I wait for him to finish, because the way he is clearing his throat is the way he buys time in a sermon when he is trying to decide what to say.
“But God for sure didn’t speak to Joseph Smith,” he tells me, looking into the fire.
I try to sound respectful. “How could someone know that?”
“Because Joseph Smith said that God was mad at all the churches,” he says,
“that they were all wrong and had been for 1700 years and he chose Joseph to be special, to start a church that God liked.”
I stare at the floor. “So you’re saying that God couldn’t talk to him because he wasn’t Amish?”
He looks at me sharply.
“No. I’m saying that if Joseph was telling the truth, that Jesus was a liar.”
My head jerks back. I’ve never heard anyone say that Jesus could be a liar. Papa is continuing on.
“Jesus promised that He would protect His church, that the gates of hell wouldn’t prevail against it. So Jesus lied if He said that—and then a few years later His church died off and needed a jumpstart in New York after hundreds of years of no-show.”
I’m still not getting the point of this.
He settles back into the chair and I hear his voice settle into a rhythm, like he does when he is preaching.
“My daughter dear, we have a protection against anyone who lies about God talking to them,” he says. “If someone comes to you or me and says that God has spoken to them—or that they’ve had any kind of supernatural experience, for that matter—we have to compare what they say to what the Bible says. Line it up like a checklist,” he says, making little marks in the air with his forefinger.
I am nodding, but I have no idea how to do that.
“And that’s why the only protection is to know the truth, so you can recognize error,” he says to me. Then he leans way over to one side into the chair and brings out his wallet. He puts a dollar bill on the end table between us.
“You know how you recognize a counterfeit?” he says to me. He is really enjoying this, even seems to be enjoying it when Sarah comes into the room with a tray of hot Kaffi and some of her doughnuts. He takes one and puts most of it into his mouth, and the sugar grains fall from his lips and sparkle in his beard.
I wonder about a woman who finds such satisfaction in making things with centers of air.
He is speaking again between sips of the scalding liquid, brushing the sugar from his fingers as he picks up the dollar from the table.
“The U.S. Treasury agents, I am told,”—and here he looks for approval at Sarah, whose husband knows things—“train their men by having them study genuine currency, every detail of it.” She nods and goes back into the kitchen.
(But I am derailing myself again, wondering if all the agents are men. Do they train women to examine money?)
“And after they’ve memorized the way a bill is supposed to look, then they can spot a fake.”
I can see he is trying to decide whether to take his hands from around the heat of the mug to get another doughnut, or keep them warming. The doughnut wins, and he eats it in three bites, it as if there might not be more tomorrow.
“And so it is with any error. You won’t know it until you know the truth.”
I settle back into the warmth of the couch and nod as he continues about watermarks and threads in paper and engraving tools, but I am not listening really.
He stops in mid-sentence and turns to look at me.
“This isn’t just about currency fraud,” he says to me.
I nod.
Something—light, understanding, I don’t know what—makes his eyes widen.
“And it’s not about Mormonism, either,” he says. “Is it?”
I shake my head.
He opens his mouth but I can tell he is afraid to ask me more. Perhaps he is wondering what God might say to me, if He were of a mind to talk to a girl.
For the first time in my life, I believe I am more powerful than my father, and the thought fills me not with triumph but with grief.
When Sarah comes back into the room and offers me a doughnut, I smile at her and take it. Out of the corner of my eye I see her sit down and lean toward Papa and I know she believes that her Kaffi, her doughnuts, make her, for now, acceptable to him, for they have begun in recent weeks to squabble like siblings, more than Miriam and I ever did. He doesn’t lean away like he usually does, but when I steal a glance I realize that he has stopped chewing, stopped drinking, and is staring out the window with eyes unfocused.
Sarah doesn’t notice. She is looking at her curtains, black, stiff flying buttresses on each side of the window. When we first moved here to The Anchor, she worked for hours on the treadle sewing machine making flowing white curtains for all the windows in the house. Around the edges of each hem, she laboriously appliqued leftover scraps from years of quilting in tiny, precise blocks: a celebration of a new community, a new house, a new start. But then the women had meetings with their husbands and the husbands had a meeting with Papa. Even though I was just a little girl the words they said have stayed in my memory: Not Amish. Well, then, not plain. Like the fancy women. Does she want people to think we’re Fancy Dutch?
So Sarah took down the curtains and built a fire outside under the iron pot the size of a barrel that Mama used to make lye soap in when she was a child, and when the water began to boil, Sarah sprinkled black dye in and stirred in all her curtains with the handle of Papa’s hoe. When the little squares disappeared into the inky cloth, she pulled them out and ran them through a wringer and then draped them over the fences until they dried. Then she starched them until they were stiff as boards and ironed them out and then hung them to the sides of the miniblinds that Papa installed.
To my knowledge that was the last time, six years ago, she touched them. One of my chores is to weekly dust them off with a bottle brush.
But Sarah has looked away from the curtains with their rebellions hidden in faint blackened patterns. Now her eyes reflect the flames in front of her. The wood burning stove seems like an explosion just-contained, insistent and impatient. The metal has begun to glow. She looks at it with soft, tired eyes. Her neck sags onto Papa’s shoulder and within seconds she is asleep. He turns slowly, his neck stiff, and looks down at her out of the corners of his eyes and I think he knows that if he speaks, she will awaken, so he looks out the window again.
I see them both in profile against the kerosene lamplight, like the old black and white silhouettes that people carve out of black paper and put in frames. But Papa’s beard and his hair, drawn forward and still waving with static from when he took off his cap, make his outline woolly and indistinct, like someone rubbed the edges of the paper.
Sarah looks as if she has been rubbed as well, more as if her face was made of sand and someone had drawn their fingers through it, pulling it down, wiping free tiny cracks and ridges where none had ever been seen before. Her temples and cheeks and mouth seem to sag from inside, too. I realize with a shock that this beautiful woman, the one about whom everyone speaks of such timeless beauty, has aged before me; her skin sagging from within as if she had corseted up her years invisible inside her and now all at once, unbeknownst to her as she sleeps, their weight spills forward and drags down her tissues with their own irresistible gravity.
I feel a sob rising within me and know that it, too, will spill out and so I rush from the room into the bathroom. But Sarah never stirs and I don’t think Papa even realizes I am gone.
That night, no one came to me in my dreams. And I do not believe anyone came to my room, any flesh-person, either.
And yet I awaked in the moonlight and wondered what might be coming toward our community, in the fields, hiding behind the corn shocks that stand like a ghost village of teepees in our fields.
Some of the people in Matthaus’s book seemed to be able to fly, or at least to jump long distances in the air, to climb straight up brick buildings.
I wonder if a being could hide i
nside a corn shock. If something could move from shock to shock each night, coming closer, moving above the ground, perhaps.
The next morning is First Christmas. This is the day devoted to baby Jesus. In past years the four of us, Papa, Sarah, Miriam and I, have continued the old Amish tradition of simple meals, songs about him, reading aloud from the Bible about His birth and childhood. But I can see the surprise in everyone’s eyes when I bring out some of the old Bible encyclopedias.
“Let’s not read from them,” Papa says, “let’s just read from the Word.”
I see this is not a battle to be fought, not a battle to win. But it’s our tradition that Sarah or Miriam or I can make comments after he reads.
“. . .Because there was no room for them at the inn,” he says, looking up from the chapter-long reading from the Gospel of Luke and like a schoolgirl I raise my hand. He opens his mouth again with a smacking noise, then motions for me to go on.
“About the inns,” I begin. Sarah is shifting in her chair but Miriam looks interested.
“What I read in these books,” I motion to the books that I have shoved to the far end of the couch, so that they won’t seem to have any authority, “is that inns were the places where you went if you couldn’t stay with relatives.” Papa seems amenable to this idea: Staying with relatives is the Amish way, so this couldn’t be all bad.
“And everyone’s house in Bethlehem was full to the brim because of the census, and so asking for a place at the inn showed how desperate they were.” I am warming up to this, and I am excited to continue. “The inns didn’t have separate rooms for people, just one big open area, and most of the customers were criminals, or people so bad their own relatives in town wouldn’t even take them in.”
Sarah lifts her eyes and looks at me.
“So here is young Mary, probably younger than you or me,” I motion to Miriam, “and she’s a virgin, and she’s shy, and her labor is starting, and what about a room full of strangers all leering at her.”
“That would be horrible!” Miriam says.
“Exactly! And so, what we think is so terrible, delivering a baby in a stable, was the most private way it could have been done. No distant cousin Scholomo gawking at you, no convicts watching the baby come out.”
Papa coughs and I know I went a bit too far with that image. So I stop talking and Sarah picks up from the coffee table a plate of spongy, crusty pretzels with their arms folded in prayer and offers them to each of us, and a little while later Papa begins reading again. He leads a prayer thanking Jesus for coming to the earth. Then we sing for a long, long time and my heart is filled with love for Him.
The steam rises from the sink as we are washing the dishes, Sarah and Miriam and I. The window has completely fogged over and for a few moments the warmth and beauty of the story of Jesus’ birth makes doing dishes like a holy act among sisters caught in the mists of history.
Then the talk turns to the new baby in our community and Sarah says that Sister Eve is miserable, her milk hasn’t come down yet. Miriam and I don’t know what that means, exactly, but Sarah’s face says it hurts.
I look at her and for the first time I wonder why Sarah and Papa have never had children.
We finish the dishes and Sarah and Miriam go into the dining room to talk about rolling Miriam’s wedding quilt on the rack to a section they haven’t stitched yet, and I know that in this we are not all sisters, this is now a mother and daughter thing, and so I stay in the kitchen, staring at the clouds of fog freezing on the window.
I practice being an audience, standing like the lower classes of people in the Globe, looking onto a stage in my mind, with curtains of ice.
Onstage I imagine a barn large enough for several families’ animals. I think of what I read in the Bible encyclopedia and picture a cave carved into a hillside, its ramshackle, added-on walls leaning up against a cliff near the inn that has squalid, furtive men coming and going through its doors.
I see Joseph carrying a bag up to the stable, leading his donkey, avoiding the men on the path, and finally tying the animal to the doorpost. He seems to consider a heifer who stands as if offended, exiled from her home. Joseph sighs and pulls some hay from a storage bin and feeds it to her, a few stalks at a time, squatting and talking in a low voice. Then he stoops to enter the low door, walking past farm tools piled against the front wall.
Back against the rear wall of the cave is a stone trough, and I see drag marks where it has been pulled in from outside. It is filled with straw and a tightly-wrapped bundle of cloth.
Mary stands over the baby, and only glances up for a moment at her husband. He puts an arm around her and she crosses her arms across her chest and holds herself, gingerly, and her tears fall onto the sleeping baby.
This is just the beginning, I want to tell her. Now it’s your milk that won’t let down. Then God the Son will scare you to death by disappearing for days when He’s twelve years old. Later other things will be a sword right in your heart—an old man named Simeon will tell you about that in a month or so. Just you wait. It’s downhill from here for quite a while, girlfriend.
But I think she is crying now more out of anticipation and joy. Yes, I’m sure of it.
I carry that image to bed with me and for the second night in a row, I have no dreams and no shadow outside my door with glinting fingers awakens me.
Now it is Second Christmas and the day to visit each family in our community. Papa has hammered tin trays, turning their edges with needle-nosed pliers and sanding the edges, and pressing a quilt block design onto the flat surface. They are simple and beautiful and useful, and I can tell Sarah is excited about putting her marshmallows onto the red paper napkins that Miriam and I have cut snowflake designs into. Each marshmallow has a different flower in its dark center. Each is a work of art.
We go from house to house. Though the sky seems like a low ceiling of clouds, it does not follow through on its threat of snow and the ground crunches underfoot as we walk.
We enter each house to embraces from all, as if Sarah’s starched strangeness and Papa’s clout are put aside for a divine birthday celebration with marshmallows. Each wife murmurs over the threadlike designs on the sweets and Sarah pulls back a corner of the napkin to show the rim of the tray, and then holds the tray above her head so the designs can be seen. Her face glows, but to me it looks like she is at last accepting some sort of tribute to which she is entitled. Papa beams, too, and the men of the house meander over to see how it was done. Each wife gives significant glances to her man, eyebrows high.
At each house the men go outside to smoke, but not for long because the cold worries at the liquid in their eyes and the heat from the pipes never reaches them. Inside, the women have gifts for us, too: Fancy pickles in jars with gingham rubber-banded to the tops, new wooden spoons tied with yarn, flimsy quilt pattern books rolled up and bound with ribbon bows.
The women and girls all ask Miriam about her wedding quilt, about Ryan, and the teenaged ones want to know what Ryan’s community is like. They think it is a very brave thing for Miriam and Ryan to go against tradition and have their wedding in the late winter, as some Amish have begun to do. I wonder if it’s because Miriam just can’t wait.
She talks about the two couples that will stand up with them for the wedding, and I feel embarrassed because the women are Ryan’s two married sisters and I can’t ever remember their names, Katt and Berta. There is a great deal of oohing and ahhing when Miriam says with a serious look that she doesn’t know if the fabric she has for her wedding dress is the same dye lot as that of the sisters, a lot of nodding and worry.
I know that she has already transferred her mental citizenship to Armstead—she has told me secretly that Ryan’s father and some of the Armstead people think it would be best for her to come and live in Armstead, and she intends to. Now that, Papa will not like.
Though Miriam is not a show-off, she talks of Armstead as if she is boasting of visiting a foreign country, and I realize as
I look at some of the younger children, that some of them have never been there and won’t ever go, as long as Papa. . .
I cannot finish the thought. As long as Papa is what?
Chapter 13
I know now that there’s something wrong with Papa, and I don’t know what to do about that.
The winter seems to be cruel to him and as it continues through February, his once-handsome nose runs all the time. He swats at it with a handkerchief after he blows it, as if he can shoo away the cold. His eyes are looking like those of old men when the rims sag like pitcher spouts and you can see the pink around them.
He and Sarah have stopped snipping at one another and seem not to notice one another any more, but move within rooms as if wordlessly negotiating space between them, or like two animals each seeking a corner. No one sings any more, and Papa’s full-throated talking voice has eroded away and now sounds more like wire brushes against the walls.
Even things that used to appeal to him seem to hold little interest. For example, up until this winter he often visited our little one-room school where Sister Shiprah Morgenstern once taught all of our grades like a juggler with three bottles always in the air. When I was a child, he would stand at the back of the classroom, leaning with one boot sole against the wall, for hours and just listen. Though he always came in with his enormous arms filled with firewood for the woodstove, he stayed often until that entire load of wood was burned up.
It must have been entertaining to an adult, now that I look back. Sister Morgenstern would get the littlest ones started practicing their handwriting with the help of one of the oldest girls, then she would hand out math papers to the oldest children and then would teach the middle grade children to recite the judges of ancient Israel or memorize a passage in German.
Sometimes Shiprah’s husband Daniel would come in and do science experiments for us children. One time he fired a little plastic rocket with vinegar and baking soda. He told us about how each substance was good and useful—the vinegar for pickling and cleaning and chasing ants away and getting skunk odor out of an unlucky dog’s coat; the soda for baking and heartburn and deodorizing (“and scrubbing just about anything you don’t want to scratch in the process,” I added helpfully after he acknowledged my hand waving in the air).
What Will Be Made Plain Page 11
