DC03 - Though Mountains Fall (40 page)

Dat went straight up onto the tracks and began stepping from crosstie to crosstie like a child, hands clasped behind his back. Rachel kept pace on even ground, letting him have his space. He kept going for nearly a mile, his head down watching his step, his hat brim covering his eyes, so he was nearly upon the workmen before he noticed them. A clank of metal caused him to stop and look up.

There were two of them, next to a small handcar with their backs to him. One of the workmen bounced his full weight on a claw-foot pry bar, trying to break loose a stubborn spike. The pry bar slipped off and he fell down, busting a knuckle.

Dat moved a step closer, watching. The two workmen eyed him suspiciously, but they didn’t speak.

“Try it from the other side,” Dat said, pointing at the spike.

The one with the pry bar ignored him, cinching his coat tighter about him and peering up at the sky. Now that Rachel
could see them clearly she thought the two men looked Mexican, but she didn’t seriously entertain the notion until the man her father had addressed turned to his partner and spoke in Spanish.

“I want to go home,” he said wearily. “I wish I was back in San Luis Potosi, where the weather doesn’t crack my bones and we don’t have to put up with these ignorant yanquis.”

Her dat stared blankly for a moment, as if he hadn’t understood, but Rachel saw the narrowing of his eyes. Suddenly his anger boiled over and he said, in flawless Spanish, “In San Luis Potosi you would live at the mercy of a rich haciendado. You would work all day in the scorching heat for a few pesos while bandidos steal your burro and federales take your women. The
jefes
politicos would burn your church and throw your priest in jail, and you would have to live in a mud house with scorpions and snakes. If life is so terrible here, why don’t you go home?”

Both of the Mexicans froze, staring at him. “
Su español es muy bueno
,” the other one said in a hushed tone.
Your Spanish
is very good
.

“Sí,” Caleb spat. “Most of the ignorant yanquis around here speak Spanish very well. Perhaps you should choose your words more carefully.” Before they could answer he turned his back to them and stalked away, back toward Levi’s house.

As he brushed past Rachel, she heard him mutter, “Even here, I can’t get away from it.”

He kept up an angry pace, coiled fists swinging at his sides. Rachel had to trot to catch up.

“Dat, I think maybe you were too hard on those men. They meant no harm.”

His face was red, his eyes like stones. “I’m sorry, it just offended me. Anyway, it don’t seem right for people to be working on the day we put Emma in the ground.”

She waited a while before she answered, letting him walk off some of the venom. But something had to be done. The whole world was out of kilter when Caleb Bender became irrational.

She finally touched his arm, gently, and said, “Dat, it’s a weekday, a regular workday for those men. They were only doing their job. They didn’t even know Emma—there’s no reason to be angry at them.”

No answer. Instead he kept walking.

She took his arm to slow him down and pleaded, “Listen to me. You haven’t been right since we came back to Ohio. You never talk, you never laugh, and you’re always angry. Everyone tiptoes around you, praying for the day you’ll be yourself again. Please talk to me. What’s wrong?”

“
Everything
, Rachel. Nothing has been right since we left Paradise Valley. I still don’t know what Gott expects from me, and I grow weary of asking. Nothing ever changes. No matter what I do I’m still a broken old man who’s lost everything . . . and now Emma. I’ve searched and prayed, and still I don’t know Gott’s question. How can I answer if I don’t know the question?”

“What question? What are you talking about, Dat?”

His voice softened perceptibly, but he wouldn’t look at her. “Something Emma said to me on the train, on the way home from Mexico—that we don’t always understand Gott’s purposes, that He uses our failures to teach us, to help us grow. Emma believed Gott was asking me a question, and she said the rest of my life would depend on my answer. Rachel, I still don’t know what she meant . . . and her voice haunts me. I can hear her like it was yesterday.”

“So can I. I miss her so.”

“There will never be another Emma, that’s for sure. I don’t see how anybody can be so like me and yet so different.”

He had calmed down a little and slowed to a more leisurely pace as they approached the woods where the trail led back to Levi’s. It was easier to talk now.

“She
was
a lot like you, Dat. Emma was wise.”

A faint smile came to his face, the residue of fond memory. “Sometimes a good deal wiser than I am, I’m thinking.”

Rachel shrugged. “She just saw things different. It’s like she could see inside people and know what they needed.”

“You mean like Levi.”

“Exactly. Emma was always so good with him. She said no one had ever shown him gentleness or patience, so she was gentle and patient with him. I’ll never forget the day Miriam and Domingo drove up to help with the barn raising at Levi’s. It was right after they got married. Miriam had on her Mexican clothes, and her hair was down in a braid. Levi wasn’t sure what to do, so Emma took him off to the side and talked to him. She didn’t think anyone was listening, but I can still hear her voice to this day. She said, ‘Who has been forgiven much, loves much. Gott is love, and love forgives. Who are we if we don’t do the same?’ I saw the change come over him then. From that day on Levi treated Miriam and Domingo like family. Emma always knew how to talk to him.”

A memory washed over her as they came out of the woods by Levi’s cornfield, and she couldn’t resist a chuckle. “Dat, you never saw that little table, did you?”

“What table?”

“In Emma’s kitchen, in Mexico. After Miriam was banned Emma got Levi to build a smaller table the same height as their kitchen table, and whenever Miriam would visit, Emma would push it up to the end of the big table so Miriam could sit right beside her. She used to put a peso between the tables for a spacer. I’ll never forget what she told Miriam. ‘I’ll give the width of a
peso to the ban,’ she said, ‘and everything else to love.’ Like I said . . . Emma had your wisdom.”

She went on a few paces before she realized her father was no longer walking next to her. He had stopped several paces back and was just standing there, staring across the fields to the east, breathing through his mouth.

“Dat, are you all right?”

As she drew closer she noticed the faint line of silver at the bottoms of his eyes.

He spoke softly, with a kind of reverence in his voice. “Emma didn’t get that bit of wisdom from me. It came from her mother.”

“What do you mean?”

“When Mose was born, right after we moved to Mexico. We knew the timing wasn’t right, and I wanted to—”

“Dat, you
knew
?”

“Jah, Rachel, we can count. It was your mother who talked me into letting it go—not saying anything to the church. Mamm’s exact words were, ‘Is not love greater than the law?’ Sometimes, when somebody speaks the truth in just the right words it fits into you like a key in a lock, and you know it like an old friend. It seems to me, now, the best of Emma’s wisdom came from her mother.”

His voice broke with this last. He turned away from Rachel, and his eyes focused on the hill a mile away where Emma now rested. A relentless wind tugged at his hat brim.

“Rachel, you go on back to the house now, and tell them don’t hold supper for me. I got some more walking to do. Tell Mamm I’ll be back by dark.”

Caleb stood alone in the slanting light, in almost the same spot where he had stood among a host of others at noon. He
held his hat loosely at his side and rubbed his bald head as he looked down on the mounded grave.

“Even now,” he said softly, “my children teach me. Emma, I don’t know if it came from Gott or out of your own true heart, but what you said was right.

“These last few months I been searching high and low, trying so hard to see what Gott wanted me to learn from failure, from losing my farm—a house that will one day crumble to dust and land that won’t remember me. And all the while the real question was right there in front of me. I know now what made me bitter. I know why Gott turned His face from me. His Word is plain. I know you tried to tell me, Emma, but some people are so close, so like a man’s own mind that he doesn’t really hear them until they’re gone.”

He took a deep, shuddering breath, wiped his eyes on a sleeve and whispered, “But I hear you
now
, child. I see the truth, finally. I want you to rest easy, and know it’ll be all right. I’ll make everything right.”

———

It was dark by the time Caleb got back to Levi’s. The windows glowed with the soft yellow light of lanterns, and as he came through the back door he was met with the familiar acrid smell of kerosene.

Mamm looked up at him from a hickory rocker, and he gently prodded her shoulder.

“We have to get on home,” he said. “I need to get an early start in the morning.”

Chapter 33

R
achel stayed on at Levi’s after the funeral to take care of the children until other arrangements could be made. Ida Mae kept Tobe. He would most likely stay with her until he was weaned.

Levi barely touched his breakfast. He said nothing, even to his children, his only expression an empty, stony glare. He ate a few bites and shoved the plate away, then stuffed a hat on his head and went out without a word.

Clara and little Will stood on a chair and helped Rachel with the dishes while Mose went to help his dat with the chores. Mose was almost five now and already a willing worker. When the housecleaning was done Rachel walked Clara and Will over to Ida Mae’s to check up on their new brother.

“He’s fine,” Ida said, handing over the swaddled bundle. “No trouble at all. A sweet boy, and I’m thinking he’s going to be a handsome little woodcutter.”

Rachel pulled back a corner of the blanket and peered at the sleeping face. “He looks just like his mother,” she said, and
it brought a lump to her throat. “Oh, Ida, I miss her so. I can’t imagine a world without Emma in it. To think of her now, up there on that bald hill . . .”

She could see it through the window, that naked green dome a mile away, wearing a white picket fence like a lopsided crown, and a thought came to her. It was a wonderful idea, and she didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of it before.

“Ida,” she said, “can you keep the little ones for a while? There’s something I need to do.”

Ida Mae gave Rachel a dismissive wave, laughing. “Jah, what’s a couple more? Go!”

———

Rachel ran back to Levi’s, hitched a mule to the hack, tossed a shovel in the back and drove to the nearest woods. Walking the edge of the woods, the shovel on her shoulder, she soon found what she was looking for: an oak sapling, a little taller than she was, symmetrical with a good straight trunk the thickness of the shovel handle.

She smiled. “How about this one, Emma?”

It took her nearly an hour to dig it up, saving as large a root ball as possible, and then her ambition caught up with her when she tried to lift it. By the time she got it loaded on the hack she was filthy from head to toe, and smiling with deep satisfaction. It was perfect.

Driving the hack up the hill toward the picket fence she saw the lone figure of a man standing in the graveyard with his hat in his hands, head down. She hadn’t expected to meet anybody, and after a quick, embarrassed inventory of her grimy hands, muddy feet and filthy sweat-stained dress she thought seriously about turning around. But when she looked up again she was close enough to recognize him, and she felt a little foolish.

It was just Levi.

The graveyard sloped gently down from the crest of the grassy hill. Rachel pulled up to the fence and set the brake. Levi stood silent beside the fresh mound, never once looking up at Rachel. Little Mose stepped out from behind him, a miniature copy of his dat in his wide-brimmed hat and bowl haircut. He smiled when he saw his aunt Rachel, and came running.