At first I didn’t want to believe that my dreams were about my mother; for she had never raised her hand to me, or spoke harshly to me, or gave me anything more than love. Why would dreams of her cause me to awaken shaking and sobbing?
So when morning after morning came and I knew that the dreams were about her, it filled me with a sense of great loss. It was as if she had died every night the night before.
In my dreams, she goes through the progression of her illness. At first I see her troubled. There are lines on her forehead that disappear when she turns to me, when she first sees me, but they come back and I know that she is looking inside herself, trying to hide the pain. She becomes thinner before my eyes though I know the process when it truly happened must have taken months. But she drips away like an icicle in bright sunlight, from cloudiness to transparency. In my dreams I can almost see through her.
Then she turned yellow. Then she turns yellow.
Then she died.
But in my dreams she is alive, and turns to me with sunken eyes that make requests.
Like visiting the room with the books, in the early dreams I only remembered how it made me feel, and some outstanding things. Like the Bibles on the table, my mother was the familiar part. But in the room of my dreams were secrets, things I couldn’t open, things I couldn’t read.
In all my dreams now my mother speaks. What she is saying is important and I know she makes me promise to remember. But when I awaken, I can’t remember the words.
That is why I pore over the Bible passage about the blood of Abel on the ground and want to know what words that blood says.
The dreams that have come every night for six years convince me that the dead speak. Don’t anyone tell me they don’t speak. The Bible says they do. I know they do.
There is no one in my community who can tell me how to find out what my mother says to me every night. Miriam had few answers and ran out of them long ago. Sarah is afraid of me. Papa becomes angry when I talk about it. No one has ever believed me here at The Anchor.
I see that my clothes are beginning to hang on me like Miriam’s, but I know that I am not in love like she is.
I count the days until Matthau comes here and will tell me more of what he knows from Outsiders.
Chapter 8
They are coming today!
Sarah is supervising the baking of pies and bread, and her donuts are rising in rows that cover her countertops and extra tables like water lilies on a pond.
Miriam is walking from room to room and turning around again. She puts her hand to her head. The dogs wait outside the door and yawn and yearn for her to come out with her basket.
The men are sweeping up in the barns and testing the hinges on the new folding pew benches they have built: snap, snap, snap. Papa rubs the front of his trouser legs and nods and even smiles. He says he knows the Armstead people will bring their own church on wheels, the bench wagon specially fitted with racks for their folding benches. Won’t they be surprised, he tells the men, when they see all our new benches, not a splinter on them because they’ve never ridden a mile on those roads. The men nod as they run their hands along the benches stacked like firewood inside the barn.
I start to tell them that for a wedding we’ll need a lot more songbooks but nobody wants to hear that and besides the visitors will bring theirs.
This has been a very dry fall and the few snows we had melted fast. The mud is gone and I am grateful for that as I walk with a bucketful of cleaning supplies on one shoulder on a mop handle, and a stepstool in the other hand.
I never mind cleaning, because it reminds me of Mama. She wasn’t the famous cook like Sarah but she knew how to get stains out of a wooden sideboard or a collar or a porcelain sink. “Be gentle with what you are cleaning,” she always told me, and I remember the bones and veins and tendons of her hands moving a sponge back and forth. She made her own cleaning supplies out of vinegar and baking soda and rich, fragrant oils. I wish she had left some of those recipes behind, but she didn’t.
I thought of her, well, yes, and of Matthaus, as I dusted and swept all day yesterday. Then some of the young men brought the folding cots down from the attic of the old storage house and placed them in all the rooms of it.
I volunteered to clean the old house, and even swatting spider webs and carrying out the decaying mice caught on glue traps inside the cabinets makes me happy because I hope that Matthaus and his family will stay in it again. Papa tells me that there may be two families sharing the old house so I should set up the living room and kitchen with rows of cots for men and boys, and put sheets on the jammed-in cots in the bedrooms for girls and women.
I pause in the kitchen and sit on the cot that’s in the spot where Matthau’s cot was last time. I remember how the room smelled, about meeting his sister Katie who has the same eyes. I think again of their mother Sister Elisabeth and the way she held me in her arms and I felt safe, even as I was telling her about the dreams about my mother. I am happier than I have felt since I came to The Anchor.
And then I look at a kitchen cabinet that was too high for me to reach yesterday and I drag the stepstool over to it. Perhaps someone will need to stow something up there since it looks like space will be a problem.
I wrap a rag around the duster and poke experimentally into the open cabinet, blinking and half expecting to find something alive there. A book is wedged against the wall of the cabinet so you can’t see it unless you stand up high as I am standing, with your face right against the door. When I manage to pry it away from the wall, it flips out of the cabinet and falls to the floor.
I have never seen anything like this book. Papa’s Bibles don’t have pictures, though the encyclopedias and catalogues do, so I’ve seen drawings before in spite of the fact that the Amish and we don’t approve of graven images. This book is flimsy, the kind they call a paperback which Papa doesn’t own any of except for Raber’s Almanac.
This book’s cover says something about it being graphic. I think of graph paper and can’t see any square lines. I make a mental note to look that up in our old Webster’s.
The colors on the front are colors I have never seen in nature, the oranges of the reflective triangles we have to put on the backs of our buggies, and unsettling purples, and black marks. There is a person on the front but his eyes are hollow looking and I swallow hard because that’s the way my mother looked, just before she died.
I am sure that Matthaus left this here. I look at the publication date inside the book and see that it was published just last year, so the previous owner of the house didn’t leave it.
I begin to thumb through the book and find that every page has drawings in it, like the coloring books I once saw Englischer children scribbling in while their mother shopped for fabric in a store.
These drawings don’t make much sense to me, at least at first. Many of the people have the hollow eyes. Some pages have boxes on them with drawings and I can’t understand them. I wonder if they would make more sense if the inside drawings had colors like the one on the cover, but they unsettle me. Some pages have writing in the boxes, some don’t. The pictures have a kind of movement and action to them. I don’t look so much at the pictures but try to understand the words. It is in English but some of the words that are used over and over again I have never heard before, and there are other words, used over and over again, from the end of the alphabet.
I look outside and see that the sun is high in the sky, which means the Armstead people will be arriving soon. I know I have to get the house cleaned and wonder how long I have spent puzzling over the book. Somehow I know that if Matthaus left this book here, he wouldn’t want me to walk out to the wagon to greet him with it. So I put it under a pile of rags I can scoop up at any moment. I work furiously wiping down countertops and scrubbing out sinks. I am not gentle.
I don’t want the pictures in my mind. Some of the words that were written over and over trouble me. I wonder why Matthaus or any of the visitors would wan
t such a book. I’m going to ask him about it, if he will talk to me about it alone.
I feel my chest tightening. He has to have some answers for me. I feel like the picture with the ridged plastic on it, and I am afraid, not afraid, afraid.
I scrub and scrub. I rush to the window. No wagons are there, so I draw the water and begin to mop the floors. We pulled up all the carpets and bound them to make them into rugs that we can hang on a line and some of the younger girls beat them with latticed wire frames to clean them. The men will have to bring them back inside since I can’t carry them alone. I just have to get the floors clean first.
I mop and mop, wring and rinse. The ammonia hurts my eyes and nose. Just as I am rinsing out the bucket I hear sounds outside. I dry the bucket with the last of the rags and put the book in the bottom of the bucket and cover it with a plastic trash bag. I set the cleaning supplies outside the back door that faces our house.
Then I run back into the house and look in the mirror. My Kapp is crooked and I have dirt on my nose in a place where it looks like I had a nosebleed, and grime under my fingernails. By the time I look presentable, people are unloading the Armstead wagons and I hear talking and some singing.
My breath is coming fast so I slow myself down as I walk. I look and look for Matthaus, but he must be taking care of the horses.
“Leah?” The voice is soft and tentative.
I turn to see his sister Katie and she is looking at me as if she doesn’t know what to do, almost as if she is afraid of me, and I laugh to myself: She should have seen me before I cleaned myself up.
The laughter makes its way to my face and I smile at her with relief. The Lesher family came!
“I am so glad to see you,” I say, and I see from her smile that she is glad to see me too. But then the troubled look returns.
“I have a message for you from Matthaus,” she says. At first my heart leaps at his name, but then I understand the “message” part.
“He said to tell you that he wanted to come but he had to work.”
“Oh.” I feel like my words are made of lead.
“With Christmas coming, all the stockers at the store have to work during the day and at night, extra shifts.” She looks into my eyes and I am sure to look back at her though I really want to look beyond her, to see if there is some mistake, if Matthaus might walk around a corner and tell me this was a little joke. But then I see her eyes are not joking.
“He wanted to talk to you, and he said he might be able to come after Christmas.”
“Oh.” I don’t know if I should mention his book. Probably not.
I shrug and know that my silence is awkward for her, so after a while she gives my stiff shoulders a little hug and finds a reason to rejoin the other young people.
The women are glad when I volunteer to help with things and it makes it seem as though I am an important part of the community, I think, when any of the young people see me. The rest of the day keeps me too busy to think about the book, but I don’t forget about it, at the bottom of the mop bucket.
By nightfall giddy Miriam has announced her engagement to Papa and is gone in the courting buggy with Ryan, to someplace warm, I hope.
Sarah and Papa go to bed early. I take a kerosene lamp outside and find the mop bucket and put away the cleaning supplies and the mop and rags which have begun to crust with ice. I tuck the book into my apron just above my waistband and go into the kitchen with the kerosene lamp.
I look carefully at the pictures and begin at the beginning of the book, matching up the words, at least the ones I can understand, to the pictures. It’s not that I can’t make sense of the sentence structure. But the new words I am catching onto, but not the words I know that it seems are being used in new ways.
Many of the people have dark-rimmed eyes, and though there is no color, I imagine some are wearing black coats. Some have many earrings and rings in their noses and elsewhere. I have seen some people like that, in town. And I recognize that they are like the Goth people that Matthaus told me about.
So I piece things together and the story in the book progresses.
And then I see.
For the first time I understand that this is a book about dead people.
I rub my eyes, for I don’t want these pictures in my mind anymore. This must be some of the evil entertainment that Papa often speaks of. Stories and movies that put images in your mind, that excite the imagination and take attention away from godly things.
And yet Matthaus said…
Matthaus said there are many who believe that the dead speak to people. Real people. Not just lonely girls in simple communities.
When I first picked up the book, I thought it must be one of a kind. Like a pyramid of mystery jutting out from a featureless desert. But as I thought of all the people that the black-coated people Matthaus knows, this book seems not so unique but perhaps more like a building among many buildings in endless cityscapes that normal people walk in and out of every day.
It chills me to think that I have just used the word normal to describe these kinds of people.
The book seems to buzz in my hands. I hold it by the corner and put it into the wood burning stove and the picture on the cover curls and contorts before it bursts into flames.
I lie in bed and think again and again of the pictures burning. I get up and stir the ashes in the stove so that the wisps of black paper are mixed into the greying ashes.
I did not want to know that other dead people could walk and talk. I only wanted to know what my mother says to me.
I awaken and know that she came to me again last night, and like someone elbowing through a crowd she pushes all the black and white people with dark rimmed eyes aside and she speaks to me.
And my tears are hot on my cheeks because again I cannot remember what she said.
I stumble through the next days and wonder when I see my own reflection if this is the way that the dark lines come around your eyes. Mine are swollen and I know I’m dehydrated and don’t care. I have no appetite, not even for Sarah’s donuts. The food I scrape from plates into the bucket for the chickens looks the same to me as the uncut pies on the table.
I take the chores that no one wants to do because of the visitors. John was supposed to muck out the chicken coop today and I see him walking toward it with Miriam holding his hand. She is calling him “Yanni,” and they are laughing about something. When I tell them I’d like to give them some time together and I’ll do the coop, they look at me with gratitude. And then they look at me with something else, and when they walk away they are not talking.
My mother does battle every night with the black and white people. They come out of corners and from behind locked doors that they break down, but she pushes them aside and speaks again and again. In my dreams I look away from her but I can feel her eyes on me, trying to get my attention, trying to get me to try one more time to hear her.
The day of John and Amy’s wedding I am tired because Miriam and Sarah and I have gotten up hours early to begin kneading the dough for doughnuts. Two weeks ago the betrothed couple spent several days traveling to communities where they both have relatives, to hand-deliver their wedding invitations. From what John said, we should expect the whole Armstead community and maybe 150 other guests. That’s a lot of doughnuts to be made.
Some of the guests, John told me, tell him that they don’t like the idea that this will not be a traditional wedding.
“‘Not traditional,’ I say to them,” John recounted. “‘What’s not traditional? We’re doing everything according to everyone’s traditions, which makes it very complicated!’” But the rub is that the true tradition is that the wedding should take place in the bride’s community not the groom’s. But Papa won’t allow it because The Anchor is not going to travel to them, and that is that.
It seems upside down to me, too, because a bride is supposed to help her parents prepare the food and other things for the wedding, and then help with the cleanup, and then spe
nd their first night in her parents’ home.
But Papa taught a lesson a year or so ago about how such things were done in Bible times. He says that long ago the engaged man would build a lean-to structure next to his father’s house for the honeymoon time. So the community has been watching John’s strong arms unloading logs at the side of their house. Many of the men spend their evenings breathing clouds into the cold-splintered nights by the light of kerosene lamps, first in the barn helping him split and plane the wood, and then in the daylight building the structure.
It’s finished now. Miriam and I sneaked into it when the men were having a meeting. The walls are rough-finished like I would think a ranch in Texas would have, and it has its own little woodburning stove, so small it almost looks like a toy, in the corner; and a bed. That’s it.
John said Amy cried about not being at her parents’ house but everyone has to make some compromises in marriage, he told her, and this is just temporary for Papa’s sake.
I’m not surprised to learn that John’s part of the compromise is that he and Amy will go to live in Armstead: Just as The Anchor isn’t about traveling it is also not about recruiting. In fact, Papa seems anxious for the couple to live with the Amish.
So Miriam and I are nearly intoxicated by the yeast in the kitchen as Sarah begins heating the oil to fry the doughnuts just as the sun rises. Papa built her a set of tiered plates that rest on racks that ascend like a wedding cake so she can put her doughnuts on a table and not take space away from the other women’s food. He’s always thinking that way.
We lift with wire spatulas the blossoming doughnuts as they seem to want to leap from the oil and let them drain over pans that catch the oil to reuse. Then some of the doughnuts are rolled in grainy natural sugar, others in powdered sugar colored blue to remind you of the bride’s dress, Sarah says. Others must cool completely before we can frost them.
Papa has allowed the fire in our woodburning stove to die, because the house is too hot already and the sun is just up. I hear him scooping the ashes out into a bucket and I pray that no corner of Mathhaus’s book remains in the stove.
What Will Be Made Plain Page 7
