Balm of Gilead

by Adina Senft

  “Gut.” Sarah nodded in sympathy. “After I get the washing hung out tomorrow, I’ll mix some up and bring it to you on my way to Ruth’s on Tuesday.”

  “You’re so good to me.”

  Sarah’s gaze faltered. “I still feel—after my mistake in trying to encourage you to leave the farm—”

  “And this will be the tenth time at least that I’ve told you that’s in the past and forgiven—if there was anything to forgive in the first place.”

  Since it was Sunday, and Ella had come down to greet the visitor and put the kettle on, their conversation turned to other things—the upcoming Council Meeting, what was left to pick in their gardens, the logistics of Linda’s mother coming from Strasburg over January roads when the baby was ready to be born.

  Sarah didn’t want to stay long because Linda needed to drink her infusion and rest, so she took the packets of tea out of her basket and set them on the table. “These ought to last you until Thanksgiving, and by then you’ll need a different recipe. I’ll ask Ruth what the best one might be and mix it up for you.”

  “Denki, Sarah. I appreciate it.” Linda glanced at her sister-in-law, who had turned away to cough into a handkerchief. “Maybe this week Ella could talk to you about something for that cough. She sucks the candies, but it doesn’t seem to help.”

  “I’d be happy to.” Sarah smiled, and to her relief, Ella smiled back with real friendliness. So the wall that had been between them, too, was finally down. “I know just the thing. I’ve been picking elderberries, so I can make you a syrup. Come by any day after tomorrow and I’ll have some for you.” It was with a sense of relief and gratitude that Sarah went outside to find the boys. The ability to help another was a gift—just like the warmth in Ella’s eyes had been for her. And the little gifts added up to a larger one—she would feel as though she could go to Council Meeting and take part in communion with a pure heart.

  “I’ll just go find my boys,” she said to Linda from the porch. “You go and rest—if Crist and Arlon are out here, the boys will be with them.”

  Linda leaned on the door frame, inside the screen. “I wouldn’t assume that—but if you see Crist, let him know I’m lying down. He was trying to get me to do so earlier.”

  The Peachey barn didn’t look like any other barn in the district. The milking parlor hadn’t seen a cow in years; instead, it had been scrubbed to within an inch of its life and turned into a shop. The loft above, which should have held a season’s worth of hay by now, was, as far as Sarah could see, full of pieces and parts that might someday come in useful. Washing machines, lawnmower engines, even what looked like a corn augur and a whole lot of crates that could contain anything.

  Having come into such unexpected success with the solar battery for the cellphone tower, the Peachey brothers were clearly deep into the next project, though Sarah’s unpracticed eye couldn’t tell what it might be among all the mess of machinery. What she could see was that the place was deserted except for a stray red hen that had somehow found her way inside. She picked her up and carried her out before she hurt herself on metal parts, and set her down in the grass with her flock behind a low fence.

  As she straightened, she heard voices. Not the deep ones of Crist and Arlon, but more familiar tones. Aha. The boys were out in the orchard.

  “I’m telling you, Yoder, she’s off limits,” came Benny’s disembodied voice. “She and Joe were holding hands, you said so yourself. That oughta give you an idea of how things stand.”

  “How they stand now.”

  “And you aim to change them? Just walk back into town and upset everything?”

  Somehow Sarah’s feet stopped moving in the grass, though she’d had no intention of listening. She still couldn’t see them, but the orchard was a tangle of unpruned trees and waist-high grass, branches reaching for each other and knotted trunks covered in lichen. The boys could be lying in the grass six feet away and she’d never see them. The scent of rotting windfalls mixed with the smell of leaves and the sharp tang of—Sarah glanced down—yarrow. Exactly what she needed for a tea for Ella’s cough, along with the syrup. She knelt to pick some of it and put it in her basket, peering through the stalks of grass and wondering where on earth the boys could be.

  “But she likes me. She has for a long time.”

  “And you had your chance. I had mine. And she turned both of us down when she started writing to Joe. I think you should leave well enough alone. I don’t even know why we’re talking about this—or about her behind her back.”

  “Because you’ve been here and I haven’t. I wanted to know how things stand.”

  “Then you should ask Priscilla and get the cold shoulder for your trouble. What about Rosanne Kanagy? She’s pretty cute—and she makes a mean blackberry pie. One of the best I ever tasted.”

  “There’s more to a girl than her cooking.”

  “I dunno,” came a laconic voice. Leon. “You live with one, you live with the other, seems to me.”

  “Nobody’s living with anybody.” Simon sounded a little disgusted at the young men’s failure to get the point. “I’m eighteen and I’m not ready to think about marriage. I’m not even ready to think about joining church.”

  Sarah’s heart missed a beat as her blood seemed to stand still in her veins. She got to her feet, looking more urgently through the trees. They had to be here somewhere—and not too far away, either.

  “Why not?” Benny wanted to know. “I’m going to.”

  “You are? This fall?”

  “Neh, in the spring. I already talked to Bishop Daniel about baptism classes.” A pause. “What’s the matter?”

  “I just never thought.” Simon’s tone sounded rattled. Unsure. “You and Leon seem to be having a pretty wild Rumspringe.”

  “Ja, but that comes to an end eventually, or you wind up like poor old Henry Byler, all by yourself without family or church or anything.”

  “He has family. Right across the highway. And he’s famous, from what Caleb says.”

  Caleb wasn’t with them? Sarah came to herself with a start. Enough was enough.

  “Simon!” she called. “It’s time to go.”

  There was a crackling sound, and the scrape of old lichen being stripped off a trunk by a man’s boots, and Simon slithered into view three trees away. She swallowed back the hundred questions clustered on the tip of her tongue, and merely said, “I haven’t seen you up a tree in a while. Is Caleb with you?”

  “Neh, he went to look at the tower with Crist.”

  Benny slid down, and on the other side, Leon swung from a branch like a monkey and dropped into the grass. Sarah smiled at them. “Hallo, boys. Find any apples?”

  “One or two.” Benny held one up—a half-eaten Golden Delicious whose skin was bubbled with brown russeting. “The birds have got most of what we left after we picked.” His face was blank, pleasant…the kind of face that any mother of teenagers recognized.

  Sarah said, “We’re going now, Simon. Find Caleb, please. I’ll be in the buggy.”

  She had done what she could. It would be up to the gentle leading of the Spirit now. And it was clear the Spirit was up to something. With an internal smile, Sarah hoped Bishop Daniel’s baptism classes were ready for Benny Peachey.

  Chapter 9

  Henry was carefully lowering the pumpkin pitcher into the kiln when the telephone on the wall over by the barn door rang. Another man might have jumped at the sound in the misty stillness of the early October morning, but another man didn’t have what might turn out to be four hundred dollars’ worth of pottery in his hands.

  He’d made sure the woodstove had been banked with a big chunk of wood in it last night, so that the barn stayed warm. Granted, the kiln heated to 1800 degrees, but he’d found it worked a lot better when it wasn’t struggling against a cold environment. Besides, when the greenware came out, it would need a gentler introduction to the outside world than the crisp rime of frost he’d found on the grass this morning.
r />   Since there was no electricity for an answering machine, the phone stopped after half a dozen rings. Henry forgot about it in last-minute adjustments to the contents of the kiln—a set of four plates, several mugs, and a batter bowl shaped like an acorn squash that suggested it might go rather well with the pumpkin pitcher—for those who could afford it. With careful movements of the separators, he moved the pieces until nothing touched and he was finally satisfied. He set up the cones that would melt when the kiln reached the temperature he wanted, and closed the lid.

  The Honda generator he’d found when he moved here in the spring had turned out to be quite the workhorse, and hadn’t failed him yet. As long as he kept its gas tank full, it ran like a champ to meet the huge demands of the kiln. He hadn’t had to rent space in someone else’s studio for the firing, which was a relief. The thought of trying to load bisque and greenware into the trunk of the car when so much was at stake with D.W. Frith gave him the willies.

  He’d no sooner returned to the workbench and pulled off his surgical gloves than the phone rang again. He flexed his fingers and winced with the pain as his skin cracked and began to bleed. There had to be a solution for this—the problem only seemed to be getting worse. On the sixth ring, he finally got to the phone. Ginny was expecting her family any second, so this was probably her letting him know they’d arrived.

  “Henry here.”

  “Am I speaking to Henry Byler, the potter?”

  Not Ginny. A man, late twenties, maybe. “Yes.”

  “Great. Henry, you’re a hard man to find. This is Matt Alvarez, with TNC.”

  “I’m not interested in buying anything,” he said cautiously. “And it’s a busy morning, so if you don’t mind—”

  “Wait—I’m not a phone solicitor. I’m a producer. Are you familiar with TNC? The reality channel? Shunning Amish?”

  “Is that a television show? If it is, it doesn’t make sense—the Amish don’t care if people shun them.”

  He laughed as if Henry had cracked a joke. “It sure is—number one nationwide on Wednesday nights. It’s about the ex-Amish—probably one of the most popular topics we’ve ever covered. We’re interested in doing a segment on you.”

  “What?” Henry started to run a hand through his hair, then realized it was the one smeared with blood, and he lowered it. Why on earth would anyone—

  “You’re an interesting man, Henry. My wife showed me the video about your pottery on the Frith site earlier in the summer, and it took me a couple of months to get the green light from the network. Then about six weeks to track down someone who would talk to me—or who knew where you were. Finally I got ahold of a guy called Dave Petersen, and he told me some of your story.”

  So much for protecting the integrity of the artist. “I’m sorry you went to all that trouble, Mr. Alvarez, but I don’t shun the Amish and I don’t want to be on TV.”

  “Henry—”

  “Have a good day.”

  Henry hung up before the guy could get out another word, and dialed the New York number he knew by heart. If Matt Alvarez tried to call back, he’d get a busy signal. Two birds with one stone.

  “Petersen—hey, is that you, Henry? Did the guy from TNC call?”

  “I just hung up with him.” Then he corrected himself. “On him.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. I don’t much appreciate you giving out my phone number to TV producers, Dave. Or anyone else, for that matter. I’d like your assurance that it won’t happen again.”

  “Come on, Henry, lighten up. There isn’t a person in the US of A who wouldn’t jump at the chance to be on TNC. They’re the number one rated network on—”

  “Wednesday nights—yes, so I understand. But I think in Whinburg Township at least, you’ll find a lot of people not only not jumping, but actively running away, me included.”

  “Henry.” Dave’s voice sounded so patient that Henry braced himself. “You’re not seeing the bigger picture here. Now, the response to your pottery has been great, and orders are coming in even better than we expected. Which is good for you, and us. But what we’d really like is a greater reach of awareness.”

  Henry sighed. Marketing people should speak a language that was easier to understand. Like Tagalog. Or Pennsylvania Dutch. “What does that mean?”

  “It means relative value. It means that if ten million viewers discover you on an episode of Shunning Amish on Wednesday night, your relative value goes stratospheric. It means that countrywide, people will be demanding your pieces. It means you’ll be one of the most famous ex-Amish people in the country.”

  “There are famous ex-Amish?” Who knew? But, he supposed, once a man left the church, he wasn’t obliged to practice Uffgeva or be demut anymore, was he? Though it seemed a strange way to court fame—for not belonging to something.

  Dave rattled off a couple of names that Henry had never heard, and went on, “The thing is, this will be your chance to tell the world why you left the church—and yet, how it still informs your art. Classic conflict, Henry. People will eat it up.”

  The urge to throw the phone out the barn doors was overwhelming, but it was on a long spiral cord and would only bounce back. Henry controlled himself and schooled his voice to calm rationality. It seemed to him to be the only way to counteract such rampant craziness. “Dave, for one thing, I didn’t leave the church, because I never joined it. And for another thing, the Amish faith doesn’t inform my art. If it did, I’d be making plain white coffee mugs and sauerkraut crocks like the one I made my cousin’s wife not long ago. The Amish don’t go for embellishment or anything that could be called fancy—and even you can’t deny that there is plenty of fancy going on in my pieces.”

  “Missing the point again, Henry. Okay, so you don’t want it to be an exposé. Fine. I get that. But what we need here is some exposure, and let me tell you, it doesn’t come any better than this—and at no cost to Frith, to boot.”

  “But why? You said the orders were coming in better than you expected.”

  “For now. Christmas is a-coming, the economy is up, and people are buying. But what about in January? If they do the filming this month, the episode will air early next year—right when the Christmas sales have fallen off and we need something to goose things along until the spring catalog comes out.”

  “Isn’t that your job? Isn’t that what Marketing is for?”

  “Yes,” Dave moaned dramatically. From the tone of his voice, Henry could imagine him pulling at his hair in despair. “Which I am trying to do as we speak. This is a terrific opportunity, Henry. Once in a lifetime, even. TNC won’t come knocking again. We can’t afford to turn them down.”

  Henry was silent. We? Really?

  “Tell you what,” Dave said, when it became obvious someone needed to fill in the gap. “Why don’t you sleep on it, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “There’s nothing to sleep on.”

  “Yeah, there is. A renewal of your contract, for a start. It was for the fall/winter season only, remember, with an option to renew in the new year.”

  “Dave…” Did he really have to be so heavy-handed? Henry was perfectly aware of the amount of time the contract covered.

  “I hate to bring it up, I really do, but you have to plan for success. Expect success. I know that’s not what the Amish do, or what you’ve been used to doing in Denver, but this is here and now and I want you to think about it. Talk it over with your fiancée. You never know. Maybe she watches TNC.”

  Henry gave up. “Fine. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. But my answer won’t be any different.”

  “Maybe not, but at least you’ll have given it a fair shot.” The smile was back in Dave’s voice, and for the first time, Henry wondered what kind of pressure was being brought to bear on the man from the people above him.

  Maybe when they spoke tomorrow, he’d ask him.

  * * *

  “TNC?” From around the dining table, four pairs of interested coffee-brown eyes pinned H
enry to his chair. “They want you to be on Shunning Amish?”

  Venezia grabbed Ginny’s forearm in excitement. “That’s my favorite show! Or one of them—right after Dancing with Celebrities and Own That Gown. I can’t believe someone I know is going to be on TNC!”

  Immediately after Henry had hung up on Dave, Ginny had called to let him know her parents and sister had arrived from Philadelphia. As he left the kiln to do its job, it was almost a relief to get away from the studio and what was becoming an unwelcome connection with the demanding world outside of quiet Willow Creek.

  How had he never noticed what it was like before? Had it been this bad in Denver?

  “I don’t think Henry has said yes to the press yet, Venezia,” Rafe Mainwaring told his daughter. “This isn’t the face of a guy who’s a hundred percent happy about the idea.”

  From the first handshake, Henry had decided that he was going to be lucky in his future father-in-law. Rafe’s balding head was fringed with grizzled gray hair, and he wore a tweed jacket whose obvious comfort complemented well-worn jeans. He was heavy enough to give his wife’s cooking a good testimony, but moved like a man who could waltz her around the room if he had the chance—which, Henry imagined, he would, at the wedding.

  When Henry looked at Donnée, Rafe’s wife, he could see where Ginny got her cheekbones and her wide-lipped smile. Ginny was the more voluptuous of the two sisters, though; Venezia favored her mother’s angular figure. They hadn’t even been in the house an hour and he wondered if there was a man on the planet who could keep up with Venezia. She was scary smart, which he supposed was a requirement for managing a sales force in the pharmaceutical industry. She had a frivolous side, though, it seemed, if she watched celebrity dancing shows—and if the sparkly dragonflies in her ears were any indication, she and Ginny had something in common outside of their gene pool. When they were teenagers, had they fought over who was going to wear what earrings?

  “Henry’s not the television type.” With the authority of long practice, Ginny cut the fresh gingerbread cake, dabbed a spoonful of real whipped cream on each serving, and topped it with tiny, jewel-like pieces of homemade candied ginger. Then she handed them around to her family, the biggest servings going to Henry and her dad. “And I’ve already seen what even the most careful supervision of the filming will do—nothing. Henry watched them film that Frith video, and still it came out almost completely inaccurate—showing what they wanted instead of what he is. Imagine what a TV episode would do.”