Clouds Without Rain

by Gaus, P. L.

  The sheriff’s black-and-white 4x4 was stopped in the passing lane beside the produce truck, door hanging ajar. Another sheriff’s unit was parked at the top of the next hill, turning cars back toward Walnut Creek. A cruiser from the state highway patrol came past the roadblock and pulled in behind Robertson’s 4x4.

  Branden stepped over to his pickup, reached in under the seat, pulled out binoculars, and turned the dial back to a full wide-angle view. He turned momentarily to check on the line of cars and trucks that had stacked up behind him and saw that his roadblock was self-regulating, as some cars turned back to find another route.

  When he first held the binoculars to his eyes, black smoke filled the eyepiece. He trained right and found the bottom of the overturned cab, its front wheels hanging awkwardly in the air, the driver motionless on the ground. He moved the binoculars up and left and found Robertson waving the state trooper closer to the fire.

  Robertson pushed toward the fire with his forearm over his eyes and reached Deputy Schrauzer’s cruiser. Branden cringed as he saw the sheriff start to work at whatever had pierced the windshield, struggling to pull it back out with his left hand, while he tried to steady Schrauzer with his right hand through the driver’s-side window.

  The fire in front of Robertson flared violently, and Branden, startled by the massive orange fireball, sucked in air through his teeth and stumbled backward. There was a shattering crack of glass as flames expanded out and upward. Robertson turned his back and bent low beside the cruiser, shielding himself from the flames. But after a few seconds the big sheriff lumbered up onto the hood of the cruiser, and the trooper dashed up to take charge of Schrauzer, still pinned in his seat. As writhing gasoline flames spread toward Robertson, the sheriff pulled what looked like a tight bundle of wooden poles out of the windshield. He tossed it onto the pavement beside the cruiser and climbed down from the hood. Shirt ablaze, he helped the trooper drag Schrauzer out of the cruiser and along the pavement, away from the flames. Once Schrauzer was clear, Robertson threw himself onto his back and rolled from side to side, while the trooper beat at the flames with his hat.

  There was another flare-up over the burning car, and Branden heard the first squad’s sirens out on the high Walnut Creek hill. The ambulance crested the hill, sped into the valley, and went directly past the trucks to where Robertson and the trooper crouched beside Schrauzer, who was laid out on his back.

  Branden watched as the highway patrolman began to help Robertson out of his uniform shirt, still smoldering. Robertson bent suddenly backward and appeared to cry out in pain as the shirt stuck to the skin on his back. A paramedic hurried forward and cut the shirt loose from patches that had fused to ugly burns on the sheriff’s skin. Nancy Blain, in jeans and a T-shirt, stood back from the sheriff, snapping photos for the Holmes Gazette.

  A team of paramedics loaded Schrauzer into an ambulance and headed back toward Millersburg. Robertson turned and surveyed the crash scene, as a paramedic from a second squad tended burns on the sheriff’s back and arms.

  Branden watched Robertson, bare-chested, directing fire department volunteers to the burning car, with pieces of his uniform shirt clinging to his back. The sheriff took a step toward the fire, and the paramedic pulled him back by the arm. Gratefully, Branden sensed that Robertson then seemed content to stand back and let the squads do their jobs.

  The first fire truck to arrive had started laying foam on the burning car. Nancy Blain darted here and there among the wreckage, taking photos with her black Nikon. Up on the hill behind the wreck, the professor trained his binoculars on the ground at Robertson’s feet, then in wider circles on the ground in front of the semi. In every direction on the opposing hill, both on the pavement where Robertson stood, and sprayed over the vehicles and terrain not directly damaged by the impact of the crash, Branden saw a vast scattering of black fabric and wooden splinters. Back up the hill there lay a thin axle. Smashed and twisted buggy wheels lay in the ditch beyond, two of them still attached to a second bent axle. The largest fragment of the buggy lay in the field at the edge of the road, some twenty yards away from the cab of the semi. In its tangled mass, Branden made out the torn and twisted fabric of Amish attire. Nancy Blain’s slender figure came into view, as she aimed her camera at the buggy. She lingered for several shots there and then stood and began firing off frame after frame as she pivoted full circle in place.

  A second pumper arrived on the scene. Having extinguished the fires at the car, the firefighters ran their heavy hoses out into the burning fields and sprayed a broad arc of water on the outlying ridges of fire burning through the crops. Branden looked again for Robertson, and found him kneeling beside the road, near the overturned cab of the truck.

  He was holding the head of the downed horse by its bridle. The horse’s back legs had been mauled by the impact, and the right hind leg was torn loose at the hip. The horse’s coat was matted with blood and its flesh was ripped open, exposing the bowels. The front legs of the horse pawed uselessly at the air. Branden saw Robertson draw his sidearm and point it at the head of the horse. There was a puff of smoke at the muzzle, followed abruptly by the report of the gun, and the horse lay immediately still.

  2

  Monday, August 7

  4:30 P.M.

  PASTOR Cal Troyer crested a hill on a gravel lane south of Walnut Creek and turned left into a crushed stone driveway, where a two-story white frame house with a green roof stood in the lee of a mature stand of blue spruce mixed with wide oak and tall hickory. He parked his old gray truck off to the right of the drive, where a small patch of gravel normally was occupied by a buggy. Out of the barn to his right, two teenage boys drove a pair of draft horses hitched to a manure spreader, waved briefly, and turned toward the field beyond the trees.

  On the lawn at the side door, Cal greeted two small children, a boy and a girl, about four or five years old, splashing in full Amish garb in a round plastic toddler’s pool. They stopped when he spoke to them, but, obedient to their teaching, they did not reply.

  He stepped up onto the small porch, rapped his knuckles on a wooden screened door, and was admitted by a young girl in a long purple dress and a white cap, who let him in and kneeled immediately to sweep a small mound of dust into a dustpan on the gray wooden floor. Behind her, the floor into the kitchen was bright and clean, and before Cal took another step, she caught him gently by the sleeve, produced a weak smile, and pointed to his shoes. Cal nodded, untied his white cross trainers, and slipped his feet out of them, saying, “Is Andy Weaver staying here?”

  The girl stood up with her dustpan and broom, said, “For a spell,” and pointed the end of her broom handle toward a door on the other side of the kitchen. She had never met Cal Troyer, but recognized him from stories of his long, white hair. Like everyone in her community, she knew of the preacher’s reputation as a friend to her people. She stood respectfully and studied his powerful arms and large carpenter’s hands. He thanked her in a gentle voice and stepped over his shoes.

  In the kitchen, uncomfortably warm from the wood stove, a mountain of rising dough nearly two feet abreast and a foot high lay on the open door to the oven. In a corner behind an icebox, another daughter was scrubbing the floor with a damp towel wrapped around a pine two-by-two board, switching from one side of the board to another as each became soiled.

  Cal asked again for Andy Weaver, and the teenager said, “On the back porch.”

  Cal pushed through the heavy walnut door the first girl had indicated and entered a large dining room with several china cupboards and a round dinner table with ten chairs and one highchair. The only other door in this room led to a moderately sized sewing room, where three women—eldest daughter, grandmother, and mother, Cal guessed—sat leaning over a square wooden quilting frame. As they took small stitches in the ornate patchwork of cloth, only the mother looked up from her work.

  Cal asked, “Andy Weaver?” and she wordlessly nodded toward a screened door behind her.

 
; The door led Cal to a long concrete walkway connecting a Daadihaus to the main house, and on the porch of the little house, Cal found Bishop Andy R. Weaver sitting on a three-legged stool, mending tack, or rather holding it in one hand while he gazed, lost in thought, at a distant fence line.

  Weaver’s hair was pushed down over his ears by a battered straw hat. His shirt was dark blue, and his trousers were of denim. His long gray beard fell loose and uncombed on his chest, and he was shaved around the mouth, though some stubble was evident.

  “Andy,” Cal said, and approached. Weaver turned, saw Cal, and rose to offer his hand happily, saying, “You’re white, Cal,” indicating Troyer’s shoulder-length hair and full beard.

  “Been a long time, Andy,” Cal said. He shook his old friend’s hand and added, “So it’s Bishop Andy, now.”

  Weaver nodded self-consciously and said, “Thought I had gone to Pennsylvania for keeps, Cal. Take a walk?”

  Cal retrieved his shoes, and the two strolled through a swinging iron gate and along a rusted fence bordering a sunbaked field of hay. The bishop’s old straw hat was broken open at the front of the crown where he had pinched it so often, putting it on and taking it off. His vest hung limply over rounded shoulders. The leather of his boots was split and scuffed, encrusted with patches of dried manure.

  Cal drew a pair of sunglasses from his shirt pocket and put them on. After they had walked a ways, he said, “What made you decide to come home, Andy?”

  Weaver stopped, stuck his thumbs in his suspenders, and studied his boots. He kicked at some dirt, looked at Cal somewhat ambiguously and said, “They’ve all promised to change.”

  “And your brother?”

  “So, you remember.”

  Cal nodded and Weaver said, “He’s been out for a long time, now.”

  “Bishop Yoder kicked him out?”

  “Should have,” Weaver said, passing judgment.

  Cal’s fingers toyed with his long white beard. He stood thinking silently in the bright sun about the old days, about the crusade against cults that he and Weaver had organized some years ago. After a moment, Cal shook loose from his memories and asked, “They’re all going back to Old Order?”

  Weaver shrugged unhappily. “Not all. I lost one family already.”

  “I doubt you’ll lose that many more.”

  “The rest are waiting to see how I’ll rule on various things.”

  “They asked you back to help after Yoder died?”

  “The most of them did. A few holdouts, I suppose,” Weaver said.

  “But you’re bishop now. They’ll align themselves under your authority.”

  “People here have gotten too far along into modern ways, Cal. Getting back to Old Order will be hard.”

  “They all knew you well enough before you quit for Pennsylvania. Wouldn’t have asked you back if they didn’t mostly want Old Order.”

  “You don’t know how far gone Yoder let the District get.”

  Cal reached down, plucked some dry alfalfa, and stuck it between his teeth, waiting for Weaver to continue.

  “Think about it, Cal. We’ve got at least three neighborhood phone booths out by the roadsides where no one person can be said to actually own the things. Some have secret phones in their barns, and I can’t tell you how many have cell phones tucked under pillows. I’ve even got two families who own vans. They each hire drivers, but they still own the vehicles, for crying out loud.”

  “They’ll get rid of it all, if you tell them to.”

  “The old ways are disappearing, Cal. It’s the kids more than anything. They won’t have farms the way things are going. Right now, there are at least nineteen of them working in shops or stores. Some restaurants, too. For as long as six years in some cases. They’re not going to be able to farm. Probably not marry in any traditional way, either.”

  “Shops seem to be the way to go, these days,” Cal offered.

  “They’ve got too much idle time on their hands,” Weaver complained.

  “Are you going to go to the sheriff with those other bishops? About the drinking parties?”

  “The sheriff can’t stop our young people from drinking, Cal.”

  “It’d be a start,” Cal offered.

  Weaver shook his head soberly. “It’s the cult, Cal. After all these years, it’s still that cult.”

  Cal nodded, cast his eyes at the ground, and kicked up dust angrily, remembering the problems he had faced in his own congregation, when the thing had first gotten started. He and Andy Weaver had crusaded against it throughout the county. In the end, all they could do was to expose it, and keep their own people from mixing in. After that, Andy had moved away, Cal had tended to his own congregation, and the cult had grown quietly to the point where it seemed that everyone in Holmes County knew about it, without feeling the need, in these more liberal times, to stand against it. Live and let live, is what they all would say. Who’s to judge, anyway?

  “I judge it,” Cal thought to himself, and looked back sternly at Weaver. Revulsion for the cult sank deep furrows into his brow.

  Andy peered into Cal’s narrowed eyes, laid a hand on his shoulder, and said, “It’s bigger now, Cal. More powerful.”

  “And you think some of your people are mixed in?”

  “Don’t know yet, but I’m afraid so.”

  “Mike Branden is working on some robberies that might tie in with this.”

  “I know. I’m going to ask for your help again, Cal, when I know more.”

  Cal fell silent and thought about the difficulties they would face. “This will prove dangerous. Busting it up altogether.”

  “I don’t intend to take on the whole of it, Cal. Just get my own people out. We don’t stand a chance of getting back to true Old Order until I accomplish that.”

  3

  Monday, August 7

  6:30 P.M.

  SHERIFF Robertson was laid out, face down, on one of the metal hospital beds in the emergency room of Joel Pomerene Hospital in Millersburg. His large chest and belly sprawled over the white sheets, and his shoulders bulged over the metal railings on either side. His burned arms hung limply down and his shins hit the metal bar at the foot of the bed. The nurses had stacked two pillows there to soften the edge.

  The nurses had also re-hung the IV lines that the paramedics had started, and now a regulator box clicked on a pole next to the bed, as fluids were pumped into Robertson to combat dehydration. They had also strapped his face with a clear blue plastic oxygen mask, and Robertson’s head hung over the front edge of the bed, face down.

  When he had first arrived, Robertson had insisted on sitting upright on the edge of the bed while they scrubbed the tattered and melted strips of his uniform shirt out of the second- and third-degree burns on his back and on the backs of his arms. He had made a nuisance of himself by taking his oxygen mask off to give orders to the nurses about who’d be coming in to see him and how soon he’d be needed back at the accident scene. Then the first doses of morphine had begun to wear off, and the nurses had convinced him to lie down on his stomach so that the doctors could tend to his burns. One of the doctors had called for another dose of morphine, and the nurses had pushed enough to sedate an average-sized man. Still, he lay awake on his stomach, grumbling about the procedure through his mask. He tried to sit back up, but an ER nurse kept him pinned on his belly. When Lieutenant Dan Wilsher arrived, Robertson was fighting with the nurse to remove his oxygen mask again.

  Lieutenant Wilsher pulled a metal chair up to the head of the bed and sat to face the sheriff. He took one of Robertson’s hands, partly to help the nurses, and also to let the sheriff know he was there. Wilsher was dressed in street clothes, but his badge was out on his belt, and his face and white shirt were smudged with soot.

  Robertson immediately asked, “How’s Schrauzer?”

  “I’m not sure,” Wilsher lied.

  Robertson scowled and said, “Get me a report, Dan. I’ve got to know.”

  Wilsher answ
ered, “I will, Sheriff, but you’ve got your own problems to worry about here.” He looked back and winced at the scrubbing that was underway on Robertson’s back and arms.

  A doctor had a scalpel out, cutting skin loose where it was stuck to bits of tattered cloth. One nurse kept a flow of cool saline on Robertson’s burns, and another applied ice packs to those areas where the skin was only pink. The darkened skin on Robertson’s back had swollen considerably, and near the ugly splotches of third-degree burns, another doctor was cutting shallow lines into the flesh. A third nurse dabbed with a saline swatch at the open wounds to clean them.

  Wilsher grimaced and said to Robertson, “We can handle this, Bruce. You’re gonna have to stay here for a while.”

  Robertson groaned and shook his head. “Going back out there tonight. Something’s not right.”

  Wilsher said, “It’s OK, Bruce. We’re doing everything that can be done. Even setting up portable floodlights for night work if that’s what it takes.” Relenting slightly, he reported, “The car is a total loss.”

  Robertson asked, “Casualties?” His voice sounded muffled through the mask. He tried to lift his head to see Wilsher more directly, but couldn’t quite manage the angle.

  “A young fellow died in the car,” Wilsher said. “He’s local. We’ve got some identification from the license plate, and the family is being asked to come in.”

  “Won’t have a solid ID until Missy Taggert has a look,” Robertson said. He shook his head lightly from side to side, remembering the smoke and tremendous heat from the flames.

  Wilsher opened a small spiral-bound notebook and said, “There were three others there, besides Schrauzer. Jim Weston in one truck, a Mr. Robert Kent in the second pickup, and Bill MacAfee driving one of his produce trucks. We’ve got preliminaries from all three.”