the bed, I ask, “What was your community like?”

  Ida Mae is silent for so long, I look up. “Whoever said I was from a community?” she says, her murky brown eyes peering right down through my innocent-sounding question to the purpose beneath.

  “You just did. You said you can’t see that something needs changed in the community until you’ve been removed from it. I assumed you were talking about yours.”

  “You know what they say about assuming things, don’t you?”

  I shake my head and Ida Mae sighs. “Well, it ain’t good. I’ll say that.”

  Running a hand through her hair, making it stick up worse than it already did, she asks, “Now, what’s this you got for supper? I’m smelling something awful good.”

  “Just leftovers,” I mumble, knowing this is Ida Mae’s end to a conversation I had only found the courage to begin.

  At three in the morning, a train rattles past, its shrill whistle blows, and Eli awakens and begins to cry. Only this is not his normal cry, but a high-pitched gasp that sounds more animal than human. Clambering down the bunk bed ladder so fast a splinter spears my palm, I lean over Eli’s bed, which is hemmed in with blankets and pillows, and put a hand to his chest. Eli’s blue eyes are open wide and his face pinched as his tiny rib cage fights to draw in oxygen.

  Whisking Eli’s sweaty body up from the bed so fast he startles and cries even louder, I sprint across the carpet and fling open the door to Ida Mae’s bedroom. It is as black as a cellar, so I flip on the lights and run back toward her t
iny bathroom. Twisting on the faucets above the claw-foot tub, I blast hot water as fast as it will go and reach over with my foot to kick the bathroom door shut. I sit on the closed toilet seat with my infant gasping on my lap. It seems like his lips are turning blue even as his face is tomato-red.

  Five seconds pass before the bathroom door smacks open and an irate Ida Mae is standing there with her wild hair askew and flannel nightgown twisted up around her knees. “What in the world!” she cries. “You got a mind to wake the dead as well as the living?” Then her groggy eyes seem to clear because she runs over to the basket where she keeps her towels and hands one to me. “Put this over your head,” she instructs. “And lean over that steam. If we can just get him to cough up that phlegm, he’ll be fine.”

  “But what if he can’t?” I am surprised to hear my words are as high-pitched as Eli’s wheezing.

  “He will, Rachel-girl.” Ida Mae puts a hand to my cheek, which I didn’t know until now was wet with tears. “He’s gotta.”

  The whole night passes this way: Ida Mae cycling out wet towels that she drapes over my head so the bathtub’s hot steam will rise up and be trapped, helping free my son’s clogged lungs. When his coughing becomes violent, I jerk back the towel and stare down at Eli as he struggles to breathe.

  Ida Mae asks, “Should we take him to the emergency room?”

  I look up at her standing over my shoulder and see genuine fear in her eyes. “I don’t have insurance.”

  “That don’t matter,” Ida Mae says. “Not when he’s bad as this.”

  My mamm nursed Leah and me through numerous bouts of childhood illness without once having to take us to the doktor, but I don’t know the herbal remedies she used and would not have the supplies on hand even if I did.

  I can feel my resolve weakening. I am about to have Ida Mae drive us to the closest hospital when Eli’s body stiffens, his breathing stops, and then his mouth projects a clump of mucus so small, it seems impossible it could have been enough to block his passageways.