Sunshine and Shadow

by Sharon

  Regaining her poise took a long time, but she allowed it to happen as it would in its natural span. Later she washed her face in the cold creek water, holding her head under as long as her lungs would stand it, the ribbons of her kapp stretching in the drift of the current. She let the sun dry her skin.

  Alive again, she walked around the long way to visit Fanny and Christ. The breeze picked at her hair and drove the clouds in fast fleecy herds through a bluebell sky.

  Passing the home of Seth's father, she saw he had the grandchildren for a visit, running here and there, playing Red Rover. She hunkered down to talk to tiny Abraham, who was sitting with his legs apart in a bare spot near the road, spooning dirt on his trousers with elaborate care. When Seth appeared from the house she smiled and waved.

  Seth ignored her, frowning at his nephew. "What have you done to yourself? Your mother has better things to do than wash your clothes. Go on in now and get a fresh trouser. We're going to visit Auntie Wilma." Setting the toddler on his feet, he sent him off toward the house with a kindly scoot.

  When Seth looked grave, it was her habit to tease him out of it. "Not too long back, I remember there were days when you looked about the same. Like a dusty little shake rag."

  His glance was as clear and cold as autumn rainwater. "It's no surprise to me you'd like to see a child at play in the dirt. You do it yourself."

  It felt as if a fleeting cloud were crossing the sun. The world turned darker. "Best you don't talk so loud when you want to spread hate, Seth. You don't want to give Satan too much of a voice."

  "And you, Susan? You've given him your whole body."

  Today, she thought as she turned from Seth and walked quickly away. It will happen today.

  But Fanny and her husband, Christ, were, as ever, happy to see her, with no trace of distance in their manner. There were new puppies from the setter to show her. Fanny was talking about the twelve quarts of sausage she'd canned with her pressure cooker.

  Christ had the carriage in for work on the brakes, so they rode in the smaller open buggy to visit the Raders, happily snug together, Fanny on Christ's lap while he watched the road and handled the reins, Susan holding Jesse and Lizbeth, while Sadie and Jonas trailed behind on their Shetland ponies. Christ had to joke about how it was just like when they were all courting, and to Susan that time seemed like yesterday—Christ, with his yellow duck's-down hair and eyes ripe with merry devils; John, sun-browned, making plans. How much running around had they done crammed tight together on the narrow seat, cozy and excited? The boys liked to drive down by the dam to look for berries, they said, but the truth was that they wanted to smooch, until the township put up a sign that read "No Parking" and, below that, "No Buggies."

  Time passed pleasantly at the Raders'. Susan was pretending nothing had happened that morning. Acting.

  Then they were on the way home and a family of English tourists taking pictures of the rolling scenery turned to aim their camera at the buggy. Christ put his hat between himself and the camera, Fanny put her two hands like a shield to block her face, and Susan realized she had no impulse anymore to protect herself from cameras. But no one noticed. Christ flipped his hat back on and said it had been as bad as Pennsylvania around here lately; he'd be glad when the movie company left and there weren't so many English tourists coming around trying to have a look.

  They had a good rousing sing the rest of the way home, timed to the percussion of hoofbeats. More than ever, Susan valued what she had, the fresh air, the friends, the belonging. She tried to cling to each minute, to understand its perfection.

  They let her down at her parents' farm, waving broadly as they drove away.

  The house was quiet. Leaves bobbed in the breeze, painting the grass with dancing shadows. Four cats made plump mounds where they slept on the sunny porch rail. There was no one in the yard, no sound from the barn, no one visiting except Daniel. His buggy stood near the house.

  But something separated this quiet from the reverent peace she'd always known of the long afternoons on off-Sundays when there was no Church. On this nice day, there should have been children outside in their Sunday clothes sitting on a blanket cracking nuts or pushing each other in the tire swing. Someone should have heard the buggy and be calling to her from the window. The empty yard looked desolate.

  They know, she thought. Her legs refused to function, and then they carried her forward quickly, her heart battering at the walls of her chest.

  Lady, the retriever, was scratching by the kitchen door, unusual behavior in an outside dog. She hadn't been quite right since Rachel left. She'd been Rachel's purebred dog, a gift from Seth so extravagant that Susan could remember her parents thinking over for a few days whether or not Rachel would be allowed to accept it. Rachel had never trained her, just loved her up, and when Rachel did her chores, Lady used to follow her, never underfoot, faithful, a beautiful, silent golden wraith.

  As Susan approached the door, Lady turned, agitation in her eyes, tail wagging wildly.

  Rachel's dog. Rachel.

  She tore open the screen door, calling out, "Mother? Grandma?" to an empty kitchen. Tasks had been left half-done. On the stove a pot had cooked dry. She took it off the heat.

  Voices drew her to the living room.

  Her family clustered there, bleak disbelief in their faces, making them look like bewildered survivors of a calamity. Some were missing, out visiting, but her mother was here, flour dusting her chin, her hands twisted in her' apron, her eyes blighted and longing. Grandma was in her rocking chair, with the square of a handkerchief pressed to her cheek. Behind her stood Aunt Mary and Luke, both of them hiding sensitivity under hunched shoulders, Luke glancing in a strained way at Daniel, searching for cues. The open window backlit her older brother. He held his hat loosely, turning it around and around by the brim, his face still; his deep, field-work tan the color of fine wood, all lines clean and clear, his eyes watchful, angry, loving them all.

  Most pitiful were the children, Anna and Carolyn, their lips trembling, Norman's face pink and puckered from crying, Katie pulling at her mother's skirts for attention.

  Only on two faces was there certainty. As in the deadly calm within a hurricane, her father stood like an aged and wrathful Moses, facing the lone child he said he had severed thoroughly from his heart. And here was Rachel, eerily present like one who had died and been reborn, re-formed in another incarnation. Too painfully familiar was the thorny dignity, the sense of great leashed emotions; too shocking was the alteration in her appearance. She wore English garments, a red dress with a woman's black suit jacket over it. The hair that had hung past her knees, that Susan had so often washed, for her, was cropped short, English-style, so that she looked like a shorn lamb. It made her eyes larger, her face thinner, more worn.

  Rachel's gaze lifted, hit hers, held there, gripped like a vise before slipping away to become part of a rueful smile, a slow headshake. Susan moved like a sleepwalker to that lonely soul, put her arms around her, and pulled her close. She felt as if she were choking on her own breath.

  "Enough!" Rarely as her father raised his voice, it fell around them like a thunderclap. "Is that why you came today? To make like a wedge in this family?"

  The words were for Rachel. He wouldn't say her name aloud. Rachel's back became rock-hard; her arm muscles quivered. She drew away from Susan in a strong movement, as though she were abandoning a weakness.

  She pulled a book from a black clutch purse. "This is mine. I would like you please to read it."

  "So. This is how you are, coming to us swollen in your pride, showing off this thing you have done."

  She held it out, her calm beginning pathetically to slip. "This is me. This is my body."

  He made no move to take it. She set it on a bench, and made her back straight again. Her eyes fogged. "I love you."

  "I've learned real good about your kind of love. Sometimes I wake up at night and hear your mother crying for you in her sleep. Where is your love then?
For one year the little ones ask for you again and again, the little ones, who don't understand what you've done. You should have been here to see their hurt. Is that love, that brings such hurt? You left Seth like a man with a snake in his belly."

  "Should I have married him and spent the rest of my life with a snake in mine?"

  "Who was it picked Seth? You chose, not me." His hand slashed the empty air, an impotent reflex. "You didn't leave because of Seth. You left for this—" he sought the word, his palm savagely indicting the book, "this pride. You say you love. I think it's yourself you love."

  The effort at control had drained color from her cheeks. "Dad, why is it that you won't ever let me explain things to you? Maybe if I did, you could understand—"

  "What could I understand? Right now I understand already. Before from you I've heard this explanation. Here you can't thrive. You don't fit. You have to go out there, in the world. This I don't want to listen to again. What kind of talk is this: I should live this way, I should live that way? Who are you to say how you should live? Are you smarter than God?" He took the German Bible from the mantel, his hands clumsy in his rage. "Here's what God has written about how you should five: 'Be not unequally yoked with unbelievers. Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.' That's the kind of talk I want to hear in this house. That's the only kind of talk I want to hear in front of my family."

  It had become too hurtful to look at her father. Instead Susan stared at the hat in Daniel's hands, seeing that it had gone still.

  "Dad, it wasn't easy for her to come," Daniel said. "She didn't have to. Can't you give her anything back?"

  Susan looked up. The face of each person in the room was too ravaged to look at. Staring fixedly at the floorboards, she didn't see her father grab Rachel's book from the bench and hurl it through the open window. Flying pages smacked the air like the helpless, flapping wings of an injured bird.

  "It is for the father to govern the son. Never for the son to govern the father." Her father's voice belonged to an ill man. His blunt shadow fell across Rachel's feet. "No more bending. You understand? First I bent when you were reading a book instead of doing your chores. I knew where you were, yes, up alone in the attic. But I thought, what harm can there be? I bent when you sent your stories to those magazines, press of this, press of that, English publishers. You think I didn't know why you were restless before the postman came, why you were first to the mailbox? I turned my head away from how you were so clever. I took pride in it. It was my pride, my sin. I think how you have a wonderful gift. But I was wrong. It was a temptation. Mine. Yours."

  Susan's gaze traveled upward. She watched her father's rough hands fasten on Rachel's upper arms. He was looking at Rachel as he would have looked into a cradle. "Whatever it is that you think you've discovered, it could never be so great that it would be worth throwing away your hope of salvation."

  A flush had begun to streak Rachel's cheeks like slap marks. "Maybe some of the things you think come from the Devil come from God."

  His arms fell to his sides. Rachel stepped back, hesitated before speaking again. "And maybe some of the things you think come from God come from the Devil."

  He half-turned from her then and spoke to the window, his face as empty and leached as the sun-washed pane. "We have no welcome for you in this home. If you are hungry, you may eat alone in the basement. If you have no roof, a bed will be brought for you there. But no member of this household will keep company with you. To me you are dead."

  As much as he, she had become immobile, clinging to the tattered cloth of her defiance, making it a shield. Then, with no warning, the facade broke. "Dad," she whispered, and like spilling water she put herself against her father's chest, her pale knuckles on his coat, her posture crumpled, her face hidden in his shirt. Her short hair caught like dark satin threads in the bristles of his beard. Open-eyed, he watched the window. His body gave her nothing, the chill of winter, a stone.

  In the end, she did what was necessary herself. Humiliation in her eyes, she made herself separate from him, straightened, picked up the clutch purse. She spoke to her father's profile.

  "Unless someone stops me, I intend to kiss the rest of you good-bye."

  She put her arms around her mother's stiff form, kissed the unmoving cheek. Equally brief, equally soft, her parched lips touched Anna, Luke, Carolyn, and brushed like raw cotton on Susan's cheek. Aunt Mary rebuffed her with a turned head. Grandmother received her into her arms, taking the burden of the shorn head on one delicate shoulder, rocking her to the same slow rhythm they had each learned as infants. Then, moving half-blindly, Rachel knelt before Norman and Katie. Their unformed baby faces were slippery with tears, a pair of tiny blemished Hummels.

  "Don't you remember me, Normie?" She put out her hand to stroke his, but he pulled back, his sobs keening. Katie tried to run, and fell backward in her skirts, yelling in fear.

  After everything, Rachel could not seem to take this last, grim rejection. She had been at both their births. She stayed as she was until Daniel came, his hands on her as they might have been on a newborn life, telling her to come, he would drive her back in to the bus. They left, Daniel taking her through the front door, the door that company used.

  Stress spun through the room, worse now, a desolate web-work of consequences. Her father remained in wordless communication with the window, his arms rigid at his sides. Then, flat-voiced, he said, "There's cows need milking," and stalked out. Susan's mother watched him pass, her eyes darkening over the last spark of hope. The kitchen door slammed.

  Susan rushed to the window. There was only one sensible path from house to barn: along the cement walk, through the white picket gate, across the gravel yard, where Rachel was climbing into the buggy. In long, unshaken strides, her father followed that path, coming within feet of Rachel, but not once did he look toward her.

  Their mother fled the room. Luke was sitting, his hat dipped forward on his brow, staring hard at his fingers. Anna was holding Katie—they were a skein of wool, wound together. The others were the same as when she'd entered, bereft, in postures of barren formality.

  "Susan?" Grandmother was standing. "I'd like to have that book. Will you get it for me?"

  "Yes." Her hoarse voice made only a fragment of the syllable.

  Outside the sun struck her, made her cold, and she realized she had been sweating lightly. If there was mercy anywhere in the situation, it was that the buggy was gone, with Lady frantically chasing behind.

  The book had landed on its back in the grass, the pages open and tumbling in the breeze. She heard her sister's words in her mind, This is my body and lifted it with care, squeezing it to her chest.

  At once, all the bitterness in the world seemed to coalesce inside her, the anger she had kept in and kept down, the urgency about her sister's life she had tried foolishly to solve with money.

  "It doesn't have to be this way," she heard her own voice ring out.

  He would read the book or word by word she would read it to him. Scorched in hatred, she ran toward the barn, after the flinty tyrant who had stopped listening far too soon.

  Soft sounds halted her at the threshold. She stepped inside quietly. Herbal scents assailed her, with the chitter of sparrows in the eaves, the peaceful blurred light. Her father sat on a hay bale, his back bent, his broad shoulders bowed, elbows on his knees, his face in his hands, his fingers spread like stars. And he was weeping.

  Chapter 18

  In the past twenty-four hours, Alan Wilde had sustained eight hours of meetings, interviews with two major news magazines, a network morning news show, and a late-night talk show that was taped in the afternoon. Having assured the continental United States that he and David had never been closer, he planted careful seeds to awaken box-office interest in the film, and sidestepped questions about whether the unknown local girl he had hired to replace Carrie was really Amish. Up to his neck with productio
n and self-discovery in Wisconsin, he'd had no idea how widespread the rumor had become. It was only a matter of time before someone pursued it seriously.

  Wedged in between, there had been briefings on the movie he'd done before this, the movie he planned to do next, an appointment with his lawyer, another with his manager, drinks with an old lover he accidentally called Susan. So much for picking up the threads of a former life.

  If every day had a theme, today's was the evil attendant on having one's name appear on a best-dressed list.

  "Sexy Alan Wilde, the khan of horror films, is forever haunting. His style is loose and artsy, and he carries casual chic to its spine-tingling nadir. From his scuffed docksiders to his breeze-weight linen pullovers, he drapes his thoroughbred lines in a gorgeous mongrel assortment, looking both pulled together and pulled at random from his drawers. And we'd love to have a chance at those drawers." Plenty there to live down.

  He arrived back in Wisconsin tired of himself, exhausted by triviality, tense from the effort of projecting blasé good nature about a subject that embarrassed him. He spent some time in the producer's room, explaining the trip to Ben, David, Dash, the others, watched himself as the laid-back director on a late-night talk show, drank a brandy, and retired gracefully to his suite.

  Someone had aired the large front room. It was full of garden smells and moonlight. He flipped on the light, killing the romance of it, walked into the semidarkness of the bedroom and opened the closet door, flung in his jacket, closed it.

  His mind froze on a picture of Susan, huddled on his closet floor, arms wrapped around her knees.

  His thoughts often conjured Susan. It took a second to distinguish the reality from a wishful thought. Lightheaded, he opened the door again.

  She was there. The jacket had landed full on her, draping her chest and shoulders. Above, her eyes shone like a doe's, startled, twilit.