Sunshine and Shadow

by Sharon

  Her clasped fingers were damp, cold as icicles, her face stinging not, the contrast sickening.

  "If I saw a child in a wilderness lost beyond hope, would I say, 'No, there's nothing I can do, he isn't Amish'? Would I pass by a man in chains and say, 'I can't help, I'm separate'? God loves the unbelievers. Their welfare is precious to Him. Doesn't the scripture say that God is like the shepherd who finds one lamb has gone astray and goes to hunt for that lamb, leaving all the others? As much as He loves me, more than He loves me, He loves this man."

  She drew a breath, her heart lurching. "I knew Alan might try to lead me into sin. He has no idea about salvation; he wouldn't be able to help himself." Her breath sped almost as fast as her heartbeat, and the words came faster too. "And I thought, 'I'm strong, nothing can happen to me,' but that was pride; I didn't understand how temptation would be. It wasn't like I thought. It doesn't -feel like evil with him, and I can't find a way to deliver myself of thinking that if I had it to do over I would do the same." She broke off, forcing an end to the babble, trying to swallow, and clenched her hands together, shaking hard. So wrong, so hopelessly unacceptable, the defenses, the admission that she could repent of only the consequences of her actions and not the actions themselves.

  Down to the side she could hear someone weeping, a woman, her aunt, she thought. She looked up and found it was John's mother. Again the world dissolved behind a tattered veil of brightness, and when that cleared she was looking up past the ivory-colored cloud of the Bishop's beard, finding his eyes. Briefly she was confused—she was back at her baptism, kneeling, awaiting the moment the Bishop would extend his hand to her to help her rise, welcoming her into the body of Christ. So would he extend his hand now if he were to pardon her. But this time, the moment did not come.

  She was past listening after that. Others had begun to weep, the sounds too terrible to hear. The Bishop was speaking to her, the words too terrible to hear. She saw the shock the words caused in the faces around her. It was an awful thing to shock people. There was something indecent about it. She felt stripped naked before them, felt that she didn't own enough clothes to cover the shame.

  It went on for a long time, like childbirth, longer than she could really bear, and when it was over, she was left with nothing but a sickened feeling.

  Outside the sun hit her like a hard wind, and she walked chin up into it, and kept walking, squeezing her middle. Her brothers and sisters had been waiting near the door. She heard Carolyn say, "What's the matter, Susan? Levi, why is Susan crying?"

  Close beside her, running to keep up, Anna whispered, "Susan, what's happened?"

  "I've been excommunicated." She didn't want to stop to breathe or think. She walked across the farmyard until her legs lost their strength, and then Daniel was there to catch her.

  Running hard, Fanny caught up to them before they passed the first bend, and she said, "I won't shun you, Susan." Those were the words Susan took with her toward home.

  Luke and Levi came with her, and Daniel and Anna too. They should have been sent back—it would cause trouble. But she hadn't the heart for it. Partway home, they stopped under a bridge, took off their shoes and stockings, and put their legs in the cold creek. Susan wet her apron and pressed it to her face and hot throat, taking long breaths through the saturated cloth. Beside her, Luke was shredding marsh grass into thin strips.

  - "Daniel?" Luke's voice was hesitant, on the verge of discovery. "Is one reason you haven't been baptized that you don't want to support the ban on Rachel?"

  "It's one reason."

  "Then it's one of the things that has Dad beside himself about Rachel going off."

  It was, of course. Susan came to a terrifying awareness: This morning had ended nothing. Nothing had ended, only begun.

  She was desperate to be alone, half-crazy with it. Daniel knew, and finally he was the one to urge her to go off for a walk if she wanted, and although it was difficult for him to do it openly, he gave her a bear hug, the funny, bone-compressing one, and said, "Be back soon. Please?"

  So she walked, looking up mostly toward the northwestern sky, where storm clouds piled lazily in an immense floe shot through with pencil lines of escaping light. Her thoughts and emotions kept up a quick, nauseating fluctuation, and she felt over and over the numbing surprise that this was her life, this oddity, this was happening to her.

  In time she realized she was near town, near the public telephone, and she ran there, her breathing agitated, closing herself in the glass walls, carrying out the strange sequences of operations. He might be gone already. He was leaving sometime today. She heard one ring, a second ring, and then Alan's soft, inviting voice, inattentive, indifferent.

  "Hello."

  Unbearable longing. Too much, too much. She fell back against the glass, cradling the phone close to her face, her mouth on the receiver, her blood frantic. She heard him repeat the word, now making it a question, his attention beginning to focus, and she waited another moment, savoring the dreamlike connection, before she returned the receiver to the hook.

  Susan left the telephone box, blinking at the sunlight, startled that it was still there. The mighty pyre of a thunderhead filled up the western sky, and its moisture reached out to touch tiny chills down her spine.

  She wished she could go back and call him just once more to hear him say one word, just one more word…

  She had to be careful now. This was the time cowardice might try to creep in. Nothing could defeat her like her own fear. She must make her will like steel.

  The Fellowship after service had. ended. Rigs passed her, leaving her in silence, with the taste of dust in her mouth. She walked along the shoulder of the road, taking the burden of avoidance upon herself.

  Most of the children didn't know yet. They'd hear gradually. The truth was a slow sieve. Their parents wouldn't want them to hear everything, and she remembered how it had been when she was young, how the ones who strayed became sunk in myth and speculation. So the children still waved at her, her scholars, the cheery ones, the mild, passive ones, the ones who couldn't get out of mischief. They called her name, and she returned their smiles, her chest aching.

  The wooded hillside was fat like a sleeping cat where it curled around the Amish cemetery. Only spirits were here today, and a peaceful wind, the grass nodding. Wandering through the aisles of white arched stones, she heard buggy wheels strike gravel and her name being called. In the outer yard behind the wire gate, Levi drew up in his rig with her grandmother. Susan was there to help her descend. Levi stayed in the rig.

  Arm in arm they walked up the hill together, retracing the path Susan had begun, the sun a many-speared star on the top of the trees.

  They stopped once by a pair of sunburst locust trees that draped on each side of two stones.

  "My, these trees have grown since they were planted." Grandma patted the bark, and Susan thought about how beautiful people became when they got older, how her grandmother's hair was light as a cloud, how her eyes had a child's brightness that people lost in midlife, how her skin tissue was so fine, rayed with life, fascinating in its transparency, wonderful to touch. Grandma found the familiar headstone without help. "Forty years since Grandpa's been gone. And my folks longer yet. Here I am ninety-four. Think how long they've been gone." She put her hand on the stone beside it, then stepped backward looking toward what she couldn't see, smiling a bit. "Used to be I'd come down here and stare real hard at my stone, at that number that isn't there yet, and there'd be times I had the feeling, if only I looked close enough, I'd be able to read it."

  She tucked her arm around Susan's waist. "Sure wish you could've known your grandpa. I tried to pass on a little of him. Daniel reminds me so of him. Whenever he could, he'd be out there at night with that telescope, looking up at the sky. He saw all kinds of things up there, comets, meteors, knew all about them. Only one thing he ever had wrong. He said, 'Man will never make it to the moon.'"

  Susan had her eyes shaded, scanning the sk
y. "It's something, what they've done, sending things up there..."

  An old straight wire fence wound with grape leaves ran along a lily-covered slope at the edge of the woods. Branches overhung the fence, letting the sun through in spots, and moss grew thick under the grass, creeping up lichen-freckled stones. Only two headstones up here were new, without the worn inscriptions of the others—a white arch, and beside it, a tiny one.

  "Look here, a little oak tree is coming up." Susan showed Grandma with her hand.

  "A nice little tree…" Then, "Listen to those birds."

  "Grandma, do you remember how funny John's dad got when I told him John had asked to be buried up here?"

  "Some don't care for it up here. They say it gets so messy under the trees—the leaves come off, and the branches are so dry."

  "John pointed up here when we were walking once, and said, 'That's where I want to be, right up by the woods,' like his mind had already been made up for a long time. He had this funny thing he used to say about how a cemetery was the place to learn about democracy."

  "He had a way about him, he sure did. Those were the days, him riding over on that high-life horse of his. How he liked to kid you about how small you are. Said he could carry you around in a thimble. He'd put his arm straight out and it could go over your head."

  Inside she felt soft as the moss beneath her toes. "Sometimes he bent his knees down when we walked, to be the same size. It looked so comical."

  She sat by the little grave, fragrant with scatterings from the forest, and wrapped the stone in her arms, resting her cheek on the cool granite. The coolness went through her; the wind tugged wisps of hair from under her kapp and set them to motion on the sides of her face. She whispered, "I wanted to pick flowers with her."

  "I know you did." Her grandmother's hand lay against her hair, her open cheek. "You just remember, she has John with her."

  "Do you think children grow up in heaven? I want her to be able to run and learn about things, and to play..."

  Breezes flowed over her lips, into her mouth and throat, catching there. "I'll never forget the day she was buried. Remember how it was just starting to snow lightly and a young deer came to the edge of the woods and stood there looking at us? It was so pretty." She came suddenly to her feet, enclosing her grandmother in a hug. She's so frail under her clothes. Ninety-four, and last winter was so bard on her. She's lost weight. I could lift her myself "I don't want to leave you." The words came from her heart like a prayer. "Grandma—"

  "I know you so good, Susan. You don't have to tell me."

  The wind blew their skirts together, making them bob as one. Inside she was nothing, only hollow, hurting like an animal. "Thank you for always loving me."

  Her grandmother's smile was tight against her face, and Susan drew back to see it, the narrow mouth, the lips that unusual color, like the flower of a milk thistle, but bluer these days than they'd been once. The clear pearl of a teardrop pooled in one corner.

  She put a hand on Susan's kapp. "You never did get no bigger than a hollyhock."

  She managed to answer, "Runt of the litter."

  "Pick of the litter." The gentlest, gentlest hands took hold of her face. "We'll all be together again one day and then the separation won't have seemed long, and I'll be able to see this sweet little face again. You and I, we've got our star all picked out."

  On Sunday morning, during his last hours at Greyling, Alan found himself at the window often, gazing across the open field toward the gap in the woods showing the path Susan had often used to come to the set. Day and night had become the same to him, equally without meaning. He didn't know what to do with the pain of worrying about what she must be suffering. The pain was there all the time, chattering at him.

  The air had turned cool, that strange Wisconsin warmth with a bite in it. The sky was darker than a blueprint. A black thunderhead spread over the countryside, puffing to an impossible height.

  He wondered if she was watching it, too, alone in her battles. The only thing left that he could give her was the gift of his absence, his discipline.

  He sat in front of a reel of film outtakes of her, watching her face, the forthright smiles, the moody ones, the intuitive and knowing ones. His mind gave him the taste of her mouth and the feel of the texture of her hair against her skin. He lived for minutes in the fairy tale of the flickers of colored light.

  When the Lop wandered over to snuggle up to his ankle, he lifted it without thinking, and the second his hand brushed over the warm fur, a terrifying sense of loss gripped him. The film ended and he was not able to recognize that he was looking into a square of empty light.

  Another image entered his mind, of the ragged desperation on her face when he'd asked her to come with him to California. Dear God, her eyes… Help me, they'd said, you can't help me.

  He had the feeling he would never readjust to life without her. He felt as though most of him had been torn away, all the good parts. There were no words to describe it. He missed her… he missed her… There were no words anywhere to describe his longing.

  The bottom of the thunderhead fell out in a deluge that thrashed the trees and peppered the carpet through the screen. Weeds and grass were packed flat. Lightning chained the clouds, and he went to the window, closed it, and put his hands to the glass, feeling the sepulchral shock of answering thunder. Rain struck the glass in blasts. Staff after staff of broken light stripped back the darkness.

  Something moved near the trees. A small figure hunched against the rain hurled from the gap in the forest, running into the bleak field.

  He felt himself backstep, whisper something, hope tearing at him. He knew he was speaking, couldn't control it, couldn't stop it.

  By the door he realized he was saying her name. Fear made him slow, fear that what he wanted to see wouldn't be there. Heartbeats ripped up into his throat.

  Then he was outside, running in the downpour, heavy raindrops like marbles soaking his clothes, and he saw her, pallid in a blast of light, waving her limp bonnet at him, her skirts saturated, taking the shape of her legs, her hair down and soaking, water vapor flying like smoke around her. And then he had her in his arms, really holding her, the narrow, graceful body pressed to his through the wet clothing, finding warmth. With the sky blowing up above them, they kissed, water running in their eyes and mouths, desperate, thirsty kisses, her skin sweet as honey glaze. His mouth moved in disbelief over her face, drinking rainwater. His hand curved under her breast to experience the pace of her heartbeat.

  Lightning snaked out of the sky and struck in the woods, filling the air with a geyser of sparks. Sound split and perished in the crackling thunderclap. They watched it together, shaken and elated, shivering.

  Catching her hand, he tried to pull her toward shelter, but she lingered, head back, eyes closed, letting the rain wash over her smiling face.

  Laughing, he dragged her close again, kissing her until he made himself drunk on her.

  "Isn't the rain wonderful?" she said, holding tight.

  "Why is it wonderful?"

  "Because… Because when it comes down as snow you have to shovel it. Because it makes plump berries. Alan, I love you. I need you."

  She was everything he wanted in this life and the next, sodden, piteous, and fervent in his arms, and he held her tight, as if he were holding onto a dream, and said, "I need you, I need you too."

  Chapter 22

  Coming in from the rain, Alan felt cleansed, purer than He'd ever been. He cherished every second, undressing her in the warmth and brightness of his bedroom, sending her clothes to be dried, rubbing the moisture from the brilliant drift of her hair. She smiled often at his love talk and gentle teasing, but it took a long time for her to stop shivering. In the car to the airport, on the plane, he could feel the tremors chatter under her skin.

  She came to him with nothing beyond the clothes she was wearing, and it hardly surprised him. When he'd asked her it there was anything she'd like to bring, she'd looke
d surprised, and laughed.

  "I've never been anywhere before. I suppose I don't know about bringing things."

  He suggested that if she'd like to, they could stop by her house. She shook her head, the smile frozen, and he hadn't urged her. Parting with her family was not something she seemed able to tell him about. It was easy to believe she wouldn't want to go through any of it a second time.

  That one aspect was the only blot on his happiness. It felt so good to be with her, he couldn't come down, and she was so fierce to protect him from her sorrows, maybe to disguise them from herself, that he saw her stress only in glimpses.

  Her image of the outside world was made up of myth, a collage of inexperience, science fiction, hearsay, innuendo. Plucky and positive, she was composed, almost prosaic, about boarding the plane. He had almost forgotten this was new to her, when she asked, "Aren't we going to wear parachutes?"

  When they were high in the air, she balanced a pen on her palm, waiting for it to float.

  It was right to laugh. She encouraged it. She laughed, too, at her misunderstanding. They shared it, discovery and self-discovery, and they shared the unreal quality of being here together, the feeling of surprise that repeated itself minute by minute.

  For someone who had never been more than thirty miles from home, Los Angeles might as well have been Baghdad. He was an Angeleno, born there, and in his rootless way fond of the city. Less than a melting pot, Los Angeles was a sprawling confederation of interests—pilgrims who had come west, like wide-eyed Goldilocks, looking for a place that wasn't too hot or too cold, a place that was just right all the time.

  Other extremes flourished here—the full flower of bourgeois opulence in the hills; the entertainment community, with its laid-back zeal and parlor Bolshevism; the seekers after truth; the hand-to-mouth beautiful people waiting to make it big; the weird; and the masses, trying in their extraordinary ways to be ordinary. It all managed to look a little sleazy to the rest of the country; to him it was uncomplicated, comfortable in its neurosis, people trying to make room for one another.