Fall from Pride (27 page)

Her eyes and nose were running. She wiped at them with her sooty sleeve and realized she was not burned.

Her mother and Martha emerged from the growing crowd, Lizzie and her husband, too. Ray-Lynn stood there, wringing her hands. “Get my paint ladder!” she shouted, and her sisters ran for it. She heard voices below her in the barn.
She wanted to scream down to ask if Gabe was all right, but her throat was raw.

With Ray-Lynn's help, Lizzie and Martha banged their father's ladder up under the loft window. It didn't reach, but Sarah didn't care. She was getting out.

She would have to dangle her feet to reach the top rung, but she knew this ladder, the feel of the rungs, how far it could tip. She saw that she would cut her hands hanging from the broken window, her artist hands, so she covered the jagged glass at the bottom with Hannah's apron, folded over. She hung there, smoke streaming past, clinging to her, billowing out. But just when she knew she'd have to let go, Nate was scrambling up her ladder to the very top, shouting.

“Hang on! I'll grab your legs and you can fall back on me!” She felt him grab her ankle, both ankles. It felt so good. So strong and safe.

“Gabe?”

“Alive but still out. Help is coming. I've got you! Let go! Trust me!”

His words pounded in her head. She did trust him. And she was going to have to learn to let go.

She fell against Nate and the ladder. Somehow he held on to her as the women below gasped, then cheered. Nate held her to him against the ladder. She put her arms around him and held on, even as he guided her down. She saw more of her people streaming across the field to help.

“Did you hear me say Peter Clawson?” she asked, coughing, her voice rough. It hurt to talk, but she had to.

“The bastard dared to show up first over at Eshes', then here, just business as usual—arson. I tackled him and Sheriff Freeman arrested him—with a drip torch in his bag.”

“I'll testify,” she insisted, hacking. “It would be wrong not
to. I'm going to have to go against my people on that—on other things. Oh, Nate,
Daad,
not our barn, too!” she sobbed as he handed her down the ladder to her father.

They heard the shriek of the approaching siren. They wanted her to lie down but, holding on to both Nate and her father's arms, with trembling legs she walked around to the front of the burning barn. The scene reminded her of the night they saved Noah from the Miller barn as her mother knelt over Gabe's prone form.

Coughing up gray mucus, sucking in air, then breathing pure oxygen from a mask while the firemen and Nate fought the fire, Sarah sat by her brother, too. In the end, they saved only the front wall and doors of the barn, where Peter Clawson had not used the drip torch, no doubt so that he could escape, but he'd never escape justice now.

In the midst of praying women, Gabe regained consciousness and moaned. The ambulance came to take him to the Wooster hospital with
Mamm
going along. With her sisters by her side—someone, blessedly, must have kept
Grossmamm
over at the Eshes'—Sarah looked up at her quilt square painting. It was sooty, charred at the edges; some of the color had crackled and blistered, but it was pretty much intact. It had come through the flames, just like her.

She glanced over at Nate again, still busy with the firemen, then back up at her painting. Instead of an abstract pattern, she pictured there a panorama of a barn raising with the Amish brethren lifting the wooden sections toward the heavens, and the women bustling around the long tables to feed everyone, and the hills of the Home Valley under a brilliant sky with puffy clouds but no smoke—and, like the golden sun, with lots of love shining over everything.

One month later

IT WAS WORSE THAN WHEN SHE TOLD HER family she was going to testify against Peter Clawson in a Cleveland courtroom. Now Sarah looked at the dumbstruck faces of each of her loved ones around the breakfast table. She had waited until they were all together. Gabe was home from the hospital and had started to grow his hair out where they'd shaved his head to put in stitches. Plans were set to rebuild the barn. But she wouldn't be here. She'd just told them she was leaving for Columbus.

“Just for a visit?”
Grossmamm
inquired in the stunned silence. “That will be nice.”

“Staying where?” Martha asked breathlessly.
Daad
's fork had clunked down on his plate, and
Mamm
's eyes swam with tears. Sarah knew it was what they'd been dreading.

“Staying with Nate's foster mother, Mary Ellen Bosley,” she told them, gripping her hands in her lap so they couldn't see how scared she was. She'd agonized over this ever since
the barn burnings had been solved. “She's a widow and has a spare bedroom and a nice glassed-in sunroom I can use to paint. I
have
to paint. It's part of me.”

“And we aren't?”
Mamm
blurted. “You'll be put under the
meidung!
”

“I know. I've thought it all through.”

“If you could paint here, more than decorations,”
Daad
asked, his voice very quiet, “would you stay, or is there another reason you are going to Columbus?”

“I need to find out if there's another reason. Yes, I think there is, but I need to give that time, a chance.”

“A chance?”
Mamm
jumped back in. “We don't live our lives by chance. And how will you get a hundred miles to the big city of your dreams?”

Sarah blinked back tears. She'd steeled herself for this, rehearsed it over and over, but she felt as if she was being ripped apart.

“I hired a car, the same driver we used when we went to see Lake Erie. Ray-Lynn offered to drive me there, her art gallery friends offered, Nate and his foster mother offered, Hannah offered, but—”

“All those people knew before us?”
Mamm
cried. “And Hannah? Her rebellion gave you this idea!”

“No, my own head and heart and hands gave me this idea,” Sarah said, fighting to keep her voice under control. “I am so sorry that what I need to do cannot be accepted here. I know our people strive to keep the community and our traditions honored and preserved. By painting precious scenes from our lives, I'll preserve all that in a new way, and I'm sure it will send more tourists here.”

She stood. Her chair scraped back much too loud. “I regret I will not be here to help with
Grossmamm,
” she added,
“especially now that Martha will have to take the half-moon pies into the Dutch Farm Table. Martha, I'm leaving you my buggy and Sally, and I know you'll take good care of both.”

“I'll help more with
Grossmamm,
”
Mamm
said, sniffling. “I didn't realize how much you two did there, and I'm grateful.” Sarah wasn't expecting that kindness. She couldn't hold back her tears.

“I am, too,”
Grossmamm
piped up. “But I want both of you girls—Gabe, too, when his bean heals—to meet someone you can marry, get a come-calling friend.”

Sarah could feel everyone's eyes on her, even as
Grossmamm
went on about “frolics in the good old days.”

“I'm not running away to be with Nate,” Sarah told them, “although I respect and—and love him. I'll be leaving late this afternoon. I can pack everything by then. I deeply regret that this decision cuts me off from the people I love, those I will paint with great affection, and that all of you will suffer as I will by our separation. But I have to do this. It's not the accepted thing but it's the right thing.”

She turned and ran, thudding up the stairs. Later, as she packed her things in large shopping bags, including the new sketchbook she had almost filled, Martha came in to help and Gabe poked his head in the door, as if to flaunt his twenty scalp stitches as he had in the hospital.

“I think Nate's a great guy,” he whispered. “He likes the Amish—maybe he could come live here instead.”

“It wouldn't work that way,” she told him, hurrying to the door to hug him before he got away. “It has to be like this.”

He hugged her back hard and fled.

She left her home and family and people at one-thirty that afternoon, trying not to look back at the Home Valley
as her hired car sped away and turned south on the highway. Everyone had embraced her in the kitchen, but no one had helped to carry her things to the car.

 

“I hope you will feel at home, but I'm sure it will take a while,” M.E. said as she and Sarah sat over lemonade and gingersnap cookies later that day in the sunroom where Sarah would paint when she purchased her supplies. An easel Nate had bought for her stood waiting to be used. She and M.E. were both watching the clock. Nate was on assignment in Southern Ohio with VERA but he said he'd be here about 6:00 p.m. For once, M.E. had refused to meet him somewhere so he could avoid coming down the street past the place where his parents had died.

“You've been wonderful, you and Nate both,” Sarah said. She was without her bonnet and prayer cap and wore her hair down her back in a loose braid. She figured she'd cut some of it soon, maybe to shoulder length, because, for the first time in her life, it felt too heavy. She also wanted to get some other clothes, conservative ones, but not Amish. Today, she'd borrowed a long denim skirt and long-sleeved blouse from M.E. She was only Amish inside now, not outside, since she'd taken this big step, she kept telling herself.

“And a phone call from home already!” M.E. said. “So how is our friend Ray-Lynn? She said she had a surprise for you that you'd tell me.”

“Her good news is that Peter Clawson is going to have to spend so much money for his legal defense that he agreed to let her buy out his share of the restaurant.”

“I thought she didn't have the money.”

“She doesn't, but Sheriff Freeman does.”

“So he's back in her good graces?”

“I wouldn't count on it, not the way she operates. But I still hope she'll partner with me to get my work sold in the Homestead area. M.E., if you don't mind, I'd like to walk down the street to meet Nate. I know he hates to go by the lot where he lost his family, and I thought maybe I could help him through that.”

“I've tried, but not with the same skill set you have, my dear.” She walked Sarah to the front door with her arm around her shoulders and gently closed the door behind her.

It was a lovely but humid early July day. Several people had their sprinklers twirling water on the lawns they had cut with loud mowers. Kids played in the end of the court, just like Nate probably did when he was young. No sidewalks here, yet there was too much concrete and noise. Well, she'd get used to all that.

She walked briskly to stand in front of the empty, overgrown lot where Nate's parents had died. She could see a ragged concrete foundation amid the weeds and wildflowers. The city owned the land now, but evidently no one had wanted to buy and build here. She was standing about ten feet from the curb in the tall grass when she saw a car turn into the court. It was Nate. No VERA, but he had to give his partner back at night when he was here in Columbus.

She wondered if he'd drive on by, not recognizing her or refusing to stop, but he didn't. Frowning, yet looking relieved to see her, he turned off the engine and got out, slamming the car door. But he didn't budge from the curb.

“Thank God you're here,” he said, “but why
here?
”

“So we can put our pasts to rest and go on. Outsiders—we've both been that in a way. We've both lost our families, but—I think—we still have each other.”

He nodded but did not advance to where she stood her
ground—the ground, she knew, he had not so much as looked at, let alone walked on, for many years.

“You won't believe what happened today,” he said, still not moving. “Stan Comstock is retiring in six months, and the state fire marshal has offered me his northeast Ohio supervisor job. If I take it, I'll be stationed not far from Homestead.”

“Oh!” she said. “That's wonderful, and my peop—the Amish—will love you.”

“But will you love me? If so, I think that move is something we should decide together.”

“Yes, I do and will love you, Nathan MacKenzie, and I'm not even jealous of VERA anymore.”

He didn't laugh, though his blue eyes lit up. He strode across the wild-grass space between them, lifted her and held her tight.

“Then, wherever we are together—in Amish country or even here on this sad spot,” he said, tears in his eyes, “I'm home.”

“
Ya
—yes—me, too!”

EACH TIME I VISIT AMISH COUNTRY NOW, I SEE it with new eyes. To write about something, for me, is to become part of it. Unlike most writers who begin with plot or character, I almost always start with a place that intrigues me.

Special thanks to the Amish of Holmes County at such places as the Berlin Helping Hands Quilt Shop and other venues who answered questions. Ray-Lynn's restaurant is partly based on Grandma's Homestead Restaurant in Charm, Ohio, and partly on the various Ohio-based Dutch Kitchen restaurants. I am especially grateful to the Amish who were kind enough to let me visit their barns and to the Amish barn builder, or timber framer, who sketched various styles of barns for me. And I appreciate the interview I had with Shasta Mast, Executive Director of the Holmes County Chamber of Commerce and Tourism Bureau. Her insights were very helpful.

Quilt square paintings on barns are becoming popular in the Midwest. One place to view these online is www.monroecountyohio.net/tourism/barns. Interesting
articles about Amish life are available at an excellent website at www.amishnews.com/amishseries.html. Clinton County in Ohio has an excellent Barn Quilt Trail for tourists to enjoy. For information on that, contact Barn Quilts, 2846 Starbuck Road, Wilmington, OH 43177.

Anyone interested in learning more about the Amish book, the
Martyrs Mirror,
in an English translation, can enter in Google “The Martyrs Mirror” + “English translation.” Some of the woodcuts and etchings of that book inspired Sarah's nightmares about people being burned tied to ladders—the tragedy of the Amish past when they were persecuted in Europe for being Anabaptists.

The Amish, like many Americans, have been hit hard by the national and global recession. Melvin Troyer, an Ohio craftsman who makes Amish furniture, has said they've been marking items down to “rock bottom” to keep more members of the Amish community earning a living.

Special thanks to Meredith Bair, LPN and Hyperbaric Technician, for her information on burn victims and their treatment at the Cleveland Clinic.

VERA is very much based on the specialized vehicle of the office of the state fire marshal of Ohio; however, it is called MIRV for Major Incident Response Vehicle. I have, however, fictionalized the state fire marshal's name and staff. Any mistakes in investigating techniques are my error, not theirs.

Of course, one of the joys of visiting Amish country is the delicious, homemade food. This story mentions different, favorite dishes, but the half-moon pies were the main focus. A recipe for these can be found online at such charming sites as www.anniesrecipes.com. These pies—which I also see are called preaching pies sometimes, probably because they are
good ones to take for individual people at church—are also similar to the popular Amish fry pies.

The other books in the
Home Valley Amish
Trilogy will focus on new main characters—next time Hannah Esh gets center stage—but Sarah and Nate will also return. Happy reading, quilting and eating—and just appreciating life day by day.