Plain Confession

by Emma Miller

  “Someone’s out there,” Rachel said, trying to decide if she should walk in that direction. “A man. Who could—”

  “Pay no attention to him,” Alma responded, clearly unconcerned. “That’s Rosh from next door.”

  Rachel turned to the older woman. “But he hid when he realized I’d seen him. Why would he just stand there looking?”

  “Ya, Rosh creeps around all the time. Likes to keep an eye on Mary Rose.” She waved a gloved hand and picked up a bucket. “He’s harmless.”

  “What do you mean, he keeps an eye on Mary Rose?” Rachel stared at the place where she’d seen him, but he didn’t reappear. “It seems like odd behavior.”

  Alma shrugged. “Odd for some. Not for others. He’s a sweet boy, but shy. Hard worker. All the time he hunts and traps, fishes for trout in the creek, digs ginseng on the mountain to sell. Picks mushrooms. He and Mary Rose used to play together when they were young. Rosh is a Hertzler. You must know his parents. They belong to our church and are our nearest neighbors to the south.”

  “Actually, Rosh is someone I’ve been trying to catch up with,” Rachel said, still keeping an eye on the hedgerow. “Mary Rose said he’s the one who came to tell you what had happened to Daniel. Maybe he saw something in the woods that day while he was hunting. He might be able to help Moses.” She turned to Alma. “Do you mind if I try to speak to him now?”

  “Of course, if you think he could help my son. But you may not catch him. We tease him; he’s like a ghost. One minute you see him, the next he’s gone.”

  “I’d like to try,” Rachel answered, watching Mary Rose, who had gathered up her clothes basket and was walking toward the house. “It will just take a minute, and then I’ll come right back and help with the milking. I promise.” She started across the yard toward her Jeep. “Which way is Rosh’s house from here?”

  The older woman pointed south.

  Rachel nodded. “I won’t be long.”

  Rachel got into the Jeep, started the engine, and drove down the long lane. When she reached the road, she turned in the direction of the Hertzler farm, drove a short way, and pulled off on the shoulder. There, she got out and hurried back along the road. She found a fallen log and sat down to wait in the shelter of a big oak tree.

  No vehicles passed on the road. The only sound was the wind in the trees and the chattering of squirrels as twilight descended on the mountain road. Again, Rachel was swept back in time to her childhood. She could remember trekking through the woods with her father, picking edible mushrooms. Theirs was a big family, as most Amish families were. But her father had always taken care to spend time with each of his children, and she cherished those hours when he was hers alone.

  He would point out the different types of mushrooms, warning her not to touch the poisonous destroying angel or the yellow stainer. Instead, she helped him to gather basketfuls of turkey tail, giant puffballs, and white chicken of the woods mushrooms that her mother would prepare for dinner and share at church. Her dat had also taught her to be wary of rock piles where timber rattlesnakes might hide and not to confuse the dangerous copperhead with the harmless hognose, milk snake, or black racer. It paid to keep your head about you when you went into the deep woods, especially alone, but her father never wanted any of his children to fear the mountains because the land provided so much for them.

  In less time than Rachel thought possible, a crow squawked a warning cry, and a blue jay scolded an intruder. Rachel didn’t move. She remained hidden behind the oak as a slim figure in a black watch cap, camo pants, and camo jacket moved silently out of the woods onto the road. She didn’t call out to him until he’d almost reached her hiding place.

  “Rosh Hertzler?”

  The slim figure froze and his pale blue eyes searched the trees. “Who’s there?”

  “Rachel Mast. I’ve been wanting to speak with you, but you’re hard to find.” She stepped out from behind the tree. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. I wanted to thank you for calling Mary Aaron that day to let us know that the police were questioning Moses.” She studied Rosh. She must have seen him in town or at one of the church affairs, but she couldn’t place his face. He stood no taller than her, perhaps not as tall, and his tanned features were almost delicate. Acorn-brown hair brushed the collar of his jacket and not the slightest shadow of a beard darkened his cheeks. In a dress and kapp, he could have passed as a girl, Rachel thought, but despite his size, there was nothing weak-looking about him. His gaze was guarded, and she had the feeling that he couldn’t decide whether to talk to her or dart back into the woods.

  One lean hand dropped to the bulging bag tied to his belt.

  “You’ve been digging ginseng,” she ventured. The season lasted only until the end of November.

  “Ya.”

  “On Studer land?”

  He shrugged. “Different places.”

  “I saw you there, a few minutes ago. And you saw me. Why were you spying on Mary Rose?”

  He shook his head. “Wasn’t.”

  “Weren’t you? It looked like that to me,” Rachel said. “Alma says you like to watch her.”

  He shrugged.

  She hesitated, considering what she should say next. She got the impression that if she wasn’t careful, she’d spook him and he’d just take off into the woods again. “That day you saw the police going to the Studers’. You told Mary Aaron that one police car was there and another was driving up the lane. You said you were driving past. But you can’t see the house from the road. How did you know the police were questioning Moses? Were you there on the property? Watching Mary Rose?”

  He shrugged again.

  “Rosh, you had to have been on the property. You must have been close to the house to know that the detective was asking questions.”

  He avoided her gaze. “Maybe I was.”

  She considered his answers or lack thereof. “Alma says you spend a lot of time in the woods, hunting and such. Mary Rose said you were the one who came to tell them about Daniel. So, I guess you were in the woods the day Daniel was shot?”

  Rosh shifted from one worn hunting boot to the other. The tip of his tongue licked a chapped lower lip. “Ya.”

  “Lots of people were hunting deer that day,” Rachel said. “Were you?”

  “Ya, I was.”

  She took two steps toward him. “Rosh, I need to ask you,” she said softly. “Did you shoot him? Maybe . . . accidentally?”

  Rosh rubbed at his chin with the back of a gloved hand. “Did you know him? Daniel. You know what kind of man he was?” He surprised her by meeting her gaze.

  “Only what people say about him. I didn’t know him personally. But a lot of people in the community thought he was a good person: a hard worker, faithful to the church, and kind to the less fortunate.”

  The young man’s mouth twisted in disdain. “That was what he wanted folks to think. But . . .” One slim hand knotted into a fist, released, and then tightened again. His voice dropped. “Daniel had a mean streak.”

  Rachel thought back to what Moses’s employer had said about seeing Daniel hit Lemuel. “How do you know he had a mean streak?” When he didn’t respond, she went on. “Did you see Daniel strike Lemuel the day Daniel died? Before the hunt? Did that make you angry?”

  The boy shook his head. “Don’t know anything about that. Wasn’t with them. I hunt alone.”

  “Sooo . . . did you know Daniel hit Lemuel?” she repeated.

  “Heard about it. Don’t doubt it was true. Like I said, he could be mean. He caught me in his barn one time. Beat the—” He looked down, his shoulders quivering. “Hit me, kicked me. Near broke my wrist. I wasn’t doing nothing wrong. I’m not a thief. I’d never steal from nobody. You go to hell for stealing.”

  Rachel took a step forward, shocked by the idea that an Amish person would commit such violence. “He beat you up?”

  Rosh’s voice was muffled, almost as though he was trying not to cry. He wiped his nose with his s
leeve. “Ya. He beat me up. Told me to run and never come back, else my dat would be laying me to rest in the cemetery.”

  His words shocked Rachel. Surely he couldn’t have been talking about the man the elders in the community were talking about. The man who went out of his way to help a neighbor. “Did you tell anybody?”

  He turned back to face her. His eyes were red and moisture pooled in the lower lids. His Adam’s apple bobbed.

  How old was he? she wondered. At first, she’d guessed sixteen, but something in his eyes . . . “How old are you, Rosh?”

  “Nineteen.”

  Nineteen. Almost a man in the Amish way of thinking, though he looked younger. There was an unworldly, almost fey quality about Rosh Hertzler . . . but there was something more. Her gaze dropped to the hunting knife strapped to his waist just as a gust of chill wind found its way down the back of her neck. She shivered and, involuntarily, she took a step back.

  Faintly, almost as if in a dream, her father’s voice sounded in the recesses of her memory. “Look closely, Rachel, because the young ones are deceptive. Never trust the young ones. A good mushroom and a poisonous one are too much alike before they reach full maturity. What you’re thinking is an oyster mushroom could be a death cap that hasn’t quite reached its full growth.”

  “I gotta go,” Rosh said. “I got chores at home. My father will be mad if I’m late for milking.”

  “What did your father say about Daniel beating you?”

  “Didn’t tell him. Said I took a tumble down the mountain.” He turned away.

  “Rosh, wait. Can you tell me how you knew . . . why you were the one who went to tell Mary Rose that Daniel had been shot?”

  He stopped where he was and for a long second he said nothing, then he turned back to her. “Heard the commotion when he was found.”

  “Do you remember who was there? Who told you to run and tell his wife?”

  “A lot of people there by the time I got there. Paramedics were there.” Rosh met Rachel’s gaze. “Nobody told me to. I wanted to. I thought . . .” He looked at the ground. “I thought someone who cared about her ought to be the one to tell.” He turned again and walked away.

  “Rosh!” Rachel called after him. “Why would you lie to your dat to protect Daniel Fisher? After he beat you.”

  “Why?” Rosh said. “Simple. ’Cause my father would have beat me again for causing trouble with the neighbor.”

  * * *

  “Be careful,” Rachel’s mother cautioned. “Don’t fall.”

  “I’m not going to topple off a peach basket.” Rachel stifled a giggle. Her mother was afraid of heights and had been warning her of the dangers of breaking her neck since she was a baby. “And if I do fall, it’s not that far to the ground.” She stretched her arm to remove the cord that held up a hefty side of smoked bacon.

  They were in the smokehouse at her parents’ farm. She’d always loved the smokehouse with its rich smells of smoked shad, salted and sugar-cured hams, and, of course, the smoked hams that hung in rows from the dark beams overhead. Feeding a large family necessitated forethought and planning. And despite the two propane-powered freezers in her parents’ cellar, the smokehouse provided a good deal of the meat served on the table year-round.

  Rachel was helping her mother get ready for the midday Sunday meal that the Mast family would be hosting that day. Worship service was held every other Sunday in the homes of those who belonged to the church community. Services would start at nine sharp, and continue until noon or whenever the preacher finished his sermon. Then everyone would take a two-hour break to share a light dinner before afternoon services resumed. Technically, no work and no cooking was done on the Sabbath, but no one would begrudge a woman adding a little bacon to the beans that had been simmering all night on the back of the woodstove.

  Normally, Rachel wouldn’t attend the Amish church, but her mother wasn’t that far from her chemo treatments. She’d not regained her full health, and Rachel, who knew her mam wanted everything to be right for her friends and neighbors, needed to help this morning. Rachel had sisters, and Aunt Hannah could always be counted on, but Rachel wanted to do her part.

  Rachel and her mother had gone for many years without talking to each other because of Rachel’s life choices, and now that they were close again, Rachel wanted to spend as much time with her as possible. She felt that they’d dodged a bullet with the cancer. Her mother’s doctors said that everything looked good, but they’d come too close to losing Esther for Rachel not to appreciate every opportunity she had to be with her mother.

  And, if there was cooking to be finished off this morning, it was better that Rachel do it. Not being baptized, she wasn’t required to live by the ordnung, the rules that each Amish church community followed.

  “You remember the ingredients for my sugar cure?” her mother asked as Rachel used a butcher knife to slice off pieces of bacon from the larger section of meat she’d placed atop a barrel kept in the smokehouse for just this purpose. “Watch your fingers, child. That knife’s sharp.”

  “You can cut yourself just as easy with a dull knife as a sharp one,” Rachel replied. “Isn’t that what you always told me? And, ya, I remember the recipe for your rub.” She recited back what she’d been taught since she was ten years of age.

  “It came to me from my grandmother and her mother before her. Don’t forget it, and don’t share it with your guests. It’s our special family recipe.”

  Rachel carefully rewrapped the side of bacon in clean cheesecloth and got back on the basket to hang it from the overhead hook again. There the precious meat would be safe from vermin and from the cats that her dat sometimes let sleep in the smokehouse to discourage mice from nesting in here.

  The sound of buggy wheels on the frozen ground made Rachel glance out the one small, barred window. The blue-tinted and bubbly glass was old with a swirling bull’s-eye pattern, but she could still see through it well enough to recognize the young man getting out of Mary Rose’s buggy. He helped her down with the baby, and then led the horse to the open shed that had been prepared for the horses. The previous day’s beautiful fall weather had given way to gray skies and the threat of rain, and possibly a light snowfall, and her father didn’t want to see any horses tied outside in the cold on such a day.

  “That’s Rosh Hertzler helping Mary Rose,” Rachel mused aloud. She turned to her mother. “How well do you know him?”

  “Well enough to know that he’s sweet on Mary Rose,” her mother answered tartly. Rachel’s surprise must have been evident because her mother laughed. “What? You don’t think that a young woman as pretty as Mary Rose might have admirers?”

  “Ya, of course,” Rachel answered. “But . . . her husband only died a week ago.”

  “Two weeks, or near as. And Rosh was smitten well before that. I think he’s always liked her, and now there’s opportunity.” She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Life goes on, daughter. She’s a woman alone with a child to look after. Mark my words. She’ll be married within the year.”

  “But to someone like Rosh? He’s . . . he’s younger than she is, too young to be married.”

  “He’s of legal age. Nineteen, two months ago. We were invited to his birthday supper. He’s a nice boy; he’ll make a good match for someone. He’s good to his mother, and you can always tell a man’s character by how he treats his mother.”

  Rachel watched through the little window as Rosh tied up Mary Rose’s horse and removed its bridle. He had a gentle way with the animal. “He doesn’t strike you as a little odd?”

  Her mother seemed to think about it for a moment. “You mean the way he’s always roaming the woods? They say he’s a bee charmer. His mother says he robs wild bee colonies of their honey and never gets stung. Not once in his life, to her knowledge. I suppose you could call that odd.” She laid the slices of bacon out on a platter and examined them. She leaned close and sniffed the meat, then smiled and used the butcher knife to cut the strips into smaller p
ieces. “And Rosh is the only boy in the family. He’ll probably inherit his father’s farm in time. Runs right alongside the Studer acres.”

  “He just seems so . . . young,” Rachel repeated.

  “He’s not got his full growth. Time will fix all that.” She chuckled. “Sometimes, you still seem very young to me.”

  When her mother drew the knife over the bacon, her sleeve slid up and Rachel noticed a bruise on her wrist. Rachel swallowed as apprehension washed over her and she pulled up her mother’s coat sleeve to get a better look. “That’s a nasty bruise,” she said. “How’d you get it?”

  Her mother smiled. “I know what you’re thinking; it’s not the cancer. You worry too much. I wasn’t paying attention. Struck it on the corner of the cabinet. Old skin. I bruise easy since the cancer. It’ll go away in a few days.”

  “If it doesn’t, be sure and mention it to your doctor when I take you for your checkup next month. It’s on the twentieth, isn’t it?”

  “Ya, the twentieth.” She picked up the platter. “We’d best get back to the house. I need to get this bacon into the beans before services begin.”

  “Right.” But Rachel wasn’t thinking about the bacon. She was thinking about a bruise. A bruise she’d seen elsewhere. On Mary Rose’s wrist that first day she’d gone to visit the Studers after Daniel’s funeral. Mary Rose was young and wouldn’t bruise easily.

  Which made Rachel wonder . . .

  What if . . . Joe had said that Daniel had hit Lemuel. And Rosh had told her the previous day that Daniel had beat him up. She hated to jump to such an awful conclusion, but what if there was truth to it? She looked to her mother.

  “Mam, have you ever heard anything about Daniel Fisher having a bad side?”

  “What do you mean?”