Though Mountains Fall

by Dale Cramer

  “There is a war?” Emma asked.

  “Not yet. It is coming.”

  “Maybe it won’t happen,” Emma offered. “Or maybe he will live! Domingo knows how to take care of himself.”

  “So did his father. So did Kyra’s husband. So did Elliot Burgess.”

  Burgess was an Englisher from Fredericksburg—the only man the Benders had known personally who went off to fight in the Great War. He came home in a box.

  Emma touched her fingertips to Miriam’s belly and her voice dropped. “Did you tell him you are with child?”

  Miriam nodded. “ ‘All the more reason,’ he said.”

  The sisters talked for an hour while they hung laundry and packed dishes into a wooden crate, wrapping them with towels and rags. It helped a lot, talking to Emma. Nothing she said would change the fact that Domingo was going off to war, but in times of frustration and grief it always helped to share the burden with a sister. It was as if Emma lifted part of it from her and carried it herself.

  “We will pray for him,” Emma said as Miriam mounted her horse to go home.

  Right after Miriam left, Emma loaded Clara and Will into a little wagon, and Mose came alongside to help pull the wagon as she walked over to her father’s house. Emma’s instinctive reaction to this kind of news was the same as Miriam’s—she had to talk to a sister.

  Rachel was in the kitchen with the others, packing up. Emma hung back in the living room and made Rachel come to her so the others wouldn’t hear, but it did no good. When she told Rachel the news, she recoiled in horror.

  “Domingo is going to war?” Rachel said, too loudly.

  Leah dropped a plate. Mamm and the others looked up in shock as a deathly silence fell.

  Rachel’s lip quivered. “But he’ll be killed.”

  It got worse. Now she saw Dat, standing in the kitchen doorway. She hadn’t heard him come in.

  “Is this true?” her father asked. “Domingo is going off to fight?”

  Emma nodded.

  “Against who? The federales?”

  “Jah. The priest is going, too. Captain Soto and his men came to San Rafael yesterday and burned their church. Noceda was outraged. He said there’s going to be an uprising, and he wants to be part of it. Domingo decided to go with him.”

  “They’ll be killed,” her father said, without emotion. “Who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.”

  Then he turned and went back out without doing whatever it was he had come in for in the first place.

  Chapter 28

  We leave in three weeks,” Domingo told her when he came home that evening. “I don’t know how long we will be gone, but I’ll write when I can. You can stay with Kyra and my mother if you wish—in fact I would prefer it. You will be safer there.”

  “Perhaps they can teach me how to be a widow,” she said angrily, her back to him, flipping tortillas.

  He came and put his arms around her. “I will be fine,” he said. “I’m not some child who can’t keep his head in the heat of battle.”

  “There was talk among the women in the market today. They say the federales are invincible. They say this peasant army is ill-prepared, that it will be a slaughter—shopkeepers with clubs and farmers with hay scythes against battle-hardened troops with guns.”

  He took her by the shoulders and turned her around so he could look into her eyes. “You must not listen to the women in the market,” he said. “They know only of fear and waiting. In their need to shelter their children they sometimes forget the honor of their men and the fire inside them. Miriam, these are honorable men, fighting for a just cause—the freedom to worship as they please. Is this not why you came to Mexico in the first place?”

  “Jah,” she said, “but we would never have gone to war over it. There is always a better way.”

  “Is there? If no one resists them, how far will they go? If the federales persecute the Catholics, how long will it be before they come after the Protestants? The Amish?”

  “After tomorrow there will be no Amish to persecute,” she said.

  He looked down at her belly. “This godless regime must be stopped, Miriam, at whatever cost. Would you have our child grow up without knowing God?”

  “Would you have him grow up without knowing his father?”

  Domingo chuckled, squeezed her. “I will be there for him, Miriam. And I will tell him how his mother’s cheeks grow red when she is angry.” His voice softened as he reached up to touch her face. “And how lovely she was when she came to me in the evening with a moonflower in her hair.”

  That evening Miriam cleaned her little house until it shined and then stood by the front window, waiting, watching. Her family would be leaving in the morning, all of them, and there was a very good chance she would never see any of them again. Ban or no ban, surely they would come tonight to say goodbye.

  But no one came. She stood by the window until long after dark, until she knew it was far too late for a family who had to rise early the next morning and start the long trek to Arteaga.

  Domingo came and put his hands on her shoulders, spoke gently into her ear. “Let’s go to bed, Miriam. They aren’t coming tonight. Tomorrow morning they will have to pass right by San Rafael on their way north. I will go with you, and we will be waiting for them on Saltillo Road.”

  Dejected, she moaned, “What if they don’t stop?”

  “Then we will wave to them as they pass by. Miriam, we can only decide what we will do. What your family chooses is up to them. It has always been so.”

  Caleb tossed and turned all night and finally gave up long before the rooster crowed. He got up and dressed himself, lit a lantern and wandered across the dark valley to the little graveyard at the foot of the opposite ridge, where four small crosses stood next to a larger one under a cottonwood tree.

  The air was still and cold, a full moon hanging over the mountains, so bright the stars faded and the trees left shadows. Never in his life had he felt such confusion. Nothing seemed right. He wanted to talk to Gott, but for the first time in his life he could not feel Gott’s presence, even in the silence.

  So he talked to Aaron.

  “I guess this is the last time I’ll be here,” he said. “But I want you to know how bad I miss you—you and your brother both. I hope you found one another. I like to think so.”

  He sat silent for a long time, then with a great shuddering sigh he looked up to the heavens and cried, “I do not want to leave this place!”

  But when he looked across the valley and saw lantern light in the windows of his house he forced his feelings back down into their proper place, got up, dusted the back of his breeches and ambled down the hill on aching knees. There was work to be done, and it would be a long drive to Arteaga.

  ———

  John Hershberger took the lead in the caravan of wagons and buggies and hacks trundling out of Paradise Valley. He’d decided to abandon the farm, now that harvest was done, and take an apartment in Saltillo, where he might have better luck finding buyers. He would put his family and all their earthly goods—furniture and farm implements and buggies and wagons and cows and horses—on the train in Arteaga and then go on to Saltillo alone.

  It was full daylight when they passed by the edge of San Rafael, and Caleb sensed the tension in Mamm, sitting beside him on the bench of the heavily laden wagon behind a team of Belgians. Up ahead he saw a trio of people standing on the side of the road as if they were waiting for a ride, and he knew who it was even before he drew close enough to recognize them.

  Miriam, come to say goodbye.

  Mamm touched his shoulder. “We must stop,” she said. “It’s not right to leave without speaking to her.”

  He didn’t answer. Inside he was dying a little, unsure if his heart could take the strain of looking into Miriam’s eyes, knowing it was the last time he would ever see her. He steeled himself, hunched forward, keeping a tight grip on the reins and his eyes straight ahead. He didn’t plan to stop, no matter wh
at Mamm said, but John Hershberger was in the lead. Up ahead, John waited until Caleb’s wagon was about to pass Miriam and Domingo and Kyra, then halted his wagon, blocking the road. The whole caravan ground to a stop for no apparent reason.

  Caleb’s wagon sat ten feet from Miriam.

  She was right there, looking up at him. Caleb refused to even look. He kept his eyes ahead, the reins in his hands. Mamm took one look at him and climbed out the other side.

  The others came too—Miriam’s sisters and Harvey, Levi and Emma, Mary and Ezra, Jake and Rachel. They poured out of their wagons and buggies and came running to Miriam, gathering around her while Caleb sat stone-faced, refusing to budge. His breathing quickened, listening to their tearful goodbyes and seeing all the desperate clutching and hand-holding from the corner of his eye. It was killing him.

  Finally, unable to stand it, he climbed down and walked away, up toward the front, to ask John why he was holding them up.

  John sat calmly in his wagon, smoking his pipe. He nodded when Caleb walked up, tipped his hat.

  “What did we stop for?” Caleb demanded.

  John suppressed a wry grin as he held up the corncob pipe. “I had to light my pipe,” he said.

  Busybody. A child would know he didn’t have to stop a whole caravan just to light a pipe.

  “Well, we need to get going again,” Caleb said, his jaw working. “We have a long way to go yet.”

  Without another word he stalked back toward his wagon, but John turned around and called to him.

  Caleb stopped, glared over his shoulder.

  “She’s your daughter,” John said gently. “Do what’s right.”

  But in that moment Caleb’s anger burned, and he was in no mood to be told what was right. If John Hershberger hadn’t been such an old and good friend, Caleb would have given him a tongue-lashing right there in front of everybody and told him to mind his own business. But he didn’t. In his rage he headed for the little crowd gathered by his wagon, a single thought in mind.

  I’ll show you what’s right.

  His family parted for him, and he walked straight up to Miriam and Domingo. A hush fell. Miriam’s hair was down and loose, and she was dressed like Kyra in a printed skirt and peasant blouse, a shawl wrapped about her shoulders. It hurt Caleb to see her that way; it insulted him.

  He didn’t reach for his daughter or speak to her. He fastened a hard glare on Domingo instead.

  “I heard you were going away to fight in a war,” Caleb said.

  Domingo nodded. “Sí, es verdad. We leave in a fortnight.”

  Caleb drew a deep breath. “May Gott have mercy on you. When the day comes that you lie bleeding to death on the battlefield, perhaps you will see the folly of your ways. I want you to know that when you are dead your wife need not suffer hunger or deprivation.”

  When you are dead, he said—not if.

  “If Miriam can find her way back to us, and if she repents, we will forgive her and take her in. She will be welcomed. She will always have a roof over her head and food to eat. Perhaps in your last hours this will bring you some measure of peace.”

  Miriam hung her head and wept.

  “Now let’s get moving!” Caleb shouted, and turned away without another word. His daughters ran crying, and as he helped Mamm up into the wagon he could hear Miriam above the others, weeping as she turned toward home.

  It’s her own fault, he thought as he tugged the reins and the big draft horses lunged against the traces. I did not ask for this. She brought it on herself.

  It took all day to get to the station in Arteaga, and it was nightfall before everything was loaded into cattle cars. The train pulled out the next morning, leaving only John Hershberger waving from the platform.

  They were silent, all of them. The family was torn apart, even from each other. Morose and dispirited, they had all merely gone through the motions while they loaded what was left of their lives on the train, none of them speaking unless they had to. Though the gloom was common to them all, they kept it to themselves, refusing to share it, each of them lost in his or her own dark thoughts.

  Even Emma was confused and disoriented. This was a new thing, as if Satan himself had ripped the family apart and built walls between them, and it frightened her. Emma spent the first day alone in a corner of the cattle car, comforted by the rhythmic clacking of the steel wheels, thinking.

  They had all suffered grievous losses, Emma not least among them. She’d left behind the farm she and Levi built, their first home, where she’d planted a thousand trees, and where all three of her children were born. A great many dreams died when they pulled out. She understood loss.

  But Emma knew that wasn’t the source of this new darkness. An eternal optimist, she knew from countless stories in the Bible that dreams swept away by the hand of Gott would soon be replaced by new dreams, and brighter. Houses could crumble to dust and barns could burn, but her faith was not in temporal things. Gott was Gott. Life would go on.

  They had lost a brother, yet Emma understood that even death was part of life, part of Gott’s plan. The words spoken at a funeral always comforted her and brought her peace: the Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord. That wasn’t the problem either.

  It was her father. She’d never seen him like this. Caleb Bender had always been as dependable as the dawn, faithful and wise. Whenever the family suffered storms he had always been their anchor—even-tempered, patient and farsighted. It was Caleb Bender’s vision that held them together. The Bender family could weather any storm so long as their anchor held.

  But now Dat was not himself. Full of wrath and regret, his anger and impatience drove wedges between them all. Perhaps somehow Satan had found a crack, a way to reach even her father. Since leaving Miriam in tears by Saltillo Road he had barely spoken a word, and his dark fury was contagious.

  Emma sat up late into the night talking to Gott, and the second day on the train she went to talk to her father. She found him sitting on a nail keg, staring out through the slats at a countryside painted in brilliant reds and golds as they traveled north into the hills of Tennessee. He didn’t even look at her as she sat down on the floor and leaned back against the slats next to him. She reached out and touched his knee.

  “Dat,” she said, “it’s not your fault.”

  He didn’t react at all, and was silent for so long she was afraid he hadn’t heard. But then he spoke, softly.

  “I led them down there.”

  “You only did what you believed Gott wanted. There’s no wrong in that.”

  He shook his head sadly. “Then it must not have been Gott’s voice I was listening to. There’s plenty of wrong in that.”

  “Why would you even think such a thing?”

  “Because I failed. Because we probably won’t be able to sell our farms, and everyone who followed me failed. Because the friends who listened to me lost everything—even children. Half of them left a child in the ground in Paradise Valley, as I did.”

  “There was an epidemic, Dat, just like the one in Ohio that took Amos. It’s not for us to decide who lives and dies, or when, or where.”

  Still, he refused to look at her. “I was wrong. I led people astray. Gott didn’t really want us in Mexico.”

  She fell silent for a moment, pondering this. “So the test of Gott’s will is that we succeed at whatever we do?”

  He looked at her now, but his eyes narrowed. “What do you mean? What are you saying?”

  A shrug. “I’m saying maybe it was Gott’s will—all of it. Maybe we weren’t meant to succeed.”

  He turned away again. “Why would Gott do that?”

  “I don’t know. To test us? To teach us something? Why did He send Moses into the wilderness for forty years? Good things only teach us to be grateful. It’s from failure, loss and hardship that we learn what we really believe. Like you—now.”

  He shook his head. “What am I to learn from this disaster, Emma? I’m going home b
eaten and embarrassed, poor as Job. What am I to learn from that?”

  “I don’t know, Dat, because Gott’s questions are personal and I’m not you. But I know that somewhere inside you lies a question, a choice that must be made, and only you can make it. I’m thinking maybe the rest of your life hangs on which way you choose.”

  Chapter 29

  There was a crowd waiting for the Bender clan when they arrived at the train station in Fredericksburg, mostly relatives and church members. John’s brother met the Hershberger family at the station and took them home with him. Even so, the caravan up to Salt Creek Township ended up being far longer and more boisterous than the one that left Paradise Valley.

  Looking around him, Caleb saw that the world had changed since he left. On the slow procession out of Fredericksburg he noticed more buildings, more people and far more automobiles than five years ago—and every one of them in a hurry. The pace of life seemed to have quickened in his absence, the rush and crush of the 1920s now roaring past the plodding Amish.

  He hadn’t forgotten a thing. Every pebble and pothole in the road, every fence post, every front porch and every barn lot was as familiar to him as his hat, as if he had never left. When they turned the corner and the old saltbox house came in sight at the top of the hill it brought a lump to his throat. He was home. Whatever hardships lay ahead, his family would be able to handle them.

  What was left of his family.

  Jake and Rachel retired to the Weaver farm two miles down the road, where they would live until they got on their feet. Everyone else went straight to the old Bender place. The Bender house was packed to the rafters that first night, but Ezra and Mary and their five children left for Millersburg first thing in the morning. Ezra had made arrangements to work for a cousin, making furniture. They would rent a house in town.

  The following day Levi took Emma, who was now noticeably pregnant, along with their three children and all their household goods and farm implements, to a farmhouse up in Apple Creek. Levi’s brother had decided to move to another church district and agreed to let Levi tenant-farm his old place until he could raise the money to pay for it.