Clouds without Rain (11 page)

“Jimmy’s awful shook up,” Becker said.

“About the wreck?”

“That and Brittany Sommers being missing.”

Branden nodded and said, “They used to be sweethearts back in high school.”

Becker pulled closer and said, “Jimmy still loved her,” with an eyebrow raised. “She helped him out of a jam or two over the years.”

“You’re not his partner?”

“Foreman. He and I are the only two licensed surveyors in the outfit, and then we’ve got a crew of two more men who go out with us in two-man squads.”

“But you did talk with him about the wreck?” Branden prodded.

“On Tuesday,” Becker said. “We were supposed to finish up a couple of lots out north of Walnut Creek, but Jimmy couldn’t work. Or so he said. By noon, I’d heard about all I cared to hear on the Weaver wreck, so I took the new guy out for a training run.”

Branden gave a questioning look, and Becker explained.

“Since Larry Yoder hasn’t been working—he’s the fellow who used to hold prism poles for Weston—we’ve been short a man. We always need one to take data at the tripod and another to handle the prism rod.”

“How long has that been?”

“Since we lost Yoder?”

“Right.”

“Couple of weeks. Weston finally had to let him go officially. Wasn’t reliable. Jimmy tried to help him, but Yoder was a nut case, and he wouldn’t take his medicine. Had a drinking problem, too.”

“The bishop out with the Yoder family said Larry Yoder was upset about some of the surveying you were doing,” Branden offered.

“I reckon he was,” Becker said, and eased back on his swivel chair. “We finished up on some five-acre tracts in the hills north of Walnut Creek for Sommer Homes, but Yoder got angry about something when we started in on the farms out there. You never know with that kid, anyways. He and Weston had words, and Yoder went off the deep end. I’ve seen him that way before. He blows hot and cold. One month he’ll be down, brooding, and another he’ll be pumped. Either way his temper gets the better of him and Jimmy fired him. Can’t say as I’m sorry.”

“From what I’ve heard, your Larry Yoder was upset that those farms were being cut up. He’s got family out there.”

“That’s John Weaver’s deal. Or it was. We just do the surveying,” Becker said, somewhat defensively. “Anyway, Jimmy has put it all on hold, now that Weaver is dead and Brittany Sommers is missing.”

Branden considered that and asked, “You say Weston is over in New Philadelphia?”

“Yes. Trying to scope out new surveying deals. That’s a fresh area for us.”

“Let’s go back to what he told you about the wreck,” Branden suggested.

“More than I wanted to know. Got so as I felt guilty that I wasn’t out there myself. He even called me from the roadside after it happened.”

“I probably saw him make that call,” Branden said, remembering the chaos of the accident scene.

“He told me everything. It was like he couldn’t shake the thing. There was a backfire, and the horse went down. Buggy stalled. Semi came over the hill too fast. Air brakes squawking and hissing. The jackknife. Cab crashed into the buggy and the trailer overturned on a car as it skidded on down the hill.”

“That sounds about right,” Branden said and stared at the carpet, thinking about the crash. After a moment, he thanked Becker, saw himself out the back door and sat for several quiet minutes in his car, wondering if there was any point in talking to Becker again. It surely was Weston he needed to talk to, but maybe not. There would be MacAfee this morning, and then the facts of the crash would be well established. Briefly, he wondered what had happened between Sommers and Weston after he had left high school for college. Eventually, he walked back into the offices, hunted up Becker and asked, “Do you know if Weston has been, well . . . ‘involved’ with Sommers lately?”

“Couldn’t tell you,” Becker said and shrugged. “He never talks much about that sort of thing.”

The phone rang, and Becker wheeled his chair over to the desk. He said, “Hello,” listened for a moment and said, “How in the world did you manage that, Jimmy?” Then he grinned, gave a laugh, and waved Branden farther into the room. At intervals he said, “I’m NOT laughing. Which hospital? All right. Sure, we can work south of Walnut Creek instead. OK. You sure you’re all right? No problem. What? Nobody knows, Jimmy; she hasn’t turned up. What? Right. OK, bye.”

When he turned to Branden, Becker was smiling again, almost laughing. He tapped fingers on his knee and said, “That was Jimmy Weston, there. He’s got himself in an emergency room over in Dover. Fell off some boulders at a prospective site and cut himself all to pieces in a patch of wild raspberries along an old barbed-wire fence.”

14

Friday, August 11
10:38 A.M.

 

 

CAL Troyer bent over beside the three-story white frame house and turned on the water spigot for Andy Weaver, who held the open end of the hose down in a shallow irrigation ditch in the garden beside the house. The warm water from the attic tank ran the length of the hose, spilled out the end, and disappeared into the dry soil. Eventually, the soil began to darken with the water. Slowly, the dark patch moved forward in the trough between two ragged lines of beans.

Andy laid the end of the hose in the trough and ambled back to Cal. They came slowly around to the shaded front porch and took seats, side by side, on a deacon’s bench.

What was left of a large garden covered a scant quarter-acre beside the house. Beyond the garden there ran a sagging line of grapes, the thick shoots hanging with stunted new growth from wire strung between old posts. Behind the garden, three small, matching red barns with rusted metal roofs stood baking in the morning sun. Beyond that, high above the barns, there stood a windmill on corroded metal stilts. The white vanes of the windmill turned slowly from time to time in a light, irregular breeze.

The tin roof of the white house was painted a fresh, brilliant green, and red brick chimneys sprang from the peaks on either end of the roofline. Beside the house, the driveway was made of baked, packed earth. It came up to the house past a fenced area for a billy goat, and a sturdy wooden bench set on the lawn, taking the weight of three fifty-gallon drums of heating oil. The billy goat was munching on the end of a hay bale in the shade.

The long clothesline in front of the house was hung with the bishop’s recent wash, dark blue shirts, denim britches, and sheets and towels in faded colors. Scattered on the lawn, there were several old white stumps where trees had come down over the years.

A neighbor lady in an aqua dress, long white apron, and black bonnet came through the front screen door and past Cal and Andy, carrying another basket of the bishop’s laundry out to the clothesline. At the side of the house, her two youngest boys had set up sawhorses and were working in the heat, pink shirtsleeves rolled up, to install white-trimmed aluminum replacement windows in a downstairs room. By noon, the mother and her sons would be gone, and another neighbor’s buggy would wheel down the drive, bringing the bishop’s lunch.

Cal leaned back on the deacon’s bench and stretched his legs out. He took a handkerchief and ran it over his forehead and around his neck. He turned slightly to Weaver and said, “Losing their farms doesn’t mean they’d have to leave your congregation, Andy.”

“You should know better, Cal,” Weaver said gently.

“They’ll still have their homes and five acres. That’s enough for a garden.”

“It’s not just the men, Cal. I’ve got to think of their families, too.”

“They can take jobs. The way cottage industries are springing up around here, there are always going to be jobs for anyone who wants one. Furniture shops, sawmills, buggy factories, printing shops. You name it.”

“And where would their farms be?” Andy asked.

“They’d earn a living. Lots of Amish have gone that way since the tourists started coming.”

“To our ruin, I’m sure. Besides, I expect the tourists will disappear one day.”

“Amish are popular now, Andy. You’ll always have the tourists.”

“We’ve been persecuted before, Cal, and we will be again.”

“That’s a stretch, Andy.”

“We’re already hearing from children’s services that farming is too dangerous for the younger ones. They say there are too many accidents involving our children.”

“That’s not going to settle out for a long time, Andy.”

“I expect the day will soon come when some government agent will want to tell us how to raise our children, lead our lives, or handle our livestock. I predict those tourists of yours will grow to be judgmental, the more they learn of our ways. The locals are already like that enough, as it is.”

“Maybe true, Andy, but for now, the men could stay in the congregation and hold down jobs for a livelihood. They might have lost their farms, but they’ll still be Amish.”

“To live Amish has always meant to farm,” Andy replied. “To live independently and farm the land. And if a man has no farm, then what will he leave to his sons? Jobs in the city? Thank you, no.”

“There are plenty of young fellows working at jobs already,” Cal said. He took a hand fan out of a pocket at the end of the deacon’s bench and began waving it slowly in front of his face.

Andy did the same and said, “If a youngster takes a job, it is meant to be short term. So he can save enough money to buy his own farm. Then he can marry. Raise a proper family. Take responsibility for his own household. That’s the proper role for Amish fathers. Without the land, there can be no family. Besides, I’ve seen firsthand what idleness can do in a youngster’s life.”

Cal held silence.

Weaver got up slowly, and Cal followed him to the garden. The bishop bent over at the hose and moved it to the next irrigation ditch among the shriveled beans. He turned his eyes to the stationary vanes of the windmill and said, “First day, lately, we haven’t had some kind of a breeze. The wind has kept my attic tanks full, but if that stops, I’ll lose the garden.”

“Save water for washing and cooking,” Cal said and squinted at the sun. “Can’t remember a hotter summer.”

“We can use a hand pump on the shallow well for cooking. It’s the irrigation and the livestock I’m worried about. I suppose it’d be no trouble to rig a gas pump and a line to the pond out back, but that’s going dry too, and the livestock need it worse than the garden.”

“I saw one of your neighbors turning his fields under the other day,” Cal remarked.

“Henry Miller,” Andy said heavily.

The two walked to the nearest of the three barns and stood in the thin line of shade cast by the high roofline. Andy stood quietly for a spell, watching the water run from the end of the hose and disappear into the thirsty soil. In an almost offhand way, he eventually commented, “We’ll not be able to stay here, Cal.”

“That’s not like you,” Cal said.

“I can’t let these eight men take jobs off the farm.”

“Then hire a lawyer,” Cal said.

“That’s not the Amish way,” Andy said. “We’ll wait to see what Mike Branden can figure out with the lawyer. Maybe there is a way out.”

“What makes you think that?” Cal asked.

“I’ve got to try, Cal. Otherwise, as bishop, the only other advice I can give those families, in good conscience, is to move. Take the money they get for their farms, and make a fresh start, in another state. Someplace where the land values aren’t forcing families off their farms because of the taxes. Someplace where the tourists and the big home builders haven’t overrun the county.”

After several quiet minutes, Weaver drew Cal around the corner of the barn and whispered, “I found a rubber mask in a barn, Cal. A goat’s-head mask.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“When I’ve learned who all is involved, I’ll come for you, Cal. Until then, pray.”

“I’ll be ready.”

“I know, Cal,” Weaver said. “I know.”

15

Friday, August 11
11:22 A.M.

 

 

THE long white buildings of MacAfee Produce stood on the south side of Route 39, just below the hilltop town of Walnut Creek, where the road starts its descent into the Bulla Bottoms. Here, Walnut Creek cuts a wide and low, fertile valley into the surrounding highlands, and in a normal year, the flats would have been planted in abundant strips of corn, wheat, barley, and alfalfa. This year, the bed of Walnut Creek had already been baked to hardened clay.

Branden swung his truck into the parking lot, and found Bill MacAfee hosing out the bay of a new truck. Branden displayed his reserve deputy sheriff’s badge, and MacAfee held up two fingers, saying, “Two minutes.”

Branden had already talked with Robert Kent, one of the three accident witnesses, after Becker at Weston Surveying. MacAfee was the third of Ricky Niell’s witnesses.

When he had finished cleaning the truck, MacAfee stepped onto the cement loading dock and shook Branden’s hand, saying, “We can talk in the office.”

Inside, MacAfee’s office was a clutter of overstuffed filing cabinets, loose papers, and computer printouts. Cast-off magazines, ashtrays, used Styrofoam coffee cups, and wall calendars of young women in swimming suits. In front of his black metal desk, there was enough room for two small office chairs and a dusty, glass-domed gumball machine. Branden moved magazines from one chair to the other and took a seat in the narrow space facing MacAfee, his knees pressed against the front of the black desk.

With MacAfee standing behind the desk, Branden said, “I’d like to ask you what you can remember about the wreck last Monday on 515.”

MacAfee turned to a shelf beside his desk, ladled coffee grounds into the filter of a drip maker and said, “I don’t imagine there’s a thing about that wreck I’ll ever forget. It’s stuck in my head like a nightmare.”

He took the carafe into the hall, filled it with water at an old drinking fountain, returned, and poured the water into the machine. He flipped the switch and sat down as the machine started its first grumblings.