The Outcast

by Jolina Petersheim

  Cutting through the wake of the community who have begun filtering down the porch steps, Tobias flings open the front door, almost colliding with his daughter Miriam, who was about to open it from the other side.

  Tobias takes her by the shoulders. “What’s wrong?”

  “Mammi!” Miriam wails. “She’s bleeding!”

  My knees buckle and my vision blackens. Tobias looks over at me with terror in his eyes. Judah flips open his cell phone.

  “Call Ida Mae!” I cry. “She’s at the hospital!”

  “There’s no time,” Tobias calls from the porch. “Call 911. Come now, Rachel, your sister needs you.”

  I peel my fingers from the fence post and walk across the yard. As I move through the stunned community and step into Leah and Tobias’s farmhouse, I am afraid. Tobias and I might have found forgiveness for the immoral act we committed, but that does not mean our family will be exempt from paying its price.

  AMOS

  Rachel and Helen sit side by side on the couch with their fingers clenched in their laps and ankles snapped together. With every agonizing tick of the uhr, it is obvious that regardless of their best efforts, nothing more can be done. Yet as soon as Tobias—holding Jonathan in one arm and wiping tears from his face with the other—and the four older children file out of his and Leah’s room and descend the stairs, Rachel and Helen do not stop.

  As if her efforts alone will keep Leah with them, Helen packs the area between her daughter’s legs with fresh towels, trying to stave off the bleeding until the ambulance arrives. They are soaked through within minutes. Rachel no longer takes time to wipe tears away. She is trying to save her twin sister, but all the shepherd’s purse and raspberry leaf that Rachel applies will not squelch the blood that keeps pouring from Leah to such an extent it is no small wonder she and the baby are both still alive.

  Leah suffers through their frantic ministrations for two more minutes. “Stop,” she says. “Please . . . okay? Just stop. I’m fine. I’m going to be fine.”

  Holding on to the bedpost, Rachel turns to the side and lets a sob rip through her body without her mouth emitting a sound.

  “Mammi.” Leah smiles from her fake sickbed that, within a few short hours, has become unbearably real. “I love you, but I need to speak with Rachel now.”

  Helen’s alarmed eyes ricochet between her daughters. With a resigned sigh, she presses a kiss to Leah’s cheek and leaves the room.

  Waiting for the door to shut, Leah pats the spot next to her where Tobias always sleeps. Rachel does not move.

  “It’s all right,” Leah says. “Just come. Be with me . . . for a little while.”

  Rachel takes her shoes off and stretches out on top of the quilts. Leah leans her head against Rachel’s shoulder and entwines their arms. Regardless of her resolve, Rachel’s body quakes. Leah turns on her side. “Oh, Rachel,” she says, “my dying’s not your fault. It is just a part of life. And sometimes life does not go according to plan.” Leah turns her twin’s face toward hers. “Will you promise me something?”

  Rachel dries her eyes on the quilt. “Anything.”

  “If I die today—” Leah silences her sister’s protests by placing a finger to her lips. “If I die today or tomorrow or twenty years from now, I want you to look inside the purple martin birdhouse beneath the sycamore tree.” A blush steals over Leah’s pale face. She looks down. “The letters will explain everything,” she says, “but make sure you read the top letter first. The yellowed one from Tobias. His letter will explain the most.”

  “I’m not going to read Tobias’s love letters to you,” Rachel says. “I’ve taken enough from your marriage as it is.”

  “Rachel.” Leah places a hand on her sister’s tense body. “The letter was not to me. The letter from Tobias was addressed to you.”

  “To me?”

  “Yes. You were the one he wanted, not me . . . never me.” Tears flood Leah’s eyes. She closes their lids down hard, willing them back. “Two years ago, a letter came in the mail addressed from Tobias to you. Mamm had heard of his wife’s death, and she believed she knew what the letter entailed.”

  “She read it?” Rachel asks.

  Leah’s words fall faster. “Yes, she read it, and then she gave it to me. She told me to respond to Tobias and tell him that you had received the letter but you weren’t interested in becoming his wife. He hadn’t seen any of us in so long, Mamm said he wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “But why did you do it?” Rachel says. “Why did you leave?”

  Leah sighs. “You had all these boys wanting to court you when I didn’t have one. Mamm told me that you would marry soon and leave, and I would be left behind on Hilltop Road if I didn’t respond to Tobias’s letter and choose to leave first.”

  “Tobias didn’t think it strange that you wanted to take my place like that?”

  “He was too desperate. He had a baby and three other children to tend. He needed a wife and a mudder, and I was willing to become one. So . . .” Leah smiles, but the brilliance fades before reaching her eyes. “Although I knew I was just a substitute for the person Tobias really wanted, I married him. I married and moved away from you because I had convinced myself that you were moving away from me.”

  “Oh, Leah.”

  Leah clasps her sister’s hand. “Don’t you get it?” she says. “I told you because I don’t want you to keep feeling sorry for me. I don’t want you to keep blaming yourself for everything when all of this is not your fault.”

  “But most of it is.”

  Leah smiles ruefully. “Perhaps most, but not all.”

  Down the lane, they can hear the ambulance siren. Leah’s face grows white. Rachel rubs her sister’s hands, but no matter how hard she massages, the warmth will not return.

  Leah stares out the window. Her voice is clipped as she turns and says, “Rachel. Look at me.”

  Rachel does and can see that her sister’s eyes are glassy.

  “When I visited you and Eli at Vanderbilt, I first asked Ida Mae who your doctor was, then went and told Dr. Sengupta that I was expecting. I told him that the baby I carried would probably have the same genes as Eli, since our children have the same father and we’re identical twins. I knew there was a possibility Tobias wouldn’t let Jonathan donate bone marrow, but I thought he couldn’t stop me from donating the cord blood from the new baby.”

  “But how did you—”

  “How did I know? Mamm didn’t just teach you the medical basics, Rachel. Plus, I called Norman Troyer and ran some questions by him.”

  “So you—you . . . ?”

  Leah smiles. “Yes, I filled out the paperwork that will allow my unborn child’s cord blood to be used for Eli’s bone marrow transplant.”

  The sobs that Rachel had suppressed rush up from the fount of her soul.

  Putting an arm around her sister’s shoulders, Leah strokes the dark-blonde hair. “There’re some other things Tobias will have to fill out,” she says over the sound of her sister crying and the ambulance howling up the lane. “Dr. Sengupta was going to see if I could donate the cord blood without my husband’s permission. But now—now, I don’t think Tobias would protest even that.”

  “What if . . . ?”

  “What if the baby and I die?”

  Rachel nods, sobs racking her body.

  “I don’t know,” Leah says. “I don’t know if the stem cells would be developed enough for the doctors to harvest them.”

  The farmhouse door thwacks open; the brisk stomps of the EMTs’ boots ascend the stairs. Leah’s lips clench shut. The twins cling to each other as they did throughout childhood and adolescence. The steps draw closer. Even then, no words of love are uttered. Each sister knows that the bond they have shared since the womb has been frayed, but never broken. And regardless of what this life or the next life brings, that bond of love will continue still.

  22

  Rachel

  The wooden gate creaks as I push it open. Orange and r
ed leaves, stripped from the trees during last night’s storm, tumble across the graveyard and splay like painted hands across the five rows of simple, dark stones. Eli drops my hand and totters across the uneven ground. His thin curls flutter in the breeze; his steroid-swollen cheeks are flushed bright with cold. Turning back to face me and grin, my son’s overconfidence in his newfound walking abilities does not match his bearings. He collapses onto the cushion of his diaper and, startled, almost cries until finding a pinecone nestled amid the leaves, which he proceeds to beat happily on the ground.

  Reassured that Eli is not going to bring the pinecone to his mouth, I walk over and kneel before the newest stone placed beside the grave of Tobias’s first wife, Esther King. The vines have curled back over both bases, despite my many attempts to clear them all away. Tears flood my eyes as they have every time I’ve come to the Copper Creek graveyard over the past five months.

  Most people would not understand the depth of my grief. They would not understand how I could have harbored such love in my heart for my two-pound niece, whose short lifetime was spent inside an incubator and whom I never even held. But without that two-pound child—without Leah and Tobias’s daughter, Serenity Joy King—I would not have my son. Through Serenity’s cord blood, harvested after her premature birth, Eli was given a second chance at life. A chance that could have never come through Jonathan, who turned out not to be a match for Eli.

  Digging into my coat pocket, I take out the thimble-sized crystal horse Judah gave me on the day of Eli’s transplant. I place it in front of Serenity Joy’s grave and clear the weeds from her stone and Esther’s. Scooping my son into my arms, I press his warm body against me. He pushes against my chest and looks up into my face.

  “Ich liebe dich,” I murmur. “Ich liebe dich.”

  Carrying Eli, I stroll out through the graveyard gate, past the schoolhouse, and up the long gravel lane. The line of stores comes into sight with their shake-shingled roofs and painted window boxes brimming with purple and white pansies. A few cars, minivans, and buggies are parked at each pristine location, proving that though the scandal surrounding the former bishop of Copper Creek swept the whole way up to the communities in Canada, it has not hurt business the way the store owners feared.

  The glass door to Hostetler’s Bakery swings wide. Elvina stalks down the handicap ramp with the rubber entrance mat in her hands. She lifts it over her head and whacks it over the handrail. Dust and coin-sized leaves flutter through the air. The brown apron of her cape dress lifts with the breeze, revealing thick calves sheathed in black tights. I raise my hand in greeting. Letting the mat flop over the rail, Elvina folds her arms and stares. Not moving, not saying a word. Eli sees her too. Delighted to meet a potential friend, he smacks a kiss into his left palm and then his right. He wags his christened hands and gives her the grin that won over so many nurses on the myelosuppression floor.

  Elvina’s lips begin to twitch—proving that not even a miser can withstand my son’s unstudied charms. She lifts her hardworking hand and waves at Eli. And then she nods at me. I smile as tears blur her stout figure.

  Any customer watching this exchange between a young Englischer and an Old Order Mennonite woman would not think it unusual. But this simple interaction with the unofficial gatekeeper of Copper Creek shows that though I will never reenter the community, I am no longer outside its fold.

  With grace in my step, I continue walking. Eli babbles in my ear, but I do not hear his nonsensical words. My mind drifts to the seven-month journey our family has been on. A journey whose destination I sometimes could not see, and therefore did not think I had the strength to reach.

  The deacons contacted the head bishops in Pennsylvania the same day Tobias confessed his affair in Tennessee, the same day his wife almost died and his daughter was born. It did not matter that Leah was hospitalized or that Serenity was in NICU; that next week Tobias was summoned to stand before the bishops’ judgment seat. It must have been a rude awakening for Tobias to see that he was on the bottom rung of the hierarchy in Lancaster County, even though he had reached its pinnacle in Copper Creek. He repented before the bishops, as he had repented before us. But it made no difference in the outcome. I am sure he never expected it would.

  Tobias resigned from his position the day he returned home. Rumor was, the deacon who made the call to Pennsylvania was the same deacon who opened the pages of the Ausbund to find the paper declaring him the new bishop. Only this time, the mantle was one he had long expected to wear.

  Tobias was not bitter. He even dismissed the allegations that his forced resignation had been selfishly devised. This made me realize that he had truly changed. A part of this change took place the day he emptied his burdens through confession. But losing Serenity Joy was the pain-filled metamorphosis that cemented his faith. At that point, he could have turned his back on God. He had risked everything to cleanse his soul, and in recompense, he lost everything. Amazing as it was, Tobias did not waver in his pursuit of righteousness. I knew then that Tobias was not predestined to be bishop of Copper Creek, yet he was meant to lead others in seeking the ways of God—just as his father, Amos King, had done.

  Leah and I did not talk often after Tobias stepped down. Eli was confined to the myelosuppression floor, and she was confined to the NICU with Serenity Joy. Occasionally we would meet in the hospital’s cafeteria to drink watery coffee and eat thick oatmeal cream pies the remarried Ida Mae Speck smuggled in from Hostetler’s. For a short time, we were two young meed seated at our mamm’s scarred kitchen table. Then silence would loom between our adult selves like a dam built by my betrayal—unspoken turbulence blocking the tranquil flow of our conversation.

  In this, I have paid a hundredfold for one night of thoughtless passion. The only comfort remains in the thought that perhaps, with time, our new intimacy will be cherished all the more for our having lost the old.

  On the knoll, the tall white farmhouse with the ten rooms and ten plain windows comes into view. Coils of steel-gray smoke twist from the chimney. Leah and Miriam are at the kochoffe inside, preparing the last esse that will be shared among the Kings and the Stoltzfuses before Tobias and Leah’s family moves to Canada. The community has not asked the Kings to leave, but neither have they asked them to stay. It will be hard for my sister to leave behind everyone she loves, but the dynamics of our relationship being what they are, Tobias and Leah know they must start afresh rather than remain in a place dank with what should have never been.

  Resettling my son’s comforting bulk on my hip, I stride down the lane toward the farmhouse, relishing the feel of jeans and the wind running its fingers through my short hair. In the breeze, my earrings tinkle like chimes. Eli reaches up and touches one.

  “Don’t pull,” I warn, kissing his fingers.

  With a whine, the farmhouse door opens. I look up. Tobias King is standing on the top porch step. Even before Serenity’s death, silver had threaded his black hair and beard. Although he has not regained the weight he lost over the past twelve months, peace usually reigns in his eyes, where they were once evidence of his inward war.

  But today, despite my brother-in-law’s eyes still being filled with the peace that passes all understanding, they are also filled with sadness. For a moment, those dark eyes lock with mine. That one silent glance communicates what a lifetime of contrite words could not. Tobias then shifts his gaze down to this beautiful, innocent child cradled in my arms—the child he and I created—and I know the sorrow he feels is not over the past, but because of the future. For throughout Tobias’s life, he will remain only a distant uncle to this child, when he should be so much more.

  The front door opens. I look past Tobias to his younger brother, Judah, whose face splits with a smile mirrored by my own. Wiping his calloused hands on a dish towel, Judah tosses it over his shoulder and plods down the porch steps. His soft, honeyed eyes igniting with joy, he extends his arms toward me—toward his familye—and I step into them, ever so grateful that Judah
King has awaited my return.

  Perching the basket on my hip, I scale the porch steps and enter the kitchen, letting the screen door slam. I dump the pole beans in the sink and set the basket on the countertop. Keeping my back to Alice, I start snapping.

  Her hands, which have been slicing flattened dough into squares, grow still. “People need to know we’re out here, Rhoda.”

  “They already do, or they wouldn’t’ve sent that journalist.”

  “They don’t give real journalists these kinds of stories.”

  “If she’s not a real journalist,” I say, “then why’d you bother talking to her?”

  “I had to. Something’s gotta change.”

  The beans are so dehydrated from the sun, I have to score my thumbnail into the flesh to sever the ends. But nothing can be wasted. Not anymore. “We’re fine.”

  “You keep saying that, but pregnant girls can’t live on potpie and green beans alone.”

  I toss a bean into the bowl and grip the edge of the countertop. Stress coils around me until every ligament in my body feels like a bowstring. “I know what they need.”

  “Of course you do.” Alice walks over and places a hot, floured hand on my arm. It is all I can do not to swat it away. “The Lord knows you took good care of me and Uriah,” she says. “But times—they were different then. We had more food. We had more help. And your job was just to take care of us girls, not manage a farm at the same time.”

  I stare down at the old stone bowl I’ve painstakingly filled with shriveled beans and resist the impulse to knock it to the floor.

  Nineteen years ago, former head midwife Fannie Graber suffered a slipped disk while helping maneuver a posterior baby down the birth canal: a painful graze of nerves against bone, forcing her into early retirement and forcing me into her former position at the tender age of twenty-three. Ever since that night when I found myself doing what I never thought I would, I’ve been caught between my desire to make Hopen Haus a success—by begging the Old Order Mennonite church to let us have electricity and state-of-the-art equipment—and my desire to keep Hopen Haus as archaic as possible, so that my previous life and the secrets pervading it can remain sheltered from the outside world.