When the English Fall

by David Williams

  But without any way to get money into a bank, or any way to use cash? What did it mean, to get paid?

  “I’d thought about that,” said Abram. “We’re providing food, and it’s an emergency. How can we think about money when there are those who are going hungry?”

  Sergeant Williams had grunted. “That’s what your Bishop said, when I tried to explain to him what I’d been told about compensation.” He’d then shook his head. “I’ve heard that maybe the federal government is going to handle it, but everything we hear is bits and pieces. And how can they handle it, if there’s no way to get money, and no way to transfer money? I could tell him what I’d heard, but nothing more.”

  Abram had then asked him if that was why Bishop Schrock was upset. The soldier had laughed, a sharp little bark. “No. No. Hard guy, that man, but he knew that was how things were. He’d asked me about martial law. About what it meant. About how it was being implemented in other places. About what I know. Damned if orders are that we’re not to say, but hell. I’m still a citizen, and if you’re giving us supplies with no idea when you’ll get paid, I owe you what I hear. What I hear ain’t good.”

  And then the Sergeant had stared at his boots for a while. “This is just a hell of a thing,” he said. Then he had looked up. “You’d think people would work together. You folks know how to do that, right? But ain’t nothin’ working.”

  And then Abram himself went quiet for a moment, as he paused in the retelling. “And then he told me what he had heard from Philadelphia. From yesterday. A National Guard unit had been helping with the distribution of food from a church. There were too many people, and the crowd had swollen, and then they’d run out of food.

  “But some in the crowd wouldn’t believe it. Men were shouting, saying there was more food inside, that the soldiers were keeping it for themselves. Things had gotten ugly. The people began pushing, and shouting and screaming, and the soldiers had been trying to hold them back.

  “But then there was a patter of shots, and one of the soldiers went down, and the crowd surged forward.

  “Then the soldiers opened fire.”

  Abram went quiet again. “He told me there were at least a hundred dead. At least. Many of them women and children. And then he said they had heard more stories just like that.”

  And then he told me the soldier said, “It’s all coming apart. Ain’t no soldier signed up for killing kids.”

  But Lancaster was not like that, Abram said. It was peaceable. Tense, but peaceable. And there was still enough food, between the soldiers and the storekeepers and the emergency stores that every wise family had kept.

  We talked for a while longer, about his kids, about the wild weather, about last Sunday’s worship. It felt good to talk about other things.

  October 2

  It is dark in the house, and it is late, but I am awake. I am tired, because it was a long day of work, but I can’t sleep now. It was the sound that woke me.

  Once, twice, and then a patter of them. Gunshots, and not all the same gun. Some quieter pops, maybe a pistol, and then the deeper tone of a shotgun. It sounded like my father’s gun, the old Remington he used for deer hunting. But no one hunts with a pistol, and it is too late in the night for hunting.

  The shots were not close, maybe a mile off, and they were not really very loud. But I should not be hearing them at all.

  Hannah did not wake, and I heard no movement from Jacob. It had been such a hard day, with so much work, that this was no surprise. I wished I was sleeping as they were. I lay there, but the sound had woken me from my dreamless sleep. I said a few prayers, prayers for whoever it was out there in the darkness. Then I lay there for a while, trying to return to slumber.

  But I could not, as tired as I was. So I rose and lit the lamp and came downstairs. Sadie was there. She was sitting alone in her nightdress in the half-dark kitchen, holding a glass of water. I started a bit to see her, and my heart, already worried, stirred. If Sadie was up at night, that often meant bad things. But she seemed fine.

  “Hello, Dadi,” she said.

  I asked her what had woken her.

  “I heard the shots, Dadi. That’s why you woke up, isn’t it?”

  I walked over behind her and held her shoulders for a moment. I told her that it was, and then I told her that she shouldn’t worry, that they were far away.

  “I’m not worried, Dadi,” she said, with a very small smile. “But I think they aren’t as far away as we’d like them to be.”

  I laughed a little bit, because it struck me as funny. Then I asked her how far away that was.

  “So far away that we couldn’t hear them,” she said. “But we don’t have a choice about what we hear. Sometimes we have to hear things even if we don’t want to. Because they’re there, aren’t they, even if we don’t want them to be.”

  She got up, and turned around, and rested her head for a moment against my chest. Then she stepped back a half step. “But it is quiet now. There will be no more sound tonight, I think.”

  She yawned, and her bright eyes were dimming with sleep. “I will go to bed.” She stepped forward again, and I kissed her on the top of her head. “Good night, Dadi. Maybe you should write a little bit. It will help you sleep.”

  And so I have. Dear Lord, but I am tired now.

  October 3

  In the early afternoon, I went downstairs into the larder. With Sadie’s help, Hannah had been working hard these last few weeks to be sure we were ready for the coming of winter, and she showed me what she had so far accomplished. That work does not only come in fall, of course. To prepare for winter, you need to be preparing the whole year. It is part of one’s mind all year long. It must stay on your heart all of the time. And so it is with us. Always aware of what is coming.

  The jars were there, hundreds of them. Corn and tomatoes, pickles and beets and beans, all neatly organized on the shelves. Each had been harvested in season, but our little patch of land has always yielded more than we need for the right now.

  Hannah has been so competent at this, a good gardener, and a very diligent organizer. She is an excellent wife, she is, and I tell her so. She is a blessing.

  Jacob and I have especially been helping her with the beef, the meat from the steer we slaughtered in August, and the two pigs. We had been storing it over at the Schrocks’, in their large walk-in freezer. That compressor failed with everything else. That was a loss, a difficult one, not just for us but for everyone.

  The community had agreed, years ago, that while all should not have refrigeration, it would be acceptable for us to share something. If we all had refrigeration, then it would tell us that we were each separate from one another. It would stir our pride, make us selfish, and let us pretend that we were each free of each other. But just one, shared among us all, owned by all of us together? That would be different.

  That conversation happened well before we came, and a big part of it was where such a thing would go. It ended up on the Schrock farm. Some of the people who just cannot help but gossip do whisper about that, that it had to do with his pride and wanting to control it. Hannah has told me that some of the women say this. But I have talked with others. Bishop Schrock did not want it, and Mrs. Schrock did not want it, and for exactly that reason. But they had the space for it, and they are close to the center of all, and so that was that. It was how it needed to be.

  It was a reminder, a reminder of just how reliant we had become on the English. We have cured and dried the pork and the beef. Salt and spices we had, and plenty of them. We had enough to share, as it was an old habit of mine going back to my father’s house and the Order of my childhood.

  There, refrigeration was forbidden. It was hochmut, prideful and arrogant. It would come up sometimes, but that Order was totally unyielding. What is pride is pride, as my father would say. And so for meat, things were different. It was put into soups that were canned. It was pickled. The taste of pickled pork still lingers in my mouth, and I will say that I n
ever liked it very much.

  But it was also saved by drying, and that I know as well as I know the feel of wood. There is something about jerky in particular that I have always loved. I love the chew of it, the rich salt of its flavor. It is so practical, so lasting, so good in its very simple way. There are few things more demut than a nice hunk of dried beef. That, I remember my father saying, too.

  So we have dried meat, not just for ourselves, but enough to sell as we need to. The taste for jerky is another thing we share with the English, and for those that come to wander and wonder at simple folk, it’s one of those things that they love to buy and take home. We sell it at our little stand, but it also has sold well enough in some stores in town, along with Hannah’s preserves. It has been good for us in these years.

  I do it differently from my father. Among that fellowship, the method was traditional. The long thin strips would hang on frames and trellises. I always thought they looked like meat socks hung out to dry. That was how it had always been done, and it did work, mostly. Sometimes birds would eat them, and sometimes the drying would not happen swiftly enough, and some of the meat would spoil.

  But here, and with the permission of Bishop Schrock and consent of the others, I have used another method.

  Between the house and the field are my drying houses, three of them, built with my own hands. Funny little things they are, wooden cubes, looking a little like open chicken coops. Instead of chicken wire, they have large windows. I used glass windows, cast off from a nearby construction project. From the bottoms of the “coop” windows, three ramps of black-painted corrugated tin run from three of the four sides, facing south, west, and east.

  The black-painted panels concentrate the heat of the sun, collecting it and increasing both the heat and the dryness inside the chamber. The concentrated hot air flows through the central chamber, and then up through a chicken-wire vent at the top. The meat—spiced by hand and cured for twelve hours—goes onto trays. It takes two full days, at most.

  It is funny how you learn of these things. I did not learn it from my father, though he taught me to dry and prepare meat. It was in a conversation with a Baptist, years ago, which turned to our love of jerky. He shared with me what he had seen in Africa, how they dealt with their meat, and I confess that I had not heard of it. I should have, I think, but sometimes things that you should know dance just out of reach for many years.

  These last few days, I have given out much salt and spices and advice to our neighbors. This is a good thing.

  And it is also good, I think, to look into our larder, dry and cool. It is full of cuts and strips of beef and pork, all hanging like decorations, dried and ready to eat. It looks for all the world like a harvest of flesh, I thought, and though that was good to see, I found myself shivering when I thought those words.

  But this will be food for my family for winter, when winter finally comes. And for some reason, I thought to something I had heard the day before. Of the refrigerators and the freezers at the Giant, of how they had tried to give away meat that could not be sold or kept. Of how much of that meat had spoiled, simply gone to rot. Hundreds of pounds of it, all of that effort, all of that work. It was such a terrible waste.

  I am glad, now, for the hardness of my uncle and my father’s uncompromising spirit. It does not happen often, I will admit. But sometimes I am glad.

  IT WAS JUST A little after noon and the sun was high when Young Jon Michaelson came by, riding his mare. The heat was in the air, so Hannah offered him some lemonade, which he took gladly.

  He was there bearing news. The shots we had heard were from the Smith farm. Bill Smith had woken to the sound of his dog barking. He had taken his shotgun to go investigate, and had startled three men breaking into their barn.

  Two of the men just ran when they heard him, but the third man had a gun, and before he started running, he fired. Bill had fired back across the yard, and they had exchanged a volley. “No one was hit,” said Jon, “but there are bullet holes in the front of the Smith house. And a window was shattered.”

  I asked if the police knew, and Jon said that one of the English neighbors of the Smiths had ridden his bicycle to tell them.

  “But they are saying that there is not much the police can do now for anybody, because there’s no way to know what is happening soon enough. Most of the men on the farms now say that they are keeping watch together. Many are talking about forming a watch group.”

  What sort of group, I asked him.

  “I saw the signs posted, as I was riding yesterday, and even more signs today. Asking for people to meet at the Stauffers tomorrow afternoon. Come and bring your guns, it said. Rally to protect your families, it said. The signs were all made by hand, but they all say the same thing. And I’ve heard my neighbors talking about it, too. They’re talking about how important it is to be ready and organized to protect themselves if people come to take things. There just aren’t enough Guardsmen, and the police can’t be called in an emergency. I saw some of the guys I know from the area on the road yesterday, and they were all carrying their guns. I think every one of them is going to the Stauffers. It seems to be something that so many of our neighbors are doing.”

  I said that did not seem like a good thing to me, and he agreed.

  “It feels like a nest of fire ants around here lately,” he said. “All stirred up and angry about everything, ready to sting anything that comes close.”

  I agreed again.

  GRACIOUS LORD, AS I prepare for sleep, I remember your Providence and grace and care. I remember how you watched over your people Israel, how you delivered them when they were slaves in Egypt. I remember my Savior, how he gave his life and his blood for all of us. I remember your love for all of us, written in that very same blood.

  I remember all of these things, but I will admit that I am afraid. Sinner that I am, weak in the flesh, I cannot help but be afraid. Though I seek your peace and your calmness in all that I do, I find that my fears for my loved ones are strong. I am nothing, and I do not fear for myself. But Hannah and Sadie and Jacob are not me, and I love them so. I see that darkness is coming, and has come, and is all around us.

  Care for them, Father. Watch over us. Give me your peace, that I might have the strength that is needed for those we both love.

  In the Blessed Name of Jesus I pray, Amen.

  October 4

  The morning found the world again touched by a coolness, a blessed coolness. Not a chill, but an easing off. No longer summer, whispered the morning. No longer summer.

  With the animals fed and breakfast eaten, I hitched Nettie up to the buggy and waited as Hannah readied herself and Sadie for worship. Jacob walked along the path, dressed neatly, or as neatly as he can be. He grows like beans on a vine, that boy does. His pants seem always too short, his broadening shoulders straining his dark jacket, his hat just a tiny bit too small.

  I watched him, walking in the drive, aimless and thinking, kicking a rock through the dust. Still a boy, but not for much longer. I wonder, for a moment, about his running-around, about his rumspringa, just a few years away. How will he run around, if the English world is in tatters? I do not know.

  Nettie sat patiently in the harness, and so I walked a little myself, pacing down the drive. I could see, here and there, a whisper of yellow in the leaves of the big oak near the gate. Not much yet, just a hint, like the first speckle of pepper gray in a man’s beard. The rising sun played across the tree, catching it with that rich, warm morning light.

  And there, in the air beneath the canopy of the oak, I saw a single bright yellow leaf. It was not falling. It hovered, whirling, floating and bobbing and moving. It did not fall. It refused to fall.

  I watched it as it danced, defying the fall, a leaf that would not come to earth. It was magic, this leaf.

  A soft morning breeze rose up, and the golden leaf lifted upward, arcing back toward the branches that had cast it down. Like a fallen angel, repentant, straining back toward heaven.<
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  I knew what I was seeing, even though I could not see it.

  Attached to the leaf, defying my sight, beyond my human seeing, there was a single silver thread. That cord was there, though I could not see it, strong as steel, light as air. I knew this. It was woven by a spider, and fixed to the leaf, and fixed to the tree.

  That is why I was seeing a leaf that would not fall. I knew this.

  But it still seemed magical. Just like everything in our world.

  When she came out, I showed it to Sadie, who always loved such things. She hugged me, and planted a little kiss on my cheek.

  “Hope, Dadi,” she whispered in my ear.

  WORSHIP TODAY WAS LONG, and made the longer by Bishop Schrock’s preaching. But that it felt long did not mean that it felt unspiritual. We sang with fervor, and listened to his preaching, and even though it was long, it felt needed. We were hungry for it, for the comfort of our worship, for the songs.

  He talked and he talked, and his voice was dry and it did not vary. But there was something different in the tone and the way that he was speaking. Or perhaps there was not, and it just seemed so.

  He always does talk about the importance of staying strong in the spirit of calmness, of being dutiful and diligent in pursuit of peacefulness, of how important the many rules of the Order are for giving our lives joy and balance. I have heard the same words from Bishop Schrock in every sermon he has preached since Bishop Beiler became too weak to preach.

  He is like the sun rising in the morning, or the full moon coming in its turn. Always the same.

  But today, perhaps I needed to hear it in a way that I usually do not. When the world is wild and inconsistent, sometimes simple and consistent are a comfort.