The Outcast

by Jolina Petersheim

  This is the first I’ve ridden with Ida Mae that she has not played the radio, and I am relieved. My mind is so cluttered with thoughts, I do not think it could withstand any more stimulation. Resting my head against the window, I try to keep my breathing regular as I replay an incident as shocking as Tobias striking my sister before disappearing into the woods.

  Those five months after I moved down, so many questionable episodes took place between my sister’s husband and me, it is now hard to determine which was the catalyst that set the events of that raw December night into motion. A night so cold, no amount of covers and shivering could get my body warm. I was padding downstairs to make tea when Tobias came into the house, holding his muddy boots in one hand. His suspenders were looped down on either side of his black pants, his white shirtsleeves rolled to his forearms and stained around the edges.

  “Leah?” Tobias squinted up at me standing on the moonlit steps.

  “No,” I clarified. “Rachel.”

  “Rachel.”

  A shiver arched up my spine. I tried to keep my voice steady as I said, “How’s the horse?”

  “Not goot. The Epsom salts didn’t work.”

  “Did you try packing the frog with calcium sulfate?”

  Tobias shook his head.

  I listened to the wind howling around the house like it was searching for a way to get in, to the glass chattering at the windowsills like teeth. “Perhaps I should take a look at her?” Tobias knew how much I had helped my dawdy.

  He pointed over his shoulder. “It’s bad out there.”

  “Can’t be worse than Pennsylvania. Let me get my coat.”

  When I came downstairs, Tobias had his boots back on and was facing the door, clutching a lantern in his hand. I went to stand beside him, still in my nightgown but weighted with my coat and a satchel of holistic medications my mother had forced me to take in case Leah needed them.

  “You’re sure about this?” Tobias searched my face without meeting my eyes.

  In response, I smacked open the door and marched into the blustery weather. Tobias followed, the lantern he carried throwing circles of light across the dead grass. The wind cut our cheeks and sliced through our jackets like a knife. Side by side, we stepped into the barn’s shelter, which felt immeasurably warmer than outside. I inhaled the muddled compost of hay, fermented silage, saddle soap, and dung: the scents of my childhood.

  Tobias held the lantern high. “She’s in here,” he said.

  I motioned for him to lead, then took one step and tripped over a pitchfork. Tobias turned and caught me. Staring up at him, I watched pieces of sawdust filter down from the haymow and dust his broad shoulders and hair. I reached out and brushed a strand of hay from his right shoulder. His grip tightened on my ribs. My sister’s husband leaned his head closer to mine. Even by the lantern’s murky glow, I saw Tobias’s pupils bleed into his dark eyes. His lips parted.

  The infected horse stamped once and snorted. Tobias removed his hand from my back and strode into the stall. I took a breath and followed. The huge Clydesdale was standing in the far left corner, favoring her right foreleg with the abscess. Her head was down, her nostrils dripping, velvety lower lip hanging slack. With every wave of pain, her powerful muscles rippled beneath her smooth, fawn-colored hide. I knew her case was hopeless even before seeing how far the tentacles of infection had reached.

  I tossed my coat over a loosened hay bale the horse had been too sick to eat and rolled the sleeves of my nightgown. Kneeling beside the mare, I tapped the back of her right knee. “Lift,” I commanded, squeezing her feathered hock. “Good girl.”

  Her hoof was the size of a serving platter. The fever snaking up through the soft lamina radiated out through her skin and warmed my hand like a flame. Though drained of pus, the flesh still smelled like rotten cheese. Breathing through my mouth, I asked, “You have a hoof pick?” Tobias nodded. “Can you run it through the lamp’s flame first?”

  He did and passed the silver pick to me. I prodded the inflamed frog, but my first instinct had been right: the infection had spread so high up the white line connecting the hoof capsule to the bone, there was little we could do besides euthanasia. I still had to try. Growing weary of her awkward stance, the Clydesdale began to rest her massive weight on me. I crab-walked into a firmer position. “That bag over near the hay bale,” I said. “I need a bottle that says calcium sulfate.”

  Tobias sorted through the contents and dropped the blue bottle in my lap. I unscrewed the cap and tilted the bottle until a steady stream of powder poured out into the softened frog. Batting at the cloud hanging over my head, I asked Tobias to pass me a spool of gauze. This I wound around the frog to seal in the calcium sulfate and block out any more infection. I slid the hoof into a burlap sack that Tobias held out for me, fastened this with a strip of twine, and lowered the mare’s foot to the freshly mucked floor.

  Hobbling to my feet, I rested a hand against my lower back and stroked the mare’s muzzle. Her limpid brown eyes flicked up and met mine with such a look of intense suffering, they almost seemed human. “Oh, Tobias,” I sighed. “I don’t think there’s anything we can do.”

  Tobias rose from the bucket he’d turned upside down and used like a chair. Coming to stand beside me, he slipped his arm around my lower back. This time, I did not look up at him in confusion or try to decipher his actions. I just leaned against his body, savoring its warmth and strength when I had no right to.

  My brother-in-law and I were silent as we exited the horse stall and crossed the short distance between the farmhouse and barn. My pace was far more hurried, causing the wind to iron my nightgown to my legs and flap open the lapels of my coat. Plodding up the porch steps, I opened the front door without letting the screen door slam behind me. I was halfway up the staircase when Tobias came in. I did not turn or say good night, but continued mounting the steps until I’d reached the safety of my room. Leaning against the door with my heart rushing in my ears, I could still feel Tobias’s eyes burning their way through the wood, burning the clothes off my back as they had the entire time I climbed the stairs.

  Bathing my face and hands in the weschbohl of frigid water on the dresser, I unbuttoned my nightgown and dabbed at the skin of my neck and chest with a cloth. Even without the mirror we were forbidden to possess, I knew how flushed I was. I could feel a fever roaring through my body as aggressively as that infection was spreading throughout the horse. I was attracted to my sister’s husband. I had known this since that hot afternoon Tobias so tenderly wiped the stain off my face as we knelt in the kitchen. But I had never admitted how much this attraction consumed me until now. I had thought that he and I could just continue living a hairbreadth away from each other while aware of our temptation, yet doing nothing about it. Recalling how the two of us had locked eyes after I stumbled in the barn—our bodies trembling although our limbs barely touched—I knew it was no longer safe to remain here, to remain sheltered beneath my sister’s roof when that meant sleeping one thin wall away from her husband.

  There was a gentle rap on the door.

  “Yes?” I said.

  The door opened as I turned from the dresser and put down the cloth. My breath caught. There Tobias stood with my sister’s wedding-ring quilt draping his arms like an offering. But when his gaze fell on me—on the moonlight spangling my open nightgown and flushed skin—the quilt fluttered from his arms and pooled at his feet. Tobias reached behind him and closed my bedroom door without taking his eyes from my face. Trampling the quilt, he strode across the room; his steps were so careful on the floorboards that, although the whole house was moaning with the wind, there was not a single creak.

  Tobias’s breath pattered against my face. I could smell the salt on his skin. “Rachel?” Leah’s husband asked.

  I did nothing to shield my nakedness or to shield the naked look of longing in my eyes. “Yes,” I said, not knowing what he had asked or what I was really answering. “Yes, Tobias.”

  And
as Tobias’s head bent, bringing the first touch of his cool lips against mine, the fever raged throughout my body. I knew then that whatever happened tonight, both he and I were consumed.

  “Wake up.” Ida Mae pushes my shoulder. “We’re almost there.”

  My eyes snap open. Pressing my body against the passenger door, I clench my forehead as tears drip between my fingers like rain.

  “Rachel-girl,” she says, squeezing my knee, “they’re gonna find Tobias. Judah’s probably done found him, and in all the hubbub, they’ve just forgotten to go out to that barn and give us a call.”

  I wail, “But I don’t want them to find Tobias! I wish he were dead!”

  “Rachel Stoltzfus!” Ida Mae chides. “You can’t go wishing people dead, honey. No matter how much you might hurt. Take it from somebody who knows. That kinda hate will eat you from the inside out and leave you just a husk of what you once was. Like a locust shell stuck on a tree.”

  Drawing in a shuddering breath, I wipe my face on the front of my dress. “Did you hate the Amish church for what they did to you? For making you take your child off life support?”

  Ida Mae clutches the steering wheel and shifts the wad of snuff to her other cheek. “Russell Speck,” she spits, blaming him for my knowledge of her past and not Norman Troyer, the man who told me. Swatting her right blinker, Ida Mae careers her truck up Copper Creek Mountain. Her brights bounce off the narrow, corkscrewing road. “Yeah,” she says. “I hated everyone in Flat Plains so much, I wished they’d all keel over like flies. But then, after the smoke cleared and I was the only one standing there—the only one in my immediate family who wasn’t in the grave—I realized the person I hated the most was myself. You see, I made my sons, Jacob and Daniel, go with Norman and Henry that day ’cause I wanted them out from underfoot. I packed ’em all a big picnic lunch and told them not to come back before supper. Such a wonderful day I had. I loved having every minute to myself: no cooking, no cleaning, no wiping up spills or taming strubbly hair. I took me a long nap, then went for a walk around my in-laws’ land. I had no idea that that day I ate up the quiet would be the first day of the rest of my life that the quiet reminded me of everything I’d lost.”

  I begin to cry again as I watch tears wind down Ida Mae’s face. “For a long time . . .” She pauses. “For a very long time, I blamed myself for my sons’ deaths and for the death of my husband. And the only other person in the world who understood my pain was the man who believed he was responsible for it.”

  “Russell,” I say.

  Ida Mae nods. “I didn’t marry that man ’cause I loved him—’cause I sure didn’t at the time. I married that man ’cause every morning I woke up with Russell Speck in my bed was like putting flowers on my sons’ graves or taking down the books they’d made that were still at their grossmammi’s haus, laying out to dry, when that state trooper come driving up that lane and told me about the accident.”

  “And the blue room? The bunk beds?” I ask, recalling how it used to look before I returned from that upsetting weekend at Copper Creek and found everything repainted green. Everything made fresh and new like a thawing spring rain after the last winter storm.

  Ida Mae drags a flannel sleeve across her nose and clears her throat. “That stuff was never my sons’. After me and Russell split up ’cause looking at him stopped being a balm and started being the knife that kept peeling scabs right off my wounds, I no longer had no monument of grief to wake up to every morning. That’s when I decided to make that blue room. I went to Goodwill and yard sales and decorated that room with everything I imagined my boys would have wanted if they’d been English.”

  I ask, “What made you give it away after all that time?”

  Ida Mae slows the truck. I can hear gravel crackling beneath the tires. Leaning over, she rests her weathered hand against my cheek. “You did,” she says, tears spilling from her eyes even as she takes her thumb and wipes my own away. “You and Eli did. After the doctors told us about his cancer, I realized how much I loved that little man. How much I loved you. I knew then I couldn’t keep living with one foot in the past and another in the grave when that little man needed me, when you needed me. I know it sounds awful, but Eli being diagnosed with something that could take his life gave me something to live for. ’Cause for the first time in twenty years, I had something to fight for.”

  “So you repainted the room.”

  Ida Mae smiles. “Yep. I painted over that room and burned everything I could within Blackbrier limits. Russell Speck helped me that whole weekend. He never left my side ’cept to go home to sleep. I knew then how lucky I was to have this good-hearted man still standing by me after all these years I’d been so hateful to him. So, you see—” Ida Mae takes the left side of the lane that divides Tobias and Leah’s house from Verna King’s—“if I hadn’t let go of the past, if I hadn’t let go of all that hate and let myself love again, I’d be missing out on so many good things. Things like you and Eli and that confounded man, Russell Maynard Speck.”

  She flips her headlights to low, but not before I notice Judah King leaning against his truck’s back bumper with his arms crossed and eyes squinted against the brightness. Ida Mae pulls her truck up behind Judah’s and lurches it into park. Turning off the ignition, she stares at him before looking over and touching my face. “Promise me, Rachel-girl . . . Promise me you won’t let hate for Tobias make you miss out on love. No matter what this community does or whether Leah forgives you, you gotta promise me that you will forgive. That you won’t live your life wishing you could do it over. That your life will keep moving forward, that your life will keep going on.”

  “I promise,” I whisper.

  I climb out of the truck, and my twin rushes down the three porch steps with one hand over her battered face to stifle her sobs. Closing my eyes, I pray for the Lord’s infinite mercy. Without it, I do not know how my life can keep moving forward. My life is the reason so many other lives will never be the same.

  20

  AMOS

  I do not know how long I have watched Tobias run through the woods with branches slapping his face and brambles lashing his skin. But I do know that he must stop soon. His rib cage is laboring like fireplace bellows. The small portion of his body that is not stippled with blood from its collision with briars is covered with sweat that plasters his torn shirt to his chest and gleams like silver on his skin. Right after Tobias struck his wife and went charging into the night, I approached my heavenly Father and beseeched him to let me go—once, just this once—back to Earth to speak Life into my son. I could see how Death leered down from the trees and lurked in the corners of Tobias’s desperate mind. I could see how every breath my son released into the air was putrid and as dark as the wilderness Tobias dove into.

  In three days, my son had come to the end of himself. He had nothing left to live for, nothing left to gain or lose, and the voices hissing in the recesses of his mind told him that he should then choose to die. Taking death into his own hands was the one last thing Tobias could do for his wife and family, as they didn’t need such a volatile man wreaking havoc on their lives. It would be insufficient to say that Tobias was not thinking clearly as he charged into those Copper Creek woods. Tobias was not thinking at all. His thoughts had been left to their own sinister devices for so long, now that he wanted to rein them in and take control he found that he had no control. So he gave in to these thoughts that had wielded their power over him for years when he believed he was the one who, regardless of his dalliance with lust, still held dominance. He gave in to the thoughts that told him he should just end it. End the torment, end the suffering . . . end it all.

  These tormenting voices are the reason—hours later and as winded as a green-broke horse—Tobias continues to run. The reason he runs until he doubles over and vomits the bile of his soul into the twisted undergrowth of the woods.

  Please, Lord, I plead in my spirit. Please let me go to him.

  But still, I am not rele
ased.

  I grasp the gilded arm of the park bench. My son clatters down a ravine, clutching at saplings and kudzu roots to alleviate a fall. Springwater splatters his leather boots and saturates his pants up to his ankles. Tobias’s nostrils flare and his mouth gapes wide as he struggles to suck in oxygen his body is too exhausted to absorb. The waning crescent flickers through the trees hardly budded with enough foliage to shield their skeletal forms. Through this filtered luminosity, I can see the ravine—no more than a darkened slash in the earth—yawning open to a cliff whittled from shale.

  A grin slithers across my son’s features, but I sense he is not the one causing its form. His troubled soul sees this cliff too, causing Tobias to believe his end is found. Stretching out his arms as if to embrace it, Tobias begins his reckless descent. I yearn to cry out, but no words I utter from this celestial park will ever reach his ears. Hanging my head, I close my eyes. I cannot watch my eldest son go over the precipice from which there is no hope of return. This is why I do not see so much as hear Tobias’s dampened feet become ensnared, and his body begin tumbling beneath a Force far more powerful than gravity. I look up. My son flips down the ravine, his white shirt and black pants a checkerboard kaleidoscope. Smiling, I think, Your ways are not my ways, Lord.

  With one wild somersault loosening pebbles and clods of decomposing earth, Tobias’s body ceases its kinetic momentum. He is so close to the cliff edge, his left arm dangles like it is hanging over a bed. Not a finger on that hand moves, not a muscle on Tobias’s body twitches, not an eyelash flutters against his cheek.

  My fatherly heart aches watching my son, yet I trust that our heavenly Father—who loves him even more than I—has allowed Tobias’s fall from such a great physical and metaphorical height. Peace floods my mind and renews my spirit. My eyes clench shut as the heavenly realm begins rushing up at me until I can hear the thunder of a thousand galaxies zipping past my ears. My eyes open. I can see years streaking by—time reduced to the tail end of a fiery comet—along with the explosion of supernovae in that unexplainable void called space. Closing my eyes again, I bow my head as I begin my journey through the opalescent haze of the Milky Way to a foreign planet I called home a mere five months before. My descent through the Earth’s atmosphere appears the same as when I check in on my family from time to time, but it does not feel the same. Not at all. Although I am not back in the flesh that once housed my spirit, my soul feels weighted with the cares of the world I hadn’t known I had left behind until now.