Lifted Up by Angels (18 page)

Charity continued. “Other men picked up the coffin this morning and took it to the undertaker’s. The hearse will return with it this afternoon for the viewing.”

Suddenly it struck Leah that everyone in the community would be arriving to see Rebekah’s body lying in the coffin. She shuddered, not certain she could participate in the ritual.

“Many people are helping us now,” Charity said. “The men are doing the chores. The women are cleaning the house and setting up for the funeral tomorrow morning. Tomorrow we will have a church service here. Then we will all go to the graveyard at the back of our farm for the burial. Afterward, people will come back here for a meal and help us clear the house of the extra chairs and things. Then everybody will go home.”

And life will go on,
Leah thought. Chores would be done, cows milked, chickens fed, gardens tilled. Rebekah would be under the
ground, and life would go on. She turned to Charity. “You’re burying her on the farm?”

“Our family has lived here for many years. In time, all of us will be buried on this land. It is ours.”

Leah recalled movies in which cemeteries were portrayed as dark, creepy places where the dead haunted the living. But here, in this land of the Amish, cemeteries were merely resting places for loved ones. There was nothing ghoulish about cemeteries. “What should I do?”

“Just be with us.”

Leah plucked a flower from the flower bed and rolled it between her fingers. “Can I send flowers for her funeral?”

Charity shook her head. “That is not done. Amish bury plainly, just as we live.”

“Where’s Ethan?” All at once, Leah ached to see him, to touch him.

“He is at the family cemetery. He is digging our sister’s grave.”

Leah followed Charity’s directions to the family cemetery, located beyond the barn and the woods, at the back side of the property. She
passed the garden and remembered the first day she’d come to the farm and how Rebekah had run to meet her. Leah turned her head. She passed the chicken coop and the barn, remembered the day of the water fight, and felt a lump the size of a fist clog her throat.

Leah skirted the woods and saw a short white picket fence marking off an enclosure of well-kept grass. Within, she saw headstones. She entered by a small gate, covered with an arched arbor, heavy with jasmine and morning-glory vines. She heard the sound of shovels digging in earth and crossed slowly to a pit. There, deep in the hole, stood Ethan, Simeon and Jonah. Emotion almost overcame Leah as she watched them scooping up soil and tossing it up to a pile heaped alongside the grave. “Ethan,” she called quietly.

He looked up. Sweat poured down his face. His homespun shirt was limp and soaked. “Leah! What are you doing here?”

“I—I wanted to see you.”

Ethan glanced at Jonah, who said, “Go.”

Ethan came up a ladder and swung over the top edge of the hole. Leah stepped closer, but he stepped away. “I am dirty. I will mess you up.” Dirt clung to his work boots and hands.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I want to. It is the very least I can do for her.”

Leah realized that this was Ethan’s way of easing his grief, of sweating off his own pain. The physical labor was good for him. She read it in his expression. “Is there something I can do to help?” she said. “Can I bring you water?”

Ethan shook his head. “We have water with us.”

Leah shrugged and glanced around the cemetery. “Whose is the earliest grave?”

“Joseph Longacre. He was the infant son of my great-great-grandparents. He died one winter of scarlet fever.”

“Sad,” Leah said. “When babies die, it’s really sad.”

“Dying is part of living,” Ethan said. “Nothing can bring my sister back to this life. Now she lives with God, in heaven. I know baby Joseph is playing with her.”

Leah wanted to believe it too. How she wished to have Ethan’s simple faith! But she was angry at God. He should have allowed Rebekah to live. “I guess I should go back to the house,” Leah said.

“We will not be much longer,” Ethan told her. “I will clean up and see you there. Many will come this afternoon and evening.”

Leah returned to the house and stayed close to Charity. Later in the afternoon, Leah watched through the kitchen window as a lone black horse pulled a simple springboard wagon into the front yard. In the back of the wagon lay an unadorned child-sized pine coffin with two long poles attached to it. Six men, including Ethan, stepped up and pulled the coffin off the wagon, shouldered the poles and carried it up onto the porch, in through the front parlor, and into a small room at the back of the house.

Leah followed Charity and other family members into the room, a room swept meticulously clean, with only a table to hold the coffin, a single chair and a few candles. Both fascinated and repelled, Leah watched as the coffin was set upon the table turned bier. The window in the room was open, but without fans the room felt stifling. Leah left the small, airless room. She pressed herself against a wall, hoping not to faint from either the heat or her burden of grief.

Back in the kitchen, she splashed water on her face from the hand pump over the sink.
Minutes later, she felt Ethan’s touch on her back. “More people are coming,” he said, looking out the window. “To pay their respects.”

Leah saw buggies pulling into the yard—a yard cleaned, weeded and clipped to receive friends and neighbors at its very best. Leah murmured, “I—I’m not sure I can go in there and look at her, Ethan.”

“It does not matter. Only her body is in the coffin. Her spirit is with the Lord.”

“There was a chair in the room. Why?”

“We will keep an all-night watch. It is our custom never to leave the body alone.”

She wanted to ask why but decided he probably didn’t know. He rarely knew the why of their customs, only that it was always done that way. She looked back to Ethan. “I think I should go.”

“You do not have to.”

Leah shook her head. “Yes, I do. I don’t belong here. I’m the only English.”

“That should not trouble you.”

Tears filled her eyes. “But it does, Ethan. It does.”

Ethan followed Leah outside. The undertaker had gone, but the memory of where his wagon had stood forced Leah to make a wide
arc in the yard before she headed toward the road and her parked car. Ethan caught her elbow at the edge of the yard. “What will you do, Leah? Where are you going?”

“Back to my apartment, I guess.” She wiped under her eyes. “I should start packing. There was a message on my answering machine from my mother when I got in last night. She and Neil are in Los Angeles and will be flying to Indianapolis today. She plans to come help me get my stuff home next week.”

Ethan stared down at her. “I had forgotten. You will be leaving. But … so soon! I will miss you.” The last was said haltingly, as if he was pulling the words from deep inside.

“You know, two weeks ago, the thought of leaving was driving me crazy.” Leah looked over his shoulder at the rambling farmhouse. “Now … well, I’m sort of glad. It would be hard to stay, to expect to see Rebekah whenever I came out here.” Her voice wavered. “It’s best this way. I’ll go back to my world. You’ll stay in yours.”

“You will always be a part of my world, Leah. Because you will always be a part of me.”

Her gaze flew to his face. His clear blue eyes were serious, tinged with grief. Was some of it
for her? For them? Leah choked down a sob, holding it at bay with steely resolve. “I have to go now. I don’t think I can take any more sadness, Ethan. I can’t.”

He caught her arm once more. “Will you be here tomorrow?”

Leah nodded. “I have to come. I have to tell Rebekah goodbye.”

“Yes,” he said. “We will all tell her goodbye.”

Yet as Leah drove off, she couldn’t imagine watching that plain, undersized coffin being lowered into the cool, dark ground. She drove to town, weeping all the way.

I
t took Leah a long time to decide what to wear to Rebekah’s funeral. Anxious that she might be the only English among the mourners, she didn’t want to stand out any more than necessary. After much deliberation, she chose a simple black denim jumper and added a white T-shirt underneath. She brushed her dark hair and plaited it into a French braid. She wore no makeup, not even lip gloss.

She drove slowly to the farm, often following black buggies headed in the same direction. When she arrived, she saw a long line of buggies parked in the farmyard and along the country road fronting the farm. Younger kids helped with the horses, tying reins to hitching
posts. Leah also took note of several cars. Glad not to have driven the only automobile, she again parked at the far end of the Longacre property and walked to the house. The first person that she saw in the yard and recognized by name was Martha Dewberry.

Martha’s eyes were red from crying. “This is the worst thing that has ever happened,” Martha said to Leah. “Rebekah was so sweet. So young.”

Leah agreed. She felt no animosity toward Martha. There was no rivalry between them now. In the shared experience of grief, they were only two teenagers, mourning the loss of a friend. “I’ll miss her,” Leah said.

“She talked about you all the time. She thought you were glamorous.” Martha managed a smile. “Like a movie star.”

“You’re kidding. I didn’t know she even knew what a movie star was.”

“She peeked in our magazines. The ones we stuff under our mattresses.”

“My friends and I used to do the same thing,” Leah said. “Hide the things we didn’t want our parents to know about.”

“It isn’t easy growing up Amish. The things of the English are very tempting.”

“Your Amish ways are tempting too,” Leah said. “I guess neither way is easy.”

Leah left Martha and slipped into the house. The furniture had been removed from the dining room and parlor. Wooden benches had been set in long rows. An usher, a young man Leah recognized from Jonah’s group of friends, showed her to a place on one of the benches. Rebekah’s coffin had been placed at the front of the room, and the Longacre family sat in front of the coffin with their backs to the rows of mourners.

As the mantel clock struck nine, a man stood, removed his hat, turned toward the others, and began to quote Scripture from the Old Testament. Eventually he mentioned Rebekah and the loss of her young life. But the man mostly talked to his audience about living godly lives and preparing themselves for eternal life. He quoted: “ ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’ ” Leah thought it a strange eulogy.

At her grandmother’s funeral, the minister had talked about Grandma Hall and her rich, full life. He’d mentioned how much she’d be missed and shared personal things about her life. Leah could only see the back of Ethan’s
head, but she wondered if he would have liked the minister to say more in praise of Rebekah. Leah certainly wished that the man had. But it wasn’t her place to criticize, either.

Once the first man sat down, another stood and spoke. He also had little to say about Rebekah, but instead reminded all the Amish youth, “No person knows the hour of his death, so all must live good lives. Stay away from sinning.” Leah shifted uncomfortably. Nothing either man said seemed to address the loss of Rebekah. She wondered if anyone was receiving comfort from these speeches.

Eventually the second man asked the group to kneel. He read a long prayer in German. Songs were not sung, but spoken in German. And just when Leah thought she couldn’t sit for one more minute on the hard, uncomfortable bench, the congregation was asked to vacate the room. The room would be rearranged and the mourners would file past the coffin for one final farewell to Rebekah.

Leah almost panicked. She couldn’t look at Rebekah. She couldn’t! And yet, when the time came, she found herself in line in front of a young woman who was holding baby Nathan.
The child grabbed at Leah’s braid, and Leah turned and smiled at him. The baby gave her a slobbery grin. The woman holding him spoke to him sternly, and Nathan’s lower lip quivered.

Leah turned back toward the coffin, and with her heart hammering hard against her ribs, she stepped beside the plain pine box and looked down. The lid was formed in two halves. The top half was raised, and inside lay Rebekah. The child was dressed in white, the color for Amish mourning. Her head was covered with a white prayer cap, the ties fastened neatly beneath her chin. Leah wanted to untie them and let them hang loose, as Rebekah always had in life.