Not only had he suffered emotional losses—the deaths of his wife and son, and then learning of little Leah’s illness—but also economic losses: his farm, most of his livestock, and just Sunday, another horse was taken from him. Aiden wanted to insist that Joe turn back and take him to Daniel so he could somehow comfort him.
“The Amish community wanted to rebuild for him,” Joe went on, unaware of the impact his words were having on his passenger, “but he refused. He moved back home with his mom and dad right after it happened. Rents his land to an English farmer now.”
Exhausted with emotion from all the things Joe had revealed, Aiden leaned his head against the headrest. “So that’s why Daniel has a beard.” He never considered it before that moment. “Amish men keep their beards even after they’re widowed….”
“Yep, that’s right,” Joe said. “You didn’t actually think he was divorced, did you?”
“Well….” Aiden flushed. “I guess there’s a lot about the Amish I still don’t know. I just feel so bad for Daniel. What a horrible thing to have to live through.”
“Sure is. Like I said, lucky you saved them from more tragedy.”
“Yeah,” Aiden said, mostly to himself, as the farmland whizzed past his window. “I guess it was kinda lucky.”
Chapter 7
“You don’t like Aiden Cermak, do you,” David said to Daniel at the family’s furniture shop.
“That’s a hasty assumption.” Daniel was checking inventory tags on several of the shop’s items, trying to ignore his little brother’s bothersome accusations. He wanted to ready the shop for the “early weekenders” tomorrow. After the lackluster winter and spring months, he was hopeful shoppers would want to add more digits to their credit card bills.
No doubt competition was rife, even in the best of times. Amish woodworkers in the county were as common as fireflies in summer. Although a handful owned shops in town, hundreds more operated woodworking businesses from their farms, some displaying rather prominent signs alongside the busier thoroughfares to bait tourists. Each had his own skill level, as well as business acumen. Daniel’s reputation honored him for his attention to detail—in both artistry and commerce.
Checking and rechecking, he needed everything organized and properly marked. Almost a week had passed since his last stint working at the shop, and he did not trust his uncle’s family, or his own for that matter, to run things as efficiently as he. Uncle Eldridge’s family would be manning the shop during the weekend, and the extra effort to arrange things would make it easier for them all.
He always suspected his father wanting to own the shop with his eldest sibling was nothing more than an act of charity. A few times Daniel had caught the sixty-three-year-old sitting at the desk in the back with his feet up and his hands cupped behind his head, snoozing. His children, Daniel believed, had inherited their father’s faulheit. Bad enough most of what they sold derived from Daniel’s own hands.
He wished he could focus more on the shop, but the oats permitted little time away from the farm. On several occasions, Samuel insisted he did not need to work the farm so hard, but Daniel knew that until David got older, his father could use the extra hands. Besides, the farm work allowed Daniel to take his mind off things. The slow and quiet shop sometimes made his thoughts wander.
He’d hoped to rid his mind of some of those irksome thoughts while immersed in inventory work, but his pesky little brothers would not let him.
“You don’t like him, admit it,” David persisted.
“Stop being so shussly,” Daniel said.
“I think he’s nice,” Mark said from the shop window where he was wiping off smear marks with a chamois cloth dampened with vinegar and water. “Even if he is a bit clumsy.”
“He’s a nuisance if you ask me,” Daniel said, annoyed with the topic already.
“We’re learning him things,” David proclaimed. “He’s doing better.”
“Ya, and at least he’s not lazy,” Mark said. “A lot of those Englishers are for sure lazy.”
“He chores real hard,” David said. “You have to say.”
“He chores like an old woman.” But Daniel regretted having uttered the caustic words the moment they had slipped past his lips. He didn’t want to ridicule the Englisher in front of his brothers. He liked him. He liked him a lot. He simply did not want his brothers, or anyone else, to know.
He shook his head. Whether he did this to organize his thoughts or jumble them further, he was unsure.
“You should try be nicer,” David said. “You can’t forget he saved us from that crazy Bobby Jonesboro.”
“Ya,” Mark said, “we’d all might be dead for not him.”
“Shtill!” Daniel swept an abrasive look from one brother to the other. “Are you going to needle me all day or do me some work?”
“Don’t get all upset,” David said.
Daniel softened his tone. “Look. You boys keep an eye on things out here. I got some work to do in the back.” He set down his inventory pad and trudged past David for the storeroom in the back.
The smell of mildew and dust surrounded Daniel the moment he shut the storeroom’s door. He inhaled deeply, appreciating the momentary quiet away from his brothers. He almost resisted switching on the light, for he welcomed the darkness. It stilled his thoughts. But he knew there were too many loose items and boxes lying about for his safety.
He switched on the flickering fluorescent light and nudged a path to a wood crate. He wished his thoughts could be so easily pushed aside. Seated, his elbow pressing into his thick thigh and his fist pushing into his beard, he peered at the dusty concrete floor.
For too long now, his thoughts were a whirlwind of distractions slipping through his fingers. Guilt, remorse, anger, illicit desires, all rambling through his mind like debris in a whirlpool. Which notions would surface from one moment to the next he could only speculate.
Thoughts as tangled as the shredded remains of his farm after that fatal tornado had rampaged through it.
He didn’t like dwelling on Esther and Zachariah’s deaths. What good came from it? Whether God’s will or a random act of nature, it was done. Life continued in the same way as when the Belgians found their pan-sized hooves stuck in a groundhog hole. Jolting and irritating. One still needed to shake free and move forward.
Since that horrible day, he had spent countless hours wondering what he might have done to prevent their deaths. So engrossed at the furniture shop the day of the storm, he hadn’t bothered to heed the tornado sirens. It was March in the Heartland, after all. It seemed the Englishers’ sirens were blaring every other day. Why should he have taken them seriously then, when all the other times they had been false alarms, merely green skies and high winds?
Just when he began to tune out those crazy spring storms and the never-ending warnings that came with them, an F-3 twister tore apart his world. Maybe he could have done something, raced back to his farm on his bicycle, to have saved his family?
The twister hit so early that Esther’s mother and some of the other women helping her care for the newborn had yet to arrive at the farm. He cringed when he learned Esther and the baby were alone when they died.
The emergency technicians found her crouched in the corner of the basement, her body shielding Zach’s, what used to be the house piled on top of them.
Even if he had been able to reach them in time, what difference could he have made? Wouldn’t he have been killed too? For sure he would have chosen the same safety zone as Esther. They always headed for the basement whenever they decided to heed the English sirens. Maybe he would have done something different, made one tiny decision that might have altered the deadly course of events? Maybe he would’ve insisted they seek shelter at the high school the community used as its official storm shelter?
He and Esther weren’t even married a year when the tornado ended her life. Sweet for each other since the eighth grade, an eight-year span had passed before he asked her to be his wi
fe. The afternoon after their baptismal before Bishop Hershberger, he popped the question in typical Amish understatement while standing under a tulip tree: “You want to get married?”
Her simple reply: “Okay.”
He knew by his late teens there was no loving her the way she deserved. No matter how pigheaded he sometimes treated her—to chase her off, perhaps?—her love for him was as enduring as wisteria. Ultimately he did what she, and the community and God, expected of him. She would still be alive today if she hadn’t accepted his sham of a proposal.
His Amtrak trip to Glacier National Park a few weeks before their wedding, with the thorns of guilt pricking him, was to give him some solace, some understanding of his life. No one understood why he wanted to go. His running-around years were behind him now that he was baptized and about to be married. But Daniel made himself clear. He needed to get away for a short while. His “bachelor party with God,” he had chuckled to himself at the time.
Surrounded by the towering hemlocks, the peaks of the Livingston and Lewis Ranges glistening with a freshly fallen June snow, gooey-looking like marshmallow cream, he concluded he’d made the right choice in asking Esther to be his wife. Men and women were supposed to marry and have families. That was God’s will. No one was to question it.
Kneeling before the Bishop at their long-awaited wedding a week after returning, he knew he was an imposter. But what else could he have done?
Nine months later, Esther’s giving birth to a boy, his son, astonished him. He dropped to his knees and thanked God when the midwife came downstairs to tell him of Zach’s entry into the world. At that moment, everything seemed in its rightful place. God beamed above. The love for his newborn echoed throughout the community. Although the love he bore for Esther never went further than the love a brother would have for a sister, he believed he was doing what the community expected of a man.
He exemplified the Old Order Amish more than anyone in the community, he was certain. His beliefs stood as stalwart as his ancestors’ who migrated from Lancaster, Pennsylvania by wagon train. He never transgressed against the Ordnung, the church rules… not really. During his rumspringa, he spent most his time alone, avoiding those “barn parties” and English hot spots most of his friends scurried off to each weekend. He preferred to spend his time with nature, listening to the wind rattle the leaves of the elms, or watching the Canada geese cut through the crisp blue sky.
Daniel was as plain and simple as one could be.
Sure, he wore English clothes during his running-around years. Jeans, flannel shirts with buttons, his favorite hiking clothes from the Sierra Trading Post. But that was more out of practicality than some youthful rebellion.
No, he never really transgressed. He always deferred to the ministers. Once baptized, he took the route expected of all men in the community—marry, start a family, work hard, and be a good provider. Nevertheless, God smote him.
Was it all part of His plan? Did God send that fatal tornado as a punishment for his wrongful thoughts? Would he be forced to forever suffer, though he tried to fight against it and do right?
He lumbered to a small wooden vessel sitting on a crate. He had carved it the winter he turned twenty, but never knew for what purpose. Others felt the same, for he had difficulty selling it. He had stowed it away with a few other items several months ago as “unsellable inventory.” Lifting the vessel, he blew off the dust. The buffed pine felt smooth to his touch. His broad thumb caressed the grain, his eyes far away.
Should he have stayed leddich? Is that how God wanted it, for him to remain single the rest of his life? Did God make him that way so that he would refrain from marriage? Had God been listening to his prayers all along, and Daniel had failed to heed His clues in the same way he’d failed to heed the tornado sirens?
He knew of a few people in the community who never married. All but one were women. His sister was one. At twenty-three, Elisabeth was at an age when every Amish woman was at least courting, if not married. As far as he remembered, Elisabeth hadn’t courted since she was nineteen. Did she intend to never marry? Perhaps her charm and intelligence frightened the men off? There was talk of her becoming a schoolteacher. She would be good at that, he always thought. Many times he wanted to ask her why she refrained from marriage and courting, but faltered whenever he tried. It was her life; he shouldn’t want to pry.
As uncommon as it was for Amish women not to marry, it was even more so for men. There was only one man he knew of who had never married, still into his thirties. He spied the man from the eastern district a few times at the flea market. Good-looking, a pleasant man who, each time he saw him, wore a smile. So strange to see an Amish man his age with a smooth, clean-shaven face. Surely there were many maydels in the community who would have been interested in the man. Why did he shun them all?
Did he feel the same way as Daniel?
He had hoped that marrying Esther would put such notions behind him. For a while it worked. Even after Esther and Zach’s deaths, he stowed those pestering thoughts in the far reaches of his mind, hidden away, like the items in the storeroom. Like the silly wooden vessel he now turned over in his calloused and nicked hands.
Then Church Sunday came, and that Englishman with curly raven-black hair and eyes the color of honey literally crashed into his life.
Mark and David had it wrong, of course. Daniel did not dislike Aiden Cermak. His feelings for him were anything but dislike. He had the coordination of a one-legged chicken, but his gumption and the warm smile that curled his upper lip like a blooming rose petal brought out desires in Daniel he wanted buried for good.
Plain and simple? Plain and simple, he fancied the plucky Englishman. He could no longer hide the fact from himself. Just looking at him made him catch his breath. He knew from the start. The way he’d looked, like a wayward cherub standing by the front door, the day his father had brought him home from the hospital. He bore the weight of his longing like a horse collar strapped to his neck, invisible hands yanking hard on the reins, jerking his emotions.
How long had it been since Daniel had felt the intimate touch of a lover? A week after Esther had given birth, in February? Although Daniel held no strong physical attraction for Esther, not the way he knew he was supposed to, they still had carried on marital relations, as outlined by Scripture. The Bible was very clear on that point: a husband and wife belonged to each other, in body as well as in spirit. Being with Esther was pleasant. He liked the touching. He enjoyed the feeling that he was loved and cared for by someone whom he trusted. But never did he have the physical urge for her, or any woman, not the way he occasionally had for men. Not the way he had for Aiden Cermak.
Was the Englishman just another one of da Hah’s tests?
He thought that maybe, maybe, Aiden was “one of those.” What did the English call it? Gay? He never understood why they used such a term. Nothing happy about such feelings.
Aiden said he never married. The English, he knew, often waited until their thirties to marry. What with so much premarital sex in the English world, he supposed there was no need to hurry. Such a strange, selfish existence the English led. Readying for bed a few nights before in the room he temporarily shared with his brothers, Mark and David said something about Aiden mentioning he was not even courting. They all thought it peculiar, a good-looking man in his twenties without at least a girlfriend. Yet none of his brothers suspected he was “one of those,” at least not openly.
Daniel understood that an entire community of people like that existed. Though mildly curious in his teen years, he had no real desire to explore that world, well-known to be found in inner cities across the United States. Only once did he ever dare venture inside a gay bar. That was in Paducah, Kentucky, after hiking the River to River Trail in downstate Illinois. He had left almost as soon as he had stepped inside. The men, much older than he, had ogled him like hungry hounds before feeding.
Men from that distant alien world occasionally visited Henry, the
ir sexuality uncomfortably clear. Sometimes even the Amish chuckled at an English kemmahrah, a man with noticeable homosexual traits.
Through the years, he knew of a few Amish men he considered kemmahrah. They all married, so Daniel never thought anything of them. Aiden wasn’t effeminate, not by any means. Still, there was something—something about his expression. A compassion, a keen insight that extruded through those eyes of his, golden like the sunset.
As Daniel himself proved, most times no one could tell. No one ever guessed about his second cousin, Kyle Yoder, either. At least he hadn’t thought anyone had. Had Kyle been “one of those”? He regularly prayed to God to forgive him for that one little transgression with Kyle so many years ago. He was the only man he’d ever come close to… close to sharing his body with. No one had ever found out about Kyle, found out about “them.” Except for Kyle’s father.
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