The Calling

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

“I guess he poked around Dad’s old records. He showed me their divorce certificate, and I copied down the return address on the envelope.”

  “Was she glad to see you?”

  “I wouldn’t say . . . glad.”

  “What would you say?”

  “Let’s just say it gave me some peace of mind to see her.”

  “That’s what I want too. Peace of mind.”

  “Bethany . . . you can’t unsee a thing once it’s seen, or unknow it once it’s known.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Just leave it alone. Remember her the way you want to remember her.”

  Well, that was the problem right there. She couldn’t remember her mother. The images were so mixed up they never made much sense, strange thoughts and feelings that flickered and were gone like moths darting at a lamp. She remembered someone humming a song. She remembered a black-and-white dog sleeping on her bed. She remembered playing checkers with another child—Tobe?—in a room that was dimly lit. She wanted to know more. “Would you at least give me her address?”

  He shook his head. “I’m trying to protect you as best as I can.”

  “I don’t need protecting. I need answers.” She put the water bucket down. “I just feel so mixed up inside. I’m trying to make peace with things—Jake, Dad’s death—but I feel like I can’t move forward, not in anything, until I get some things sorted out.”

  Tobe was silent for a long, long time. “I’m sorry, Bethany. Like I said, some things are just best left alone.”

  Shootfire! Everybody seemed to think they knew what was best for her.

  Mim had responded to Stuck’s letter by telling her just what Danny had said—that a life could be transformed by God, if a person were only willing to ask for help. The newspaper didn’t want to run something so overtly religious, Bethany said, after a brief meeting with the features editor, whom she thought was small minded and unimaginative, so Mim went ahead and mailed Mrs. Miracle’s response to Stuck to the return address on the envelope.

  The features editor did tell Bethany one interesting thing: the column was getting a lot of attention and he was thinking about expanding it from once to twice a week. Bethany said she smiled at him and took full credit. “Here’s this week’s mail pouch,” she said as she tossed the manila envelope on Mim’s bed.

  It was twice the size of last week’s batch.

  “I bought more stamps for you while I was downtown.” She handed Mim a roll of first-class stamps. “You’re not going to make any money if you mail letters to people. Just because the newspaper isn’t printing them, it doesn’t mean you have to answer them.”

  “I know. I just want to.”

  Bethany sat on the bed. “What are these poor saps writing to you?” She put a hand out to reach for the manila envelope, but Mim grabbed it.

  “You’re being mean. Don’t call them poor saps. They’re just people. All kinds of people. And you can always read the column in the newspaper. It’s not a secret.”

  Bethany tilted her head. “Isn’t it?” She jumped off the bed and crossed the room to the door. “Sure hope you know what you’re doing, Mim. You could get into a heap of trouble for this if anyone catches on that you’re masquerading as Mrs. Miracle.” She closed the door behind her.

  Masquerading? How insulting. People needed to write to Mrs. Miracle and she felt compelled to write back. She turned the manila envelope upside down on her bed and let the letters spill out. She picked up a letter and opened it:

  Dear Mrs. Miracle,

  My name is Peter and I am in the sixth grade. When I talk, I stutter. Yesterday I tried to order a large coke at the movies. I said to the counter guy I would like a lllllllllllllllllarge coke. He looked at me as if he thought I was mental. It was very embarrassing. That kind of thing happens a lot to me and I take a lot of teasing.

  Sometimes it feels that my mouth is stuck in a traffic jam and nothing can move.

  Will my stutter ever go away?

  Yours truly,

  Peter

  Mim remembered a boy with a stutter from her old school. She could still see the pain on his face as he tried to get some words out, with children snickering all around him. This boy grew quieter and quieter, until a new teacher arrived in the middle of the year and put a stop to the teasing. She came up with all kinds of strategies to help this boy. Mim remembered a book report he read on the last day of school . . . without a single stutter. She would never forget the look on that boy’s face when he finished the report—like he had scaled Mt. Everest. Mim tapped her chin with her pencil . . . what were those strategies the teacher gave to that boy? Oh yes! She remembered.

  She pulled the typewriter out from under her bed and set it up on her desk. Then she took a fresh sheet of paper and fit it into the roller.

  Dear Peter,

  I have some tips that might help the next time you are in a situation that makes you feel anxious, like ordering a large coke at the movies or giving a book report in school.

  1) Say the words in your mind before you say them out loud.

  2) If you have to give a talk in front of your class, avoid looking at any one particular person. Look above the heads of the other students and focus on something in the back of the room.

  3) Take up singing. Stutterers normally don’t stutter while singing. It will help you build confidence.

  4) Try not to put pressure on yourself. One of the things that makes stuttering worse is anxiety.

  I hope those ideas might help you, Peter. And I also hope you will not let anyone’s teasing cause you to stop talking.

  Sincerely,

  Mrs. Miracle

  Mim pulled the letter from the typewriter and scanned it for typos. She was a stickler for typos. Satisfied, she carefully folded the paper in three sections and placed it in the folder to be returned to the Stoney Ridge Times.

  Being Mrs. Miracle was a wonderful job.

  Mim glanced at the alarm clock on her night table. She had time for one more letter before she needed to go to bed. She was waking up extra early this summer so she could join her mom on pre-dawn walks up in the hills. It was their special time together, just the two of them, and she loved to have those moments with her. She flipped through the pile of new letters and saw one with Stuck’s unique scrawl. She ripped it open.

  Dear Mrs. Miracle,

  It was nice of you to send a letter to me but I am sorry to say you are dead wrong about God. He doesn’t exist. If he did, my mother would not have killed my father. She would not be spending her life in jail. If there were a God then someone on this earth would care about me.

  Don’t bother praying on my account. It’s just hot air hitting the ceiling.

  Signed,

  Stuck

  Oh, boy. Being Mrs. Miracle was a difficult job.

  When Sammy and Luke galloped past Bethany as she hung laundry on the clothesline, she hollered at them to stop. “Where’s Tobe?”

  “In the barn!” Sammy said.

  “Hunting for something,” Luke added. Then they both vanished through the hole in the privet.

  Galen King, she thought, was a saint to put up with those boys underfoot.

  Bethany finished hanging her dress on the clothesline—a blue one—and she stopped for a moment, watching the dress flutter in the gentle breeze. She was always drawn to the color blue and she couldn’t say why. The color gave her a feeling of calm and safety. One of the eagles flew overhead and caught her attention, silhouetted against the sky. Maybe she loved the color blue because it had something to do with the vastness of the sky. Endless, permanent, predictable.

  She still had bedsheets to wash and hang on the line to dry, but she wanted to talk to Tobe while no one was around. She walked down to the barn and, once inside, was hit with a blast of pungent moist air: hay and horses and manure. She blinked; it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimness and she heard footsteps above her head. She found Tobe in the hayloft, amidst a sea of opened boxes, dusty o
ld trunks, broken furniture waiting to be repaired. “Tobe, I’ve given this a lot of thought. I want the address for Mom.”

  He looked up at her. “You’re not going to get it from me.”

  Bethany crossed her arms over her chest, furious. “Shootfire! You seem to be keeping a lot of information to yourself these days!”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Rose said, as she emerged up the hayloft ladder. “I have two questions for you, Tobe, and I’d like the answers.” She climbed to the top and leaned against a haystack. “Why did you run off last year, and why did you come back?”

  Tobe didn’t answer her, but his eyes looked a little frightened when Rose asked him those questions, or perhaps only surprised. Like a cottontail caught in a sudden beam of a flashlight.

  Rose walked closer to Bethany and Tobe. “Tell me what you’re looking for.”

  He kept his eyes fixed on the ground. His hands were clasped together; Bethany saw them tighten involuntarily. “Just something I left behind. Bethany said that most of the things in the basement got moved up here when you started the inn.”

  Rose looked around the dusty hayloft. “That’s right. The inn has kept me so busy, I haven’t had time to organize anything. It’s on my to-do list.” She brushed some hay off a barrel top. “Tobe, are you looking for something that has to do with Schrock Investments?”

  “Maybe I should leave,” Bethany said.

  “No,” Rose said firmly. “Bethany, it’s time you understood the bigger picture.” She turned to Tobe, who had turned his attention back to the barrel. “I want an answer: are you looking for something that has to do with Schrock Investments?”

  Head down, he stilled. “There’s nothing more to be done with the business.”

  “No, that’s not true.”

  He snapped his head up to look at Rose. “The Amish Committee is paying people back. The other investors have already gotten their money from claims. It’s going to be okay.”

  “But that doesn’t answer the question of why the business started to fail in such a fast and furious way.”

  He shrugged and started to go through the contents of the box in front of him. “It was the economy.”

  “It was more than the economy. You know that . . . don’t you?” It wasn’t really a question Rose was posing. “Tobe, if you’re in trouble, I can help.”

  He startled. “What makes you think I’m the one who’s in trouble?”

  “You disappeared for a reason. My guess is that you were frightened. Maybe you thought something was going to be discovered. Something you had done wrong. So you panicked and left.”

  “Is that true, Tobe?” Bethany asked. She had assumed he had left because he felt like she did, tired of the whole business of failure.

  He turned away from Rose and Bethany and opened up another box. “I left because the business was going under and there was no reason to stay.”

  Rose slapped her hand down on a trunk so hard the dishes inside it rattled. Tobe jumped. Bethany’s eyes went wide. “No! That’s a lie!” she said. “You need to stop lying to me! You and Jake Hertzler did something to Dad’s business. This isn’t going to go away, just because you hope it’s all over. It’s not. Life doesn’t work that way. You’re in serious trouble with the law, Tobe.” The words echoed and echoed, into the barn rafters.

  She surprised Tobe so that his face flushed. He looked at Rose now as if he’d never seen her before. “What makes you say that?”

  “There is a lawyer with the Securities Exchange Commission who wants to talk to you.”

  “There’s no reason! I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t.” Tobe stared at Rose, silent, then his chest shuddered with a deep sigh. He slid to the ground, his back against a pole, and covered his face with his hands. He started to cry. Rose crouched down on the floor with him and held him in her arms, the way she held Sammy and Luke when they were little, until he pushed her away. “It wasn’t my idea,” he protested, his voice breaking on the last word so that he sounded as guilty as he seemed. “It was Jake’s. He falsified bank statements so it looked like we had money when we didn’t.”

  Bethany heard the words but it was her brother’s anguished face that broke her heart. A panic gripped her chest so tightly that she thought her heart had stopped beating. She kept discovering new things about Jake that seemed impossible to believe. “How? Why? Why would Jake do such a thing?”

  Tobe rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. “He said it was to help Dad out. He said that if Dad and I could just keep getting new investors, there wouldn’t be any problem. He kept reassuring me that everything was okay.”

  “How did you find out he falsified bank statements?” Rose said.

  Tobe wiped his face with both hands. “Jake usually deposited the checks at the bank. One time, Jake was at the dentist so I deposited for the day. I checked on the balance and saw that it had dwindled down to practically nothing. That was when I first thought that something fishy was going on.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell Dad?” Bethany asked.

  Tobe looked up and his hard gaze met hers like a blow. “I was going to! I wanted to. But when I went back to the office, Jake was there, so I showed him the bank balance and asked what he knew about it. He told me that he knew all about it—there was less money in the bank than Dad thought there was, but he knew Dad was having heart problems. He didn’t want to worry Dad, so he just changed the statements that he showed him. He said not to tell Dad, not to put him under any more pressure, that things were going to be fine.”

  “And you believed him,” Rose said, but in sadness, not anger.

  “I was worried about Dad. Jake said he had enough stress. I wanted to believe him. You remember how tense Dad seemed, and he never slept, and how his heart was beating too fast.”

  Bethany remembered. She used to hear her father’s footsteps downstairs as he paced in the middle of the night.

  “Jake wanted Dad to concentrate on getting more investors. He said it could be a very short-term cash flow crunch, if we could only go out and get more investments. Jake had a way of explaining things that made it seem like a good idea. So I went along with him.” He picked up a piece of straw and rubbed it between his fingers. “Then the house was foreclosed on and we had to move to Mammi Vera’s. Things kept getting worse, not better. So Jake told me he had figured out a way to buy a little more time until the economy improved.”

  Rose was stunned. “Did you not realize he was setting up a pyramid scheme?”

  Tobe shook his head. “Jake kept saying it was a short-term solution. Just to buy some time.” He dropped his chin to his chest. “It was the simplest thing. Strangely simple. Jake just whited out the address and account number, using other investors’ statements, typed the right address and account number, and then made a copy so you couldn’t see that it had been changed.”

  “And Dad had no idea?” Bethany asked.

  Tobe shook his head. “It gets worse.” He crumpled the straw and tossed it away. “Checks started bouncing right and left. As word leaked out, shareholders started to try to liquidate, which only made everything spiral out of control. Dad was advised by the bank to declare bankruptcy so they could try to control the implosion and figure out what had happened. That was when Jake showed me that he had been keeping a second set of books. He had given Dad the cooked books. Jake had the real books, the real story—Schrock Investments was running out of money.”

  Rose rubbed her face. “Then the ones Dad handed over to the SEC were falsified books?”

  Slowly, Tobe nodded. “That’s right. I was in the office on the day the subpoena was delivered to Dad. He was told that shareholders had organized a lawsuit against Schrock Investments. That was when I started to panic. I took the second set of books and I hid them in the basement. I just needed to get away for a few days, to think. To figure out a plan of how to tell Dad what Jake and I had done.” He put his forehead on his knees. “And then Dad died. I couldn’t come back. I just cou
ldn’t. So I ran. I ran as far away from here as I could get.”

  “Es is graad so weit hie as her,” Rose said. It’s just as far going as coming.

  Tobe squeezed his eyes shut. “I was only trying to protect Dad. He must have known what I had done. He must have figured it out.”

  “Probably so,” Rose said. “He was very upset the night before he died. He left the house and said he was going to go fix everything. I didn’t know what he meant by that. The next thing I knew, the bishop and police arrived to let me know Dad had drowned.”

  At the mention of her father’s death, Bethany suddenly felt aware of how hot and stuffy it was in the hayloft. She felt as if she was having trouble getting a full breath of air. She walked over to the open hayloft window and tried to get some fresh air.

  “So,” Rose said, all calm and matter-of-fact, “you only came back because you heard that the Amish committee was going to reimburse people for what they lost?”

  “Yes.” The word had come out of Tobe almost like a gasp. “I thought it would be safe. I thought it was all over.”

  “Are you looking for ledger books? For the accurate books?”

  “I’ve looked everywhere! I’ve been combing this hayloft for two days. I can’t find them anywhere.”

  Bethany’s head snapped up. “I gave them to Jake.”

  Tobe stared at her. “You what?”

  “He was here a few months ago. Jake told me you were in trouble. He said you needed those books. I thought I was doing something to help you.”

  He let out a short, bitter laugh. “Jake scores again.”

  “Tobe, we need to talk to the SEC lawyer,” Rose said. “Allen Turner is his name. He’s been looking for you for the last year.”

  His head shot up in panic. “You would turn me in?”

  “I’m not going to tell Allen Turner anything. You’re going to tell him. Everything.” Out of Rose’s pocket, she pulled Allen Turner’s business card and handed it to Tobe.

  His face crumbled. “I can’t do it. I can’t. You don’t understand.”

  “I understand that life doesn’t give you many moments like this. You have a very long life ahead of you. But how you handle this situation will decide the man you’re going to be from now on. The man God wants you to be.”