She closed her eyes, and for a moment I thought she had fallen asleep. But then, with her eyes still closed, she said, ever so softly, “Thank you, Zed. You have brought us full circle.”
I could feel myself choking up, so I moved away from them and looked around at everyone else. It was interesting to listen to the various conversations that had begun to rise up in the wake of the movie. Ella and Lexie were talking about their beautiful wooden boxes and how much they treasured them. Giselle was asking Zed technical questions about the making of the movie. Alice and Will and Ada were talking about the desk that had been used in the final scene. Apparently, they had one much like it in their home too. I wasn’t surprised, as I had a feeling it was a fairly common design, at least back in the 1800s when Mamm’s had been built.
“Oh, yeah. That desk,” Will was saying to his grandmother with a laugh. Then, turning to Ada, he explained, “I thought I was the only one who had discovered it had a secret compartment in it. When I was on rumspringa, I kept my driver’s license and my one set of Englisch clothes hidden in there.”
The three of them laughed. It was hard to even picture the fine and upstanding Will Gundy sneaking around on rumpsringa.
“Ya,” Alice said, “then your dad found it and was none too happy with you.”
“What happened?” asked Ada, her eyes sparkling as she clearly enjoyed hearing about this side of her husband.
“He wrote me a note and stuck it in the pants pocket. I didn’t find it until I was out with friends, and of course it made me feel terrible. The whole night I was dying inside that he’d found out and was upset with me.”
Will and Alice shared a smile, remembering.
I thought again of the similar desk in my home, which had been passed down through my mother’s family. Then I gasped.
“Izzy?” Ada asked. “Are you okay?”
I shook my head. I caught Zed’s eye and waved him over.
“What is it?” he asked, coming closer.
Turning to Will, I said, “Repeat what you were just saying about the desk.”
He looked a little confused, but he did as I asked. “We were just commenting that the desk you used in that final scene is similar to one we have at home.”
Zed said that style was fairly common.
“But there’s something unique about Will’s desk,” I prodded.
Zed’s eyebrows raised as he looked over at him.
“Oh,” Will said. “It has a secret compartment behind the lower left drawer.”
Zed didn’t seem to catch on, so finally I spelled it out for him.
“A secret compartment. In a desk. Mamm’s desk is that same style. What if hers has one too? What if the missing pages of the chapbook are hidden in there? It’s been in the family for years, you know.”
“Which desk? The one in the living room?”
I nodded.
“It wouldn’t matter, Iz,” he replied. “That desk can’t be more than a hundred years old, and it’s certainly not from as far back as Abigail’s time.”
I understood what he was saying, but something inside of me wouldn’t let it go. “It’s worth a try, don’t you think? Even if it didn’t exist back then, who’s to say that one of Abigail’s descendants didn’t use it, years later, to hide the rest of the chapbook?”
“Why would they bother? Abigail would’ve been dead by then—”
I reached for the hem of his sleeve and held on. “I don’t know. Why did they cut the rest of the pages from the chapbook?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “Because they wanted to hide the truth about her story?”
“Exactly. We don’t know why yet. We only know that they did. What if there’s a secret compartment in our desk too—and the missing pages from the chapbook are in there?”
“We need to look at your desk,” I told my mamm as Zed and I burst in through the door. The house was strangely quiet, and I realized that everyone else was already in bed, save for her. She was in the living room working on Daed’s bills.
“Whatever for?”
He went to take a look as I explained. “We just found out it might have a hidden compartment in it. If it does, we’re thinking maybe the rest of the chapbook is inside.”
She and I followed Zed into the living room, where he was on his knees in front of the desk.
“That’s impossible,” Mamm said. “It was built long after those chapbooks were printed. The desk dates back to after the Civil War.”
Zed pulled out each drawer in turn but found nothing. He looked at me, disappointed, but I stepped forward and reminded him what Will had told us.
“You pull out the drawer, and once you think it’s all the way out, you pull some more. It has a fake back panel, but then there’s room behind that for a little extra space.”
“I did that already,” he said, but at my urging he tried again, starting on the right side as I tried the drawers on the left. He was right. There were no false backs to any of them.
“Let’s pull them all the way out,” I suggested, tugging and wiggling the top left drawer until it was completely loose. I set it on the floor and studied it carefully, but there were no hidden surprises anywhere.
I was about to return my attention to the desk and pull out the next drawer down when Zed got the one on his side loose and placed it on the floor next to mine. With a gasp I realized that my drawer was a good six inches shorter than his was.
Our eyes met, and we shared a wide grin.
Heart pounding, I turned toward the desk, still on my knees, and peered inside the dark cavity where the drawer had been. I asked Mamm for a flashlight, but before she could respond, Zed had turned on the one on his phone and was shining it into the opening.
The funny thing was, it didn’t look as if anything was back there. But when we compared the opening on my side with the one on his, it was clear: The back panel of mine was about six inches closer than his was. He reached inside and pressed his fingers against the wood, moving them along the top, back, and sides, but nothing happened.
“There’s room here for a hidden space, so there must be some kind of latch somewhere,” he said.
“Maybe you get to it from beneath,” I offered, gesturing toward the lower drawer. It was bigger and heavier than the top one, so he helped me jiggle it loose and set it on the floor.
Once that cavity was empty and open, we bent down lower and he shone his light inside it, aiming the beam toward the top at the back. Solid wood divided the top drawer from the bottom, so we weren’t able to see our hiding place from this new angle—and there was nothing unusual inside here at all. Just to be sure, however, we removed the lower drawer from the right side and compared the lengths. They were equal. Without a doubt a hiding place was in this desk, and it was located behind the top left drawer.
The question was how to get into it.
Zed reached his hand into each cavity in turn, feeling around for some sort of latch or hidden release. When that didn’t work, I suggested we move the desk away from the wall to look at the other side. We did so quickly, and as he returned to his inspection of the cavities and the front of the desk, I studied the back, wondering if the hiding place could be accessed by the removal of a small panel.
At first my idea did not look promising, but when I carefully compared the back panel on the left with the one on the right, I noticed one small difference between them…a tiny square slot at the bottom outer corner.
I looked to Mamm, who was now holding the flashlight I had asked for. She handed it to me, and I crouched down on the floor and used the light to try to see inside the little slot. It was just too small.
“You need some tools,” Mamm said, and as she turned to go, I realized she was finally getting on board with our theory as well.
A few moments later she returned with the small household toolbox and handed me a screwdriver. Gripping the round handle, I carefully slid the flat tip into the slot as far as it would go. Nothing happened, so I gave it a
n extra push—hoping I wouldn’t hurt the antique wood—and much to my surprise I could hear the gentle ping of what sounded like a release from somewhere inside.
“That’s it!” Zed cried, his head popping up like a groundhog from its hole.
I got to my feet and my mother and I went to the other side. Kneeling, I shone my light into the space behind the top left drawer and saw that the wood panel at the back had indeed come open.
Zed scooted away, gesturing for me to do the honors. Hands trembling, I reached inside and swung the little door wide, thrilled to see that behind it had been stashed a very old and yellowed cloth bag. I carefully removed it from the hiding place and brought it out into the light.
“Well, would you look at that,” Mamm whispered. “What is it?”
The bag had a drawstring top, so I set it on the desk and worked the strings apart. Once I had it all the way open, I peeled back the fabric so we could all see its contents. From what I could tell, we were looking at a very old and neatly folded bundle of buckskin. It looked like Indian buckskin, and it was small and obviously fragile.
Holding my breath, I slid my hands into the bag and pulled it out, hoping the chapbook might be underneath, but there was nothing else there.
“Check the hiding place,” I said to Zed. “Is this everything?”
He took another look and then met my gaze. “That’s it.”
He got to his feet and we were all silent, just standing and looking at the folded buckskin in my hand. A part of me was so disappointed that we hadn’t found the chapbook after all, but another part was thrilled just the same. Whatever this was, it was really, really cool. And just the fact that it had been hidden away had to mean something.
Zed reached for the buckskin, and he and I were about to unfold it together when my mother stopped us. “Didn’t you tell me Frannie’s daughter from Europe is an expert in textiles?”
We nodded.
“Well, then, if I were you, I wouldn’t do a thing with this except bring it to her to examine. It might fall apart if you even try.”
She was right. I slowly slid the buckskin back into the drawstring bag and then clutched it to my chest as Zed and I headed out.
“Danke, Mamm,” I called as we flew down the steps.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, coming to the door. “Danke to you too. For the…uh…adventure.”
By the time we got back to Klara’s, the crowd had thinned. Will had taken the children home, although Ada had stayed with Lexie and James, who could drive her home later. They sat at the kitchen table with Ella and Luke, their hands wrapped around mugs of tea, still talking about Zed’s film. Klara and Alexander had gone on to bed. Marta was also asleep, dozing upright in a chair in the corner.
Giselle was on the couch, her eyes on Frannie, who was resting.
“We have something to show you.” Zed said, sitting down beside her as I gently pulled the bag open so that she could see the buckskin inside.
“Oh, my goodness,” Giselle said. “That looks ancient. I need those gloves just to touch it.” She left quickly and then returned a couple of minutes later with the white cotton glove liners on her hands. “I’m thrilled to do the honors,” she said, sitting back down on the couch and taking the bag from me.
Slowly she pulled out the buckskin and then carefully began to unfold it. I watched how she did it, and I was paying so much attention to how she was protecting the creases that I didn’t even notice something was in the middle. Zed gasped, and then I looked down and saw that it was a packet of yellowed paper. It had been folded up inside the buckskin.
I was thrilled, but Giselle’s voice indicated she wasn’t. “That can’t have been good for the buckskin all these years.” There was a discolored area on the leather, but it didn’t seem to have been made by the paper.
Giselle pulled off the gloves and handed them over, telling me to put them on. After I did she gestured toward the packet and said, “Your turn.”
My heart pounding, I picked it up and sat on the couch on the other side of Zed. For a long moment I stared down at the documents in my hand, hardly able to grasp that we had uncovered the truth at last.
We decided to go through the items one by one, starting with the one on top, which was a letter dated July 1876 and written by someone named Odette Kanagy. That name sounded familiar, and then I remembered seeing her name on my family tree.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, standing and leaving the packet with the letter on top on the couch. As soon as I was out the back door, I ran to the daadi haus, went swiftly down the hall to my room, and grabbed the paper with the chart. Then I ran back to the house and over to the couch.
“What do you have?” Zed asked as I picked up the packet and sat back down.
“A family tree.” I followed down the list of my ancestors with a gloved index finger, coming to a stop on Odette. She was my great-great-great-great-grandmother, and Abigail’s great-great-granddaughter.
Now I remembered. When I was on the bus coming home from Indiana, I had tried to calculate the number of generations in my family that had lived during a time of Indian unrest. Odette was the ancestor who would have been in her thirties during Custer’s Last Stand, which I had figured to be the end of the worst of it.
Zed nudged me. “Read it out loud.”
“It’s not addressed to anyone in particular,” I said. I handed him the family tree, held the letter where I could see it, and then began to read.
To Whom It May Concern,
If you are reading this letter, then that means you have found the bundle of buckskin and papers I am now about to hide away. My hope is that enough years have passed between my putting it here and your finding it that the world will have changed in the ways that are so troublesome in these present times.
In truth, I have chosen to hide these things not because I am ashamed of the truth or of the Indian blood in our past, but because I fear repercussions against me and my own children. Though I could not bear to destroy my great-great-grandmother’s chapbooks, I have removed the telling parts of the three remaining copies and kept only the fourth fully intact, which I will hide away in the hidden compartment of my husband’s new desk. With it I will include the bishop’s letter regarding the situation and the buckskin that was my great-grandmother’s only remaining possession from her family of origin.
Sincerely,
Odette Kanagy
My eyes fell back to the beginning of the letter. “Indian blood? What does she mean?”
Zed nudged me again. “Look in the packet for the chapbook.”
I pulled out the next item. Sure enough, it was an intact copy. I felt a chill just looking at the cover. At the border design and the feather. At the words printed there:
A Reflection of My Experience Concerning the Indians of Long Ago
Abigail Vogel Bontrager
Overcome with emotion, I took off my gloves and handed them to Zed. Seeming to understand, he slipped them on and then took the chapbook from me.
“Read it,” I whispered. “So we can find out whose Indian blood she’s talking about.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Zed settled back against the couch, and with a final glance at me began to read the chapbook aloud. I couldn’t bear the suspense, so I stopped him on the first page and made him flip forward, to where the first half had ended. He started with the last few paragraphs on that page.
All along, father insisted to any who would listen that the Conestogas were not involved in the conflict between the settlers and the Indians and that we could trust them completely.
How very wrong he had been.
In the end, they were involved in the conflict between the settlers and the Indians, through no fault of their own, to tragic results.
He paused and we looked at each other, eyes wide. This wasn’t a story of broken trust between friends. It had only seemed that way until we had the next part of the story. Zed took a deep breath and kept going.
The a
utumn of that year started out with great joy, but by winter a horrible tragedy changed all of our lives forever.
I married my beloved Gorg in September 1763. He farmed with my father, and besides the uneasiness swirling around the Indians and many of the settlers, our lives were good. For a while, both Gorg and Father had thought it unsafe for me to visit Indian Town, so I had not seen Konenquas for months, though she was often in my thoughts.
Then, on the morning of 14 December of that year, a neighbor came running across our field, shouting at my father that a group of militia had attacked our friends, the Conestoga Indians. Gorg and I had been breaking up the ice in the trough and understood our neighbor’s words before Father did. We ran to hitch our horse to the buggy and then took off toward Indian Town as fast as we could.
What we saw when we got there has haunted me to this day.
Six Indians had been in the village that morning, including Konenquas and her husband. Six Indians, and the Paxton Boys had massacred all of them.
Unable to believe my eyes, I rushed to my friend’s side, but I knew before I got there that I was too late. I had not seen my old friend in nearly a year, and now she was dead. I collapsed to my knees and sat weeping beside her lifeless body. But as did, I began to hear an odd, muffled sound coming from beneath her, almost like the mewling of an infant.
Stunned, I pushed her body so as to roll her onto her side, and that’s when I realized that there was a babe—a live babe—kicking and crying from inside a basket that had been strapped to Konenquas’s chest.
With shock I realized my dear Indian friend must have recently given birth. I had not seen her for so long, I hadn’t even known she was in the family way. Now, of this whole tribe, the only one here that day who had survived the massacre was this infant. In the chaos of the attack, Konenquas was fatally stabbed in the back and had fallen down, trapping the baby beneath her. If not for the stiffness of the basket’s edge, the child would probably have suffocated.
I wanted to cry out to the other settlers who had come to help, but I was afraid of their reactions. Not knowing what else to do, I waited until no one was watching and then discreetly pulled the little one under my cape and rushed away. Father later told me that those in the group who noticed my quick departure thought I was merely overcome with emotion and could not take any more of the horrible sight.
The Amish Seamstress Page 34