Paradise Valley

by Dale Cramer

  Then she stood up.

  When the nurse looked up, Rachel smiled demurely and crept closer to the desk.

  “I’m very sorry to bother you,” she said meekly, “but I have to go.”

  “Go? Oh no, dear, I’m afraid you can’t go. You have to stay here and wait your turn like – ”

  “No, I mean I have to go. You know . . .” Rachel pointed discreetly to the window and her voice dropped to an embarrassed whisper. “To the outhouse.”

  The nurse chuckled. “Oh, you poor child, we have no outhouse here. This building has indoor plumbing. The facility is just down the hall to the left. I’ll unlock the door and let you go if you promise to come right back, okay?”

  Rachel’s face twisted in girlish confusion. “Indoor plumbing? But I wouldn’t know what to . . . I’ve never even seen one of those. I don’t know how it works.”

  It was a small lie – two of them actually – but she could repent of it later. Rachel had seen an indoor toilet, though she’d never used one, and she did know how it worked. Nevertheless, the nurse took pity on her, which was precisely the reaction she had hoped for. Rising from behind the desk, the nurse pulled a ring of keys from a drawer.

  “Oh, all right,” she said, laughing. “Come on, I’ll show you. It’ll only take a second.”

  She unlocked the door and followed Rachel out, locking the door behind them before hurrying down the hall. After showing Rachel the toilet she even pulled the chain and flushed it once to demonstrate how it worked before she scurried back to her post.

  The scream reached the bathroom, even with the door closed, and Rachel smiled.

  When she got back to the waiting room the only people in it were the nurse and the superintendent. Cold air poured in from the wide-open window, and in the fields beyond she could see a bedlam of grown men chasing Amish kids through the tall grass in every direction.

  “I don’t know how it could have happened,” the nurse was saying. “I was only gone for a minute!”

  The superintendent stood with his back to her, glaring out the window with his arms crossed on his chest. Even from behind she could see his jaw working. Rachel tiptoed into the room and took a seat, folding her hands innocently in her lap. She had promised to come straight back, and she had kept her word.

  Ten minutes later her friends and sisters had been recaptured and returned to their seats in the waiting room to await their humiliation – all except for two.

  Jake and William Weaver were still missing.

  Chapter 4

  The Holmes County jailer never had to feed his Amish inmates. He wouldn’t have been able to feed them even if he had tried, for the five Amish fathers refused to accept anything from the hand of their jailers. Every morning just after daylight a buggy would pull up to the hitching rail, and one of their wives or daughters would bring a basket of food sufficient for all five men for the entire day. She would visit for as long as the jailer allowed, and then take her basket and return home. On Saturdays they received a double portion, for no wife wanted to dishonor the Sabbath with so much work, nor would they willingly miss gma if the biweekly services happened to be held that day.

  Early on a Saturday morning Caleb’s wife arrived at the jail lugging her large basket, her steps leaden, her face lined with grief and fatigue. There were dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep and she was constantly fighting that rattling cough. It was unusual for her to come. Usually she sent Emma with the meals. Something was wrong.

  “Mamm, are you all right?” Caleb asked her as the jailer unlocked the cell. She nodded weakly, handing him the cloth-covered basket and fussing with the handkerchief in her hands, unable to look him in the eye.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” he said. “You don’t need to be out in this weather. What is it? What has happened, Mamm?”

  “They have taken the children,” she wheezed.

  Caleb nearly dropped the basket as his eyes widened and he gasped audibly.

  “Who took them?”

  “The sheriff.”

  “Which children? Tell me.”

  She named them, one by one, ending with her own. “They took them away to the children’s home,” she said, “and they cut the boys’ hair.”

  “No!” The four other men, two in the cell with Caleb and two in the adjacent cell, all clung to the bars as the jailer closed the cell door in front of Martha Bender.

  “They cut the boys’ hair?” Reuben Miller cried out. “My boys, too?”

  Martha nodded, barely able to look up. “And they took away their clothes. They dressed them in fancy clothes yet, all of them.” Then she remembered, and caught the eye of Jonas Weaver. “But not your boys, Jonas. Jake and William got away.”

  She eyed the jailer suspiciously, and Caleb read her thoughts. Even though she was speaking Dutch and was fairly certain he couldn’t understand a word, she would say no more regarding the whereabouts of the two Weaver boys. Nor did she need to. Jonas knew her well, and he would know from her tone of voice that she had spoken to his boys. They were safe, either at home or at a nearby Amish farm.

  “What will we do now?” John Hershberger asked quietly from the other cell, his knuckles white on the bars.

  “I think we all know what we must do now,” Caleb said. They were out of options, and he knew when he was beaten.

  “Mamm, listen to me. On Monday morning you must go to the courthouse and ask to speak to the judge.”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t do that!” she said, shaking her head in horror. “What would I say to him? He wouldn’t talk to me anyway.”

  Caleb nodded gravely. “Jah, he will speak to you. This man knows one of us will come to him. Who do you think ordered our children to be taken away? Tell him we will do what he asks. He knows we have no choice now.”

  Eli Stoltzfus laid a hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “We cannot do this,” he said, his voice thick with anger. “It is against the ordnung.”

  Caleb’s burning eyes leveled on Eli, and he thought for a moment of saying to him, It is mighty easy for you to talk about the ordnung when your daughter is safe in Lancaster. But he held his tongue. Such words would only cause strife now, and they could not afford to be divided.

  “We have no choice,” he repeated, as calmly as he could manage. “Before, we chose to be in jail rather than have our children go to the consolidated school. Now we have a different choice. We must choose whether to let our children be in the worldly school five days a week, or to let them be raised in the children’s home all the time. We must choose the lesser of the two evils.”

  “The lesser of two evils,” Eli said, “is still an evil.”

  It seemed cruel and punitive beyond measure, but when Martha Bender finally met with the judge, he gave orders for the five men to appear in court again on a day nearly two weeks off, and in the meantime the children would remain in the children’s home.

  The minutes and days were as an eternity for the men in the jail, but the day finally came. They stood once again in court, this time with their heads hanging in abject defeat. The judge levied fines against them all, and they were made to say out loud in front of the court that they would agree to send their children to school and allow them to study the prescribed subjects. And then, right there in the courtroom in front of their wives, they signed a paper agreeing to do this. They had no choice. They were utterly defeated.

  The next day, on a Saturday in late January, the children came home. Caleb was standing on his front porch watching, and he saw the automobile chugging up the road from a long way off. He called out to Mamm, and by the time the automobile stopped in the driveway of the Bender house, the entire family had gathered on the front lawn to welcome the girls home.

  Rachel got out first, from the passenger side of the car, with her copper hair hanging down her back in long braids. She was wearing shiny black leather shoes with brass buckles, and a green gingham dress that came up almost to her knees. Her younger sisters followed her like ducklings, hiding
in her shadow, clearly ashamed of the way they were dressed. The three of them walked around the car with their heads down, unable to look anyone in the eye, angling across the yard toward the steps, heading directly for the house with the obvious intention of bypassing their family while they were in such a state.

  The whole family shared in the humiliation, but no one spoke. No one moved. Caleb’s heart burned within him and he was filled with a desire to lift his baby daughters off their feet in a great roaring bear hug right there in front of everybody, but he didn’t do it. It would not have been proper, and it was not what they expected of him. As Rachel passed he couldn’t stop his hand from reaching out to her, and her shoulder just brushed under his fingertips. She didn’t look up, even then, but kept walking quickly, resolutely. As the car backed out, Caleb and his family fell in step behind the girls.

  As soon as they were inside, the three girls asked to go up to the room they shared. Mamm went with them, and ten minutes later Rachel came back down the stairs looking like herself. Gone were the green dress and the downcast gaze, and her hair was once again neatly pinned under her prayer kapp. Smiling contentedly, she carried three Englisher dresses bundled in her arms, and when she got to the bottom of the stairs she turned left instead of right. Without a word, she passed through the kitchen on the way to the back door, lifting a box of kitchen matches from a drawer on her way out.

  Chuckling softly, Caleb followed her. He picked up a can of kerosene from the back porch and fell in behind his beautiful red-haired daughter as she marched straight to the burn pile down behind the barn.

  Chapter 5

  The next morning Rachel and her family huddled together under a pile of buggy robes in the surrey while Caleb drove to the home of Uri Mullet up near Apple Creek. The horse’s breath chuffed little clouds on the frosty air as it trotted, head high, glad to be running on such a morning. Mamm was not with them. Unable to breathe lying down, she had sat up all night next to the stove in her rocker. Dat told her to stay home and rest rather than make the drive on such a frosty morning in an open buggy. He was uncharacteristically silent while he drove, his face lined with worry.

  After two weeks in the children’s home, Rachel’s first morning at church felt almost as good as her first day back home. All the familiar things – the pile of black hats on the mud room table, the backless benches, the dark curtains tied back to let in clean winter sunlight, the singing, the old bishop’s singsong preaching, and especially the faces of all the people she loved – all of it felt as fine and warm as home itself.

  Jake Weaver was there, sitting across from her – and so was his hair, she noted with a twinge of selfish pride. The other boys had not been so lucky, but it was only hair – it would grow back. No one blamed them for what had happened.

  She hadn’t seen Jake since that first day at the children’s home, nor had she bumped into him before the service began, but he was here now, sitting alongside his father and brothers. The mere sight of him filled her with joy. Once, before the minister got warmed up, she caught Jake sneaking a glance in her direction. She averted her eyes quickly, but she knew. He was looking for her. She sat a little straighter, held her head a little higher and took pains not to let her gaze linger on him. Until she turned sixteen, even such innocent flirtation would meet with dire disapproval. Besides, even now she suffered the natural insecurities of a fifteen-year-old girl, and Jake had really said nothing of his feelings. How could she be sure that Jake’s gentle caress that day in the barn hadn’t merely been brotherly consolation over her father’s arrest?

  After the service Rachel and her family went outside to wait for a bit while the Mullets and their kin prepared lunch. She lined up at the privy with the rest of the women. The men, in order not to make the line at the outhouse uncomfortably long for the women, gravitated to the barn to use the unoccupied stalls.

  Rachel kept an eye on the group of men going in and out of the barn, but she didn’t see Jake. He must have stayed behind with some of the men and older boys who remained in the house to help set up tables.

  A short while later everyone went back inside for lunch. Each of the long tables held three big bowls of bohnesuppe – it was called bean soup, though it consisted of mostly bread and milk – enough so that everyone could reach one of the hot bowls without having to pass them around. There were loaves of fresh homemade bread and newly churned butter, and for dessert what the children called “moon pies” – half-moon-shaped fruit pies, usually filled with apple snitz.

  For Rachel and the others who had been the last two weeks in the children’s home eating strange food, it was wonderful. To be back among family, breaking bread in a warm Amish home with so many who had shared so much, Ida Mullet’s weak bean soup was a feast for which Rachel was truly grateful. School or no school, life was good.

  After lunch she went outside with a dozen girls and wandered down to the other side of the kitchen garden to catch up on the latest gossip. Lovina Hershberger was there, along with the others who had been imprisoned with Rachel and her sisters in the children’s home. Lovina had always been like a sister to Rachel and Emma, and on this day the girls who had been in the children’s home were the center of attention. Everyone peppered them with questions, endlessly curious about life in that awful place.

  “Did they beat you?” a little girl asked. There were several smaller children with them, including a toddler or two. The older girls were expected to help tend the little ones.

  “Every day, twice,” Lovina said, her eyes twinkling with mischief. She leaned close to the little girl and added in a whisper, “With barbed wire.” Then she burst into hysterical laughter.

  Rachel wagged her head. “No they didn’t. You shouldn’t scare the poor child like that, Lovina. Really, it wasn’t that bad. Most of them were nice. We had warm beds to sleep in, and a hot bath on Saturday.”

  Still chuckling, Lovina said, “The worst of it is now we have to go to school every day.”

  “I won’t,” a six-year-old said, stamping a foot. “I’ll run and hide in the loft.”

  “No you won’t,” Rachel warned. “Our fathers gave their word. They made a promise. Would you make a liar of them? Besides, if you don’t go to school, the attendance officer will know and then they’ll come and put your dat in jail.”

  Tears welled up in the little girl’s eyes. “But why?” she whined. “Why must we do this?”

  “Because they don’t understand,” Lovina answered patiently. “You know what they said? One of the women in the children’s home told me we had to go to school because it was cruel of our parents to make us work on the farm.”

  They all laughed at that. Home was home. They had seen enough of the world to know they were far more likely to encounter cruelty in the consolidated school.

  “Cruel?” the little girl giggled, her eyes wide in disbelief. “How could anyone think that?”

  “I don’t know,” Rachel said. “I think they only know how to look at us the same way they look at each other. My dat says a prideful man thinks everyone is vain, and a deceiver thinks everyone is a liar. Anyway, most Englishers are in such a hurry they don’t want to take the trouble to understand someone who is different from them. They don’t think the way we do, that’s all.”

  Caleb Bender stayed at his table when lunch was over, as did most of the men. The women chatted happily, busy with cleaning up, hustling dishes to the kitchen and wiping the tables clean.

  The minister sat down next to Caleb and asked after Martha. “I noticed she is not here this morning,” he said. “Has she gotten worse?”

  “Jah,” Caleb said. “I even took her to the doctor once, but he didn’t give us much hope. There was nothing he could do. He said she needs to go and live someplace where the air is dry and warm, like Arizona.”

  The minister nodded gravely.

  What Caleb did not say, would not say, was that the doctor had told him she would die if he did not do this. Though the doctor would never underst
and it, Caleb knew that moving to a place with no Amish community was not an option. He could only pray that Gott would not allow her to die, but when she left the bed in the night to sit upright by the stove, the doctor’s words tormented him.

  Caleb twisted his water glass on the table, staring at it. “What will we do now?” he asked, mostly to change the subject. “About the schools, I mean.”

  “We will trust Gott,” the minister said firmly. This was always his first answer.

  “Always,” Caleb agreed. “Still, there are choices we must make. Will we be content to send our children to the consolidated school forever? I think it would be the end of us.”

  Eli Stoltzfus, the man whose daughter hid in Lancaster, rolled his eyes. “Neh. I say we ignore them and do as we have always done. In time the government will get busy with something else and forget us. They always do.”

  Caleb shook his head. “No, they won’t forget. We have already seen what comes of that thinking. Anyway, we made a promise. Now we must keep it.”

  “Then you have no choice but to honor your word,” the bishop agreed, one fist stroking his long white beard as if he were milking it. “But just because we have no choice does not mean we become complacent. For now, we must pray and ask Gott to show us a way. We must think of our children, the future of our people and our way of life. If we bring them up in the way they should go, when they are old they will not depart from it. But if we let them be raised by the world, why it’s only a matter of time until they leave us and go their own way. No matter how we love them, most of them will jump the fence. Caleb is right. If we let this go on, in twenty years there won’t be any more Amish.”

  “It won’t last forever,” John Hershberger said. “Things will change, you’ll see. We just have to endure for a time.”

  Caleb Bender shook his head sadly. “For how long a time, John? I say only until we can find a way to change things. This is a new problem, one we have not dealt with before, at least not in this way. We have to learn to think in new ways, to see a new path. We have to think bigger and wider and be willing to pay any price to save our children. We can even leave here if we have to, and start another settlement someplace where the law is not against us.”