I dare not look. What if he finds the staples?
I am frozen in place looking out the window as he goes to the ash heap and I realize Miriam and Sarah are looking at me. I can’t think of a reason I have been standing there, so we all silently return to the ritual of the doughnuts, more sacred to Sarah than anything, I think; her only remaining passion now that Miriam is engaged.
I imagine we are all thinking this will be the last wedding day in which Miriam will stand in our kitchen, making doughnuts as a wedding guest and not the bride or a married woman.
The sound of the horses’ hooves clamoring on the concrete driveway to the old house startles us back into jerking motions as if we are connected wooden toys on a rail. The first of the visitors are arriving and now there are shouts of delight as people greet friends they haven’t seen since the last wedding. An old acquaintance comes in to see Sarah to tell her that they’ve brought all their china for the dinner, someone calls for Miriam to come outside and giggle.
No one asks for me, of course, so it seems right that I begin taking the doughnut racks out to the tables. Several urns of hot Kaffi puff steam like chain smokers and the six plates of long johns won’t last till I get back with the first load of doughnuts. There are people everywhere, and all of them are eating.
I think of how I want to be like Jesus. And the only one of His miracles I can hope to approach is the feeding of the five thousand.
I go back and forth: I am the most perfect Amish machine, for I work efficiently, utterly unconnected to the world around me.
In the church service that precedes the wedding, Papa and Brother Luke both preach. Papa’s sermon is on keeping oneself unspotted from the world. Brother Luke skirts around the Song of Solomon without ever actually quoting it. But in my mind I say the words:
Strengthen me with raisin cakes, refresh me with apples, for I am weak with love.
Papa must hear the words in his head too, because he is shifting back and forth on the pew. Luke notices this, I think, and goes instead to First Corinthians and love is patient, love is kind, and ends with the beginning of this passage: You can give your body to be burned but if you don’t have love, it counts for nothing.
Papa sulks to one side as Brother Luke asks the wedding questions. The ceremony is simple, so simple that I almost miss the words as I watch John’s face. He looks like the peak of a building as the first morning sun hits it.
I am jealous—not because he is getting married but because he has someone, and they have somewhere else.
The tables groan with food and with bunches of celery in tall vases like floral arrangements. There are several seatings for the meal that follows even though we have a lot of benches to put together to form tables. Some of the visitors who live farthest away leave first but before they do, the women still help with all the dishes to keep the cycles going. I am honestly too tired to go to the hymn-sing. Even Miriam is yawning as she sits across from her betrothed.
She tells me that someone mentioned my name as the bride called out the seating for the singing. I can’t imagine who would have been paired with me. Sarah is my partner in our slow dance to put dishes away.
Just before the Armstead group leaves, Sister Elisabeth seeks me out.
“Have you been avoiding me?” she asks gently, and I hang my head because I have been.
She sighs. “Well, I didn’t know how to talk to you, that’s a fact.” I see that her eyes are filling with tears.
“Before we came I asked all the men in our community about, about…” She puckers her lips and her shoulders do an “I just don’t know” motion. “About your mother, and what you said.”
I feel hope.
“Matthaus asks questions, too. He told Katie he is searching things out for you, for all of us I guess. That’s what I want to believe.”
A tear splatters onto her forearm and I realize that I have let her put one arm around me and that she is stroking my shoulder with the other hand. She is crying, but unlike the way I can’t talk and cry at the same time, she says her words between soft little sobs.
“He’s having a hard time right now,” she says. “Not just with work and the long hours, because he’s so responsible that he keeps up with his chores on the farm, too. We have so many cattle, a blessing from the Lord to be sure, but a lot of work.”
My mind sees his strong shoulders pushing up against a whiteface heifer to guide her into a chute toward an Armstead corral.
The picture makes my heart beat slower. There’s a smell like raisins in the air and I don’t know where it is coming from.
“He’s trying to really count the cost, as the Scriptures say. He wants to make sure that he can live Amish for the rest of his life, so his Papa and I are letting him make those choices. We’re giving him the rumspringa freedoms because we have faith...”
Her voice trails off and now she can’t speak for a while. I wonder if this is an acquired skill, to cry noiselessly. I would like to learn.
“He is spending all his free time, what little he has now, even his break time and lunches at work, with some young people I just can’t understand.”
I listen now, not to her breath and her crying, but to her words.
“He has brought some of them to our house and of course I welcome them because they are his friends. And they are nice to his Papa and to me, and to Katie as well. They are polite. They have good manners. They thank me. And they eat everything I put in front of them, and I give them the best I have because they are guests and because they look, so, without.”
“Without?” I believe my voice will shake so I don’t use many words.
“Hungry, for sure,” she laughs a little bit. “But even though they wear black clothes with metal on the clothes, and metal on them, the earrings and the lip things and when they laugh I see metal even on their tongues. . .” She has drifted off again, lost in a memory, but starts up again.
“And the drawings on their skin, girls and boys alike. Tattoos. Snakes and flowers and faces that frighten me. And Matthaus doesn’t seem to mind, he laughs with them and they have a language, English to be sure, but with so many words I have never heard before.”
I know some of those words.
“And I can’t exactly explain this, but he has begun to look like them, in the way he walks, for instance, forward and urgent-like. And he asked me the other day what the Bible says about dyeing your hair and I thought he was suggesting I get rid of some of these gray hairs,” she plucks one out of her Kapp, “which of course I would never do, such a worldly thing, but then I realize he’s talking about dyeing his own hair. His beautiful blonde hair.”
The air is ripped by the sound of a child screaming, first in the distance, now getting closer and closer. Katie runs up to us carrying the littlest sister and anyone can see something is very wrong with her arm. It hangs forward at an odd angle and Katie is trying to support it, but the child is crying so hard she loses her breath. Several of the other young people are running toward us, drawn by the screams.
Katie’s mother takes the child into her arms and when she sees the arm, her face goes very pale.
“Quickly, go get Brother Luke,” she says. “Tell him to come to the old house.”
Katie starts to come with them, but Sister Elisabeth shakes her head. “Keep up with the other little ones here for me,” she says over her shoulder. Katie corrals the other children and the rest of the young people are silent until Brother Luke hurries past.
I step back. I don’t want him to think I had anything to do with the child’s injury. His opinion is very, very important to me.
But in contrast to my tension, all of the Armstead people seem to sigh and their facial expressions change from worry to relief. I’m sure that’s what I’m seeing, relief. But I can’t understand what has just happened.
Katie touches my shoulder and then, with a little hesitation, takes me in her arms and holds me tight, tight.
“About Matthaus,” she says. The thought
occurs to me that she is trying to get my attention off what is going on in the old house. And it works.
She whispers to me: “Look, girlfriend.” I startle at the sound of that. Girlfriend. She continues: “Matthaus is a good person. A good brother. A good son to my Papa and Mama. They are trying to give him a chance. I have faith in him.”
I want to ask her if the friends Matthaus has are all men, or if some of them are girls who have come to his house. I feel a chill of something inside my shoulders that travels up my neck and curls like smoke around my ears.
But one of Katie’s little brothers begins to cry and Katie jumps to make sure nothing has happened to this one. It is only a splinter but the child, obviously still unnerved by his sister’s screams, wants to make sure everyone understands that his is serious, too: There’s blood. By the time I’ve gone to get a pair of tweezers and Katie has pulled the splinter out, we see Brother Luke, his brows knitted, walking alongside Sister Elisabeth who is carrying the girl out of the old house. She is no longer crying, and her arms are held across her chest.
I dared not ask what happened in the old house. And to be honest, it didn’t seem quite as important as what I had learned about Matthaus.
Matthaus and the Goths. I am turning this over and over in my mind.
The book I burned in the fire no longer exists, of course. But I am sure that if the pictures had been colored, some of the people had blonde hair.
But I am sure they want to dye it black.
And I have a feeling that whatever I thought I had with Matthaus, I have lost it and him.
Chapter 9
Today a man on a bicycle came riding up our road. I was on the front porch of our house, trying to shovel some of the snow off the front sidewalk even though nobody would walk on it since all our visitors to our house were just members of the community who would knock at the back door because it was closer. Any other visitors were postal carriers (if they showed up, they usually were new on the job, since we had one big box for all of us and never ordered anything other than tools that had to be held at the post office for us to pick up and once in a while a registered letter) and the occasional lost person who needed directions. Normally we just ignored the knocks on the door from both types of people but here I was, on the sidewalk with no excuses.
The man wore clothing so tight that I felt like shading my eyes from him. He wore a helmet that came to a point on the back which made him look a lot like a squash bug, and I could see myself reflected in his goggles.
“Excuse me,” he said, with teeth whiter than any Amish man I’d ever seen, which made me wonder if he rinsed his mouth with bleach. “Can you tell me how to get to Cartersville?”
I couldn’t speak at first because I was startled to see how thin I looked in the rainbow colors of his goggles, how stark and plain-not-in-a-good-way my dress looked. My eyes peered back at me.
“What?” I said.
He leaned back on the seat of his bicycle and considered me for a minute.
“Can you tell me how to get to Cartersville? Do I keep going on this road?”
I realized that I must not let him think I didn’t know how to get there. So I stood the shovel up and leaned both forearms on its handle.
“You go right up this road,” I said, with all the authority I could muster. “Yes, that’s right, straight up this road five miles. North. Then you go five miles south. And you’ll be there.”
I guess he was looking at me, I don’t know. I couldn’t see his eyes. But his mouth was making little movements like he had a charley horse in his lip.
“If I go five miles north,” he said slowly, “and then go five miles south, I’ll be right back here.”
I decided I’d had enough of this conversation. We weren’t supposed to talk to Outsiders anyway.
“Well, I can’t help you then,” I said, and walked as fast as I could back to the house. I must be crazy, I thought, with just us women here in the house, to talk to a man who looked like he was wearing a black garden hose.
Papa had been gone for two days. He left when the skies cleared enough to travel in after the weather turned really cold. No matter how he protested it in letters he took to the post office in town day after day, he was nonetheless called to report for jury selection. Adding to his frustration, since the journey took two days by horseback, for overnight lodging he had to put himself at the mercy of a distantly-related Amish community that lies between us and the capitol, Jefferson City. And, fortunately, his trip fell between our famous weekly ice storms. I don’t know what we would have done if he’d been trapped somewhere and unable to get back here.
“I know he doesn’t want to be dependent on anyone else, “I say to Miriam as we sit knitting in the weak winter light. “But why does he seem so angry about the jury duty? And have you ever heard of any of our people being called to serve on a jury?”
Miriam shakes her head. “Ryan and I were talking about that the other day. He says you don’t get called to jury duty unless you’re registered to vote, and you know how Papa feels about voting.”
Voting fits in Papa’s category of being in the world and of it. Connectedness. Like telephone wires, or electricity. Like grafting in a different color of wool into a garment. I struggle with my two needles, trying not to drop stitches, because the hats and mufflers that our community sells in town are a big source of winter income for us, and I’m really not a very good knitter. I end up pulling out two rows for every one that I leave in. But the biggest pleasure to me is feeling the richness of the purple wool I’m working with—nearly like silk, I think, except I have never felt silk.
“So couldn’t he just tell them he doesn’t vote? Wouldn’t they have records about things like that?” I ask. One of my cuticles catches on the yarn. I put my finger in my mouth to catch the blood so it doesn’t drip on the yarn.
Miriam shrugs, then shoots me a warning glance. I see her mother Sarah over her shoulder and wonder how long she has been listening.
One thing about being seen as a troublemaker is that you can actually stir things up a bit and nobody is surprised.
“So, Sister Sarah,” I begin, perhaps lingering on the Sister part because I refused from the beginning to call her by any title that was like she might be regarded as my mother, “so why does Papa not just tell the government people that he doesn’t vote?”
“Because he was registered, once.” Her voice is flat in the darkening room. She turns toward the doorway to the kitchen as if the meal in the oven is calling her.
Miriam and I look at each other. True, we know of Amish who vote but they are not in the majority, mainly because people like Papa preach long, long sermons about not voting.
Sarah is shifting from one foot to the other. “He registered when he was young. During his rumspringa.” Miriam is nodding as if that explains everything but I am struck with an image I can’t get out of my head, of Papa being young and doing something so un-Amish as signing up to vote. So un-Papa.
Papa, who leads us in drills to know what to do if the government would raid the compound looking for guns. Of course, only Papa and some of the men know where most of them are buried. So none of the rest of us has to lie about it.
Then we hear the clattering of hooves outside and Papa is home. He has called one of the young men to take his horse to the warm barn and rub him down. Papa sits and removes his boots and massages his big white feet in front of the wood-burning stove and I know that he must have walked the horse for the last mile of the trip in order to cool him down. But Papa is in a good mood and motions to Miriam and Sarah and me to come sit in the living room too, next to him and his steaming boots.
“Funniest things happened on this trip,” he says.
Sarah wrinkles her nose. “So you don’t have to be on the jury, of course,” she says. She shoots a hard look at Miriam and me as if to say, don’t ask him for details.
“Oh, no, no,” he says, “I started out by asking where I could tie my horse up every day during
the trial and they got the picture.” We laugh along with him.
“I was a few miles outside of the city when I met an Amish family on the road at a rest stop,” he says. “A man and his wife and their teenage son and the woman’s father. The father is very old and seems all right, but his mind is going. He walked away from their farm three days ago and they finally found him at a homeless shelter in the city.”
I don’t see anything funny about this, but Papa is laughing as he finishes the story.
“So I talk to the grandfather a bit, and he tells me, sort of proud-like, that he has dementia.”
“He used that term, said that word?” I ask. I know it because of old Brother Heinrich, who used to wander a lot and talked about the Great Depression when you asked him questions about anything.
“Yes, indeed.” Papa stands and bends his body like an old man and I know he’s going to do one of his famous imitations.
“I found out I had dementia,” he says in an old-man voice, “and it worried me until I asked what it was and somebody told me that it meant that you forget things sometimes. Boy was I relieved—I thought I was going crazy!”
We laugh as we go into the kitchen where the table is set and Sarah is dragging a dark blue granite roaster out of the oven. She takes off the lid and the smell of onions and meat and something sweet and caramelized rises from the pan. She scrapes the carrots and potatoes off the sides of the roaster into a big platter and then runs water into the hissing pan.
We sit on the four sides of our little oak kitchen table and Papa leads a long prayer about traveling mercies and raising an Ebenezer in a foreign land and bounty amongst the unbelievers and cisterns we didn’t dig and vineyards we didn’t plant and protection from the world. I open my eyes just for a moment to look at Miriam who sits as serene as a madonna and my heart aches because I can’t imagine sitting at this table next winter and her gone to Armstead forever. Finally the prayer is over and we can eat.
What Will Be Made Plain Page 8
