Broken English

by Gaus, P. L.

  “This is the same field you brought me to that summer during graduate school when I came here to visit you,” Caroline said, smiling nostalgically.

  “It’s a special place,” Branden said.

  “Because of you and Cal.”

  “Because of you,” Branden said. “But yes, because of me and Cal and Bruce Robertson. These were our summer camping grounds.”

  “Boys,” Caroline remarked. “If I remember, you just happened to have a blanket with you the afternoon we came here.”

  The professor grinned boyishly, remembering the slow, tender afternoon that had sealed their commitment to one another. He drew her to him and kissed her.

  Caroline held him close for a moment and then released him. “You three used to come up here to camp,” Caroline said. “When did that start?”

  “Seventh grade, I think,” he said. “We came out here on a whim one weekend. Built a little campfire and made ourselves sick smoking cigars. At least Cal and I got sick. Bruce liked it from the start.”

  “So you’re responsible for Bruce’s smoking, Professor.”

  Branden made a wry expression and defended himself. “Bruce didn’t smoke at all in high school. He started in the army, Caroline.”

  Caroline waved her hand dismissively, pronouncing her husband guilty as charged.

  “That was just the first time, Caroline. With the smoking. After that, we came up here any time we could, and no more cigars!”

  The professor saw he was wasting his breath, so he ambled over to the fence line at the edge of the drop-off. He walked a short length of the fence with his eyes down, doubled back a few paces, and motioned Caroline to his side. He began pulling up weeds to reveal a ring of large stones. “Our campfire ring is still here,” he said. “We got permission from the old Dutchman who owned the field, and we kept a permanent site here. We’d use it mainly on weekends. Holidays too. Sometimes we brought shotguns and threw clay pigeons for each other out over the drop-off. Sometimes we’d shoot quail and roast them for supper.”

  Caroline frowned, teasing him with her disapproval.

  “We didn’t do that very often,” Branden said. “Mostly we’d hike the creek bottoms down below. There’s a bass pond down there in the tangles, and we’d fish for our dinner. At night, Bruce would go down with his gig and catch bullfrogs.”

  “I guess you’re going to tell me you ate frog legs, too,” Caroline sighed.

  “Delicious,” Branden said emphatically. He kicked at the blackened earth in the campfire ring and said, “The last time we came up here was the night before Bruce went off to basic training.” He gazed into the distance, dwelling on memories. Eventually he said, “It hasn’t changed up here in all those years. No electricity anywhere.”

  Caroline looked in every direction and could not find a single electric wire.

  In all, they waited there for more than an hour. On the little gravel lane where they had made their turn into the field, an occasional buggy rolled slowly into view and then went down out of sight toward the valley beyond. One buggy rolled by twice and then came along a third time with all of its black window flaps tied down. It seemed to tarry briefly at the little grassy path to the oil pumper, and then its black iron wheels wobbled away in the gravel. In a few moments, the buggy reappeared at the white house on the western edge of the plateau. It turned around in the oval driveway in front of the house and then came slowly back to the path. This time, after hesitating again at the path, the driver pulled hard on the reins, tapped the buggy whip off the horse’s flank, and pulled the buggy onto the path through the field.

  The Brandens watched it approach through the wheat. When it stopped beside their car, all of the window flaps remained closed. The only windows were small rectangular holes, about two inches by four inches, in the top center of the flaps. They waited beside their car and heard soft, unhurried voices speaking Low German. Branden recognized Cal Troyer’s voice, muffled behind the black flaps. The other voice was a woman’s. After a while, the windshield flap on the buggy was rolled up, and there sat Cal Troyer on the left, next to a young Amish woman in traditional dress.

  Her leather shoes were the old, black lace-up kind. Her ankles showed only an inch of black hose. Her light plum dress was altogether plain. She wore a long black shawl over her shoulders, and it was clasped in front by a pin. The collar of her dress came up high around her neck, and her large black bonnet lapped down to her shoulders on the sides and back, entirely covering her hair and neck. It also was tied closely against her cheeks to cover her ears. Her hands were sturdy, folded delicately in her lap. Her face was a tranquil white, eyes a soft brown behind plain, round, wire-rimmed spectacles.

  Branden pushed away from his spot leaning against the car and walked over to the left side of the buggy, next to Cal. He took off his wide-brimmed black Amish hat and ran fingers through his hair.

  Cal set the hand brake on the buggy and said, “Frauline Raber, I’d like you to meet Herr Professor Doctor Michael Branden.” Then he turned farther toward her on the seat and added, “He’s a professor of Civil War history at Millersburg College. Mike, this is Abigail Raber.”

  The Amish woman turned slightly toward Branden and, with a reserve that bordered on painful shyness, she tipped her head an inch in greeting and said, “Herr Professor.”

  He stood at the left front corner of the buggy and wordlessly nodded in return. As she faced him, he held her eyes, and before she had turned away, he saw an unpretentious Dutch beauty in her features. A simple and delicate tenderness. Large, gentle eyes that gave her an aloof, almost alluring air of detachment from the world. Full lips and a long, arching scar that started under her chin and curved along her right jaw, up under the flaps of her bonnet toward her right ear.

  Abigail’s eyes fell to her hands in her lap, and then she looked back into the professor’s eyes and said, “Pastor Troyer has advised me that I should tell you about Mr. Hawkins.” Her eyes peered into his for more than a proper length of time, and she seemed to take the measure of his heart.

  Branden answered, “Yes. If you are willing.”

  She drew her eyes away from the professor. “We are to be married.”

  Branden held back a discrete moment and then encouraged her with, “I understand he’s a most remarkable man.”

  She considered that briefly with a skeptical expression and said, “I’m not sure about remarkable, Herr Professor. I would say, rather, that he is capable. Maybe, also, uncommon. The most uncommon and capable man I could ever have met.”

  Her candor startled him. She looked at him with an intense, peaceful calm. There was a momentary, glintering sheen in her eyes. With a disarming gratitude, she whispered, “He has rescued me.”

  Branden glanced for a moment to Cal, and then he held out his hand and asked, “Would you like to walk a spell, Miss Raber?”

  Abigail gathered up the folds of her dress, climbed forward in the buggy past Cal, took the professor’s hand, and stepped down and off the rig. The buggy rocked on its springs, and the horse pranced against the brake. Cal steadied it with the reins.

  Branden introduced Abigail to Caroline, then turned and strolled with Abigail several dozen yards through the winter wheat, until they reached the southern precipice. Her black and plum outfit swayed against the tender green hues of the new wheat. As they approached an old fence line, a dozen or so quail bolted out of the rough and thundered on wing into the sky.

  They stood together at the fence line, perched high over a long and distant view, and she spoke to him softly of David Hawkins. She told of his fervor to study the Amish ways. Told of his extraordinary determination to master the plain life. Told of the early days, almost four years ago, when he first had showed up at a Sunday service, in Deacon Yoder’s barns. He had sat quietly, head down, among the men. Like no man she had ever known, he had gazed exclusively into her eyes when she had helped the other women serve dinner to the men on the kitchen benches after the services.

 
She reached up and lightly ran a finger along the scar on her cheek and told how David Hawkins had labored in the fields of her father. How he had come to her one evening at the well beside the houses. He had pumped the water and sought her eyes. Held her hand and began to court her openly.

  Finally, she told of the evening over a year ago when he had proposed to her. They had driven an open buggy out through the fields, and although he had never asked her about it, she had told him of the horse that had kicked in her face when she was only twelve. And she had cried beside Hawkins on the buckboard, telling this one, most uncommon man, for the first time, of the lonely, inward, hidden vigil she had kept over the years because of her deformity. Last, she told the professor how Hawkins had softened in that miraculous moment and had wept in her arms, broken, beseeching her to understand, as he had confessed to her the dark things he had done in the world.

  As Abigail finished, she turned to look back at the buggy where Cal and Caroline waited. Her eyes swept over the high plateau and then into the valley. She looked at Professor Branden, into his eyes. She considered, as she stood there with him, why she had confided so completely in an Englisher. She wondered what events she might set in motion when she decided to trust him. Tried to understand why she had found him so easy to talk to, and realized that she had already committed herself to trusting him unreservedly. Then, in a clear moment of honesty, she conceded to herself that she, and David Hawkins, needed helping.

  They were to be married. Father had promised her hand. But only after a two-year courtship. David had done so well. His conversion was real; she knew that with a lover’s assurance. Knew it in her soul, where words were inadequate to express her deepest thoughts. She knew it in her prayers, where the Spirit spoke to her, spoke for her, spoke for them. And she knew it because of the irrevocable promises of the most uncommon man she had ever known. Because of the promises of the only man who had understood her. Because of the word of the man who had rescued her from a sure fate in her closed society.

  But Abigail Raber also understood that the murder of David Hawkins’s English daughter had changed him. And she admitted to herself, as she stood next to Branden, that the night at the jail had produced a crisis for Hawkins, a crisis of faith that would test David Hawkins to the breaking point. The words that the murderer had spoken to him had hit like a hammer against an anvil and threatened to pound David Hawkins out of her life. To shatter the new faith that he had found. She knew it, now, with a clear and consuming certainty. The words and deeds of the murderer of his daughter could push David Hawkins out of her reach forever. Could destroy the life they had intended to build. Could drop her back into the closed society where unmarried women grew old to a spinster’s fate. Could drive Hawkins to an unforgivable deed. To an act of revenge that her father would never accept. Drive him to vengeance in a community where vengeance was forbidden. Drive him out of her life forever, away from the faith she could never abandon.

  All of these thoughts grew in Abigail to a desperate but still tender realization that her future and David Hawkins’s future depended on the decisions she was making there on the high plateau. Without actually thinking the precise words, and without actually coming to a recognizable moment when she had found her resolve, Abigail Raber held out her trust to Michael Branden.

  She turned to Branden, eyes glistening, with an expression of calm and unfaltering certainty, and said, “Pastor Troyer has said that you can help us. We know that there has been another murder. We also know that the sheriff believes David has done it.

  “But I know, Professor, that David cannot have done this. I also know, full well, who he was, and what he had done, before he came to me. But, Herr Professor, David Hawkins is a new man. I saw his baptism. I heard his vows. I know his heart.”

  “It would help,” Branden said, “if I could speak with him.”

  For a lingering moment, she seemed to gather herself to a task.

  Then she said, almost inaudibly, “We do not know where David Hawkins is.”

  Slowly she turned and started back toward her buggy. Branden followed silently. At the back of her buggy, she reached in under some blankets and pulled out a heavy object. When she turned around, she was holding a Ruger .22 automatic pistol by the tip of the barrel, the heavy gun hanging from her fingertips. Branden looped his little finger through the trigger guard and took it from her gingerly. She turned and drew out another piece, a long black metal tube, threaded on one end, which Branden recognized as a silencer. He asked Caroline for a handkerchief and took possession of the silencer.

  As he stood holding the two pieces at the back of her buggy, Abigail said, “We haven’t seen anything of Mr. Hawkins since last Wednesday, when I found these wrapped in some blankets in his buggy.”

  7

  Monday, June 9 1:45 P.M.

  BEFORE driving Abigail back to the Raber homestead, Cal Troyer drew Branden a map locating the Raber farm in the hills east of Fredericksburg. Then he handed Abigail up into the buggy, climbed into the driver’s seat, and turned the horse back down the narrow path. The Brandens drove south to Millersburg, lunched together on their back porch, and talked their way through all of the larger and finer details of the case.

  In the afternoon, Branden drove down off the college hills to the center of town and found a parking spot at the bank behind the red brick jail. He walked up Clay Street, turned at the courthouse lawn, and pulled open the front door to the jail.

  Inside on his left, a wooden bench for visitors and a soft-drink machine stood next to a black iron door that gave access to the first-floor gang cell. On his right, there was a long wooden counter with a swinging door at its far end. Behind the counter, a desk stacked with an odd collection of old and new radio equipment crowded another desk where Ellie Troyer sat typing. Branden went up to the counter, rested his elbows on it, and waited without speaking.

  Ellie sat with her back to him. She continued typing steadily, saying merely, “Yes?” without looking up from the keys.

  Branden said nothing.

  She turned around from her typing, grinned at him, shook her head, turned back to the typewriter, finished a line on a form, pulled the form through the rollers, and tossed it into her out-box. Without saying anything more to Branden, she wheeled her chair around to face the intercom, pushed the button marked “Bruce,” and caroled, “Oh, Sheriff.” in a singsong tone.

  They heard a gruff “Yes?” through the static of the old intercom.

  “We’ve got someone here who can help you with those little college problems you’ve been grumbling about.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Come and see for yourself.”

  At the end of Ellie’s counter, where the swinging door cuts through, the hall into the rest of the old jailhouse leads straight back to the rear door. Off that hallway on the right, the first door leads to the sheriff’s big office on the northwest corner of the building, and a squad room is further along the hall. On the left are two interview rooms. The sheriff’s office has windows looking out onto both Clay Street to the west and Courthouse Square to the north. The office also shares one wall with Ellie Troyer’s alcove out front. After a brief delay, Ellie and Branden heard the door to Robertson’s office open, and presently he appeared at the front counter, lumbering along slowly as he read a typed page.

  When he saw it was Mike Branden at the counter, he tossed the page into Ellie’s in-box, held out his hand from behind the counter, smiled, grinned, and then laughed and said, “Well I declare. It’s moldy Doc Branden come down off his hill.”

  He tapped at Ellie’s chair with the edge of his leather sole, glanced at her mischievously, and added in a loud whisper, “They don’t let him out for summer until he’s handed in all of his grades.”

  Branden shook Robertson’s hand, held on to it firmly, and pulled the big sheriff out across the counter. Robertson sent the professor a challenging schoolboy look, laughed, and then faked a panic tone. “Help me, Ellie darlin’.”
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  Ellie shook her head at them both and sat back unconcerned.

  Branden released Robertson’s hand, laughing. Robertson reached around Ellie to her coffeepot and filled two Styrofoam cups. He handed one over the counter to Branden, sipped on his, and asked, “You want to tell me what in heaven’s name is going on up at that college of yours, Mike?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary, so far as I know,” Branden answered, instantly on guard.

  “Oh, is that a fact?” Robertson said and then, “Tell him, Ellie.”

  “You tell him yourself, Sheriff. You’re the one’s been hollering most about it.”

  Robertson set his coffee on the counter, reached into his shirt pocket and lit a Winston. He drew on it vigorously, blew out smoke, and laid the Winston in an ashtray. He was tall, broad, and round. His fingers were disproportionately big, and his hands were almost double the size of most. His neck puffed out over his collar. His pleasant round face gave him a look many people mistook for carefree jolliness, but his eyes were sharp steel blue. His gray hair was cut closer than fashionable, in a flattop. Today his tie was still in place—unusual, Branden noted, for his intense, irascible friend.

  Branden knew how Robertson worked. He’d lumber into his office with a local miscreant, sprawl casually in his chair, light a smoke, undo his tie, and lull some unsuspecting soul into mistaking his jolly size for evidence of a simpleton’s stupidity. Anyone who knew Robertson well could attest that the incisive traps he laid in interviews could be detected only by watching his eyes.

  Branden sipped at his coffee, and winked at Ellie with his standard, unconcerned “Oh, Bruce, come now” expression. Then to Robertson he said, “You’ve got a problem with our little college?”

  Robertson held his cigarette to his lips, closed his eyes slightly, drew on it, and trickled smoke as he talked. “My sister does,” he said. “Her kid goes to your college. He wants to be a doctor. Science, math, biology. But his adviser says there’s plenty of time to pursue a professional career. Do that later, he says. Sample the whole college to start with, and then get going on the sciences when he’s sure that’s what he really wants to do.