Fire in the Night

by Linda Byler

“You better hurry up.”

  She dashed to the bathroom, pulled out the steel hairpins, and ran a brush through her long, curly hair. Opening the silver faucet, Sarah cupped her hand beneath the streaming water and wet her hair. She used a fine-toothed comb to help tame the silken, brown curls and then applied hairspray liberally, her fingers working the pump of the lime green bottle of Fructis. Satisfied, she carefully placed a neat white covering on her head, sliding the straight pins along each side to hold it in place.

  She decided to stay in the green dress she’d donned in a panic. It was the color of grass. She yanked a black apron from the closet, slid it over her head, and tied the strings behind her back. She pulled on warm socks and ran down the stairs.

  She was surprised to see a line of weary men already waiting to fill their plates. Dat hurried by with clean towels as they washed up at the sink in the kesslehaus.

  “Pour grape juice,” Mam instructed curtly, the strain of the night showing in her eyes.

  Quietly, Sarah opened the refrigerator door, found the gallon pitchers of chilled homemade juice, and began to pour, her eyes downcast.

  “Matthew, what took you so long?” Hannah said, her voice rough with irritation.

  “It takes a while, using up all that bread,” was his jovial answer in the gravelly voice that amazed Sarah.

  They’d gone to school together. All their years, they had stood in singing class and played baseball and volleyball and Prisoner’s Base and King’s Corner. He was in fourth grade when she entered first grade, a scared, sniveling little girl who cried every single morning that first week. She couldn’t imagine her life without Matthew Stoltzfus in it, albeit in a detached way since he’d started dating Rose Zook.

  They were the perfect match, and Sarah was happy for Matthew. So happy, in fact, that she cried great tears of happiness that puddled into a rushing river of misery. It wasn’t safe to sit on its banks and observe the way the water took away all her peace and comfort and hope for the future.

  But she was happy for Matthew. Really happy.

  He stepped up to the table and set down a steaming hot roaster piled high with French toast, looked sideways at her, and said, “Hey, Sarah.” She looked back at him, saw the sympathy in his eyes, and knew she’d be sitting by that rushing, roiling river again. Her voice came out a bit choked and shaky when she said, “Hey, Matthew,” and she went right back to pouring grape juice as if her only interest in life was how accurately the liquid came to within an inch of the top of each glass.

  Chapter 3

  THE MEN WERE RAVENOUS, and the food disappeared as Hannah’s stack of Great Value paper plates from Wal-Mart were filled one by one. English men with caps, mustaches, and long shoulder-length hair or no hair at all—their heads shaven cleanly, shining in the early morning light—lined up with Amish men, their straw hats removed, their hair and beards trimmed and cut in almost identical fashion.

  The thing was—English people didn’t have an ordnung. They could dress as they pleased. If they wanted to wear something, they could, and if they didn’t want to, they didn’t have to. Mentally, Sarah wondered what Elmer King would look like if he shaved his head like the one firefighter. He’d probably look very English, at any rate.

  How long would it take a whole head of hair to grow back?

  “Good morning, Sarah.”

  She started, looked at Elmer King, smiled, and answered politely. She shouldn’t think things like that, she told herself. But you couldn’t help what you thought, could you? She’d never say what ran through her mind; she just thought it, which never hurt anyone.

  She was aware of a wet smell—a stench, actually. It smelled like a campfire doused with water, sending up a stinking steam.

  Eww. Someone smelled bad.

  She saw Mam looking at the firemen’s boots, the black ashes mixed with mud making great tracks on her clean kitchen floor. But she stayed quiet, of course.

  Old Sam Stoltzfus was already in line, Sarah noticed. Bless him, so eager to help at an age when many men would have been glad to stay at home. Sarah knew, though, that his balding, gray-haired head housed vast knowledge about rebuilding barns, a veritable treasure of unforgotten skills honed by a lifetime of experience. Somehow, the sight of the well-known member of the community was an immense comfort.

  Another comfort was the arrival of the womenfolk who came before breakfast was over bearing casseroles and cake pans and Wal-Mart bags. After the others were served, Sarah was fortunate enough to have a slice of the French toast for herself with a cup of good, strong coffee. The sweet toast was thick and spongy, heavy and perfect doused with maple syrup. How could a twenty-one-year-old guy cook like this? She shook her head and hoped Rose would appreciate him. Wow!

  Sarah packed Suzie’s and Mervin’s lunches, making sandwiches with Kunzler sweet bologna and provolone cheese. She added chocolate whoopie pies, wrinkling her nose at the sticky Saran Wrap. The whoopie pies had to be a week old, but she guessed school children never really noticed what they ate. She grabbed a handful of stick pretzels from the bag of Tom Sturgis pretzels, added red, juicy apples, and snapped the lids closed.

  Hurriedly, she pushed Suzie into the bathroom, wet her hair, and brushed out the tangles amid silent grimaces. Ignoring the ouching and complaining, Sarah wasted no time getting her sister ready for school.

  “I don’t know why we have to go if our barn burned down,” Suzie said, unhappily adjusting a hairpin.

  “You have perfect attendance, don’t you?” Sarah asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, then. Careful on your way out.”

  Casting a worried look out the window of the kesslehaus, Sarah decided to walk to the road with them, grasping reluctant little Mervin’s hand firmly in her own.

  “Not so fast!” he protested.

  “You always stalk along like a big old goose,” Suzie added, still not quite accepting of the fact that she was being trundled off to ordinary school with all that excitement at home.

  “Hey!”

  “Well, I mean it.”

  “Think of the story you’ll have to tell the other children!”

  “Maybe Teacher Esther will let you come watch!” Mervin shouted.

  Sarah watched them go, waved, and turned to go back to the kitchen. Suddenly, she noticed how strange the farm seemed without the big white barn beside the house where it belonged. Is that really how fast a barn can simply disintegrate into a jumbled, stinking mass of blackened timbers?

  She couldn’t think of the horses and hoped they were turned to ashes, the way bodies were when they were cremated. The calves had died, and a few of the heifers. The wagon parked in the haymow, the diesel and fuel tanks and bulk tank and milking machines—so many things she never thought of were gone.

  The trucks and bulldozers and men swarmed around the remains of the barn as the smoke continued to billow, changing from black to gray to white before it was absorbed into nothingness by the atmosphere.

  Suddenly she stopped, horrified. Oh, no! She couldn’t watch, but she couldn’t look away.

  The men had found a great, black skeleton, or pieces of one, with large chunks of charred flesh dangling from it like a steak that had burnt on the grill too long. The men rolled, shoved, and then lifted it. When the head dangled, Sarah uttered a strangled cry, turned to lean across the white fence, and retched, heaving up her breakfast. Reeling and sliding to the bottom of a fence post, she willed herself not to faint.

  Sarah had never seen anything so grisly, so unnerving. The smoke now appeared as a grinning specter of death, and she had to look away, unable to let her imagination conjure up the evil she felt.

  When the insistent whining of the diesel engine in the dozer suddenly stopped, Sarah swiftly lifted her head to witness a sight that would remain locked in her mind forever. Priscilla, a blue wraith with her thin limbs flailing helplessly in the throes of her agony, pounded desperately on the great yellow monster that was taking away her beloved pet.
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br />   Sarah heard the screams, the wails of denial, through the film of her own tears. A black form, Dat surely, retrieved Priscilla gently as the dozer operator hopped off his machine and also went to her.

  Sarah pressed her fist to her mouth. As tears streamed down her cheeks, her chest heaved painfully, the weight of her sister’s grief squeezing the breath from her. She walked slowly, her head bent. When she reached the yard, she noticed the well-manicured lawn that had been so perfectly maintained now contained deep ruts where fire trucks and countless other vehicles had sunk their heavy tires into the sodden soil. Was there no end to the devastation?

  Surely the fire had been an accident. If it wasn’t, she thought she might not be able to deal with it. Who could be so ruthless, so completely lacking in mercy? She desperately hoped there had been a smoldering spark in the diesel shanty. Didn’t that happen sometimes?

  Sarah reached Priscilla and took her shaking form from Dat’s arms where his filthy, smoke-blackened hands had held her as if he willed her to gain strength from him. Looking out over Priscilla’s head, his eyes—dry but so filled with pain and devastation—appeared black.

  Reaching out, Sarah said, “Komm, Priscilla.”

  As before, Priscilla went, obeying her sister’s voice.

  The bulldozer operator’s brown Carhartt sleeve reached across Dat’s back as they turned away, the English man’s coat in stark contrast to Dat’s homemade black one. It was human sympathy, man to man, English to Amish, with no difference at a time such as this.

  When they reached the kesslehaus, Sarah supported Priscilla as she reached to open the door and then turned her to look squarely into her eyes.

  “Priscilla?”

  It was a question, but her sister knew the meaning of it. She nodded, met Sarah’s eyes.

  “Sarah, don’t be mad, okay? I’m alright. I just knew it was Dutch, and—I shouldn’t have acted that way. He just couldn’t take him away. I know it’s dumb.”

  Before Sarah could answer, the door opened, and Elmer King sei Lydia (his wife, Lydia), a young woman of the community, came out to the girls and wordlessly took Priscilla in her arms, caressing her back as the sobs returned.

  “Siss yusht net chide (It just isn’t right),” she kept saying. “Priscilla, don’t cry.”

  Priscilla took a few deep breaths, steadied herself, and offered to help in the kitchen, bravely facing her loss. Dat came in repeatedly, his eyes soft with care, and inquired about his daughter’s well-being without her being aware of it. Mam cried softly but soon lifted her gray apron, removed a rumpled Kleenex, and blew her nose in one hard snort. She sniffed again, put the Kleenex back, and resumed her organizing.

  The food arrived steadily all forenoon: doughnuts from the bake shop at Weis on Route 30, boxes of canned fruit, plastic bags of potatoes, cakes, puddings in plastic ice cream containers, stews in blue granite roasters, and endless amounts of meats and cheeses. Some went to the refrigerator in the basement after being carefully recorded on a notepad to help them remember who had brought what and where it was stored.

  That was Mam. She was the best manager in Lancaster County, Hannah said.

  Sarah watched, amazed at her mother’s ability to deal with the responsibility of the day’s demands after only a few hours of sleep.

  Ruthie and Anna Mae arrived, shock and sympathy written all over their faces, carrying the little ones. Mam swooped in to extract her beloved grandchildren from her daughters’ arms.

  Ruthie had two children, Sarahann and Johnny, the baby. Anna Mae had little Justin, only three months old. Mam had had a fit when Roy and Anna Mae named their son Justin. She didn’t know what they were thinking, she said, giving their son such a worldly name. But Dat smiled ruefully and said they’d better stay out of it before they stepped on toes they had no business stepping on. Anna Mae had always been inclined toward fanciness, Mam said. A real handful.

  So they accepted and loved little Justin, and Sarah thought it was a nice name. She was glad Anna Mae had a Justin, so she could have one, too. A namesake was never frowned upon.

  After the food was mostly fer-sarked (taken care of), they planned dinner. Definitely the roaster full of beef stew. They’d do a sixteen-quart kettle of corn and one of green beans and potatoes. Three heads of cabbage would make graut (coleslaw).

  The women bustled about. They sliced heads of cabbage with wide knives and energetically scraped them across hand-held graters, keeping time with talk punctuated by bouts of genuine laughter or teasing. The boys—Abner, Allen, and Johnny—arrived with their wives and a horde of little ones who raced around the house, running underfoot the way little cousins do, the excitement high when Doddy’s barn burns to the ground.

  When Dat was surrounded by his three married sons, his spirits were lifted, energized by their unfailing support. The boys had all chosen to buy homes and start their roofing and siding business in sister communities, where land prices were inexpensive. Now they had a nearly two-hour drive to their parents’ farm. Nevertheless, Dat was encouraged by the presence of his sons and their families, greeting each one with a special light of welcome shining from his tired eyes.

  The dinner was set up on plastic folding tables in the kesslehaus. Great platters of cakes and bars and cookies were placed on another table with lemon meringue, pumpkin, and cherry pies.

  Sarah laughed when Hannah hid a particularly high chocolate shoofly pie in the pantry, saying she knew that was one of Amos sei Sylvia’s (his wife, Sylvia’s), and no one made them like her. What the men didn’t know would never hurt them.

  Sarah stood, her arms crossed, listening to the men as they sat on the porch, their heads bent as they ate hungrily. Talk had started, as Sarah knew it would. The speculation, the blame, the endless questioning.

  David Beiler was a meticulous man. No greasy rags in his diesel shanty. Haying season hadn’t started. It was too early for hot, green hay. The FBI would be coming. Just watch. Something like this isn’t let go in this day and age. Arsonists don’t get away with it. Too much technology. Too many smart people. Nobody can light a fire these days and get away with it.

  Levi sat in the middle eating vast quantities of the good food, his black sweater gaping open at the front. While he insisted his sore throat was worse, he explained in great and vivid detail his night vigil before the fire.

  The men listened kindly, laughing uproariously. Levi laughed with them, his small brown eyes alight with the happiness he felt at being one of them, knowing he had seen that white car and that the Watkins man hadn’t been there since September twenty-third.

  That really tickled his brothers, who roared in unison, and Sarah laughed out loud, too.

  Helping himself to another slice of pumpkin pie, Matthew Stoltzfus turned and watched Sarah laugh. She went to Levi and wiped his mouth tenderly, the light catching the blonde highlights of her glossy, rippling hair, and he wondered at it.

  All day lumbering trucks carried away some of the wet debris, but many of the smoldering remains were simply pushed out of the way to prepare for the monumental task ahead. The cows had been dispersed to neighboring dairy farms, where helpful neighbors, who felt they were doing their duty, each took on a few extra ones.

  Old Sam Stoltzfus and Levi’s Abner sat in the shed beside the buggy with papers spread before them, making a drawing, sketching roughly. Sitting close to the telephone, they would soon be ordering lumber and metal.

  In the house, Mam finally sank into Levi’s blue recliner and slept for almost an hour.

  The daughters-in-law, Maryann, Rachel, and Emma Mae, were all eagerly waiting for the van to take them to their parents’ homes. Living so far away, they missed Lancaster County, their birthplace. They were glad to spend time with loved ones in spite of their in-laws’ loss.

  “Whew!” Priscilla sighed after the last noisy little people had followed their mothers out the door.

  Sarah was already drawing water, to which she added soap and a rag, preparing to get down on her ha
nds and knees for the task of washing away the dirt that had been tracked all over the linoleum.

  “This is the biggest mess we’ve ever had,” Suzie complained from her place at the sink, where she was washing endless dishes. According to her, dishes multiplied while sitting on a counter, so you never really finished.

  The girls worked together late into the evening and then sat at the table, so weary they hardly knew what they were saying but too tired to take their showers. The boys, Abner, Allen, and Johnny, had decided to stay to help Dat with the decisions about roofing and siding, offering to make phone calls, helping to calculate the vast amount of concrete that they would need to pour in the morning.

  As they caught up on the news of the community and other concerns, the conversation was woven with tales of other barn fires in previous years. What about the barn fires in Belleville? Folk lore or truth?

  As they spoke, a mist of unsettling sensations hovered in the air. Sarah tried to shake off a foreboding feeling of evil that meant to destroy them. Why them? Why a family of ordinary people who went about their everyday lives? Nothing in Sarah’s memory had ever evoked this sense of uneasiness.

  Before the fire, she had always gone to bed trusting, innocent, knowing that in the morning Dat would be at the bottom of the stairs calling her to do the milking. She’d never even thought of a fire destroying their barn. Now she could never return to that innocence.

  The fire marshal had come, hadn’t he? Suddenly, Sarah sat bolt upright and inquired loudly about the fire marshal’s appearance. What was the verdict?

  David Beiler lowered his head, a look of pain crossing his features yet again.

  “I just hoped you would forget to ask,” he said quietly.

  Priscilla’s eyes opened wide with fear, and Sarah was frightened for her as well as for herself.

  “Was it—did someone light our barn on purpose?” she asked, gripping the arm of her chair.

  “I wish I could spare you the truth, but I can’t. We have to deal with this strange and troubling fact. It was the work of an arsonist.”