There was none of the usual singing, but rather a kind of brisk solemnity as if by their departure they were leaving an important task undone and were grieved that no one here or there knew how to finish it. Part of it had to be Papa’s confrontation with the men. But I felt that I myself was that task undone, the cake not turned, the sapping of strength both mine and theirs.
At the last moment, Matthaus turned and looked over his shoulder in my direction and I do not know but I want to believe he was looking at me. But really, I don’t know what that meant, and I have decided not to assign a meaning to it.
Sometimes I wonder if I am a ghost myself here at The Anchor because, often, I pass by people and I see only the slightest flicker in their eyes that tell me they have stepped aside because something is in the path.
There is no cruelty there, quite the opposite. Most people simply don’t know what to do with me. What would they ask me if they spoke what they really want to know? What did your mother say to you last night, Sister Leah?
It’s been months since I have gone into town. Last time I went, the grocery stores were filled with fifty-pound sacks of almost any grain you could think of, and people where buying as many as they could fit in their cars. Even there, I heard talk everywhere about another coming catastrophe where people wouldn’t be able to buy food.
Here at The Anchor, people are relieved when I say I don’t want to go to town, and I don’t tell anyone why: I am afraid of finding people there who dress in black and speak words I won’t be able to understand. I don’t want to meet Goths. I don’t want their explanations.
Sarah was at best a reluctant homeschool teacher to me but now that it is over, I try to compensate for it by doing my own reading from Papa’s library. He doesn’t mind, because if I am reading I’m not talking to people and upsetting them. Now, the math and geography lessons I don’t miss at all and will be happy if I never use a tally sheet or a map again. The history books reinforce our community’s insistence on being in the world but not of it. Who would want to live like the ancient Romans or even the Enlightenment people? But the Bible dictionaries and encyclopedias are like dusty treasures to me. Now that I’ve learned how to pronounce all the Hebrew letters, I think I might want to start on Greek.
The late July Sunday after Matthaus left, in honeysuckle-heat so thick it clogged your breathing like flour whisked into the air, Papa preached another sermon about how good our lives at The Anchor were, and that we were the fragrance of Christ.
“Others want this sweet savor,” he said, “but they are not willing to pay the price for the simplicity of this life. They want the fruits of it, but not the labor. They want the form of godliness but they deny the power thereof.”
I wondered about daVinci and Michelangelo.
With the cloying smell of the blossoms and the rumble of bees outside Brother Andrew and Sister Priscilla’s door, then I wondered if our neighbors could indeed smell our farm from miles away, and what they would think of this, if on such a day in their cool homes they would want our lives.
But Papa’s momentum was just getting started and he continued on for two hours, with sweat turning his red hair to the color of car paint primer and his beard full of diamonds of sweat that caught the light.
Words, mountains of words, rolling waves of words, churning lakes of words.
Children gave up being fussy or playing with toys and lay limp across their mothers’ laps and every starched Sunday garment sagged. I stole a look into the cornfields that Papa Abe had preached about before, and in the light, in the wind, I could see motion, like a battalion was hiding there.
Before I could think about this, my mind reconnected with what Papa was saying, something about baptism. Though we are proud of our insistence on that rite only for adults—Papa was saying something about everyone being re-baptized, about washing away anything we may have brought with us from our previous lives.
“It is a burial of the old things,” he said. “A hope for new things, a death of all that came before The Anchor.”
I looked across the congregation and saw people shifting from side to side on the benches, like a snake crawling under a blanket, back and forth, until Papa Abe finished.
The men had a conference in the barn after worship service, and some of the women went too, while we younger ones and the shyer women laid lunch out. Some of us have no stomach for conflict and debate—we could hear strong voices and replies. But we couldn’t hear any words, and so we speculated in whispers.
“Papa Abe’s sermon sounded like he thought it was some kind of emergency that involved us all,” Miriam observed with uncharacteristic candidness, and some of the other women who heard her nodded, as if ratifying the words.
“I don’t know about you, but I thought letting Brother Abe give us all new names was enough,” said Sister Naomi Eckman. And yet as the silence of setting the food out was broken only by snatches of words from the barn, I saw the women looking at one another as if to try to discern what hidden thing in each of them might have triggered such an emergency.
No one looked at me: They all know what’s wrong with me.
When the men came out of the barn, some of them looked dazed, some relieved, some troubled. After lunch Papa stood.
“We will do a new thing in November,” he said. “Like Jesus said, ‘behold I make all things new.’ We will have a cleansing ceremony. A chance to make a new start for all of us.”
As I churned butter that day, I thought about the power of names: the reason why I wanted to know God’s names. When you rename someone, do you change them? When God gave people new names, that’s the way it worked. But seeing Papa in that role of God dispensing new names—like Adam in the Garden of Eden to a wallaby—left me unsettled. Maybe he was right, a new start by rebaptizing could wipe some slates clean.
One of the families, the Morgensterns, who came with us from Daddy Ike’s old community, left over this, I think; rising up before dawn like their ancestral namesake the morning star and disappearing into the sunlight. She was one of the best cooks among the women and he was one of the ministers of our congregation, one whose voice had been loudest in the barn meeting. Neither I nor anyone else ever heard of a minister leaving to go to another community. That was something Papa taught us to despise about worldly people who called themselves Christians and yet hopped from church to church.
I have missed the Morgensterns so much because, though they had no children, they were in some ways children themselves, willing to sit in the grass in the evenings and play with a spinning top or toy buggy with the little ones, giggling in delight until the mothers called for dinner, then rising with their hands to their stiff hip bones and hobbling home. We called them by the names Daniel and Shiprah which Papa gave them.
I wonder if they have reclaimed their former names, if they sit with other children in the shadows of dusk, if they have taken up using stools, if they still laugh at a wooden toy horse that can upend its cart, if with hands over their mouths they still laugh at each other laughing.
Even though Papa has made it very clear from the beginning (to us at least) that the Amish bishops have no authority over us, after the Morgensterns left, a bishop of a neighboring Amish district came to discuss why we would be wanting to have this rebaptizing ceremony.
Again there was a conference in the barn and much loud talking. Some of the women—perhaps all the women who had been brave enough to go to the barn for the meeting—emerged in tears and not long afterwards the bishop with tight lips and heel-first steps walked out and without a word mounted his horse and rode away.
“Brother Abe stood with his arms folded the whole time, not saying a word,” reported Sister Anna, “never said a word.” His refusal to answer the bishop’s requests led to many questions among the women who looked at one another with arms out, palms up.
The plan went forward. If we were Catholics I suppose you could say we were all going to receive our catechisms. Our Sunday meetings became like the in
structional sessions that all young people attend before baptism, as if every adult of The Anchor had somehow regressed like old people who must learn how to use a fork and spoon again, and must start over. But the usual custom of having baptismal candidates taught separately while the rest of the group sang songs in another room, Papa said, was a sin against us all because it divided us. Even those of us considered too young for baptism listened as for nine Sundays Papa preached. None of the other men took a turn preaching as in the past: we were one undivided congregation and we listened to Holy Bible and the passion of one man to make us all new.
One night a few young men and women from a neighboring community came for the evening singing, riding in an old Ford minivan. One of the young men, Karl Clemmons, worked at a factory and had bought it to get to work; though not ideal, such a thing as owning a car, I hear, is tolerated in some Amish communities until a man is baptized. (We at The Anchor of course would never compromise that way.) But they parked it down the road so that Papa would not know—apparently his reputation spread far beyond our white fences.
“So what is this we hear that you are all going to be baptized this fall?” asked Karl. “In fact, someone said that your whole church is learning the Dortrecht Confession from scratch like the kids?”
There was an uncomfortable silence from Miriam and the other young people from The Anchor. Actually, I didn’t care what the controversy was as long as it didn’t direct attention to me. I am pretty sure that my presence at the singings was on probation and I didn’t want to be noticed.
“Since I have to take the lessons, maybe everyone else being there would make it like a, a . . .” John Miller searched for words, “a review, or reminder.” I could tell he didn’t want to rock the boat. He can’t be married to Amy Krutzler until he is baptized, and he can’t be baptized without the lessons.
Karl shrugged. If that explanation suited us, it suited him. He came to sing.
As weeks passed, the women of The Anchor stopped talking about how odd it would seem to outsiders that we were all being prepared for baptism. So we all pretended we were sharing a fellowship, that humility is the highest of assets before the Lord, that no one of us is too good to be reminded of important things.
“Humility is a great virtue,” I said one day to Miriam. She looked at me suspiciously, as if I were trying to trick her, and I realized with a rush of guilt that I was setting up the conversation.
“This isn’t a trap, honestly,” I said.
Her lips pursed and her eyes widened with vindication.
“Please forgive me.” I looked earnestly at her. Her eyes cast about behind me as she grappled with the knowledge that there could be only one godly response to such a request.
In a rush I heard my mother’s voice—from the past, not from my dreams, told to an eight-year-old Leah with clenched fists and a broken toy.
“It will never matter how many times you forgive others,” Mama said, “you will forget all about those times. But you will never escape the memory of when you refuse to forgive. It will make you angry over and over again, as if it just happened.”
My shoulders jerked with the memory of her words.
But Miriam didn’t notice. She was giving herself the freedom of forgiveness. She shrugged, then patted me on the shoulder.
I collected myself, then rushed on. “But here’s what I wonder about humility, and maybe you can help me figure it out.”
Her eyes turned to the corners of her lids as her face looked away from me still.
“How do you know if you are keeping the commandment to be humble?” She began to roll her eyes but I pressed on. “I mean, if you think you are humble, does that mean you aren’t? And if someone accuses you of lack of humility, what can you say? ‘You are mistaken, I am very humble?’”
She pushed her shoulders back and began a retort, but could not finish. She began to smile at the question. For the first time in a long time, she looked deeply into my eyes, and I believe that look was a truce.
We laughed together, perhaps for the first time since she had become my stepsister.
At church, her shoulder did not lean quite so far away from mine as she sat next to me on the pew through the instructions over the next nine Sundays, every other week for 18 weeks; and when we spoke privately over our daily tasks she began asking me questions from my Bible readings, like someone hungry to learn but who did not want to be seen as having an appetite.
“Who were the Nephilim?” we wondered together. I looked it up, and we still wondered. “Why did King David count his troops and get into trouble for doing it?” “And what was the deal with touching the Ark of the Covenant when it was about to tip over?”
Other things that outsiders may have considered to be even more perplexing, we had no questions about. The God who created the universe could make a donkey talk or a great fish vomit up a man alive. No problem there.
But we do wonder about raising an Ebenezer—its practical value, of course. And how, exactly, to do it. But one day we find a big rock at the side of the house and name it, anyhow. Miriam takes a black marker and around on the back side, where it’s not so noticeable, she makes a little “E.” We stand there together, and I think about “thus far by God’s help I’ve come,” what Ebenezer meant to the prophet Samuel. I wonder if she is thinking about how coming thus far to The Anchor with a stepfather felt. I suppose something like coming thus far with a stepmother felt to me.
Of course I went back later and wrote an Aleph and a Greek epsilon right below them. But nobody has to know that but me.
I found in the kind of interchange Miriam and I had when we were together the first sense of any equality I ever felt with her—not an equality of worth because I understand that I am a trial to her, but the welcome impression that I could finally give something back to her for the many times that her activities were restricted by having to watch after me.
“Why do you say strange words when you are churning butter?” she asked me one day when we were alone in our courtyard. “Is that what the apostles spoke of, the speaking in tongues?”
At first I was startled that anyone had ever heard me, and I felt my chest squeezing with panic. What else had I said that people could hear? But Miriam looked earnestly into my eyes and I wondered why she asked questions about the Bible of me and not of Papa.
I realized that a great principle of the Bible—submission—was being played out before my eyes: For the first time in my life, someone was submitting to me.
“Not speaking in tongues,” I began, and then stopped to think. “Well, maybe. If the languages that the apostles had the ability to speak were known languages, then yes, I suppose I am speaking in a tongue because I am using Hebrew.”
She considered this for a moment.
“Why? Who are you talking to?”
My fear, that she was asking if I was speaking to my dead mother, was quenched when I realized that wasn’t what she was asking: I could tell her the truth about the Hebrew words.
“I learned some of the Old Testament names for God, and I…” I couldn’t finish.
She touched my arm with tenderness. “Go on.”
“I… call Him by those names. It feels more…personal, I guess.”
“Really?” She was genuinely interested, so I went on.
“And I can’t tell you how exciting it has been for me to learn some of the Greek letters, too.”
She looked at me, no doubt wondering about the usefulness of another alphabet when she’s had so much trouble with the English one.
“What I figured out was how the apostles would have pronounced the name of Jesus.”
She leaned close to me, wanting me to say it, and I did, sounding it out.
“Yay-Suse,” Ιησος, I said. She breathed the sounds out, too. They seemed to hang in the air like a benediction.
The syllables seemed kind, like my mother’s voice. But I didn’t say that.
We sat in awed silence until Sarah called her to com
e and help with something.
I did not tell Miriam the other part, that I begged Him by His names to help me live my life, in which I cannot always tell what is real and what is not, a life in which people speak and I cannot understand.
Each of the Sundays through the rest of the summer and into the fall seems in my memory like a chapter in a book that Papa read to us, for each two-hour sermon ended with a question to wound our hearts or rile our minds, and we were like children who waited from one sermon until two weeks later when we would meet again, anxious to see what came next. I remember serial novels like those of Charles Dickens we read in our schooling, and this seemed the church equivalent of them.
The first Sunday he instructed the men to set up the benches so that both men and women could look out the window toward the graveyard. Only old Brother Heinrich who died just a month after we arrived and the stillborn daughter of Sister Martha had died since we had come to The Anchor, and no one visits that place.
“There is no reason to honor a grave, since the spirit has departed,” Sister Minni told me the day of the infant’s funeral. I remember looking at the unadorned marker set flat on the ground and I asked her where they departed to and what might make them return, but she would not answer me then. And nobody will answer that kind of question now.
Since the graveyard was so far away, we sat that Sunday and looked over the golden fields toward a site we knew was there but which no one could actually see and no one apparently wanted to remember.
I wondered about the departing of spirits from the body, and all I could think of was the smell of my mother’s hair and the warmth of her chest when she held me and the way her breath rasped, there at the end. I could not imagine how the essence that made her herself could be split apart from all the skin and warmth and comfort that she was; and yet I know the calendar date that happened and nothing has ever been the same.
Papa’s sermon was just beginning, and I was daydreaming already.
“Shall we continue in sin which leads to death?” Papa asked, and we shook our heads, God forbid, by no means, by no means.
What Will Be Made Plain Page 5
