by Dale Cramer
© 2012 by Dale Cramer
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www.bakerpublishinggroup.com
Ebook edition created 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-6994-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Cover design by Lookout Design, Inc.
Cover photography by Mike Habermann Photography, LLC
Author is represented by Books & Such Literary Agency
For Mary Frost Nolan,
a warrior
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
The Family of Caleb and Martha Bender
January 1923
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Dale Cramer
Back Ad
Back Cover
The Family of Caleb and Martha Bender
January 1923
A DA, 28 Unmarried; mentally challenged
M ARY, 25 Husband, Ezra Raber (children: Samuel, 6;
Paul, 5; infant twins Amanda and Little Amos)
L IZZIE, 24 In Ohio with husband, Andy Shetler (4 children)
A ARON, 22
A MOS Aaron’s twin brother; deceased
E MMA, 21 Husband, Levi Mullet (infant child, Mose)
M IRIAM, 19+
H ARVEY, 18
R ACHEL, 16+
L EAH, 14
B ARBARA, 12
Chapter 1
The mountain range known as the Sierra Madre Oriental ran the length of Mexico like a bony spine. Bold summits and limestone cliffs reached up among the passing rain clouds and diverted them and frustrated them and robbed them of their moisture so that by the time the clouds crawled out of the mountains, they had been reduced to wrung-out tatters with nothing left to give. In the wind shadow of these rugged mountains, the low-lying eastern coastal plain and Rio Grande valley had become parched red lands of scrub brush and cactus, while the upper reaches of the Sierras held cloud-shrouded pockets of tropical forest.
Nestled between the ridges at the eastern edge of the mountains lay a five-thousand-acre oval of rich pastureland known, in the 1920s, as Paradise Valley. The volcanic soil was black and fertile, the six-thousand-foot elevation guaranteed moderate temperatures year-round and a modest amount of rain fell throughout the growing season.
In the spring of 1922, in response to what he saw as religious persecution in Ohio, Caleb Bender brought his large family to Paradise Valley to pioneer a new Amish colony. Others would follow. Caleb’s wife, Martha, his two living sons, and seven of his eight daughters uprooted themselves from the only home his children had ever known, traveled a thousand miles and toiled ceaselessly for a year, forging a new homestead, bonding with new neighbors, adapting to a foreign culture and breaking new ground for crops. It was a monumental undertaking, made even more perilous by roaming bands of outlaws, but the family pulled together through tremendous hardship like a matched team of seasoned horses, and they thrived.
In February of 1923 the Shrocks and the Hershbergers arrived. The population of the Paradise Valley colony tripled overnight.
After dinner that Saturday evening Caleb strolled a little ways up the ridge behind his house and sat down on his private rock to be alone with his thoughts, and with Gott.
“Have I been foolish?” he whispered, burdened by his own responsibility for this mad venture, and racked with doubts. “What have I done?”
But his eyes roamed over fresh-plowed fields and fat cattle, the adobe house his sons and daughters had built from soil and sweat, the yellow lights of his two married daughters’ houses where three new lives had come into the world—the first Amish children born in Paradise Valley—and now the campfires of two whole new families, come to do the same. He saw two of his teenage daughters standing together on the edge of the wheat field, watching the moonrise. Under the full moon he could make out Rachel’s flame red hair peeking out of her white prayer kapp, and Miriam, the dark one, the serious one, arm in arm with her gregarious sister. The mere sight of his daughters, beautiful and whole and happy, filled him with light. Caleb Bender was not a prideful man, for he was Amish to the bone, but he was bursting with pride in his children.
When the chill of the evening began to seep into him Caleb buttoned his coat, snugged his wide-brimmed hat on his bald head and started down the ridge smiling, with a renewed sense of Gott’s arms wrapped around his family and friends in Paradise Valley. Two beige cabin tents rested in his front yard, lit yellow from within by lanterns, a roaring campfire cracking and popping between them, flinging sparks into the night sky. John Hershberger and Ira Shrock, the two new men, stood warming in its glow.
Caleb joined them for a few minutes, showing his palms to the flame while they talked of old times, the weather and the coming spring.
“The soil here must be even better than back home,” Hershberger said. An old friend of Caleb’s, his long face bore his customary pleasant smile. “Your wheat is as thick as any I’ve ever seen.”
Caleb turned his back to the fire and saw how the moon silvered the tops of his winter wheat and highlighted the white kapps of his two daughters, returning to the house arm in arm.
“Jah, it’s rich,” Caleb said, “and if we rotate crops like always, it’ll only get better. We’ll fight weeds for a year or two, but not too many rocks.” Weeds and rocks weren’t really what concerned him, but this was not the time for that discussion. “My girls are headed in. Time for evening prayers,” he said, and with a good-night wave to John and Ira, headed for the house.
During prayer time he couldn’t help noticing Miriam’s downcast gaze. She looked like she’d been crying. Rachel’s freckled face, usually bright and open, was drawn and tight, harboring some dark secret. Something was going on between them, but Caleb only chuckled to himself as he rose to go upstairs. At such times his daughters were a mystery to him. He silently thanked
Gott for his wife, whose job it was to unravel the mysteries, the endless parade of troubles and triumphs that came with a houseful of daughters.
Miriam let her dark hair down and dressed herself for bed. By the time she turned in and put out the lantern Rachel was already asleep, red hair splayed across the pillow and her breathing slow and steady. But Miriam was haunted, charged and quickened by thoughts of Domingo, of his pet name for her.
Cualnezqui.
She loved Domingo, she knew that now. Was it possible his little lie and his blank expression hid the same feelings for her? If so, an inconceivable choice awaited her somewhere in the future. She was a baptized member of the church, and Domingo was not Amish, but Miriam could not help how she felt. Suffering her private torture in the stillness of the night, sleep did not come for a long time. Finally she closed her eyes and uttered a simple prayer, asking for direction. She found a familiar and yet ever-surprising release in handing the problem over to Gott, and fell asleep with the prayer still on her lips.
In the cave-black hours before the first hint of dawn Miriam’s mind swam up from sightless depths, random visions flitting past like bright silver fish as she fought toward the surface of a moonless sea, to the place of crystalline dreams. In an instant she was lifted, whisked through space and time into a startling midday light. Her dress and stark white prayer kapp vanished and she found herself wearing the coarse cotton pants and shirt of a peasant laborer. Dark, heavy hair fell loose about her shoulders, down her back, and windblown strands tickled her face. Trapped in the timeless space between dream and memory, it seemed she owned no past or future.
She stood on the razor’s edge of a sun-washed ridge. On one side the land fell away in a steep slope dotted with drought-stunted oak trees, twisted pines and clusters of prickly pear cactus. On the other side a sheer rocky cliff dropped straight into oblivion, where only a dry wind moaned through the crags.
She knew this place. The ridge overlooked their new home in Paradise Valley.
Mexico.
A great dark stallion appeared in the distance, rising suddenly at the highest point of the ridge. Head held proudly, mane flying like a flag, he surveyed the valley below as if he owned it.
The stallion’s head turned and his eyes found Miriam. He took a half step back and tossed his head, a blink of recognition. She held his gaze. Sunlight glinted from steel muscles as he reared up on powerful hind legs and hurled himself toward her. He galloped flat out, tearing along the edge of the cliff, bounding over boulders and fallen trees, racing toward her with an urgency, an intensity she did not understand until she heard a different sound.
It was a small sound, a faint rustling of dry leaves from a thicket of scrub brush in the foreground, between her and the stallion. Staring hard, searching low in the tangled bracken, she spotted a pair of large round eyes—eyes of amber framed in black. The eyes of a predator, focused on her alone. A black jaguar crouched there, coiled and motionless, waiting.
Watching.
Their eyes locked. The great cat tensed, dropping a fraction deeper into his crouch, his decision made. He exploded from the brush as if he had been fired from a cannon, bunched muscles flinging him over rock and snag with astonishing speed, but the stallion was almost upon him. Approaching hoofbeats spun the jaguar about, ears laid back, fangs exposed in an ear-splitting scream, coiling to spring at this new challenge.
Black and sleek and powerful, the jaguar launched himself at the charging horse, and the two beasts locked together. The stallion twisted, reared, bucked, but the big cat clung fast by claw and fang.
Paralyzed with terror, Miriam watched the deadly battle in agonizing slow motion. She saw the whites of the stallion’s eyes, the desperation in his struggle. She saw the singular resolve of the savage cat, bent on destruction. She saw a hoof slip over the edge of the rock, pawing for a new grip and finding only empty space.
Slowly, like a felled tree, the stallion tilted and toppled. With his head thrown back and the jaguar still clamped to his neck, he plunged over the edge into the abyss, turning and tumbling, his hooves thrashing as he plummeted out of sight.
She ran screaming, scrambling over rocks, reaching for him as though she could somehow turn back the clock and prevent this from happening, but it was a futile gesture. Hopeless.
He was gone, leaving nothing behind but the moan of the wind in the rocks.
———
Miriam awoke sitting bolt upright in bed, gasping, damp with sweat despite the cold, memory flooding her mind. The dream burned brightly in that moment, and she understood it completely. She knew what it meant, who it was about. The magnificent free-spirited stallion her dream had conjured was no horse at all, but a man.
Domingo.
The vision burned itself into her consciousness and filled her with dread, for it had been etched in her mind almost from birth that a man who lived by the sword would surely die by the sword. Domingo’s own father had perished fighting in the Mexican Revolution, along with his sister’s husband. This ringing premonition that Domingo would somehow follow in their footsteps shook her to the core.
She had witnessed a transformation only yesterday on Saltillo Road, the moment when Domingo the hired hand became Domingo the Warrior, his blade pressed against a bandit’s throat, his body taut as a fence wire, his eyes cold and hard and merciless, piercing through tangles of long black hair. Domingo the fierce. Domingo the protector.
“He is gentle,” his sister Kyra had said, “until someone he loves is threatened.”
If Domingo’s metamorphosis from farmhand to warrior was indeed triggered by the need to protect someone he loved, Miriam needed to know if she was that one. Before he’d left for home—was it only last night?—she had emboldened herself and given him every chance to declare his feelings for her, if he had any, but he said nothing. He became, if anything, more aloof than ever, leaving her to wrestle with her own doubts and insecurities. In the end she resigned herself to the belief that he wanted only friendship from her, that he granted her respect because she had taught him to read. He didn’t even see the woman behind the teacher’s veneer, let alone share her feelings.
But that name haunted her. Cualnezqui, he called her. A Nahuatl word, it had been Domingo’s pet name for Miriam alone, from the day she and her family arrived. “Friend,” he explained when she asked him what it meant, and for an entire year she believed him. But last night, as he was riding away, Rachel told her the truth, and the earth shifted.
Cualnezqui did not mean friend at all.
It meant beautiful one.
So why did he not speak when she gave him the chance? Had he been teasing her all this time? Was he treating her like a child? The questions consumed her.
Never before had she met such a man. She was smitten and she knew it, though she had always tried to hide it—partly because she was Amish, and partly because she was Miriam. Her dreams and desires were her own, jealously guarded lest they make the rounds of the gossips’ tongues and come back in whispers to ridicule, or worse. The church would take a dim view of her feelings for a man who was not Amish. He was not even American, but a half-breed native Mexican.
And then, with a shock, she recalled the brief prayer she’d uttered before falling asleep, asking for a sign.
She had gone to sleep with a plea for help on her lips and awakened to a vivid, pointed dream. Now she was plagued by the nagging fear that perhaps the dream was the answer to the prayer. Could it have been a cryptic warning from Gott himself? Would it somehow be up to her to save Domingo?
Knowing she would not go back to sleep, Miriam slipped out of bed and dressed herself in the dark so as not to wake her four sisters sleeping in the same room. The house had grown cold in the night; she went downstairs to stoke the stove.
Chapter 2
When the rooster crowed, Rachel awakened with such excitement that she barely noticed Miriam was already gone from the bed. She sprang from under the covers like a child on Christmas morning a
nd rushed to the window again, just like yesterday, to make sure nothing had changed.
The wagons and buggies and hacks were still parked in a row by the lane. Tents glowed in the yard, their lanterns already lit, while down by the kitchen garden a flurry of sparks leaped from the red embers of a dying campfire as one of the men dropped a fresh log onto it.
Their new neighbors had been here since Friday night and she still hadn’t gotten over the excitement, because Jake was with them.
She’d waited a whole year for Jake Weaver to come, the last two months without hope because she received word that his father had decided not to bring his family to Mexico. Rachel’s own father was the cause of it. Caleb Bender, because it was his duty and it was the truth, had written his friends in Ohio and told them about the bandit troubles. His candid letters had changed Jake’s father’s mind about moving across the border into such turmoil.
The news that Jake would not be coming had driven a nail through Rachel’s heart. Yes, she had barely reached courting age before her family pulled up stakes and moved to Paradise Valley. But she and Jake had known each other all their lives, and in the midst of the storm that the state of Ohio unleashed upon the Amish, the two of them discovered strengths in each other that they had never noticed before.
“I would do a great many things for you,” Jake had said, and it was as if a veil lifted and her future unfolded before her eyes with astonishing clarity. They both knew with a calm and unwavering certainty—suddenly, yes, but beyond any childish doubt—that they were meant for each other. That certainty, and their faith, had now been tested by a separation of a thousand miles for an entire year.
But now he was here. At the eleventh hour Jake’s father had relented and allowed his son to leave the family farm and come to Paradise Valley as a hireling of John Hershberger.
The eastern sky had only begun to turn purple. A sharp snore came from simpleminded Ada, sleeping in the other bed with her two youngest sisters. Rachel woke them, then rushed to put on yesterday’s dress and pin her long red hair under her covering. She wanted to finish her chores quickly and leave plenty of time to change into her Sunday clothes for gma. Today there would be church services in the Benders’ barn.
