Paradise Valley

by Dale Cramer

  “Oh, I could never do that,” Jonas Weaver said. “My grandparents were born here and they are buried here, along with my first wife and two of my children.” He wagged his head, deeply aggrieved. “It is too much of a price to pay, Caleb.”

  Caleb laid a hand on Jonas’s forearm and replied gently, “What price would you put on living as Gott would have us live? What is heaven worth?”

  The bishop and the minister nodded somberly. The results of such decisions could be the difference between heaven and hell for many.

  One of the men who was young and sometimes a little hasty said, “Mebbe we could get our people to vote, this once, to elect public officials who think as we do and who will change things for us.”

  Caleb had heard this argument before. Some of the more liberal sects did not prohibit voting, but this branch of the Old Order Amish was firmly against it.

  The bishop leveled a hard gaze on the young man, and for a moment Caleb thought there would be a tongue-lashing, but the bishop was old enough to be patient with the young.

  “Would we try to rule as the greedy do?” he asked. “Will we try to grab power over other people’s possessions? What fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness? On the day we do such as that we become like everyone else, and the battle is already lost.”

  “There has to be a way,” Caleb Bender said, shaking his head. “Mebbe Gott will show us.”

  The boys split up into cliques after lunch as well, the younger ones playing some kind of chasing game up near the house and the older ones in a group down beside the barn. Rachel could see Jake from a distance, leaning back against the wall of the barn, one foot planted against the boards, his hands in his pockets. She could tell just by watching the other boys in the group, the way they all looked to Jake, he’d gained a new stature among them by virtue of his harrowing escape from the children’s home. By now he’d probably told the story a dozen times. He was a hero.

  In midafternoon Rachel saw her father coming around the barn with the surrey, so she said a quick goodbye to her friends and followed her sisters up toward the driveway. She didn’t see Jake until she was crossing the yard behind the house and he casually stepped out from behind a tree, nearly bumping into her. As if it were accidental.

  Their paths only intersected for a second, and Jake was glancing around, looking everywhere but at her. She didn’t know if he would even acknowledge her until he whispered, with his eyes elsewhere, “Will you be here tonight?”

  The singing. The youth always gathered on the Sunday evening after church services for singing. She had heard Emma say she was coming.

  “Jah,” she said, and their eyes met for a split second.

  “Gut.” Jake nodded, and moved on. He barely even smiled, and then he was gone. She understood his caution; on Sunday, among the church crowd, nothing went unnoticed.

  But sometimes, after the singing, the chaperones looked the other way.

  Bundled with her sisters in the back of the surrey on the way home, Rachel could hardly contain her excitement. Though only for a moment, he had made contact. He had spoken to her. That was all that mattered.

  Chapter 6

  There were chores to do even on Sunday, so Rachel kept herself busy most of the afternoon, although it didn’t help all that much. She hummed constantly as she went about her chores, counting the minutes until she could go back up to the Mullet farm for the singing, and every time she thought about Jake Weaver it seemed her feet barely touched the ground. She dreamed of a time when they would be older and able to be together, perhaps to hold hands in the back of a buggy on a chaperoned date. She dared not think of kissing. Even the thought, at her age, was surely sinful.

  Time dragged by until finally the hour came and Emma called to her. There would be three others with Rachel in the surrey – Emma, at twenty practically engaged to Levi Mullet; then Miriam, eighteen and still unattached; and Harvey, the mischievous seventeen-year-old brother who had always considered Rachel the spoiled baby of the family. Leah and Barbara were too young, and Aaron had not attended a singing since the death of his twin.

  Harvey took the reins, and Rachel sat up front beside him. There was mischief in his eyes, and halfway to the Mullet farm he leaned close to Rachel and whispered, “I saw you making eyes at Jake this morning.”

  “You did not,” she said firmly, but she blushed the color of her hair and his grin widened.

  Just like in the morning service, the boys sat facing the girls, though this was a much smaller gathering because most of the adults were absent. The grown-ups stayed home with the infants and toddlers who needed to get to bed early, giving the teenage girls an evening off from baby-sitting duties. The singing was a time specially set aside for the teenagers, and there were social nuances that they all learned very quickly. A boy who was interested in a girl would jockey for a seat directly across from the object of his desire and try to catch her eye. During the singing, the girls all watched to see who was smiling at whom. Any new infatuation would be the object of endless whisperings over the next two weeks, until the next meeting.

  Rachel sat in the second row next to Emma, watching. When Jake Weaver wandered in among a throng of older teenage boys and ousted his cousin from a seat directly across from Rachel, she noticed. Emma noticed, too. Leaning forward a little she smiled knowingly at the flush of excitement on Rachel’s face. Secrets did not last long among people who knew each other so well.

  With so few adults in attendance Rachel was able to steal discreet glances in Jake’s direction occasionally, and twice during the singing she caught him looking directly at her.

  Something in the way Jake looked at her felt completely different from the other boys his age. Subtler. There was nothing brash or childish in the gesture. Even at fifteen, Jake’s countenance held something she had not seen in the others. Where most teenage boys tended to boast and challenge, strutting their colors like a peacock, Jake’s face held only a calm knowing, a patient confidence. It still surprised her to see a man where there had always been a boy before, as if overnight he had grown taller and become something very different.

  It was dark outside by the time the singing ended. Despite the cold, the young people drifted outside and mingled, although they did it so slowly and cautiously that the pairings seemed purely accidental. Groups of boys and groups of girls began to break apart almost imperceptibly, and individuals drifted toward each other. While all the adults were in the house pretending not to notice, boys and girls who didn’t even appear to see each other at first somehow found themselves standing beside each other. Then they spoke, just a word or two of simple greeting. Then, two by two, they eased away toward the barn or to the back of the buggy shed, or out behind the smokehouse.

  Rachel turned around and Jake was there. His back was to her, but then he glanced over his shoulder as if surprised and said, “Oh, hello, Rachel.”

  “Jake.” She nodded, straining with the effort of sounding nonchalant. She could hear her heart thumping.

  “I haven’t seen you since that day at the children’s home,” he said casually. “I hope they didn’t treat you too bad.”

  “No,” she said, fiddling demurely with the dangling laces of her kapp. “It was nothing.”

  Casting a backward glance across the yard, he began moving slowly toward a dark corner of the house where the light from the windows didn’t reach. She found herself walking beside him.

  “We have to take care who sees us,” he said softly, an unnecessary explanation. “We are too young.”

  “We’re almost sixteen.”

  “Jah, but only almost.”

  In the semidarkness around the corner they stopped, facing each other but not touching. She could barely make out his face. He was silent for too long, and kept peeking around the corner at the backyard, lit only by a kerosene lantern hanging by the door, as if he wanted to say something important and was afraid someone might hear. Her mind spun off a
ll sorts of possibilities while she waited. Finally, he stammered out some words.

  “I . . . Rachel, I can’t get it out of my head. I just wanted to say thank you for what you did at the children’s home.”

  “What? I didn’t do anything.”

  “You got that nurse out of the way for me.”

  She blushed. “I needed to go, that’s all.”

  “You did not. And you shouldn’t lie on Sunday.”

  “You shouldn’t lie anytime,” she said. “But I went, just the same, so I must have needed to.”

  “Well. I’m not dumb. I know what I saw, and I knew what you were thinking. You did it on purpose, and you did it for me. I thank you for that.”

  He was definitely not dumb.

  “You would have done the same for me.” This was not idle flattery. “Take me,” he had said to the sheriff.

  Again, he fell silent for too long, thinking.

  Finally, out of the darkness his voice said softly, “I would do a great many things for you.”

  Rachel was too stunned to reply. She could feel her face flushing deeply red and was glad for the covering darkness.

  He had not so much as offered to touch her hand up to this point, behavior quite unlike what she expected from a boy. Now, without the slightest hint of haste or childish uncertainty, he slowly removed his wide hat, and lifting her hand very gently in his, he brushed a kiss, light as a spider web, on the backs of her fingers.

  Then he snugged his hat back on his head and, without another word, turned and walked back into the light.

  She remained where she was for a moment because she didn’t trust her legs.

  “And I you,” she whispered to his back, but only after he was too far away to hear.

  As the host family, it was the Mullets’ responsibility to chaperone the teenagers on the night of the singing, and they could only look the other way for so long. Soon the adults filed out the back door, three of them carrying kerosene lanterns. They talked and laughed loudly, swinging their lanterns and making a general ruckus so everyone would hear and know that it was time to go. Within a minute, little groups appeared from all directions, merging into the lantern light to shake hands and say their formal goodbyes.

  The evening was officially over. Riding home in the darkness huddled under a blanket in the back of the surrey, Rachel said nothing. A million questions swirled through her mind. She owned none of the answers, but the questions consumed her.

  Chapter 7

  The consolidated school was more than three miles from the Bender house, an hour’s brisk walk each way, and unless the weather was harsh – in which case Emma would drive them to school in the buggy – Rachel and her two younger sisters would have to walk it five days a week, lunch pails in hand. She might have been able to talk her father into letting her hitch an old horse to the hack and drive it to school but she never brought it up. The walk was good exercise and it would have been hard on the horse, having to wait all day tied under a tree. And though she would never have said it, there was another reason Rachel didn’t mind the walk.

  She would be going right past Jake’s house.

  As it happened, the first time she walked to the consolidated school, Jake and his younger brother set out from home at the very moment Rachel happened to be passing by.

  It was almost as if he’d been watching for her.

  The boys fell in step with Rachel and her sisters.

  “Morning,” the younger brother said.

  Jake just sort of nodded.

  “Good morning,” Rachel answered, shooting Jake a cautious glance. After last night she couldn’t help wondering – was he only being shy, or had the light of day already changed his mind about her?

  She got an answer soon enough. Jake looked around her at the others and said, “Don’t let us hold you back. I know you children would rather walk a little faster.”

  His little brother glanced at him twice in confusion before he took the hint.

  “Oh, now I see!” He snickered, but then he broke into a trot and quickly opened up a fifty-yard space between them. Rachel’s sisters took the hint too and ran after him.

  Still, Jake didn’t say anything for a while. After a few minutes Rachel couldn’t take the silence anymore.

  “Jake,” she said hesitantly, “about last night. What exactly did it mean?”

  “Oh, that,” Jake said, and then went on another few paces while he thought about it. “I meant what I said. I thought you did a brave thing and I wanted to thank you for it.”

  She stared at him for a second. “I wasn’t talking about what you said.”

  “Oh. The other thing, then.”

  She waited patiently.

  “I’m sorry if I was too bold, or I embarrassed you or something.” He shrugged, but he avoided eye contact and his face flashed crimson. “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  Now she had inadvertently painted herself into a corner and left herself no way to answer. If she said she was glad he didn’t mean anything by it, he might think she didn’t like him. But if she told him she wanted it to be something more, he would think she was too forward. This romance business was entirely too complicated.

  “Okay,” she said flatly.

  Walking to school beside Jake every day was a gift from heaven. They only walked and talked – they dared not touch or hold hands, because William and Leah and Barbara were there. They would have told and then there would have been trouble. But being able to spend an hour walking with Jake was almost worth having to go to school every day.

  Almost. Up to now they had always gone to a little one-room schoolhouse near home where all the children were Amish, but at the consolidated school the classes were mixed – that is, there were a few Amish children and a great many Englishers. She had to learn to deal with a fair amount of teasing about her Amish clothes, yet Rachel counted her own trials as nothing compared with what the boys had to face. Some of the English boys brought with them the rantings of fathers who said the Amish were cowards because some of them had refused to wear a uniform or pick up a gun in the recent Great War. More than once Jake came home with his clothes torn from being shoved around on the playground. He would not fight back, which only served to reinforce the other boys’ suspicion of cowardice and make things worse for him.

  “And all of this,” Jake said bitterly, walking home nursing a black eye one afternoon, “because the government thinks it would be cruel for us to work with our fathers on the farm.”

  It didn’t last long. Three weeks after they started going to the consolidated school, Jake turned sixteen. The next day his father acquired a work exemption for him and he didn’t go to school anymore. At the singing that Sunday night he and Rachel managed to slip away for a minute.

  “I miss walking to school with you,” Rachel told him, “but I’m glad you don’t have to go anymore. I only wish I didn’t have to.”

  Caleb Bender watched his daughters leave the house every morning, strolling down the road on their way to school, swinging their lunch pails. When he saw them, no matter where he was or what he was doing, he stopped, took his hat off and held it against his chest while he said a brief, earnest prayer asking his Gott to show him another way. And it wasn’t just his own children he prayed for, but all the others who were being trained and immersed in worldly ways every day, abducted from their parents’ upbringing against their will. He could see no end to it. It would never stop. This would go on and on, with his children’s children, and their children too, and so on until there were no more plain people. To outsiders it seemed innocuous enough, but Caleb was wise enough to see that if Amish children were forced to spend most of their time in English schools, in a generation or two there would be no Amish left.

  It broke his heart, and it hardened his resolve.

  When he had finished his brief, hard prayer he would put his hat on and turn his hands to whatever the day demanded of him. But Caleb Bender had been a farmer all his life and his hands, like a
well-trained mule, knew their own way. His work seldom required much of his mind, so while he walked a fence line with a pair of pliers and a roll of wire, he was free to think about the school dilemma. While he chopped up a dead fall for firewood, he was probing, and while he worked a new horse or roamed the woods hunting deer, his mind was ranging far and wide searching for a way to rescue the children from the grip of the world without breaking his word. In time it became inescapably clear that as long as he stayed in Ohio he would be bound by the law, and by his promise.

  He was not averse to leaving Ohio – after all, it was persecution that drove the Amish to America in the first place. But history also told him that even a move to another Amish settlement in Pennsylvania or Indiana would provide only a temporary solution. If one state passed such a law, sooner or later they all would.

  He just couldn’t see a way out.

  Caleb’s mind was occupied with these things on a Thursday morning in mid-February when he hitched up his buggy and drove down to Kidron for the livestock auction. At the auction he spoke with at least a dozen brethren he knew very well, and all of them were scratching their heads and wagging their beards over the same issue. It was the main topic of conversation at the sale, yet none of them could see a way out.

  Caleb found nothing he wanted at the auction – it was always a little slow this time of year – but when the sale ended he was deep in discussion with his good friend the blacksmith, so he walked with him over to the hardware store. The blacksmith needed to buy a new knife for trimming hooves. He weighed various knives while they talked, hefting each in his hand to gauge the strength and balance of it, and when he had made his choice he went to the counter to pay for it. Caleb waited for him by the door, staring absently through the glass. As he stood there an Amish girl passed by on her way home with a lunch pail in her hand, and from the back she looked so much like his Rachel that he instinctively pulled the hat from his head, right there in the store, and sent up a silent, fervent plea for his Gott to show him another way.