by Sharon
Might be because she wasn't sleeping good. All kinds of strange things came into your head when you didn't sleep, things you'd never think of otherwise.
Amos wasn't sleeping either. That was unusual. Most nights he slept hard even if something was disturbing him. The long hours working outdoors took care of that. But he was awake now. When he slept she could hear his breathing, and the peaceful rhythm carried her into sleep more than half the nights of her life. Tonight he was quiet.
She had to get herself to sleep. Last night had been like this, and in the morning it had been real hard to get herself out of bed. She'd felt old, and she wasn't used to that.
She wasn't used to thinking of Amos as old either. Funny how many years went by and you didn't notice the extra weight and the lines, and then one day you did, as if they'd come overnight.
She rolled up on her side and began to stroke his hair, up and away from his brow, following the wave in it with her fingertips.
What she knew about giving, she had learned from him. She'd come to the marriage a little spoiled from her family. He'd never said much, but still she'd watched him, to be like him. She always especially admired how he didn't ignore his daughters in favor of his sons, the way some did. No matter how hard he worked, he could find the time for a little fun. And in their most private moments, like this one, he'd never put a hand on her that wasn't tender; he was never in a rush, although she wouldn't have complained if he had been sometimes. What might have been duty between them was a joy, and it was his doing.
So close they were, and yet she kept her secrets, and she imagined he had his too.. There was the dark-brewed tea she used to rinse through her hair to shade down the white tones. She got and lost a smile, thinking back to the awful thing she'd kept from him, that horrible night when she'd found Rachel gone from her bed and waked up Daniel to help look for her, and they'd found her by the creek on a blanket with Seth. Seth had been the scared one. Her fey, moody daughter, twenty years old, had said calmly, "I wanted to know how it would be with him. Maybe it's not a sin. Maybe God is the devil and he wants to keep it from us."
For herself, she'd been too numb to speak. It was Daniel who asked her, "So how did you find it?"
Rachel answered him with cold contempt. "God is right. It is a sin."
Rebecca wondered if it was different for Rachel now. She'd asked Daniel once in private if there was someone in Rachel's life. Yes, he said.
She knew why Rachel had been drawn to Seth. He was like her, severe and unsentimental, and he'd left long ago, been outside, come back. There was that streak of rebel in him.
There used to be a question in her mind whether or not Rachel would have stayed if she'd been with a better man. What had gone wrong to make her so different? Was it something in the seed, some flaw in herself she'd passed on, a hidden moral weakness that had deformed the spirit of her daughter? One thing didn't change: No matter what, she didn't find she could love her daughter any less.
She stirred restlessly, and Amos turned in the dark, drawing her head onto his shoulder.. She put her arms around his strong neck and buried her face in his whiskers. His big, rough hand touched her on the cheek.
"What are you thinking of?" she asked into the quiet.
"It got to me today when Beachy said how we shouldn't grieve over the girls because we had so many others." His voice was very low. "Like they was puppies for replacing."
"They don't understand," she whispered back. "Sometimes I have to bite my tongue, not to say anything back."
Wind came through the window, stirring the strings of her kapp on the side table. In the same low voice he said, "I've been thinking back to when Rachel started to school." His whiskers tickled her nose with each word. "She used to say how she was going to run off and live in a hollow tree, you remember? Like there was hollow trees all over just waiting for her to move in."
He rarely spoke of Rachel, only like now, in the dark. Only to her. She said, "Remember when they were born— all the attention we got? Everybody was so excited to see twins. They were the funniest-looking babies, so little, and all that black hair and round brown eyes. When I think about them, I see their child faces mostly, not their grownup ones."
"We never dressed them alike," he said.
"Maybe we should have."
His face nestled to the side of hers. His beard curled like a small scratchy animal into the curve of her neck. "We just couldn't get them straightened out. Rachel got led around by the head; Susan got led around by the heart. You know, of the two, it was Susan I worried about more. She had that streak of wildness in her, how she liked to be out walking by night." His sigh cracked as though the very air he breathed were too sharp. "I never thought we'd lose them, Rebecca."
Longing caught in her chest. "Just when they got old enough to really talk to, they're gone."
Outside the wind switched direction. Pine scent puffed across the bedclothes, carrying a faint reminder of the leaf pile. The troubling images of Abraham and Isaac crept into her mind, teasing at her. She tried to push them out, but they clung and clung, and then suddenly they were bleached in sudden, blind understanding. She knew. Just like that, she knew. The memory hadn't come without purpose. She knew why God had sent Abraham to the mountain, why the story was so important that it had been put in the Bible, what lesson God had meant to teach for all time on the day He had stopped Abraham's hand.
For the first time, she saw her way clear.
Aloud she said, "He wouldn't ask it of us. God wouldn't ask us to deny our own children."
On their fifth and last morning in Chicago, Alan was tied up on the phone, so Susan kissed his nose and went out to get her last view of the tallest building on earth.
The streets were torn up, and at the corner there were men in work clothes pouring a concrete sidewalk. They stopped to watch her walk by, and when she smiled at them, a young man wearing a red kerchief headband slapped his hands over his heart and pretended to collapse. That kept her smiling for a bit.
She looked up at the massive structures where people lived like cliff dwellers. When her neck got sore, she watched the different kinds of people. The human museum, Alan always called it. Homo Sapiens Metropolitana. There were infinite paths to follow. She knew she would always be like an explorer out here, excited by what she saw, wearied by it.
The scrawny stick trees struggling out of the concrete were shedding leaves that cartwheeled off down the streets like withered golden butterflies. She wondered what happened to leaves in the city, with no earth to sink back into. Maybe they rolled through the streets as vagabonds until they turned to dust.
At least she and Rachel could be orphans together. That was something. That was a lot. For the rest of it, she would have to be careful. She would have to be tough. You made decisions, you must stand with them. It was important to live with all the dignity one could muster. The raw sorrow inside was an inconvenience, nothing more, and she would shove it off again and again until it too was dust.
A long black automobile with dark window glass waited outside the hotel, the kind Alan rode in often. He thought nothing of it; he'd earned a million dollars before his eighth birthday. It was a way to find some privacy. But it suddenly put her in mind of Rachel, talking to the world from behind a prison screen.
She looked pale to herself in the glass doors, but her shoulders were firm, right up there, and her chin was good and high.
Inside, the hotel lobby was quiet. She saw the suitcases, and then Alan, who smiled at her. With him was a man in a freshly brushed Amish Sunday coat, his back to her.
She knew him even before he turned around. Her stomach flipped over, and she wanted to cry.
The man took off his hat and stood with his hands at his sides, gazing at her as though he weren't going to stop looking for a long, long time. She took two steps toward him, hesitated, and he began to walk toward her, fast, and then she was walking fast, too, and he put out his arms. As they came around her, drawing her in, against his br
oad, comforting chest she whispered, "Dad."
When we are small, my father takes each alone into the woods and teaches us to follow a path. Don't wander into the trees, he tells us. Keep on, even when the way narrows. Beyond the curve, you find a fallen tree. Sit there and wait for me. He can see us through the trees, of course, but we don't know that. The first time we get scared, and stop and call out, Dad! But there comes a day when we do it, we take off and wait alone until he comes smiling, and we know we've learned something very special.
Chapter 27
Amos Hostetler watched the rain dwindle.
Best kind of rain, this, coming down like snowflakes. It sunk straight into the soil. In an hour, you'd be hard put to find a puddle. July rain was nothing like spring rain, with the cow yard turned to swamp. Tonight he wouldn't have to hear Luke and Levi grumbling about the time it took to wash caked mud off of dirty teats, or cussin' when they got slopped in the face with a wet tail. It would be quiet, cows chewing, milk hittin' the pail, one of those nights when he might get talking to the boys and forget the hour. They'd had some of their best talks that way. Separated by the cows, the boys couldn't see his face, just hear his voice, and they seemed to open up easier that way. They'd let him know if something was troubling them, or if they had a question for him they would have been embarrassed to ask another time.
Maybe he should have had his daughters milk. Could be those hours in the barn were why Daniel had stayed, when his two oldest girls had left.
It was in the cow barn that he'd begun to care for Alan. When they'd first moved to be close together, he wouldn't have thought that was possible. He'd had no use for the man back then. The articulate tongue, the charm, grated on him. Those engaging manners had worked too well to pull Susan into the mire. When he saw Alan, he got a picture of Susan on her knees before her community trying to explain why she'd fallen in sin with a man she'd barely known a month. Alan's efforts to reunite them with Susan were small enough compensation for the anguish he'd caused.
Even just after the move, when he got to see a lot of them and noticed how good Alan was to Susan, how he thought the world of her, he could bring himself to feel nothing but cold toward the man.
It had been far into the spring before they got the farm sold and made a move to the new one, eight hundred miles away, and they had to settle in and get a late corn crop into the ground. On top of it, Levi got his arm crushed—broken in two places—when they were moving the bull, and a week later, Luke came down with glandular fever. Daniel had fields of his own to see to. So, reluctantly, with his boys laid up, he'd accepted Alan's help. They plowed thirty-five hours straight through, stopping only to eat and for him to bark orders at Alan. They got to milking late, by lantern light. Things had gotten quiet, the way they do. Then quieter yet. "Alan?" he'd called out, and got no answer. He'd walked around a Holstein and found Alan fast asleep on the milking stool, his head resting against the big cow's broad belly.
He'd had to chuckle, but then something took hold of him inside. God had planned it that way, he saw later. The Lord had let him see Alan that way. In the innocence of sleep, his hair in his face, the startlingly handsome face relaxed, his son-in-law hadn't looked more than fourteen years old. A fresh view of What had happened between Alan and his daughter came into his mind: the possibility that, instead of being a bad man, Alan had only been a lost one, who'd found hope in the goodness he saw in Susan.
As if Alan were one of his own, he'd woken him up and led him to sleep on a pile of clean straw, with a blanket over him.
The seed of affection planted that night took hold, and had grown in the two years since, and by now he'd come to love this unlikely son-in-law as though he were one of his own boys. The other bitterness began to dwindle that night also, just as if it were a thorn drawn out.
He'd come here so as not to lose his daughters, and at first he hadn't seen much good in the new community. There was a lot to get used to, too much change, and from what he'd seen of change, it brought plenty of bad with the good. Even the look of the Amish here was different— the men's hair a little shorter, the hats a little wider. They even sang their hymns a little faster.
He couldn't see so much to like in the way they farmed, either. Most had tractors. He didn't approve of that. It was too hard on the soil; those heavy machines packed it down, and the roots couldn't get air, the way they should. And the cost! How many more acres to plant, how many more head to milk to pay off the bank note and buy gasoline. So what did Daniel do the first week they arrived, before he'd even gotten the furniture in his house? He'd gone off to pay money down on a tractor, just as if he'd been waiting to do it all along! Amos had had words with his son over it, that's for sure. Not that it did any good to have words with Daniel over anything. He'd just tell you, "I can see your point," and go off and do what he wanted anyway.
At the time, he'd had some suspicion Alan was egging Daniel on to the new ways, but it hadn't turned out that way at all. Daniel and Alan had bought land together— good land, too. There was a partnership between them, with Alan putting up a greater share of the money, taking part of the day from his writing to help with some of the tabor. What got to everyone, though, was the way Alan liked the old ways best himself. When he plowed, he liked to work the horses. It was quieter, he said.
That had been another worry when they'd first moved. Alan's money. Rebecca in particular had feared that Susan might not be accepted because Alan was so well off. He might build himself a great big house and drive some fancy automobile, and that would cause hard feelings. You saw a lot of people with that fault in them. It was human nature to be covetous. But here again Alan had surprised them. He bought a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse, and everybody in the new church said, "Oh, poor Susan, she's going to have to live in that old house." Then he and Susan got it all fixed up inside, so it was about the most beautiful house you ever saw, all refinished oak and some fine furniture brought from California and overseas, and everybody just said, "Isn't it nice what those two have done with that old house? That took a lot of work."
His own new house he'd liked right away. There was another bedroom, for one thing, and that meant Rebecca's sister didn't have to share a room anymore, and that put her in a good frame of mind. And there was indoor plumbing and electric. He didn't use the electric much, but he had to admit he didn't miss the trip to a frosty outhouse on a January night. It was easier on his mother, too. He liked best the screened-in porch facing west, where they could sit out after supper and not get bit up by mosquitos in late summer, and watch the sky change to gold and red and pink while the sun sank down behind the woods. Or on days like today, he could sit out and watch the rain and let his dinner settle before he went off to the field in the afternoon.
Sitting right here on the porch, as he was today, he had the one view of which he'd never tire and that each day he wanted to explore again. He could watch over his family.
The clouds had thinned out enough to let sunshine sift through with the last drops of rain, and the kids were out already. Norman and Chester were halfway to the creek with a watermelon, to leave to cool for supper. Freeman and Carolyn were tearing around on the wet grass, slipping, sailing pie plates for each other to catch. That clump of white birch was at its best with rain and sun bright on its leaves, and Carolyn stood beneath it with her legs crossed, itching her nose, watching her turtle cropping grass. If he leaned almost to the screen he could see Katie's little head where she was playing in the flowers, squeezing the snapdragons to make them talk to her.
"And how are you feeling today?" she asked a snapdragon.
"Oh, not so good," answered the snapdragon in a squeaky voice. "I got the measles last night."
"Oh, that's too bad. Well, I'll get you all better soon," she said soothingly. She pinched the petals open and peered inside. "Let me look into your throat. And now I'm going to take your temperature…" She closed the snapdragon's jaws around a tiny stick.
He chuckled softly to himself, an
d thought about what Susan had told him last week. She had read a quote from an English painter who said all the gestures of children are graceful.
He had to look over his shoulder to see the barn. There was Jacob with a big, old black king snake in his two hands. What a big one. Four feet if it was an inch. For the life of him, he couldn't figure out what Jacob was doing, sneaking around with that snake. Then he remembered how Luke and Levi had taken off for the mow after dinner with a checkerboard to lay up there and listen to the rain on the barn roof and play checkers. Jacob slipped in through the side door to the barn. Amos listened for a minute or two, and then yelling erupted, screaming like you'd never heard, and Jacob came racing around the side door laughing his head off, and a second later Luke and Levi came tearing out after him with red faces, and they weren't laughing a bit. They all disappeared around the back of the barn.
Yah, he thought, you better run good, Jacob. Boys who throw snakes on their brothers really got to know how to run good.
Rebecca came by the kitchen window that let out on the porch and asked what the racket by the barn was about.
"Just the boys in the mow," he said.
She cut off a peach slice and leaned out to give it to him on the end of a paring knife. She was putting up peaches today, bushels of them, he didn't know now many, and besides Mary, she had Susan and Fanny over, and Rachel, who was staying.
The move had been good to Rebecca. He was glad about that. She'd missed some of the folks and things they'd left, but she'd found plenty to like here, and the electric in the kitchen was a big help to her. She got through work a lot faster with some of the new gadgets, the mixer and what Katie called the chopper-upper. It made him warm up to electricity, seeing how it made things easier for Rebecca. He wanted things nice for her, as nice as could be. He watched her going back to working with the girls and marveled, the way he did sometimes, that so many children could come from that one little body. It was a miracle. He'd just like to know how anyone could keep from admitting that it was a miracle. When he looked at his children and thought about how they'd come from her, he felt his chest swell up with gratitude to her and pride in her.