by Laura Bickle
He gestured to the stack of books. “Interesting reading material.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I tried to read your Ausbund, but my German’s really bad.”
“You speak some of it?”
“I did take it in high school. Don’t remember anything but bits and snatches. But I recognized the Lord’s Prayer.”
“Ja.” I nodded. “That’s the one I think we use most.”
“Read Revelations in the Bible again. Depressing.”
I put my back up against the wall, curled my arms around my knees. “Do you think that’s what’s happening? The Rapture?”
“If so, it would be a funny kind of Rapture, with all the holy folks kept on earth, don’t you think?”
“I suppose. But it still feels like the end.”
“Since neither one of us contemplates God having a perverse sense of humor like that, I’m gonna have to stick with ‘don’t know’ as an answer. At least until the Four Horsemen show up. Then I’ll revise my opinion.”
“Do you . . . do you believe in God?” I asked. Everyone I knew did, even Outsiders like Ginger, but I couldn’t tell if Alex did.
His eyes narrowed in thought. “I think I do, after a fashion. I’ve just never had any personal experiences with a god. God has never spoken to me like he apparently spoke to Joan of Arc. I’ve never seen an angel or gotten a warm, fuzzy feeling in a church.”
“God has never spoken to me, either.”
“No angels?”
“No.”
“How about the fuzzy feeling in church?”
“Sometimes, when we’re singing. It feels like there’s some kind of spirit there. It’s hard to explain. You can feel it moving through you, buzzing around you. It’s like . . . when the locusts come up in summer, and you can feel the vibration in the ground.”
He seemed to chew on that for a while, handed the jar back to me. “Most cultures do pick one or more deities, so the prevalence of the idea suggests that it could be real.”
“Hmm. It wouldn’t be easy to follow the edicts of more than one god. One is difficult enough.” I couldn’t believe I’d said that aloud, but here, in the small circle of light in the falling darkness, I felt like I could be honest.
Alex plucked a comic book from the stack. “Wonder Woman has a whole pantheon to please.”
“Well, not all of them. Ares isn’t usually too happy with her.”
“Ares was like that. He was the god of war. That was his shtick. But Athena and Aphrodite and Hera have her back.”
“It’s all fiction anyway.”
“Hera and Aphrodite were gods that people actually worshipped for centuries.”
“I could never imagine that.”
“Imagine having a pantheon of gods?”
“Well, that. That and being able to call upon a god and . . . and to have them help you.” My voice sounded very small.
“Yep. A lot of older Western religions tend to buy into the idea that God is the clock-maker. He sets the clock of the world in motion and then steps away from it. He created the world and let it run.”
I rested my chin on my hand, considering. “Ja. I think that’s what we believe.”
“A lot of old pagan religions and some of what I call the shake-your-pocketbook forms of Protestantism believe that God can be appeased or bribed to grant favors. There’s a whole idea that God is really concerned with personal happiness and he’ll make you happy and shower you with riches if you tithe enough.”
“We don’t take up collections, except on rare occasions. Baptisms, yes. Money goes to buy church benches and things like that. When there’s a death or when someone’s house burns down, yes. The money then goes to the family or for building materials.”
“Yeah, but you Amish don’t have a physical church with big television screens and sound systems and a pastor who feels that God wants him to have a Mercedes. You guys don’t have to support all that.”
“Hmm. I can’t see how God would need money.” Nor could I imagine what place a television would have in a church.
“Yeah. That’s my issue with a lot of organized religions, anyway.”
I lifted a dubious eyebrow to him. “But Ginger says that many different religions were saved.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Sounds like it. But if the human race survives, I’d be tempted to see if there’s any statistical analysis done on whether megachurches were safe from vampires. To see if God really is indiscriminate.”
“Will you also include the pagan church in the strip mall?”
“Yep. I’d study that. See if yelling, ‘Hera, help me!’ actually worked against the vamps.” He put his wrists together as if flashing magic bracelets against an assailant.
I smiled. “It worked for Wonder Woman.”
“Yeah, well, Hera had a lot on her plate. I’m amazed that she had time to spend helping Diana out.”
“Well, being queen of Mount Olympus must have had a good deal of responsibility.”
“There’s that, sure. But I think she was busiest keeping an eye on Zeus.”
“Oh?” I’d never seen Zeus appear in the comic books.
Alex scraped the bottom of the empty applesauce jar to get the last of the cinnamon from the bottom. “Zeus was a ladies’ man, always chasing women and siring illegitimate children. He’d even go so far as to take the form of a swan or bull to seduce women.”
“Ew.”
“Yeah. That’s how he got Hera. He took the form of a wounded cuckoo, one of her favorite birds. She felt sorry for it, picked it up off the ground, and the next thing you know, Zeus is up her skirt and on her.”
I wrapped my arms tighter around my knees. “Lovely.”
Alex continued, “Zeus was never satisfied with having one woman. He was really the scariest serial rapist of the ancient world. He had dozens of children with other women: Hercules, Aphrodite, the three Fates, Apollo and his sister Artemis, Perseus, the three Graces, all nine Muses . . . he was a busy beaver.”
I shuddered. Though the Amish had many children and did not use birth control, we didn’t violate one another like that. It seemed the very definition of evil.
“Hera was understandably the jealous sort. She was the goddess of marriage and unable to keep her own marriage together. She heckled Hercules for years, starting with sending serpents to kill him in his crib. When Zeus loved Lamia, a queen of Libya, Hera murdered her children and turned her into a monster.”
I squirmed. I was a bit uncomfortable hearing this, these tales of other gods. But I convinced myself that they were simply fiction. Like Wonder Woman. None of the Greek gods were swooping in to save the earth from vampire attacks. But the thrill of hearing this bit of blasphemy quickened my blood.
“My favorite myth about her, though, was the story of Io. Io was a priestess of Hera who’d caught Zeus’s wandering eye. Io wanted nothing to do with him and rejected his advances. Zeus then sent the oracles to pester Io’s father, who eventually kicked her out of the house. Poor Io was walking through the fields alone when Zeus came upon her and tried to seduce her.
“Hera very nearly walked in on this. To avoid being caught, Zeus transformed Io into a very beautiful white cow.
“Hera, however, was familiar with Zeus’s shape-changing tricks and demanded that Io be given to her as a gift. Zeus was stuck between a rock and a hard place; he handed the cow over to Hera.
“Hera, determined to keep Zeus and his would-be mistress separated, gave the cow to a giant named Argus the All-Seeing. Io was chained to a sacred olive tree at one of Hera’s temples. Argus was a pretty good guard, since he had a hundred eyes and never closed all of them. He could sleep with a few of them open at any time.”
“What happened to Io? I mean . . . I imagine that Zeus moved on to the next conquest.” I rested my chin on my knee. No one had really told me stories since I was a child. I knew all the old biblical stories by heart. This was new. While reading was a common pastime among Plain folk, that interest rarel
y extended into fiction. The dogs ambled in and lay beside me. Perhaps they liked the rhythm of Alex’s voice. I thought that he would make a good professor.
“Well, Zeus ordered the messenger god, Hermes, to kill Argus. Hermes showed up to the tree in the disguise of a shepherd. He managed to lull Argus to sleep by speaking magic incantations, then slugged him with a rock, killing him.”
“And Io? Was she free?”
“Eh. She was free but stuck in the form of a cow. Hera sent a gadfly to harass her for the remainder of her days and prevent her from resting. So, Io wandered until she came to the ends of the earth. For the ancient Greeks, that was pretty much as far as what’s now Turkey. Zeus transformed her back into a woman when Hera wasn’t looking. She conceived a daughter by Zeus’s touch. Io gave birth in secret and hid her daughter with a nymph who raised her while Io continued to flee Hera’s wrath.
“Io continued to run—ran as far as Egypt. Pimp-daddy Zeus came by and laid the golden touch on her again—bam!—and she’s pregnant with child number two. She gave birth to her son, Epaphus, in the Nile. Hera found out about this one. She had the boy abducted. But Io persevered. She searched far and wide to find him in Syria.
“By this time, Io had had truly enough of the Greek gods. She returned to Egypt and swore them off, asking instead for the protection of the Egyptian goddess Isis.”
“Isis was gentler than Hera, I’d guess.”
“Yep. Isis was a mother and nature goddess. She was all about love and kindness. Isis took her in. Io became a priestess of Isis and married an Egyptian king. She never came back to Greece.”
I sat in silence when Alex wrapped up his tale. I absorbed the whole of it, then blurted out: “That’s terrible.”
He smiled. “Those were the old gods for you, though. Wrathful. And this was how Hera treated one of her priestesses, one of her most fervent followers, who never wanted anything to do with Zeus. The part that amazes me is that it took Io so long to renounce them and switch to Team Isis. I guess you stick with what you know.”
“Ja,” I said. “You do.”
“Yeah. But the thing that I like about the story is that Io eventually gets her happy ending. I don’t know of another myth in which one of Zeus’s mortal women gets one. And she does it through sheer determination. Perseverance.”
He lapsed into silence. I stared up at the flickering lantern. Darkness had fallen soft and thick around us. The Singing was over by now, and I would be expected home.
“I should be getting back.” I stretched, stood, reached for the lantern. I felt bad taking his only good source of light. “My parents will be missing me.”
“I can walk you back,” he said.
I looked at the wound still angry on his temple. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea.”
“I’ll go with you part of the way.” He reached for the flashlight in the pile of his meager possessions and put it in his pocket. His sleeve hiked up as he did so, and I saw a black mark on his forearm.
I reached for his wrist. “Are you hurt?”
He shook his head, smiled. “No.” He rolled his sleeve up farther for me to see. “It’s a tattoo. See?”
The black mark stretched across his forearm, up to his elbow. It looked like something architectural, a stepped tower. I squinted at it, holding my lantern high.
“What is it?”
“It is a moment of folly from spring break one year. You might consider it my own Rumspringa.” He rolled his eyes at his own foolishness. “It’s called a Djed pillar. The backbone of the Egyptian god Osiris.”
“So you do believe in a god.” My skin crawled at the idea of someone worshipping those wrathful gods of fiction—for real. I dropped his wrist.
“Maybe abstractly,” he admitted sheepishly, rubbing at the tattoo.
We walked toward the mouth of the barn. I doused the lantern as he pulled the door shut.
“Osiris is a good god? Like Isis?” I wanted to believe that there was some nugget of good in Alex.
“Actually, he’s the husband of Isis. Unlike the tumult of Zeus’s relationship with Hera, there was no infidelity or jealousy between them.”
The sky was overcast, and I could smell rain coming. The night was soft and thick as lampblack, blanketing the field. I think that the crickets could sense the rain too; I couldn’t hear them.
“That’s something, at least,” I said, walking beside him. Some beauty in the fiction.
“Well, they weren’t without their challenges. Osiris was assassinated by his brother, Set. His body was torn into pieces and thrown into the Nile.”
“Again, your myths are terrible.”
I could see his teeth shining white in the darkness. “But this one has a happy ending too. Isis picked up the pieces of his body from the Nile and put him back together. Osiris was resurrected by his wife and became god of the dead and rebirth.”
I shuddered. There was something sinister about the idea of a god of the dead. “And you were moved to put his symbol on your arm?”
He shrugged. “I was going through a tough time. My grandfather had died, and I didn’t want to believe in the permanence of death.”
I thought about that. It was, in its way, similar to how Elijah was coping with the disappearance of his brothers. Trying to fight against the permanence of death. But I didn’t understand why Alex would choose something so . . . dark.
I pointed at a light in the distance. “That’s my house.”
He squinted at it. “Okay. I’ll watch from here . . . at least, as far as I can. To see that you get there.”
I smiled. “I don’t think you’ll be able to see much of me in the dark.”
He pointed to my white prayer bonnet and apron. “I can see you for longer than you think.”
This discussion seemed like a useless display of chivalry. If there were vampires in our midst, we’d be ripped to shreds. But it seemed like a bit of ordinariness that was sorely needed.
“Good night,” I said to him.
“Good night, Bonnet.”
I walked into the darkness. I felt the splash of a raindrop against the bridge of my nose. It woke me up from that dreamy world of myth and magic I’d let Alex lead me into. I shook my head. Blasphemous stories. I should not have listened to them, the voice of the obedient Good Girl in my head insisted.
But I was not sure that I wanted to listen to that voice right now. I wanted to crawl into bed and let today go. Release it. Pretend as if it didn’t exist.
I scanned the fields as I walked. I did not see any other people coming back from the Singing; it was too dark to even see the cattle in the fields. All I could see were the shadows of trees and the lighter shadow of grass.
Something moved. I froze. I thought I saw a flash of something pale flitting at the edge of the tree and the field. It could have been an apron, a white shirt. It could have been the white horse. Or it could have been . . .
I sucked in my breath and ran.
I sprinted toward the light of my house, scrambled up the back steps. I paused with my hand on the doorknob, scanning the blackness behind me.
I saw nothing.
Maybe it was my imagination, the guilty force of too many dark stories in my mind.
I closed the door behind me, leaned against it, and prayed.
Funny how the Lord’s Prayer was the first thing to come to mind when I was afraid, even in all my rebellion.
I was a hypocrite. When the roof came down, it was going to fall on me first.
Chapter Fifteen
By morning I had talked myself out of the flash of white I thought I’d glimpsed last night. I’d chalked it up to my overactive imagination, ignited by grief and fed by dark stories of old gods that no one except Alex believed in anymore.
I’d gone straight up to bed, pulling the braid out of my hair and the covers up to my chin. When I came down to breakfast, my mother spooned extra oatmeal into my bowl, as if she sensed my unease.
“Elijah came by looking fo
r you last night,” my mother said.
Across the table, Ginger nodded approvingly.
I hastily filled my mouth with oatmeal so I wouldn’t have to talk. “Mmmph.”
“Ruth Hersberger was with him,” Sarah chirped, poking at the slices of apple on top of her oatmeal with her spoon.
The oatmeal scalded my tongue, and I took a swig from my glass of milk.
Ginger lifted her eyebrows. “Isn’t that Joseph’s girl?”
I swallowed, set my spoon down. “She was.”
My mother and father traded looks down the length of the table.
“How did the Singing go last night?” my father asked.
I stirred my oatmeal and watched the steam rise from it, not meeting his eyes. I was about to be caught in a lie if I wasn’t careful. I didn’t know what Elijah had told them. I settled on a partial truth. “I left early. Went to go sit with the dogs.”
“Elijah and the Hersberger girl said that they were concerned about you.”
“Oh?” I gritted my teeth.
“They said that you seem very emotional lately. That perhaps you might benefit from more prayer and devotion to the Ordnung.”
“It’s the end of the world,” Ginger blurted. “Isn’t she entitled to feel a bit out of sorts?”
My father and mother both shot her startled glances.
“Well, maybe it would be good for her to find some comfort in the word of God,” my mother began, her voice tense. Plain folk would try to be diplomatic, but they did not brook any interference in child rearing. I wondered if Elijah had told them about the makeup.
My hand tightened around the spoon, and I set it down. “May I please be excused to begin my chores?”
I felt the weight of my father’s gaze heavy on me. “All right.”
“Thank you.” I grabbed my bowl and scurried away to the sink to rinse my dishes out. I could not bear their concern or conflict between Ginger and them. And I was furious at the idea of Elijah strutting up to my house with that fickle tart and telling my parents what was good for me behind my back. I clawed at the crust of oatmeal on the inside of the bowl as if it were Ruth Hersberger’s face.
