Sitting in the car, looking out, he felt the same transitory sense of combined belonging and separateness he’d experienced twenty-some years earlier when, while tethering his horse at the hardware up valley, another carriage passed by.
“Looks like Belfast is not just a one horse town anymore,” the proprietor’s son called grinning out to him that day from the open front doorway.
Jacob grinned to himself again in response at the memory, again appreciative as then of a display of quick wit, whether his own or somebody else’s. Then they passed the carriage and he noticed the man and woman he knew from this forward viewpoint as neighbors nodding reflexively while looking ahead, not knowing who passed them; just the same, he nodded his own greeting. Then the vehicle started up the hill, the transmission below them straining to ascend, finally quieting as the forces of the mechanical horses working within relaxed at the summit. In the ever approaching distance the pale winter-fallow field behind the house slanted upwards, a trapezoidal piece of patchwork stitched onto the wider quilt of the world, held fast by a thread-like perimeter of fresh plowing. All at once Jacob felt a surge of renewed affection for his son-in-law, who, alone, and while holding a day job, had managed to repair the harness and tack and get the Percherons to team cooperatively, and thus begin the work of the field in the week and a half of their absence.
When they were unloaded, Jacob walked Mr. Felder back to the car-van, withdrawing from his pocket and counting three curled together one-hundred dollar bills, to which he added a fifty; the man he thrust them towards held back slightly.
“It was agreed beforehand,” he protested, holding his hand a few inches away, “only three hundred.”
“True,” Jacob said, grabbing the man’s wrist and pressing the bills onto a relenting warm palm. “But gas isn’t cheap like before, and besides, we stayed extra.”
Neither man mentioned that Felder had also during the same time boarded and eaten for nothing. But that was a given of friendship and Amish hospitality. And so Felder closed his hand tight around the money and put it into his pocket as payment for transport to and fro and got into the car-van, waving and honking the horn once as he drove down the road that curved rising toward a ridgeline of bare treetops backlit by a long streak of transparent green twilight. Jacob turned his eyes to the right, scanning the valley, musing idly: Such a world, it would be sinful to live in the midst of so much and not see it. As he stood and pondered the last of the day, a blue-mottled moon emerged briefly behind a corrugation of scudding gray clouds; a fresh breeze at his neck whispered to his ears the soft rueful message that, though the calendar proclaimed spring, winter was not yet quite over.
Sometime during the night he dreamed a bad dream, reliving the event as if he were the cause of its happening. In that world of evil imagined remembrance, he backed a pickup truck to the front door of a single room schoolhouse and emerged, gaining entry to ask if any of the children had found a clevis pin in the road. Producing a gun, he forced the boys to unload the truck before sending them away, barring the door, and then forcing the compliant girls and schoolmistress to sit on the floor while he bound them. He used plastic ties, pulling the knobbed ratcheting tabs tight to thin wrists, bringing the small hands together, ever tighter behind them. He nailed up a long board upon which sometime previously he’d screwed a perfect line of shiny new eyehooks. He looped a rope between each of the paired hands and the eyehooks as his fingers, whetted by the soft flesh of forearms, danced with excitement. He knotted the ropes, anticipating the hidden entirety of their bound helpless bodies. They anticipated too and waited with absurd deference, expressing the forbearance of lambs as yet only dimly aware they’d been chosen for slaughter. One girl offered herself up in sacrifice for the others. And so he undid her. Searching her blue eyes, he saw the trusting gaze of his daughter. Her bodice slid back and his breath quickened. His trembling fingers revealed, and tentatively touched, the white purity of her bared skin. He wanted only to love her, hold her, and then perhaps let her go, but found these intentions thwarted when sirens approached close, too soon for completion.
Still held captive in that evil dream of remembrance, he splattered the walls with their innocent blood and then shot himself too in a last desperate act of defiance, waking breathless, aching with unfulfilled desire. Shamed by his fallen nature, feeling sick to his stomach, he groaned out loud. Sarah roused then too, asking in mumbled consternation, “Vut is it, dear?”
“Nothing,” he said, lying, listening in the silence to the rushing pulse still flooding his ears. “Maybe only a coyote,” he added, rising half up on his elbows.
A minute later he got up entirely and felt his way to his wife’s bedside.
“Vwy?” she asked, startled again by his presence.
“Not to worry,” he assured her, looming closer. “I will just go a moment, out to see.”
And with no more explanation or further questioning, he nursed his wife back to sleep with a single chaste kiss, feeling his beard scrape and drag on the soft neck of her nightgown, catching slightly as he eased back away. He dressed in the dark and in stocking feet slid from the room, pulling the thick white pine door quietly to behind him and sat in a ladder-back chair in the kitchen where he put on his boots, bending in dim silhouette against the twelve-panel light between the door and oval oak table. When he lifted his stiff felt hat off the peg at the side of the door he paused, then raised the bolt rifle from the paired hooks overhead before leaving.
Outside, the night world lay still. Somewhere up ahead in the woods an owl hooted. A light dusting of snow covered the frozen ground like new sifted flour. Jacob stood and looked across the back forty as his eyes gathered the night view before him. His vision, directed towards the high field, followed it upwards on a westerly slant to the low edge of the high woods. Finally, he stepped off the half porch, but no sooner had he done so than he returned and set the gun upright against the sheltered backside of the house. Going forward, he would do so in faith, with no intention of doing harm either to himself or anyone else.
And so defenseless, yet in total compliance with the Ordnung, he crossed the dry brittle grass going from the flat shadow-forms of the barn and kiln on his right to the wide open world. He passed the shallow mushy swale of ditch beyond the end of the yard, stepping higher towards the rising trapezoid of plowed field where coming on a year ago to the day he’d tilled and then sowed an early crop of spring oats; he saw again, imagining it, the summer field harvested into drying waist-high shocks of grain stacked like diminutive teepees, their sharply-skewed tops bent all one way as if broken; in that remembered moment as he moved among them, they slid together in crisscrossing rows, until, taking leave of the day’s toil long enough to pause and look, he saw they also stood motionless, as if waiting, like a still life of conical shape and shadow embroidered for a time on the gently sloped hillside.
As he continued to walk in the present, he felt the earth go soft and rough at the field’s dark plowed perimeter and then smooth and hard and more uniformly white again as he stepped into the nearly frozen, now barren, middle. The earth roughened once more at the top edge before the woods seemed all at once to step forward, embrace, and enclose him. In that last transition as the field became finally all woods, the words of the good book came once more comfortingly to mind, and so calmed him: But the land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land of hills and valleys…
He searched his memory anxiously in vain for the entirety of the verse, unable to find it, and so yearning even more in the loss of it for the knowledge of what he’d forgotten, he paraphrased what he could recall about the land drinking in water that fell as quenching rain from the heavens. But it mattered not, he told himself finally, attempting to absolve both himself and his frail memory, for in truth his mind had already moved on to thinking that, absent a big snow, the cold augured well for a continued early start to the plowing.
In the ever relinquishing embrace of tree shadows he walked on to the top of the ridge, from whi
ch the descending moon rose again as he approached it; so with each step, possessing more and more land going forward, he approached nearer the pureness of the full moon light until, coming to a small clearing, he looked back on his shadow stretched long and thin as a tree fallen straight away. It slanted down the slope of the clearing among fresh stumps of maples he could still, closing his eyes once more, imagine and see. When he looked again their actual absence contributed to a sense of aloneness so profound he wondered if he’d done the right thing. Once more he weighed, still uncertain, the value of sawing out two thousand feet of plank flooring for Leah’s and Joshua’s new home against the lost pleasure of sugaring the trees for untold years to come.
He looked down past the clearing through the bare upper limbs of sparse trees to behold again the broad sedate shadow of the inviolate valley, thinking anew he might still set up a sugar bush, just differently than he had previously imagined—and so, reconsidering the closer trees, decided there remained plenty of woods, and plenty of time and opportunity, with which to do things as might please him. He knew as well, without transcribing the
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