The Amish Clockmaker (44 page)

“Matthew Zook. I'm from Ridgeview.”

“Zook, from Ridgeview,” she echoed, and her eyebrows furrowed even more.

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Zook. From Ridgeview.” She turned to her daughter. “A Zook bought the Ridgeview homestead from my
mamm
when Clayton left.”

“
Ya
,” I said. “That was my grandfather. Isaac Zook.”

She turned back to me. “I grew up in that house!”

“So did I,” I said with a polite smile.

“Been a while since I've been by there. A long while.”

Becky pointed to the clock, clearly wanting to get on with the business of why I had come. “Tell her what it is that you have there.”

Turning to Joan, I unwrapped the clock and held it so she could see it. Then I repeated what I'd already told Becky, that I was sure it was one of Clayton's clocks. “It has his initials engraved on the bottom. It was hidden in an old coal hamper in the back room of what used to be his clock shop, a room we've always used for an office. We're doing some remodeling, and last night my wife discovered this inside the bin.”

Joan asked to hold the clock. I rose from my chair and took it to her. She ran her hand along the glossy wood before trying to turn it around to see the bottom. I helped her maneuver it. She traced an arthritic finger over the
C
and
R
. While she was admiring the clock, our lemonade arrived. Sarah placed the three glasses on the coffee table in front of us and then quietly slipped from the room.

“Clayton's clocks were so well made,” Joan murmured. “Much finer than
Daed
's
,
though I never said so to his face. Or to Clayton's.” She struggled to turn the clock back over, and again I assisted her. “
Daed
was a tradesman, but Clayton was an
artist.
”

I nodded in agreement. Certainly, this was the most beautiful clock I had ever seen.

The three of us sat in silence, Joan admiring the clock, seemingly lost in a thousand private thoughts, while Becky watched her mother's face. I waited patiently, praying I would know the right moment to ask my next question, one that might reveal to me the answers I needed in order to find Clayton.

Finally, when Joan's watery eyes met mine, I launched in, giving her a simplified version of the property issue I was facing now and my need to find her younger brother in order to straighten it out. The whole time I spoke, she
just stared at me blankly, and I wasn't quite sure if she followed what I was saying or not.

“Bottom line, Mrs. Glick,” I said, trying to simplify even further, “I very much need to find Clayton or my entire livelihood will be in jeopardy. Is there any way you can tell me how or where I might locate him?”

The question hung in the air for a moment, and then she shook her head. “Clayton didn't own that land,” she said. “Before he died,
Daed
signed the deed over to all the children, not just my brother.”

I glanced at Becky, who merely shrugged in return. Again trying to keep things simple, I added a few more details, explaining about the specific part of the homestead in question and even mentioning the quitclaim deed. When I was finished, Joan didn't reply. Almost as if she were disappearing inside herself, she simply looked off in the distance, her wrinkled lips pursed in thought.

This wasn't getting me anywhere.

Glancing around the room, I knew it was time for Plan B. Even if Joan was too old to understand what I was saying, at least I could question Becky now in Joan's presence. My hope was that if she knew her mother was right there listening, she might be a little more forthcoming.

“Becky, I'll ask you again. Do you know where I can find Clayton Raber?”

“Like I said the other day,” she replied, reaching for her lemonade, “no one around here has seen the man in sixty years.”

I nodded, letting that sit there for a moment.

“So when you say no one has seen him, does that mean you don't know where he is? That you haven't heard from him in all this time?” I leaned forward in my seat. “Or are you just speaking literally, that you haven't
seen
him?” My implication was clear. Was she hiding behind a turn of phrase?

As I waited for her reply, Joan closed her eyes, the clock still in her hands, and her feeble shoulders began to shake. “It was all the fault of that girl he married,” the old woman said, her voice breaking. “She was nothing but trouble, that Miriam. When God took that child from her, she went plumb crazy, she did. She deserved what happened to her. If it weren't for her… ”

“Crazy?” I said. “She went plumb crazy?”

“
Mamm
,” Becky interrupted, patting her mother's arm, “you don't have to tell him anything.”

But Joan went on as if her daughter weren't even there.

“Clayton had a temper, and we all knew he was upset because Miriam didn't love him. She loved that
Englischer
,” Joan said, spitting out the last
word as if it were dirt in her mouth. “They fought the day she died because she made a terrible scene in front of a crowd and he had to practically drag her back home after she threatened to run away. It was like she'd gone crazy—and it just kept getting worse and worse. Oh, if only he'd never married her!”

The woman began to sob.

“Now you've done it,” Becky said angrily as she jumped from her seat. “You've made
Mamm
cry with all your questions.” She rushed to the woman's side and patted her arm, but tears continued to stream down Joan's aged cheeks. Becky remained beside her, speaking in a soothing tone. Then she remembered me, and with a fierce gaze she asked me to leave. I stood slowly, looking toward Joan. Somehow I just knew that words had gone unsaid here, words Joan almost seemed to want to say now, but for some unknown reason couldn't bring herself to do so.

There was something she wasn't telling me.

“It's time for you to go,” Becky insisted.

Reluctantly, I offered a quick apology for having upset things, and then I headed for the door.

I was on the last step of the porch when I heard someone run up behind me. It was Sarah, and she held the clock in her arms.

“My grandmother told me to give this back to you,” she relayed, though she seemed confused by the request. “She told me to tell you we want nothing to do with the clock or Clayton Raber.”

Sarah transferred the clock into my arms as if it were a sickly baby, and then she went back up the porch steps and disappeared into the house.

T
HIRTY
-T
HREE

T
he next morning was a church Sunday, and though my heart was heavy from all that had come the day before, I tried to put aside the failure and disappointment, seeking comfort instead in the sermons, the prayers, the songs, and the fellowship with other believers.

Once the service was over, I was feeling much better. After rearranging the benches, we all shared in the usual light communal meal and were discussing the shop's expansion delay when the talk turned to Clayton Raber, startling me out of my short-lived sense of peace.

“Does it bother you to go in the barn, knowing a woman died in there—and so violently, no less?” one of the women asked.

“Different barn,” I muttered, not bothering to explain that my grandfather had taken down the one big barn decades ago, building in its place the two barns that were there now—a medium-sized one for the feed store and a smaller one for our horses.

“Still, what's it like working and living in the same place
he
worked and lived?” another person asked, saying “he” with force, almost as if it were a bad word.

I looked to Amanda on my right and then Noah on my left, hoping one of them would respond more graciously in the moment than I might.

“Makes no difference to me,” Noah answered confidently.

Nodding in agreement, I slathered a cracker with homemade peanut butter and shoved it in my mouth. I didn't want to talk about this.

I didn't want to get into any of it, not even to mention the beautiful clock we'd found, which was now sitting on our bedroom dresser until we figured out what to do with it. Mostly, I just listened as the older folks in the group tossed around the facts of the story—or at least as they had always believed them. About the only good to come out of the conversation was when someone mentioned Clayton's motive. Though I'd been familiar with the tale since I was a child, I'd never been told the supposed reason for the alleged murder. According to the folks here, Clayton had loved Miriam but she'd been in love with someone else, so that's why he'd killed her.

As the five of us rode home together in the buggy afterward, I asked my parents for clarification on this new bit of information. Though it was a delicate subject, I managed to garner from them several shocking new facts, including that Miriam was in the family way when she and Clayton married, and that although the child wasn't his, he married her anyway to save her from shame and give her baby a name. Sadly, they said, she did not carry the child to term and it was eventually stillborn.

Just the thought of that created a knot in my stomach, one that stayed with me the rest of the day.

The next morning was Amanda's seven-month checkup with the midwife. As I drove her to the birthing center, I kept my focus away from the tragic details of Clayton's life and directed it to Amanda and our own baby instead. Steering the buggy away from Old Philadelphia Pike and its busy lanes of traffic, we took the back roads to get there and made good time. Amanda was her usual talkative self on the way, but for some reason she, too, managed to avoid the one topic we'd been consumed by lately: Clayton Raber. It seemed as if we discussed almost everything else but that.

We reached the birthing center ten minutes early, which gave me ten minutes to try to talk her out of her plan. Though I had agreed to be present during the birth of our child, Amanda wanted me to come into her appointments with her from here on out, an idea I did not relish. I really didn't need to be that directly involved with what was basically a matter between her and the midwife, but she insisted, as she had for the past few weeks, saying that
all modern Amish husbands were taking a bigger part in the birthing process than ever before.

“Yeah, it's the ‘process' part of that equation I'd rather avoid,” I said, and she slugged me on the arm.

“Tough luck, buddy,” she said as she began to climb from the buggy with some help from me. “If I have to deliver this child, the
least
you can do is be there with me.”

As much as I'd rather stick with the old-fashioned approach to the matter, thank you very much, I knew that when Amanda Shetler Zook set her mind to something, there was no stopping her. I finally agreed, though once we were both inside, all signed in and sitting in the waiting room, I began to doubt that decision.

I looked at the other women—no men, only women—all at various stages of pregnancy, at the flowered paper on the walls, and at the posters of mothers playing with their babies, and I suddenly felt very out of place. Fortunately, it wasn't long before the nurse called us back.