What Readers Say About
What Will Be Made Plain
I finished reading What Will Be Made Plain, and I am in awe of you. When you said you were writing an Amish paranormal, I thought, "How could that be? The Amish would find that sacrilegious.” But you have done a beautiful job, combining your own faith and scholarship with what must have been a lot of research to tell a touching story.
– Paula Paul, author of the Alexander Gladstone mysteries
Latayne C. Scott's remarkable novel, What Will Be Made Plain, is not your typical Amish fiction. This is a powerful, intriguing story, rife with tension, written with Latayne's masterful touch. From the opening line to the gripping conclusion, this is a novel that will haunt you.
– Sharon K. Souza, author of What We Don't Know
and Annie Walker
The descriptive flow of language as we navigate through young Leah's life is mesmerizing. She lives in a house with bars on the windows to keep out outsiders. But she can hear the secrets of life that lay in the soil that awaits the plow outside even as her deceased mother's voice comes to her in the night. Her acute intelligence and awareness create cracks in the rigid life her father has built with his new bride, the emotions running so high as her family's secrets are revealed that I had to remember to breathe. Lovely and haunting.
– Amazon #1 Best Selling Author L.B. Johnson,
author of The Book of Barkley
What Will Be Made Plain
by
Latayne C. Scott
TRINITY SOUTHWEST UNIVERSITY PRESS
Albuquerque, New Mexico
TRINITY SOUTHWEST UNIVERSITY PRESS
Albuquerque, NM
Copyright © 2019 by Latayne C. Scott
ISBN: 9781945750113
What Will Be Made Plain is a Gateway Fiction book
Published by Trinity Southwest University
Other book in this collection:
A Conspiracy of Breath (TSU Press, 2017)
Books by Scott in TSU’s Doorway Documents collection:
Passion, Power, Proxy, Release: Scriptures, Poems, and Devotional Thoughts for Communion and Worship Services
The Heart’s Door: Hospitality in the Bible
Just You, Me and God: A Devotional Guide for Couples Reading through the Bible in One Year
The Parables of Jesus
Time, Talents, Things: Studies in Christian Stewardship
Cover design by Kathryn Rosa Miller
This is a patron-produced book, and I am most grateful to them.
Acknowledgments:
Without the Lord sustaining us, I could not write. Without my patrons’ support, I could not eat. Without Sharon K. Souza, this book wouldn’t have been edited. Without the other NovelMatters ladies (Bonnie Grove, Patti Hill, Katy Popa and Debbie Thomas) I never would have had the courage to write this. Without TSU Press, it would not have found a publishing home. It takes a village…. to produce a novel.
When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer . . .
Revelation 6:9-11
This is for all:
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth,
Have you so slander any moment leisure. . .
Hamlet, Act I, Scene II
Summer
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Autumn
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Winter
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Spring
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Summer
Chapter 28
Summer
Chapter 1
I guess people who have never heard the dead speak have trouble understanding. Miriam sits with her skinny face close to mine and tells me over and over that the dead don’t communicate with us, and no matter how many times we talk about it, I always win the argument.
And when I show her from the Book how the dead do indeed speak, she draws her lips together until their round pinkness—the only softness about her—disappears into a single pinched line. She looks down at the ground as I turn the pages.
“See,” I show her, as if we never had the conversation before, “look here at the death of Abel. His Brother Cain killed him and thought he could cover it up.” (And here my voice always chokes. I’m not sure why.)
I point to the verses in Genesis. By now the edges of these pages are dusty tan from my thumbing through to find them. I ask her if God would lie and of course she has to say that no, He cannot lie.
Would He exaggerate, I ask her with more a statement than a question, and she always has to say that He can’t do that either.
“Look here,” I say, and I dip my head sideways so that I can see beneath the rim of her hat to make sure that her eyes have rested on the page. (She’s sneaky that way.) It’s summertime and all of us here at the compound wear floppy-brimmed hats that my grandfather, Daddy Ike, said a woman should wear so we don’t get skin cancers. Though it is shaded here in the courtyard, Miriam is wearing her hat because she’s mentally already outside.
I am proud of my patience with her. I have shown her this scripture many times. At first she used to remind me that it can be a sin to quote too much from the Bible, because that can become a source of pride since young people and some others don’t have the same knowledge of Scripture. I understand that we’re a community, so no one should think to try to distinguish himself. Or herself.
“We should not vaunt our knowledge,” she told me several times, and I could tell she was just repeating what she had always heard, and I told her so. So now she just listens as I show her.
I tell her, I’m not quoting it, see, I am reading it. And we’re supposed to read it, right? And only littlest children cannot read, so we are all equal if we just read it.
I follow the words with my finger, but I don’t touch them any more because the ink is becoming blurred, even when I hold the pages close to my eyes.
“‘And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.’”
Now Miriam’s cheeks seem to be sinking inward, as if she is trying to suck all the insides of her mouth between her teeth; but I have to make sure she understands. Maybe this time the eyes of her heart will be enlightened.
“You see, Miriam? God said that the blood of a dead person could speak. Even when it was spilled on the ground. Now, you see that, don’t you?”
The last time I see her here, she is looking toward the place on my head where some people think a concussion happened. But she can’t really see it, she just “knows” it is there underneath my hat. I wonder if she might see the logic in this: You can know something without actually seeing it at the time.
I suppose I sort of lost myself (it happens to me sometimes) when I reached d
own to scoop up some of the rich soil that the leg of my chair has pushed up. I search in it for some signs of speech, some signs of life that I know must be in there, because this soil, and water, and a single seed, and God’s sunshine, can make a plant taller than I am. I cannot understand this mystery, and it catches my breath, even if there is no voice from the soil.
I look around, and Miriam is gone.
I should be patient with her. She doesn’t know the dead speak because she has never heard them.
I have. But I’m not sure what to do with the words.
I look at the soil and think how glad I am that I can press this darkness together in my hand and it will hold my shape, with even the squeezed-out ridges between my fingers a kind of memory on it. This cool soil is safe, here in the new courtyard. It doesn’t speak the stories of accusations: its only language is that of green unspoken promises of sprouting and someday, windsongs through leaves yet unborn.
In my cupped hand I can smell the lump’s loaminess, the hint of mold of old leaves, the smell like the taste of the old silverplate spoons that Mama used to feed me with, when I was a child.
I try not to suspect that this courtyard with bars was built just for me, but I can’t come to any other conclusion. Courtyards keep people out, but this one, I’m afraid, is to keep me in. In the old compound a county away, our houses were in a straight line, all of them with back doors facing the fields where we grew the wheat and the corn and barley and rye. In the fall of the year those fields were like oceans in the wind, “amber waves of grain,” my grandfather Daddy Ike used to say grandly, his arm flourishing over them; and even then I knew those were someone else’s words, not his.
But our front doors there all faced the road, because Daddy Ike always told us that our lives should be an open book to the outsiders. They should be able to look clean through our windows to the fields beyond, he said, and so we had no curtains on our front rooms nor on the back rooms, only on the side walls where the sleeping rooms were.
But after Daddy Ike died, and then Mama died so soon after, my Papa began to take the counsel of his fears. Someday soon, he said, the Second Great Depression would happen. He and the other men talked about economic bubbles that burst and trade imbalances and banks failing too fast for the government to bail out. I didn’t understand what they were saying and in my childish mind saw frothing soap and rickety seesaws and leaking boats that dropped pennies through slots into the water of an endless lake. I confess that even now I don’t understand.
But I know that people who couldn’t live off the land would be in trouble. In other places there are ghost-town neighborhoods of houses that Papa said people “walked away from,” and my six-year-old imagination saw great hordes of people, even little children, with bundles on their backs like hoboes, walking along the sidewalks into the sunset.
Community living, that’s the ticket, Papa would say. But for us, not the kind of community where four or five families lived together in houses just built for one family. Someday soon, Papa said, there wouldn’t be enough gasoline to run trucks all over the country and people who didn’t know how to hunt and grow their own food would begin rioting in the cities after the runs on the grocery stores left empty shelves. Papa said the government might buy them off by giving them free food when they got to the point of starvation, but that would take their souls and their freedom by instituting the regulation of all manufactured products.
But what speeded up our plans to move to a much more secluded place, I think, was when Papa and the men thought that guns were going to become illegal, even hunting guns.
Now, that would be a problem for men like Papa. Of course, those of us who had been preparing for such catastrophes wouldn’t be taken by surprise. We would never be hungry. Or unarmed.
So.
Papa bought this land to protect us and moved us all here. About that time, too, we all got new names for our new start here. Papa began with renaming his new wife Sarah, my stepmother, though I can’t remember for the life of me what she was named before.
We sold part of our livestock so as not to have to transport them, keeping the strongest and most fertile of them, and much of everything else we owned except our clothes and tools and of course our books. Papa and a couple of the other men still have some e-readers, but only the adults have them and they’re just for national news or emergencies or getting teaching materials—mainly what Papa calls history updates-- for the children. And the devices have all been location-disabled, something Papa said he paid dearly for.
When we moved, I believe I held more tightly to the dictionary than I did my Bible, I’m ashamed to admit. But then again, by the time we moved I was ten years old and had read the Bible through four times but was far from mastering all the words in Webster’s. Though I study it every day and learn five new words every day but Sunday, I don’t think I will live long enough to get past the letter M.
On moving day, we felt like the children of Israel entering the Promised Land with fields we didn’t clear, wells we didn’t dig, and enough standing forest with difficult roads to buffer us from outsiders. There was water year-round in the creek, enough for irrigation if the rains failed, and the dark rich soil. The previous owner was moving to Pecos, New Mexico, he said, to be close to his children who had moved there.
“‘Don’t want to live at the mercy of hot weather and bugs no more,’” Papa would quote to us the man’s words as he took the money for the land, exaggerating the man’s swagger and his hands opening and shutting with greed for the money before it reached his fingers. “‘Don’t want to sit on a tractor no more, or keep its batteries charged and all the parts oiled,’” Papa would mimic. And then Papa would laugh, and we would all laugh too, at a foolish man who didn’t understand that weather and bugs were the province of God, that a tractor only makes a difference if you have learned to depend upon it. We had learned, Papa said proudly, to work with our hands, and not to depend on machines and wires that came into our homes and carried information back to the government about us.
But the man’s talking about the wild beauty of the mountains of Pecos planted a seed in Papa, I think. I believe from that time on, he became discontent with our new land, no matter how hard we worked to make it productive and self-sufficient. He began to learn to smoke fish and talk about short-season crops that don’t take much water, even though we had plenty of beef and chicken and moss and mold grew everywhere here.
On the new land, the fences went up first, of course; and most of the guns and ammunition went down, sealed in large PVC tubes and buried in secret places. By the end of the first month, the entire property was protected by sturdy posts and barbed wire that was attached to car batteries or generators that ran day and night. Every boy who had begun to grow a beard joined the men in Papa’s Nehemiah brigade and patrolled the perimeters in shifts day and night. Then the barns went up, a sign of hope for the crops they would soon enclose.
Most of us lived in tents, some in brush lean-tos, on the new land for about ten months, fellowship with mankind from the beginning of time, Papa told us, camping out from the first days of spring when the land could be worked until after harvest, when all the walls were raised for houses.
Everyone except Papa and his new wife Sarah, that is, who lived in the previous owner’s small clapboard house, where none of the electric appliances worked anymore (as Papa discovered when he hauled them to Springfield to try to sell them to some outsiders). So Sarah lined up all the appliances in a row on one wall in one of the bedrooms and used the dishwasher to store her empty fruit jars and the oven for tablecloths and napkins and bread cloths and the microwave as a breadbox. The refrigerator held tools and hardware. I’m not sure what she kept in the chest freezer because it had a lock on it; and the washer and dryer—they looked worthless for storing anything I could think of, just in the way. She kept our extra kerosene lamps on top of them and cooked on her mama’s woodstove in the kitchen.
How anyone could have lived the
re without the means to cook soon came to light when one of the townspeople told Papa the previous owner’s wife died fifteen years ago and after that, the man ate his breakfast and supper at the town’s only café. A mountain of sardine and Vienna sausage cans rusting behind the barn told us what he ate otherwise. Sarah was more glad to leave that house than we were our tents when the houses were ready, she told us. I wondered if she felt the presence of the wife there, wandering through the house in the night, finding her appliances out of place in a bedroom, pushing buttons with her insubstantial fingertips and fretting that they would no longer light up.
When the men began to fell the trees in the forest land at the north side of the property and drag it to the land near the road with the horses, Papa announced that we wouldn’t build this new community in a straight row like Daddy Ike’s old one.
“We’ll build back a long ways from the road,” Papa announced after Sunday meeting as we sat shivering on the utility poles the men had sawn down after the electric company removed the wires. I still remember the day the big truck came to get them and how Papa fussed with the men with his soft answers to turn away wrath, but they sure looked wrathful to me as the sound of their tires on the pavement screamed through the air as they left.
Papa was pointing to a forlorn plateau of burlap sacks huddled up against one another, each with a stick pointing out of it. “We will plant the fruit trees in front on the south side and they will shade our houses and make them cooler in the summer. All our houses will face south-south-east and then in the winter the sun will warm our houses through the bare branches.”
There was a stir of appreciation, of murmurings, from the thirteen men who were heads of households—Miller, Dietrich, Herbert, Dunkle, Morgenstern, Stoltzfus, Sassaman, Sarg, Knittle, King, Beiler and Lapp and of course us, the Mohns. A couple of them, the Sargs and the Beilers, were just newly married and anxious for the new start that our community, The Anchor, represented. The anchor, like our hope that we throw up through the clouds to attach ourselves to heaven like it says in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Papa said.
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