In here, the only air that stirs comes from a long way off, the motion of wind from embroidered robes that move back and forth between heaven and earth, that take my wordless prayers again and again before a golden place.
Chapter 18
For Miriam, I get up the next morning, for Miriam and her wedding.
It’s Wednesday, and we have only today to prepare all the food for the wedding tomorrow. They need my help, and this is for Miriam. It is only the Armstead people here now and they have come to help because they are family, but the others will begin arriving just after dawn in the morning.
Everyone is scurrying busy. Even the men are in the kitchen--something you never see except at a wedding—and carry things in and out. No one seems to mind that I don’t talk any more. The Anchor men ignore me and the women are used to it, asking questions until they can boil them down to what can be answered with a nod or a shake of my head. But if they don’t need me, they just ignore me like the men, and I avoid the Armstead people by staying in the house and keeping my back to them, a Kapp and apron that stirs what is on the stove and hauls things in and out of the oven.
Sarah, as the mother of the bride, is not doing as much as she would for the wedding of someone else’s daughter because a wedding is a time for the community to help. Her famous doughnuts, for instance, never make their appearance but I have never seen so many long johns and crullers, stacked like firewood outside on the tables. They disappear like lumber at a barn raising but are replaced as soon as they are gone.
Miriam’s blue dress and spotless white prayer cape and new black Kapp hang from a hook on her bedroom door. Several of the older women from Armstead have come in and, thinking that no one was watching, have turned the hem up to see if Miriam’s stitches are small and even. They leave with grunts. I’m not sure what that means. And besides, I think Sarah stitched some of it.
Now two young women, Ryan’s sisters, come in with their new blue dresses over their arms and they hold them up next to Miriam’s to compare and say over and over, “a perfect match.” The Amish don’t speak of omens, but if we did, this would be a good one.
But they linger awhile, and I can see they are measuring with handspans how narrow the waist of the dress is. I smile for Miriam and am still smiling when the two young women, with the golden hair of their brother and their thick childbearing middles, turn around. They seem to notice me for the first time, so I try to keep the smile. They look at me and then at one another and hurry away without a word.
I don’t ask anyone if Matthaus’s family has come, but when I go to the window to look out, I don’t see any of the Lescher children playing, and neither Katie nor her mother, Sister Elisabeth, comes into the house to help. But I overhear one of the men bringing in a crate of dishes that is marked “Lescher” and he says that they will try to come Sunday, and they will take their own dishes back home in their wagon.
I have a dull feeling inside me. I don’t think I want to see any of them.
All through the afternoon I trim celery stalks, some for the creamed celery Miriam loves so much, and some for the table. One of the cardboard boxes in the corner of the kitchen is filled with flower vases, and I take them out and wash them with hot soapy water and dry them. Then I string celery stalks and cut up enough of it in little C shapes to fill a large washpan. I cover it with a large damp cloth and put it down in the root cellar.
Then I take the rest of the case of trimmed celery and put it in the flower vases, fronds up, and put a little water in. Tomorrow, after we put them on the tables, we will add more water. But meanwhile there is a little forest of green leaves in the corner where the case of vases once was. And somehow that makes me feel better.
The little lean-to that the men of the community helped John Miller build for his first nights with Amy has become, by some sort of common consent, a honeymoon cottage that Miriam and Ryan will use, too. I expected that Papa would protest, but his sunken eyes tell me there’s not much fight left in him, and besides, the cottage is just a stone’s throw from our house, so it’s nearly like being under the same roof. Late in the day today I see Miriam and some other women go giggling into her bedroom and come out with her new wedding quilt to take to the cottage.
I wonder who cleaned the cottage. Nobody asked me to do it, and cleaning is usually my job. So I clean the kitchen, over and over. And by the time the young people have all gone out to sing in the barn, I find I am too tired to think of going. So I take a bath alone in the silent house and give my teeth a lick and a promise, as Mama used to say, with my toothbrush.
I open my bedroom door and I’m just in time to light the kerosene lamp before the shadows start pooling around things. But I stop and stare at my down comforter on top of my quilt. I realize that at some point I had risen and then lay all night on top of it and not even noticed when I got up this morning, shivering and dressing in the lamplight.
The shape of my body, curled to one side and facing the door, is still in the comforter, like the heart shaped box that left its form in the flour for marshmallows.
And like something else, like the memory of Mama sleeping on her unfeeling left side. I feel the dizziness coming again and sit on the side of the bed until I feel that I can walk to my door and close it.
I am supposed to be remembering something.
I pull my black curtains with their covert patterns together over the blinds and slip my bathrobe off. My flannel nightgown welcomes me and I pull myself in between my sheets and see the form of my body fading away out of the comforter as I fill it with my shape from beneath.
Like God’s forgiveness, I think. Like Jesus interposing blood in glory, hallelujah. Like it never happened.
I reach to turn down the kerosene in my lamp and the mantle goes from white glow to a faded little grey cloud in its blackened chimney sky.
My bedroom door is closed but sometimes when the front door shuts and mine isn’t latched just right, it will open a slit. I hate this because I never know what I will see through that slit, so when the door opens, when I hear Sarah come in from outside, I turn my head away and try not to look.
I hear her moving around in the kitchen, and then she goes into Papa’s bedroom and I hear dresser drawers opening and shutting. She comes out a few minutes later dressed in her nightgown and robe and she doesn’t even look toward my door, but walks slowly into the living room, holding a pillow up against her chest. She sits down on the couch suddenly, like her legs gave out beneath her, and she sits staring at something I can’t see.
Her face has no expression. I remember how when she and Papa first married he called her Sara-Puppe, Sarah-doll, when he thought no one else could hear.
And now sitting alone in the living room, she has grown into that name, too; because like all good Amish dolls she has no face, at least none that brings anything from within her to the outside.
And no longer an idol to be adored, I think to myself: the reason why no Amish doll has a face. But her blankness is more a graven image than anything I’ve ever seen.
After a while I hear the rasping sound of Papa cleaning his boots on the metal ledge on the back porch, and the door latching, and my bedroom door opens a bit more with the air current from the kitchen. The sound of his boots dropping one by one on the floor near the door means I won’t hear his footsteps in his socks.
The light from the living room slants across the foot of my bed but I know my face is in the darkness still. And so I watch.
Sarah takes the down pillow and slowly lifts it up and leans back on the couch as she places the pillow on her face, her two open palms flattening it against her, sinking into the white surface.
And she is wearing the emerald ring.
I start to get up, to do something, but I can’t. It is like my bedcovers are so heavy they have trapped me beneath them. This feels like a bad dream but I look around my room and it is still there, it is real, and I am too afraid to go to the door. I pull the covers up to just below my eyes and I a
m so afraid. But I must know what is going to happen, and I must not be part of it. It must unfold without me.
Surely she will take the pillow away from her face, I think; surely she will move and gasp for air, now, now.
But Papa is moving cups around in the cupboard. I hear him striking a match to light the stove and hear the coffeepot rattling against the burner covers.
The pillow doesn’t move.
He is stabbing with a fork at the sugar cubes that are stuck together.
And Sarah does not move.
Without warning he comes into the living room and I can see him stopped, sloped forward, as he looks at Sarah and his face seems to say he doesn’t understand.
Then with one motion he is on top of her, leaning across her, wrestling with her for the pillow and she is not letting go of it. He manages—because he is so much stronger than she is—to get the pillow down to her lap and he is saying, Sarah, for the love of God Sarah, over and over in a whisper as hoarse as a crow’s voice.
Sarah still has no expression on her face, but there are tears running down her face as if her eyes are frozen pipes, thawing, just beginning to leak. Her hands let go of the pillow.
And to my amazement, it seems if Papa’s face is being rubbed away until there is just grief and eyebrows and beard; and as he seems to crumple beside her on the couch he takes the pillow and wrings the corner of it like a wet rag. And he is crying too, like Sarah without words, without sound.
They sit there like two statues on a bench, leaning away from each other, each looking into a distance I can’t see, a hand of each resting on that pillow between them, until I can’t bear to look at them anymore.
The house is filled with the smell of burnt Kaffi. I put the covers over my head and beg God for a dream, and He answers me.
Chapter 19
When I awaken it is from a dream of being underwater too long, and I realize that I have slept all night long with my covers over my head. I can smell the flatness of onion from my own breath and think to myself that if I ever find anyone who wants to court me, I must remember to brush my teeth more thoroughly and use mouthwash.
Then I remember about last night.
I stay with my head still under the covers and listen. But the sounds in my house are not normal—it sounds like a lot of people in the kitchen, all trying to talk in low, soft voices.
Of course. It’s Miriam’s wedding day, and the cooking has started already. The smells are covering the burnt smells from last night. I hear men’s voices, too, and people going in and out. I fumble to light my lamp and shiver as I put my clothes on. Since most of what happens today will be either outside or coming and going from outside to in, I put on two pairs of stockings.
As soon as I open my door (who closed it last night? I wonder), I see that some of the young women and both of Ryan’s sisters are sitting on Miriam’s bed, and everyone is giggling and whispering at once. I want so much to have her alone so I can tell her what happened last night, but when I approach the open doorway she catches my eye with something that looks like a warning.
I stand and stare. No one is giggling any more.
I go into the kitchen and Sarah turns to me long enough to hand me a spoon to stir the creamed celery. There is no trace of her tears from last night. On the other hand, the light has not come back into her eyes, not even when more guests start arriving as soon as dawn begins to break.
There is a percolator on the stove that I do not recognize, borrowed to replace the ruined one, I suppose.
Soon the men are letting down the canvas sheets that are attached to the top beams of the meeting shed. Inside, the red eyes of the catalytic heaters are angry fireflies and people come and go through the flaps in the canvas. The lights begin to fade like morning stars as the sun reaches the building
From this point on, everything accelerates. In the fields alongside the houses a line of wagons begins to form, side by side. Some of the older boys are the hostlers and they unhitch the horses and lead them into the barn for a rubdown and then out into the open fields. Even the horses seem to know each other, most of them, and stand nuzzling one another.
The day is unusually warm and the promise of being able to plant soon makes the men as giddy as the women. They walk around with pipes and stretch their arms like they are waking from a long sleep. There isn’t a cloud in the sky nor a breeze. Soon steam is rising from places on the ground where the sun is shining and some of the broken-down rows in the fields look like lumpy cornbread batter dumped onto the ground.
The children have been collected into squads and even they are taking things back and forth from homes and wagons to the tent and helping to set up benches for the ceremony. The little girls are dreaming of their own wedding days, I can see, and they are serious-faced and stately-stepping until some of the young boys accidentally bump into them, over and over.
One of them is Damaris, and she tries to catch my eye. But when one of the other girls sees her looking at me, she jerks Damaris’s arm. Caleb-the-brat walks by and looks at me as if he has beaten me in a game, his head back, his teeth in a tight smile.
He whispers to me as I pass.
“Wonder what the charm said,” he chants. “Stay away from Armstead.”
Other boys are laughing, too. They heard him. And they know about the charm.
Down the road I see a couple of old cars parking and some Amish young men putting on their hats and straightening their jackets when they get out. I look for Matthaus and think with a sinking feeling that if he came, I would expect him to come in a car.
I realize that no one has told me the hour for the wedding, but because people are heading toward the tent, I suppose it is now. I am walking toward the tent but keeping my eyes to the ground, and for the first time I see Brother Luke. He stops and reaches for my arm and I pull away; because I cannot bear any symbol of hope.
There it is. I don’t want to hope. It doesn’t seem right.
I realize how disrespectful my actions must seem, so I dip my head and turn and step back toward him. This time, however, he does not touch me.
“Sister Leah,” he begins, and I think he believes I will bolt so I stand very still. “Perhaps when the wedding is over, we can talk a bit.”
I stand very still.
“Would you let me talk to you, my little Sister?”
I realize that long moments are passing in silence between us and I am frozen, unable to respond. So after a while I dip my head again.
“Matthaus said. . .” he begins to say in my ear, but at that moment Papa has come alongside us and I don’t know if he is just there to insulate Brother Luke from me or if he really did need to talk to him for a moment, as he said.
I am swept along on the sidewalk by several couples and for a moment I feel anonymous, one of the women in their Kapps going to a wedding. As we enter the tent, we divide women from men and sit on the benches with each group facing the other. It feels like a church service, except along the sides of the tent are tables laden with food. At the end of one of the tables is my copse of celery stalks, and a little boy enters the flap with his arms full of more vases of celery. I think of MacBeth’s forest.
I sit as far in the back as I can. So far, no one is sitting even near me, but I know that many more will be coming through the tent flap so I make myself small in the center of the bench so no one will have to speak to me as they climb over my feet.
Outside the tent, I hear Papa’s voice and it has that sound of sandstone to it.
“I will preach both lessons,” he says.
And then another voice, Brother Luke, I am almost sure.
“No, Brother Abe. There is nothing that violates Ordnung to do it the way Sister Miriam and Brother Ryan want to do it.”
“It is not our custom.”
“Now, Brother Abe,” and the voice is unyielding, “this is the uniting of two families. It is a new start for them, and if it does not violate Ordnung, this is their choice of how to start their lives. W
e will divide the preaching today, you first, then me. And of course you will do the vows.”
I hear Papa grunt and then there is silence. A moment later Papa enters, his face flushed, followed by Brother Luke. Papa walks to the front of the assembly. There is some conferring between him and a man I don’t know, who is going to direct the hymn singing.
The songs are some of Miriam’s favorites, ones that she and I have sung together as we spin wool or do dishes. I look over at her but she has bright spots on her cheeks and she is only looking at Ryan and he is only looking at her.
Then the oldest man in the Armstead group, whose name I can’t recall, walks precariously to the front. One of the younger men puts his old Bible on a lectern for him and he begins to read about a man leaving his family and a woman cleaving forever and he keeps losing his place and reading the same line over and over again until it sounds a lot like polygamy. Finally he makes an end of it and I think I hear a sigh from one of the teenagers.
Then Papa gets up to preach. He isn’t the father of the bride exactly, but as close as he can be, and also the leader of Miriam’s church. So people are listening carefully.
I don’t hear what he is saying, something about not moving boundary stones and keeping to the old paths but all I can hear in my head is what I heard through all the songs, “Matthaus said… Matthaus said. . . Matthaus said. . .”
Then Papa is speaking directly to Miriam and Ryan, and when he says, “Your marriage before God cannot be dissolved for any reason,” I see a cloud pass over his face and when his voice chokes with emotion I wonder if he is thinking of Miriam and Ryan. I glance at Sarah and expect that she will be crying but she is stone-faced, just as she has been since yesterday.
We sing another song and I see some of the older people shifting a bit, looking at one another, because this wedding is being done out of the usual order. I am trying to pay attention but I wonder how many of the men and boys might be looking at me. A shaft of sunlight spears at the table of food to my right like a picky eater and warms a tray of pickles and dressed eggs. The smell drifts over to me, sulfur and vinegar and something sweet, and I feel a prickle at the back of my throat, and my eyes begin to water.
What Will Be Made Plain Page 15
