Stars for Lydia

by P. L. Gaus

  Solemnly, the bishop nodded. Seeming as weary as the ages, he whispered, “My brother has also lost his way. John. He’s just as lost as Lydia is. As Lydia was. I don’t know how to help him. So, he’ll be lost, too. How is that not my failure?”

  “We have been talking with Dr. Carson about John,” Branden said, rising. He sat again with Caroline on the sofa. “She believes that she can help him.”

  “Your psychiatrist lady is wrong,” Alva said. “John would not hurt anyone. He’s not dangerous to anyone.”

  “He might be dangerous to Mary,” Branden replied gently. “Maybe that’s why she left him.”

  Yost squared his shoulders and sat up straighter. “That would be a church matter, Professor. It’s something I should deal with privately.”

  “We would like to help you find Mary,” Branden said.

  “We are not violent people,” Alva said. “But we are a private people. And a man and his wife? That’s a private family matter.”

  “He’s depressed,” Branden said. “It’s not his fault. It’s not a failure of character. It’s a specific medical condition. His brain chemistry is all wrong. He needs medical help.”

  “I am Bishop,” Yost said hesitantly. “I’m always supposed to know what to do. I’m supposed to know how faith can cure all ills. We live by faith. If it is God’s will . . .”

  His assertion died off in consternation. Perplexity was the expression on his face. “I’ve held the line on faith for so very long.”

  Branden asked, “Does faith not allow for medicine?”

  With his brows, Yost framed a question.

  “There are medicines that can help him, Bishop Yost.” Branden continued. “Antidepressants. Anti-anxiety meds, too. They can help him. He doesn’t have to be miserable all the time.”

  Tentatively, Yost said, “Our faith is supposed to be strong enough.”

  “I have a friend,” Branden said, “whose faith is stronger than anyone I know. He has colon cancer. Does faith demand that he die with it?”

  “We are not to question God’s will.”

  “Yes. I know. But there is an operation that can save his life. Would you advise him not to have it? Would that be the proper thing for him to do?”

  “People do die, Professor. Who are we to question that?”

  “I think you have missed the point. God himself has made this surgery possible. Who are you to question that? Lydia’s letter must have opened your eyes a little bit.”

  Behind closed eyes, Yost studied the matter. When he opened his eyes, he appeared chagrined. He appeared to doubt himself.

  Branden said, “Just tell John that he should try the medicine for three weeks, Alva. Let him try it as an act of faith. Perhaps God has allowed this. Perhaps God has allowed medicines to be developed. Perhaps it is God’s will that John should be well again, and that he should be a better father and husband. Perhaps it is God’s will that they not suffer any more in that family.”

  The professor saw the moment when Bishop Yost relented. It was evident in his expression and his breathing. His shoulders took a slump as if he were releasing tension. His face softened as if he were thinking now as a person, not as an autocrat. His lungs drew a deep and long breath, which he released as a sigh.

  “Bishop Yost,” the professor said. “Take your buggy back into town. Tell John that he can try Dr. Carson’s medicine. Just for three weeks. You’ve seen how troubled John really is. You can just try the medicine. If it isn’t God’s will for John to be well, you’ll know soon enough.”

  Chapter 26

  Saturday, September 2

  11:15 AM

  At Weaver’s Marketplace on County Road 235, there was a black SUV, looking out of place and maybe a little bit lost, parked on the gravel lot with its nose pressed in against the old split rail fence that bordered the one-acre cemetery adjacent to the store. The cemetery’s headstones - some as old and bleached as the bygone centuries - had taken a lean, as if the winds and rains of the ages had rendered them weary. The grocery store by contrast looked new, bright and colorful, with large outdoor signage fastened to the side of the building and a black and yellow placard standing beside the road, advertising the store’s daily specials. Here was the anachronistic contrast so typical of Holmes County – the new and bright, parked next to the ancient.

  The professor pulled in beside the SUV, and he surveyed the old headstones before he shut off his engine. “Strange,” he said. “I’ve never paid any attention to this little cemetery. I’ve never been in this little store, out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  Caroline said, “He was sad, Michael. The bishop was sad to have read Lydia’s letter.”

  “Yes,” Branden said, “but also distressed. Lydia put it on his shoulders that he was the one who had gotten her started. She was only ten at the time.”

  “Plus, Michael, I think he’s more worried about John than he lets on.”

  “He’s worried about Mary, too. We need to find her.”

  The two climbed out of the white truck, and as she closed her passenger’s door, Caroline asked over the cab of the truck, “Do you suppose he has people searching for her, too?”

  The professor started for the entrance to the store and said, as he walked, “If he’s smart, yes. He’ll have had people looking for her for several weeks.”

  At the hitching rail, closer to the store’s front door, there was a single plain black buggy. Its rusty iron wheels had scored narrow tracks into the gravel of the parking lot. The tracks were wavy, as if the buggy horse had been unsure on its feet – slow and weary - and the driver anything but hurried.

  The black fabric carriage, dusty and sun bleached, was entirely unadorned. Its ill-kept and boney horse had its head hanging down toward the gravel, trying to crop some of the grass that grew under the rail. But the short reins on the bridle held fast to the hitching rail, and the horse looked too weary and frustrated to bother any further with the strain of reaching down against the pull of the leather straps.

  Leaning against the end of the hitching rail, there was a new-looking woman’s bicycle. It was of the cross-country style, with wide black tires and a black graphite frame. A white wicker basket was attached to the front of the handle bars.

  “A Mennonite bicycle,” the professor remarked as he led Caroline into the store. “And a Schwartzentruber buggy.”

  “I feel sorry for the horse,” Caroline remarked as she followed him into the store.

  Inside, there was a black-clad Old Order Amish woman sorting through a stack of red apples on a table display beside the front door. She glanced up briefly at the two English arrivals, her round and plain white face framed by her black bonnet, but she quickly turned her attention back to her basket of apples. The professor eased past her in the aisle and noted that the apples the woman had selected for her basket were, for the most part, the bruised and nicked ones.

  He led Caroline down a short aisle of bulk flours and beans, all put up in clear plastic bags with yellow twisty ties. “Typical,’ he thought. Bulk foods with a minimum of packaging. He progressed to the back, and he stopped beside a Mennonite woman at the glass-fronted cheese cooler, who was giving her order to two young Amish girls behind the counter.

  To the left stood three English women in colorful summer dresses, waiting for service at the far end of the meat display. The professor was amused to see their metropolitan impatience, and he turned to watch them. But when he heard Caroline speak to the girls behind the cheese counter, he broke off his surveillance, smiling and shaking his head.

  Over the top of the cooler, Branden said to the counter girls, “I’m with the Sheriff’s Office,” and he held up his badge.

  One of the two girls came over to him, wiping her fingers on an old towel. She waited wordlessly behind the display for Branden to speak.

  The professor put his badge case away and said, “We’d like to find Vera Erb. She’s a midwife out here. Your store is the only address we have for her.”
r />   The Amish girl arched a brow. “She used to work here. She died last week. Sorry.”

  “Unexpected?” Caroline asked.

  The professor noted that the Old Order Amish woman, with her bruised red apples near the front door, had turned to listen.

  “Not really,” the counter girl said to Caroline. “It wasn’t unexpected. She was ninety-seven.”

  “Just old, then?” Branden asked. “Nothing suspicious?”

  “Just old,” the girl said with an awkward smile.

  The Old Order Amish woman pushed out through the store’s front door. She had left her basket of bruised red apples sitting on the display table. The professor turned to watch her leave, and when he turned back to the counter girl, she said, “”Miriam steps out when a place gets too crowded with English folk.”

  Branden asked, “Was that Miriam Yost? The bishop’s wife?”

  The girl nodded. “The bishop likes apple pie. I mean he really likes apple pie. But Miriam only buys the bruised ones, because she knows we’ll give her a discount.”

  The girl glanced down toward the three English women in their showy summer dresses, gave a nod toward them, and said, “Anything else, then?”

  Caroline said, “We want to speak with Hannah Yost. Can you tell us where she lives?”

  The counter girl smiled, nodded, and took out paper and a pencil, saying, “I’ll draw you a map. Really, it’s just up the road.”

  Chapter 27

  Saturday, September 2

  1:20 PM

  A gentle rain, little more than a rolling hill-country mist, was wetting the Brandens’ windshield as they left the bishop’s house. They drove north on CR 235, up and down over the hills toward the Wayne County line, heading deeper into Bishop Alva Yost’s Holmes County countryside.

  A gray cover of clouds had settled close to the ground for a rest-of-the-day drizzle. Low pockets between the hilltops were shrouded with a dreary fog. The available light was little more than a pale gloom, dispelling all chances for the casting of shadows. It could have been mistaken for the twilight of a bleak and colorless late November day, except that the temperature was hanging in the low seventies.

  The professor set his emergency flashers to blinking, and he slowed his truck to a crawl while Caroline read off the numbers on the mailboxes beside the road.

  “That was it,” Caroline said eventually, and the professor stopped, backed up on the blacktop, and turned into a long gravel driveway. The mailbox read: Lucas and Hannah Yost. Just as the Brandens cleared the pavement, a heavily loaded logging truck sped by on the road behind them.

  Glancing back anxiously at the lumbering truck, Caroline said, “That truck could have hit us. It’s too dangerous, Michael, traveling out here in this fog.”

  “We’ll just try,” Branden said. “Maybe we’ll also have some luck with this last midwife.”

  The yard and driveway were deserted as they parked beside the white wooden house. The horses and buggies were put up out of sight, and the barn doors were all closed tightly. The swing set and sand box on the front lawn had been abandoned in the rain by the Yost children.

  “They’ll all be inside,” the professor said as he stepped up onto the front porch. Caroline followed and stood back as he knocked on the heavy wooden door. They waited, and then he knocked a second time.

  It was a ten-year old boy who eventually pulled the door open from the inside. There was silence behind him in the house, and the interior there seemed unnecessarily dark and gloomy to Professor Branden. All the house’s heavy purple window drapes had been closed. No lights could be seen at the windows. When the boy opened the door, there was an orange kerosene glow from indoor lanterns.

  The lad stared out at the Brandens with a stone-rigid face, and he didn’t speak. Branden gave it a long ten count, to wait for the boy to say something, but the lad said nothing as he stood impassively at the door.

  He was dressed in black Amish garb, and his bowl-cut blonde hair worked with the reserved absence of mirth in his expression to give him a somber Dutch-boy look. When Branden hadn’t spoken, the taciturn boy looked back into the dark room and seemed to be searching for instructions from an adult. A voice, nearly inaudible, sounded softly behind him. The stolid lad nodded toward the voice, turned slowly back to the Brandens and started to close the door.

  “It’s important,” Branden said into the interior of the room. “We’re trying to find Mrs. John Yost. I believe you know her. She’s missing, and I think you know that. Mary Yost. Mrs. John Yost. We’re looking for her midwife, to try to find her.”

  From a dim corner of the front room, a figure in black slowly emerged. The blonde lad surrendered his position at the door to his father, and there stood a black-clad man with a bushy gray beard, looking as grave as a funeral director.

  “We know,” the man said stiffly, “that Mary Yost is missing. Several of us have been trying to find her.”

  “Can you step out onto the porch here?” the professor asked. “I am Michael Branden, and this is my wife Caroline. Lydia Schwartz was my student at the college in Millersburg.”

  Lucas Yost nodded. “Lydia Schwartzentruber was known to us. She lost her way.”

  “She just wanted to go to college,” Caroline said, stepping abruptly forward.

  Surprised that she would speak up so readily, Branden framed an apologetic smile for Yost and said to him, “She was my student.”

  “College is not for us, Mr. Branden. We keep to the simpler ways. Should a child be smarter than her parents?”

  Caroline shuffled a few steps forward on the porch, and the professor turned back to her, to remind her of caution. She didn’t respond to Yost, but Branden realized that it was a near thing. He could see that the instinct to argue with the man was fixed in Caroline’s eyes.

  He turned back to Yost and said, “Can you please tell us if you have seen Mary? Her baby is due, and your wife is a midwife in the church. And Mary has her daughter Esther with her. We are concerned.”

  “We have not seen her,” Lucas Yost said, stepping back from the door. He put a hand on the edge of the door and began to close it on the Brandens.

  The professor pressed in closer to the screen. His nose was practically touching the mesh. “Please, Mr. Yost. John is your brother. So is Alva. We just want to find Mary. Alva should want you to help us with that. The sheriff took a phone call that makes us believe she’s in Fort Wayne.”

  Lucas Yost began again to close the door to Branden. While it was still closing, Yost pronounced a judgement. “If Mary has left her family, then she has lost her way, too. If she’s in Fort Wayne, then she’ll have to make her own way home. She’s a member of the Amish church, so if she doesn’t come home, she’ll be mited.”

  Through the screen, Branden said, “Does she know people in Fort Wayne? Or even in Indiana? If this is a waste of time, I should know that. Who would she be visiting in Fort Wayne? Are there midwives there to help her? And how would she have gotten herself over there?”

  “I don’t know,” Lucas Yost said impassively. “Most of our Indiana relatives have settled near Indianapolis. There aren’t any Yosts in Fort Wayne.”

  Branden stepped anxiously in place. He resisted an urge to reach out for the latch. He resisted the impulse to pull the screen door open and push himself inside the house. “She was at a motel, Mr. Yost.”

  Yost lifted his shoulder with a weary shrug. “There are recruiters, Professor. They do a lot of damage. They are aggressive. They help weak souls flee the church. They give them rides, clothes, and a place to stay. Maybe you should ask these English people about Mary Yost. If no one can find her, then maybe she has had some help. You English are responsible for this. Lydia is dead because of you English.”

  Caroline tried a line with the stubborn man. “Please, Mr. Yost. We’d like to talk with your wife. If she hasn’t seen Mary, then maybe she could tell us something that would help us find her. I know you are trying to find her, too. But we would just like
to ask your wife some questions. What harm would that do?”

  Lucas Yost stared blankly out through the screen at Caroline. Fog seemed to roll up onto the porch and obscure him. He seemed to recede like an apparition.

  Caroline held his stare and said, “We’ll just take a minute or two, Mr. Yost.”

  “Take a seat out there,” Yost said. “I will send her out. Once you have finished, I want you to leave us alone.”

  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

  With an infant daughter taking a breast in her arms, Hannah Yost came slowly out onto her front porch. She had a modesty towel laid over the child’s head. On a hickory rocker between the professor and Caroline, Hannah sat down carefully with her child.

  Using a casual tone, Caroline asked, “How old is your daughter?” The Brandens had agreed, while waiting for Hannah to appear, that Caroline should take the lead in the conversation. They had rehearsed some of the issues that Caroline should try to raise with her. Caroline was dressed in a plain blue, calf-length skirt and a white blouse. Her long auburn hair was up in a bun. All things considered, it was the most conservative outfit that Caroline could present with such traditional people.

  With her child in her arms, Hannah settled back on her chair and looked to Caroline to say, “I don’t know your names.” She also looked to the professor to say, “Midwives?”

  Caroline answered. “My name is Caroline Branden. We want to find the midwife that Mary Yost would use. This is my husband Michael. He’s a teacher at Millersburg College. He’s also a deputy with the sheriff’s office. We started by asking at Weaver’s store about Vera Erb. But they told us that she died recently.”

  Hannah nodded, closed her eyes, smiled, and said, “Ninety-seven.” She opened her eyes to Caroline and said again, “Vera was ninety-seven. She lived a good life.”

  To encourage the conversation forward, Caroline asked, “Was she good at midwifing?”