Tears of the Silenced

by Misty Griffin

  “Yeah.” I frowned. “Not the first time I have heard that.”

  “That’s okay.” Karen smiled at me. “Different is what makes people interesting.”

  “Do you mind if I keep this?” I asked, waving the pamphlet in the air.

  “No, you can keep it if you want. I have no use for it.”

  “Well, I don’t either.” I folded it and put it in my pocket. “I just like to look at it, I guess.”

  The next day, when I saw the truck and horse trailer pulling up with the last of their things, I ran down to the shop to see if they needed any more help. As I got to the front of the shop, I was greeted by a huge, reddish-brown dog that ran up to me and nearly knocked me over. I laughed as he barked and licked my face as if I were his long-lost owner. Karen laughed at her dog’s reaction, too, and she came over and pulled him off me.

  “Come, Simba.” She patted him on his giant head.

  I knelt down and put my arms around Simba’s neck. He was big, fluffy and friendly. Karen told me he was half wolf and half Saint Bernard and that he was a rescue dog. She had three other full-blooded wolves, too. Karen and Carl were keeping them in a fenced pen they built in front of the shop.

  “Better be careful,” I said as I stood up and dusted the dog hair off my dress. “There are many farmers around here that will shoot wolves if they see them running around.”

  “I know.” Karen nodded as she put Simba in the pen with the other wolves. “That’s why I have to keep them in here.”

  I petted the other wolves and was surprised at how friendly they were. I was hugging one of the black wolves when suddenly Simba ran over to the fence and started growling menacingly. I saw Peter walking up to the shop and Simba staring at him with ruffled fur and bared teeth. That was really strange, I thought as I went over and petted his head. Simba wagged his tail at me and licked my hand, but when he turned around, he bared his teeth at Peter again.

  “Better keep those wolves in check.” Peter’s voice was irritated. He seemed particularly annoyed at how Simba was staring directly at him.

  “Oh, I know.” Karen snapped her fingers at Simba. “I don’t know what is wrong with him. I have never seen him act like this.”

  Finally, Simba lay down, but continued to give a low growl whenever Peter came near the shop.

  As I walked back to the house about half an hour later, I heard Simba whining after me. Karen told me later that if I’d had my own house, she would have given Simba to me, since he seemed to have adopted me anyway. She said this was quite common in wolves—that they connected with certain people and that it was always best to give a wolf to whomever they adopted. She said that that person would be forever blessed with the wolf’s undying loyalty.

  Of course, I could not take Simba, but I wished I could have. But the way he growled at Peter made me wonder if he sensed something about him that we, humans, could not see.

  Karen and Carl settled into the shop. They had a generator in the back and had hired someone to install internet so Karen could use the computer for her business. At first, Peter was not happy with the installation, but when Karen said it would be disconnected if and when they moved, he agreed to allow it.

  I would often go over to Karen’s for half an hour or so in the afternoon after I finished doing the lunch dishes, and while Phyllis sat in the rocking chair with the baby and Peter napped with the younger children. I would play with Simba, who barked excitedly when he saw me coming. Karen and Carl would either be in the stables or in the shop, where Carl would often be reading and Karen would work her online classes to complete a veterinary license. Once while there, her probation officer showed up and asked her a few questions. He also asked me who I was.

  “Oh, this is my new friend, Emma Shrock,” Karen said as she waved for me to come to the door.

  I smiled and shook my head when he asked me if I was living at the residence. I thought he seemed surprised to see me there, and I wondered for a second if Karen was telling us the whole truth about why she had been in prison.

  I felt more alive when I looked out the kitchen window and saw Simba in his pen, looking toward the house I was in. I also liked to see the activity that seemed to be constantly going on over at their place. However, inside the Bishop’s house, life was taking a drastic turn for the worse, and suddenly I found myself facing a life-changing decision.

  Poisoned

  If not us, then who?

  If not now, then when?

  —John E. Lewis

  As January slipped into February, things with Peter took a swift turn for the worse. Alarmingly, Phyllis’s seizures began to happen more frequently. One week, she had seizures three days in a row. Her seizures somehow seemed odd to me. I felt there was something unusual about them, but I had no real medical training and did not know what it could be.

  At the breakfast table the morning after a seizure, Peter abruptly asked the children if they thought I would make a good mom if something happened to their own mother. I was sitting in Phyllis’s place, trying to calm the baby and feed little Edna at the same time. I looked up, startled when Peter said that, and then I looked at the children who were smiling and nodding at me.

  “Emma is more fun,” four-year-old Eli said with a giggle.

  “Children!” I admonished as I glared at Peter. “Your mother is in the bedroom sleeping. She is not dying.”

  I frowned at Peter, who was thinking about the children’s answers with keen interest. I could not believe what he had said, and suddenly I became suspicious of the frequency of Phyllis’s seizures. I had not thought of it before, but some of Phyllis’s seizures seemed to happen right after Peter had been alone with her.

  I felt a little dizzy as I noticed Peter looking at me arrogantly, as if he had some scheme he was planning. Well, I thought to myself, if this creep thinks I will become his next wife, he has another thought coming. There was no way I would ever marry him.

  The next morning, I got up early to make breakfast. It was very cold that morning and Peter had awakened me extra early but he told me not to wake the children. He said that he would do the morning chores himself so the children could sleep. After I got the potatoes and biscuits started, I stood at the wood stove stirring the tomato gravy. Phyllis was still sick and sleeping, and I was lost in thought about her declining health. She was taking some herbs, but they seemed to be making her worse instead of better. When I suggested she stop using them, Peter refused and insisted she try them for at least two weeks.

  I was beginning to believe that Peter was giving Phyllis something other than the herbs, but I did not want to tell Phyllis, as I wasn’t sure how she would react.

  After a while, I heard Peter come in through the back door with the milk buckets and go down to the basement to strain it. I was startled out of my reverie a few minutes later when I heard Peter call my name. Wondering what had happened, I took the gravy off the stove and went down into the dark basement.

  “What?” I asked in a sleepy, annoyed tone as I came to the bottom of the stairs. I looked around in confusion when I saw that the basement was completely dark.

  “The lantern went out and I can’t find the matches,” Peter said as he seemed to be fumbling about. “I think the milk spilled, too.”

  “Here.” I handed him some matches from my pocket. It was very common for Amish women to carry matches in their pockets for starting the fires or lighting lamps.

  Peter took the matches and lit the lamp. As the lamp lit up the dark basement, I gasped in horror as I saw that the entire front of Peter’s pants was open. He was not wearing any underwear and he was fully erect. I swallowed hard, and Peter looked at me piercingly as I stumbled backwards and ran up the stairs.

  I grabbed the railing on the front of the wood stove for a moment and tried to calm my trembling limbs. After a couple of minutes, I heard Peter start to come upstairs, and I looked around the
quiet, sleeping house frantically. The children, I thought, and I ran upstairs and noisily called for the children to get up. I was so noisy that Phyllis came out of the bedroom and asked if everything was okay.

  Peter was angry that I had awoken the children and told me I should ask him next time instead of just doing whatever I wanted. Phyllis told him not to yell at me as she tasted my tomato gravy and nodded with approval. I just stood there, feeling weak and ill at ease. But I acted as if nothing had happened. What else could I do? If I said anything, I would break Phyllis’s heart and it would somehow turn out to be my fault in the long run. At the same time, my inaction went against everything I believed in, but, for the moment, I had no idea how else to proceed.

  From then on, Peter seemed to constantly try to flash me. When he took his coat off, if the children were not around, his pants would be unbuttoned with everything hanging out. A few times, he snuck up on me and sat on the wood box behind where I was standing at the stove, cooking. I would turn around to get more wood, and he would just be sitting there with everything exposed. Another time, I was taking a bath and he entered and just stood there staring at me. I had been standing washing myself. According to Amish rule, there was no lock on the door but everyone knew not to enter the pantry at bath time. He stood there for several moments, grinning. I stood frozen in place, covering myself the best I could. I felt nauseous and hoped that Phyllis would catch him.

  On other occasions, he would stare at my breasts, push his erection into my back or pretend to hug me when no one was around and run his hands up and down my body. I felt trapped, alone and scared. No one would ever believe me if I came forward, and even if they did, I knew with certainty that it would be my fault for seducing him. That knowledge left me terrified.

  Every night I lay awake, afraid he would come into my room. I no longer liked my room downstairs and wished I was upstairs with the children. Only now did I realize why Peter had been so adamant about my sleeping downstairs.

  As time went by, there was no improvement in Phyllis’s seizures. As I had suspected, Phyllis was starting to have them about a half an hour after Peter came out of the room. Karen had even mentioned that she thought Peter was giving something to Phyllis. She had squinted at me and searched my face for an answer. I could tell she was slowly becoming suspicious of him even though I had not told her anything. She had offhandedly remarked that Phyllis’s seizures were strange and, with her knowledge of medicine, she thought that Peter was doing something to cause them. This had shocked me to the core: another person had validated my own fears. I had no proof, and I knew that Karen would not get involved because she was on probation. But she was telling me what I already knew deep down.

  The previous week Peter had told Phyllis that he thought she was possessed and that was causing her seizures. While she had seized, I had watched in dumbfounded silence as Peter held the Bible in front of her and commanded that the devil come out of her. I feared that his screaming was somehow making her seizures worse because it lasted much longer than normal, and, during and after, she moaned in pain for a long time. Peter had even remarked that some people died during exorcisms. I had stood transfixed to the spot. Amish did not believe in exorcisms. Fleetingly, I had seen myself as Peter’s next wife. How long before I, too, would meet the same fate.

  The last week of March is when my life changed forever. One evening, I went downstairs to the basement to see what was keeping Katie so long. She was supposed to be skimming the cream from the prior day’s milk and bringing a pitcher of it upstairs for the supper table. I was still weak from the thrush and was not yet able to eat much of anything. Slowly, I walked down the stairs and suddenly stopped mid-way when I saw Peter standing in front of her messing with the pins on the front of her dress. Katie saw me right away, and Peter, seeing that she was looking up the stairwell, looked up too. His face grew red. I felt I would faint as I watched him continue to be pretending to fix the pins in Katie’s dress. I don’t know why he did not stop. It seemed like maybe continuing would make him look less guilty. After a few seconds, I continued down the stairs toward them. I am ashamed to say that I was sort of frozen. I did not want to believe what I knew to be true. As I came closer, Peter hurriedly turned away and mumbled something as he exited through the basement door.

  I just stared at Katie who was fidgeting nervously and seemed to be pretending nothing had happened. I wanted to reach out to her, but I didn’t and she went upstairs without so much as a word. Her nervous smile was masking her real feelings. I did not make any effort to go after her, and I will always regret that. But what could I say? I could not even help myself.

  That night, at the dinner table, Phyllis asked me what was wrong when she saw I was not eating. I just told her that I was not feeling well again. She seemed to suspect that something was wrong, however, as Peter seemed irritable and short with the children. I wondered if Phyllis knew about Peter’s deviant behavior. Was she just ignoring it? She was my friend, and I was trying to work up the courage to tell her about what Peter was doing with Katie and with me.

  But what could she do about it? She could not divorce him or move in with an in-law or anything of that sort. The only thing she could do was tell the church what he had done. The ministers would place him in the Bann for six weeks, after which he would be welcomed back as a full member of the church, and the sins he had committed would never be spoken of again. The Bann did not offer any counsel for the victim. Peter would still be at home; the only difference would be that he would have to sit at a different table from the rest of the family. He would still have total access to his victims. They would most likely not speak out against him because they wanted to save themselves from embarrassment, and they didn’t want to be considered unforgiving of a man who had repented.

  All of this was whirling through my mind as I sat at the dinner table. I knew that Phyllis would probably get mad at me and believe I was lying instead of believing that her husband was a monster like her father. My hands shook as I tried to swallow some milk. I had a dilemma, but I knew I had to do something.

  The next morning, my heart was pounding as I stood outside the closed door of the bedroom where Peter was giving Phyllis her medicine. The very fact that he closed the door was suspicious, since Amish do not believe in having secrets, and bedroom doors are rarely fully shut and never locked. I was almost sure that he was giving her something to cause her seizures.

  I gathered the courage to open the door. What I saw sent a chill through me. There was something very suspicious about the glass of water Peter was giving Phyllis. But it was not so much the color of the water as the look on Peter’s face. As soon as he saw the door open, he looked around and his face grew bright red like it always did when he was caught doing something with me he was not supposed to. I knew that guilty look and it sent a terror through me. As I stared, Peter stared back at me as he held Phyllis’s head up so she could drink the water. Phyllis moaned and turned her head from side to side.

  I was scared. I wanted to write to Samantha and confide in her about what was going on, but I did not. I knew the church would find some way to blame me for what was happening. I felt very alone.

  Silenced No Longer

  There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.

  —Martin Luther King Jr., A Testament of Hope:The Essential Writings and Speeches

  That evening, I had a hard time pretending everything was okay. I could not even bring myself to be happy around the children. Phyllis commented on how extremely pale I was and felt my forehead to see if I had a fever. I finished the dishes and told everyone I was going to bed. The children were a little upset that I did not play with them like I usually did. I felt strange, and I could not stop my hands from shaking. I lay in my bed with the quilt pulled over my head and quietly cried myself to sleep.

  I awoke su
ddenly, unable to breath. I opened my eyes and felt I could not move or breathe. I was frozen in terror as I gazed up at Peter and felt his hand under my night dress. I opened my mouth to say something but nothing came out. What was he going to do to me?

  The house was quiet; I assumed I had slept through my alarm and that Peter was the only one up. My mind was racing. Was he already expecting me to fulfill the duties of his next wife? I remained stiff and felt as if I would pass out. As his hand went back up my night dress I tried to pull away. I was almost afraid to move, and I felt I was in a dream. After a few minutes, Peter sat me up and pulled me to the end of the bed. I was so scared and I had to concentrate to keep for passing out.

  Everything before Peter pulled me to the end of the bed is hazy and in between the haziness are huge blank gaps. I seemed to come to while at the end of the bed. I seemed to be coming back into my body after being gone for a while. What I do remember before that comes in tiny fluttering bits. These memories, which I choose not to recount, are terrifying but in themselves they are not even the whole story. The only person who really knows the full extent of what happened that morning is Peter.

  As I sat on the end of the bed, I had a keen sense that quite a bit of time had passed and that I did not know what had happened in that time. Only a few haunting scenes came and went like a haunting nightmare. My breasts were sore and so were other places of my body. I was gasping for breath and felt I would pass out. I would drift in and out of this state the entire rest of the time Peter was inside my room. I think the most terrifying thing is that I will probably never know everything that happened that morning.

  As I sat there on the end of the bed, I suddenly heard a little boy’s voice outside.