Gazing over the stilled silence of the crowd, he sneers and snarls and growls like a wolf at the door, and that’s precisely what he is. But this time, the wolf is in the house facing outside instead of hovering outside looking in.
Mamm says, “Hyamm...please...” She holds her hand out to him and says, “It’s time, please...long past time.”
I can say no more than that, so I watch with the others and wait for his moment of truth, hoping he’ll see it for what it is.
A blessing.
But, as he so often did when faced with a blessing, my daed could see only a curse, and he seemed determined to live it out. He says, “You people...you’re strangers to me, all of you.” He turns his attention away from the throngs behind us to me and my family, my new husband, my mother and siblings. Daed adds, “All of you! You’re strangers to me and I’m a stranger to you! Respect my privacy in future and stay well off my property.”
He turns and steps back into the dark, empty prison that his house has now become and, it seems, will always be.
No, I tell myself. Not now, when I’m so close! I’ve healed the family almost in its entirety. I’m not ready to turn away without a final attempt to complete God’s will and reunite the Schroeders once and for all, in our own eyes and in the eyes of the community.
And of God.
I step away from my huddled family and toward the house. “Hannah, no,” Rebecca says, her worry echoed in the arched eyebrows and little frightened frowns of our other family members.
“It’s okay,” I say calmly. “I have to go.”
I step toward the house and Simon follows. I stop and turn, holding my hand against his chest to thank him.
And to stop him.
He says, “I’m your husband, my place is by your side.”
How I love him for saying that! And though I know he’s correct, it doesn’t change the fact that what I now have to do, I must do alone.
As if reading my mind (again!) Simon says, very gravely, “I won’t let you go in there alone.”
I smile, my hand on his cheek, my eyes glancing heavenward. “I won’t be alone.”
Simon seems to understand, and he nods and steps back, allowing me the room and the freedom to make my own choices, and to follow them through. And so, with little choice and no second chance, I take those fateful steps toward the house I’d been thrown out of, a place where I am not welcome and where I probably do not belong.
I pull the door open and step inside.
CHAPTER NINE
The shadows are long on the walls, there is a thick stillness in the air. My footsteps against the wooden floors leave empty clacks to echo in the vacuous old house, no other sounds answering mine.
“Daed?”
Again, no answer. I begin to wonder if I’ll ever find the answers I seek. Or any answers at all. But it doesn’t stop me from trying, and it never will.
“Daed?”
“Go away,” his voice croaks out from the shadows. I take a few more steps, inspiring his voice to growl even louder. “I said go away!”
The silence dangles, ready to fall away. All it will take is a single breath. The breath of life.
I say, “I will, if that’s what you want. All you have to do is tell me.”
More silence, more curious quiet, before he asks, “Tell you what?”
“No, Daed,” I say, finally spotting him sitting in a chair by the drawn shades in a corner of the living room. “Tell me why.” He looks up at me, his face a mask of grim shame and prolonged agony. But he says nothing. So I take another step toward him, another step away from a safe escape back out to the comforting embrace of those I know love and accept me. “Why, Daed?”
He growls a bit, a caged animal who is too tired to launch that final, fateful attack, trapped and cornered and already giving up its sense of dominance, ready to be devoured by its predators after a long and noble struggle.
The hunt is over.
He says, “She was our first.”
“No,” I say, my voice very low and cool, lacking in the emotion he no doubt expects. But those are the sounds of a person struggling for control, and I am not one of those.
I am in control here, and Daed is slowly demonstrating his frustrated understanding of this fact. As my power grows, his slips away, to reveal ultimately that he never had any real power at all.
Daed says, “It’s tradition to...”
“No, Daed,” I say with greater force, unwilling to be lied to and even more unwilling to allow him to go on lying to himself. I have the choice of turning away and leaving him behind, but I know he does not have that same choice.
And I want to help him, if I can. If not, I still want him to help himself.
He knows that it is for him to say these things, and I now believe that he has come to understand exactly what it is that he has to say.
The truth.
It is the truth as he’s never seen it before, as he must struggle to understand and may never be able to accept.
But it is the truth, and now he must face it.
But he doesn’t have to face it alone.
Then the words come, slowly and painfully, squeezed out from the pressure, of this moment and of all the others that have come before it, finally piling up and crashing down upon him with the full weight of their regret and accumulated misery.
“I...I...” the words leak out of his throat, heavy with a lifetime of sorrow. “I... I knew Rebecca was fragile, prone to...to it.”
“It?” I ask, the answer coming to me too late to stifle the question. “You mean...?”
“The madness,” he says.
I take another step toward him, drawn in by this new and intriguing, albeit very troubling information. “There is a madness in our family?”
He nods, as if embarrassed to even put it into words. “I’ve always known it. Your granduncle didn’t just...change in the last few years. He’d always been that way, given to nights of raving alone in the dark, going about touching every doorknob in the house twice before leaving the house...back when he still would leave the house.”
Wait, I say to myself, I’ve heard of this. Obsession...no, obsessive compulsion, or something?
To my daed, I say, “But that can be treated...”
“I did it the way I felt best,” he says. And I know his aversion to doctors and lawyers and police and other outsider institutions; he’s not alone in the Amish community in that regard, not by any means.
“Your sister,” he goes on, words coming slow and scared, “she was always very pretty, as you know, but delicate. I knew I had to marry her off, to a good man, a man who would stay with her and treat her right even when the madness overtook her. Even one of us, from the Old Order, might run away from such madness, never mind what some New Order boy would do when he found out what kind of woman he married.”
So you didn’t turn them away because they weren’t well enough respected in the community, I realize, but because you didn’t think they would stay through the hard times. It was their character, not their families or their position.
My daed says, “It wasn’t easy, but, y’know, we don’t get divorced like the outsiders, and I couldn’t trust Rebecca to make such an important choice on her own. And the longer it took, the more difficult it was bound to be, and the more difficult it proved to be.”
“Oh, Daed,” I say, recognizing the sympathy in my voice and instantly sorry for whatever pity it may convey. That’s the last thing I want to express and absolutely the last thing he wants to hear.
And, to prevent me from showing more of that dreaded compassion, he goes on: “You, on the other hand, your brother, I didn’t see the madness in you, that...that weakness, that fragility. I knew you’d be able to fend for yourselves, make your own choices, probably better than I could do for you. But, for that to happen, I had to be a little harder on you. With Rebecca, no amount of labor was going to harden her; she’d never be able to cope, I knew that. But you and Abram, you could if
you were prepared. And it was my job to prepare you.”
My stomach sinks in me, a cold stone. I’ve hated him all these years, even as I loved him, yet I never understood him. I never even gave him the chance to explain, not that I ever expected him to. But there was an explanation all this time, and that was something I never even allowed for, much less pursued.
He isn’t the only one to blame, I now know, and will always know.
Daed’s body begins to quiver a bit, hunched over in a way I’ve never seen. He drags his fingers backward through his hair, then presses them against his eyes. His mouth twists with his increasing agony.
“Daed?”
“But I failed; I failed you all, I know I did.” His voice is a thin rasp now, pushed out past his clenched throat, little enough breath to give it any volume at all. “I wanted to protect Rebecca and deliver her to a good man, and I failed. I wanted to raise you and Abram to be strong and ready, but I never raised you at all. I bullied you into adulthood, I know that now. I...I never wanted to do that, Hannah, I...I’ve always loved you and your brother, even more than...even more than life itself...but never any less than I loved your sister!”
I find myself closer to him now, feet carrying me to his crumpled body, spine curling forward to hide his head in shame. But I reach down, my hands gently pulling his chin up to face me, to see my smile, to drink in the calm love I feel flowing from my eyes and my brain and my mind and my soul.
It’s God’s love, I realize, traveling through me and into him, blessing us all.
He looks up at me, red-faced and tear-streaked, lips quivering, eyebrows arched - a helpless child, a lost boy. I bring his head close to my body, letting his cheek rest against my waist. He reaches up with his massive, tired arms as if barely able to lift them. I stroke his grainy, thinning hair as I draw his head closer in and he wraps his arms around my waist. I hug him and he returns it, the pressure of his strength growing around me as he squeezes tighter. His love, so long withheld, overflows now - from his tears into my wedding dress, from his arms into my body and straight to my heart.
“Okay,” I say, calm and reassuring, “it’s okay now, Daed, it’s all going to be better now.”
And as much as I wanted to ease him, my words only bring louder sobs, more tears, a tighter squeeze around me. After years of resisting, he is now unable to stop pouring all that love into me, from every crevice of his body and from every dark corner of his soul.
We don’t rush the moment. After all these years of our emotional distance, I am so happy to let him express himself, and with what he’s expressing, that if the others have to wait an entire season for us to rejoin them, then that will be God’s will and for them to work out.
After I’m not sure how long, I ease him to his feet. The great and powerful giant of my childhood stands beside me now, humbled and weakened, bent forward with the weight of his own regrets. He struggles to regain his breath as I straighten out his clothes and fix his hair.
“There you go,” I say with a loving smile and another little hug. “That’s my daed.”
He looks at me, a moment passing for him to reconsider yet again, another reevaluation, another revelation. He takes a deep breath and stands erect, shoulders back, regaining almost a foot of height before my very eyes. I tap his broad chest and rest my head on his shoulder, once again the little girl he’d always resisted, and giving him the love he denied us both.
He smiles, for the first time in my recollection. I can barely recognize him.
And that’s a good thing.
I say, “Would you accompany me to my wedding party?”
“I’d be more than honored.” He extends his bent elbow and I slip my arm in. Two steps across the room, he asks me, “How would you feel about having the party here? Everyone’s already in the front yard. We can send the carriages back for the rest of the food and anyone else who couldn’t make it.”
I don’t have to think about it very long.
“I would like that very, very much, Daed.” Through my smile, even as it presses its corners deep into my cheeks and even deeper into my heart, I say, “Thank you.”
“No, Hannah,” he says with another smile, already becoming delightfully familiar, “thank you.”
# # #
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Table of Contents
Whoopie Pie Secrets
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
Whoopie Pie Secrets Page 10