Fire in the Night

by Linda Byler

  His eyes were very blue. She wasn’t aware of it until later, though, when she recalled their interaction.

  He plunked a larger slice onto his plate. Sarah added a small amount of pudding onto Levi’s plate, caught Mam’s eye, who smiled ruefully and shook her head, only a bit, then followed the tall blond youth until she came to Levi.

  “There. Now eat.”

  Levi looked up at Sarah and drew a deep breath—one that quivered, like a small child.

  “Are you angry with me, Sarah?”

  “Of course not.”

  She reached out to ruffle his hair. Dat smiled at her, and Levi beamed as he lifted his spoon, happiness and anticipation shining from his florid face.

  “Ich gleich dich (I love you).”

  “I love you, too, Levi.”

  This exchange was not lost on the blond youth, who watched Sarah and forgot to eat his cake. He’d never seen eyes that color. They reminded him of the ocean but only when it was stormy, not when it was calm. When she moved, he thought of the antelope that roamed the plains of Wyoming. Why had he never seen her? Who was she? He never did eat his cake.

  After the plates of food were consumed, large garbage bags were filled and taken to the pile of smoking debris, where they disappeared, the intense heat consuming the plastic.

  Women and girls moved from table to kitchen, fer-sarking leftovers, planning tomorrow’s meal, complimenting. They were relaxed now, the crowning point of the day achieved.

  And it had gone well, hadn’t it? It surely had.

  Hannah sat smack down in the middle of the riotous mess and folded a fresh slice of whole wheat bread around a large portion of the succulent ham. She poured a glass of ice cold meadow tea and said the young generation could do dishes, which drew a mixed response.

  Out in the kesslehaus, Mamie Stoltzfus said Hannah sure hadn’t changed now, had she? Always running the show, being the boss, and then the minute the real chores started, she sat there in all her glory. It just irked Mamie.

  Barbara Zook agreed, but shrugged her shoulders and said that was just Hannah’s way.

  But still, Mamie said.

  Sarah moved to the sink where Rose had begun scrubbing the pans with dried food clinging to their sides. As Rose finished with the pans, Sarah took them and dried each one as if her life depended on it. In reality, her thoughts were far away.

  Through the kitchen window, she watched the beams being put into place. Agile men clung to the precisely cut lumber, the hammers flailing. But she was not really seeing anything. What was wrong with her?

  She felt guilt about Matthew, and the stone in her heart was now an unbearable thing. There was Rose, beside her, washing dishes at a rapid speed, chattering happily, her blonde hair and beautiful blue eyes adding another stone marked “Shame” to the one that had “Guilt” inscribed on it.

  Who did she think she was? Why had Matthew been the one to dress her hand? Why not Mam, or Hannah, or anyone else?

  Silently groaning, she half-heard Rose. The men on the new yellow lumber swam together like colorful fish, but her unfocused gaze obscured the sunlight-infused picture before her.

  “Sarah, you’re not listening to me!”

  Rose was emphatic and then looked perplexed as Sarah’s hands—bandages and all—stopped their motion and tightly gripped the edge of a large roaster.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asked, her bright blue eyes inquisitive, innocent.

  Everything’s wrong with me. Your boyfriend, Matthew, is an elusive rainbow in my life. I want him. I’m terribly guilty, my mind is so jumbled I can’t see straight. How can I get out of this?

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “Well, Sarah, of course there is. You’ve been through a lot. It can’t be easy, knowing someone lit your barn on purpose. It would really give me the creeps.”

  “It does.”

  “Of course it does.

  Sarah met her friend’s eyes in a sort of half-slant. Seeing the blue gaze of love and concern, the childlike honesty and trust, only multiplied her guilt.

  It was time for everyone to go home. Then she could sit in a clean, quiet kitchen and have a genuine old-fashioned talk with Mam.

  She needed advice. She needed Mam.

  How desperately now she wanted Mam to tell her that it was alright to let yourself love your best friend. No. Mam would never.

  Sarah dried the roaster viciously and avoided Rose’s eyes.

  Chapter 6

  THE NEW BARN STOOD like a beacon of renewal, a proud sentry of fellowship, caring, and love administered to those in need. Yet the weeks following the barn raising taxed the good humor and energy of the whole family.

  It was the rain. The constantly scudding gray clouds containing inch after inch of rain persistently rolled in from the east, slowly eroding the optimism of even the most encouraging member of the family.

  Even Mam, who usually refused to spend needless money to dry clothes, gave in and hired a driver to take the mounds of laundry to the Laundromat over along Route 30. She muttered to herself as she dumped out the gallon jug with its heavy accumulation of loose change and counted her quarters feeling as blameworthy as someone who had just committed a crime.

  The thing was, those great, gleaming washers that spun her towels and tablecloths and the broadfall pants and dresses would simply disintegrate her clothes one of these times. She placed no trust in anything electric. Who knew if she wouldn’t be shocked—simply sizzled to death the moment she reached out to grasp that handle to extricate what was rightfully hers? Sitting and sewing all those clothes wasn’t just anything, after all.

  And how many times had she pressed the wrong button accidentally, setting the heat on the dryer to high, ruining her good dresses and capes and aprons, wrinkled completely beyond repair? It was risky, going to the Laundromat.

  Sarah adjusted the white covering on her head, hurriedly sticking the straight pins through the thin organdy. She ran down the stairs when Jim Harper, the driver, tooted his horn, jangling her nerves the way it always did. He was the only driver who did that. All the others sat in the driveway, waiting patiently if the family wasn’t immediately aware of their arrival, although they turned their heads occasionally, to see if anyone was coming out the door. But they didn’t put the palms of their hands on the center of the steering wheel to let their impatience be known.

  Sarah helped Mam lug the heavy plastic hampers and totes to the small navy blue van. She arranged them in the back, slammed the door, and went around to the side.

  Mam said hello, but Jim just grunted and said, “Seat belts.”

  They complied, and he moved off, complaining about the weather and that he couldn’t see what was wrong with driving a horse and buggy to the Laundromat. He was clearly unhappy with the few miles he would be able to charge.

  Mam humored him, saying with a choking sound in her voice that the horses had burned. Jim placed a hand on Mam’s shoulder and apologized profusely, saying he didn’t know. He was sorry, he said.

  Mam assured him and told him she wouldn’t drive a buggy to Route 30 and through all the stoplights, even with the safest horse. Too much traffic, too many tourists gawking.

  Sarah groaned aloud when she saw the occupants at the Laundromat. Oh, no.

  “Mam, look!”

  “Oh, we’ll be busy. She’ll let us go.”

  Sarah knew better about Fannie Kauffman, the most inquisitive, anxious woman in at least a fifty-mile radius.

  They had no sooner settled themselves after filling the hungry machines with Mam’s precious quarters than she bustled over, the pleats in her ill-fitting black apron shelving over her hips, pinned much too tightly between layers of overeating.

  “Malinda!”

  “Fannie.”

  “It just rains, doesn’t it? I told Elam that if it doesn’t stop raining, we won’t get the tobacco in until June, which will just make it late for market, and we won’t get our price. But then, who am I to complain? You losin
g your barn and having that loss. My goodness. I said to Elam, I guess the Lord chastens whom He loveth, gel? Gel? You have to wonder what you did to deserve this, gel? David likely did nothing. He’s such a perfect man.”

  There was really no nice way to answer that hailstorm of words, Sarah thought, so when Mam smiled a bit rigidly but made no comment, it only increased Fannie’s velocity.

  “But then, you have Levi too, you know. A retarded boy. Well, you do good, though, you do good. You know I wasn’t at the barn raising, not that I didn’t want to, but my sciatica was acting up. Pain! Oh, Malinda, I was in mortal pain. My lower back, down the back of my legs. I had Davey’s Rachel to do my work every day that week.”

  There was a shrill beep, and Fannie erupted from her chair and lunged across the gleaming waxed tiles to reach the stopped dryer. She grabbed the handle of the large machine and gave it a tug before extracting the armfuls of clothing.

  Mam sighed, a deep, tired, very relieved sound. She cast a weary look at Sarah when Fannie wheeled her cart over to the plastic table beside them and started shoving hangers into the shoulders of Elam’s shirts.

  “How’s the barn coming? Are you milking yet? Are you? Good. That’s good. But you know how much your cows will drop back in production? Way far. I told Elam that family has no idea how great their loss will be yet, even if you have Amish fire insurance. It never covers it all.”

  She stopped for breath and then bent to pick up a stray dryer sheet, holding it to her nose for a quick sniff.

  “These dryer sheets don’t work.”

  Mam raised an eyebrow, enough of a reply for Fannie to keep up her verbal onslaught.

  “Have you heard about Junior’s Melvin? Our Junior? He had such a stomach ache….”

  Sarah watched a young girl slumped in a blue plastic chair near the door, her legs sprawled in front of her. Her light brown hair fell over her cheeks like a curtain of privacy, a signal, along with her drooping shoulders, to leave her alone. She was thin, almost painfully so, and her hands picked restlessly at a thread along the bottom of her beige shirt.

  Sarah felt a tinge of pity, then concern, when a small white vehicle pulled up to the front window. A young man hopped out and tore open the steel framed door, almost colliding with the girl in his haste.

  She pulled her legs in and wrapped her arms around her middle. Her shoulders squared as she turned to face him with large, dark, defiant eyes. She recoiled as he lowered his head and hissed something quiet but deafening with a menacing force.

  Sarah turned away. This was none of her concern. She watched though, unable to turn her eyes away as he hooked a hand beneath the girl’s elbow and clawed at it, forcing her to stand and follow him, her head bent, the fine brown hair falling over her cheeks.

  A white vehicle.

  Well, no sense in making the comparison. There was none. Who could ever find the person in a white vehicle that supposedly lit their barn a few weeks earlier?

  Sarah half-heartedly listened to Fannie and watched the small red light on the washer, the suds banging up against the glass and churning the clothes inside to a clean maelstrom.

  The rain fell relentlessly as lines of traffic hissed past, water streaming off them. The stoplights, signs, store fronts—everything was wet and shimmery with water.

  Sarah tried to imagine Noah’s flood in Bible times. It would have rained a hundred times harder. Then the springs of the earth would have opened, water gushing from the ground in a way no one had ever seen before and wouldn’t again, ever. The water would have covered the streets, then the vehicles, the signs, the stores, the stoplights. People would be drowned by then, or clinging to treetops or high buildings. She shivered, thinking of it. Water everywhere.

  Fire was the opposite of water but just as destructive.

  Already, Sarah missed the barn. It was on days just like this that, as a child, she had played in the haymow with her brothers, the clamorous rain drumming down and sometimes drowning out their voices. The only thing between them and the sound of it was the old sheet metal and a few wide lathes.

  It was safe and cozy and crunchy with hay. They piled bales to make perfect houses, brought lunch and had dinner in it, spitting out the prickly hay seeds if they dropped onto their sweet bologna sandwiches.

  Allen claimed people could eat hay if they chewed it long enough and then promptly inserted a long strand into his mouth and chewed furiously. Abner told him to get that out and quit it—cows had two stomachs, humans had only one and weren’t supposed to eat hay.

  The washer clunked and then stopped. The red light went off, so Sarah got up, opened the door, raked the wet laundry into a large, wheeled basket, and pushed it to a dryer.

  Fannie came rolling over. Rolling was the only way to describe her—rounded and tipping from side to side, like a child’s plastic ball that bounced along.

  “Sarah, don’t you have a chappy (boyfriend) yet?”

  From behind the door of the dryer, Sarah shook her head, “No, I don’t.”

  “What are you? Twenty? Twenty-one?”

  “Soon twenty.”

  “My girls all married before twenty. What are you waiting on?”

  Fannie snapped a dishcloth and folded it meticulously, without looking at her.

  “There’s no hurry.”

  “Sure there is. A girl blooms like a rose at age sixteen, and it’s all downhill from there.” She laughed ridiculously, becoming hysterical at her own joke.

  Sarah smiled weakly, and decided one ill-mannered person could erase weeks of gratitude for the wonder of human companionship. She decided to stand her ground.

  “I have dreams of becoming an old maid and having my own dry goods store.”

  Her words carried well, reaching Mam’s ears as she ducked behind a washer to conceal her wide grin and jiggling shoulders.

  Fannie finished and left hastily, splashing clumsily through the rain in her large black Skechers, her bonnet stuck haphazardly on her head, no doubt flattening the questionably white covering beneath it.

  Inside, Mam shook a finger at Sarah.

  “Now, Sarah!”

  “Well. She could have stayed quiet. She’s simply so nosy. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Her heart’s in the right place, though.”

  “You sure?”

  Mam didn’t bother answering but asked Sarah if she really wanted to be an old maid.

  “You should say ‘single girl.’”

  “Or leftover blessing? No. I don’t want to be alone all my life. Of course not. I want my own house and yard and garden. Just like you. But…well, Mam, you know how it is.”

  “Is it still?”

  Sarah nodded, which produced a drooping of Mam’s kind features.

  “You do try and let him go? Out of your thoughts?”

  “Yes, Mam. I do. Seriously, the harder I try, the worse it gets.”

  Sarah launched into a colorful account of her burned hand, the way Matthew reacted, Rose’s innocence, her guilt. But she stopped the story there, reserving the attractive blond young man and hiding him from her mother’s scrutiny, knowing disapproval was forthcoming.

  They folded soft towels, the clean-smelling linens, and were careful to test the heat in the dryers containing the dresses and black aprons.

  “Well, Sarah, you know I’ll always tell you the same thing. This time is no different. Pray, pray, pray. Always. You will discern God’s will for your life once you have given up your own will, and I’m afraid Matthew is simply that. Your own will—wanting something you can’t have. You know how much human nature tends to run along those lines. Just like Aesop’s fables. Remember the story of the fox who wanted the grapes that were out of his reach?”

  “And when he finally acquired them, they were sour, and he wondered why he’d wanted them in the first place,” Sarah finished for her mother, nodding good-naturedly.

  Jim, the driver, was gruff and short with them on the way home. He required a twenty-dollar payment, saying he had in
surance to pay, and he sure wasn’t making any money hauling people to the Laundromat.

  Mam handed over the twenty-dollar bill, but her eyes sparkled too brightly, and she slammed the front door with plenty of muscle behind it.

  Sarah ducked her head and splashed through the rain with the hampers of laundry, happy to put it all away in the drawers and closets, thankful to have clean, dry clothes, for now.

  Surely the rain would stop soon. She paused by the window of her room and saw the muddy churning waters of the lower Pequea Creek had risen way beyond its banks. She shivered, a foreboding clutching her reason.

  The new barn was stately, built solidly in the old pattern. The exterior’s new ribbed metal siding was white, the color of the old barn. New cupolas proudly straddled the peak of the roof, the weather vanes turning as the wind changed direction, guarding the Beiler farm with their resilience. Look at us, they seemed to say. We’re new and better, here for the next hundred years.

  Sarah smiled and was glad.

  The old stones and timbers were gone, but good had come of it as well, Dat said. The new barn was better. The ventilation design, the materials—everything was better, especially the diesel and the air system. It was the sadness of lost history that kept him humble, the ruined painstaking work of his forefathers.

  He said the Amish church had seen changes in the past two hundred years, and they weren’t all bad, same as the new barn. Some things were good, like milkers and bulk tanks and pneumatics, battery lamps and fiberglass carriages and nylon harnesses that were lighter and more durable. Better.

  And still it rained, day and night.

  Dat slogged through the mud to accomplish even the smallest task. Mud was everywhere from the way things had been churned up around the barn by the dozers and lifts and other equipment. Dat said if it continued raining, the roads would be closed due to the high water. He hoped no one would try to cross the creek where it overflowed; that was downright dangerous.

  Priscilla stood by the window in Levi’s room, chewing alternately on the inside of each cheek. Or she chewed the nails of her right hand, her eyebrows rising taut above her large, anxious eyes, watching the green maple leaves dripping water.