Looking up at Bishop Tobias King, I see a man tortured by the same mistakes as I, yet with nothing to show for these mistakes except what he hides from the world. For the first time, I understand that my plight might be the easier cross to bear. “If you could, Tobias,” I say. “If you could. But you won’t. That was obvious a year ago when I told you what happened, and you turned from me.”
“I had no choice!”
“And I did?”
“I offered you money, but you wouldn’t take it.”
“No! I wouldn’t take your money. I couldn’t. Not if I was going to keep my self-respect.”
Folding his arms, Tobias stares out across his land that has increased in acreage since his father’s death. I turn and look at it too: at the rolling hillsides iced with white, the way one field is distinguished from another only by the rustic fence posts dolloped with snow.
“What’s going to happen?” he whispers. “I don’t mean you and me. I mean to all of us.” He unlaces an arm and casts out a hand to take in these fields. “All of this. What’s going to happen if the truth comes out?”
“You will survive,” I say, and though I try, there is no compassion in my voice. “It will be hard. At first you will feel like you are dying, but then one day follows into the next, a week becomes a month, and you realize that life goes on . . . although it is not the same life you knew before.”
Tobias shakes his head. “I won’t do it; I won’t tell. There’s too much at risk. My family, the community—”
“Your reputation, your pride.”
His face hardens along with his voice. “That’s enough, Rachel. You have said your piece.”
“So we’re back to that now, are we?” I force myself not to be cowed by his domineering tone. “You’re once again the bishop, and I am the fallen woman of Copper Creek?”
“No. I may not have always been the bishop, but you have never been anything but a fallen woman. Like Eve giving the apple to Adam, you alone are the reason I fell.”
The quilt slips from my shoulders at the same time my right hand whips out and smacks Tobias’s face. Exposed to the elements for so long, my fingers have gone numb, but now they tingle and sting from the impact of skin striking skin. Tobias does not rub his bearded jaw or even wince. Angling his head, he just looks at me. In his black gaze, I can see a steely resolve that chills my bones more than the oncoming storm.
AMOS
The afternoon Tobias came into my office and took the chair across from my desk—the desk that has been carried down through the King familye since we came to the New World to escape the persecution of the Old—I could see by his troubled face that something was weighing heavily on his mind. I knew Tobias had come there to discuss it, and I was honored that he trusted my discretion enough to confide in me. But I was so eager to speak with my firstborn for the first time in weeks, I wanted to catch up on trivial things: the new residents being born, the ones who had died, the families who were just arriving in Copper Creek, and the ones who were leaving in hopes of acquiring more land. After we had discussed these changes, Tobias cleared his throat and stared at his hands in his lap, as if too ashamed to meet my eyes.
I couldn’t understand it, because I could not imagine what my eldest had to be ashamed about. Once again, I didn’t want Tobias to speak, to ruin such a delightful visit with talk that would surely upset me, since I carried each of my children’s burdens like they were my own. But when I stood to check whether Verna had any egg custard pie in the kich, Tobias held up his hand and said, “Dawdy, please. Sit down. You must hear what I have come to say.”
The moment those words left my son’s mouth, I was taken. It happened so fast, I could not say good-bye. I couldn’t get my papers in order like I had always hoped. I couldn’t hug my wife or kiss my children. I couldn’t push my grosskinner one at a time, one more time, on the tire swing attached to the sycamore. I was simply whisked from one world and placed in the next, a world unlike any I have ever known. I do love it here—with all the tears wiped from our eyes, how could I not?—but for weeks after I watched my temporal body being lowered into its earthly grave, I wondered why I died without any warning. I had thought that the Lord and I had such a sweet communion that he would tell me, like Moses, when it was time.
I have come to realize, however, that when I passed away, my affairs were more in order than I knew. My wife and I were enjoying the best years of our marriage. My children were all grown, and most of them had birthed children of their own, who all filled me with more joy than I thought was possible. I loved the Copper Creek Community, and I loved leading the humble flock of our church in seeking the ways of God.
I thank the Lord for taking me when he did, even though I did not understand his ways, which are higher than mine. Now, I can gaze down upon the grief my firstborn has caused, and I can forgive him because my vantage point here is much better than it was on earth, when I foolishly evaded Tobias’s confession. You see, after I died and the paper in the Ausbund declared Tobias bishop, pride in his newfound title would not allow my son to confess to a deacon what he and Rachel had done. Inadvertent though it was, I condoned Tobias’s sin by allowing him to remain in darkness. The only ability I long for is to help Tobias and Rachel. If I could somehow communicate to him that repentance is much more important than pride, and to her that forgiveness will break chains while anger will only keep her in bondage, I am certain they could get through this pain without causing themselves or others permanent scars. But without applying the balm of repentance and forgiveness, if Leah finds out, or—I cannot bear to think it—my precious wife, I don’t know how their heartbreak will ever heal.
Even though the Lord does wipe the tears from our eyes, that does not mean this cloud of witnesses is exempt from feeling empathy for those hurting below. If I could shed tears over the direness of Rachel and Tobias’s situation, I would. But I cannot. I cannot cry over it, and I cannot mend that which I have not torn. Instead, I turn my thoughts to Judah, my youngest, who has never brought anything to my life but joy.
Judah has traveled far from home, all the way to Cody, Wyoming. At this moment, he is sitting on a stool, wiping beer froth from his lip with the back of his hand.
I do not believe it is the biased opinion of a vadder when I say that something sets Judah apart from the rest of the men parking their sorrows at the bar. I see how the women watch him from their positions around the pool table, which holds a game they have no interest to play, as their aim is far more strategic. Cringing, I watch as one young woman with brown hair tangled down to a slender waist bends over the pool table and gives Judah a smile that somehow seems exposed. But my son is oblivious. He just keeps nursing his beer and cracking peanuts that he picks out of the shells but does not eat. I do not need this heavenly perspective to know what has hardened my son’s heart and snuffed the light from his eyes. If I hadn’t been so terrified of our Lancaster County bishop, I might have gone to a bar myself that first time Verna turned me down for open-buggy courting. But my son doesn’t have any bishops around to fear, and I know he would not fear them even if he did. His feeling of rejection has consumed him to the point where he cannot feel anything else.
When you are twenty years old and the only woman you have ever loved has spurned not only you but also your love, it seems like life just isn’t worth living. This is why Judah is seated in the Watering Trough with a fake ID purchased from a rodeo clown burning in his back pocket. This is why, when that young woman with the tangled brown hair comes sidling over and touches Judah’s back, he looks at her and smiles. This, and a loneliness unlike any he has ever known, is why he invites her to sit beside him and purchases another mug of beer.
As the late-night crowd gathers, the room grows darker. The woman leans over, her perfumed hair blanketing Judah’s right arm, and pulls his other arm so that his barstool spins and he has no choice but to walk with her onto the dance floor. My son has never danced in his life. This would be obvious except for the fact that this woman k
nows her moves. Twining her arms around his neck, she steps so close, her belt buckle grinds against his. She sways her body to the music. Judah does the same. I watch how he peers over this woman’s head and out through the bar’s smoke-stained window. I hope that just like Joseph with Potiphar’s wife, he will flee temptation and make his escape.
Trailing her nails along Judah’s neck, the woman leans up and whispers. At first his face blanches, and then red sweeps the sides of his cheeks. He nods. The woman laces her fingers through his and leads him from the dance floor. The last image I allow myself is of Judah helping the woman into her jacket and walking with her out the door.
Thankful that even in my present state, I am privileged to intercede for my loved ones, I implore Judah’s heavenly Father to intervene in his life in a way I am no longer able to. I notice, not for the first time since I’ve found myself here, that my prayers pierce the heavens with a power I had always imagined when I knelt and beseeched the throne from earth. I can only hope they will make a difference before foolishness destroys my younger son, just as it is threatening to destroy his brother.
13
Rachel
Although I am sure Leah’s meal is delicious, each bite rolls around in my mouth like sand. This morning, when Leah invited me and our parents to supper, I knew I could not decline without revealing that something was wrong beyond my son’s illness. But I also knew I would be unable to act as if everything were fine when it is not. For this reason, I do not know how Tobias can just sit at the head of the table, which demonstrates his place as the head of the King home, and smile and laugh as if he hasn’t a care in this world. He even attempts to draw me into a conversation regarding the expansion of Copper Creek. The hypocrisy of his acting cordial toward me in public—when he knows full well what has taken place between us in private—fills me with such loathing, I cannot unclench my jaw long enough to reply.
“Creamed welschkann, Rachel?” my mamm asks.
I shake my head, but she passes the bowl to me anyway. Perhaps she senses that if she can keep my mouth filled, I will not be able to open it. Taking an obligatory scoop, I pass the bowl over to my father, who dumps half the contents onto his plate and reaches for another heel of salt-rising brot.
“This is nice,” Leah says, looking at her husband from the opposite end of the table. I cannot help but note how her eyes shine, which causes tears to well up in my own. “We haven’t all sat around the same table since our wedding. Have we, Tobias?”
He shakes his head and smiles, swallows his small mouthful of food. For a country-raised Mennonite, he has impeccable manners, which only emphasizes my belief that you can look the part of the honored bishop but still be a barbarian inside.
“Rachel?” my mamm says. “Would you help me a moment?”
Pushing my chair back and passing Eli to my eldest niece, Miriam, I follow my mamm into Leah’s kitchen. Even as a young child, I could always tell when my mamm was about to lose her temper from the way she would bunch the muscles of her shoulders around her neck or walk across the floor with the rigidity of a windup doll. Now she is doing both. Jabbing a finger back toward the mudroom, my mamm continues walking and I follow, feeling like I am five years old again and about to get my behind swatted with a spoon.
Earth and must combined with lye and freeze-dried clothes fill my nostrils. My mamm slants her body against the wooden shelf labeled, in my sister’s calligraphy-worthy hand, with each of the children’s names along with hers and Tobias’s. On wash day, each cubbyhole is filled with folded laundry that the four older children then take up to their rooms and put away in their respective drawers, which are also labeled: socks and underwear, pants for the boys, dresses for the girls.
“She’s some housekeeper,” I remark, still staring at the shelves.
My mamm ignores this, grabs my upper arm. “What do you think you’re doing?” she hisses. “I know you’re upset, but you have got to stop this ferhoodled behavior!”
“What are you talking about?” I groan. “What did I do now?”
“You just keep sitting there, not saying a word to anyone. Leah’s prepared this nachtesse especially for you, and I won’t let you ruin it!”
“My son’s just been diagnosed with cancer, Mamm. Forgive me if I’m not feeling cheerful.”
“That’s still no excuse! And the way you keep looking at Tobias . . .” She digs her fingernails into the flesh of my arm. “I taught you better than that.”
I do not defend my behavior toward my brother-in-law, knowing my silence will both condemn our past actions and explain my present anger.
“Ach, Gott forgive you,” my mamm breathes as the puzzle of my child’s paternity slides into place. “I don’t know how it happened, but you . . .” She stops and grapples both my cheeks in one hand, forcing me to face her, to meet her probing eyes. I am filled with indignation at being treated like such a child when I have a child of my own, but I know even if I were forty-five and my mother eighty, she would treat me just the same. “You had better keep the secret regarding Eli’s vadder to yourself.” My mamm shoves my head away, and it knocks against the side of the shelf.
“I am not the only one who’s sinned,” I say, rubbing my cheekbone.
“But you are the only one responsible for your sin, and I won’t have Leah dragged into this. She has just gotten her strength back. I will not allow you to take it from her!”
I wield my tongue to fillet her with a reply, but when I open my mouth to speak, my voice cracks. In that briefest pause, I find that all fight is taken from me. I turn to face the shelves so my mother cannot see my tears. Looking at those names my sister carefully wrote for each member of her family, however, only causes me to weep even more. “I am just tired, Mamm,” I say. “I am tired of living with my mistakes and knowing I will die by them. I am tired of being treated like a child when I am a woman, have become more of a woman in the past four months than I have in three years, and I am tired of being punished alone for a sin that I did not commit alone.”
I face my mamm. Even in the shadows, I can see the glint of her cobalt eyes. I think its source is anger, but then she swipes her palms across her cheeks, and I know she is crying too.
“My meedel . . .” Mamm reaches out and cups my wet cheeks, bruised by the force of her fingers. “You do not have to live with your mistakes if you’re willing to admit them and turn from them. Even this can be forgiven by our Gott. But you will never be able to turn if you remain focused on Tobias’s sin.”
Pans clatter in the becken. Mamm drops her hands from my face as we turn and see the kerosene bulb sprouting to life, filling the kitchen with an illumination brighter than electricity. Leah, her voice so sweetly unselfconscious it is almost like a child’s, begins to sing. “Gott ist die Liebe, läßt mich erlösen; Gott ist die Liebe, er liebt auch mich.” She scrapes plates and dumps the residue in a slop bucket for the sei.
“What’s going to happen?” My mamm sighs. “You can’t hide it from her forever.”
Swallowing, I say, “No, I probably won’t be able to hide it from her forever, but I am at least going to try.”
AMOS
Leah remains in the kitchen long after the kerosene light has been extinguished, the dishes washed and put away, the children kissed and piled beneath enough quilts to weigh them down into peaceful dreams. But still she stays, her dry hands clasping the becken, staring through the window out into the snow-covered darkness. In this second, her careering thoughts stopping long enough that she can grasp the tail end of one, Leah pauses to stare at her own reflection, illuminated by the oil lamp’s glow. She takes in her shadowed eyes, pointed face, dark-blonde hair scraped into a kapp, and wonders why someone who looks identical to her is the one her husband wants.
Tonight is the first in several months that Leah allows her suspicions to rouse themselves from the depths of her subconscious’s slumber and raise their ugly head. She never questioned asking her sister to come live with her and Tobias becau
se she knew Rachel would never do anything to cause her or her family harm. But with a courtship as short as theirs, Leah’s husband was still a stranger when she married him, and this is where the danger lurked. Or at least this is how Leah explains it.
In the beginning, there were little things—things so minute Leah did not bother to contemplate them longer than it took to discard the incidents from her mind. Her husband did not like to be alone with Rachel. He did not like to sit near Rachel. If Rachel would enter a room, he would leave it. If she would ask him a question, he would not look up at her as he answered.
Leah didn’t know her husband well enough to even know his personality, so she told herself that he was shy. But Tobias was not shy. He knew everyone in the surrounding communities and everyone knew him. If Gerald Martin picked them up in his spray-painted van and took them into town for supplies, Tobias would even strike up a conversation with the owner of the outlet shoe store, a heavyset Englischer with a gold neck chain and capped teeth. And if Tobias was discussing a smithing job with one of his customers, he would often become so caught up in a conversation about anything but smithing that Leah would have to send one of the children over to pull their vadder respectfully away for supper.
Her husband’s awkwardness around her sister was something she could dismiss until the afternoon Leah risked the doktor’s strict bed-rest orders because she heard Rachel’s cry echoing up from the kitchen, followed by the sound of breaking glass. It took Leah ten minutes to make the excruciatingly slow journey from the bed, to the floor, to the hallway, and then down the twenty precarious steps. Her nightgown was plastered to her sweaty skin by the time she stepped off the last stair and into the airless dining room. For almost a minute, Leah stood with one hand clinging to her chest and the other to the doorframe. But as soon as she caught her breath and peered into the kitchen, her breath was lost again.
The Outcast Page 16
