Fall from Pride

by Karen Harper

  Though Ray-Lynn had lived in Cleveland with her husband for years, it was no secret she’d been born and bred in the deep South, so she drew her words out a lot more than most moderns did. She even had a sign in the restaurant over the front door that Sarah had painted. It read Southern Hospitality and Amish Cooking—Ya’ll Come Back, Danki. And she was always trying to talk Sarah into painting a huge mural of Amish life on the side wall.

  Secretly, Sarah yearned to paint not static quilt patterns but the beauty of quilts flapping on a clothesline, huge horses pulling plows in spring fields, rows of black buggies at church, one-room schoolhouses with the kinder playing red rover or eckball out back, weddings and barn raisings….

  But all that was verboten. No matter what Ray-Lynn urged, Sarah knew an Amish painter could never be an Amish artist.

  The moment he turned off the highway onto the narrow, two-lane road at the sign Homestead: 4 Miles, Nate MacKenzie felt as if he’d entered a beautiful but alien world. Another road sign bore the silhouette of an Amish buggy, so he cut his speed way down. Farmers plowing or planting in the fields used four-horse hitches and all wore black pants, blue shirts and broad-brimmed straw hats. Here and there, little boys dressed the same way as their elders, and girls in long dresses and white aprons fed goats or played some kind of beanbag game barefoot. Clothes flapped on lines and no electrical or phone wires existed around the neatly kept houses, which all boasted large vegetable gardens. Though the roads were nearly empty, he passed one black buggy and saw many others sitting beside barn doors or in backyards. The fields, even the woodlots in this broad valley, seemed well tended, almost as if he had driven his big vehicle into a painting of the past.

  He noted a beautiful painted square, of what he wasn’t quite sure, on one old barn. Despite his need to get to his destination—“Two miles on Orchard Road, then turn left onto Fish Creek Road,” his sweet-voiced GPS recited—he slowed and craned his neck to look at the painting. The design was amazingly modern, yet he figured it was something old-fashioned. Not a hex sign, for sure. A quilt? Maybe they sold quilts at that old farmhouse.

  He turned his eyes back to the road and tried to shake off his exhaustion. He’d felt burned out from too much work lately, but he’d managed about five hours’ sleep before Mark called, enough to keep him going. He thrived on adrenaline, one reason he loved this job, though this case could be a bit of a challenge with the unusual culture and all.

  At age thirty, Nate MacKenzie was the youngest of the state’s twenty-one arson investigators. Though he’d told no one but his foster mother, his goal was to work his way up to become a district supervisor and then chief. He had both law enforcement and fire training. He saw himself as a detective who dealt with the remnants of a crime, the clues hidden in the rubble and ruins. After the tragedy that had happened to his family, his career was his calling, his only real passion.

  He passed a one-room schoolhouse with a set of swings and a dirt baseball diamond. Man, it reminded him of something from the old show Little House on the Prairie. But surely a group of old-fashioned Amish couldn’t be too hard to handle, especially with his experience and the state-of-the-art technology at his fingertips. He would make a quick study of the Plain People by picking VERA’s online brain so he’d know how to deal with them and in case he needed their help.

  Sarah was about to head home when she saw something big and black coming down the road, then turning into the lane. It looked like a bulky, square, worldly emergency vehicle but it was bigger than that—why, it could almost swallow four buggies in one gulp. She hoped it wasn’t some kind of hearse and one of the injured firefighters had suddenly died and was being brought back for burial.

  She and the rest of the Plain People stood their ground and stared at it. Even Ray-Lynn quit talking. It had a truck cab and real fancy writing on the side, but, as it pulled in and stopped, the large lettering didn’t really make sense except for the first word: OHIO. OHIO FEIB SFM VERA it read in big print with some smaller script under that.

  Bishop Esh, her own father, Ben, and Eben Lantz—the three farmers whose lands adjoined—walked over to greet the man who emerged from the truck cab. Even without his big vehicle, he stood out as an ausländer. Bareheaded, he was a good foot taller than the bearded Amish men, even with their straw hats. He was clean-shaven like unwed Amish men. His short, almost ebony hair looked strange amid the blond and brown heads she was used to. His body seemed all angles and planes, maybe because he didn’t look as well-fed as the Amish men. He wore belted jeans and a white shirt under a brown leather jacket, a kind hardly seen in these parts.

  She wished she could hear what they were saying. The men shook hands and walked together toward the broken, still-smoking pile of beams and rubble. Sarah sidled a bit closer while some of the boys went over to peek at the vehicle.

  She saw the visitor was not only speaking with the men but was talking into a little wire that hooked over one ear and curved around his face and stopped at the side of his mouth. It was either a small kind of recorder or a microphone like some workers wore at the McDonald’s in Homestead when you gave an order and they passed it on to the kitchen. The stranger seemed to be repeating some things the men told him. Bishop Esh was pointing and gesturing, then he swung around and scanned the crowd and motioned—to her.

  Feeling exposed, maybe because she was bonnetless, since it was still back in her own barn, wearing only her prayer kapp on her head and suddenly aware of her soil-and-ash-smeared appearance, Sarah went over to join the men.

  “Sarah Kauffman is the one who spotted the flames from her own barn, over yonder,” Bishop Esh was saying as he pointed across the fields, and the man turned his head away to look toward their barn. Her father nodded to her. He’d said earlier he was glad she had done the right thing to run across the fields because it took him twice as long to hitch up the buggy and come over to help.

  Their visitor spoke something into his curved wire, then turned back to look at Sarah. Their gazes slammed into each other, right between the two men who held the most sway over her life, and yet it was like they weren’t there at all.

  “I’m Nate MacKenzie, Mrs….Miss…” he floundered.

  “Just plain Sarah is okay,” she said, crossing her arms over her waist, as neither of them broke their steady gaze. She bit her lower lip. She hadn’t meant to make that sound like a joke about the Amish being called the Plain People, but no one seemed to notice.

  “I’m from the state fire marshal’s office in Columbus, here to determine the cause of the blaze,” their visitor told her.

  The cause of the blaze. His words rotated through her head. Funny but she was starting to feel warm, as if the seething fire was still sending out flames. She was usually real easy with strangers, enjoyed talking to moderns with their outside experiences, so why should this man be different? Well, maybe it was just that big version of a worldly buggy he drove and his different looks.

  Nate—that was probably really Nathan, a good Old Testament name—had strong features, a little cleft in the middle of his chin, which, along with his sharp-slanted cheeks, was peppered with beard stubble, like he’d been up all night and in a hurry, which he probably was. His lips were taut, his nose broad with a little bump, like maybe he broke it once. A thin white scar on his forehead slanted into his left eyebrow, but it was his eyes that entranced her. He had deep blue eyes when she thought dark-haired people mostly had brown ones. What a color that lake-blue would be for a painted quilt square—probably for the pattern of Ocean Waves, because that design, like her other favorites, seemed to shift, to move and beckon….

  “The state fire marshal’s office received calls from the sheriff and the newspaper editor about this blaze,” Nate said directly to her. “I understand you ran across the fields. I’d like to interview everyone who saw the early stages of the fire. Actually, if it’s okay, I’d like to have you show me the exact spot at your place where you first saw the blaze so you can describe size, color and po
sitioning to me. A time frame of its spread pattern will really help.”

  Ordinarily, Sarah would have waited for the bishop or her father to approve, but she said, “I’d be glad to help. I was just going to go back over, and I can meet you there, or you can come calling—I mean, visit us when it suits.”

  Her father cleared his throat and said, “Sarah had a big loss here, too, Mr. MacKenzie. She’s been painting large quilt patterns on barns to help draw visitors to our area, and this was her first one. Enlarging it lately, just yesterday, too.”

  “Please, call me Nate. I saw one of those on the way in. Very striking. Did you lose paint or paint thinner in the barn last night?”

  “Yes, but the cans were all closed up tight,” she told him, her voice steady now. “I tap them back in their grooves when I’m done. Besides, I use exterior latex paint, water soluble, not oil base that needs turpentine or something like that. I left my scaffolding and two ladders just outside the barn, leaning against it. That’s the bigger loss, moneywise.”

  Nate, still watching her, nodded. The sunshine shot more directly into his eyes. She saw he had sunglasses in his coat pocket, but he made no move to put them on, maybe trying to blend in with her people just a bit. He no doubt felt like the outsider he was. Though she was Amish born and bred, sometimes even she felt like that, unwed at the lofty age of twenty-four, a painter, not a sewer of quilts like other women.

  “Like I said, Mr. MacKenzie,” Bishop Esh put in, “no lanterns inside the barn and only seasoned hay, not the green stuff that can catch itself on fire.”

  “No open accelerants from paint supplies, no spontaneous combustion from methane-emitting hay,” Nate said into his mouth wire. “Would it be okay if I take Sarah over to your farm in my vehicle?” he asked her father.

  “Sure, and I’ll ride along,” Daad told him. “My son, Gabe, can bring our buggy back over.”

  Sarah knew better than to feel prideful or important, but her people parted for the three of them like Moses at the Red Sea as they walked toward the big, black truck. “We call her VERA for Vehicle for Emergency Response and Arson,” Nate explained, patting the shiny hood as Sarah might her buggy horse, Sally.

  “Arson,” Sarah repeated. “Then you do think someone set the barn on fire?”

  “Yet to be determined. Arson’s the easiest crime to commit but often the hardest to prove. I know this barn—all your barns—are important to your way of life. If we can eliminate accident and act of nature, arson’s what’s left, and then I’ll investigate that.”

  Nate wasn’t sure if the Amish woman and her father were awed or frightened by VERA, but they climbed in the big front seat with him, Sarah between the two men. He was surprised they didn’t fumble with their seat belts but clicked them quickly in place. She wore no wedding ring, but then he hadn’t seen one piece of jewelry on any of these people.

  Amazing that, with her honey-colored hair parted in the middle and pulled straight back under her messed-up small cap and with her old-fashioned dirty apron and dress—a peach-colored one, not black—with not a bit of makeup on her face, Sarah Kauffman was a real looker. She was a natural beauty with auburn, perfectly arched eyebrows over heavily lashed amber eyes that seemed to have little flecks of gold swimming in them. Surprisingly, mixed with the scent of smoke, she smelled faintly of lavender. Her full mouth pouted as she looked wide-eyed at the dashboard computer screen.

  “Why, it has a map of our area on it,” she said.

  “It’s called a global positioner, and it talks to me in a nice female voice if I want it to,” Nate said as he backed up, careful that none of the crowd, especially the gawking boys, were behind him.

  “Oh, now it’s changed to a kind of TV screen that shows what’s in the rear when you back up,” she said. Her voice was mellow without a trace of the accent that the older men seemed to have.

  “Sarah, Mr. MacKenzie knows what’s in his truck,” her father said.

  “Oh, right.”

  “So could you tell me what you were doing when you first saw the fire?” Nate asked as he drove them out of the dirt lane to the road.

  “My family was hosting a barn dance for my brother’s buddy group,” she explained. “Gabe is seventeen and during the mid to late teenage years, our young people are given a time of freedom called rumspringa, kind of a running-around time before they decide—or not—to join the church. I went outside to ask someone to leave and looked up above his car and—”

  “His car?” Nate said.

  “Right. Jacob Yoder’s. He shouldn’t have been there, and he was drunk, I think, and making noise, and I was going to ask him to leave.”

  Her father put in, “Jacob Yoder has been shunned for breaking the ordnung, Mr. MacKenzie. Lied to the bishop and aided an illegal theft ring of stolen cars, and was unrepentent.”

  “So he and Bishop Esh have a history—not a good one?” Nate wanted to ask more about shunning and breaking the ordnung, but he let it go for now. Mark was right about this being a foreign world, one he was going to have to navigate his way through. Find an interpreter of their ways, their culture, Mark had advised. He supposed he should rely on the bishop whose barn had burned, but sitting next to this interested, interesting young woman, he had a better idea. He needed a translator all right, because, despite all of VERA’s space-age charms, he felt like a Star Trekker who was about to go where no man had ever gone before.

  When her daad said he’d be out later and went into their house, Sarah was surprised. It was unusual for her father to leave her alone with an outsider, a man at least, so Daad must trust this man. Instead of taking time to change clothes, she decided to get his investigation going right away. She led him toward their barn since he had asked her to show him where she had been when she first noticed the blaze.

  “By the way,” she told him, “our barn is almost a replica of the Esh barn, if you want to see how it looked before the fire. Except it’s usually neat as a pin, and we all ran out and left it like this last night.” She gestured inside where a table with food sat and bales of straw surrounded a now-empty circle.

  “Yeah, it would help immensely if I could study its structure,” he said, lifting his eyebrows and looking intrigued by something. He had left his mouth wire in his truck. She wondered if he wanted to make her feel more at ease with him, which probably wasn’t going to happen, because he just plain disturbed her somehow.

  “Feel free to look around,” she said, noting he at last pulled his gaze away from her to glance high and low inside their barn. “So,” she went on, “I was helping Mamm—my mother—serve food behind that long table there, and I came across this threshing floor—”

  “Still used for threshing at harvest time?”

  “Sometimes, but we haul modern gasoline threshers now, pulled behind the horses, of course.”

  “But animal horsepower pulls them, so they’re not actually fueled by gasoline? That means the hay baler Bishop Esh says he lost in the fire would not have had gasoline in it even off-season?”

  “Right—modern equipment but real horsepower.”

  “In your field and the Eshes’, I saw them—beautiful horses, big as the Budweiser team. But go ahead. You walked to what spot before you saw the fire. And what did it look like then?”

  “I honestly don’t know what time it was, if you need to know that—”

  “I have the exact moment the call came in, so that will help.”

  “Anyway, I shouted for someone to call the fire department. Later, Jacob told me he’d called it in on his cell phone.”

  “Right. I have that info from the sheriff.”

  “When the buzzers alert the volunteers, it takes a while to get to the firehouse and then here,” she said as she led him out of the barn.

  “I’ve got all that and will be checking everyone out.”

  “Oh, sure, to get their descriptions of the fire, too. So I would say I was right here when I saw the golden glow in the distance, which was growing fast an
d turning orange. And it seemed to start high, then burn downward.”

  “Really? That could be a key clue.” He was taking notes with just a regular ballpoint pen on paper now, nodding, looking across the fields where she pointed.

  “I thought at first the fire might be the headlights of Jacob’s fancy car,” she added.

  “If he was exiled, why—”

  “Shunned.”

  “Okay, shunned. Then why was he here?”

  “It really doesn’t have anything to do with the fire,” she assured him, hesitant to get into all that about Jacob’s past, especially how it meshed with hers.

  “You need to let me decide that, Sarah,” he said, turning to her. “Just in case the cause of the fire is incendiary and criminal, I have the right to investigate anyone who could have caused it, even make an arrest.”

  “You’re a policeman, too?” she blurted. Although her people rendered to Caesar what was Caesar’s and got on just fine with Sheriff Freeman, the Amish way was to steer clear of government authorities like the ones who had persecuted—burned to death by the hundreds—her people in Europe centuries ago. Her grossmamm, Miriam, was always reading to her from the Plain People’s heirloom book, the Martyrs Mirror—talk about horrible burnings!

  “I’m a law officer under certain conditions,” he said. “So what’s with this Jacob Yoder I’ve heard mentioned more than once? He was shunned by Bishop Esh?”

  “By all of the church, really. I—it will take some explaining.”

  “Then we’ll do it in a later interview. Go ahead and take me across the field the way you ran last night and tell me how the fire appeared to change as you got closer, how the flames spread.”