DC03 - Though Mountains Fall (10 page)

She stared at him for a moment until she felt herself melting under his astonishing strength.

“Sí,” she said softly, and then remembered the priest. “Will you come with us,
por favor
?”

The priest gazed longingly over his shoulder for a second. There were soldiers wandering in and out of his rectory, laughing, smoking, cursing.

“Sí, I might as well. I have nothing left here,” he said, and climbed into the carriage.

———

Domingo drove the lead carriage himself, since Paco was wounded. Miriam sat up front beside her husband on the driver’s seat.

As soon as they got under way Domingo leaned close and muttered, “Lo siento, Cualnezqui. I would have done anything to keep this darkness from your wedding day.”

She smiled, tightening her grip on his arm. “We are together. I am content.”

They rode along for a little ways before she asked, “Domingo, what will we do with Father Noceda? Your house is too crowded already. I wasn’t even sure where
we
would sleep, and now there is another.”

He grinned. “I was going to save the surprise for later, but now I think it is best to go ahead and tell you. Over the winter my nephews made bricks, and in the evenings I built you a house. It is only two rooms, but big enough . . . for now.”

Warmth flushed through her and she blushed, knowing what he meant.

“I know how to make bricks, too,” she said. “When the time comes that we need to add on, we will do it together. Together, we can do anything.”

Shocked speechless by all she had witnessed, Rachel didn’t say a word all the way home. Her father pulled up to the corral, stopped, and just sat there for a minute, watching smoke rise from the ruins of Levi’s barn a quarter mile to the west.

“Harvey, leave the wagon hitched and wait here. You and me will be going to Levi’s shortly.” He set the brake and climbed down from the wagon. “Rachel, come with me.”

She followed her dat without a word, head down, past the corral and up the ridge, almost to the tree line. This was about Jake, and she knew it. She’d seen her dat’s wheels turning as he pieced it all together during the ride home. He knew she had lied to him. Trailing along in her father’s footsteps as he trudged up
the steep face of the ridge she couldn’t help thinking of Isaac, following Abraham.

Please let there be
a ram,
she prayed.

He sat down on an outcropping of rock overlooking his farm, took off his hat and patted the rock beside him.

“Sit,” he said.

She sat.

He was silent for a minute or two as he gathered his thoughts, and then he said, quietly but sternly, “I want you to tell me the truth.”

She tugged at her kapp strings, thinking. There would be no more lies, but her whole future might very well depend on how she shaped the truth.

“Do you remember when I told you about the night I was chained in El Pantera’s barn at Diablo Canyon?”

Caleb nodded curtly. “Jah, I remember well. You said Jake knocked out the guard and that was how you escaped.”

“There was more to it than that.”

“Tell me the whole truth, Rachel. I want to know everything.”

“The guard came to me alone in the middle of the night. To harm me.” She hesitated then, embarrassed.

“You don’t have to say any more about that,” her dat said. “I understand.”

“He came into the stall where I was chained, put his hand over my mouth and told me what he was going to do. He would have done it, but Jake came and stopped him. Jake caught him from behind with his handcuff chains and choked him.”

“Jah, so that much was true, but it wasn’t the
whole
truth, was it?”

She took a deep breath and her gaze dropped away from her father. “No, Dat. The guard was dead. Jake never
meant
to kill him, but it was dark as pitch and he couldn’t see. He only
wanted to stop the man, to make him pass out, but Jake was half crazy with fear and I guess he held the chain too long, too tight. I lit a match and . . . it was awful.”

“Are you sure the man was dead?”

Recalling the sight, she was overcome with emotion for a moment. Finally she managed, “Jah. There was no doubt. I only saw his face for a second, but it was a horrible sight. When Jake came to his senses he ran away to the other side of the barn. He didn’t see what I saw.”

“So Jake believed the guard was still alive?”

“No, not at first. He was so sure he killed a man that he nearly lost his mind. The flames of hell flashed before his eyes and he couldn’t think of anything else. He didn’t hardly know where he was after that.” Now she clutched at her father’s arm, pleading her case. “Dat, we only had one chance to escape and we needed Jake to be alert. Domingo saw how shook up he was, so he lied to him. Domingo told Jake he saw the guard breathing, that he was only unconscious.”

“But Domingo knew the man was dead?”

“Jah, he took the guard’s weapons. He knew. When Jake asked me if Domingo was telling the truth, I lied, too. I said yes, the guard was alive, and Jake believed me because he trusted me. He was all right after that. Dat, I don’t believe we would ever have made it out alive if we hadn’t lied to Jake about the guard.”

Her father’s jaw tightened and he stared straight ahead.

“So why didn’t you tell him after you got home? It’s been seven months, Rachel. The boy you love has been walking around in danger of hell’s fire for seven months, and he didn’t even know it. All because of you. Why didn’t you tell him the truth?”

She hung her head and began to cry softly. “I was afraid he would be sent away and his father wouldn’t let him come back. I didn’t want to lose him.”

Her dat stared into space a bit longer, and then as he jammed his hat back on his head and started to rise he said something that cut her like a knife.

“The truth is more important than what you
want
, child. I’m disappointed in you.”

The dam broke then. Rachel Bender could bear almost anything, but not her father’s disappointment. She lay on the rock with her face on her arms and wept.

“Jake will confess,” her father snapped. “He will have the chance to repent before Gott and his brethren, and cleanse his soul. A man’s soul is no one’s plaything, Rachel.”

Then he stalked off down the hill and left her alone.

Chapter 8

E
mma clutched baby Will tight with one hand and hung on to the buggy rail with the other. Levi was pushing the horse harder than he should, his eyes fixed on the thick column of smoke in the distance. Little Mose and Clara clung to each other in the back seat as the buggy jostled hard over rocks and through ruts, flying past the other buggies and wagons.

She tried to calm him, once. “There’s no need for such haste, Levi. What’s done is done.”

But Levi only leaned forward and whipped the reins harder. “You never know. We might still save something.”

He let out a long wail of anguish as soon as they were close enough to see. The barn had already collapsed in on itself, a tangled mass of charred rubble still belching smoke and flame from between the adobe foundation walls. A lone mule and a draft horse looked up at them from the kitchen garden as their buggy bounced into the yard. A few chickens pecked at the dirt by the smokehouse, but there were no other signs of life. Dead horses and cows lay scattered in the barn lot.

The open front door of the house hung by one hinge, smoke crawling out the top of the doorframe. The roof was still intact.

Levi jerked the buggy to a stop and leaped out, running. He grabbed a bucket from the back porch, filled it from the horse trough and rushed into the house. Two other buggies rolled up as Levi stumbled out the door and doubled over, coughing and gagging.

They found more buckets, and the women carried water while the men doused the flames and dragged smoldering cabinets out of the house.

“It’s only the cabinets,” Levi wheezed. “The rafters never did catch, and adobe walls don’t burn.”

By the time Dat and Harvey arrived the fire was out. Levi had destroyed his coat beating out the flames, and one of the cabinets left a nasty burn on his forearm, but the house was still standing.

In the barn lot, the men loaded two dead cows onto wagons to be strung up and butchered. Even though it was a Sunday, they couldn’t afford to waste the meat.

———

In the evening, after everyone left, Emma walked out to the barn lot where Levi stood alone, leaning on a shovel outside the smoldering ruins of his barn. He was completely exhausted, his beard singed, his shirt filthy and torn, but beneath the weariness she could see rage in his eyes.

“It could have been worse,” she said softly, holding little Will on her hip. “We still have our house, and the fields were too green yet to burn.”

Levi sighed heavily, glaring at the carnage. “Besides our stores of hay and grain we lost a good mule, a milk cow, a yearling Guernsey bull, a fine kid-broke draft horse, a wagon, a harrow and a planter. All gone,” he said, his voice a raspy whisper from
fatigue and smoke. “Was this Gott’s doing, Emma? Punishment for our unconfessed sin?”

She rubbed his shoulder. “Aw, Levi, everything bad that happens is not Gott’s punishment. Sometimes it’s just bandits. There are bad people in the world.”

He still refused to look at her. “Then why did they only burn
our
barn? Why not someone else’s?”

“Ours was the first one they came to, that’s all.”

“A lot of hard work, wasted.”

Emma shook her head, put an arm around him. “But it’s only work, Levi. Our children are safe. The things we lost are only things, and we have family and good neighbors to help us rebuild. We’re going to work every day of our lives anyway, no matter what comes, and even now, with the help of Gott and neighbors we will want for nothing. We will still have food to eat and a roof over our heads. We are blessed.”

Watching his eyes, she saw that he remained unconvinced. From birth, his heavy-handed father had pounded it into him that no sin would go unpunished, ever. She could see it still, in Levi’s angry eyes, and she knew his thoughts. The two of them had sinned before Gott and had never confessed publicly. In Levi’s world, every ill wind was divine retribution.

“We are cursed,” he said.

Shifting Will to her other hip she smiled patiently and kissed his cheek.

“No, Levi. We are blessed. In time, you will see.”

He looked down at the baby she was holding and gently ran his blackened fingers through Will’s curly brown hair. When his eyes met hers she saw it—the glimmer of hope, the beginning of faith. Levi trusted her. In time, he would come to know the Gott of love and forgiveness that she knew.

In time.

The butchering of Levi’s cows kept some of the men busy all afternoon, but they managed to gather in Caleb’s barn that evening. Because of everything that had happened there would be no youth singing, although the church benches remained in place.

They were all there except Levi, sitting shoulder to shoulder on a couple of benches in the back—Caleb’s son-in-law Ezra, John Hershberger, Ira Shrock and the five new men. Caleb stood before them, and with grim determination told them everything Rachel had confessed about what happened that night in El Pantera’s barn at Diablo Canyon. There were gasps of astonishment, along with a few grunts and groans as he talked, but no one interrupted.