It’s a victory for me that Damaris’s mother lets her spend time alone with me, due doubtless to Brother Luke’s passionate sermon two Sundays ago.
He held up the charm that still bore the ripped corners from where he had torn it off our front door. He held it in front of him, reading, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”
If silence had texture, it would have been that of burlap, stuffed into the room, rubbing everyone’s noses raw.
“Did you know that struggling with the concept of a witch is part of our heritage as plain people?” he asked. Everyone sat up straight at that. We Amish are big on tradition.
He went on to explain that he had researched it.
“When our forefathers, some of the first Anabaptists in Europe, dealt with this problem it wasn’t that they thought there were witches among them,” he said. “It was that outsiders thought all us Anabaptists were witches!”
I think I heard some neckbones popping when he said that. And more when Brother Luke pulled a hammer and a nail from under his pew, took the charm and nailed it to the place where his knotty-pine paneling made a cross. I’d never noticed that cross before.
“Jesus nailed the old law with its ordinances and punishments to the cross,” he said, triumphantly. And sweating a bit: We Amish aren’t much on visual aids, either.
“You want to go back to the Old Testament laws?” he asked. “Really?”
He waited until you could hear distant sounds, the cattle, the birds, the cars on a highway two miles away. The sound of the paper fluttering on the beam, lazy and toneless.
“So what are your objections to our Sister Tabitha?” he asked, turning and pointing to me. I wanted to make a tent of my apron and hide under it. I thought of Jesus putting His prayer shawl on His head to make a little tabernacle, His own tent of meeting.
Brother Luke’s words sounded like the beginnings of some sort of trial. I held my breath, wondering who would speak up. But Brother Luke was hurrying on, counting off things on his fingers.
“So she speaks the names of God in the languages of the people who wrote about Him?” he asked. “So she speaks the names of Jesus in the same sounds on her lips as those who walked with Him?” He pointed to the west. “So we should condemn our neighbors the Rubios for calling His name in Spanish?” He waited until prayer Kapps and hats began to move back and forth: No.
“Secondly.” He held up two fingers now. “We know from what happened with King Saul that it is not impossible for the dead to speak to living persons. We know that from Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, with Moses and Elijah who were at the time dead. What’s the test? Does the dead person speak the truth? Does what he or she says square with what the Bible says?”
Again, the burlap silence, with its lint in the air. Everyone knew that what Mama told me was true.
“What about dreams?” It was a man’s voice, gruff and defiant. I wanted to turn around and know who said it. I did not recognize the voice.
“Dreams!” said Brother Luke, with an aha in his voice. “Dreams? You want to talk about people having dreams from God? I’ve got a list of them.” He reached down to the pew and pulled up another piece of paper and waved it. “Being caught up to the third heaven, that’s the apostle Paul. Seeing a sheet coming down from heaven with animals in it, that’s the apostle Peter. What about the man from Macedonia—and we don’t even know his name, whether he was alive or dead when he appeared to Paul in a dream and asked him to come?”
I heard rustling in the pew behind me.
“You want to talk about hearing a voice from someone who is dead?” He looked around the room and waited for another objection. “Let me tell you this. How many of you, during the singing of the Ausbund this morning, could remember your mother’s voice when she sang it? Do you have that sound in your mind right now? And for how many of you, is that just the voice of a woman who is now dead?
“We have no way of knowing what part of Sister Tabitha’s voices were memory, and what part were warnings from God. But we know they were true. And we know they were troublesome.”
I thought of John the Baptist, branded delirious from a diet of insects. I thought of Paul, crazy, obsessed.
I thought of Jesus’ mother and brothers coming to take charge of Him, saying He was out of His mind.
Somebody touched my shoulder, on the right side. Then someone touched my other shoulder. I felt hands on my back and the warmth of palms, flat. This, then, was the embrace of community, the welcome home for the ones out of their mind for truth.
Later, Brother Luke showed me what he had found in some of Papa’s books. He seemed afraid, almost, to open to me the pages where he had placed scraps of paper for bookmarks, in some books so many that they looked like the leaves of corn just sprouting in a field.
I realize that I am charcoal: desicated from long, slow burning, flammable. I wonder that he would place such fire near me. He must trust me.
I am learning to trust myself.
I have moved out of Brother Luke and Sister Rebekah’s house into a little house that I own and share with Sister Naomi. Perhaps it is an acknowledgment of the bitterness of her life that she has kept the name that Papa gave her. We talk often in the evenings, when she wants to, when she wants respite from the solitude that her soul craves. I am learning from her, learning to love her. She shows her love to me in the way she can: I have the most plush, luxurious rug I’ve ever seen in my bedroom. But we have agreed to acknowledge its usefulness in what we say about it. It’s insulation for the plank floor.
I don’t know if I will ever see my Papa again. Brother Luke says that he has wrapped himself in a cloak of shame and gone to Pennsylvania to live with some Amish there, where no one knows he took a ring off his dead wife’s finger to give to someone else.
I think of the proverb: A prince without his subjects is ruined.
In my mind I can see him on his horse, hunched forward into the wind from the east that blows into his face, traveling through states that don’t think of the Amish as a part of their lives, for whom a horseman is an annoyance on the road.
Where did he stop each night, I wonder? Did anyone take him in?
Brother Luke brought me a check for the land that Papa sold, his portion of The Anchor. He tells me that Papa has vowed never to see me or contact me again.
My mama’s legacy was to let me see. My papa’s legacy is money and questions and aching for him.
Last night Brother Luke and Sister Rebekah came to my house.
“We have come to ask you to consider something,” Sister Rebekah said. “A gift, perhaps, you might call it.” She looked at Brother Luke as if she had fulfilled what she came for, the expression of complicity, and sat back into the couch.
I looked at their hands and they were empty, clasped earnestly in their laps.
“I have the gift of brauching, as you know,” said Brother Luke. “I was taught it by Sister Gretta Nell, may her soul rest in peace, who had the gift before me. And it is the custom for it to pass from man to woman, to man.”
“You want to give it to me?” I was taken off guard.
“Yes.” His voice was decided, non-negotiating. “You have the ability to feel the pain of others. I have seen you minister to Sister Naomi with tenderness, and be freehanded with forgiveness to your sister Miriam.”
“It’s not enough to be nice, is it?”
He shifted in his chair a bit.
“No. To brauch, you have to be willing to bear the pain of others, not just respond to it.”
I remembered again the child with the wrenched arm who stretched it out just minutes later with no apparent pain, yet afterwards the cringing of something acquired on Brother Luke’s face. I remembered again his touch on me, the sensation of something draining away from me like liquid absorbed by a towel.
“Don’t think of it as a choice,” he said. “Think of it as a calling. You are equipped by your past to help others. You either decide to do it, to put your hand to the
plow and not look back—or you walk away from it. But there won’t be another call to do it.”
“She doesn’t have to give you an answer now, does she?” Sister Rebekah asked.
“No, not tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
But even as he spoke I knew that what he said was true: I can feel on behalf of others. I know I can. And my shoulders have been made strong by what I’ve carried since I was ten years old. I know I can hold the pain of others, too.
Like Jesus. A little bit, anyway.
I hear the sound of little bells, dancing with divine motions. I think of Jesus before the altar, whirling from me to God and back and forth, carrying my pain.
I can intercede. I know I can.
Today, sitting under the tree with Damaris’s clover chain swinging in the breeze, I look out over the lake that is turning orange like the sky it reflects. The sun is down but the world is like a spark from an engine that breaks out into the air, charged with hope, charged with possibilities.
I see the ducks on the lake coming toward me, pushing along intersecting chevrons before them, lines that stretch out across the lake and lose themselves in the distance.
I think of how I have learned that God is a mysterious and terrifying God of love.
I have learned that His dealings with people—in the Bible, in life—are a whole picture. But if you start cutting things apart to look at them, and then put them back together, a transformation happens. The pieces still fit, but they overlap with soft, blurred edges that blend into one another. He’s the puzzle we can’t ever solve, not with our human minds, because we can’t see all of it at once. He’s the wheel in the middle of the wheel with eyes all around and none of us can capture that with our thinking.
I am not surprised at all when the ducks veer away and I hear a cough behind me and know it is Matthaus. That’s the way God does things, with surprises you should have seen coming, because He’s faithful that way. I turn and look at him, standing beside the tree, with the clover chain swaying beside him.
“Matthaus, the first gospel,” I say, and he smiles. “The good news.”
He waits for me to motion for him to sit down. He stays a good distance from me, pretending he needs the space to put his brimmed Amish hat down on the grass between us.
I try not to stare at his hair. It is black and short, but the roots are growing in blonde. I peek to make sure he is dressed plain and he is. So I look out over the lake and wait for him to speak.
“I’ve been back for a week,” he says. “During the day, Brother Luke and some of the other men come over to the house and talk to me, answering questions, and pray with me.”
I see it, the evening star, in the dusking distance. Not a star, I remind myself, a planet that revolves, just like us. Another one of those mysteries that became plain with time.
“You know,” he says, as if we are continuing a long conversation, as if we are close friends, as if as much doesn’t need to be said, as does. “You know, my goth friends told me that the Bible was just stories made up to scare people into doing things.”
I do my part, of understanding what doesn’t need to be said. Of not saying.
“I believed that,” he says, and I hear something like a cough in his throat. “And at first, it seemed harmless and exciting to think about an unseen world of great powers, of mysterious people who didn’t have to live by any rules. Not even the rule of dying.”
I try to identify a sound in the distance. It seems the only sound in the world for a minute, earnest and clear.
“But I found that the world they created was a world I tried to live in, at least in the way I looked and talked.”
He rubs his hair. Probably at no time in his Amish life has he ever been able to feel the prickle of the ends of it, still standing up in places. My hand moves without me knowing it and I want to feel that too. But I catch myself in time.
“I tell you the most amazing thing about it, Leah.” He stops, realizing his mistake, but he is like Damaris trying out a Greek word when he says, “Tabitha, I mean Tabitha.”
I let my squirming hand make a dismissive gesture.
“The amazing thing is this: That world of shadows and death became so real to me that it made the world I live in, that I’ve always lived in, seem like the shadow. I carried the arguments and rationales—even their histories, their customs, their habits, their likes and dislikes—of undead fictions so strongly in my mind that they actually seemed to come to life, and argue with my mama, my papa, with all I ever learned.”
I do not think this is the right time to tell him about the dreams I had, of my mama in combat with dark, evil things.
“My friends—and they are good people, really, searching people—say only crazy people actually believe that someone dead wants to drink their blood or eat their brains.”
I flinch, then turn and look at him but he won’t meet my eyes.
“But it’s their religion. Like the religion of many Outsiders who talk about supernatural events in the Bible, and celebrate its holidays and even talk about the people as if they could have actually lived. They think nobody can prove it’s not true, but they don’t really buy into it with their souls.”
Buy into something. I wonder what that means. I think I know what that means. I speak in a low voice. “It’s because we all have a God-shaped hole in our hearts.”
“Yes.” His voice is fresh and surprised.
“And we can stuff it full of supernatural events, or stories about God, or we can fill that hole with God Himself.”
“Yes.” His voice sounds like it has the cough again. “And then one day as I was stocking the shelves at the supermarket I suddenly knew something. I knew that even the most raving atheist can’t say that Paul never lived. Or there never was a Jericho. Or a Jerusalem. We have proof.”
“Yes,” I say. “We have proof.”
“But here I was, immersing myself in a world of things that never existed—and never will, never should. Movies. Books. Magazines.”
I think of the book I found after he left. About how even the touch of my eyes on the pages gave life to the images.
“One of my friends called me a fool, to stay here at Armstead where people refuse to acknowledge the real world. So I moved from Armstead, and shared rent—and other things—with them.”
I sit very still.
“That day in the supermarket it came to me. Who is the fool, to take on a life based on what other people create out of their minds? What good does it do them? None of them would die for what they live for.”
It’s getting dark now, but the moon rising over the treetops seems enormous, almost sun-like. Everything it touches is golden.
“I thought of your courage,” he says, and then as if an afterthought, “Tabitha Angelica.”
I am filled with uncertainty. I am afraid he might touch me. I lean forward and draw my knees up to me and look out over the lake.
I don’t hear him walk away. I am thinking of the meaning of the other name my mama gave me, Angelica. I think of holy beings who can travel through space and time in a whisper. That’s not me, for sure. But I also think of the other meaning of the name angelos: someone who carries a message.
In the distance, in the silence, I hear the sound I heard before. I remember what it is: a neighbor’s hollow-throated bamboo wind chimes. They sound like human voices, singing back and forth to each other.
Above me, a bank of clouds moves forward, stately, majestic; propelled, I guess, by a wind too high for me to feel. They look like Lord Sabaoth and His armies, moving purposefully forward in battle, and all I see is their robes brushing an unseen road.
I think of the last thing the disciples saw of the Lord was when His feet disappeared into clouds. That’s the way with Him, I guess.
And then in the distance, I see my mama, and it’s not just my glasses that let me see her clearly, every detail sharp as if she is in brilliant sunshine. The light is from her dress, and it is like a mirror, refl
ecting something else, and filmy like the edge of a cloud.
I see the truth, the foretelling, the secret of an eck that is the intersection of God’s love and its endlessness. My mother is dressed for a Bridegroom who wants her to live forever.
She smiles, and I know I won’t see that smile again for a long, long time.
The breeze, Holy Breath, is like a blessing on me. I pull back my Kapp a little bit and let it touch the hair on my forehead.
On this night, this night of homecomings and farewells, I sit for a long time, listening to the sound of voices calling back and forth to one another:
Deep calls to deep,
Love to love,
Truth to truth,
Peace to peace.
THE END
What Will Be Made Plain Page 19
