The Amish Clockmaker

by Mindy Starns Clark

  We were just starting to make some progress when I noticed one of the workers waving from the back door.

  “Ya?” I asked, stepping away from the mess. I pulled the mask from my face and wiped the sweat off my brow with the back of my arm.

  “We have a problem out here,” he said, gesturing for me to come.

  I couldn’t imagine why I might be needed, but the urgency in his voice told me I should hurry. I set the mallet over to the side and told the other two I’d be back in a minute.

  I went out the door and followed the guy toward the side of the building. As I came around the corner, I was surprised to see that the workers were just standing there, watching and listening as Kenny, the foreman from next door, stood in the middle of our construction area, yelling at Virgil.

  On the ground around them were the stakes that had already been laid for the foundation, poking up out of the ground at intervals and connected by strings. As I moved closer, Kenny saw me coming and broke off mid-sentence. Then he began yelling at me instead.

  “What do you think you’re doing here?” he shouted.

  “Expanding the feed store,” I replied, coming to a stop in front of him. “I told you about it that day we talked. Why? What’s the problem?”

  After all the inconvenience we’d put up with from the construction next door, I couldn’t believe he was going to harass us about our project now. At least I had all the right permits, which I’d be happy to show him once he calmed down.

  “Yeah, I remember what you said, but you never told me you were going to build right here.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, trying to understand what was happening. “What’s wrong with right here?”

  He let out an angry growl and said, “It’s not your property.”

  “What do you mean? Of course it is.”

  He shook his head emphatically. “No, it’s not. Our hotel group is in negotiations to buy this land.”

  “Negotiations? With whom? This tack shop is ours. It’s been in my family for three generations!”

  He shook his head, a scornful expression crossing his face. “I’m not talking about the tack shop. I’m just talking about the land right here, beside the store.” He gestured toward the ground all around us, explaining that the parcel in question ran two hundred and fifty feet from front to back and one hundred and seventy-five feet from side to side. “It’s only an acre, but it’s important that we acquire it.”

  “Listen, I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but this entire place—including the piece of land we’re standing on—belongs to my family. To my parents, Harlan and Erma Zook. And it’s not for sale.”

  Kenny hesitated, his brow furrowing. “Zook? No, that’s not the owner’s name. It’s something else. I can’t remember right now, but I’m sure it’s in the paperwork.”

  “In the paperwork,” I repeated, totally lost. What on earth was he talking about? “Listen Kenny, I assure you that my grandfather purchased this homestead almost sixty years ago. I can show you the deed. His name was Isaac Zook.”

  “Deed or not, my records tell me otherwise,” Kenny replied, crossing his arms over his barrel-shaped chest. “You’re going to have to cease and desist on your expansion until this is straightened out. You can direct your questions to our lawyer.”

  Cease and desist? Was he crazy? I glanced over at Virgil, who seemed as startled and confused as I was. Then I turned back toward the store where, judging by the muffled booms, Noah and Andy were still hard at work, smashing the bathroom walls to bits.

  Kenny shifted in place and cleared his throat. “Do I need to contact the authorities to make you stop?”

  Authorities? Like, the police? I shook my head in disbelief. “This is ridiculous. Wait here. I can straighten this whole thing out.”

  Turning my back on the man, I went inside the shop in search of Daed. I found him in the main area with Amanda and told him that the foreman from next door was outside, telling me that we had to stop our expansion because this wasn’t our property.

  “He said what?” Amanda asked.

  “I need to show him the deed. I’m hoping that’ll clear things up.”

  Daed said, “It had better.”

  “I assume it’s in the box with all the important papers?”

  With a nod from my father, I ran all the way to the main house at the top of the hill. I took the porch steps two at a time, relieved when I spotted Mamm at the clothesline out back. I really didn’t want to explain anything right now.

  Inside, I went straight to the living room and then to the old wooden breakfront where the family’s important documents had always been kept. The lower cabinet held a fireproof metal box, so I knelt down and pulled it out, set it on the floor, and quickly began sifting through its contents—birth certificates, marriage licenses, and so on. I found the deed near the bottom in a manila file folder with several other property-related papers, including a survey map of the area.

  Perfect. I grabbed the whole file, shoved the box back into the cabinet, and headed back out. By the time I reached the bottom of the hill, Daed, Amanda, Noah, and Andy had joined the other workers outside.

  “Here’s everything you need,” I said as I handed Kenny the file. “Proof this land is ours. See for yourself.”

  He scanned the papers quickly and quietly, his frown setting even more deeply on his face. Around us, the only sounds I could hear were the whispers and murmurs of the workers. Suddenly, I found myself wishing that we could settle this matter in private, away from an audience. I turned my attention to Kenny, who seemed to be growing more confused the longer he studied the deed and survey map.

  “Come with me,” he grunted. He handed the papers back, turned sharply in the direction of his construction site, and began walking.

  I told the crew to take a break till we returned, and then Daed, Amanda, and I followed Kenny across our grassy lot, over the paved driveway next door, and onto the packed dirt of the site. Halfway there, as we rounded a giant backhoe, I saw where we were headed, a small trailer on the far edge of the property.

  Daed and I removed our hats as we stepped inside a room that was serving as an on-site office. Kenny sat at a metal desk, pulled out a drawer, and began rifling through a thick row of hanging file folders.

  He found the document he sought and pulled it out. “Take a look at this.”

  I took the page from him and studied it, Daed and Amanda flanking me to get a look as well.

  It was identical to the map I’d produced with one critical difference. This map was missing a small portion of our homestead, a long, narrow rectangle that ran between the tack store and our westernmost property line. The rectangle on this page marked the space as being separate from rest of our property, and in its center was the numeral “23.”

  Kenny scratched his head. “I don’t know what to say. All I’ve been told is that we’re planning to buy that portion of land to use in Phase II of our development project.”

  “But it’s not a separate portion,” Daed explained. “Our map clearly shows that it’s part of our farm.”

  “And my map shows that it isn’t. Look, I’m just as confused as you. Like I said, you’re gonna have to talk to our lawyer. In the meantime, you can’t do any more work over there until this matter gets cleared up. Understand?”

  “What I understand,” I replied, anger pulsing through my veins, “is that this whole thing is ridiculous. Zooks have been living on that land for the past sixty years—and will still be living here sixty years from now. Including lot twenty-three, which we have every intention of expanding on.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Kenny offered an exaggerated shrug. “Hey, go ahead. Build all you want. But in the end, when I’m proven right, you’re just going to have to take it all back down.”

  “Proven right?” I demanded. “Are you kidding me?”

  Sitting forward again, he slid open the desk drawer, rifled through its contents, and pulled out a busine
ss card that he handed over. “Like I said, talk to the lawyer. I hope he can straighten out this ownership issue nice and quick.”

  “There is no ownership issue!” I shouted in a voice that reverberated around the trailer’s metal walls. At my side, Daed let out a soft grunt, which was his way of telling me to calm down. I took a deep breath and blew it out. “We’re the owners,” I continued at a lower volume. “It says so on our deed. Wherever this map of yours came from, it’s obviously old and out of date.”

  “Sorry,” he said, taking the page back from me and setting it on the desk, “but this map came from the city clerk’s office within the last year or two. It was acquired when Starbrite was scouting properties for a hotel.”

  “Starbrite?” I asked, the name sounding vaguely familiar.

  “The resort’s management group, Starbrite International. Anyway, the people there liked this spot but wanted a little more acreage, so they looked into purchasing the various neighboring properties—including yours, I imagine. Though obviously you declined to sell.”

  I nodded, realizing now why the name sounded familiar. I remembered when the hotel people made an offer for our homestead. Daed had very clearly turned them down, though we’d been surprised to learn that our next door neighbors had not. Instead, they had chosen to sell and move away. Since then, not only had we missed them as friends and fellow church members, we’d also been suffering from the fact that their land could have separated our homestead from the new resort. By selling out, our former neighbors had left us with no buffer at all—except, of course, for the portion of our own property we were debating about now.

  “Anyway,” Kenny continued, “we were able to acquire enough of the neighboring properties to proceed as planned. The only step we lack is the acquisition of lot twenty-three as well. But that is in the works.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You said you’re in negotiations to buy it now?”

  Kenny cleared his throat, looking hot under the collar all of a sudden. “Yeah. Well, sort of. There have been some… issues.”

  “Issues?”

  “Yeah. With locating the owner.”

  “That’s because we are the owners. And we’ve already turned you down.”

  “Hold on,” Kenny added as he shuffled through his papers again, looking for something else. Daed glanced at me and then piped up.

  “Records or not,” he said to Kenny in a calm, even tone, “my father bought this entire place from a woman named Lucille Raber in 1956. She’s passed on now, but I’m sure one of her children—”

  Kenny looked up. “Raber?”

  Daed nodded. “Lucille Raber.” He pointed to her name at the top of our deed, the one I’d brought down from the house. Kenny looked at it and then up at me.

  “That’s it. That’s the name I was trying to think of, the owner of lot twenty-three. Raber. But not Lucille. It’s a man.”

  He flipped through a few more pages, pulled one out, and handed it to me. “Here you go, right here. According to county records, lots twenty-four and twenty-five belong to a Zook, but the parcel in question, lot twenty-three, belongs to a Raber. Clayton Raber.”

  Clayton Raber?

  I sucked in my breath. How could that be? I looked over at Daed, who seemed just as startled—and worried—as I.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll look into it, then.”

  Kenny’s scowl softened. “And you’ll cease and desist with your expansion in the meantime?”

  “Ya,” Daed and I agreed simultaneously. We turned to go.

  “We’ll be in contact with your lawyer,” I told Kenny over my shoulder as I took Amanda’s arm and guided her down the steps of the trailer.

  Then we began making our way back across the construction site as fast as we could.

  “What’s going on?” Amanda asked, trying to keep up. “What’s wrong? Who’s Clayton Raber?”

  Daed and I exchanged another look, and then I leaned close to her ear.

  “He’s the Amish man who used to live here, the old clockmaker,” I whispered. “The one people say murdered his wife.”

  FOUR

  I first learned about Clayton Raber’s past from twin brothers who used to live up the road. I was about seven or eight. We were playing in my yard one evening after we had all finished our chores, and when I invited them inside for some of my mom’s pie, they refused. When I asked why, they looked at one another and then back at me.

  “That’s where the murderer used to live,” one of them said.

  They then proceeded to tell me the story—or as much of it as they had overheard. The rest I gathered on my own after talking to my parents later that night. Legend had it the clockmaker known as Clayton Raber was a bitter man prone to fits of temper. He’d been the victim of a childhood accident that had left him with various injuries, including a badly mangled leg that had healed poorly and made it difficult for him to walk, as well as a disfiguring scar on his face. He also had a troubled marriage, and when his wife died under suspicious conditions, Clayton was charged with killing her. He was only twenty-seven. Everyone knew he’d done it, they said, but for some reason all charges were eventually dropped and he was released from jail. He later left the community—and the Amish church—in disgrace, and no one ever saw him again.

  Up to that point I had known only that a family by the name of Raber once lived in my house and that they’d had a clock shop in what was presently my grandfather’s tack and feed store. But even after my friends told me the story, which I’d found startling and more than a little intriguing, I still didn’t understand why it scared them so. My house was warm and safe, its wooden floors worn soft by generations of running, skipping, and playing. What did some silly rumor from the past have to do with anything now? Those twin brothers may have thought of Clayton Raber as a murderer, but to me he’d always just been the guy who grew up in the bedroom that had eventually become mine.

  And I loved that room, especially when my older brother moved out and I had it all to myself. My favorite part was the window seat, where I used to sit and read for hours as a boy, just as Clayton Raber had probably done years before when it had been his room. A wide strip of molding ran vertically along the wall beside the window seat, and I used to gaze at it often, at the markings that covered the length of it.

  The reason it held such fascination for me was because those markings charted Clayton’s height as he’d grown. Someone had measured him at various ages and sliced little horizontal lines into the wood. Beside each one—which started at about four feet high and ran all the way up to nearly six feet—was a date and his initials.

  Though the dates had all been carved by the same feminine hand, it seemed as if Clayton had added in the initials himself. Down low, the first few CRs were childish looking and barely legible, but each one became less so as he worked his way up the wall through time. When he measured in at about the height of an eight or nine year old boy, his letters had become for the most part neat and straight. By the time he’d reached his full height, they were downright elegant, carved by the hand of a teenager who was on his way to becoming a clockmaker and talented woodworker.

  For some reason, the sight of those measurements and dates and initials on that strip of molding had always pleased me, though I was never sure why. I supposed it made me feel connected somehow to the house, and to the boy who had once lived there. Learning those new facts from the neighborhood children about Clayton’s wife and the murder charge and everything had not changed my feelings about my room nor repelled me from my home—quite the opposite, in fact. In bed that night, I didn’t lie there thinking about murder or death or jail or any of that stuff. Instead, I trained my eyes on the beautifully carved initials near the top of that growth chart and told myself that if the police let the guy go, then he must have been innocent and that was that.

  I hadn’t thought about Clayton in years, but now my life was once again intersecting with his in a new way. Whatever happened from here, I told myself a
s we neared the group waiting for us on the lawn, I could only pray it wouldn’t hinder any more of my carefully laid plans for the expansion.

  Everyone’s eyes were wide with curiosity as we drew close. Not wanting to broadcast to the whole group what we’d learned, I pulled Virgil aside and told him we had a problem with the paperwork and I would have to see a lawyer before we could keep going with the construction.

  “Send the workers home for today,” I added. “I imagine we’ll be able to start back first thing tomorrow morning, but I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I know for sure.”

  “Okay,” Virgil replied with a worried frown. “I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”

  We returned to the crew, and I thanked them for their work thus far and apologized for the mix-up. Virgil took it from there, addressing the men as Amanda and I went inside, my mind spinning. I was embarrassed to have to send these guys home so soon, and more than a little frustrated. How was I going to get my business up and running again with a delay like this? If the foundation wasn’t poured today, then it would be like dominoes tumbling down the line, ruining the project’s entire time frame. My window of opportunity with the work crew would be gone and I would lose them to other jobs. Once that happened, who knew how long it would be before we were back on track?

  First things first, I told myself as I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. I waited for the men to leave and then used the phone in the shop to contact Jim Purcell, the lawyer on the business card. When I was finally put through to him, he said he’d been expecting my call.

  “I just heard from Kenny McKendrick over at the Ridgeview site, and he told me about the situation.” The man’s voice sounded cool yet melodic, his tone the kind one might use to soothe a worried child into going to sleep—or to trick a jittery cow into entering a slaughterhouse. I asked him what all of the confusion was about.