A woman with pure white hair and round, rosy cheeks sat propped up with a myriad of pillows in a hospital-style bed. She wore a blue satiny bed jacket that brought out the azure in her eyes. Behind her, on the wall, a large bulletin board was filled with birthday cards.
Cheerfully, the receptionist announced his entry. “The young man I told you about is here to see you, Lily. His name is Philip Bradley.”
“It’s very nice to meet you, Lily.” He offered his hand, and the delicate flower of a soul offered hers.
“Your name is Philip?” came the fragile voice.
“Yes.”
“Please, pull up a chair and make yourself at home.”
“Thank you.”
When he was settled, she said, “Can you tell me where you found this postcard?” She held it in her thin, wrinkled hands.
“I certainly can. While I was staying at an Amish bed-and-breakfast in Lancaster this week, I discovered it caught under a drawer in an antique rolltop desk . . . in my room.”
“Antique rolltop, you say?”
“I was told it dates back to the 1890s. A beautiful cherrywood finish.”
She was quiet for the longest time, only her eyes blinking, as if assimilating the information he’d offered. “Adele’s mother once owned a desk like that,” she said softly.
“Then you knew her well?”
A smile crossed her face. “Ah yes.”
He was hesitant to spoil the moment by asking if he could tape-record their visit, but he mustered up enough professional oomph to do so. “I hope you won’t mind.”
“It’s all right, I guess.” She sighed, and Philip noticed dark circles under her eyes. “Perhaps it is time someone heard Adele’s story.”
“Most likely, someone besides myself will listen to this tape,” he explained. “Rachel, the grand-niece of Gabe Esh . . . her mother’s uncle.”
Lily tilted her head and stared at the window. “I knew a girl named Rachel once. She was a sweet little thing—an Amish girl—one of Adele’s students at the one-room school where she substitute taught one year. But then, there were many Plain girls named Rachel in Lancaster County—probably still are.”
He switched on the Record button just as Lily mentioned the Amish schoolhouse. “Do you mind if I state the date of our conversation before you begin?”
Offering a slight smile, she agreed. “Are you sure you’re not a newspaper reporter, Mr. Bradley?”
He’d come too far and too often for this meeting to fall through the cracks. “One thing I’m not is a newspaperman.” He was glad that he could honestly say so, though writing for a magazine hardly exempted him from the category.
“So, Mr. Bradley, what is it you would like to know about Adele?” she asked.
The question took him by surprise. “There is much about Gabe’s situation I don’t understand. An Amish farmer told me he died soon after writing the postcard, yet Gabe was buried here instead of Lancaster. That seems very strange to me, given the circumstances.”
“Yes, I suppose it does.”
“I’m also curious to know why the man was shunned by the Amish community when, according to various folk in Bird-in-Hand, he never joined the Amish church.” He stopped, thinking he might have thrown out too many questions at once. “Maybe we should start with how you came to know Adele Herr.”
The white-haired woman looked toward the window and seemed to lose herself there. “Adele and I were . . . quite close at one time.”
He settled back in his chair, eager for the answers. “Then you must have known Gabe Esh as well?”
She nodded, closing her eyes for a moment, still clutching the postcard. “If it’s Gabe you’re interested in,” she said, opening her eyes with a smile, “then perhaps I should take you back to the very beginning. . . .”
Twenty-One
The day Gabriel Esh was born, a fierce snowstorm with up to forty-mile-an-hour winds swept through Bird-in-Hand. John and Lydia Esh had been blessed, at long last, with their first son. His seven older sisters were in attendance at the home birth, in one way or another. The older girls boiled water and ran errands for the midwife; the younger girls played checkers near the wood stove in the kitchen.
Shouts of “It’s a boy!” rang through the farmhouse. The eldest dashed outside in knee-deep snow to ring the bell, announcing the news as a strong wind blew the message through the Amish community.
It didn’t take long for his parents to see that Gabriel was an unusually sensitive child. Not the sort of rough-and tumble son John Esh had long wished for, and not much good on the farm, he was so slight.
Along about his seventh birthday, things began to change for the quiet, blond-haired boy. He’d gone out with three of his older cousins—much older, in their teens—and was tramping around between the rows of corn at the far end of Bishop Seth Fisher’s cornfield when he felt a peculiar burning sensation in his hands and a mighty downward pull, enough to halt him in his tracks. He battled against the unseen force that seemed to come from the ground beneath him.
Painstakingly, he was able to battle against it, moving his hands, palms flat out in front of him, while the other boys ran ahead. The hot tingling continued until young Gabe thought his hands might be reacting to a low-voltage current somewhere in the ground. He hadn’t ever watched a man go dowsing for water across a field, but he’d heard enough stories about it, growing up in Lancaster County. Folks called dowsers did this sort of thing all the time, deciding where to drill for water or locating minerals, hidden treasures, and lost objects like keys and other things. But from the stories he’d heard, it was usually older men or women who were the ones out water-witching, not young boys half scared of their own voices.
When his cousins realized Gabe wasn’t trailing along behind them, one of the boys came back for him. Seeing Gabe’s hands trembling to beat the band, the boy shouted to the others. “Come, see this! Looks like we got ourselves a new little water-witcher in the family.”
Gabe didn’t like what he was feeling. The electricity flying through his hands made him think he might be close to being electrocuted. He clapped his hands, trying desperately to make them stop twitching. At last, he folded them as if in prayer, pulling them close to his chest, and stepped back. He stared in awe at the ground, knowing it belonged to Bishop Seth. “Was in der Welt?—what in all the world?” he whispered.
“There’s gotta be a water vein below us,” Jeremiah, the oldest cousin, said. “We best mark the spot and tell the bishop.”
“He’ll be right happy to hear ’bout this,” said his brother with glee.
The boys, all three of them, started laughing and hooting, jumping up and down, and getting right rowdy about the find. “Maybe there’s a gold mine under our feet,” said one. “If there is, we’ll be richer ’n snot.”
Then Jeremiah quit leaping long enough to say, “Wait a minute. Bishop Fisher’s lookin’ for someone to pass the powwowing gift on to, ain’t so?”
“I heard Pop say he’s a-huntin’ for a young woman for the transference. It’s been ever so long since we had die Brauchfraa—a lady powwow doctor—’round these parts. That’s prob’ly why.”
“No . . . no, it don’t matter, just so long as the person’s got a trace of the gift already. And lookee here who it is!” He was pointing to Gabe and laughing.
Soon all the boys were gathering around him, pretending to be sick or faint, begging him to chant or make up a charm over them.
Gabe ignored them, letting his hands drop to his sides. He shook them hard, feeling all wrung out—like he needed to lie down. “I’m goin’ home now,” he muttered.
“Oh no you ain’t. We’re takin’ you to see the bishop.”
Gabe started running, fast as his little legs would take him, straight through the cornfield and down the dirt lane to his dawdi’s side of the house.
He had outrun Jeremiah and the others that day, but it was just the beginning of folks taking notice of him. Word spread quick as lightni
ng about the “wee dowser” in their midst, and Gabe couldn’t go anywhere—school or church— without somebody comin’ up to him and makin’ over him, like he was special or something. Maybe it was because the bishop got a well driller to come out and sink a shaft in the corner of his cornfield. Lo and behold, if he didn’t discover a water vein at twenty-five feet!
Seven years later, around the time Gabe turned fourteen, Preacher King took him aside, came right into the schoolhouse and escorted him outdoors. “Bishop Fisher wants to have a word with you, son.”
“Me?”
Preacher looked over his shoulder comically. “Well, he sure ain’t askin’ for me.”
Gabe ran his fingers up and down his suspenders, then took off his straw hat and looked it over good. “I didn’t break the Ordnung, did I?” He shouldn’t have let the tears well up in his eyes, this close to being a young man and all, but he was mighty worried he’d gotten himself into some trouble. Random transgressions happened all too often in the community, seemed to him—folks making a mistake about the width of a hat brim or the kind of hobbies they might choose.
“Best be gettin’ yourself up to the bishop’s and find out,” said Preacher King. “But I’d say it’s nothin’ to fret over.”
Preacher’s laughter and the urgent, ominous look in his eyes made Gabe feel uneasy. He’d overheard some of the Mennonite teenagers talking disapprovingly about powwow doctors, that they were conjurers or hex doctors, but he’d never witnessed the “evil eye” as some of them cautioned. That day he felt something keeping him back, telling him not to go see the bishop, something as powerful as the pulling force in his hands the day he’d walked in that water-rich cornfield. Yet there was a fight raging inside him—another voice just as strong, nagging him to get going, urging him to obey the man of God.
“I don’t know what’s-a-matter with me,” he told Lavina Troyer, a tall and skinny blond girl in the eighth grade. “I feel God callin’ me to somethin’—I just don’t know what. But everyone says I have this here gift, and if that’s true, I should obey and see the bishop ’bout it, right?”
Lavina stared a hole clean through him. “This may sound like tomfoolery, but do you ever pray ’bout things before you just up and do ’em?”
It was the single most absurd thing he’d ever heard, but then most folk he knew figured there was something worse than wrong with Lavina. She struggled hard with book learning at school; most everywhere else, too, it seemed. Though she was getting close to courting age, he wondered if any boy would ever have her. ’Course, then again, if she chewed peppermint gum ’stead of them awful garlic buds, maybe that would help. But that was the least of his worries.
Yet Gabe couldn’t dismiss Lavina’s remark, and instead of running off to see Bishop Seth Fisher like Preacher King said to, he hurried on home after school, out to Dat’s barn, and knelt down next to a hay bale and talked to God as if He might even care to be listening. That prayer and the feeling that followed turned out to be the downright oddest thing he’d ever encountered. When he quit praying, there was an awful ache in his belly, low in the pit of his stomach, like he hadn’t eaten in over two days. He was one hungry boy, but when he went in the house and gulped down a handful of oatmeal raisin cookies and the tallest glass of milk you ever did see, none of it seemed to satisfy him.
The hollowed-out feeling persisted, even as he crawled into bed that night. Instead of saying a silent rote prayer the way he was taught to do, he whispered into the darkness a prayer that came straight from his young heart. It was all about how he wanted God to fill him up inside, to make his life count for something more than just working the land, raising dairy cows, and marrying and having a family like his pop and mamma and their dat and mam before them. He wanted a mission to carry out, something far different from the powwow doctoring everyone said he was destined for. He wanted to do something holy and good for Jehovah God.
When he finished his prayer, the emptiness inside was filled with something strong and true. He knew God would answer.
Gabe figured he couldn’t tell just anybody what he’d done, ’least not his family. But he did feel homelike enough with one person to tell her about his prayers because he figured Lavina Troyer wouldn’t go squealing on him, on account of her childlike way. But it went deeper than that. He felt he could trust Lavina with most any secret. She was the kind of older friend he’d wished he’d had in a brother, but God had seen fit to bless him with a houseful of sisters. Maybe that was why he felt at ease around Lavina.
“I’m right proud of you, Gabe,” she said when he told her at recess about the praying he’d done.
“You don’t hafta be proud, really. I’m just doin’ what I believe is God’s will.”
Her eyes went banjo-wide. “You sound like you’ve been talkin’ to the Mennonites.”
He wondered what she meant by that and decided to investigate. Soon he had two fast friends, Paul and Bill—not brothers but cousins—both of them saved and baptized Mennonites. For the next couple of years, he spent as much time with them as he could, sneaking off to Bible studies, even attending Sunday school and church on the People’s off Sundays.
He was constantly having to avoid certain farmers who kept after him to come help them locate the best place to dig a well or plant a new tree on their land.
And there was Bishop Seth Fisher. “You’re runnin’ from God Almighty,” the tall, imposing man with graying beard and penetrating dark eyes said after a preaching service at the Esh home one Sunday afternoon. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be surprised at nothing, the way you’re acting. Out and-out glotzkeppich—blockheaded you are, Gabriel Esh.”
Gabe didn’t think twice about the bishop’s vague, yet somewhat threatening, pronouncement. He wasn’t frightened or intimidated by it and wouldn’t consider going to meet Seth Fisher privately at the man’s home because of it. In fact, Gabe was more determined than ever to follow the new calling on his life. The calling of God.
There came a day of testing, when his own mother was so ill with a high fever and convulsions, Gabe’s father declared that her brain might burn up if Gabe didn’t at least attempt to exercise some of his supernatural powers over her. But Gabe refused, petitioning God to heal his mamma, quoting the New Testament as he offered a fervent prayer. Angry, John Esh went out and brought Bishop Seth back to the house with his powwow cures and remedies instead.
By the time Gabe was twenty and showing no signs of taking the expected baptismal class necessary to become an Old Order church member, the People wondered if they might be losing one of their own to the world. Bishop Fisher was enraged over the situation—this haughty course the wayward young man had set for himself—and it was mighty clear to everyone that Gabe was avoiding the bishop like the plague. “John Esh’s son won’t amount to much of anything if he don’t join church,” the bishop was reported to have said to Preacher King, who in turn told Gabe’s father.
So John took his son aside one winter afternoon while the womenfolk were having a quilting frolic. Gabe’s father walked him out to the barn, to the milking house. “You know, Gabe, we named you Gabriel for a very gut reason.”
“What’s that, Dat?”
“Well, honestly, I handpicked the name myself on account of it being your great-grandfather’s name before you. You see, son, Gabriel means ‘God is my strength’—right fitting for a scrawny lad such as yourself.”
He’d heard the story often enough, though never the part his father was about to reveal.
“Your great-grandfather, old Gabriel Esh, was a powerful healer in the community, looked up to and revered by everyone whose life he touched. He died at the ripe old age of ninety-seven, but long before he did, he graciously passed on his gift to Bishop Seth, the bishop we now have.”
“Why didn’t he transfer the gift to someone in our family?” Gabe asked, knowing that was the way things usually happened.
“Because the woman—your grandmother’s sister and your great-aunt Hannah—wh
o was most expected to receive it died in childbirth. There was no one else in the Esh family with the same inclinations toward the ‘curious arts,’ so the gift fell to our present bishop.”
Gabe contemplated his father’s explanation. “Ain’t it true that my great-grandfather could’ve chosen anybody, even someone with no inclination at all?”
“Jah.”
“Then why Bishop Fisher?”
His father looked down at his work boots. “Seems that after your great-aunt passed away, there was a lot of pressure comin’ from Seth Fisher’s elderly grandfather for Seth to have the gift. And that’s just how it went.”
“What sort of pressure do ya mean?” Gabe asked, eager to know. Because he, too, had felt a burden, almost an obligation, to follow through with Preacher King’s invitation “to go and see the bishop,” even now, after all these years of avoiding the austere man.
“I s’pose it’s not for us to say, really.”
“But there must be a reason why you think that, Dat.”
John Esh shook his head, exhaling into the cold air. “It’s just a downright shame that you ain’t interested in the bishop’s blessing, son. ’Twould give us another healer in the community, and the good Lord knows we sure could use more than one.” He paused, wrinkling his face up till Gabe thought he saw the man’s eyes glisten. “Such a wonderful-gut honor it would be to the Esh family, havin’ our son become the new powwow doctor.”
So it was the family Dat was thinking of! Gabe should’ve known, but he had no idea the “blessing” was so important to his parents.
“God’s called me to preach,” he said boldly. “To expose the wickedness in high places.”
His father’s mumblings were not discernible as the farmer walked away, kicking the stones in the barnyard as he headed back to the warmth of the house.
That brought the discussion to a quick end, though Gabe often wondered about the things Dat had said. He searched the Scriptures even more vigorously, together with his Christian friends. It was becoming clear to him that there were certain patterns in families, ways of thinking or behaving that seemed to influence as many as three and four generations from the original sin of a particular family. Some patterns affected the continuation of blessing in a lineage; others gave full sway to chronic sickness and money-related troubles, relationship problems, and barrenness. And there were those who seemed accident-prone or who had emotional or mental breakdowns, all of which seemed to run in families.
The Postcard Page 20