“How’re you doin’?” I ask softly, knowing the answer. She nods sadly, and I brush her cheek with the back of my fingers, wiping a solitary tear from her red, swollen cheek.
Her breath is irregular, but I can hear that her lungs are tired. Her voice is scratchy, soft. “Hannah, I...I don’t know if he’s gonna make it.”
“Don’t say that, Rebecca, he will make it, he will! He wakes up for a while, the doctor said he...”
“The doctor doesn’t understand,” Rebecca says, eyes beginning to drift off.
Uh-oh, I hear myself say. I’ve seen that look before.
The madness.
I ask, “What doesn’t the doctor understand, Rebecca?”
“That thing out there, that bear...it is a demon...”
“Rebecca...”
“Like a curse on this town, on this family. Why do you think it struck in the months just after we arrived.”
“Coincidence.”
“There are no coincidences,” Rebecca says in a whisper that’s fast becoming razor sharp, wielded in anger. “Whether we brought it here or not, it’s not going to go away. And as long as it’s out there, we’ll never be free. Beau won’t get better, we won’t get married, and...”
“Rebecca, you’ve got to stop talking like this! Get a hold of yourself! It’s just a bear! The game commission is after it now, they may have killed it already!”
“They won’t kill it,” she says, eyes staring off again, voice slow, almost hypnotized. “They can’t kill it.”
I say, “Rebecca, they’ve got dogs, and equipment, and special all terrain vehicles. If anybody in the state can get the bear, they can!”
“No.” Silence follows Rebecca’s expressionless reply.
After more quiet than I can stand, I have to ask, “Why are you so sure, Rebecca?”
Then she turns to me, head moving slowly, eyes finally locking on mine. Her expression is quite blank, however, her eyes not so much looking at me as looking through me. She says, “Only one of us can kill it.”
“One ... one of us, one of our family?” Reading her blank stare as confirmation, I have to add, “Why? It’s not our problem to solve, Rebecca.”
She looks back at Beau, lying on the bed, hovering between life and death. Machines hum behind him, one beeps steadily. Then she looks back at me and my blood runs cold.
“It is now, Hannah.”
CHAPTER FIVE
I get home in time to help Gramm with the dinner. The roasted chicken fills the kitchen with the smell of rosemary and garlic, the rustic scent is warm and nurturing. But I can’t enjoy it. The steam from the asparagus spears clouds up hot and white, but I can’t relish the feel of it on my face.
What brings me joy now is Simon. The horrors of Rebecca’s sorrow at the hospital, the idea of being in her position, picturing Simon in that bed, so close to death; it reminds me of how fragile life is, how quickly it can all be taken away. And I know Simon was on that hunt too, by Beau’s side, in essence. It could easily have been him who’d gone over that ridge first and been hit by the bear. So easily. Only the grace of God could have put Simon where he was, and Beau where he was, or a fluke. But either way, my husband is here with me now, once more working nearby building the new schoolhouse. He’s alive, and when he comes home and I wrap my arms around him and kiss him and squeeze him so tightly, feeling him squeeze me too, then I’ll be whole again.
But not until then.
Finally, Simon steps through the door and I turn, crossing the kitchen in two healthy strides before meeting him in the middle of the living room and throwing myself into his arms.
I relish the familiarity of his smell, the thick ropes of muscle under his skin. He holds me as tight as I’d spent the last few hours anticipating, his nose rubbing against mine as we kiss, sharing that unique exchange. Each kiss being like a snowflake, entirely unique, so no other can share or could ever share such a kiss as this one.
Simon asks, “Is everything okay? No bad news from the hospital?”
“No, he’s holding on,” I say. “With God’s help, he’ll pull through.”
Gramm nods from the kitchen. “With your help, I cook.” I turn, chuckle, and we both follow her back into the kitchen to finish chatting while we prepare to serve the meal.
I can’t help but ask, “Any word...on the game commission and their progress in the foothills?” But I know the answer. If there had been good news, Simon would have mentioned it by now.
He confirms my suspicions. “They’ve got dogs, copters, suddenly there’s not a bear in sight.”
“You think you might not have injured it in that first hunt like you thought? Maybe it’s cleared out of the area by now.”
Simon considers, glancing at Gramm, who shakes her head grimly. As we carry the food to the dinner table, he finally says, “It’s possible that the bear’s left the area, I suppose. Unlikely if its a female with cubs.”
I say, “Rebecca, she seems to think...” I let the words trail off, Simon and Gramm looking at me expectantly. Deciding to keep Rebecca’s growing madness out of the conversation, for reasons of her privacy and my practicality, I go on with, “...She thinks they’ll get the bear soon.”
Simon nods and he and Gramm dig into their roasted potatoes, so good with the rosemary and garlic chicken.
But to me, the food has no flavor at all, the garlic no scent, the cider no tang. My relief at being reunited with Simon, the love of my life, is pushed back by my new concern for Rebecca, who shares my life’s blood.
I’m not a superstitious person, and I don’t see the bear as an omen or a curse. But I do see how Rebecca can be seeing it this way. Our family has long been living in the shadows of horror, our family madness, the generational rejection we get from our neighbors, the anger and despair that isolates us from others and then separates us from one another. I can visualize the personification of all that pent-up misery, that chronic malady, leaping out at us from the wilds of our collective past. Like the madness itself, I can imagine it looming ever nearby, threatening to take any one of us in its horrific clutches, pulling us away from the lives we know, devouring us in mind and heart and soul as much as in flesh and bone.
But I can see the difference; I know that similarity is not sameness, that fantasy is not reality. But I’m afraid that Rebecca increasingly cannot tell one from the other. And that is what madness is - her madness, which she only barely escaped a few short months ago. She’d been to the edge of sanity and nearly toppled off into the abyss but for the love of a good man. But she never came that far back from the precipice, never far out of the shadow of that family curse.
I know the madness may be overtaking her again, preventing her escape, recapturing her in its dark den. And if she loses Beau, she’s certain to lose her mind. And there’s nothing I can do to help her this time.
* * *
Samuel Thompson, in the mean time, has taken refuge at his brother’s house, where my Daed lingers to help console the crumbling, crippled little man. He sits with his face in his hands.
Daed doesn’t say anything, just standing in the corner of the room, watching the brothers work the problem through.
Samuel says, “I know she’s horrid, I’ve known it for years. But she’s the mother of my son. And she’s the wife I took, before God and before my community. I...I don’t mind for myself, but I won’t disgrace the community, or God...”
“We’re not talking about that,” Olaf says, not needing to put the word into the room. “But you’ve got to get a hold of yourself, Samuel, and of your household.”
Daed clears his throat, commanding their attention. Once he has it, he says nothing, releasing a heavy sigh before shaking his head slowly and clearing his throat again.
Olaf says to Samuel, “Samuel, if your life is comfortable for you how it is, then simply return to it.”
“Comfortable? Every minute of my life with her is like chewing clam shells.”
“Then assert yourself,” Olaf s
ays. “Tell her you won’t be treated that way! You can’t let her slap you down in public, Samuel. And if you’re ready to do that, at least be ready to accept the consequences. There are always ramifications, Samuel.” Olaf turns to Daed with a small smile. “Hannah just taught us all that quite clearly, eh? A fine girl, fine girl.” Olaf turns back to Samuel and says, “She stood up to all of us, the whole town. And if she can face down five hundred people, well...it's a lesson we can all take to heart, eh?”
Samuel begins to sniffle a bit, holding back his tears. “You’re saying I have no more courage or strength than a little girl?” Daed clears his throat again, this time a wordless correction. I am not a little girl, no matter how much older than me somebody else may be. Samuel goes on to say, “What am I to do? Raise my fist against her, against a woman?”
Especially not that woman.
Samuel ignores my Daed’s mildly disgusted expression, lips tight in his frown. “I can’t change her. I’ve tried, but...she is who she is.”
“What about you?” Daed finally asks. Samuel and Olaf look over at my Daed as he steps closer to them. “What are you?” Seemingly beguiled by the question, the confused Samuel has no answer.
But Daed does: “Are you a mouse, as your wife claims, or are you a man?”
“Well now, Hyamm,” Olaf says, “shooting a bear and striking a woman are no measures of a man.”
Daed reaches out and, in a flash, grabs Samuel by the collar, lifting him to his feet. Daed says, “No woman would stand between me and my boy if he were in that bed, if she were the child’s mother or the virgin mother of the Christ child himself. But you come here and cower?” Shameful silence fills the room. Daed gives Samuel a little shake and ignores Olaf’s quick plea to release his tiny brother. Daed adds, “You can at least walk through a doorway, can’t you? Well, can’t you?”
Samuel stands limp, he begins to cry, face bending in a sorrowful mask. Daed shakes him again, now yelling, “What’s the matter with you? What kind of man...?”
But Daed stops himself. He stands, clutching this sobbing little man, helpless in his clutches. But it’s easy for Daed to imagine his own son in that bed, the son he never raised and hardly knows, the son he hopes to become closer too. The son he could just as easily have lost.
And he knows what kind of man can be weak, and fail to rise against his own weakness. Daed knows all too well the maddening doubt that can suppress a man’s actions, cloud his judgment, and render him helpless in the face of an oncoming assault. Any man can reach that point, at which everything he’s tried to accomplish falls in on him, and everything he’s tried to be proves ineffectual and even ungodly.
Olaf eases his way between the two men, and my daed releases Samuel and steps away. Olaf bids my father a good evening, and Daed realizes he’s said too much, gone too far. He nods his way out of the Thompson house, uncertain that he’ll ever be invited to return.
* * *
I make some Whoopie pies for the first time in a while. I intend to take them to Beau at the hospital, for his folks and his friends and mostly (to be honest) for my sister, Rebecca. I’m being sent to drag her home, but I’m not very confident I’ll be able to wrench her from her beloved’s side. It’s been so long that she’s been alone, it took her so long to find him, I can see that she can hardly stand to part with him now, even for a few minutes. During the funeral she was distracted and she went right back to the hospital at the first opportunity.
It’s an odd experience, making the Whoopie pies. I retired from making them to sell, but I did reserve the right to keep making them for myself and my friends. But the experience just seems different now. It has always been a personally fulfilling thing to make the pies, like an artist creating a work of art. I often felt like a musician playing some elaborate musical instrument; the swish of the spoon through the cream was like the whirl of fingers tracing circles around the strings of a harp, the tap of the spoon against the bowl providing a thumping percussion.
But now it’s just an empty experience. Now it’s just stirring marshmallow and cream, cake batter in a bowl. Not like before, or cooking a meal for Simon, these things I do just don’t seem to resonate the way they used to. Simon’s absence, Rebecca’s worries, these things are hitting me harder than they ever have, harder than I ever would have expected. Is it the nearness of death? I wonder. Is this a change of life, the unavoidable transition into adulthood and all its terrible responsibilities?
No, I have to contradict myself. I know instinctively that it’s not true. Flavor, sense of smell, these are not merely the provinces of the young. It’s not that, I tell myself. It’s something more. Something worse.
Something I can’t escape.
Things are changing, that’s for sure. What part of me is changing, I have to ask myself, and will it ever change back?
* * *
Around that very same time, Lilly comes into the hospital with her parents to visit Beau. They sit out in the waiting room, praying together as Lilly shuffles into the hospital room. Quiet, meek, Lilly pokes her head into the room.
“Rebecca, hi.”
Rebecca looks over. “Lilly.”
A tense silence fills the room before Rebecca finally must say, “Please, come in.”
Lilly steps into the room, her eyes falling on Beau. Her expression reads sorrow, pity, the precise things Rebecca doesn’t want or need to see. There is none of the old spite left in Lilly, only simple sorrow and genuine care.
“They say he may be waking up soon, that he’s been coming around throughout the day.” Rebecca just nods. Lilly goes on: “We saw his folks out front, that’s how I know...they also say that...that you’ve been here practically ‘round the clock.” Rebecca nods again. She’s not looking for applause. Lilly adds, “I understand how you feel. If it were me, I guess I wouldn’t leave my man’s side either.”
Rebecca looks at Lilly with new eyes, suspicion and lingering resentment melting away. “I am sorry, by the way, about Jessup. If I haven’t had a chance to say so...”
Lilly tries to smile as she puts her hand on Rebecca’s. Lilly almost speaks, but words and strength fail her. Finally, she manages, “I know your Beau will be okay. Maybe...maybe my Jessup is on the other side, helping to convince Beau to come back to you. Not that he would need any convincing, of course, but...you understand my meaning?”
Rebecca doesn’t quite, but she nods anyway. She asks, “Any news?”
Lilly clears her throat, the sorrow not pushed away by her feeble gesture. She says, “No sign of it, or its cursed offspring, if there are any.”
Rebecca lets a bittersweet half-smile occupy half her mouth, the other half dipping in a knowing, downward curl. “They’ll never find it.”
Lilly considers, the hum and beep of the machines underscoring Beau’s strained breathing. Lilly says, “To me belongeth vengeance and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.”
Rebecca looks at Lilly with an even fresher perspective, something like respect. She says, “Deuteronomy, 32:35.”
Motionless but for her trembling lips, Lilly goes on: “If I whet my glittering sword, and mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to mine enemies, and will reward them that hate me.”
Rebecca nods, the words sinking into her own heart, her own mind. “32:41,” she says.
Lilly’s voice grows stronger, as if she senses Rebecca’s willingness, her readiness. “Rejoice, O ye nations, with His people.”
Rebecca considers, understanding what Lilly means, and what she intends to do.
Lilly adds, “For He will avenge the blood of his servants, and will render vengeance to His adversaries, and will be merciful unto His land, and to His people.”
Rebecca looks deep into Lilly’s eyes, and Lilly into hers. There is total clarity between them, each foreseeing the same outcome, the necessary outcome, the only outcome.
* * *<
br />
My Mamm is busy with chores around the house, cleaning mostly, as Abram steps in from several hours cleaning the barn. “Don’t track that dirt in,” she says, “I just cleaned the floors!”
Abram tiredly pulls off his boots and carries them outside to set them on the porch. He turns and crosses back toward the closet and pulls out a broom and dust pan. He starts sweeping the floor.
“Oh, let me do that,” Mamm says, taking the broom and doing the sweeping. “You have a rest there.”
“I don’t want to get dirt on the couch.”
“Don’t you sass me, Abram Schroeder!”
“I’m not sassin’...”
“Then you just sit, I’ll take care of the sweeping.” With a shrug, Abram sits down and releases a long sigh. “Hard day?”
“Barn needs repairin’, that’s hard work.”
Mamm nods. “Well, I know you’re doing a fine job of it, Son. Your Daed and I appreciate it.” Abram smiles, but says nothing, leaving my Mamm to keep sweeping. But there are some things she can’t sweep away so easily. She says, “So, that was quite a show you put on at Hannah’s TV show debacle those weeks back. With the eggs?”
“Thanks, Mamm, I...I didn’t think I could pull it off as well as I did, to tell you the truth.” After a humble little pause, he adds, “and if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Why should I mind? I’m proud of you, I want you to be able to take some pride in the things you do well, in the person that you are.” More awkward silence passes between them, before Mamm clears her throat and adds, “Are you still thinking of becoming a performer?”
“Tell you the truth, Mamm...”
“Of course I want you to tell me the truth.”
“Well, I’m trying to.” A smile and a nod later, Abram asks, “I really was going to, up until last year. Then I decided, y’know, what kind of way is that to make a living, juggling on the street?”
My mamm can’t describe the relief that flushes through her. She doesn’t dare.
Whoopie Pie Promise - Book 3 (The Whoopie Pie Juggler: An Amish of Lancaster County Saga series) Page 7
