The Outcast

by Jolina Petersheim

  Leah says, “Maybe it’d be easier if I just told you.”

  “Told me what?”

  “What was in my letter.” Smiling, she links her arm with mine. “I want to move Mammi and Dawdy into the dawdi haus on our land, and then you and Eli could live here . . . with them.”

  “That place hasn’t been lived in since Grossdawdy Fisher died. Anyway, I could not live with Dawdy. I don’t have the patience for him that you do.”

  “It’d take work, I know that,” she says, leading me down the sidewalk. “But just think: if you lived here with them, you and I could be nochberen.”

  “That would be the only benefit,” I drawl. At Leah’s horrified face, for she has a different relationship with our dawdy and cannot begin to imagine mine, I change the subject. “You really think Mamm and Dawdy would just give up the bauerei?”

  My sister stops walking. The tree branches overhanging the path cast a lattice of shadows across her face. “They’re losing it anyway, Rachel,” she says. “Dawdy’s not making the sales he used to, and Mammi’s arthritis is getting so bad, she has to turn new reflexology patients away.”

  “How come they didn’t tell me when they were down?”

  Leah shrugs. “Maybe they didn’t want you to worry? Maybe they were ashamed? A developer’s made them a good offer, and they’re going to accept. Dawdy’s horses and tools will be auctioned off at New Holland next week.”

  My mind reels with the weight of this news. For years after the Lancaster County area had exploded with expansion and our neighbors had cashed in on their properties and moved farther south, my parents continued turning down offer after offer. How bad must their finances be if they’re now allowing our yellow house on Hilltop Road and the land surrounding it to be transformed into another cookie-cutter subdivision?

  “You and Tobias are going up for the auction, I guess?”

  Leah nods.

  The impromptu timing of everything is the only reason I find the courage to say, “You think he’d let me ride along?”

  “I—I don’t know.” Leah looks at the cracks fissuring the sidewalk. “But I promise I’ll ask.”

  “I know you will.” I reach out and give my sister a hug. With our bodies pressed so close and Eli on my hip, I can feel how our stomachs—both changed since the birth of our sons—touch each other like two halves of one whole.

  “It was awful good to see you,” Leah says, her voice catching. “I’ve missed you terribly.”

  “I’ve missed you too,” I whisper into her hair, and then turn and head down the sidewalk before she can see the remorse in my eyes.

  AMOS

  Before Tobias falls asleep and Leah sneaks downstairs to begin her cathartic letter-writing, Leah asks if Rachel can join their journey to Pennsylvania.

  “No. Absolutely not,” her husband answers, the question not having fully left Leah’s mouth. “There’s no way.”

  “How is there no way? Gerald’s van’s not even full.”

  “It will be full when it comes to the likes of Rachel.”

  “The likes of Rachel?” Leah bolts upright in bed. “She’s still my flesh and blood, Tobias, and I would appreciate if you spoke about her with a little more respect.”

  “I would speak about your sister with a little more respect if she had earned it.”

  Swallowing the words that threaten to career off her tongue, Leah stares down at her husband’s back, and for the first time in her twenty years, understands her sister’s temper. “I know you do not agree that my sister should accompany us on our trip,” she says. “But there have been many things you have done that I have not agreed with, and still I have complied.”

  “That is how it is supposed to be. You are my wife.”

  “And you are my husband, who has made decisions that have devastated me. I think the least you owe me is this!”

  My son’s breathing grows shallow.

  “Tobias?” Leah asks. “Did you hear me?”

  Nodding, my son clears his throat so his voice will not crack when he replies, “Yes. I heard you.”

  “Then Rachel can go with us?”

  “Jah.” Tobias punches the pillow beneath his head. “She can go.”

  Leah has a sudden impulse to reach out and embrace her husband, but they haven’t really touched since she returned from the hospital, and any caress would probably seem like manipulation to him now. So Leah simply turns toward her husband rather than the window and stays in bed for the first time since her nightly letter-writing began.

  Tobias does not fall asleep until the sun begins to rise over the pines, for the sentence his wife had uttered about her sister’s banishment from Copper Creek held another meaning entirely for him.

  Ida Mae says, “You sure ’bout this?”

  Looping the car seat, heavy with Eli’s weight, over her arm, Rachel watches Tobias stow suitcases and pillows in the back of Gerald’s van. “No,” she says. “I’m not.”

  “Welp, if you get into trouble, just give me a holler. I’ll come up there and fetch ya.”

  “The whole way to Pennsylvania?”

  Ida Mae nods. “I could get one of the gals over at the high school to run my store, so don’t you think twice about calling me.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Rachel says, blinking doubt from her eyes. “It’s only for a few days.”

  Once Rachel closes the truck door, Ida Mae starts driving down Copper Creek Road, but she watches Rachel and Eli in her rearview mirror until they become nothing but blond specks decorating the horizon. It takes the whole drive back to Blackbrier for fear to stop clutching at Ida Mae’s throat and her fingers to loosen their death grip on the steering wheel. And in her dreams that night, the memories that have haunted Ida Mae for twenty years come to life again.

  Not until they have crossed into Virginia does Tobias acknowledge that Rachel is along for the ride. Even then it is only because he happens to glance up in Gerald’s rearview mirror and catch her sitting on the bench seat, nursing Eli.

  “Have you no modesty?” Tobias barks, averting his gaze.

  Rachel’s cheeks burn from irritation more than embarrassment. “Obviously I do or I wouldn’t be wearing this.” She uses the hand not supporting Eli’s head to tug at the afghan.

  Rachel is incensed by his rebuke and rightly so; Leah has nursed Jonathan three times over the past seven hours, and Tobias hasn’t said one word to her. Rachel tried to sate Eli’s brutzing for as long as possible, but when she realized that Gerald Martin wasn’t going to stop at another gas station until his full tank emptied into the red, she covered herself up to the neck with the afghan she’d packed, took Eli from his car seat, and let him suckle.

  Tobias huffs, “You could’ve at least gone to the back of the van.”

  “And what if Gerald got pulled over, and I couldn’t get Eli back into his car seat in time? He could lose his license.”

  “I’ve never gotten pulled over,” Gerald says. The first sentence he’s spoken since the trip began.

  Minutes pass before Leah says, “If you’re not going to allow us to get out to stretch our legs and use the restroom, we have no choice but to nurse our children while we drive.”

  Astonished, Rachel stares at her sister. Tobias is so shocked by his wife’s forthright tone that he turns in the seat, as if looking for proof that she and Rachel haven’t switched places. He then remembers that Rachel is still nursing and, cheekbones striped with red, faces the front again. Gerald Martin says nothing, just keeps his hands positioned at the ten and the two and pushes his white sneaker down on the gas pedal until his black van is cruising just under the speed limit—the fastest he has ever gone.

  Once Eli and Jonathan are lulled to sleep by the rhythmic bumps of the van moving over the patched Pennsylvania roads, Rachel and Leah climb into the backseat and get Lebanon bologna and Swiss cheese sandwiches from the cooler. They pass four up to the men and then grab two for themselves and unwrap the wax paper.

  After
taking a bite, Leah wipes mayonnaise from her mouth and whispers, “You okay?”

  “My back’s a little stiff.” Rachel yawns. “But I’m sure it’ll loosen up once we get out.”

  “I don’t mean how you are feeling.” Leah looks toward the front of the van and then lowers her voice. “I was wondering if you’re okay after what my husband said.”

  Rachel balls up the wax paper and sets it in her lap. “I’m getting pretty used to him by now.”

  Leah sighs. “I still wish he wouldn’t treat you the way he does.”

  Rachel chews a bite of sandwich rather than responding.

  “I’m hoping you and I can get some alone time up here,” Leah continues. “I’m sure Tobias will be helping Dawdy. That should make things easier.”

  “That would be nice,” Rachel agrees.

  “Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” Leah smiles. “The two of us? Just like old times.”

  Rachel sets the sandwich in her lap. She feels carsick, which she has never struggled with before. How can she tell Leah that no matter how hard they try, no matter how much alone time they have while sifting through the memories in that yellow house on Hilltop Road, they can never go back to the innocence of old times again? Leah would not understand Rachel even if she said this. All their lives, she was the one who believed in the good of people and the good in the world. If Leah only knew how the people she loved most in the world had betrayed her, her naive life would be stripped of its innocent perspective.

  Leaning over, Leah begins to massage the muscles of Rachel’s neck. “Are you worried about Mamm and Dawdy?”

  Rachel turns toward the van window and nods, even though the situation involving Helen and Samuel is the last worry on her mind. Only when Leah has drifted off with her head on her sister’s lap does Rachel stare at her young, trusting face and allow the tears she has been holding back to flow down. Observing movement at the front of the van, she glances up to see Tobias watching Jonathan and Eli asleep in their matching car seats. He then looks up at her. For the first time since her pregnancy became apparent, in his gaze Rachel sees not anger, but sorrow. As if she is not the only one who has failed someone she so desperately loves.

  Rachel

  We arrive at my parents’ house on Hilltop Road at two in the morning Pennsylvania time. It has taken over thirteen hours for us to make the usual twelve-hour journey, and that is without the rest stops one is required to make with a group our size. The only reason I can give for Gerald Martin’s driving at the speed he does is that he is still becoming accustomed to his “liberal” black-bumper Mennonite ways after being in the Amish church for so long. Going fifty miles an hour, even on the interstate with a speed limit of sixty-five, must feel like flying to him.

  Pushing open the side door into the mudroom, I find that Mamm and Dawdy have not waited up. But downstairs clean sheets and blankets are stretched across the couch, and a rickety cot is set up in the reflexology office. Leah and Tobias will take the upstairs room my sister and I used to share, with its wood-paneled walls, iron bedstead, and flowered debbich my mamm, not the best of housekeepers, has probably allowed to become sheathed in dust as thick as the quilt backing itself.

  I smile as Leah comes in carrying Jonathan. She tries to smile too, but the expression does not reach her eyes. I do not have to ask what she is feeling; I am feeling it as well. It is hard coming back to my childhood home for the first time since I left it, knowing this visit will also be my last. As children, we sat at this table—in these chairs with the fuchsia rosettes painted on the back by masculine Amish hands—making homemade play dough with flour, water, salt, and a splash of the food coloring not often used. Together, Leah and I would tug a stool over to the kochoffe and peer down into the pot churning with whichever supp my mamm was making. Sometimes in the winters, when the horse sales had slowed because of the buyers at New Holland not having funds left over from their summer crops, Mamm would start adding water to the supp. All we had for supper one night was tomato supp—so diluted it looked more pink than red—and runny rice pudding.

  But my sister and I were almost into our teens before we realized just how poor our family was. Our dresses and shoes were often hand-me-downs from wealthier freindschaft, and at Christmas, our toys were ones Mamm had found at charity shops throughout the year. Because my dawdy often purchased horses and tack he could not pay for, our family was on the brink of bankruptcy numerous times. Still, my mamm never let us out the door with our hair strubbly or shoes unshined. Leah and I might return from the Mennonite school within walking distance of our haus and, regardless of the weather, be sent out to pick dandelions, walnuts, strawberries, or meadow tea to sell to local restaurants, but Mamm was adamant that we did not have to look as close to poverty as we were.

  Leah says, “I’m going to bed.”

  I bid her good night and carry Eli’s car seat into my mamm’s reflexology office. Stretching my son out on the pallet already prepared on the floor, I tuck the afghan under his chin and lean in to kiss his cheek. It is then I hear the wheezing of his breath despite all the precautions I have taken to keep him from catching another cold. I climb onto the narrow cot and bunch the quilts around my shivering frame. Perhaps it is the panic coursing through my veins like caffeine serum, juxtaposed with the calming scent of echinacea, oregano, and olive-leaf extract wafting from the green and blue bottles lining the dusty walnut shelf, but my weary mind soon drifts to the holistic doktor, Norman Troyer.

  For years, my family’s purse remained weighted only with my dawdy’s debts until the afternoon my mamm visited a little hovel next to the sprawling Masonic Lodge in Elizabethtown. Cluster headaches had plagued her for as long as my sister and I had been alive, but the only reason she wanted to address the ailment now was because of its thwarting her ability to work. We were not with Mamm that summer day she met Norman Troyer. Still, I can imagine her skepticism as he picked up a cheap flashlight from his desk and used it to peer at the navy rimming the irises of her cornflower-blue eyes. After five minutes of perusal not involving a single touch, Norman pinpointed the source of my mamm’s cluster headaches: a pinched nerve on the side of her neck, which she’d probably strained giving birth to twin daughters thirteen years before.

  To this day, I do not know what made that renowned holistic doktor take my mother on as his apprentice, teaching her everything he knew, then—when the Muddy Pond Community objected to the prospect of a woman iridologist—giving her textbooks on reflexology that she could market as a foot massage instead. Maybe it was the hunger Norman Troyer read in her eyes—physical hunger, yes, for she encouraged Leah and me to take seconds before she had even had firsts—but there was another hunger present, an insatiable hunger, a thirst, for knowledge beyond what the mundane tasks of an Old Order Mennonite woman required, and alternative medicine soon became her never-ending smorgasbord.

  9

  AMOS

  The New Holland sale, where Samuel Stoltzfus’s horses and tack will be auctioned off to the highest bidder, takes place the morning after Tobias and the twins arrive. Because of the auction, both Samuel and Helen are out working in the barn when everyone else wakes up. Eli and Jonathan will not stop brutzing during breakfast, where the adults eat banana nut muffins and fruit that Helen has prepared. Nobody mentions it, but after having spent the previous day on the road, they are as tired and irritable as the children. Thankfully, Gerald Martin has agreed to shuttle everyone around rather than spend the three days with his extended family in Lititz, so Tobias and the twins will not have to leave the haus for another hour.

  But Rachel finds no rest, since Eli’s breathing is becoming more labored. After his bath in the becken where Helen gave her twin infants theirs, Rachel rubs Eli’s body down with grapeseed oil to try to soothe him. She turns him over to massage his back and sees the buttonlike protrusions of his spine. Tracing her hand over them, she runs fingers along his hairline and the small column of his neck. That is when Rachel feels it: a knot tucked in
the hollow of his clavicle, no bigger than a pea.

  A shard of worry wedges itself between Rachel’s shoulder blades as she recalls the severe cold her son just cannot seem to shake. The only reason Rachel has not taken Eli to see the doktor is that none of his coughing fits have been as bad as that night she and Ida Mae spent in the bathroom. Well, that, and the fact that Rachel believes, just like her mamm, that Englischer doktors will only pump children full of antibiotics—killing the good bacteria along with the bad, hampering their bodies’ ability to fight back before they have learned to fight at all.

  By the time everyone, including Helen and Samuel, loads up in Gerald’s van and heads toward the auction, Rachel has tried to put her fears regarding her son’s health to rest. But as Eli holds on to one of her fingers with all of his, her worries awaken anew; even his grip seems to have weakened since the night before.

  “Mamm?” Helen turns toward her. “Is Norman Troyer still around?”

  “Of course,” she says. “Why?”

  “I thought I’d get him to look at Eli while we’re up.”

  Seated in the passenger seat as he was on the journey from Tennessee to Pennsylvania, Tobias says, without shifting his gaze from the windshield, “Isn’t he that powwow doktor over near the Masonic Lodge?”

  Helen says, “No, Tobias, Norman just looks at the whole body when finding a cure.”

  Her son-in-law says nothing, nor does Rachel.

  It is a quiet drive until they reach New Holland.

  The New Holland auction is a flea market that sells animals rather than antiques. Outside the enormous tin barn housing the sale, vendors layered in wool and checkered flannel sit behind tables, hawking cut-rate goods. Just outside the huge double doors that have been slid shut to block the cold, a young Amish boy with Judah’s fair coloring stamps his feet and blows into chapped hands while a snow globe of flurries swirls around him. In front of the boy, a folding table is crowded with Christmas poinsettias featured in pink, yellow, and red, along with a heavy metal box. The poster board taped to the front of the table, which conveys the price of the blummen for sale, is misspelled and written in a child’s hand. Just observing for five minutes, as my loved ones unload from Gerald Martin’s van, the boy has six pictures taken of him and two cups of hot cocoa placed on the table beside his money box.