DC03 - Though Mountains Fall (22 page)

“But, Emma, she’s banned,” he said softly.

Emma nodded. “Jah. That’s why Dat wouldn’t help them. He can’t do business with her.”

“Neither can I,” Levi said, casting a sympathetic glance at Miriam.

“But no money will change hands,” Emma said. It was then that Miriam saw the little twinkle in her eye, the catlike smile. “So you wouldn’t be doing business with them at all; you’d only
be helping a neighbor in a time of need. Besides, it’s only for a few days. We’re a thousand miles from the nearest bishop, Levi. It will be over before anyone can say ‘Don’t.’ ”

He scratched his chin, and Miriam saw Emma’s little grin creep onto Levi’s face. “Well, I guess if no money changes hands. My loft is new and almost empty—you could put a lot of vines up there. But I’m thinking the work would go a lot faster with a hay wagon.”

He was right. A hay wagon was rigged with ropes. When the wagon pulled up to the barn with a load of hay the ropes were gathered from the corners and attached to a lifting hook hanging from the beam above the loft door. While that was being done, someone would unhitch the draft horses, walk them to the far end of the barn and hook them to the other end of the rope. A team of Belgians could lift an entire wagonload into the loft in a matter of minutes.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Miriam asked, giving him an out. “There will be talk.”

Levi gave Emma a little sideways smile. “Let the tongues wag,” he said. “Go home. Tell Domingo I’ll be there shortly.”

Quickly Miriam got herself back on the horse and took off at a gallop.

———

Kyra caught up with her in the barn as she was putting away the horse.

“Father Noceda moved all the church benches out of the way and told the people they could bring their beans into the church—a good idea, since it sits on high ground and it was a warehouse before it was a church. You know, he really is a good man,” Kyra said. “Pity he’s a priest.”

Levi arrived a half hour later with a team of Belgians pulling his hay wagon. The freshening wind put new strength into arms
and backs that had already seen a day’s work, and the hayforks flew. Dusk came and went, and they toiled on by lantern light as the wagonloads trundled out of San Rafael, around the ridge and up to Levi’s farm at the other end of Paradise Valley. Men, women and children labored all through the night, filthy and utterly exhausted.

Miriam and Domingo rode on the wagon with Levi as he drove home with the last load. At the barn, his horses leaned into the hoisting rope, lifting the last of their bean vines into the loft as lightning flashed, the sky rumbled, and black night paled to a yellow gray.

A steady rain began to fall as Levi pulled his wagon into the barn and took care of his horses. Miriam and Domingo propped each other up in the doorway to watch the rain thicken in the half-light of dawn. It fell softly at first, then harder and harder. Ten minutes after the last of the beans went into the loft the rain swept through in sheets, blowing, driving, gathering into little streams that wound through fields and down the lane, growing.

“It looks like my mother was right,” Domingo said, his voice raspy with fatigue. “This is no ordinary storm.”

———

The hurricane behaved exactly as the anciana had predicted, spending its fury on the coast and then pushing inland until it came up against the mountains. By the time it reached the foothills the tired winds merely hummed about the eaves for a few hours, too weak to tear off a roof, but frustrated clouds piled themselves in against the piedmont and dumped rain for three days. Streams cut gullies through plowed fields and washed out parts of the main road in the valley. There were few places in Paradise Valley where water could stand, so the runoff streamed out of the valley and wandered to the southeast in swelling
torrents. There would be terrible flooding in the lowlands, but Paradise Valley and San Rafael suffered very little damage.

Except for the bean crop. Most people didn’t see the long hard rain coming, and even if they had, most of them owned no barn big enough to shelter their crop. Everywhere rows of wilted vines rotted and melted into the mud. Most of the peasants would wait a few days and then go out with long faces and slumped shoulders to turn the entire crop under. It was going to be a long winter.

But not for Domingo and Miriam. On the fourth day the sun broke through. And on the fifth day, when the ground began to dry out and firm up, they went back to Levi’s farm. Kyra and her boys came with them, and together with Domingo’s cousins they pitched the vines down from the loft and piled them in neat rows in Levi’s pasture to finish drying.

“We probably lost a fourth of the beans from so much handling,” Domingo said.

“But we saved
three
fourths,” Miriam answered.

At noon Emma called everyone inside for lunch. Miriam tiptoed in tentatively, not sure what to expect, but Emma was prepared. She had pushed a small table up against the end of her long dinner table and covered both with one long cloth. She used a peso for a spacer, leaving a mere crack between the tables. On the main table sat large bowls of vegetables—creamed corn, tomatoes, butter peas and sweet potatoes—and on the little table at the end, smaller bowls of the same.

Miriam covered a little hiccup of a laugh when she saw the arrangement, and took her place at the smaller table without a word of direction, pointing for Domingo to sit opposite her. Domingo gave her a puzzled look as he sat down. Miriam said nothing; she just ran a finger down the divide between the tables, pressing the tablecloth into the void to show Domingo that the
letter of the law was being preserved. Emma was bending the rules as far as she could without breaking them.

Later, when the men had gone back to work, Miriam stayed behind in the house to help Emma clean up. All three of Emma’s children were napping and the kitchen was quiet; it was just the two of them. Emma was up to her elbows in a washtub full of dishes while Miriam dried.

“Thank you for that,” Miriam said quietly.

“For what?”

“The table. The way you set it up. You can’t know how much it meant to me. You’ve made the ban bearable. It was a generous gift.”

“It was nothing.” Emma was concentrating on her dishwashing, but now she looked up and gave Miriam that catlike smile. “Actually, it was Levi’s idea. He built that little table just for you and made sure it was the same height and width as the other one.”

Miriam nearly dropped a plate in shock. “Levi did that for me?”

Emma nodded. “For him to even think of such a thing is a real turning point, I think. It still makes him nervous to tread near the edge of the ordnung, but he’s learning. I believe it helps that there’s no bishop here.”

“He’s come a long way,” Miriam said. “The Levi I know would never have done such a thing.”

“Jah, I know. I’m so proud of him. I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to open him up like that. It’s just not the way he was raised.”

“He’s a lot like his father. And the Bible does say Gott chastises those He loves.”

“Jah, but whose life is
not
full of trials? Even the righteous lose crops and loved ones. Triumph and disaster alike, it’s all part of life. Our faith only helps us put it all in its place.”

“That’s true. I never thought about it like that.”

“Neither did Levi,” Emma said. “He’s still divided on it, but he’s trying.”

“What do you mean, ‘he’s still divided’?” Miriam asked.

Emma shrugged. “I get the feeling he’s watching me, and watching Gott, to see what happens. Helping save your bean crop, making this little table for you—it’s Levi’s way of testing things. I can see it in his eyes. He’s testing Gott, watching to see if punishment comes from bending the rules. But Levi’s mill grinds slowly, and it might be years before he makes up his mind.”

Miriam chuckled, sliding another plate onto the stack. “Well, you better hope nothing terrible happens in the meantime. He’ll blame you for sure.”

Emma shook her head. “No, Levi never holds anything against me. He loves me, and he knows I would never do anything to harm him. That’s not what worries me.” Her hands stilled themselves in the washtub and she fell silent for a moment, staring out the window.

“I’m afraid he’ll blame Gott.”

Chapter 18

T
he Benders hosted their annual Thanksgiving feast in late November of 1925, their fourth since coming to Paradise Valley, and it was bigger and brighter than ever. More than a hundred Amish came to break bread together, to celebrate the fruits of their labors as only very hardworking people can.

Emma found joy in it too, and most of all, sitting at the women’s table, she saw her mother had almost returned to her old self. Mamm was eating again and putting on weight. Her smile was back.

But when the meal was done, the turkey and ham and sweet potatoes and pies all ravaged, as Emma was helping clean up she saw her father standing apart from the others. Staring out over his fields he had that distant look in his eye, picking at his teeth with a wood splinter, and she could tell from the tilt of his head and the slump of his shoulders that he was troubled. A darkness had settled upon him.

There were plenty of women to help with cleaning up, so Emma left a stack of plates on a table and went to him.

“Are you all right, Dat?” she asked, touching his shoulder.

He stared blankly for a moment, shrugged and looked away.

“What’s bothering you?”

His chest swelled with a long sigh. “Your sister,” he said quietly.

He meant Miriam. Otherwise he would have named her, or at least said
My daughter
.

“I miss them too,” Emma said, the plural intentional. It was their first Thanksgiving without Miriam and Domingo, and she knew her dat missed Domingo almost as much as he missed his daughter.

“There’s a hole in the family,” he said. “We gather at a time like this to give thanks, and we have a lot to be thankful for, but I keep catching myself looking for Aaron and Miriam. And Domingo. It’s not the same. There’s a hole in my
heart
, too.”

Emma knew his heart, and she watched his eyes. Looking out over the tables of food and beards and bonnets in his yard she knew that here, finally, was what he wanted, what he had set out to accomplish in the beginning. This thriving community was the very reason the whole family had worked so hard these last four years. In many ways the sight of all these transplanted Amish, living and laughing and celebrating a fruitful harvest in the wilds of Mexico, vindicated her father’s heartfelt belief that people who honored Gott, worked hard and cooperated with one another, could thrive anywhere. But for her father, the achievement had come at a terrible price.

“It’s not your fault,” she said gently, rubbing his shoulder. “You only did what was right.”

He gave a little snort, shook his head. “What I
thought
was right. My stubbornness cost me a son, and now it has cost me a daughter as well.”

“What one man calls stubbornness, another might call courage and conviction,” she said. “Only Gott knows what the future
will bring. It was not your fault Aaron died, or that Miriam fell in love with Domingo.”

“But neither would have happened if I hadn’t brought us here.”

“Maybe so, but we don’t know what
else
might have happened. I’m pretty sure Mamm would not have lived this long if we hadn’t moved to a dry climate.”

“Maybe. I will not complain against what Gott has ordained, but I still wonder if I’ve done right.”

“You did what you
believed
was right. That’s all any of us can do.”

Her father looked at her then, and a smile of gratitude crinkled the corners of his eyes. “I guess in the end that’s all Gott asks of us.”

This was one of those moments, and she knew it. Her father was a man of principle, but Emma was one of the few people who could sway him . . . if she was careful. She’d been waiting for such a moment.

“No, Dat, that’s not
all
Gott asks of us,” she said, and let the words hang there a moment. “He also asks those who have been forgiven of their sins to pass it on. He asks us to forgive, too.”

It was a gamble, a risk she took willingly. But his eyes hardened.

“Gott asks us to forgive those who
ask
for forgiveness. Those who
repent
,” he said, then turned and walked away.