by Laura Bickle
I looked out the window, at the dark hills and the slightly lighter sky. The stars shone down as they always did. But I heard no engines of cars on the highway. And it seemed that there were fewer lights in the distance than there usually were.
I pulled the quilt up close to my neck and shuddered, remembering what I had seen in the helicopter. I did not sleep at all, feeling those glowing red eyes burning into my mind. Even working a prayer on my lips did nothing to drive them from my thoughts.
I rose in the dim gray light before dawn, dressed, and padded down to the kitchen. I needed to see for myself that there was nothing there, that my stressed imagination had conjured something from nothing.
I grabbed my shoes, arranged in a neat line beside my family’s shoes near the back door. I slipped outside . . .
. . . and into the realm of the ravens.
They were everywhere: perched on our gutters, in the trees, walking along the ground, swarming in the sky. I heard them calling to one another in their raspy language, a sound that swelled the farther I walked from the house toward the field. They swirled like vultures over the corn, cawing. They swept through the sky in large black swaths.
I stared up at them. This was wrong. Ravens were not migratory birds. They stayed throughout the winter. While they formed loose affiliations with others, they did not flock. Not like this. Not in the hundreds. Not in the thousands of black specks that I could see on the lightening horizon. As the light grew, so did the cacophony of their voices.
They were smart birds. I gathered this from years of watching them. They remembered faces, and gave Elijah a wide berth because they knew he’d throw stones at them. They avoided Herr Miller’s fields because he’d shot one of them, and one dead was all that it took to keep them away. When the bird had been shot, there was a terrible cawing the next dawn, as if they mourned. My father called them “gossip birds.”
I never hated them, not the way Elijah and the farmers seemed to. To my way of thinking, they were God’s creatures, same as cows and dogs. I never shooed them away from the grain. And they never avoided me the way they did Elijah.
But something had gotten them riled, some contagious thought that had them on the wing, sweeping south. I frowned as I entered the cornfield, pushing aside the stalks bent from yesterday’s activity. What did the ravens know that I didn’t?
One raven hopped on a bowing stalk before me. I looked up at him.
“What’s wrong?”
He stared at me intently, then cawed three times. I honestly felt as if he were trying to tell me something. He flapped his wings and disappeared into the sky with his fellows, the stalk he’d perched on bobbing in the gloom.
I bit my lip and kept pressing forward. I smelled the location of the crash before I saw it, smelled that dew-damp artificial burn stink that clung close to the ground. I peered into the battered clearing, anticipating seeing only the scorch mark pressed into the earth.
But I was not alone.
Ravens hopped through the broken bits of debris, puffing up their wings. In the center of the flock stood a man dressed in black, the hems of his trousers stained gray by the ash. He was turned away from me, and I could tell that he had been here for some time: a white circle was circumscribed around the crash site in something that looked like whitewash paint.
My palms began to sweat. I rubbed them against my skirt.
The man muttered to himself, and it seemed that the ravens understood some of what he said. They cawed urgently when he paused to take a breath. He was bowed in prayer, and one bird lit on his shoulder.
I was torn between asking him what he was doing here and looking on in silence. I watched him for some moments, before the wind kicked up and the ash blew toward me. I pressed both hands over my nose and sneezed.
The man turned around. I recognized him as the bent old Hexenmeister. He looked at me with glazed, cataract-covered eyes. “Katie.”
“Herr Stoltz,” I said, my cheeks flaming red at having been caught out for spying. “I didn’t mean—”
“Go home, Katie.”
“Herr Stoltz, I—”
“Go home, Katie. And do not speak of this. There is nothing here. Not anymore.”
That phrase sank deep into my bones, seemed to chase away a bit of the memory of yesterday. Dawn began to spill over the horizon, in brilliant gold, and the ravens took wing in a furious flutter of black, like rotten leaves stirred up in the bottom of a bucket.
I shuddered.
But I obeyed.
Seth and Joseph didn’t return by midmorning.
And the English didn’t come for their helicopter.
I said nothing about the Hexenmeister’s visit to the field, heeding his order. I felt that I had intruded on something sacred, fearsome, and intimate. I was ashamed and curious, both at once. No one noticed that the ravens had all gone.
Herr Miller had come to our house to use Mrs. Parsall’s phone. His hands were pale and fidgeted nervously. “They said that they’d be back this morning,” he murmured. And he kept saying it, over and over.
Mrs. Parsall redialed the number to the furniture store, then shook her head. “No answer.” Her brow was creased with worry. “Do you want to come with me in the car to go looking for them?”
“Has the curfew been lifted?” my father asked.
“I assume so,” Mrs. Parsall said. “I turned on the car radio this morning. All it was playing was music.” I’d sat with her in the passenger’s seat, listening. Everything sounded normal.
“Maybe they’re just being poky,” my mother suggested. It was almost five miles to town. By buggy, that could take a bit over an hour. If the boys were on foot, it would take up to two hours.
I squinted at the window. It had been daylight for three hours. They should be here by now.
“I’d be grateful to go check on them,” Herr Miller said. “Elijah’s doing the morning chores.”
“Maybe we’ll find them walking by the side of the road,” Mrs. Parsall said hopefully.
I followed them out to the car. Mrs. Parsall started the station wagon up, and the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” was playing.
I bit my lip. I didn’t believe in omens.
My father’s hand clamped down on my shoulder as I moved to sidle into the back seat. He shook his head. “Not you, Katie. There are chores to be done.”
I stepped back and stared after the station wagon as it bounced down the rutted drive to the road, the music sounding tinny in the distance.
***
I’d helped my father milk the cows and was feeding and watering the dogs by the time Elijah located me in the kennel.
“They didn’t find Seth and Joseph.” Elijah sat down heavily on an upturned bucket. His hands were slack in his lap, and his eyes were dark with worry.
“They checked the furniture store?” I patted Sunny’s belly, full of babies and meat scraps. I’d snuck her some canned hamburger, and she was still licking the gravy from her chops. I thought that gravy was good for the pups, but no one else shared my philosophy.
“Ja. The door was open, but no one was inside.” Elijah’s mouth thinned. “Father won’t say anything else. He came back white as a ghost, and he and Mrs. Parsall went straight to the Elders.”
I frowned. “Mrs. Parsall went with him?” They must have seen something very strange for Herr Miller to take an Englisher to the Elders.
“Ja.” Elijah blew out his breath. “Either my brothers are in trouble, or . . .”
“ . . . or they’re going to get in trouble with the Elders.” A certain amount of drift was expected, even tolerated among young Plain folk. But not the kind of disobedience that caused parents to worry so much they needed to go to the Elders.
“They didn’t check Schmidt’s?” I asked. The boys liked to visit the general store whenever they could slip away. It was the same place we swapped messages on the bulletin board with the Outside world. Schmidt’s had chewing gum, soda pop, cigarettes, b
eer, and, most enticingly for Joseph and Seth, comic books. The boys kept a secret stash in their shared bedroom.
Elijah shook his head. “No. I didn’t know that my father and Mrs. Parsall had left.”
And he would have been reluctant to tell his father the secret. I understood. Though we loved our parents, we often kept secrets from them. The older we got, it seemed like the secrets multiplied.
Elijah stood up, nearly knocking the bucket over and startling Sunny. “I’m going to go look for them.”
“I’ll go with you.” My morning chores were finished.
“You just want to visit Schmidt’s,” he teased as I followed him out of the barn.
“Maybe.” I shrugged. “I would like a Coca-Cola. And maybe a magazine.”
“What kind of magazine?”
“Maybe Cosmopolitan.” I said it only to shock him, to test boundaries.
Elijah raised a brow. He’d seen the scantily clad women on the glossy pages and the covers that announced new sex tips—probably incomprehensible to both of us—every month. I’d shown him one the other week. His mouth had fallen open. He dropped the magazine three times before getting it back on the rack. It was a scandalous thing, that magazine. The women in it seemed obsessed with expensive clothing and makeup and horoscopes and sex. There rarely seemed to be much mention of the other parts of a woman’s life: of work, of families, of being part of a community.
I smiled innocently. “I would like to smell the perfume samples.”
“Ah. Naturally.”
We walked the mile to the Millers’ barn, where Elijah readied his favorite horse, Star. She was a Haflinger female, all golden with white socks and a white star on her forehead. Star was too old to breed now, but she’d been around long enough to be unfazed by traffic. I rubbed the gray flecks on her nose and murmured at her while Elijah hitched her up to his buggy.
Elijah had his own buggy, which he’d saved for with his carpentry and produce money since he was twelve. It was an open buggy, glossy black, that seated two people. It was what many called a “courting buggy”—there was no privacy whatsoever, which ensured that its occupants behaved themselves. It was terrible in rain. Elijah bought it used, and the wheels needed to be reset at least three times. But he worked on it himself, kept it as clean as any young man on the Outside would with his own vehicle.
“What if we find them?” I asked, as Elijah offered me a hand up into the seat beside him. There was no room for the boys in this buggy. I thought for a moment about suggesting that we take Herr Miller’s surrey buggy, which could seat up to five, but stopped myself. That would be too much like stealing.
“Then we’ll make them walk and follow along behind them,” Elijah said with a grin.
“What if they’re hurt?”
His grin faded. “Then we are the ones who walk.”
Star pulled the buggy out onto a rutted dirt lane, and Elijah shook the reins gently. The horse cantered out into the morning, the buggy bumping behind her for a good two miles until we got to the paved roads.
Paved roads were smoother on the metal wheels, but almost as noisy, as the buggy squeaked along the blacktop two-lane highway. Sometimes the English had issues with the horse droppings left behind as we traveled. There were always some who would honk their horns or try to spook the horses.
I remember when I was a little girl and one of the boys from school was driving a buggy down the road. He was twelve at the time. His horse was frightened by a swerving vehicle, and the boy was thrown into a ditch and killed. My mother used it as a cautionary tale, and I still had some fear of the road each time I set out upon it. Cars often whizzed past so quickly that they shook the buggy.
But there was no traffic today. A breeze moved briskly, stirring the yellowing tassels of grass by the side of the road. There was a lot to be said for traveling by buggy. One could miss so much when riding in a car—I knew from the few times I’d ridden with Mrs. Parsall. Cars went too fast, and the details blurred away. I watched for more ravens but saw none. Only a groundhog chewing gravel by the side of the road and a solitary heron fishing at the edge of a pond. My brow furrowed. The ravens sensed something that escaped the notice of the other animals.
My gaze fastened on something by the side of the road. A piece of red glass. My eyes followed over a rise in the road, seeing that a car had gone off into a ditch and struck a fence post.
Elijah slowed. “We should see if anyone needs help.”
I hopped off the seat before Star had come to a complete halt. Elijah continued forward a few yards to find a level place to pull the buggy off the road and activate the flashers.
I stepped down the grassy slope into the ditch. The windshield of the car was broken, but the headlights still gleamed. The engine was silent. I leaned into the car, peered inside.
I saw no people. Just a woman’s handbag and some children’s toys in the back seat. I swallowed when I saw a rusty stain that looked like blood smeared on the back of a baby’s car seat. The passenger’s side door was open.
“Looks like they got out,” Elijah said behind me. “Whoever they were.”
I reached into the back seat and picked up a pink plush rabbit with red plastic eyes. I held it to my chest as I studied the car seat. One of the seat belts securing it had been torn. I pointed at it.
“Maybe . . . maybe the police came and cut them out,” Elijah suggested.
My eyes fell on the handbag. Plain women carried what they needed in their aprons and dress pockets. But English women were inseparable from these bags, in which they seemed to keep everything from medicine to money to makeup.
The breeze plucked strands of my hair from my white prayer bonnet, and I picked the tendrils out of my mouth when I spoke. I voiced what we were both afraid of on the empty, eerie road. “There was mention of violence on the radio last night. Rioting.”
Elijah’s mouth flattened, and he looked at the northern horizon. “Seth and Joseph will be all right. They would not have gotten mixed up in that.”
“I know.” Seth and Joseph were pacifists, like the rest of the Plain folk. I knew that they wouldn’t be caught up in perpetrating a random spree of violence.
But it didn’t mean that they couldn’t fall victim to one.
We climbed back into the buggy and drove into town without another word passing between us. When we reached a sign that reduced the speed limit from fifty-five miles per hour to thirty-five, I knew that we had arrived in Torch. I said a prayer under my breath that we would find Seth and Joseph in short order and return home before our parents even realized that we were gone.
But my heart dropped as the buggy jingled down the road.
Torch had never been a large town. It contained less than five hundred full-time residents. During the weekends, it often appeared that there were more, since Torch catered to the tourist trade in this rural part of the state. The Olde Deutsche Restaurant served hearty Amish fare; as we passed, we noted that there were no cars in the parking lot, and the windows were dark.
We passed English houses, which seemed normal enough, with cars parked in the driveways. But more than one still had the porch lights shining in the day. And I noticed that the mailboxes perched by the side of the road were full of yesterday’s mail.
Schmidt’s General Store and gas station was positioned at a crossroads where the highway intersected the main street in Torch. Lights shone within, including a neon sign advertising beer. A car was parked in the fire lane in front, but there were none at the gas pumps.
We parked the buggy behind the store and hitched Star to a telephone pole that many Amish used for that purpose. The owner, Schmidt, sold anything his store carried to Amish youth with a wink and a nod. We often thought that he kept the alley behind the store clear specifically so that young men and women would have a place to smoke out of sight. I half expected to see Seth and Joseph loitering in the back, eating potato chips, but no one was there. Not even pigeons.
The back door to Schmidt�
��s was always open. We stepped around the ashtray on the back stoop and into the bright light of the store.
Music played overhead, something wordless and inoffensive. The English called it “elevator music,” but I was never quite certain where the term came from. I’d been on a handful of elevators, and none of them was ever musical.
The cases containing dairy products, pop, and beer were all lit and humming. Everything from the buzzing fluorescent lights to the drip of a toilet running in the bathroom seemed to intrude on my thoughts. The English probably considered noises like this to be part of the background, but I found them distracting. Mrs. Parsall even told me that she sometimes fell asleep to the flickering television, which I couldn’t imagine.
We wandered down the aisles. I paused beside the racks of comic books. I’d read many of the Miller boys’ comic books over the years. Joseph had a preference for Superman.
But I had a different favorite. I squatted down at the bottom of the rack, my fingers flipping through the curling pages. I plucked up an issue of Wonder Woman. The cover showed a magnificent woman with curly hair soaring through the sky, wearing only the skimpiest of clothes.
I had followed the Princess of Themyscira’s adventures since I was a little girl. I was amazed at how she was unconscious of her near-nudity and beauty, fascinated that she was stronger than the men. I also felt some pang of kinship with her, knowing that she came from a society closed off from the rest of the world. Paradise Island was, in its own way, frozen centuries behind in time. And it was even more cut off from Man’s World than we were.
But most of all, I was intrigued by the idea of her purity. Wonder Woman was certainly not Plain, and not even any stripe of Christian. She followed the ancient Greek gods, who occasionally appeared in the stories.
But she retained her virtue. To my knowledge, Diana remained virginally pure. Despite her seemingly overt sexuality, there was a certain innocence about her. Power and innocence. It flummoxed me.