A Prayer for the Night (21 page)

Andy hoisted both arms over his head and threw them to his side in drunken frustration. He skittered sideways on the lawn, lost his footing, and fell over on his side. He lay, curled up, mumbling, until Jeremiah and John Miller came down off the porch, picked him up, and carried him, unconscious, into the barn. They laid him on some loose straw in one of the stalls, and when they came out, the people were starting to move again and to talk. In time, everyone seemed to settle back to normal.

Bishop Raber drew Andy’s father aside and asked, “Can you get him home?”

Stutzman nodded wordlessly, eyes cast to the ground, obviously deeply embarrassed.

Raber said, “I’ll have some men load him into your buggy in a bit.”

Stutzman nodded again, hesitated, and said, “We’re afraid of him, Bischoff. He hurts people when he’s drunk.”

“Has he hit you?”

“Yes.”

“Has he hit your wife?”

“No.”

“Has he broken things?”

“All over the house.”

“Why didn’t you say something to me?”

A humiliated shrug.

“We’ve got to do something.”

“What? He is our son.”

“The preachers and I need to make a decision about him,” Raber said solemnly. “You need to prepare yourself for the worst.”

“He’s planning to leave us. It’ll break his mother’s heart, Bischoff.”

“I know that well enough,” Raber said gently. “But isn’t her heart breaking now, anyway?”

 

IN the slow afternoon, before the women ate their traditional meal separate from and after the men, Jeremiah was able to coax Sara up onto crutches long enough to move out onto the front porch. She leaned on her crutches for several minutes, gratefully watching the youngsters run a marauding game of tag, and then asked for her wheelchair. Jeremiah wheeled the chair out to her, and they returned to the parlor.

When the women had finished eating and had washed up another stack of dishes, it was announced that pie would be served off the back porch. The men made it slowly around to the back and stood in line with the younger children for their pie. Cal Troyer took two plates to Jeremiah and Sara in the parlor, and sat with them while Jeremiah helped Sara eat and then finished his own pie.

Sara managed a “Thank you” of sorts.

Cal nodded and put the empty plates on an oil-lamp stand in the corner of the parlor. He sat back down, saying, “You’re doing better, Sara.”

She smiled crookedly, the muscles on her left side not quite cooperating with the right side of her face. She looked to Jeremiah and then to Cal and said, “It’s slow.”

Cal said, “I talked with Abe Yoder yesterday, down at Mt. Carmel East Hospital. He looks better. Should be released soon.”

Jeremiah said, “I suppose you’ve heard about Johnny’s things. His property.”

Cal shook his head and said, “What about them?”

“The Schlabaughs have agreed to sell everything, tractor and all, to raise money. So the church can buy more land close to here. The men will all help to raise a cash crop each year, so the Bishop will have funds he can use when someone needs a doctor.”

Cal said, “That’s all in the future. What about now? Are you two going to be all right?”

Sara gave Jeremiah another of her crooked smiles and said to Cal, “Be fine.”

Jeremiah followed with his own enigmatic smile and said, “You don’t need to worry about us one bit.”

Cal said, “If it was just the two of you, I wouldn’t worry. But with Red Dog White still running loose, that gives me cause to worry a lot.”

Jeremiah leveled his eyes at the pastor and said, “You also do not need to worry about him.”

 

AS most of the congregation was preparing to leave, Cal took the opportunity to sit in the parlor again with Sara and Jeremiah. Sara cradled her left forearm in her right hand and lifted her left arm as high as she could manage, about level with her earlobes. Jeremiah helped her hold it there for several seconds and then lowered her arm to her lap. They exercised the limb that way several times, and Sara said to Cal, “Supposed to keep moving.”

Her enunciation of the letter “v” in “moving” produced an awkward “w” sound. She said, “Moving,” again, and struggled to get a better “v,” this time coming closer to the correct pronunciation.

Cal encouraged her, saying, “If you keep at it, Sara, you’ll come along faster. The key is to keep trying.”

Sara nodded sternly and let her left arm settle into her lap. She held Cal’s eyes for a spell, turned aside and said, softly, struggling for some of the words, and watching Jeremiah’s eyes, “Jeremiah wants to marry me.”

“He’s a fine young man,” Cal answered.

“Got land,” Sara said.

Jeremiah explained, “Usually, it’s the land that holds a couple back. Land is so expensive. But, I’ve got our land all set up. My uncles have set a tract aside for me when I marry.”

“You’ll have to make some changes,” Cal said.

“We’ve already allowed so many accommodations to modern things,” Jeremiah said. “There are batteries under buggies for radios and lights, and cell phones everywhere. Johnny used to say we were all hypocrites. That we’d accept some things and reject others, without any consistency, without any sensible reasons. Hypocrites, Cal. That’s what he would say if he were still alive. How can we be sure what is right?”

Cal offered, “Only the Schwartzentruber sect is still completely backward. Can you all be Schwartzentrubers?”

“I couldn’t live like that, so close to the earth,” Jeremiah said. “But it’s the temptation that drives you mad, Cal. You think the English have such wonderful things. Turns out all they have is gadgets. If Johnny showed me anything, it’s that gadgets can’t make you happy.”

“So, you’re both ready to live Amish?” Cal asked, looking from one to the other.

Jeremiah said, “I am,” and glanced knowingly at Sara.

Cal said to Sara, “But?”

Sara tried for a sentence and failed. Eventually she managed, “Lose me. Lose Sara.”

Jeremiah took her hand and explained for her. “She’d lose herself, her identity. She’d be swallowed up in conformity, and who she could have been would fade with the years into something indistinguishable from the hundred other Amish women who have tied their lives to a bishop, a husband, the church. She’d lose herself, Cal. We’ve talked about this before. Right, Sara?”

Sara nodded.

Cal sat and pondered this, while his fingers brushed across his short white beard. He nodded seriously, then smiled and said to Sara, “You don’t know why God numbers the hairs on your head.”

Sara looked puzzled. She waited for him to explain.

Cal said, “In the scriptures, it states that God knows us so well that He has counted the hairs on each of our heads.”

Sara gave a lopsided nod, still puzzled.

“It’s not a statement about what God does. It’s not even about hair, really. It’s a statement about God’s capacity to know us, and recognize us, as individuals, Sara.”

“Amish—all—same.”

“Aren’t you Sara Yoder?”

A cautious nod.

“How many Sara Yoders are there who were born on your birthday, to your parents?”

“Just me.”

“Then this alone makes you unique. There is no one like you. There never can be. God’s ability to know you, to recognize you, and to acknowledge you as an individual is infinite. That’s what that scripture means.”

“I don’t see how that can be possible,” Jeremiah said. “All Amish are the same. Indistinguishable. That’s the whole point.”

“Think with me. You are different and distinct from every other human being because your path on earth is like no other’s. Where you have gone, when you have been there, is unique to you, and irreproducible. Even if someone tried to make themselves exactly like you, they’d fail in a thousand ways. They could never match your path on earth.

“Then, your path in life is solely yours. Your decisions, your dilemmas, desires, and responses. All of these are yours alone, and they are known perfectly and completely by God. No one else can respond to life exactly as you have done. No one ever will.

“Further, your time on earth is yours alone. Even if a million people shared your birthday, to the second, and your death, they will still be distinct and different from you because of the places they have been and the things they have done.

“It doesn’t stop there. As you walk your path on the surface of the earth, in the precise time limits of your existence, your path in God’s universe is completely and uniquely yours, and equally distinguishable to God. For one thing, you move about on the planet like no one else. Then, the earth is spinning from day to day, so that your location in the solar system is constantly circling. This circling path is made into a unique spiral by the concurrent revolving of earth around the sun. The pitch of this spiral is dependent on the seasons, the tilt of the earth on its axis. On top of that, our solar system is located in the galaxy, which itself is spinning through space, in a universe that is constantly expanding. Your universal path is a complex trajectory through space, made up of all these motions, simultaneously, and all God needs to have in order to identify you, and you alone, is one universal location at one particular point in time. Any particular point, at any particular time.”

Sara whispered, “God’s GPS.”

“On an infinite scale, yes. God’s GPS. And this is your identity, uniquely. It’s as much who you are as your personality is. God charts the individual trajectories of every living thing. He knows his creation. He numbers the hairs of our heads.”

Cal had said this all in a state of reverie, not really looking at Sara or Jeremiah, not actually noticing their reactions to his comments. When he looked up, finally, he saw that Sara was crying, and smiling intermittently, too. He leaned closer, took her hands into his, and said, “You alone are Sara. No one will ever be able to change that. To dress alike, and act alike, and live alike, as Amish, does not hold the power to diminish you. Not in my eyes. Not in God’s.”

Monday, August 2
2:30 A.M.

 

 

ANDY STUTZMAN took a pull on a pint bottle of whiskey and climbed out of his car, parked behind the grocery store at tiny Becks Mills. He circled around to the front and keyed John Schlabaugh’s unregistered cell phone to display the number of the last incoming call. At the public phone mounted on the front wall of the grocery store, he dialed the number and waited impatiently as it rang through.

It was Samuel White’s voice that came back to him, “Yeah? What?”

Andy said, “I’ve got your Holmes County drugs and money in a briefcase. You want it back?”

“Who is this?”

“Never mind that, White. Do you want your drugs back or not? Maybe I’ll just keep the money.”

“I don’t know who you are, pal, but you just bought yourself a world of hurt.”

“You’re wasting my time, White. I need an answer. Yes or no.”

“OK, yes. What’s the deal?”

“I’m just an Amish kid who needs to make a fast couple thousand. So I’m gonna keep some of your money. If you want the rest, you need to come out to Becks Mills.”

“How am I gonna find that?”

“Knock it off, White. You’ve met Johnny Schlabaugh out here half a dozen times that I know of.”

“When?”

“I’ll give you an hour. Then I’m gonna disappear, and you can kiss your junk good-bye.”

“I’ll need a couple of hours, anyway.”

“You’re wasting my time, again, White. One hour. Becks Mills. Be there.”

 

WHITE pulled a late-model Toyota 4Runner onto the gravel lot in front of the Becks Mills grocery store and found a black Amish buggy waiting for him at the edge of the store’s security lighting, with a young Amish man on the seat. White climbed out of the Toyota, palmed a small automatic handgun, and approached the buggy cautiously. Five feet off, in dim light, he brandished the weapon and said, “Either you’ve got what I want, or you’re a dead man.”

Sounding unimpressed, John Miller replied, “Give me a break, White. If you want your drugs and money, climb aboard.”

White looked around slowly, scanning for danger, and moved cautiously to the edge of the buggy. He pointed the gun at Miller’s head and climbed awkwardly up to the seat beside him. To Miller, he said, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but this isn’t going to turn out how you planned.”

Through the part in the black curtain separating the front of the buggy from the back, Andy Stutzman pointed the muzzle of a side-by-side, double-barreled shotgun at the back of White’s head, saying, “I think a 12-gauge coach gun trumps a peashooter any day of the week, White.”

White cursed and turned slowly to face the gun. Andy planted the muzzle behind White’s freckled ear, pushed his head back around, and said, “Over your shoulder, now, White, hand that thing back to me.”

White held his gun up to the side of John Miller’s head and said, “How’s about I just kill your friend here?”

Andy cocked both hammers on the coach gun and said, “You want to die, do you, White?”

“You’re Amish. You’re not gonna kill anyone.”

“I’ve left home, White. I can never go back. Wouldn’t live Amish now if I could.”

“You’re drunk, kid. I can smell it on your breath.”

“Been drinking, yes. But drunk, no. And my trigger finger is as twitchy as a squirrel’s tail. So I suggest you hand your gun back here, and we can get busy with the reason we’re out here.”

“OK, let’s do it,” White said, and handed over his gun.

“Next, White, so I know you won’t pull a fast one, put your hands behind your back.”

“Why?”

Andy poked the muzzle hard against the back of White’s skull and snarled, “Do it!”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” White said, and started to turn in his seat.