“But put vinegar and soda together and pow!” he said. And there’s still a gouge in the ceiling tiles from where the rocket blasted up there and got stuck.
“The lesson is this,” he told us soberly. “God has created many things, and everything He made is good. But some things don’t need to be mixed because you might not be able to control the consequences.” He pointed overhead to the plastic rocket.
“God created all people,” he said. “But we’re different than others. You can’t mix the simple way of life with that of outsiders. It has to be one or the other.”
I remember sitting and wondering whether the simple life was vinegar or soda.
During my time in school, the grades were separated: against the left wall up front were the children through third grade in a semicircle, the second row in the middle of the room was the fourth through six graders, and up against the other wall toward the back were the older kids. Since I graduated, no one has yet moved up to that row for now. Perhaps that’s for the best.
When Sister Morgenstern and her husband left “in a huff, by cover of darkness,” as Papa put it, Papa tried to get Miriam to teach. But after a few days it was obvious that wasn’t going to work because she had absolutely no memory of her own recent studies of math, stumbled badly when reading aloud, and in the end could only teach with any competency one thing, and that was botany.
So the children learned to put an avocado seed suspended by toothpicks over a mason jar of water to grow a house plant, and how to identify field flowers and thirty-seven agricultural pests and how to get rid of them. At one point she assigned the older students to formulate math “story problems” out of the species (they graded each other’s papers of course) and used leaves for art projects and tried to direct the dissection of a hapless five-legged grasshopper (Miriam couldn’t look but the boys were very interested) who was trying to winter in the barn.
At this point Miriam was completely out of lesson materials. So Papa cajoled Sister Eve to teach while Miriam watched her children, but the birth of her new baby brought an end to that.
The next Sunday Papa called Sister Naomi Eckman’s name during church and said the Lord had called her to teach. Now, everyone knows that in the Bible, the old woman named Naomi changed her own name and asked everyone to call her Mara, which means bitter; and we all in The Anchor know why Papa renamed Sister Naomi Eckman that. It’s like a secret meaning in her name, and I think Papa kind of enjoys naming people that way.
Though she may have once been a pretty woman, Sister Eckman’s eyes wear hoods like cobras and the bottoms of her cheeks hang down like the earflaps on a winter hat. Sometimes when she’s talking and all the time when she’s singing her voice sounds like wooden slats in a wagon rubbing against each other. Miriam and I had a theory that her husband had died just to get away from her since we don’t countenance divorce and he didn’t want to endanger his immortal soul by leaving her any other way.
So we all wondered what in the world the Lord had in mind calling a woman, who only wanted to be left alone to make her famous braided woolen rugs and who was more sour than her own homemade kraut, to teach little children.
Last week I peeked into the schoolhouse window and saw that she had all the children’s desks in rows bunched up in the middle of the room. The desks are all the same, old-fashioned ones with curlicued wrought iron frames and holes in the writing surface to hold inkwells, refinished each year by the men of the community who sand away the secret etchings and varnish them.
Sister Eckman’s desk, a shining hairless mammoth, was far away, right up against the whiteboard at the front of the room, as if besieged by some invisible forces. I saw that her writing on the board was on each side of the desk—sums on the right, vocabulary words on the — left, as if she only got up to write on each side, close to her desk.
One day I saw her leaving the schoolhouse long after the children did and as she walked in the frigid air, a tear froze on her face. I felt as sorry for her as the children. But Papa had not gone a single time, I heard from one of the younger children, to the schoolhouse since she began teaching. She could be teaching computer science for all he knows. Or fashion design. Or Our Goth Neighbors: Celebrating Our Common Heritage And How We Can Get Along.
Two winters ago the men of the community finally finished clearing all the brush and rocks from the open area near the schoolhouse for a baseball field and during the recess time, the children run with legs and arms so padded by their overcoats and layers beneath that they look like soft pretzel dolls. The men of the community are happy to get out and play with the children. There’s not much else to do outdoors except the ice hockey they sometimes play down at the frozen pond. And of course when there’s snow on the ground, which has happened a lot this winter, the men and children trudge through the snow to make the big spoked wheel to play Fox and Geese.
The young girl who reported to Miriam and me the progress at the schoolhouse is a ten-year-old named Damaris King, and her parents, Amos and Ann, have always been kind to me. The family has eight children: Maybe that’s why they don’t have time to be concerned about me much. Damaris, though, is probably the only one in our community outside of Miriam who isn’t afraid of me now, I think. Maybe she sees me as her ministry. That’s the way I would have seen a strange person like me, when I was her age. Looking for the poor person among you and being nice, as the Epistle of James says.
Poor me.
Sometimes Damaris comes bringing cloth for me to wheel-cut into quilt pieces and stays to talk, though I don’t encourage it much. Her hair is wiry and coarse brown and constantly seeks to escape her Kapp. She has freckles but they look like constellations on her face, not sprinkled across her nose with some sort of evenness but as if the finger of God flicked color from a toothbrush onto her, here and there. She has that stubbornness about her lower lip that I see in the mirror sometimes, and for that I dare to love her.
Her curiosity about history and the outside world remind me of myself at her age, too. She’s smart enough to ask only questions about the Bible, though, because I guess she’s learned I don’t feel safe talking about much more than that. When you’re crazy you stick with what you know for sure.
“So, Leah, what about underwater earthquakes?” she asks me one day. “Sister Eckman read us something about that the other day.”
I tear my eyes away from the cloth she has brought me—luxurious purples and turquoises and greens with soft clouds of color that her mother will make into a “watercolor quilt.”
“What?”
She is pulling the King James Bible off the coffee table and thumbing through it, chattering as she looks for a verse.
“I’m sure she said that the Bible says that in the last days there will be underwater earthquakes. . .”
I wait until she reads aloud Mark 13:8: “For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be earthquakes in divers places. . .”
She points triumphantly at the verse. “See, underwater. Where divers go.”
I try not to smile at her as I reach for our German Luther Bible and look up the same verse. I read it aloud. “Es wird sich ein Volk wider das andere empören und ein Königreich wider das andere, und werden Erdbeben geschehen hin und wieder,” I read to her. “See, hin und weider, that means occasionally, at different times.”
She wrinkles the Pleiades on her nose as I explain.
“We have to remember that the people who translated the Bible four hundred years ago—into English, into German—they didn’t talk like we do, today,” I tell her. “Words change over time. That’s what I’ve read, anyhow.” I find myself faltering. I haven’t lived long enough to know if this is true at all. I brighten with a new thought: “But we do have the Greek that the New Testament was written in, so we can translate it for ourselves.”
She says ahhhh with her mouth completely open.
“They have those? Who has those? Do you have a Greek Bible?”
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sp; I nod.
She looks at me and sticks out that lip.
“Two problems,” she counts out on her outstretched fingers. I notice that they are spatter-painted, too. “Who around here can read that Greek?”
I calculate, too, not on my fingers but on my fears.
“Well, Papa can, or used to be able to. And I’m trying to teach myself that, a little,” I say to her, not looking at her eyes.
“Awesome!” Her voice is like a shout-prayer.
I make shooing motions with my hands. “I’m just getting started. But learning the alphabet lets me look some things up that bother me,” I say, “like the thing that bothered you.”
I move reluctantly to Papa’s bookshelf and bring out an Interlinear Bible, one that has a literally-translated word underneath each Greek word. I look up some passages that she has memorized, and show her how to find the words in Greek, and the English underneath. Then I tell her that there are many newer translations of the Bible, for people who don’t talk in thees and thous.
She is holding her head with her hands like it might burst, and grinning at me. I have the feeling that her life may never be the same, that I’m about to become a Greek tutor, and that we’ll both be escorted to a street corner in town and dumped there with our pockets full of boiled eggs and our Kapp strings blowing in the winter breeze.
Her next question could seal our fate.
“Okay. So the second question,” she says. “So if our old translations of the Bible have old words that don’t mean the same now as they did in . . .” here she thumbs through the Bible to see its first publication date, “Sixteen-eleven?” She is rubbing her chin as she looks at the Luther Bible too, and points at the 1534 in the front. “So why don’t we use newer translations that won’t confuse us so much?”
I start to tell her about the nobility of the old languages, but at that moment Papa steps into the house. Damaris and I look at each other. Divine timing has given the answer to that question. And divine providence keeps him from noticing the books spread out on top of the billows of fabric on the couch.
He is harrumphing and coughing and goes into the kitchen. We can hear him and Sarah talking about a pipe that froze up at the old house, and who is repairing it now.
We sit in silence for a while and then I quietly put the books back. I am already regretting telling Damaris anything at all. Why couldn’t I just say, “I don’t know” when she asked me? Do I have to settle every scriptural question that comes my way? Other people get addicted to games or sweets or tobacco. Why am I addicted to finding things out?
Damaris doesn’t say anything. She touches my arm and then helps me fold up the fabric and put it on the table. That’s another way she’s like me: She leaves me with a kiss on the cheek and not a single word.
I sure don’t want her to turn out like me, the scourge of the community, like the village idiot that should be hidden from outsiders and treated with shrugs by our own.
No, little Damaris; no, little girl, no.
I realize I am speaking to my ten-year-old self. But what could I have done differently, to not become who I am now?
Is it possible, I wonder, that God is rough on those He loves?
I think about Jeremiah in a slime pit, Job on a dump, Paul on the run.
I think about Damaris and worry for her. Then I realize that she’s unlike almost every female in the community in that she is not swayed by Papa, never has been….
And something else is changing about Papa. His preaching is not what it used to be, and I think he doesn’t know what to do now that we have all been re-baptized and then nothing was different. So he has taken to preaching all the time about the book of Revelation, and the images of beasts with horns and eyes all around make me dizzy. I close my eyes when he is preaching and when I open them I see that others have followed my lead. The trick is not to fall asleep, and I never do, because I can’t get Papa’s voice out of my head.
But some of the other young people do fall asleep (not Damaris, of course, never Damaris), and their parents poke them, and when the child startles awake the parents try to cover it up by dropping a hymnal or something like that so Papa won’t notice. I think he does notice, though, because his delivery used to be so smooth and rhythmic, like a horse on a long gallop in the open air, but now it is like a just-broken mare between a walk and an uneven run, jostling and jarring the rider. Or listener.
No one else seems to be bothered, however, by the beasts.
I lie in bed and wonder about a beast that comes dripping seaweed from ocean waters I have never seen, a seven-headed creature with filigree golden crowns on each, body of a leopard, feet of a bear, a lion’s mouth of blasphemy.
I shiver in my bed, but that beast does not come to me.
I have looked long and hard in our pastures—as best I can, with my weak eyesight—for a black horse or a white one because they were the ones that brought famine in the book of Revelation. Everything at that distance is fuzzy so I can’t be sure, but Papa prides himself on the fact that he raises only Appaloosas. So all our horses are both black and white, which has caused me all kinds of consternations. I wonder if he bred them that way on purpose, like Jacob in the Old Testament who made a bargain with his father in law, Laban-the-cheat, agreeing that Jacob would take only the speckled animals in the herds.
For a while, all I can think of is peeled sticks and spotted animals. And then I go back to thinking about the Revelation and all its plagues.
I wonder about the famine thing, not because we don’t have enough to eat in our house, but because all four of us are losing weight. I have no appetite and that’s what both Sarah and Papa say, too. Miriam has no problem with her appetite but picks up spoonsful of mashed potatoes, looks a long time at them, and puts some back. She tells me that she wants to have a very small waist in her wedding dress. Then she looks at me with wide eyes as if daring me to accuse her of pride or trying to appear better than someone else.
Fortunately none of the images of the beasts of Revelation ever come to me in the night. I wonder about why this is so. I think about the fact that I made my own theater of my mind to see the stable of Jesus’ birth, and although I knew it was real, that it really happened, I knew I was just an audience for it. I think the same thing is true of the beasts in Revelation.
I can see them, they are real, but they are not… here. I can close a curtain on them if I wish.
But. There’s a “but” of all of this. The images from Matthaus’s book, from the moment I first saw them, seemed to take up residence in my mind and in my dreams and I can’t evict them no matter what I try. No curtains. No turning them away. It’s like their claws have grown long fingernails and have worked their way into me, in invisible places no one else knows about.
I don’t want anyone to know this. I don’t want to imagine what my friends and neighbors would say if they knew that when night begins to fall, I can’t open a door and go into a darkened room. Just beyond the shadows of a curtain or a dresser I see gliding away from me the hems of smoking garments. I wonder if a closet door stands open because hands with long fingernails hold it there. I see shadows and wonder if blood pools in them.
I don’t know how to broach this subject with Papa, for he seems more skittish than I am; in fact, when I am around him I see that thin slivers of the whites of his eyes surround his irises, like someone on alert or an animal searching the wind for something. I don’t know what I’ve done that has brought this about, so I don’t talk to him any more, really, about anything. He knows that I carry his Bible encyclopedias from room to room and study them, but he says nothing to me at all. If it weren’t for Sarah and Miriam, I would believe that I am becoming invisible in this house.
Tonight Miriam sees me stand in front of the door of my bedroom, and I can’t go in.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, in a gentle voice.
I don’t know how to answer. But she knows what to do. Every night I light a kerosene lamp in my bedroom befor
e it gets dark and leave it burning until I come to bed, but tonight I was called away to take a basketful of quilt pieces to Schweshder Rachael’s and as soon as I stepped in our door upon my return, I guess I startled Sarah. She dropped a drinking glass that shattered into a thousand pieces. She’s dropping a lot of things, lately. By the time we had swept and mopped the kitchen floor, it was dark in my bedroom.
I didn’t know others had noticed my new ritual about the lamp, but without a word Miriam goes into my room and lights the lamp beside my bed. I can’t meet her eyes as I come in, but I also can’t help looking around in the room, into corners. When I look up, Miriam is sitting on the edge of my bed, watching me, and her eyes are soft and kind.
“I guess all that talk about the beasts in Revelation has me on guard,” I say, awkwardly. I feel myself blushing because I know I am telling a lie. It is instead the dark-eyed creatures from Matthau’s book I see, I can almost see, in the shadows.
She nods, slowly, then pats the bed beside her. I sit down and our hips touch and I am relieved that she can’t see my face.
“My mother told me something, once, when I was younger,” she says, and I struggle with the image of a younger, beautiful Sarah holding a little Miriam in her lap. “She told me not to be afraid of the dark, because only what is there in the daytime, is there in the night.”
She gives me a little sideways hug and I blabber something about her soon having little baby versions of Ryan to comfort in the night, and she warms to the idea of her coming marriage and children. She begins to speculate on what they will look like, but I am not listening.
What is there in the day, is there in the night.
So, what isn’t there in the day isn’t there in the night, either.
I am in a wrestling match in my mind with what the people in Matthaus’s book say and are. Creatures that come alive only in the dark. Dead people that don’t walk around in the sunshine. People who aren’t alive and aren’t dead but who seek the living, not just to talk. Blood that isn’t just blood, it is. . .
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