The Amish Clockmaker (20 page)

F
IFTEEN

D
uring the final weeks of his father's life, Clayton had hoped that being busy from sunup to sundown would give him little time to think about Miriam. Apart from a wave now and then across the little pasture, he had barely spoken to her in two months. They'd had just three actual conversations, in fact, all of them brief and none of them satisfying. Each time, Miriam had gone on and on about what was apparently her latest obsession, the theater. Once her boss had taken her to her first matinee, Miriam said, she had loved it so much that she'd actually gone back a few more times by herself. The whole situation made Clayton very uncomfortable—her enthusiasm for the stories and the actors and the costumes and the music and the fancy sets—not to mention it wasn't exactly a topic he knew or cared anything about. During their first conversation on it, he'd just stood there, trying to cautiously listen but mostly thinking about how pretty her lips were when she spoke and how brightly her eyes sparkled when she was animated.

The last time they had talked, she launched into the same topic, and he considered interrupting her to point out the issues inherent in her obsession and indeed with the
Englisch
world overall. But he held his tongue, fearing he might start to sound like a rooster, crowing the same song day after day. In the end, the only chiding he did was about the way she spoke of her boss,
Brenda Peterson, as if the woman were a best friend rather than an employer. In response, Miriam had simply laughed.

“A person can be both, you know,” she'd quipped, but a momentary flash of irritation in her eyes told him the subject wasn't up for discussion.

Sadly, nothing seemed to make any difference in the way Clayton felt about Miriam, not his heavy grief over his father, her silly enthusiasms, or the lack of time they had spent together lately. He still found his thoughts frequently wandering in her direction, especially when he would see her taking in laundry or coming home from a buggy ride with her suitor, whom Clayton had learned was named Vernon Esh.

Clayton thought of Miriam when he saw a kerosene lamp glowing in her bedroom window across the small field that separated them. Or when he lay in bed at night unable to sleep. He had begun to pray every day that God would make the feelings he had for her go away. He
implored
God to take them away, but nothing seemed to change inside of him. If anything, his feelings for her had intensified, and this made no sense to him whatsoever.

When Rosie started to calve at a few minutes after sunset on a warm summer's eve, Clayton had hesitated a moment before going over to the Beilers' house—only to be told that Miriam was working late in Lancaster that night. Hours later, around midnight, he heard a car door slam outside, which likely meant Miriam's boss had finally brought her home. But by then Rosie was already nursing her newborn and Clayton was in bed and nearly asleep.

He had hoped to catch her before she went to work the next morning to tell her about the new calf, but he never saw her. Perhaps that was God answering his prayer to be delivered of his attraction, he thought. Perhaps it was to happen slowly, like this. It was almost like an escapement in a clock, he decided, where each swing of the pendulum would cause the gear train to advance in a small, fixed amount. Over time, those incremental advances added up, just as perhaps over time, these missed moments with Miriam would add up, ultimately lessening his feelings for her.

To Clayton, it seemed that he was facing two difficult goodbyes at the same time. One was the imminent passing of his beloved father. The second was the much-needed demise of his affection and fascination for Miriam. He truly wanted no part of either farewell, but he had no choice.
Daed
's days were numbered, and Clayton was just as sure that he should not continue to feel this way about Miriam, especially now that she was being courted by another man.

And she was definitely being courted. He knew that because he'd seen the fellow's buggy show up at her house almost every Friday and Saturday evening for weeks. Clayton didn't know where they went on their dates, but more than once he'd watched from his bedroom window as Miriam came out of the house and headed off with Vernon into the night. Sometimes they would stay out till ten or eleven, and sometimes he'd have her home by nine.

The first time Clayton had seen them was on a warm Friday night, not long after supper, when he was alone in the kitchen just finishing up the dishes. His mother was in the next room tending to his father, and Clayton was standing at the sink, absently drying a glass, when he noticed a beam of light angling across the dark yard outside, an indication of a vehicle of some kind pulling in at the Beilers' place.

Curious, he put the glass on the shelf, closed the cabinet, and walked to a different window to get a better look. Trees partially blocked the view, but from where he stood he could see the front corner of what seemed to be a courting buggy sitting in the driveway, the horse still hitched up but the headlights now off. The driver was striding toward the side door of the Beilers' house, but before the man got there, the door swung open and a woman emerged. Even in the dark, Clayton could tell by her faint silhouette against the white clapboard that it was Miriam. Squinting, he watched as she approached the driver, and then the two of them walked together back toward the buggy. They became obscured by foliage as they went, but Clayton knew that the man was likely helping Miriam up into her seat before going around to the other side and climbing in next to her.

They were too far off for Clayton to hear any conversation between them, but through the open window he could make out the faint crunch of tires on gravel as the horse began to move again. The buggy's lights popped back on, and the beam swept in a wide arc across the grass as they made a U-turn in her driveway. Even after the buggy was down the hill and out of sight, Clayton stayed there at the window for a long time, listening until the distant
clip-clop
of hooves on blacktop faded away, leaving behind only silence and darkness.

An hour later, he was up in his room for the night, dressed for bed but perched on the window seat with a book in hand, telling himself he was there to read, that it was purely coincidental that this particular window offered a clear line of sight to the Beilers' house and driveway and yard. A light outside caught his eye.

Clayton quickly extinguished the small kerosene lantern that hung from
the wall next to him. Then he returned his attention to the world beyond the window, to the sight of the same buggy he'd seen earlier, finally returning Miriam to her house.

In the past hour the moon had emerged bright above the horizon. From his unobstructed, second-story viewpoint, he saw the horse come to a stop. The lights flicked off. The man and the woman climbed down from the buggy and walked to the door.

As the guy leaned in to kiss Miriam on the cheek, Clayton knew he should look away, that he should close the shades on his pain and frustration and just forget all of this. But he couldn't tear himself from the open window and the scene unfolding before him.

Even after the buggy drove off, he remained where he was, stiff and tired but unable to move. He stayed there at the glass, staring into the dark, trying to pray but mostly just thinking. About Miriam. About the hollowness in his stomach. About the literal ache of loss. He spotted a flickering glow behind the shade of the second window from the left, top floor. Her bedroom. Five minutes later, the light went out.

Wearily, Clayton rose from his perch and made his way across the room to his own bed. It was still quite warm, and as he folded the bedspread down and slid onto the mattress under a single sheet, he chastised himself for having spied on his lovely neighbor. What right did he have to watch her comings and goings? None at all, and that was that.

Yet the very next night, he found himself back at the window again, waiting and watching until she came home. By the end of the following weekend, which once again included outings with her Amish suitor two nights in a row, Clayton recognized a sad sort of rhythm. The beam of headlights catching his attention. The buggy turning in and pulling to a stop. The man and woman walking to the door. The woman going inside. The woman's bedroom light coming on. The woman's bedroom light turning off. The lonely man limping over to his own bed.

Clayton tried to stop watching for her. He really did. He tried to tell himself it was a waste of time to long for a woman who would never be his, but he just couldn't help it. He was
drawn
to her, like a magnet, unable to leave his place at the window, unable to find sleep until he knew she was there across the narrow field, second room from the left on the top floor, also asleep.

By the time the following weekend rolled around, Clayton didn't even bother with the self-recriminations anymore—or with the pretense of
reading. He simply got ready for bed, twisted off the light, and resumed his post at the open window, waiting and watching for Miriam to come home. It was a chilly night, but he didn't even gather a blanket around himself for warmth. He just sat there and waited.

Eventually the buggy appeared, as usual, and Clayton slid into the rhythm of it all yet again as he watched the walk to the door, the closing of the door, the buggy driving away, the light coming on upstairs. As the light turned off again, he let out a deep sigh and tried to find the energy to go to bed himself.

But he wasn't tired. He was restless. He knew if he were to crawl into bed, sleep would not come to him. He padded across the darkened bedroom, opened his door, and within a few minutes was at the mudroom door, opening it to the starry night. He stepped outside in his bare feet and for a few minutes just stared at the expanse of the vast heavens above him. The sky at night looked calm and serene. He wanted to drink in that peaceful strength. He wandered over to a pear tree and leaned against its trunk, the branches a leafy bower above him. A few minutes passed, and he was just about to go back inside when he detected movement at the Beilers' house to his right.

Someone was at the side door and then running down the driveway in the darkness. It wasn't until the person was almost to the road that Clayton spotted a car pulling up to the curb with its lights off and its engine idling.

He stepped out from the branches. Miriam? Was it Miriam running toward the car? The running person swung open the car door to get inside, and the light that came on confirmed Clayton's fear. It was her.

Worse, she was dressed in
Englisch
clothing.

Flummoxed, he watched as the car began to creep forward. Not until it was well down the street did its lights come on. Whoever it was hadn't wanted to be observed—at least not by the people inside Miriam's house.

But who did she know that owned a car? Was it her boss, Brenda Peterson, the woman who seemed to be her friend? It had to be. What other
Englischers
did she know? Clayton spent the next hour hovering by the pear tree, waiting for Miriam to return, but she never came. Finally, furiously, he limped back to his house and his bedroom.

Why had he insisted on watching her? What did it matter to him what she did or who she was with? It was none of his business. He was just the next-door neighbor, the guy with the hideous face and the crooked leg who pined over the beauty with the auburn hair and the lilting voice.

Once in bed, he lay awake for a long while, trying to convince himself
that this was it. He was done with her. But it was no use. Every sound of the night outside his half-open window snapped him to attention, and when he finally heard soft footsteps running across gravel, he leapt from the bed, hobbled to the window as fast as he could, and confirmed that Miriam was finally home.

The car that brought her drove off quietly into the night, but no flicker of light ever came on in the second-floor bedroom. Clayton could picture her at that very moment, sneaking around her room in the dark, getting ready for bed as quietly as she could, hiding away her
Englisch
clothes. No doubt, she had a place where she stashed them, some secret place where no one else would ever think to look.

With a heavy heart, he told himself he needed such a place as well, a secret place where no one would ever look, a place he could hide his pain.

When the next Friday night rolled around and after his parents were asleep, Clayton was again at the pear tree when Miriam turned out the light in her bedroom. Sure enough, less than an hour after making his way in the dark to the tree, a car without its lights on pulled to a stop at the curb down at the main road. From where he stood, Clayton could almost make out the driver. He was about to take a step from the shadow of the branches when he heard the side door at the Beilers' house open.