by Laura Bickle
“I . . . wondered what would happen when we do as the Bible says. When we leave childish things behind.” I looked down at the comic.
Elijah shrugged. “That’s on the other side.”
“The other side of what?”
“Rumspringa. I figured everything would sort itself out then.”
I clutched Wonder Woman to my chest, refusing to give her up. I paused before the case of pop, opened it, and reached in for a Coca-Cola. I had a weakness for Coca-Cola—the bite and the sweetness were unlike anything at home. Maybe Rumspringa would dim that desire out of me. But not yet.
I walked up to the cash register, reaching for money in my apron pocket.
But Mr. Schmidt wasn't there. I peered over the counter, festooned in ribbons of lottery tickets. The clerk’s stool stood empty, and the cash register was closed. Fear prickled along the back of my neck.
Elijah’s arm reached around me to ring the bell on the counter. “Maybe he’s in the bathroom.”
I gestured with my chin at the open lavatory door. “No.”
“But his car’s out there,” Elijah insisted. It was as if he was refusing to believe what we saw.
“He’s not here,” I said. “And neither are Seth or Joseph.”
Elijah rang the bell again, out of frustration, before he walked to the back exit of the store to fetch the buggy.
I looked down at the pop and comic book in my hands. For an instant, I considered walking out with them. The thought gave me a rush that crept up to my cheeks in a flush of power.
But I put my money down on the counter, calculating the exact sales tax in my head and counting out the change to the penny. I left it in a neat pile beside the cash register before I walked out.
I might have been rebellious. Maybe a bit sinful. Maybe a lot sinful.
But I wasn’t a thief.
The furniture store was a two-story building built to resemble a barn, the front porch crowded with rocking chairs. Connected to the store was a sheet-metal warehouse where furniture was constructed and finished by Amish men. Elijah guided the buggy down the gravel drive and stopped to tie up Star on a hitching post beside the building.
We climbed two short steps to the porch and wove around the rocking chairs for sale. I paused before the front window. The store usually displayed hope chests, china cupboards, and bedsteads in the large window. These things were still here, but the glass was broken out. A few shards were on the porch, but it seemed as if most of the damage reached within the display window. Glass sparkled like ice on a bedstead with a red-and-white quilt spread on it.
“Stay with the buggy,” Elijah whispered.
I shook my head and followed him across the porch. The floorboards creaked under our shoes as we reached the front door, which still had its Closed sign turned out. It dangled slightly askew. Above the door frame, a carved wooden placard bade visitors “Welcome.”
Elijah grabbed the door handle and pulled. It opened, and the bell jangled.
“Seth? Joseph?” he called into the darkness.
Only the echo of the bell answered him.
My fingers gripped the sleeve of Elijah’s shirt as we crossed the threshold. The air felt cooler inside, as if the shadow of the building still held some of the darkness of night that it was unwilling to release into the day. Elijah turned on the light switch beside the entrance.
The fluorescent overhead lights flickered to life, casting harsh blue light into the show room. If there were shadows in my imagination, they scuttled away under that blisteringly clear light.
“Joseph!” Elijah yelled.
I pursed my mouth. If Herr Miller and Mrs. Parsall hadn’t found the boys, then they weren’t here. But I understood Elijah’s need to see what had driven them straight to the Elders.
Glass from the store window crunched underfoot as we wove our way through the displays that smelled like cedar and sawdust. I’d never seen the store empty before. There were usually at least a half-dozen English stroking the grain of the wood or filling out custom orders for kitchen cabinets. It was a lucrative business. But not today.
Today a chest of drawers was upturned on the floor, drawers spilled out. As a credit to the workmanship, none of the wood had split.
Elijah’s face paled.
“They might not have been here when this happened,” I said. “They may have been robbed, run away . . .”
“They were here.” He walked to a pair of bedsteads pressed up against the wall. The Amish quilts spread over mattresses for decoration, to help shoppers envision the pieces in their homes, were rumpled. Rumpled as if someone had slept in them.
I swallowed, said nothing. What I’d said still held true. Maybe.
Elijah walked back through the store. I paused before the cash register. It was one of the old-fashioned ones that didn’t run on electricity, so that Amish employees could use it. The drawer was still neatly tucked beneath it, undisturbed, so it seemed they hadn’t been robbed.
Elijah reached behind the counter for the telephone. He punched “911” on the buttons and waited. After a few moments, he shook his head. “No answer. Just a recording.”
“What does it say?”
He stood close beside me so that we could both listen to the receiver. A female voice said: “County Sheriff’s Office. Due to an emergency, all personnel are temporarily unavailable. For motorist assistance, call the State Highway Patrol at . . .”
Elijah put the phone down. “An emergency,” he repeated, shaking his head. His breath disturbed a tendril of hair that had escaped my bonnet.
The knowledge seemed to race through him. I watched as his jaw hardened. He turned around, headed for the back door.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To find out what happened to my brothers.”
Elijah and I searched the back storeroom, stacked high with finished chairs and special orders with yellow tickets taped to them. We made our way through a maze of furniture to the workshop in the back. The door to the workshop was ajar and pushed open easily.
One could tell that Plain folk worked here. All the tools were hand tools, not powered by electricity. Hammers and saws were hung neatly on pegs, nails and screws captured tidily in Mason jars. Half-finished skeletons of furniture perched on tables, waiting for turned legs or handles. The sawdust made me stifle a sneeze.
“Elijah,” I croaked. I pointed at the floor.
A narrow keyhole saw lay there. It wasn’t quite as long as my forearm and covered in serrated teeth with a grip like a pistol. The fact that the saw was on the floor and not put away was remarkable in and of itself. But the blade was covered in stale red blood.
The blood spattered along the floor and terminated along a freshly sanded cabinet.
Elijah’s callused hands knotted into fists. They didn’t even unravel when I tried to slip my fingers between his.
Chapter Four
It was as if all the people had been mysteriously taken up in the sky.
We rode in silence through town, staring at the empty homes and businesses, until I spoke. I was always the first one to break our silences.
“Do you think that . . . I mean . . .” I fumbled to find the right words. “The English occasionally talk about that Rapture thing.” Plain people were more concerned with our works on earth and tended to think that the afterlife sorted itself out.
Elijah looked sidelong at me. “No. Not possible,” he said, flatly.
“Why not?”
“It’s just not. We weren’t taken.”
I opened my mouth, closed it. “But if the Elders were wrong . . . what if we are wrong? About God? About everything?” I opened my hand and gestured to the countryside and the larger world beyond it.
“Not possible.” He shook his head, vehemently. “Seth and Joseph are gone too. If God favored the English, he wouldn’t take all the English and just Seth and Joseph.”
I considered it. He had a point. But I didn’t remind him of the bloody saw on the wa
rehouse floor.
Star’s ears twitched at a distant wail.
“Sirens.” Elijah pulled the buggy over to the side of the road as far as he could. “Not everyone was sucked up in your Rapture,” he said pointedly.
I turned around behind us, where the sound of the sirens grew louder. I stood and lifted my arms to flag down the policemen. The breeze whipped my sleeves and skirts like pennants, and my heart lifted at the thought of finally getting some help for Seth and Joseph. Some answers.
I shouted as the patrol car came over the rise in the road, but my shout was obliterated by the blare of the siren. And it wasn’t just one patrol car . . .
There was a caravan of them, roaring down the highway at breakneck speed. The first one rushed past us in a roiling howl of wind and sound. I counted four more before I realized that they weren’t stopping.
The cacophony spooked Star. The buggy lurched beneath me, and I lost my footing, falling forward. The metal rail at the front of the buggy drove the wind from my chest. Star lunged ahead, and I saw Elijah struggling with the reins from the corner of my eye.
A wheel caught in the ditch and shrieked as the buggy pitched right. I clutched the rail as the buggy tipped and lurched. It landed on its right side in the ditch with a crash. I tasted dirt and blood and grass.
I’d been thrown. I could feel the impact in my ribs and spine. I pulled myself up on my palms in the grass, drew an aching breath to shout: “Elijah!”
With the buggy caught in the ditch, Star stopped dragging it, rearing with a scream of fear. I saw Elijah’s white shirt behind a wheel, saw him stumble from the wreck, and breathed a sigh of relief.
I looked beyond him at the road. The caravan of police cars kept charging on as if the Devil himself were after them.
“Are you hurt?”
Elijah picked me off the ground. A cut glimmered red above his eye, and his hat was missing. I touched his brow, and he winced.
“Nothing broken,” I said as my fingers felt my ribs under my dress. “You?”
“I’m all right.” But I could see that he was putting no weight on his left foot. “I’ve got to get this shoe off before my foot swells into it, and it has to be cut off.”
“Sit down,” I ordered. Elijah obligingly sat on the grassy embankment over the ditch while I stripped off his shoe. He was right: his ankle was hot and swelling already under his sock. He flinched when I touched it.
“Do you think it’s broken?” I asked.
“Not sure.”
I attempted to feel his bones through the swelling. Though I couldn’t feel anything jutting out, it didn’t mean that there wasn’t a fracture in there somewhere. I took off my apron, rolled it lengthwise to form a bandage, and wrapped it around the ankle to stabilize it.
Elijah groaned as he looked at the wrecked buggy. “So much for sneaking out.”
I walked to Star, speaking quietly. She let me touch her nose and her head. I stroked her sides, ran my fingers over her withers and legs. I unhitched her from the buggy and led her up the slope to a fence that I could tie her to.
Nothing seemed to be broken on her either, but I could see that she’d thrown a shoe. She let me pull out a piece of nail that remained in her back hoof, and she calmed down enough to lip at some clover that sprouted around the fence post.
I walked down the embankment to where Elijah hobbled. He hopped on one foot and circled the buggy, bracing his hands on the frame as he examined it.
“Star’s okay. But she needs a trip to the farrier. How’s the buggy?”
Elijah grimaced. “It’ll take more than a trip to the wheelwright to fix it. But it might be drivable.”
“Let’s get it righted and find out.”
We scrabbled to get a grip on the side of the buggy that was aimed skyward. It was streaked in mud, and purchase was difficult. Finally, we succeeded in rocking the buggy right and left, creating enough momentum to allow it to fall back on its wheels with a clatter and a crash. We scrambled back to avoid being trapped beneath the undercarriage.
The buggy stood, bent and creaking. I could already see that the right wheel was badly warped. Elijah limped over to it and ran his fingers over the rim. He put his shoulder to it, trying to straighten it out.
The back was dented, and one light cracked out. I didn’t think that it mattered that the safety lights were out; no one was out here who would pay attention to them, anyway.
I found my comic book blown up against the fence, caked in dirt. But there was no sign of my bottle of Coca-Cola. I looked for it for a few moments but gave up and returned to the buggy.
“Is it drivable?” I asked.
“I think so.”
Elijah brushed the worst of the dirt from the seat. It took several tries and many promises of oats to get Star to back into the harness. I insisted that Elijah sit before he made his foot worse. Reluctantly, he climbed aboard while I finished cooing to Star and fastening her into the harness. I climbed up into the buggy beside him, and he stared between the horse’s ears morosely. He elevated his sore foot over the front rail.
“It’s going to be a bumpy ride,” he warned.
He was right. He started the horse out at a very slow walk. The bent wheel, on my side, wobbled along, knocking my teeth together. I felt bad for Elijah, his foot thumping along the front rail, with his broken buggy and thinking of his missing brothers.
I reached out and patted his sleeve, though it seemed an ineffectual gesture.
It was afternoon by the time we’d made our slow progress back home. I’d hoped that we’d be able to slip back into the barn unnoticed, that Elijah would be able to break the news to his father about the buggy slowly.
But dozens of Plain people had clustered around Elijah’s house. I swallowed as they turned to stare at the mangled buggy as it creaked along the dirt road.
“Elijah!” Herr Miller broke free of the group. “Where have you been?”
Elijah’s jaw was set in a hard line. “Looking for Seth and Joseph.”
Herr Miller blinked, running his hands over the buggy and taking in our battered appearances. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“We were run off the road by policemen. Six cars.”
“Elijah’s hurt,” I interjected. “His ankle . . .”
Herr Miller and I shoveled Elijah out of the buggy. He leaned heavily on my shoulder.
“I’ll take care of the buggy and Star,” Herr Miller said. “Will you see to him, Katie?”
“Of course.”
I supported Elijah as we limped through the throng of people. I spied my mother and father at the edges.
“Katie . . .” My mother tied my askew bonnet strings firmly under my chin. It was a gesture she’d repeated since I was a little girl, whenever I made her nervous. “Are you all right?”
“Just bumps and bruises.” I looked over her shoulder at my father. His expression was a combination of worry and disapproval. That expression punished me more than any verbal reprimand.
“I must attend to Elijah,” I whispered, feeling guilty.
“I will help you,” my mother said.
“And I will help Herr Miller with the buggy,” my father said.
My mother and I got Elijah up the steps of his house, through the living room, and upstairs to his bedroom. Elijah shared a large room with his two brothers, and it seemed very empty without them. Too quiet. The three beds were covered with quilts my mother had made. Elijah’s was in the middle and received the most sunlight from the thick-paned window above it.
Elijah groaned as we set him upon the bed. My mother began unwrapping his foot.
“Bring me some water, Katie,” she said. “And take a moment to clean yourself, too.”
I nodded, then scurried away to the kitchen. I carried the washbasin out to the pump in the backyard.
I spied Mrs. Parsall, lurking awkwardly at the fringes of the crowd. I waved to her, and she made her way to me. She looked distressed.
“Where did you
go?” she hissed.
“We went looking for Elijah’s brothers.”
She paused. “You went to the furniture store?”
“Yes.” I looked away, trying not to remember the stained keyhole saw and the broken glass. “We tried to call the police but couldn’t reach anyone.”
Mrs. Parsall reached out and grasped me in a fierce hug. “It’s going to be okay.”
“Does anyone know what’s happening?”
She shook her head against mine. “I don’t know. I can’t reach Dan or the kids. I think . . . it’s something big. I don’t know . . .”
I muffled a sob against her shoulder, and she stroked my mussed hair under my bonnet. But I felt like I should be soothing her, with her husband and children unreachable. I hiccupped, then asked her, “Are all these people here . . . to form a search party?”
I saw some of the Elders talking in a tight knot. They would have a plan, surely.
“I think that they’re waiting for the Bishop. To decide what to do.”
“That’s best.” I clasped Mrs. Parsall’s hand. “Stay with us. Until it’s over.”
She wiped her eyes beneath her glasses. “Your parents have already insisted.” She tried to smile, but it came off crooked. “Your mother has offered me some of her clothes.”
The corner of my mouth turned up to imagine her in our style of clothes. “You’ll be a lovely Plain woman.”
“You’ll have to teach me about the bonnet thing,” she said self-consciously, reaching up to smooth her hair. Hers would be black, for a married woman, not a girl’s white one.
“I will,” I promised. I worked the pump until water rattled forth into the washbasin. I quickly scrubbed my face, hands, and arms in the frigid water, emptied the basin, and then refilled it with fresh water.
I carefully carried the basin back upstairs to Elijah’s room and set it down on the floor at the foot of the bed. My mother was perched on Elijah’s bedside like a sparrow, clucking over his injuries.
“Is it broken?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Just sprained, I think.” She dipped a rag into the washbasin and cleaned his foot, to prepare it for some of her homemade liniment. I took one of the other rags and began to scrub Elijah’s face and hands.