“I don’t know.” I am telling the truth. “It just seems important.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s kind of like I have to remember.”
“Remember what?”
I laugh nervously. “I don’t know.” I laugh a little reedy laugh. “I guess it’s not working, huh?”
She shrugs and gives me a little hug around my shoulders with her wrists so her floured hands don’t touch my dress. We work on in silence until all the marshmallows and flour are stowed and the pans wiped clean and replaced. She puts on a clean apron, gets her sewing bag and a basket full of the pieces I have cut, and puts on her coat. She is going to join her mother and the other women. The way her arm looks carrying the basket reminds me of something.
“Miriam, I have been meaning to ask you something.” She starts to protest and then realizes that tit for tat, she asked a question and now I should be able to do so too.
“I was thinking the other day about the little Lescher girl, you know, the one whose arm was—what? injured?—when the Armstead group was here.”
She nods and then puts the basket down and sits across from me.
“Yes,” she says, “Ryan tells me that she is just fine.”
“So is Brother Luke a doctor or something?”
She shifts in the chair.
“No, not exactly.”
“So how did he fix her arm? I mean, you saw it, didn’t you? It looked so,” I search for a word, “unnatural.”
She nods again. Then she looks beyond me, like she is trying to decide about something.
“He knows about brauching.”
I’ve heard this word but really don’t know what it means, so I raise my eyebrows and wait for her to tell me.
“It’s a kind of healing power,” she says slowly. “Sympathy healing, some call it. I asked Ryan about it over and over and he finally told me.” She pauses and then goes ahead. “The Armstead group, and according to Ryan, some other Amish groups, have people who can heal others.”
I don’t know how far this word goes, healing.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” I tell her. She shrugs.
“You’ve never heard of a lot of things,” she says, a slow smile warming her face. “Remember, we’re supposed to be disconnected.”
“But why not talk about something, I mean, amongst us?”
She looks off again into the distance.
“I’m not sure I should be talking about this,” she says. “For one thing, because of what it costs Brother Luke.”
“You mean he charges for this?” I am trying to reconcile this idea with the gentle and generous man I know.
“Of course not!” She seems indignant. “It costs him!”
I remember the look on Brother Luke’s face when he came back with the injured child and I wonder. I begin to ask another question, but Sarah is at the door, stomping snow off her shoes. She has forgotten her favorite thimble. As she goes into her bedroom to find it, Miriam leans close to me and whispers.
“I should never have brought that up,” she says. “Ryan would be so disappointed in me. I couldn’t face him if he knew I’d been talking about it.”
We hear the sound of dresser drawers opening and slamming shut.
“Don’t ever ask me about it again,” Miriam rasps firmly. “I mean it.”
Sarah comes into the room and Miriam puts on her coat and they leave together.
“Don’t forget to stir the soup,” Sarah says as she closes the door.
I look at the stove and stare into the pot of pea soup that Sarah began for dinner. It has begun to thicken and boil, and the bubbles force their way up to the surface and explode. The sputtering is beginning to spatter the stove top so I balance a lid on top, tipped just a bit so that the heat won’t build up too much and overflow the pot, but will still control the spattering. This takes me a long time, to achieve the balance between suppressing something that must be kept cooking, and keeping it from making a mess. And then I have to start all over with the balancing part each time I remove the lid to stir the soup. For some reason this seems not just a cooking job but a cosmic, symbolic one, and I’m not up to either.
And then I understand it: This is Sarah’s soup.
I check the burner under the pot and bundle myself up and walk out to our courtyard. If I drag my chair over to one corner where the snow has melted and the sun shines now for a few more minutes until it begins to drop in the sky, I can feel it soak into me. I want to store it up against the night that is coming, this the longest night of the year.
From beyond the gate, out of my sight, I hear voices, low, cautious, urgent. A couple of men whose pipes are sticky-fragrant with cherry tobacco have stopped to talk over near the barn, and both their voices and the smoke drifts toward me.
“We can’t protect our children just by staying separate,” one of them says and the other um-hums in agreement. “There are enemies out there that would take our children from us. Remember what Papa says, he’s right.”
“Maybe we should think about putting iron bars on our houses like he did,” the other man says. I hear one of them grasp the iron and shake it gently.
I don’t move, don’t breathe. I don’t want them to know I’m here.
“We have the protection of rumspringa,” says the second one. “Our kids, they get out into the world, they see what’s there, they know what they’ve got here, they make good choices, they come back, they always have.”
“They always did, until lately, you mean. Have you heard about Armstead? The problems they are having there?”
Armstead. I freeze in my chair, leaning forward like the racers we see on bicycles, like a hound on point.
In my mind I see Matthau walking with people who have blackness coming off them like dust. It swirls in the air around them.
“Think back, Brother, remember how it was for us when we were young, the Ordnung, the security of rules, these protected our minds.”
“No more.” The man’s voice is rough, combative. “It’s like an invasion, like our fences won’t keep them out.”
“So you think we shouldn’t let our kids go to town? Keep ’em locked up, huh?”
I hear feet shuffling and the tapping of a pipe against the siding. It sounds like the house is hollow, not just the emptied-out pipe.
“It’s different now. It’s like all the strangeness, the darkness, comes back with them.”
I hear a faint snort. “So it comes back on their clothes, you’re saying, like fertilizer dust we should just, what, wash out?”
I catch my breath. The blackness, like dust—had I not just thought that?
“What they see, it changes them. Once you have an idea, you can’t unthink it, you know what I mean? You can’t get images out of your head.”
I see images. Of soot-colored empty eyes.
“True enough.”
“It’s like they lie in the fields like seeds and even though you forget them, the first rain in spring makes them grow.”
Things you thought were dead, like hidden seeds.
Book people, that other book people thought were dead.
Fears, thoughts that take shape and rise up out of fields.
Whisperings in the rows.
The men have turned their conversation now to the varieties of seeds they have ordered, to fertilizers, to oiling plow blades. I hear the ache for longer days in their voices.
But I look toward the fields and see the shadows lengthening there. I am straining to hear, but the men don’t talk any more about anything I can identify with than their sighings, wishing spring would come. Then they walk away.
I realize that the sun is no longer shining on me in the courtyard. I am shivering. My teeth rattle against each other like old bones hanging on a cord in the wind.
For the first time I entertain a thought, that what I saw in Mathhaus’s book, the dead who come alive, the bloodied people—perhaps they were not just out there in the cities, not jus
t something vomited out of the mouth of televisions and rising up out of subway stairs to walk in groups with long black coats that sway, sway, sway with each step.
Perhaps Matthaus didn’t bring with him to our community just a book, but something else that lies in our fields waiting to rise up.
I’m trying to lasso my thoughts, like my mind is running away and I have to stop it. Think. Think. Do things work that way? Jesus brought forth the dead with just words. Just speaking syllables.
I think back to what one of the men just said. “You can’t unthink a thought.”
By having a thought the first time, I wonder, do you give it permission to live? Even if it comes to you from someone else—does it plant itself in your mind? And when you remember it, do you give it life again?
I am shuddering and crying now. I have to find a way through this dark underbrush of my thoughts.
It will take a lot of courage to do what I need to do. I need to ask Papa a question and I can do that tomorrow. And since this night will be so long, I can start after dinner with the project I’ve started. It’s sort of like my Christmas and New Year’s gift to myself.
I have in my mind named this the head-on collision project. It’s kind of like the chicken game that sometimes the courting buggies play when there’s nobody else on the country roads at night. I know it frightens the wild-eyed horses more than it does the drivers, the young men who are anxious to show others, especially their betrothed, that they have courage.
I have that kind of courage. I’ll have to, to survive. But I’m not proving anything to anyone but myself. I am going to look some things in the eye. I am going to use all those parts of the Bible that I’ve been hiding from and I’m going to look them in the eye.
I think I know a way to do that.
I don’t know what the inside of a movie theater looks like. I’ve never seen a television except from a distance, a trembling confusion of colors through the picture windows of Outsiders I have seen as our buggy rode past. But I saw pictures of the Globe Theatre, Shakespeare’s theater, in a history book. I know what a stage is. And I know what an audience is.
I’ll be the audience. I’ll start with the hardest one, the scariest one, the story of Samuel coming back from the dead. I don’t know how I’ll find the strength to do this because if I acknowledge this story as real, I know once and for all that what I’ve seen when my mother comes to me in the night is real.
But this may not end so well. As I recall, having someone come to you who is dead didn’t work out so well for the one who he talked to.
But that night I don’t start my project, my head-on collision, because Sister Eve begins her labor three weeks early, and Miriam goes to help with her little ones, and Sarah and I begin after our own dinner to cook oatmeal and long johns for the family tomorrow. At the last minute, deep into the night, I decide to candy some pecans as a kind of welcome to the world celebration for the baby and a snack for the new mother and once again I am stirring sticky things over a fire. By the time I fall into bed I am too tired to watch anything other than the insides of my eyelids.
I think that perhaps I won’t have any dreams tonight, that perhaps Mama will have sympathy pains with Sister Eve and will not come to me.
And I am right, she does not come to me with her mouth opening and shutting like a fish tonight.
I wish she had.
I awaken—or did I awaken? I don’t know—in the night and there is light coming in from the hallway, light that is a tall, skinny rectangle and at the edge of my door there is a hand, holding it open just enough to look in. I am terrified because I do not know whose hand it is, and one eye looks over it and I can’t see the eye clearly either. But there’s a sudden glint on the hand and of this I am sure: I see Mama’s ring catching the light from the hallway and I know that green brilliance.
And I know that the last time I saw it was on Mama’s hand as it lay across her body in our living room, before they put her into her casket.
Chapter 12
It’s kind of a point of pride among the Amish and some other people that we don’t wear wedding rings, that the vows we take are written on our hearts, sealed until death, and we don’t need any outward symbol to warn away other men from an Amish wife.
A woman’s virtue is her protection, Papa always says. A woman’s virtue is her beauty.
Mama received that square-cut brilliant emerald ring from her own mother and she told me sometimes that it was her only vice.
“Keeping such a worldly thing isn’t very plain,” she said to me one evening as the cancer began to swell her abdomen and wither her arms and legs. “But I like to see the lights inside it, as if it has a thousand tiny green candles made by a hundred candlemakers.” That was the way she thought, always seeing even a simple seam embroidered in her mind. I remember leaning over her shoulder as she lay, resting my chin there, smelling the lavender in her hair, seeing green flames everywhere.
I heard the sadness in her voice. “It keeps me company while you are in school,” she said, and I wondered why Papa did not stay with her. I wondered, even then, where he spent his days. I wondered about the sound of a shutting door sometimes in the night.
The ring was the last thing of value Mama’s own mother owned because her house burned to the ground just before Papa and Mama married. Mama’s cedar chest full of linens and even the quilts, the family quilts, all were gone. The ring, my grandmother GrossMem’s own only dowry from her Philadelphia mother who gave it to her and then disowned her when she married Papa, this was her only dowry for Mama.
Papa always said that the ring carried a bad spirit with it like the idolatrous ephod Gideon made and that Mama should sell it so that it wouldn’t bring estrangement and disaster to me when I got married.
“We’ll stop that right here,” he once said, “just get rid of the ring. Buy some land for the community.” But Mama never did, one of her few little rebellions against Papa.
I saw the ring on her hand as it lay on her wedding dress (pulled together and held with clothespins in the back, she had lost so much weight) after Papa insisted on being the one to wash her body and prepare it for burial.
There was a stir about that, I remember. But he was her husband, and no one could deny this sobbing man that last service.
No one seemed surprised that Papa said he would bury her ring with her, though. As a child I often opened Mama’s wooden box where she kept hairpins and safety pins and old ribbons and put the ring on my skinny fingers, holding it up to the light and marveling at the way it split the light into other colors and made them dance like fireflies on the walls and ceiling. But I never gave it another thought after the day of her funeral.
And now, like so many things in my life, that ring doesn’t want to stay buried. I awakened this morning with a sickness in my stomach that didn’t go away with the news of the healthy new baby born to Sister Eve.
In the light of morning, this I know: Though I don’t know whose hand wore the ring last night, I know it wasn’t Mama’s.
I am wearied beyond words. I must get to the bottom of all of this, of all the nighttime communications with words and without.
I go to Papa in the evening as he sits beside the roaring fire. He is drying his coat and gloves on a hanger above it, and steam rises from his work boots. He looks up at me with an absence in his face that I see more and more often. Perhaps is it mostly because it is winter, and all the men in the community look that way toward the middle of the short days and long nights because they have so little to do. After the wood is chopped and split and snow shoveled off of walkways, even the most artistic of them grow weary of home repairs and of making furniture or sanding the little wooden toys the tourists seem to love so. It’s as if their muscles grow slack, or perhaps they are afraid that they will, and their faces become slack and expressionless too; and their eyes seem to search the fields for the first unspoken permissions to go out into them and touch the cold dirt, to find out that frost has releas
ed it, to feel it crumble between their fingers.
For Papa, though, I am quite sure that it has as much to do with not being in this house one minute a day more than he has to be.
“Papa, I’ve been spending a lot of time reading my Bible,” I say.
He straightens himself up and some of the old heartiness seems to return.
“Wonderful, wonderful,” he booms, and reaches out with both hands to grasp my right hand like men do with one another when they are greeting one another. He stops in mid-motion and puts his hands on my shoulders.
“I am proud of you,” he says, and his eyes soften.
“And I’ve been using your Bible encyclopedias, too.”
I see a bit of wariness in his eyes. He gave me permission of course but one never knows where knowledge will take you. Perhaps he, too, knows of books that change your life.
“Ah,” he says.
I push on. “And I need to ask you some things that I can’t find answers to.”
He nods, encouraging me.
“You know how you were talking about the Mormons the other day,” I begin, and I see his shoulders lowering. And then he looks over my shoulder, just a glance, just a moment, and I am wondering if he is looking to see where Sarah might be.
“I read in one of your books that their religion started when their founder Joseph Smith said God spoke to him.”
Papa nods again, and then seems to startle a bit when he realizes that this requires a response from him.
“But God didn’t. Speak to Joseph Smith that is.”
I gulp. “So how do we know that? Are you saying that God never does that any more?”
He fidgets and pretends to check on one of his socks. He stretches it out a bit and I notice, as I often have, how he seems to have no body odor. Never has. Not even in his feet.
“No,” he says slowly. “I mean yes. Some people believe that God stopped speaking to people when the New Testament documents were put together, to complete the Bible. But we have to believe that He still communicates with people today. He still guides us. Of course. Of course.”
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