The Divide

by Jolina Petersheim

  I cover her eyes. The sound of “No!” ricochets through the forest, echoed by a greater one. The songbirds that have been so silent rise from the pines and wheel through the air. I wrap my arms around my sister, crying and fighting her surprising strength. “Shhh,” I soothe. “Shhh.”

  She sobs against me. I hold her tight, still shielding her face. Over her shoulder, I watch Jabil sink to his knees and then fall back. Having stood firm until the end.

  Leora

  THE RESOUNDING ECHOES from the shot that killed Jabil have barely made their way out of the mountains when the forest is unexpectedly ripped apart. The wings of the Cessna shear the smaller saplings as it dives into the clearing, splintering the wood like matchsticks. I drop to my stomach, pulling my sister down with me. There is a cacophony of noise—of metal being twisted and more trees being snapped—as the full force of the inbound plane smashes into the ground where the group of guards once stood, followed by an explosion that sends pieces of the aircraft all throughout the clearing. After it’s over, I force myself to lift my head, squinting against the livid core of yellow flames. The bodies of the guards are sprawled around it.

  Nothing moves except for the fire.

  I rise from the earth as I stare up at the tops of the pines. The plane clipped them, as the pilot purposely glided through the sky, aiming for the guards. How could he? Tears run down my face, dripping off my chin, melding with the soot that has tainted me. That always will. My heart aches. Panicking, I leave Anna, my shell-shocked sister, and run through the forest. The broken branches cut my arms. Patches of ground are on fire. Acrid smoke clots my nostrils, the scent calling to mind the day Moses crash-landed in the meadow next to our house in Mt. Hebron. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Did he believe the beginning was also how it was supposed to end?

  “Leora?”

  I glance up and see a man, turned ethereal by smoke. I stare at the image, not sure if it’s real or just a figment of my longing. “Leora,” he says, “it’s me.”

  Still crying, I try to walk toward him but find that I can’t. “Moses?”

  He comes around the wreckage of the plane with one arm extended. “Come here,” he says. “Are you okay?” His face is smeared with paint, and he holds his other arm at an odd angle. He presses me against his chest, and I sob in relief against the warm, reassuring solidity of him. “Josh,” he says. “Josh was in the plane. We thought the convoy would come by the main road that goes by the airport. We never even thought of the other way.” I feel him shake his head. “The guys and I found their trucks parked on the highway by the trailhead. We tried to catch up with them before they were too far ahead of us. But Josh, he must’ve cut the engine and . . .” His words die away as their meaning registers. Tears trickle down his dirtied face.

  I take my husband’s hand. “Josh barely even knew us, and he sacrificed himself.”

  Moses kisses my forehead and waves to two other men, my vadder and . . . Seth. My brother’s right eyebrow is sliced open. Blood trickles down into his eyes. Somewhere in the woods, and in some way he might not want to recollect, my little brother transitioned from boy to man. “Thank you,” I say. “For protecting us.”

  Nodding at me, he wipes the blood and says, “Thanks, Leora, for protecting us too.” Our vadder puts an arm around his son’s back. I look up at Moses and then over at the men.

  “Come,” I call. “Let’s all go home.”

  Moses

  SEPTEMBER

  MY WIFE PLACES the heirloom butternut and spaghetti squash in the basket and stands, resting the bounty against her hip. But I can’t stop staring at her belly, which is just beginning to show our baby, growing inside it. Leora glances over at me, pieces of shiny, dark hair falling in her face. “Stop it,” she says. “You’re staring again.” But then she smiles. Like she always does.

  Stepping across the patch, I try to take the basket; she keeps holding on to the other end.

  “Moses,” she chides, “you’ve got to let me work.”

  “Not as long as I’m here to do it.”

  Something changes in her eyes. She lets go. “And I’m glad you are.”

  I curl my arm around her waist, and together we cross the field to the stand of trees where we buried Josh and Jabil four months ago. Leora gathers a clutch of fallen pine boughs—since the wildflowers she used to gather are long gone—and places one on each grave.

  She stands, dusts off her hands, and says, “Someone could still come for us, you know.”

  Setting the basket down, I step up behind her and rub the sides of her arms. “I know.”

  “But life’s almost better this way, I think. If I had to choose between going back to the way things were, before the EMP, and going through what we have, I would choose this. Every time. The uncertainty is what makes every moment beautiful.”

  I place my palms on Leora’s belly, envisioning my daughter or son stretching and turning in her womb, unaware of this strange new world outside it. I want to protect this child with every fiber of my being, and I will, but I also know this child will be born into a generation fraught with more danger than any generation before. This would evoke more fear if I didn’t know the One who loved this child before me, and whom I can trust with everything.

  “One thing is certain, though,” I say, resting my head on top of Leora’s. “I love my wife and my baby, and I always will.”

  She reaches up to touch my face. “That makes it beautiful too.”

  Hand in hand, we walk back to the community, and she lets me carry the basket. There is no wall anymore, so the Technicolor beauty of everyday life greets us like it’s staged: the new horse whinnying in the pasture; Colton laughing as Elyse and Anna chase him around the spring; laundry snapping in the cool, autumnal breeze; Papina drinking dandelion coffee on the porch with Judith Zimmerman as they talk soap-making and herbs. The easy rhythm of their rockers keeps time better than any electronic clock that is no longer ticking. Weaving around all of this—all of us—is the tapestry of Lost Children: Emmanuel, Elizabeth, and the others, whose parents, we’ve since learned, got sent to the camps. These ten orphans have found a home here, on the mountain, where my wife is determined no child will ever be turned away.

  “Hey,” Leora says, pointing. “Look who’s here.”

  My heart pounds and body stiffens involuntarily, since even small surprises awaken my fight-or-flight response, but then I relax when I look toward the spring. Charlie is standing beside a haggard brown mule, whose swayback is packed down with dry goods. Squeezing Leora’s hand, I let go and walk toward him. “You peddling now?” I ask with a grin.

  But Charlie won’t meet my eyes. “No,” he says. “I’m holding up our end of the bargain.”

  “What bargain’s that?” I ask.

  “The militia brings food since the community takes care of the orphans.”

  I step closer until Charlie’s afternoon shadow falls across mine. “You don’t have to do that, Charlie. We’re getting by.”

  Our gazes meet, and then he abruptly looks away. “Winter’s coming.” Charlie pulls on his nose and sniffs. “I’ll keep bringing supplies as long as it doesn’t take away from my men.”

  “Well,” I say, “we’re much obliged.”

  “There’s no obligation.” Charlie begins to turn, then stops and looks over at Leora. “That belly suits you,” he says. “I know you two are gonna have a beautiful baby.”

  My wife blushes. “That’s kind of you to say.”

  Feeling awkward, he quickly passes the donkey’s reins to me.

  I ask, “Don’t you want to unload it?”

  “Nope,” he says. “This here’s a package deal.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he says. “This donkey’s a real pain in the—” He stops and looks at Leora, but my wife just smiles indulgently. “I reckon,” he says, “I’ll be taking my leave.”

  Charlie is walking past the schoolhouse when Leora calls, “Charlie!” He loo
ks back. “Tell my vadder and brother hello for me, and—” her voice catches—“to be safe.”

  “Will do,” he says, nodding while mimicking tipping a hat.

  Still holding the donkey’s reins, I retake my wife’s hand. We silently watch Charlie walk through the scarred heart of the forest, which will take years to heal, even though we long ago removed the wreckage of the plane. Maybe Charlie came today because he regrets not participating in the fight against the ARC. And though his presence probably couldn’t have changed the outcome, upholding Josh’s promise to provide for the orphans appears to be Charlie’s penance for not stepping forward that morning in the garage when everything came down to a decision between survival and humanity. But there really is no decision: you must keep your humanity, your respect for life, if you are to truly live.

  “Our beautiful normal,” Leora says beside me, turning from the scarred view to take in our life. “I can’t get over it.”

  Yes, I think, looking at her. Neither can I.

  1

  Rachel

  My face burns with the heat of a hundred stares. No one is looking down at Amos King’s handmade casket because they are all too busy looking at me. Even Tobias cannot hide his disgust when he reaches out a hand, and then realizes he has not extended it to his angelic wife, who was too weak to come, but to her fallen twin. Drawing the proffered hand back, Tobias buffs the knuckles against his jacket as if to clean them and slips his hand beneath the Bible. All the while his black eyes remain fixed on me until Eli emits a whimper that awakens the new bishop to consciousness. Clearing his throat, Tobias resumes reading from the German Bible: “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .’”

  I cannot help but listen to such a well-chosen verse, despite the person reading it. I feel I am walking through the valley of death even as this new life, my child, yawns against my ribs. Slipping a hand beneath Eli’s diapered bottom, I jiggle him so that his ribbon mouth slackens into a smile. I then glance across the earthen hole and up into Judah King’s staring, honey-colored eyes. His are softer than his elder brother Tobias’s: there is no judgment in them, only the slightest veiling of confusion not thick enough to hide the pain of his unrequited love, a love I have been denying since childhood.

  Dropping my gaze, I recall how my braided pigtails would fly out behind me as I sprinted barefoot down the grassy hill toward ten-year-old Judah. I remember how he would scream, “Springa! Springa!” and instead of being caught by Leah or Eugene or whoever was doing the chasing, I would run right toward the safety of base and the safety of him. Afterward, the two of us would slink away from our unfinished chores and go sit in the milking barn with our sweat-soaked backs against the coolness of the storage tanks. Judah would pass milk to me from a jelly jar and I would take a sip, read a page of the Hardy Boys or the Boxcar Children, and then pass his contraband book and jelly jar back.

  Because of those afternoons, Judah taught me how to speak, write, and read English far better and far earlier than our Old Order Mennonite teachers ever could have. As our playmates were busy speaking Pennsylvania Dutch, Judah and I had our own secret language, and sheathed in its safety, he would often confide how desperately he wanted to leave this world for the larger one beyond it. A world he had explored only through the books he would purchase at Root’s Market when his father wasn’t looking and read until the pages were sticky with the sweat of a thousand secret turnings.

  Summer was slipping into fall by the time my mamm, Helen, discovered our hiding spot. Judah and I had just returned from making mud pies along the banks of the Kings’ cow pond when she stepped out of the fierce sun into the barn’s shaded doorway and found us sitting, once again, beside the milking tanks with the fifth book in the Boxcar Children series draped over our laps. Each of us was so covered in grime that the jelly jar from which we drank our milk was marred with a lipstick kiss of mud. But we were pristine up to the elbows, because Judah feared we would damage his book’s precious pages if we did not redd up before reading them.

  That afternoon, all my mamm had to do was stand in the doorway of the barn with one hand on her hip and wag the nubby index finger of her other hand (nubby since it had gotten caught in the corn grinder when she was a child), and I leaped to my feet with my face aflame.

  For hours and hours afterward, my stomach churned. I thought that when Dawdy got home from the New Holland horse sales he would take me out to the barn and whip me. But he didn’t.

  To this day, I’m not even sure Mamm told him she’d caught Judah and me sitting very close together as we read from our Englischer books. I think she kept our meeting spot a secret because she did not want to root out the basis of our newly sprouted friendship, which she hoped would one day turn into fully grown love. Since my mamm was as private as a woman in such a small community could be, I never knew these were her thoughts until nine years later when I wrote to tell her I was with child.

  She arrived, haggard and alone, two days after receiving my letter. When she disembarked from the van that had brought her on the twelve-hour journey from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, she walked with me into Leah and Tobias’s white farmhouse, up the stairs into my bedroom, and asked in hurried Pennsylvania Dutch, “Is Judah the vadder?”

  Shocked, I just looked at her a moment, then shook my head.

  She took me by the shoulders and squeezed them until they ached. “If not him, who?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “What do you mean, you cannot say? Rachel, I am your mudder. You can trust me, jah?”

  “Some things go beyond trust,” I whispered.

  My mamm’s blue eyes narrowed as they bored into mine. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. Although I was nineteen, I felt like I was a child all over again, like she still held the power to know when I had done something wrong and who I had done it with.

  At last, she released me and dabbed her tears with the index nub of her left hand. “You’re going to have a long row to hoe,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  “You’ll have to do it alone. Your dawdy won’t let you come back . . . not like this.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “Did you tell Leah?”

  Again, I shook my head.

  My mamm pressed her hand against the melon of my stomach as if checking its ripeness. “She’ll find out soon enough.” She sighed. “What are you? Three months, four?”

  “Three months.” I couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “Hide it for two more. ’Til Leah and the baby are stronger. In the meantime, you’ll have to find a place of your own. Tobias won’t let you stay here.”

  “But where will I go? Who will take me in?” Even in my despondent state, I hated the panic that had crept into my voice.

  My mamm must have hated it as well. Her nostrils flared as she snapped, “You should’ve thought of this before, Rachel! You have sinned in haste. Now you must repent at leisure!”

  This exchange between my mamm and me took place eight months ago, but I still haven’t found a place to stay. Although the Mennonites do not practice the shunning enforced by the Amish Ordnung, anyone who has joined the Old Order Mennonite church as I had and then falls outside its moral guidelines without repentance is still treated with the abhorrence of a leper. Therefore, once the swelling in my belly was obvious to all, the Copper Creek Community, who’d welcomed me with such open arms when I moved down to care for my bedridden sister, began to retreat until I knew my child and I would be facing our uncertain future alone. Tobias, more easily swayed by the community than he lets on, surely would have cast me and my bastard child out onto the street if it weren’t for his wife. Night after night I would overhear my sister in their bedroom next to mine, begging Tobias, like Esther beseeching the king, to forgive my sins and allow me to remain sheltered beneath their roof—at least until after my baby was born.

  “Tobias, please,” Leah would entreat in her soft, high-pitched voice, “if you don’t want to
do it for Rachel, then do it for me!”

  Twisting in the quilts, I would burrow my head beneath the pillow and imagine my sister’s face as she begged her husband: it would be as white as the cotton sheet on which I lay, her cheeks and temples hollowed at first by chronic morning sickness, then later—after Jonathan’s excruciating birth—by the emergency C-section that forced her back into the prison bed from which she’d just been released.

  Although I knew everything external about my twin, for in that way she and I were one and the same, lying there as Tobias and Leah argued, I could not understand the internal differences between us. She was selfless to her core—a trait I once took merciless advantage of. She would always take the drumstick of the chicken and give me the breast; she would always sleep on the outside of the bed despite feeling more secure against the wall; she would always let me wear her new dresses until a majority of the straight pins tacking them together had gone missing and they had frayed at the seams.

  Then, the ultimate test: at eighteen Leah married Tobias King. Not out of love, as I would have required of a potential marriage, but out of duty. His wife had passed away five months after the birth of their daughter Sarah, and Tobias needed a mudder to care for the newborn along with her three siblings. Years ago, my family’s home had neighbored the Kings’. I suppose when Tobias realized he needed a wife to replace the one he’d lost, he recalled my docile, sweet-spoken twin and wrote, asking if she would be willing to marry a man twelve years her senior and move away to a place that might as well have been a foreign land.

  I often wonder if Leah said yes to widower Tobias King because her selfless nature would not allow her to say no. Whenever she imagined saying no and instead waiting for a union with someone she might actually love, she would probably envision those four motherless children down in Tennessee with the Kings’ dark complexion and angular build, and her tender heart would swell with compassion and the determination to marry a complete stranger. I think, at least in the back of her mind, Leah also knew that an opportunity to escape our yellow house on Hilltop Road might not present itself again. I had never wanted for admirers, so I did not fear this fate, but then I had never trembled at the sight of a man other than my father, either. As far back as I can recall, Leah surely did, and I remember how I had to peel her hands from my forearms as the wedding day’s festivities drew to a close, and Mamm and I finished preparing her for her and Tobias’s final unifying ceremony.