The Amish Clockmaker

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Congratulations, Mr. Raber,” the lawyer said, putting the cigarette between his own lips instead. He flicked open a lighter, cupped his hand around his mouth, and lit up.

  “Please tell me what’s going on,” Clayton said, for some reason sounding angry even though he wasn’t.

  The lawyer blew out smoke in a long, satisfied stream. “Charges were dropped. Officially speaking, the prosecutor decided there was insufficient evidence to go to trial.”

  Clayton blinked. Insufficient evidence? So why had they arrested him in the first place? “I don’t understand.”

  Another drag, another exhale. A long, heavy pause, and then what almost felt like a secret shared in a low voice. “A credible witness came forward who said they saw the whole thing.”

  A witness? But he and Miriam had been alone. Who could possibly have seen them?

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know. The person asked to remain anonymous. But the police must have believed whoever it was, because after taking a statement they decided to drop charges and close the case. You’re a free man.”

  He took Clayton’s elbow as if to usher him forward away from the jail doors, but Clayton would not budge.

  “What witness? Who?” he insisted. Theoretically, someone could have observed their encounter from down below in the barn. The hayloft was open, after all, and they were for the most part standing close enough to the edge to have been seen.

  But no one had been down there. No one else was in the barn with them.

  “Does it matter?” the lawyer asked, seeming vaguely irritated. “The point is you’ve been released.”

  “Why remain anonymous, though? If someone saw what happened, why wouldn’t they speak freely?”

  The man sighed, impatient with Clayton’s persistence. “I don’t know, Mr. Raber. But if I were you, I’d just count my blessings and never look back.”

  Clayton spent the first few days of his return home in solitude, praying and mourning. Though he had expected to be welcomed back into the bosom of his family and community, he quickly realized that matters were unfolding in the opposite direction. Apparently, not only did the newspapers and Englischers who read them believe he’d been guilty and had simply gotten away with it, but everyone in his community—and his family—did too.

  Even his mother seemed to have her doubts. She moved over to Maisie’s the same day he came home, claiming his sister needed some extra help around the house. But Clayton knew the truth. She thought he was guilty, that he was a killer. And now a part of her was actually afraid of him.

  Oddly, the only ones who seemed willing to believe him and move on were the very people who should have harbored the most anger toward him: Miriam’s parents. Though he could tell it was hard for them to be with him—to even look at him—at least their words were kind and they made an effort to see that he was fed. In the absence of his mother, Norman brought over a dinner plate each afternoon and left it in the kitchen for when Clayton came home from the shop.

  At first, he assumed that the community and his family members needed time. Miriam’s death had been a shock, and maybe their consternation was more about that than about some perceived guilt of Clayton’s. He hoped things would get better. But even being at worship service was strange, different. Almost as if he were officially shunned, the people wouldn’t quite look at him, barely spoke to him. Whispered about him constantly. Even Uriah, his wise bishop, treasured friend, and trusted confidant, now regarded Clayton with a mix of skepticism and mistrust.

  Except that he wasn’t shunned. He wasn’t dealt with by the church in any way at first, almost as if they were still trying to make up their minds about Clayton Raber and the truth of what happened that day.

  He’d never felt so alienated and alone.

  At least he had his clocks, he thought. But then it seemed the town, too, had made up its mind, and without the support of local customers, his business began to decline. Still, he tried to hang on, telling himself God knew the truth and that was what mattered. Clayton hoped that in His sovereignty He would reveal that truth to others in time.

  But the longer that seemed to take, the more Clayton withdrew. Unable to bear how he was treated at church, he stopped going altogether. Stopped trying to contact family members. Finally even stopped opening the store on any sort of regular schedule. Not that it mattered. Business had dwindled to a trickle.

  He knew what folks were saying about him. Some believed he’d purposely pushed Miriam off the loft, hoping the fall would kill her. Some believed he pushed her in anger, not realizing the fall would take her life. But whether they thought it was an accident or intentional, they all believed he’d pushed her. They all blamed him for what happened.

  Oh, Miriam. If only I had fallen instead of you.

  One day he was visited by Uriah and three of the ministers, who had come to inform him that his prolonged lack of attendance at church had become unacceptable. They were putting him on probation, and if he didn’t come to the next Sunday meeting, he might be excommunicated.

  He knew that was just an excuse. What they really wanted was for him either to go away entirely or to confess and repent for having killed his wife. The fact that the police and the court system had declared him innocent made no difference to them. After all, some of them had been there. They had heard it for themselves. They had witnessed Clayton’s temper and seen Miriam’s anguish and known their marriage was headed for disaster from the very start.

  It was obvious to him they believed he was guilty. Clayton tried to defend himself, tried to share the same sorts of facts he’d shared with Detective De Lucca, but nothing he said made any difference, not even the news that there had been a witness who had seen the whole thing and sworn to his innocence.

  “The police know I didn’t do it. They dropped all charges.”

  “We are to be a peculiar people,” Uriah said, shaking his head slowly. “What the state concludes and what we know to be true are separate matters.”

  Clayton’s eyes filled with tears, but he was not ashamed.

  “How could you think I killed her?” he asked, looking from one man to the other. “I loved her. I wanted to help her. She was sick.”

  No one would look at him, so he spoke to Uriah directly.

  “I told you how irrational Miriam had been acting. You saw how much her suffering pained me, how much I loved her.”

  The man sighed, and in that sigh Clayton knew that all Uriah chose to remember was the night Clayton had come and asked him for an annulment once the baby died.

  “I think we sometimes do strange things for the people we love, things that seem best at the time,” Uriah said, tears in his own eyes as he finally met Clayton’s gaze.

  Clayton felt his hands ball into fists. “I can’t confess to something I didn’t do, Bishop.”

  No one spoke a word in reply.

  The men left Clayton’s home in sorrow, the matter unresolved. Clayton did not go to church that Sunday, and three days later he was informed of his excommunication.

  After that, he devoted the lonely hours to making clocks, the one thing he still had left, but even this began to seem meaningless. Each morning, he found himself more and more reluctant to enter the shop. Christmas came and went without much fanfare, and then he stopped going to the shop altogether.

  He couldn’t spend his days working on gears, wheels, and pendulums that reminded him every second that he would spend the rest of his hours alone, without his family, without his community. Without Miriam. No one was coming into the shop anymore anyway, except those who wanted their repaired clocks returned to them as well as those who wanted their not-yet-repaired clocks returned. The only tourists who stopped by were those curious to get a glimpse of the Amish man who had murdered his wife and gotten away with it.

  With sinking clarity, Clayton realized there was nothing left for him in Ridgeview, nor in Lancaster County. The one person he wanted to share his life with was gone, and everyone else had tu
rned their backs on him for good.

  Clayton knew he had to leave. He would tell Mamm to sell the shop if she wanted, sell the land, the house, the property—he didn’t care. Sell it all. She’d be set for the rest of her life, money-wise. She could stay with Maisie if she wanted, maybe use some of the funds to help Roger put in a little daadi haus over there. Either way, she wouldn’t have to live alone at the homestead among its miserable memories once he was gone.

  Yes, she would be sad for a while at the loss of the home she had shared with Daed, and she might even be sad that Clayton was gone, but in the end she would be cared for and spared of any visual reminders of what had happened here. She could go on with her life, investing it in the lives of her daughters and their families. She wouldn’t need Clayton’s company anymore. And her asthma would be monitored by Maisie’s watchful eye. In time, she would be happy again.

  As for Clayton, he would set out for somewhere else and make for himself as quiet and simple a life as he could.

  It wouldn’t be an Amish life. It couldn’t be an Amish life, but it would be a Plain life, one as pleasing to God as he could make it out among the Englisch.

  It would be the solitary life he was already living here, but without the constant looks of mistrust from strangers, the ongoing rejection by his church and loved ones, and most of all the reminders of Miriam and of his loss. He was done.

  Done with anger.

  Done with love.

  But he would get by. A quiet life of solitude, somewhere far from here, would require neither.

  PART THREE

  Matthew

  THIRTY-TWO

  The once-beautiful clock bearing Clayton Raber’s initials was the first thing I saw when I awoke the morning after Amanda and I discovered it in the back room of the tack shop.

  At first my wife hadn’t been overly thrilled to have the dusty clock in the cottage, much less in our bedroom, but I really wanted to have it near me before I turned it over to Clayton’s family members. To make her feel better, I’d checked it for spiders and bugs and had found neither.

  I was eager to get to the Helmuths’. I wanted to see Joan Raber Glick—the only living sibling of Clayton Raber—face-to-face to see if she could help me figure out where her brother was living now. If he was living now. Regardless of what she’d told the Starbrite hotel people, I had to believe she had some idea of where he might have gone when he left Lancaster County so many years ago. Now that I had this old clock we’d found hidden in the wall of the back room, I hoped I finally had a chance of convincing Becky Helmuth to let me in to speak with her mother.

  Fortunately, Noah agreed to work both my shift and his at the shop so I could slip away first thing, even though it was Saturday, our busiest day of the week. At Amanda’s insistence, I wasn’t even going to swing by the store first lest I get caught up in things there. I was just going to take the clock and go.

  When I came in from morning chores, hungry for breakfast, I was astounded at what awaited me on the dining table. Next to a steaming plate of eggs and corned beef hash sat the most beautiful, shiny, elegant, gleaming clock I had ever seen.

  “Is that the same clock we found last night?” I asked, stepping toward it and carefully lifting it in my hands to get a better look. The piece was magnificent, a work of art in wood.

  “I think it’s made of cherry,” she said, “but other kinds of wood are in there too, all inlaid together. That’s what makes the design.”

  I ran a finger over the front panel of the clock at its base. She was right. Now that the dust and cobwebs were gone, what had looked last night like some painted-on decoration was actually not painted at all. The various colors in the design came from the different kinds of woods that had been used to make it.

  “Does it still work?” I asked, realizing that if it did, it might possibly be worth a lot of money.

  “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Zook,” Amanda replied with a wink. “What time is it?”

  I looked at the beveled glass on the front of the clock and then over at our modest little kitchen wall clock and realized that the two timepieces matched perfectly. All I could do after I had gently set the clock back down was sweep my wife into a big hug and thank her for making the most of my chances today at the Helmuths’.

  An hour later I pulled into their driveway with the clock nestled on the seat beside me, wrapped up in a clean swath of fabric. I left it bundled as I gently lifted it out and carried it up to the front door. I knocked more loudly than usual, hoping that maybe Joan would answer. But she didn’t. Becky came to the door, and when she saw me, she had the same stern look on her face as she had the last time I saw her.

  “Wait! Please. Before you close the door on me, let me show you something.” I held up the bundle so she could see it and then peeled back just a corner of the fabric to reveal a bit of the gleaming reddish brown wood underneath.

  “It’s a clock, Becky, a beautiful old clock with the initials CR on the bottom. My wife and I found it last night. It was hidden in the back room of the tack store in an old coal bin I don’t think anybody has seen the inside of in decades.”

  She seemed surprised and somewhat interested—until I added, “I was hoping I could show it to Joan.”

  Becky’s eyebrows lifted, as if she were appalled I would stoop so low as to use an old family heirloom as barter to gain a visit with her mother. But before she could refuse and once again send me away, I pulled off more of the fabric and then raised the clock so she could see the bottom.

  “Look, there it is,” I said, pointing to the initials. “ ‘CR. E-c-c 3:1.’ I know this is Clayton’s signature because I’ve seen it plenty of times before. He made this clock and then for some reason hid it in the old coal bin in the back of his clock shop.”

  For the first time since I’d met her, Becky seemed somewhat less than sure about what she should do. Tentatively, she held out one finger and touched the letters that had been carved into the wood, as if she were reaching back through time to touch the hand of her long-lost uncle.

  “Clayton made this clock,” I repeated, keeping my tone even and gentle. “I know your mother would want to see it.”

  Before she could reply, another face—an even older, female face—appeared behind her. Thin and frail, the woman leaned on a cane, and her kapp seemed too big for her withered head.

  Surely this was the woman I’d been so desperate to see. This was Joan Raber Glick.

  “What’s this about Clayton? Who has heard from Clayton?” the woman said, her voice quavering.

  Becky sighed under her breath. “No one has, Mamm.”

  “What did that man say about a clock? Has he a clock of Clayton’s? I want to see it.”

  “Mamm,” Becky began, but the old woman interrupted her.

  “You there!” she said to me, as she opened the screen door with a shaking hand. “What did you say about a clock?”

  I looked at Becky, who gave a resigned sigh. “Bring it on in then. She won’t rest until she sees what you’ve brought. She’s already heard too much.”

  Trying not to grin, I came directly into a large sitting room. Becky helped her mother into an armchair and directed me to sit on the couch.

  “Danke.”

  Becky sat beside me but closer to her mother. “Sarah, maybe you could bring us some lemonade?” she said to her granddaughter, who had just come into the room. The young woman nodded and headed off for the kitchen.

  “What did you say your name was?” Joan asked, looking at me with a furrowed brow.

  “Matthew Zook. I’m from Ridgeview.”

  “Zook, from Ridgeview,” she echoed, and her eyebrows furrowed even more.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Zook. From Ridgeview.” She turned to her daughter. “A Zook bought the Ridgeview homestead from my mamm when Clayton left.”

  “Ya,” I said. “That was my grandfather. Isaac Zook.”

  She turned back to me. “I grew up in that house!”

&nbs
p; “So did I,” I said with a polite smile.

  “Been a while since I’ve been by there. A long while.”

  Becky pointed to the clock, clearly wanting to get on with the business of why I had come. “Tell her what it is that you have there.”

  Turning to Joan, I unwrapped the clock and held it so she could see it. Then I repeated what I’d already told Becky, that I was sure it was one of Clayton’s clocks. “It has his initials engraved on the bottom. It was hidden in an old coal hamper in the back room of what used to be his clock shop, a room we’ve always used for an office. We’re doing some remodeling, and last night my wife discovered this inside the bin.”

  Joan asked to hold the clock. I rose from my chair and took it to her. She ran her hand along the glossy wood before trying to turn it around to see the bottom. I helped her maneuver it. She traced an arthritic finger over the C and R. While she was admiring the clock, our lemonade arrived. Sarah placed the three glasses on the coffee table in front of us and then quietly slipped from the room.

  “Clayton’s clocks were so well made,” Joan murmured. “Much finer than Daed’s, though I never said so to his face. Or to Clayton’s.” She struggled to turn the clock back over, and again I assisted her. “Daed was a tradesman, but Clayton was an artist.”

  I nodded in agreement. Certainly, this was the most beautiful clock I had ever seen.

  The three of us sat in silence, Joan admiring the clock, seemingly lost in a thousand private thoughts, while Becky watched her mother’s face. I waited patiently, praying I would know the right moment to ask my next question, one that might reveal to me the answers I needed in order to find Clayton.

  Finally, when Joan’s watery eyes met mine, I launched in, giving her a simplified version of the property issue I was facing now and my need to find her younger brother in order to straighten it out. The whole time I spoke, she just stared at me blankly, and I wasn’t quite sure if she followed what I was saying or not.