“Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?” His voice was rhythmic as the Austrian clock in the hallway. And we looked toward the fields.
And for the coming hours as Papa’s voice rose and fell, we looked toward the fields. Until I could focus no more and I leaned forward and held my head in my hands, because the fields mean death and life at the same time and my head felt too light for the sight of it.
Two weeks later Papa preached again and I can remember nothing except that he assured us over and over we must die to the world. Though he explained this for hours in the basement of Brother Richter and Sister Anna whose turn it was to host church, I do not know what he meant.
Papa spoke again and again of being buried in our faith and as I looked through the shallow basement windows above our heads I felt the weight of the earth around us, the precariousness of the ceiling above us, the location of every couch and bed for their eight children that hovered unseen over my head.
Give up your life, Papa said. Surrender.
And I want to, to God who is so far away from the turmoil in me.
But for now, I feel as if I should hold onto my life as if it is my clothing being ripped from me.
The final instruction was two weeks ago. It was our family’s turn to have worship in our home. As people entered, the wood burning stove warmed the large front room that faced the road, and Papa carefully pulled the sheer curtains as if to show to anyone passing that we were doing what we were supposed to be doing.
By nine in the morning the November sun through the bank of southern windows made our dark clothing hot on our skin, and people put on jackets just to shield their shoulders. The older mothers fanned themselves so furiously that you could feel the breeze from their motions and little children turned their flushed faces toward them for relief. Finally someone propped the back door open a slit and the air blowing across the snow-crusted fields entered the house and nagged at our ankles like a dog.
That service was longer than any I can remember. Papa thumbed through the whole New Testament pointing out each place where it said “one another”: Love one another, bear with one another, pray for one another, encourage one another.
I looked across the pews to faces of plain people, godly people, whose souls are knit together like those of David and Jonathan and who yearn to encourage one another not just once every two weeks on a Sunday, not just when people are looking; who do those things in their hearts as well. It was out of the well of such simplicity and unchallenged humility, I believe, that something was drawn that day.
But though I had lived among this clot of people since my birth, I felt as if I were an outsider looking through the windows. I hated my secrets, and feared the secrets of others with a dread of unknown things that seemed to draw themselves together like smoke inhaled; and what seemed to hover over my Papa was not that day the anointing of light but the waves of heat that rose from him in that room.
Chapter 6
It was no surprise that John Miller stood to be baptized after Brother Yost offered the last prayer. It was for him, at least at first, that the instructions were given, after all; for him the baptism so that he could get married. But I was surprised when Miriam rose too from her bench and for a moment I wondered if her insistence at running to the road to meet the mailman each day was because of letters from Ryan Herbert, wondered if there would be another coming announcement of a spring wedding. If that were true, she, too would need baptism before she could get married.
As if to answer, she turned to me with a long sideways look before she knelt before Papa. Once in town I saw a little card that had a picture of a face covered with ridged plastic, and when you tilted it one way it smiled and the other way it didn’t. That was what Miriam’s face looked like, first smiling and then not, smiling and not.
The congregation murmured and seemed to settle like tea leaves onto the bottom of a cup, for they believed what was coming was a familiar and loved rite of passage as orderly as the worship service. The young people would each get an opportunity to express a desire to leave all worldliness, to become part of our community, to make a public statement—to which everyone there was expected to hold them until death—that they believed the Bible and would be loyal to The Anchor’s principles.
In some ways, I thought, this was like a pre-wedding wedding where they pledged their lives to the community and their Lord.
Papa nodded his approval of the two young people kneeling before him and looked from her face to his as he asked the first question.
“The Anchor has built a great tradition of love and devotion to one another,” his voice sounded out. “We are proud of our separation from others. I have explained this now, for your weeks of instruction.” He looked to the rest of the people, many of whom nodded as if he were speaking to them.
“Do you understand the rules and ordinances of our community?”
“Yes,” John and Miriam said in unison as if they were marrying one another, and then both laughed nervously at the coincidence, as did some in the congregation.
Papa’s eyes darkened as he looked down on them.
“You think this is something to laugh about?” The walls of the room were too short, too small to contain his anger.
“No, of course not, Brother Abe,” John’s words stumbled.
Covering her eyes with her hands, Miriam could only shake her head.
This is not a good beginning, I thought.
The silence in the room was as thick as the heat had been earlier. Baptism for a man meant that one like John put himself into the community not just as a member, but when married, he would be subject to the choosing of ministers for the congregation.
In my mind I saw a pile of hymn books and men’s hands picking them up, each by each. In one of them beat the heart of a slip of paper wedged hidden in the pages: So much depends on a slip of paper in a hymnal, I thought. I wondered for the first time what God was thinking when He allowed Papa to be chosen by lot as a minister long before I was born, what people who knew him well must have thought the day when he opened his book and found the paper with the scripture on it. Would they have foreseen this man who breathed so heavily before us in the silent room?
“Can you live this simple life, for the rest of your years? Do you commit to serve Christ and His Church? And abide by it, and thereby live and die?” Papa’s voice was loud, too loud.
Both John and Miriam nodded. John cleared his throat.
“I can.”
Miriam nodded again.
“Can you renounce the world, and even your own flesh and blood?” Papa’s voice was low and he said the last three words so slowly that the air buzzed.
The two candidates and many in the congregation startled. Miriam began to cry.
“Oh, I do, I do,” she sobbed.
“I do.” John spoke up.
“Do you renounce the devil?”
I felt a chill as I have always felt, at this point in the confession.
John’s head was down like Miriam’s now, as if this were a great wave of water that would pass over him and they would survive if they could stay anchored and still.
“I do,” John whispered and Miriam turned to him, wordless, nodding, as if he should speak for her.
The only sound in the room was the scouring of shoe soles against the wooden floor. Papa’s face looked like a lake with clouds passing over it, first darkening, then shining, then darkening again.
His voice was hoarse now and it seemed to be more of grief than of anger.
“We all need cleansing. We all need commitment to each other.”
He swayed as he spoke. His beard seemed to quiver.
I did not see it, but others said later that apparently upon a signal of the eyes both Sister Minni and her husband Adam walked toward one another from the facing pews and joined hands and he said they, too, would make a new commitment to the community and its life.
From that point on
it was like what I would imagine a series of resurrections would look like as first one stiff-sitting man and then his wife, then another couple, then another couple rose to their feet.
And then there was sweetness, conquering sweetness, in the room.
When couples gave confession, they looked into each other’s eyes with commitment, not with guilt and as if they didn’t even realize that Papa was asking the questions. In the end, that day every adult over 20 years of age was reborn into the second life of The Anchor.
For each one, our deacon Brother Lapp poured water through Papa’s hands onto their heads. Soon there was a pool of water where people knelt and then passed on back to their seats like the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.
Or the Jordan. I couldn’t decide which.
Just as people began to relax and the deacon reached for a towel to dry his hands, Papa grasped the surprised man’s forearm, stopping him. He released his arm, then Papa strode over and reached for my stepmother Sarah. I had said that her profile looked like that on a coin but today she seemed all edges like shavings off a sharpened plow. She was crying as she knelt and cried and hiccupped all the way through her profession of faith and her baptism; then when Papa himself knelt beside her and in front of—well, in front of no one, actually, now that I think of it—he pulled Brother Lapp’s pitcher of water over his head and kept it there, running through his own fingers, until his hair and shoulders were soaked and the pitcher was empty.
Our Sunday lunch was an unusually joyous one, in spite of Papa’s stony face and the fact that Sarah went immediately back to the house, still crying.
But for everyone else, it was genuine love and the one-anotherness, I believe, that caused our congregation to begin a new life that day, and not Papa’s impassioned urgings that they cast off uncleannesses and create new lives.
“I could see it in Papa’s eyes, the disappointment, when he saw the people did it because we loved each other, all of us, just as we are,” Miriam whispered to me the next evening as we spun wool shorn from our sheep months ago.
I nodded: I was sure that Papa wanted them to do it because he thought he’d convinced each to want to be someone else.
Miriam’s fingers were expert in feeding the right amount of wool into the mechanism whose treadle I worked with my feet. Careful not to separate the strands, I concentrated on handing her more connected fluffy clouds of wool—the threads of the memory of summer heat—as she needed it. I could barely hear what she said next.
“I know I must work on my humility…” she began.
“Oh, it’s the humility paradox again,” I teased.
“But tell me, Leah, doesn’t being baptized mean that you have a new status with God? That He washes away our sins continuously?”
“That’s what it says in John’s epistles,” I said cautiously. I started to say, John’s first epistle, but decided not to show off right then.
She, as a baptized person, now had that status of continuous forgiveness from her sins. I, on the other hand, kept accumulating my sins bit by bit just like the fibers she fed into the spinner. So who was I to instruct her?
“So here’s the humility part,” she said after a while. “I know that the baptism didn’t make me perfect. But, tell me, what could make a man be so obsessed to be baptized again at Papa’s age? And not just baptized—that man drenched himself.”
Something inside me thought I knew, and that elusive idea makes me sick at my stomach.
I am becoming a great skein.
I hope that no one else wants to be baptized soon, so that their instructional lessons will not implicate me. Though I am too young to be considered for baptism, I wouldn’t want it if I were old enough. I need to wait.
With no resentment, really, I’ve accepted a role of being an example of one of the aspects of simple living that is most necessary, a separation from the world, a living in it but not of it even in the community here: I am the shadow on a wood-plank wall, the last mist on the grass as the sun burns off the dew, the memory of a sound.
I wonder what old things of my life could be buried and stay dead.
I wonder if there is any baptism in any universe that could guarantee that it would raise only good in me to life.
Chapter 7
Brother Luke Krutzler’s group from Armstead—in my mind, I’ve begun calling them Matthau’s people—are coming this week. They will be able to stay a day longer since it’s winter and there are not so many community chores to leave for others. But the most important thing is that they must come early in the week so that we can all prepare for the wedding of John Miller and Amy Krutzler, Brother Luke and Sister Rebekah’s daughter, on Thursday.
Several times since his baptism John has taken Papa’s courting buggy to go to see Amy. He leaves in the midafternoon because now that it’s late November it’s dark by the time he gets to Armstead. He comes back half frozen, his mother Sister Minni says, and she sounds pleased.
Perhaps he meets Ryan Herbert in his open-air courting buggy on the highway, coming from dropping off Miriam. I wonder if they stop and race each other like other young men I’ve heard of.
Ryan and Miriam have seen each other secretly four times now. Funny how Amish see their secrets: It’s something everyone knows but no one talks about. That’s the beauty of Amish courting. Everyone pretends they don’t see but the fathers start making lists that all have dollar signs on them, and all the women shop for fabric and sugar.
We tease John sometimes about bundling, and the hungry look in his eyes says he would be willing. But nobody does that anymore, lying in a bed with the person you’re engaged to, whiling away the night with a board between you or at the very least the bride wrapped up like a mummy to keep her pure.
I looked at John’s ears the other morning and they were red as fire, frostbitten from last night’s ride home I suppose, and I thought nobody should take pride in his physical appearance, I wonder if for the sake of his poor ears alone something should be done to let them see each other more.
“Perhaps there is a community halfway,” Miriam says, and I can tell that she is thinking of the same thing when she looks at his ears. I think she wears earmuffs when she goes in her courting buggy and she carries a pottery footwarmer filled with boiling water and closed with a cork. Nobody has told me how far we are from Armstead, and when we came from there six years ago all I know is that it took what seemed like a whole day.
Armstead. I think how appropriate a name for the place where Matthau lives.
Meanwhile in the daytime Miriam has become nearly worthless, walking around so distracted that I’ve seen her run into fenceposts because her neck is twisted east toward Armstead. She hardly seems to notice, brushes herself off and looks around to see if anyone else saw, but within minutes the eggs slip out of her basket onto the ground where the dogs lick them up. She probably doesn’t even know why they have begun to follow her everywhere.
She hardly eats any more and her dresses are beginning to hang on her a bit. She told me she is engaged and she and Ryan plan to tell both sets of parents when he comes later this week. They would like to get married in the early spring.
“Somehow I don’t think Papa will oppose it,” she says to me, and I agree.
“Maybe even before the cold-weather plantings,” she says, hopefully.
I pat her on the shoulder. I think Papa would let her marry tomorrow, except that means that Sarah will have to watch out for me now. But I haven’t debated anyone about communications with the dead for a while now, and I think everyone is beginning to relax.
I don’t tell anyone about the dreams, not even Miriam.
I don’t tell them that the dreams are becoming more detailed. It’s like the first few times you walk through someone’s living room as a new guest, you feel either comfortable and welcomed—or not.
The first time, you notice the big things: the size of the couch, the ceilings if they are unusually high and have polished beams, the books stacked together on
a table and on the shelf behind it.
Then you are invited back again. And because it no longer feels completely strange to you, you sit on the couch and notice how it sags just where you sit but not where you slide to when someone else needs to sit, and you realize that someone sits every day in one spot but not in the other, even though the couch looks level when no one is on it. You see cobwebs on the beams, and a gouge in one of them that is turned toward the wall. And the books are in categories: Bible and study materials on the table, maps and history books and farm catalogues up higher.
On another visit you go to the table and begin to thumb through the Bibles. This feels safe and comfortable to you, because you’ve read other Bibles, and your father has the same study books. But you want to look at the other books but there’s not enough time.
When you come another time, you notice the colors of the bindings on the other books.
Later you count those books that are on the shelves.
Another time you read the titles out loud.
But you never open the books. You never know what they say, or what they’re about. They are mute.
This is the way of the dreams. I believe I’ve had them ever since Mama died, but for a long time I couldn’t remember them at all, just awakened with a feeling that dark sheets fluttered over my eyes all night long.
But then I taught myself to lie very still upon awakening and to concentrate on what I had seen. I started this when I was nine years old, when the dreams began. I think I had dreams before that time, but they weren’t the dark-sheet kind. In those days I think I dreamed of swinging in long arcs over a river, and chasing lightning bugs, and something about pinning up a doll’s hair.
The early-morning training of myself was hard because I was not sure I wanted to re-live the dreams that made my stomach hurt when I awakened from them. But I had to know, thought of myself like Nebuchadnezzar who told his wise men that he didn’t want just to know what his dreams meant, but what the dreams he couldn’t remember were.
What Will Be Made Plain Page 6
