What Will Be Made Plain

by Latayne C A Scott

  I sit looking out the window at birds crowding one another out of a bird feeder. I wonder who puts the seed in it. I go when I’m called to dinner, help with dishes again, and then read from one of Papa’s books about what David the psalmist meant when he talked about the language of the stars.

  When I fall asleep that night, my dreams are like vacant white rooms.

  I am still trying to understand why Mama wanted me to know about what Papa and Sarah did to her. Today when I ask Sister Rebekah about why God gives messages in so many ways when He could just use a cattle prod, she didn’t see the irony in that, I guess. And I’m thinking she’s been warned about me and my questions.

  Brother Luke tries, with the grace of a man who is both farmer and leader, to answer some of my questions, including my oldest one: He says that blood speaking from the ground, Abel’s blood, isn’t language. More a symbol, he says, of how everywhere dirt was, guilt would be for Cain.

  Probably my face tells him I’m not buying it. I tell him about the psalm I read the other morning. He says he’ll do some more study on it.

  I work up the courage to ask him where my Papa is, and he tells me he is at The Anchor, trying to find a buyer for the land. I look at him, not understanding at first. I don’t know whether I am more surprised at this news or confused about how to feel about my Papa, the man who married a woman he knew killed my mama.

  This sets me back for a day or two.

  Outside the family, Sister Elisabeth and Katie are my first visitors. They stand at the door looking at me, with Brother Wilhelm, Katie’s father, off at a distance as if he is on guard as they visit. I’ve never heard him say anything, and remember his nickname of Wordless Willie. I wave half-heartedly at him, but he does not respond.

  Katie and her mother come in and negotiate where to sit with glances at each other. They treat me at first as if I am some sort of royalty, which confuses me because I feel even more like a freak than before, closed up in this house like I was at The Anchor. I suspect that there’s still talk about the charm, so I look outside on Brother Luke’s front door every day for another printed warning, but there hasn’t been one yet.

  Sister Elisabeth and Katie bring me some fabric and with it, an implied invitation to be part of the quilting at Armstead. I am grateful for this, and test the water with them by telling them that I have an appointment in town to get an eye exam and some glasses, so maybe I could see if my stitching skills are up to par. That means sitting with them and the other women, leaning across a quilt frame, not just cutting pieces alone, as before. They don’t back off—a very good sign.

  They look directly into my eyes as they speak, as if they are monitoring my vital signs that they’ll see in my facial expressions. Maybe they think I can’t see them doing this.

  The talk about quilting and crops and other innocuous subjects goes dry, and this brings back the old fear about whether I’ve been exiled from normal activities for too long. But then Katie does something no one has done to me for a long time. She teases me.

  “So, are you working on any new foreign languages?”

  I fumble to answer this, but a Greek Interlinear, one of the ones that used to be Papa’s, is sitting on the end table of the couch.

  “I mean, any languages spoken by regular people?” she continues, and I see a smile around the corners of her mouth.

  “Only the ones I need to write charms,” I answer, not looking at them. Then Katie bursts into laughter. And I breathe easier, because people don’t laugh at witches.

  Sister Elisabeth has brought all her children who are too young to go to school and with Sister Rebekah’s young ones here too, somebody is laughing all the time in this house. It’s a strange sound to me, a house with laughter.

  “When is Miriam coming back?” Katie asks as they begin corralling the curly-haired Lescher children so they can leave.

  “Brother Luke says they will be back next week,” I say. “Actually, he said it would be a good idea for them to continue visiting some of the other communities, even during the week. Armstead can get along without them for a while longer.”

  They nod.

  “And I told Brother Luke that was just what bridegrooms in the Old Testament did, taking a whole year just to get to know their wives, while others in the community take up their part of the work.”

  I am proud of sharing this tidbit of Bible knowledge, and am surprised when they don’t look all that happy about an increased workload. And then I add, “Brother Luke says they will help with the other communities for a while, kind of like Armstead’s ambassadors.” They are still fidgeting.

  “And Outsiders say we don’t send people on missions.” At this the two women begin to giggle. Perhaps they are wondering about dreamy-eyed Miriam helping anybody with anything right now.

  I want them to know one more thing before they leave. “Brother Luke says he wants to sit down and talk to Miriam and me.”

  They look at each other with knowing looks and they don’t press for any more information—just as I haven’t asked about Matthaus. But even though I haven’t been outside this house for the nearly two weeks I’ve been here, I know without anyone saying so that he’s not living at Armstead any more.

  I guess Brother Luke has underestimated the power of Miriam’s curiosity, because by noon I hear that they are on their way back to Armstead. When she arrives she bursts into the house and gathers me up in her arms.

  She is crying, and I am too. Whenever before in human history have two stepsisters shared such a tragedy, where the mother of one killed the mother of the other? And then both lived with a father who knew, and never did anything?

  Miriam’s wails tell me she feels responsible because it was her mother who held the pillow. She calls Sarah by the name she had before Papa and she married, Wauneta, not Mother or Mama.

  “Some of the people that Ryan and I have visited say she’s left the community and no one knows where she is,” Miriam tells me. “But it doesn’t surprise me, really. The night before my wedding she told me she wasn’t sure she could continue to live the simple life. She has distant cousins in Pennsylvania who she called ex-Amish. She said she might go and stay with them awhile.”

  “But you haven’t heard from her?”

  She shakes her head.

  I can hardly bear her sorrow. And I can’t comfort her, no matter how close I hold her, no matter how close she holds me.

  And we both know Papa’s part in it, too. And the knowing of this doesn’t help, it just causes me at least to grieve more.

  The sun begins to sink low into the sky by the time we are cried out. Ryan looks in on his bride with a set of emotions on his face that I can’t fathom. But I’m pretty sure he’s caught the almost-tangible guilt in the air and it is incubating in him, too. How could no one have known? There’s more than enough to go around.

  A few minutes later Brother Luke comes in the door. His boots look like greenware ready for the kiln, a slip of mud from laces to soles. Sister Rebekah pulls his coat off him from behind, like you pull the peel off a tangerine. He gives us a shake of his head, pity, I suppose.

  “We will talk after supper,” he says, “after the children are down.” So Miriam does her missionary duty of peeling someone else’s potatoes, crying salt into them; and I find some comfort in churning milk in Sister Rebekah’s enormous slope-shouldered glass churn. The constant motion of people and words in the house overloads me a bit, so I am glad to be alone on the enclosed porch to turn the crank and hear the sound of the cream transforming itself into something I can shape with my own hands.

  But I don’t feel I need to put my handprint on it. Not any more.

  After dinner and the children are all asleep, Brother Luke rubs his baldness back and forth on the top, from front to back. He points to the loveseat for Miriam and Luke, and the larger couch for me and Sister Rebekah, who puts her arm around me with the tender part of her inside arm near my shoulder.

  That seems sweet and tender, an
d to be honest, very foreign to me, and I am grateful to her. But that is also my first clue that I am not going to like what I hear. I thought the part about having your mother killed by your stepmother was bad enough. Or maybe the part of being accused of being a witch.

  Brother Luke straddles a low-backed chair, his forearms on the top rails of it. His face is redder than usual, and he speaks slowly.

  “There are some things you both need to know,” he begins. “Some of these things will bother you, but I assure you that I have spoken to our deacons, in fact to several people, to make sure that what I’m going to tell you is true.”

  Miriam and I look at each other. Sounds like an investigation, I think.

  Brother Luke looks down, then at me. “You remember your grandfather, of course, Brother Isaac.”

  I have to think for a minute, because no one in our family called him anything other than Daddy Ike. I nod.

  Brother Luke clears his throat. “Your grandfather was a good man, everyone knows that. But like all of us, he made some mistakes. Years ago, during his youth, during his rumspringa, he met a young woman. Unbeknownst to him, when they parted ways, she was. . .” He reddens even more. I notice that his ears look like they are on fire. “She was with child. She wouldn’t tell anyone who the father was. She died in childbirth.”

  I am trying to process the idea of the man who smelled like cherry tobacco and gave the longest prayers at church, having an illegitimate son. But he is looking at Miriam now.

  “That child was your mother, Miriam.”

  A daughter. Miriam. She and I stare at one another in astonishment.

  Then I feel myself brightening.

  “So we are really sisters. Or cousins? Or what?” I look at her and then at Brother Luke, who is shaking his head. And Miriam looks sick, because she has figured it out before I did.

  “That means that your Papa, Brother Abe—and Miriam’s mother, Sarah—were half brother and sister.”

  “And they married one another, knowing this?” Miriam’s face is red, like she is trying to hold back her dinner.

  “Not at first,” Brother Luke is talking fast. “Not at first. By the time they had begun their married life, and they found out, only a few of us figured it out, too. I went to your Papa, and tried to talk to him. We were concerned about the plans for moving and making a new community, and Sarah’s talk about new ways and how the Mormon communities did things—it unsettled all of us even before we found out that Sarah was his half-sister. And of course at that time none of us even suspected how, how, your mother died. . .”

  Miriam is crying again. I want her to stop, so we can hear the rest. And then I understand something.

  “That’s what started all the renaming, wasn’t it?” I say.

  Brother Luke nods his head. “He wanted to do the right thing. He thought by giving Wauneta the name of Sarah, he could justify something. . .”

  Miriam is shaking her head. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Brother Luke is careful as he speaks. “When the world was young, God allowed people to marry close relatives. Like in the book of Genesis, with the patriarch Abraham and his wife, half-sister wife, Sarah. Maybe it had to do with the fact that people in general were scarce and scattered and the rules were relaxed.”

  I have to set this misconception of the Bible straight. “It was before the law was given, saying you couldn’t marry a close relative,” I say. “There weren’t any rules to relax.”

  Brother Luke pulls his lips together like a drawstring tote and waits for a minute. “That’s right, Tabitha.”

  That name still zings me when I hear it.

  “So, your Papa being named Abraham already, and finding out he’d married his half sister, it seemed right to him to name her Sarah.”

  I’m peeved that I didn’t figure that out long ago. After all, I knew why I’d been named after weak-eyed Leah and Miriam after history’s first babysitter.

  “And I was fine with Miriam,” she says in a voice like a child. “Gerti was okay for a little girl but I couldn’t see going through life named Gertraud.”

  Well, no wonder, I think.

  Ryan is staring at her, probably digesting this new information and happy about the name situation too.

  Then Miriam asks the question we all want to know.

  “What… what will happen to them?”

  Brother Luke rubs his head again before he answers.

  “There’s a considerable amount of discussion about what the Ordnung would say about a woman taking a married woman’s life so she could marry the widower.”

  Hearing this said so flatly, taking a life, marry a widower, gives me a chill.

  “Though God hates divorce, given the close blood relations of the two, and the crime, most people are agreeing that they should separate.”

  The crime.

  I think of the impression of Sarah’s body on the window seat where she slept. They separated long ago, I see.

  “But what about the legal issues?” Ryan asks. “You said it yourself, a crime was committed.”

  “It is never a good idea to involve Englischer law to deal with this, of course,” Brother Luke says. “Our first responsibility is to forgive them.”

  I feel anger rising up inside me.

  “It wasn’t your mother who was murdered!” I shout. And even as I say it I wonder if I need another brauching, except I don’t know who I would hate enough to pawn off my anger on.

  Miriam is crossing the room, stumbling toward me, and falls toward me sobbing again.

  “I didn’t want to tell you this,” Brother Luke says, his eyes locked for a moment with his wife’s. “But Sarah—Wauneta, I should call her, because she’s taken back her name—is already in the jaws of the Englischer’s system. She went to Pennsylvania, I’ve been told, to stay with relatives, and told some people that she needed to hide because she’d committed a terrible crime.”

  Miriam is rocking back and forth in my arms. Ryan kneels beside her and holds her shoulders tightly.

  “And the long and short of it is that she talked so openly about it that the police came to question her, and she confessed right away, seemed relieved, I understand, to have it in the open and to have some way to pay for it.”

  I remember her sitting in our living room, wearing Mama’s ring, as if she were just waiting patiently for someone to come and see.

  There is no sound except Miriam’s sobbing.

  “And Papa?” I whisper the question.

  Brother Luke leans his head back and looks at the ceiling.

  “Sometimes the worst prisons are those of the mind,” he says.

  And I think I know what he means.

  Summer

  Chapter 28

  On a sprawling farm in southern Missouri with a crescent-row of identical houses on it, some man is driving his tractor down the rows of corn that an odd group of people planted and then ran away from as if it had ghosts behind every stalk.

  I wonder if this man thinks about what the people of The Anchor were thinking as they planted the corn behind horse-drawn plows. I wonder if the corn will grow any differently, when worked by people who sit so far above it, and don’t stoop to feel the way the dirt sifts through their fingers, how it won’t stay in your hand, how it seeks return.

  I speculate with Damaris, who is lying on her back under a tree with me, and wrinkling all her freckles as she concentrates on making a chain out of clover blossoms. We wonder about how the land would yield to a tractor after so long being plowed. Her family has moved to Armstead, too, and she has become part of my healing process. She rolls one of the koine Greek names for Jesus around on her tongue like a lozenge, pantokrator, pantokrator, pantokrator, all-powerful. She wants to learn, and I teach her.

  Suddenly she sits straight up.

  “I wonder if it’s not a man,” she says, slitting a stem with her thumbnail, “maybe it’s a woman who drives the tractor at The Anchor now.”

  I like that
girl.

  It wouldn’t be accurate to say that my integration into the community here has been seamless, or easy—for me, or for the people of Armstead. Of course a charm eventually showed up on Brother Luke and Sister Rebekah’s door a month after I got here. And then another—this second one using a verse about witches, written with a red marker in block letters. That one seemed to push Brother Luke into territory that was new to him—but he learned to navigate.

  Many nights after he came in from the fields and the children were in bed, he took some of Papa’s books from the top bookshelf and read and made notes in a spiral notebook like the children use for school. In fact, once when he was reading some of his findings to me, I noticed that it was indeed one of his son’s notebooks, only Brother Luke flipped it over and wrote on the blank backs of the pages with a pencil.

  He’s right, I thought: Paper is precious. Words written on paper are precious, because they capture thoughts.

  I don’t tell anyone, though, about my own notebooks, where I try to untangle my life.

  I see that Damaris has finished her clover chain. Unspoken questions, unspoken battle: She holds the chain up against her for a moment. But plain people don’t wear necklaces. She sighs and stands up and drapes the chain on the sawed-off branch of a tree.

  I am struck, as I am almost every day, by what I can see with my new glasses: the petals of the clover are like slivers of light hanging from the branch.

  “What’s the name I can memorize for tomorrow?” she asks.

  “Alpha and Omega,” I tell her. “First and Last. Jesus is the sum total of the story.”

  She tries the words out and smiles. From a distance, we hear her mother calling her name, Damaris, strong woman of old.

  She bends over me and brushes my cheek with her lips and I know this for what it really is: a kiss from God on the lips of a child.