Papa’s announcement about the orchard was no surprise to the men who often heard him talking about something he called “passive solar gain” and other ways that we could be good stewards of our resources without using the devices that would connect us to outsiders. The younger men, especially the new husbands, nodded like the older ones, the flat brims of their hats like stiff-wristed children in rows waving goodbye.
The women, as usual, just stared at Papa. Except Sarah, who looked out of the sides of her eyes at the women staring at Papa.
Papa reached for several new horseshoes that had lain, much to the curiosity of children and adults alike, on the end of his bench all the way through the worship service. With a horseshoe in each hand, he dragged his shoe in a long line into the dirt, then stood behind it.
“Here’s the road,” he said, pointing to the line, then stepped back and motioned to the space between himself and the line. “And here will be the orchard.”
“Apricots?” asked Sister Minni. We call her that because her parents named her a pagan name, Minerva, before they came back to the old compound and the simple life. The parents stayed behind when we moved, but Minni and her husband and family came with us. Sort of like the Gibeonites who paid for their deceptions with generations of servitude as water carriers and firewood bearers, she was a constant reminder of their lapse. Papa did try to soften it by reminding her that her new name Minni gave honor to an ancient kingdom that God raised up to smite the wicked Babylonians.
“We never had apricots before,” Minni said, apologetically, her voice fading to a whisper. “Just peaches, you know.” Her husband Adam looked at the ground.
Papa jerked his head toward the burlap sacks. “And pears and apples and quince and walnuts and anything else that will grow. More trees, as many as we want.”
“Quince?” Six-year-old Caleb-the-brat was trying the sound of the word out on his mouth, and it made him giggle a bit. But his mother Minni nodded with satisfaction and when she looked away, I thought I saw the glint of rows of mason jars in her eyes. She was brought back to the present by the flat-earth sound of the horseshoes hitting the ground. Papa tossed them one by one and nudged them into position with his toe, until they formed a crescent, like the fauchion of Judith, with all the openings facing away from the dirt-line road. I thought of an old saying I once heard, about circling wagons for protection. But Papa always managed to say things in a different way that helped you see it differently.
“This way our homes will embrace each other and embrace the land.” A couple of the older women actually sighed.
But there were no other sounds as everyone sat looking at the horseshoes, trying, I suppose, as I was trying to envision what that would look like.
What it came to look like was a curved line of U-shaped homes, each with its own courtyard, that each offered a prim square shoulder to the distant road to achieve the solar gain. But of course you can only see the houses in the winter because they are completely hidden behind the fruit trees, taller than the houses now, each bearing her fruit in season like the twelve trees of the book of Revelation. And in the winter we put up sheer curtains when we open the thick homemade roman shades because Papa says there’s nothing the outsiders should see in the fields that time of year too.
And of course our house alone has the wrought iron gates, taller than any man, that close off the open end of our house that looks onto the fields. Papa put a lattice of oak slats across the top opening of the U, what in the other houses was a kind of patio, and trained Concord grape vines to cover it. At harvest time they hang just above our heads, heavy with sweet slippery globes inside their tough bitter skins and we count days by how long until we can pick them and make them into the jam that the men take into town and barter. So when I sit in my cocoon courtyard, I am always in the shade in summer and in the sun in winter.
I can still come here to rest and see the fields both barren and rich with grain in their seasons if I move my chair to the corner of the courtyard, for we are the last house on the west tip of the scimitar of the houses. But I cannot walk out alone to the fields if I wanted to.
Papa tells me that it is just for protection of his women that he has iron bars on all the rooms of our home. To keep out outsiders, because we know what their intentions are.
Chapter 2
I don’t go outside to the barns east of our house alone anymore. I could go with Sarah or Miriam, but I don’t. Often in the night I can hear the cows and the horses, and I miss milking the black and white heifers. I like to think that they miss me too.
I was actually very good at milking, a skill Papa says every child should learn. My mama taught me. Each time I stretch my hands out to milk, I remember how oval my mama’s fingertips were, how soft her touch, how sometimes she smelled like vanilla and powdered sugar. And the froth of milk.
There are few things as satisfying as knowing that you are relieving a living being of a burden, and surely that is what a full udder must feel like to a cow, I always thought, perhaps like the stretching pain of your armpits when you were a child and hung too long from a tree limb. I would pull a stool up to our cow, Clover (she came with that name, and since it didn’t seem to signify anything particularly worldly, Papa said, she just kept the name.) I would talk to her, then squeeze and pull a teat in each hand and milk would spurt out like an urgent white needle into the chipped blue granite bucket, first splattering onto its surface then foaming like the Sea of Galilee in storm.
By the time I finished and stripped the last of the milk from the teats, the richness of the fragrance of the warm milk and the spatters on my sleeves made it become part of me, and as I carried back the bucket I felt the ache in my shoulders and elbows from its weight and there always seemed to me to be a kind of justice in that.
Now since I am fifteen and a year beyond finishing my schooling from my stepmother Sarah, one of my jobs is churning the cream, both from Clover and from other heifers, too. We don’t barter our milk with anyone, it is just for our use.
Sarah mixes the cream of all the cows together and though I think of how you shouldn’t mix different kinds of grain in a field nor weave with two kinds of fabric, I haven’t been able to find a scripture about mixing milks, so I don’t say anything. I hold the tall wooden churn my great-grandmother owned, with its iron hoops between my knees, and the rhythm of pulling the dasher stick up and down is regulated by the hymns I sing. The words comfort me.
“The name of the LORD is a strong tower: the righteous runneth into it, and is safe.” I think over and over of all the names of the Lord that I can, because I need that strong tower and I have tried to learn them in Hebrew, because that might be more powerful, I hope. And, I dare to think, more personal. But I don’t let anyone know I’ve memorized them in anything other than English.
I whisper them to myself.
ELOHIM
ADONAI
JEHOVAH-YAHWEH
JEHOVAH-MACCADDESHEM
JEHOVAH-ROHI
JEHOVAH-SHAMMAH
JEHOVAH-RAPHA
JEHOVAH-TSIDKENU
JEHOVAH-JIREH
JEHOVAH-NISSI
JEHOVAH-SHALOM
JEHOVAH-SABBAOTH
JEHOVAH-GMOLAH
EL-ELYON
EL-ROI
EL-SHADDAI
EL-OLAM
By the time I have listed them, the butter is floating in rich yellow chunks in the pale, exhausted liquid. I wash my hands before I salt the butter and press it into a carved wooden mold with my fingertips. Before I turn it onto a plate, I smooth it and leave an image of my hand again, this time on the bottom of the butter where no one will see it. But I will know it is there, a part of me that goes into everyone’s home, and that is what matters. Some days I churn enough butter for each household’s use for that week and it will stay in the icebox in the old house until someone needs it.
Today all the cream from the cows goes to butter and very little is being mixed back into the milk. That means
visitors are coming and there will be a lot of baking. The women will need some of the cream for the frosting for the cinnamon rolls and fillings for the long johns. It’s not the season for apples yet so they’ll use some of the mason jars of pale golden moon-slices of fruit from last year for the fritters for breakfast. Each woman has her specialty, and Sarah, my father’s wife, makes the lightest doughnuts of all, each one with grainy sugar sparkling like the jewels in the breastplate of the Old Testament high priest—the people in town used to pay good money for her doughnuts when she made them to sell. But of course the spattering from the oil means a lot of cleaning up and I’ll be doing plenty of that. I don’t mind, and cleaning is one of my best skills.
That will keep me busy most of the day while they try to figure out what to do with me when evening comes. Miriam has told me that the visitors are Brother Luke Krutzler (who is actually a distant relative through marriage of Daddy Ike on the Amish branch of the family) and his growing number of children, and others from his community of Armstead. Of all the groups we barter with, and stay in touch with, we are by far closest to the Armstead people.
Brother Luke is Amish, one of the stricter orders, and a friend to us. Some say that he has the gift of Brauche and travels often to minister to older Amish people all over several counties. But I have no idea what that means, and no one will explain it to me.
When we still lived in Festeburg County, he and his wife brought all ten of their children to visit us once a month, but about the Brauching thing, nothing that I can remember.
The Amish—of all orders who lived around there—feel some affinity with us because we live simply and believe in God, like Mennonites and other “plain” people who have been thrown together in our distress and fear over the American economy. (Papa says the whole world economy will follow suit when Greece declared bankruptcy, but he has never explained that to me even when I tried to couch my questions as part of history research.)
One thing he insists on is our own self-rule. Papa says we have tried patiently, since Daddy Ike first established our community years ago, to tell other Christian survivalists that we are just us. We don’t even have a name for ourselves even though an outsider would look at how we live and might think we are Amish, if not for our lifestyle then certainly for our heritage.
We speak English and not German, perhaps as a kind of hearkening back to Daddy Ike’s first wife, who came in to the Amish from the outside. It occurs to me that I don’t know her real name, because she died giving birth to my Papa and he called her only “my Mother” whenever he referred to her. Nobody has mentioned her around me for a long time, now that I think about it. She’s a kind of shadow in our past, half unspoken outsider-danger and half blessing, one who seems to be shading us from many of the things that Daddy said he wanted to leave behind when he left the Amish.
Nevertheless, it seems to me we keep many of the old rules of the Amish. We dress plain like them, the community comes first, we stay away from the devil’s devices. So from my earliest childhood when I saw an antenna on the roof of a house I knew that was the devil’s tail and my mama would stroke my hair and whisper to me that inside that house, the devil had a square blue mouth that he spoke lies and uncleanness out of, and his blood, his strength, came from the powerlines that sagged between the poles. And because that blood would infect anything it flowed into, we should never let it come into our lives. And Papa added to that, saying that the government is the devil.
But even though we have moved away we are still all brothers and sisters, Brother Luke says, and he and his wife Rebekah and his side of the family still come and see us several times a year even though it is now a long ride for the horses and they have to bring at least five carriages and wagons because so many want to come.
We know that their cows won’t milk themselves while they are gone, and that someone will have to feed their chickens and sheep and tend to the other tasks that keep a farm going; so in a way it is like two groups of people showing their care for us, those who come and those who make it possible for them to come, a faceless group of people for whom the work will be doubled until the visitors return from seeing us.
And we’re happy the Armstead Amish come for many reasons. We get out our best white prayer caps and put away the brimmed bonnets, and that alone feels like a celebrating because it means we are not going to be working out in the sun. Part of the fun is the preparations, for we want them to see how well we are doing, what fine new land we’ve bought that adjoins ours, what good cooks we have, what clever craftsmen. See how many calves made it through that cold snap, look at the way we found to irrigate the asparagus but not flood the squash down the hill, taste this lentil soup. And they bring us much, too. New hybrid seeds that are more vigorous than what we’ve been growing, a perfectly weighted hammer handle, new non-stick mesh for the food dehydration racks. Sometimes one of them will teach us a new tune for a psalm, because we, like they, sing as we do our tasks. And they bring news of babies born and weddings and burials, though I for one usually do not know most of the people they are talking about.
As soon as they arrive, the little children all rush stiff-legged (Walk! Don’t run! their fathers tell them sternly) in a group to the creek to wade and catch frogs after school time and all the mothers yell after them to watch out for water moccasins. Miriam stands beside me with her arm around my waist, sisterly-like you would think, and if it were not for that I would want to follow the children, because I remember what it was like before the day when I stopped playing.
In the distance, I hear boys counting for hide and seek.
Then the men walk off with their hands on each others’ shoulders to the barn to talk and smoke pipes while the women show new crochet or quilt patterns and try to tell secrets without them sounding like gossip. We must pray for Sister so-and-so, one will sigh, such a problem with that worldly daughter-in-law of hers. You remember she was the one who. . .
I always wonder why the visitor women keep their distance from my stepmother Sarah, though. No one outright ignores her, or anything like it, but you can see it by the pulling of their shoulders away from her even when someone else is talking to her. I have often thought it is because she is so beautiful. Perhaps, I wondered, a face that looked like it wore makeup but needed none—with long, thick eyelashes, skin clear and translucent as if it were woven out of spider webs and a profile like the etchings on a coin—those could cause jealousy, I thought. Even in a community where no one was supposed to think more highly of herself than anyone else.
But the dynamic was powerful. Once I saw Sarah standing in a circle of the Amish visitors from Armstead and she was handing out scoops of her best popcorn, the new crop, when the bag developed a hole and kernels began to stream from it and not one woman offered her apron to help catch them. They all just stood there until she caught a corner of her own apron up to stop it, and then some women started forward as if they had meant to help.
But when she speaks every woman looks her right in the eye, as if they are searching for something inside her. I do not understand this. I wonder if it is because of what I have heard, that she was orphaned at a young age and passed from family to family until she married her first husband, and then was widowed when he died at the bottom of a well near a propane tank that had leaked. To go from being an orphan to being a widow with a young daughter—perhaps this was too painful to talk about, but something you can’t take your eyes away from.
I usually don’t dwell much on such things because there are people of far more interest to me than my stepmother. Those who are beyond the hide-and-seek and frog-chasing stage and still unmarried do what I think of as the Amish equivalent of dancing, a milling group looking one another over and circling and posing with our best features forward.
I’m still trying to figure out what my best feature might be, so when I am allowed to socialize with the courting-age group, I’ll know what to emphasize. I’m only conscious of my failings—not the one great one our com
munity is so aware of, what they all keep one eye on in such gatherings, but of the fact that my voice is husky (earnest, I tell myself), and my feet are too wide and look like spatulas to me, and that my skin is paler than anyone else’s. In a way it’s hopeless anyhow because the girls outnumber the boys no matter how you look or feel. In a community supposedly without rank, I’m at the bottom and thus pretty much without what they call prospects.
We love our Amish cousins, we need our Amish cousins. Outsiders who want to “marry in” are a disruption in the very best of circumstances, Papa says. Everyone knows The Anchor’s young people can’t marry each other because we’re mostly related, so making friendships with people who are almost us but not related is a practical necessity unless we want Moses and the prophets riled up at us from the get-go.
But Papa says we should not give anyone the impression that we are lacking in anything because that might imply that God was not supplying all our needs. It is very important to him that we be self-sufficient, and every fall after harvest when I see his back bared to the sun as he hammers out horseshoes and roasting spits and tools over a fire that singes off all the red and gray hair from his hands and forearms, I wonder if he dreams of making people.
I remember that after each visit from our cousins that Papa (whom everyone in our community calls Brother Abe) holds a meeting with the women and asks them what they learned. I always wondered if he was making note of all the names of the new recipes and quilt block patterns, but I have begun to think he wants to know what new ideas are being imported into our little country. I’m pretty sure he does this because the women won’t tell Sarah; and I used to wonder why he thinks they would tell him. However, now that I’m out of school, I go to these meetings and am always amazed how the women tell him things, things I would consider confidential or special in some way, looking to him as they would a father, I suppose; though I do not personally have that kind of adoration feeling toward him.
What Will Be Made Plain Page 2
