Fire in the Night

by Linda Byler

  “Well, we could take the lighter, get the fingerprints,” said the other, “but I doubt if it would tell us much. Arsonists always wear gloves of some sort. Or almost always.”

  “Is there anything we can do to make the community safer? Members of the congregation are sleeping very little, if at all, imagining this arsonist on the loose, afraid they’ll be the next victim.”

  “As far as you personally doing something to help? No. If someone has an old, especially prized barn, or lives close to the road with the house a good distance away from the barn, yes, there is something they can do. They can always sleep in the barn. It’s the only sure way to hear anything. Or get an extremely good watchdog, trained to bite intruders, which is questionable. What if a person stops and gets out of a car during the night for reasons other than lighting a fire?”

  Dat nodded soberly. “So we’ll have patience. Wait. See how it goes, right?

  “About the only thing we can do at this point.”

  Priscilla turned to go back to Dutch, but Mam called her back. Pea wire was cumbersome, unhandy, and Dat had corn planting to do. It was late in the season.

  Sarah smiled and said goodbye to the officers.

  No one like Mam to bring you straight back to reality, plunk you down in the middle of it, and put you to work.

  Dat was the kindhearted one, the dreamer who colored your days with different shades of jokes, laughter, smiles, little sayings, or poems. Mam was a hard-core realist.

  Grumbling to herself, Priscilla walked slowly to the roll of pea wire. With her foot, she sent it rolling slowly across one of Mam’s prized geraniums.

  “Priscilla Beiler! Now look what you did!”

  Mam almost never shouted. When she did, it was stentorian, fierce in its power to bring the offender straight to their knees in repentance.

  “Sorry, Mam.”

  “I should think so.”

  Bending, Mam plucked off pieces of the broken geranium, held them tenderly in her cupped hands, and scuttled to the house. An air of righteous indignation hovered over her white covering, its wide strings flapping behind her.

  Sarah stood, her hands on her hips, surveying the damage.

  “One geranium gone,” she said, wryly.

  “Boy, she got mad.”

  “Well, you need to be careful.”

  “I didn’t try to roll that wire over the geranium.”

  “Dat spoils you, Priscilla.”

  “I know. I love my Dat.”

  Sarah smiled and continued pounding wooden stakes into the ground, remembering when she was fourteen years old, riding horses, swimming in the creek, going to Raystown Lake during the summer at Uncle Elam’s. Life was one happy chunk of solid uncomplication, as sturdy as a cement block, and as simple. And it was supposed to stay that way.

  Turn sixteen, date Matthew Stoltzfus, marry him, and live in a small white house under a maple tree—a house with a porch, two small dormers on the roof, and ruffled white curtains at the upstairs windows. She’d grow zinnias and lavender and daisies in the garden, and Matthew would help her pull ears of corn that they’d freeze in small bags tied with red twisties.

  They’d go to an island somewhere, to a beach, and swim. She had never seen the ocean, and she planned to some day. With Matthew.

  She had turned sixteen, alright, but everything had gone wrong after that. Everything. Matthew treated her the same way he had always treated her. He just didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with that. He liked her a lot. She was his friend, Sarah, still as easy to get along with as always.

  It was Rose who bowled him over eventually. Sarah remembered exactly where she was standing when Allen told her Matthew had asked Rose Zook. She had almost fainted from an acute sense of shock, followed by a gloom as thick and impenetrable as the hide of an elephant.

  Mam had stood by her side. They’d talked, reasoned, shared their feelings, and grew close. But at the end of the day, she still had to sit on the slippery banks of the muddy river called misery—and simply deal with it.

  Every weekend, she saw him. Them. Sometimes on Saturday evening if there was a volleyball game or a skating party or a hockey game. Always on Sunday evening at the supper, when the Amish youth groups gathered at designated homes of parents or siblings, and a large supper was served to as many as a hundred or two hundred of them.

  Volleyball games, or baseball for the boys, were often in action at the suppers, followed by hymn singing. They’d all assemble along lengthy tables, the girls on one side, the boys on the other, hymn books scattered along the tables with pitchers of water and plastic cups, dishes of mints.

  They sang many hymns, and sang well, the parents chiming in as they sat along the walls on folding chairs.

  And always, there was Matthew. He would smile at her, genuinely pleased to see her each weekend. She lived for his smiles. They were like a benediction, a scepter held out for her to touch, blessing the week that stretched out empty and arid without them.

  Eventually, when Rose became his constant companion, Sarah had given up in a way. But only sort of. The thing was, he’d single her out, go out of his way to say, “Hey, Sarah. How’s it going?”

  Or the funny, “S’up?”

  He knew she’d laugh when he said that. So many reasons to believe that someday, somehow, they’d be together.

  Until they weren’t. Now he’d been with Rose for a year. A whole year and they’d grown closer and closer. Rose beamed and smiled and related every incident of their personal conversations to Sarah, including the times she loved him best. Sarah had hidden all of her own feelings securely away, despising the dishonest person she’d become. The incident at the barn raising had been her undoing, again.

  Well, life went on, and that was that. But just thinking about it made her so angry that she pounded the wooden stakes for the pea wire so hard that she sank them in too far into the ground, and Priscilla had to pull them up a bit.

  “Stop being so rausich (aggressive).”

  “Get the job done!” Sarah grinned.

  “Why don’t we just let the pea vines crawl around on the ground, and pick the peas from there?”

  “They don’t produce as many peas. The sunlight can’t reach them very well.”

  “Who says?”

  “I don’t know. I guess Mam.”

  Sarah straightened her back and gazed at the horizon, where storm clouds were gathering at a rapid rate. To the east, the white light of the brilliant late spring sun was being chased away by a threatening darkness rolling steadily along the horizon.

  A rumbling, soft and low, brought the uneasiness that accompanied an approaching storm, so Sarah increased the pounding, wanting the pea rows to be finished before a spring deluge turned the soil into a quagmire.

  The cows in the pasture lifted their heads. Crows flapped their dreary way across the sky, their hoarse caws preceding them. Sarah stopped pounding and watched the straight line of the crows. She shivered.

  “I hate crows.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “They’re evil, like a premonition of something bad.”

  “No, they aren’t. Duh, Sarah. My favorite book in third grade was Blacky the Crow. Shame on you. You know what? It’s your imagination going way overboard again. I never saw anyone who could imagine stuff the way you do.”

  Sarah laughed and brought the mallet up and over her shoulder in a mock stance. Priscilla shielded her face with her hands and begged for mercy, laughing.

  The crows wheeled back, their sizable black wings flapping faster as they lowered themselves into an oak tree behind the shed, their garbled crowing accompanying them.

  Sarah watched as the mighty, dark birds shuffled from branch to branch, quarrelsome as they vied for position. The leader raised his wings, flapped them ominously, then settled down, a strangled caw his last attempt at frightening them.

  Sarah turned to watch the approaching storm and heard the distant rumbling. As the air around them became quiet,
only the crows’ squabbling broke the humid eeriness.

  She became rigid with—what was it? Apprehension? Leftover fear? For reassurance, she turned to the new barn, a large, well-built monument of hope and goodwill, evidence of what a band of men could accomplish in the face of evil.

  Still, she shivered.

  Priscilla pounded in the remaining stakes. Together they stretched the wire between them, then pulled up a few spring onions, peeled off the outer layers, broke off the hard growth along the bottoms, and crunched them between their teeth without bothering to wash them.

  Next Sarah pulled gently on the prickly radish tops, exclaiming at the size of the large, red orb attached to it. She rubbed it across the black bib apron she wore, twisted off the top and the small root growing on the underside, and popped it into her mouth.

  Her eyes watering, Sarah exclaimed loudly and ran for the water hose wound on the bracket by the kesslehaus door. As she bent over gulping large mouthfuls of water to cool her fiery mouth, Priscilla howled with glee.

  The crows squawked their sinister calls of warning. Sarah stood, the hose in her hand, water spurting unnoticed, as they flapped their wings, exploding from the tree and wheeling on the still air. The rolling black clouds moved and changed their appearance in the background.

  Chapter 9

  THE STORM BENT THE enormous maple trees, the wind whipping the branches into helpless, skinny arms, flailing and twisting madly. A plastic bucket went skidding drunkenly across the porch floor, banged into a ceramic flower pot, and fell off the porch into the newly planted petunias below. The wooden porch swing creaked on its chain, pushed by the force of the approaching storm. Barn cats ran stiff-legged, their tails aloft like furled sails, slipping to safety through the small hole cut along the bottom of the barn door.

  Dat came clattering up to the forebay, the brown mules leaning back to stop the corn planter after they trotted through the door. Dat’s eyes were wide beneath the flopping brim of his straw hat. Just in time, he yanked down the wide garage door, lowering it behind him, before lunging to the windows to watch the fury of the wind. He’d never seen darker clouds or ones that churned like these. He hoped the rest of the family was all safely in the house.

  The two maple trees bent and twisted, the small leaves whipped furiously, and the hail began to pound on the metal roof with a deafening clatter. Inside, the girls huddled by the windows, recoiling as the darkness exploded into a blueish slash of sizzling lightning, followed immediately by an earsplitting crack of thunder.

  “Get away from the window,” Mam warned.

  Obediently, they stepped back, gasping as the hail pelted down, bouncing around in the green grass like cold, icy toads, hopping and careening all over the place.

  “Siss an schlossa! (It’s hailing!)” yelled Levi from his swiveling desk chair by the row of windows.

  “Good thing Dat made it to the barn,” Mam said, so grateful her mouth quavered with emotion.

  Then she asked, “Where are Suzie and Mervin?”

  Sarah wheeled, wide eyed.

  “They’re…they were right here in the kitchen. They came in with us.”

  “No, they didn’t. They went to the barn.”

  “They came in when it became windy, I thought,” Sarah said, suddenly alert, searching the dark kitchen for any sign of them, their shoes, a tossed head scarf, Mervin’s little straw hat.

  “They’re in the barn,” Priscilla said again.

  The rain followed the pelting hail, coming down in gray sheets of windblown water. It sluiced down the driveway, poured out of the downspouts, and ran down the windowpanes, obliterating the barn and outbuildings in its force.

  Mam’s eyes became large with anxiety, and she chewed her lower lip without realizing it.

  “I just wish Suzie and Mervin were here.”

  “Mam, it’s okay. I’m pretty sure they’re in the barn.”

  “I hope.”

  Sarah went to the door leading to the upstairs and called their names, receiving no answer. She went to the basement, searching, knowing they would be in the kitchen with Mam and Priscilla if they were in the house. But she searched anyway to ease her mind.

  The lightning flashed through the small rectangular window, illuminating the whitewashed stone of the old part of the cellar. Sarah winced as the intense clap of thunder followed.

  They had to be in the barn.

  Upstairs, Levi whimpered with fear. He told Priscilla that God was mad at them, for sure. The barn burned, and now this.

  It was raining too hard. It rained five inches in an hour and thirty minutes. Ninety minutes of water dumping and blowing from the sky, the likes of which they had never seen.

  Dat remained in the barn, helpless but glad everyone was safely in the house. He fed the mules and horses and swept the loose hay and dirt from the forebay, frequently going to the window to watch the rain in disbelief.

  The small creeks and waterways of Lancaster County were already running full. The butterscotch-colored water had returned to its normal gray-green, but it was still rushing swift and high even before the storm struck.

  An alarming amount of water rode in on the great gray wings of the storm, releasing the deluge in a thirty-mile-wide swath of wind and moisture. The creeks rose at an alarming rate, churning and bubbling over the banks into pastures, flooding newly planted cornfields and new alfalfa pushing its way into a hearty growth of verdant strands of nutrition for the many herds of Holstein cows scattered throughout the county.

  In a few hours’ time, many motorists became stranded. Cows bawled from the safety of higher ground, as small meandering creeks turned into vicious, dangerous torrents that swept away anything in their paths.

  When Dat bent his head and splashed his way into the house, he found Mam white-faced and bordering on hysteria. Her rapid words pelted him, and he felt anxiety rising within him.

  “Where are Suzie and Mervin?”

  “Aren’t they with you? In here?”

  Sarah didn’t think anything out of the ordinary could possibly happen. Their barn had burned so recently. They’d spent one night in pure terror and now lived in fear and uncertainty. God didn’t do things like this. Not tragedies in pairs.

  “They’re probably in a shed somewhere—the garden shed,” Mam said, her voice only an octave lighter than anger.

  Dat wheeled without a word and went out through the rain, searching everywhere as Mam breathed rapidly, brokenly. She put up her hands and took out the pins in her covering. She pulled it off, put the pins back in it, and laid it carefully on the countertop. She tied on a navy blue headscarf and a black sweater and left the house without another word.

  Sarah and Priscilla were mute with fear.

  “Selly glaenie hausa! (Those little rabbits!)” Levi growled. “Always making trouble.” He bent his head, shaking it from side to side, making clucking noises, as if that alone could bring them safely into the house.

  The rain still came down steadily but with less force, as Dat and Mam splashed from haymow to implement shed, garden shed to corncrib and back to the garage, calling, calling.

  When Sarah could not stand another minute of waiting, she joined her parents, dashing senselessly after them shouting, “Suzie! Mervin!”

  There is nothing emptier than the emptiness of a missing person. The very atmosphere is depleted of rationality when someone cannot be found.

  Sarah’s mind absorbed this emptiness, this wet, watery world without Mervin and Suzie in it. She imagined them, soaking wet, stranded behind the Stoltzfus barn where the road turned sharply upward. She imagined them sitting beneath Hannah’s porch roof, safe and warm and dry. She’d give them a cupcake with white frosting on top. She imagined the small winding stream of water between them, so small it didn’t even have a name. Surely they wouldn’t have tried to go to the Stoltzfus place in that rain?

  After searching every corner of every building, there was nothing to do but huddle under the porch roof and begin meaning
less suggestions born of raw fear.

  No, not the police. They didn’t need to know.

  There was a certain unwillingness to let their neighbors find out. Not us, again. It’s embarrassing.

  These words were not spoken, only thought, but they were thought together—a bond of understanding encircling them. As long as they didn’t know for sure, why trouble anyone?

  It was when Mam began to cry that Dat sprang back to reality, put a hand on her shoulder, and said everything would be alright. Mam jerked her shoulder away and yelled at him in a voice tinged with craziness.

  “We have to find them, Davey!”

  Sarah thought of the crows cawing from the oak tree and felt the hopelessness, the first slice of dread cutting into her heart.

  Suddenly, a thought sprang into her mind. Why had God kept the knowledge of the fishing poles from them? She knew before she went to see, the fishing poles would not be there.

  They had told only Levi. Levi remembered everything, didn’t he?

  Sarah rushed at him, grabbed his shirt front, hauled his big head around, and glowered at him.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” she hissed, overcome with dread.

  “I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t say if I forgot.”

  Levi cried. He begged Sarah for mercy.

  Sarah stormed to the porch, a weeping Priscilla in tow, and in a terrible, hoarse voice told Mam and Dat.

  “No! No!”

  Mam sank to her knees pleading to her God to spare her little ones, please, please. Dat looked across the porch, seeing nothing, his straw hat dripping dirty water, his beard beaded with rain. And then they moved as one, back out into the rain, knowing their search must go on.

  As Sarah opened the gate, she saw the slippery mud and the fullness of the cow’s udders as they stood patiently by the barnyard. She knew they should be milking. But she and Priscilla, Mam and Dat followed the cow path in the dripping aftermath of the storm, stumbling over tufts of grass as they spread out, unwilling to see, unable not to.

  Ah. The creek had risen to a heart-stopping muddy flood that tumbled and churned behind the wild rose bushes and tall weeds immersed by the rising waters. They ran up and down its length, calling, calling, calling.