Kornwolf (37 page)

Auntie said nothing. The sound of his voice triggered no response. She didn't even flinch.

At last, the pain began to subside, settling now to a burning rash.

Ephraim wondered how Auntie had known about this—his condition, his festering wound.

Could talk of a shooting have reached her attention?

Had somebody sighted and drawn a bead on him?

Or had it been one of the city cops in the decontamination room? Had one of them spotted his injuries during the hosing and mentioned them, later, to Auntie?

None of these scenarios seemed very likely, yet none was discountably far-fetched either.

As for the sound of his voice not perturbing her, rumors could have been circulating.

Moreover, Auntie may never have placed any faith in his diagnosis to begin with. That is to say: she might not have believed he was mute in the first place—and so, not reacted.

Again, these explanations were feasible. But Ephraim had trouble believing them, somehow. Auntie had always known more, he felt, than anyone living might have suspected. There was an air of omniscience about her. Maybe, then, she could help him now.

But first, the lead shot would have to be dug from his backside. The tissue was badly infected. The pain to come would be nearly unbearable.

He leaned forward to grip the desktop. His fingers dug into the wood. He braced himself.

Slowly, she started working the tips of a pair of tweezers into the wound.

Locking his gaze to the floorboards, he held on in rigid suspension as, one at a time, a half dozen pellets were dug from his backside.

He almost vomited.

Forcing his mind back to Auntie Grizelda, he searched for an out …

While either he couldn't remember clearly, or hadn't been conscious for most of the arraignment, one specific remark by the juvenile attorney who'd represented him lingered: the reference he'd made to some unpronounceable madness running within the family.

What did that mean? The
Bontrager
family? Or did it have something to do with his mother?—his mother, about whom he knew so little, and most of whose family had moved away—with the rest thinning out to distant cousins from outlying districts. Virtual strangers … On several occasions in youth, he had seen them in wagons, exchanging words with his father.

He'd once met his uncle Aaron too. But Aaron hadn't seemed crazy at all.

Surely, there had to be some explanation. Auntie Grizelda might know what to make of it …

The final grain of shot was extracted. It plinked in a tray from the medical kit. Water splashed into the metal pan. The towel was wrung out again. Dabbing gently, Auntie washed his wounds with soap. She rinsed and carefully dried the skin. Then she applied more iodine. Once again, Ephraim winced.

The procedure was over.

Behind him, Auntie stood and continued dabbing his shoulders and back with the towel. “There,” she mumbled under her breath, as though to say, soothingly,
Better, much better
…

She put down the towel, uncapped a bottle and began to rub his neck with oil.

He hadn't felt anything less disturbing, more soothing, since Fannie had held him last.

“
Auntie?
” he broke the settling calm. He spoke in German. “
Who was my uncle?
”

Her fingers lifted away from his skin. Ephraim sensed a flash of surprise in her. Slowly, he turned to regard her expression.

She looked surprised, if somewhat amused.

But before she could answer (or not) his question, a rumble of hoofbeats and carriage wheels pounding on asphalt sounded from down the road. A patrol was approaching. Grizelda shot to attention. She leapt to the candles and snuffed them. She doused the fire in the stove with water. Then she pulled Ephraim away from the window. She ushered him quickly into the kitchen.

There, they couldn't be seen from the windows.

She motioned to keep down.

They waited.

After a minute, three sets of wagon wheels rolled to a stop in the driveway outside. Shouting from carriage to carriage in Plain Folk. Footsteps advancing along the walk. The glow of approaching fire. Torches … Up on the porch now: silhouettes peering in every window. More voices behind them. Surrounding the house. Had they spotted the smoke?

Ephraim's heart was booming. A gouging sensation was tearing his brain to pieces. Auntie wrapped her arms around him. Gripping his temples, he choked back a scream.

Finally, the footsteps receded, retracing the path down the staircase, back to their wagons. Carriage wheels pivoting, steel on gravel, and off they rumbled: the glow of their torches shimmering past the schoolhouse windows—panning the ceiling in arcs of yellow, into which Auntie emerged from the kitchen. She stood by the window to watch them go. Ephraim, cross-eyed, stumbled behind her. He tripped on a table leg, fell to it, rolled over, belly-up, and clamped down, not letting go.

The blood in his veins had begun to boil. It felt like his spine was hyperextending.

A series of turbulent flashes commenced, each of them striking a cardio thunderbolt—booming cacophonic, fragmented crashes of falling timber and echoing foghorns—beaming erratically in between fire and blackness, the stench of decay and malevolence,
deafening, blinding, burning his nostrils—whirling adrift in it, slipping away …

On coming to, he thought that a good deal of time had elapsed. Auntie was still at the window, but now she had opened the blinds. She no longer seemed concerned with the road patrols.

Slowly, she stepped away from the window and mumbled: “
We don't want to block your light
.”

Again, it was such a bizarre remark, he had trouble believing she'd actually made it.

Along the horizon, a gentle glow appeared behind the retreating clouds.

Doubtfully looking him over, Auntie returned to the subject. “
You really don't know?
”

He shook his head.

Again, she appeared surprised, though not altogether amazed, by his incomprehension. Maybe she'd always assumed that community rumor had filled him in on this matter. Maybe she thought he'd been able to distinguish between fact and fiction.

If so, she was wrong.

At last, with an air of sardonic mirth, she went on: “I guess there's no harm in telling.”

She took a deep breath and turned. Exhaling slowly, as though to say “
Where to begin
,” she proceeded from what he could only assume was the start, in a time when his parents were young …

The year before Ephraim's birth, it had been—when his mother Maria's beloved brother, Jacob, was called up for military service. As a member of The Order, his term had been delegated to public utility work. For many families, “road patrol,” as this option was known, was no better than combat—as, even though young men were spared active duty (which wasn't at all to be taken for granted), their terms of service were such as, too often, proved wholly disastrous to life back home.

That
was what had happened to Jacob.

Growing up, he had never been known as a menace. Not unlike most other boys, he'd been given to occasional acts of mischief.
But never had he gotten in serious trouble. The youngest of three, he was seen to have come from an upstanding, disciplinarian family; through proper rearing, he and his siblings had always been thought of as even-tempered.

The war would bring all of that to an end.

Less than a month before the “draft” (as the English referred to being conscripted) had been discontinued as a government policy, Jacob's number had been called up.

The whole situation had been absurd, said Auntie. The conflict had been almost over.

Nevertheless, he'd been ordered to service, pending a lengthy appeal in the capital.

Ten months later, he'd found himself pounding railroad ties with a traveling work gang.

For almost a year, he would live in a boxcar with ten other men serving terms of their own. By day, their labor would be demanding. By night, their hours had been twice as long. The only relief would come on the weekends, when most of the crew had been granted leave. Their meager pay would carry them into the nearest urban port of carousal. Familiar, already, with bottled spirits, the Orderly roadmen were soon falling prey to the worldly temptations of song and the flesh. For most of them, life in The Basin would not resume without definite complications. Some would find the transition impossible; dozens would leave the community thus.

Now
, said Auntie (the rate of her breathing slowed with her carefully measured speech).
Now then
, she went on in Py. Dutch: “
Most of the stage had already been set
…”

On arriving home, unannounced, for a seven-day leave that autumn, Jacob—scraggly, unshaven, wearing a leather jacket and clipped with an earring—found himself up against not just the hazards of “decompression,” as it was known—including an edict of social avoidance for breach of dress and lack of humility—he was to find out, at once, of his sister's engagement to Benedictus Bontrager.

Auntie paused to allow her narrative proper time to register for Ephraim. In silence, she walked from one end of the floor to the other.

Benedictus, she said, had been one the oldest bachelor males in the district. At least three women were known to have spurned his proposals of marriage—and more his advances. He'd been renowned as a drunken letch, the bane of an otherwise God-fearing family. In youth, he'd spent many years in transit, steadily moving around the region. Once his family had settled in Blue Ball, he'd already come of working age. He had landed a job in a livestock yard. Soon, he had left the home of his parents. He'd lived in a one-room cabin, alone, on an overgrown hillside west of Paradise. Grizelda, his newborn sister—his junior by fourteen years—would grow up in Blue Ball. He would have little in common with her. He wouldn't relate to her sense of grounding, her evident faith in object permanence. Matters of kinship would breed his resentment.

In time, he would drift away from his family. Auntie would never consider him kin. Neither would both of their younger siblings, who grew to regard him with muted contempt.

Ephraim's uncle, Jacob, for his part, had always distrusted Benedictus.

And
in that
, Auntie said, moving again,
he certainly hadn't stood alone
…

Even before the mill had opened, Benedictus, Grabers, Tulk and the Stoltzfi were rumored to have been involved in shady dealings with English farmers—matters so crooked, allegedly, so illegal, the church had refrained from addressing them. Likewise, Benedictus was known to have plied his trade at the Soddersburg market, a cattle yard widely renowned by area farmers for high rates of stock mortality. Many district councils forbade their members even to visit the grounds.

That being the case, a substantial number of Plain Folk resented the mills and their owners. Even though Jacob's parents may not have shared in that sentiment, they were outnumbered.

In time, he would learn to accommodate for their notable excess of gullibility. But he would
never
forgive them for allowing “The Crow” to so much as
look
at Maria, let alone for conceding her hand in marriage …

Auntie halted in mid-pivot, stopping to loom over Ephraim, her profile starkly etched in the yellow glow of the streetlights. Her posture was rigid.

Exhaling, she went on:

She and Maria, Ephraim's mother, had grown up together, one year apart. Their families had lived down the road from one another. Their parents had been members of Old District Seven.

Over the course of their childhood, Auntie had watched the uncanny bond that existed between Maria and Jacob develop.

In
Rumspringa
, even though she had been older (by two years, a critical leap in seniority), Jacob had cast a suspicious, disapproving eye toward her every suitor—even the older and bigger heads of the supper gangs—without fear of reprisal. It was a given that anyone sweet on Maria would have to contend with him …

One of his closest companions, at the time, had been Ephraim's counsel, Jarret Yoder—and no, the recurrence had not been at random. Now, as then, Yoder was clearly watching out for Jacob's interests. Just as he'd shown up in Percy's court that evening, armed to the teeth for battle, he had met Jacob at the bus station twenty years earlier, hoping to ward off disaster.

It would have been difficult for Jacob to process what Yoder had then been obliged to tell him. At first, he would've been hard-pressed to think that his friend might
dare
to be so rude. Even in casual jest, the notion of Bontrager's going anywhere near his sister would've come through as aggressively rude.

But, after a while, it would've been clear: Yoder, in fact, was telling the truth.

Whereupon, he would have been forced to explain how The Crow had moved in on Maria less than a month after Jacob had left The Basin. His parents, it would've come out, had been lured
by the thought of a well-established suitor. They had approved of The Crow's designs on Maria.

That much, he might have processed.

But never could Jacob have thought to envision that Benedictus's every advance might have prompted other than Maria's scorn.

Neither would Auntie, for that matter. Likewise, most of their friends would disapprove. But try as they would, one and all, to dissuade her, something had gotten ahold of Maria.

By nature, Maria had never distinguished herself as naive. Nor overly gullible. In many ways, she had been keenly intuitive. The problem was: she'd also been a fool for love. Benedictus had seen this, and capitalized on it: his approach had been straightforward, simple, direct: flattery, diligence, patience, consistency and most important, coaxing her parents. If nothing else, a decade of spurned advances had taught him how
not
to proceed. By dint of elimination, at last, he would manage to hit on a working formula: gifts to the family, clean, untattered garments, perfect church attendance. And never forgetting to smile—not until marital vows had been exchanged. As hard as this might have been for Jacob, on hearing about it, to comprehend, it was something The Crow had been planning for years. The groundwork had all been laid in advance.