The Outcast Page 12

  I can’t help it. As the image of Gerald Martin—pudgy, self-conscious Gerald Martin with his immaculate sneakers and ragged bowl-cut hair—filters into my mind along with the idea of his being Eli’s father, I begin to laugh. Then the reality of Leah’s question and the answer only two people in this world know comes flooding back. With it, all humor is gone.

  “No, Leah,” I say, “Gerald Martin is not Eli’s father. I think your husband paid Gerald not to drive me around and asked him not to stay here tonight because . . . well, because Tobias feels it is his duty not to protect us from men like Gerald, but to protect men like Gerald from me.”

  Fresh tears replace the ones my sister’s just dried. “But you made one mistake. One. Why can’t the people of Copper Creek—why can’t my own husband—forgive you?”

  I feel like I am standing on uneven ground. The sensation is so intense, I drag out a kitchen chair and lower myself into it. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe because—”

  The teakettle screams. Leah snatches a hot pad and whisks the kettle off the burner before the sound can awaken our children, who were so exhausted in the hospital they cried themselves to sleep. I am relieved by the distraction, by the noise. I am hoping I will now not have to finish my sentence, when Leah takes off the hot pad and sits in the chair opposite mine.

  “Because what?” my sister prods, reaching across the table to clasp my hand.

  Silence hisses like steam from the teakettle, as the explanations long prepared in my mind refuse to come out my lips. They would only be more lies added to those the Copper Creek Community spread in their quest for truth. The lies that have turned my heart from the church as well as from God, as I perceived their judgment and his to be one and the same.

  “Maybe because, Leah, I refused to repent to the church.”

  The kerosene light inside the wire netting flares, illuminating our joined hands, whose only difference is the small scar snaking across Leah’s where she sliced it during canning years ago. I look up and smile, remembering how we used to sit like this when we were children praying a wordless blessing over the meal. But I do not see any fond remembrances in my sister’s eyes, only sadness. I hate knowing I have put that sadness there, and I hate knowing how much deeper that sadness would travel if she knew the truth.

  This is when I realize I cannot unburden myself while sitting at the comfort of our parents’ kitchen table in their yellow house on Hilltop Road. For a moment—fortified by our dawdy’s brush with death and its reminder of the fragility of life—I imagined that I could unburden myself of my secrets and all would be well.

  But even without speaking the truth, looking into Leah’s sorrowful gaze, I realize that I have already hurt the one person my silence was meant to protect.

  10

  AMOS

  Fortified with a cup of stout black tea purchased in the hospital cafeteria, Norman Troyer comes to take over the graveyard shift and finds that Helen is still occupying the chair beside Samuel Stoltzfus’s bed. “Why don’t you go home and sleep?” he asks.

  Helen looks over her shoulder with reddened eyes. “Gerald’s in Lititz,” she says. “I’d have no way to get there.”

  “I could call a cab. They run twenty-four hours.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Helen stands and stretches the muscles of her lower back. “If I need to sleep, I can just use the pullout bed.”

  Norman shuffles closer to Helen. “Trust me,” he whispers, “those pullout beds are terrible. If you can ever get to sleep, the plastic covering them will wake you at every turn.”

  Helen looks down at Norman’s legs. “Did you sleep in one after your accident?”

  “Jah.”

  “Why didn’t they give you a real bed?”

  “They did. But after I got out, I would come here to stay with my nephew.”

  Helen muffles her yawn with a cupped hand. “Your nephew?”

  “Both my nephews were with me that day.” He pauses, takes a sip of tea. “As was their father—my brother, Henry.”

  She wipes sleep from her eyes, now fully awake. “Were they all right?”

  “No,” Norman Troyer says. “My nephew was on life support for a while, but in the end, I was the only one in that buggy who survived.”

  Helen says, “I’m sorry,” knowing those words are an inept covering for such a loss.

  “It’s fine.” Norman reaches out and lightly touches Helen’s arm. “It really was a long time ago.”

  Rachel

  The cot bows beneath the weight of someone crawling into my bed. I cry out, and a hand claps over my mouth.

  “You want to wake the kinner?” Leah whispers. “I can’t sleep in that big bed by myself. Move over.”

  I groan but draw back the covers, ushering my sister inside. “You’ve never slept by yourself.”

  “You’re right.” Leah turns onto her side and straightens out her legs so that she and I can both fit on the narrow cot. “And just between you and me, you’re a better sleep partner. You don’t smell like sweat.” She laughs. “And you don’t snore.”

  “Why are you so awake?” I grumble, pulling the pillow up around my ears. “It’s almost dawn.”

  “I thought that tea was decaffeinated.”

  “Let me guess. It wasn’t.” I place my spine against the wall and straighten my legs as Leah has done.

  “Rachel?” Leah says.

  “Jah?”

  “Don’t you want to get married?”

  I squint at her in the moonlight slanting through the office window. Our unbound hair strewn across the shared pillow and cotton nightgowns buttoned up to our necks remind me of us as children. The thought of the innocence I have desecrated brings me to tears; I close my eyes again before she can see.

  “What makes you bring that up now?”

  Leah shrugs, the small movement making the bed quake. “I guess just talking about moving from your bed to Tobias’s.”

  “And are you glad you did?”

  “You can’t answer my question with a question.”

  “You’ve woken me up in the middle of the night, Leah. I say I can do whatever I want.”

  “Fine.” Turning onto her back, Leah folds her arms behind her head and stares up at the ceiling. “Jah, I’m glad I married him. I wouldn’t have Jonathan otherwise.”

  “You could’ve just had an illegitimate child like me and skipped crawling into bed every night with a sweaty husband.”

  Leah elbows me. “That’s not funny.”

  “I never said it was.” I elbow her back. “Seriously, though. Why’d you marry him?”

  It is a long time before Leah whispers, “Because I knew nobody else would ask.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “No, it’s not. Mammi told me Tobias might be my only chance.”

  I can feel anger bubbling up from somewhere deep within my chest. “Yeah, well,” I snap, “Mamm’s not always right.”

  “And she’s not always wrong.” Leah then adds, her voice softened, “Tobias needed a wife and I wanted to get out of Muddy Pond, so I knew I needed a husband.”

  “Why didn’t you just get a job? You could’ve worked as a seamstress or a baker in town. You could’ve taught school.”

  “Rachel, come on. You’ve always said that I’m too naive, and now you’re the one looking at life through a rose-colored lens. How would I ever support myself on what a seamstress or baker makes? The only school I could ever teach on an eighth-grade education would be a Mennonite one, and in another community I would still have to rely on someone else to take me in . . . to feed me, to clothe me. No, agreeing to marry Tobias was the only way.”

  “You could’ve told me your plans. We could’ve figured something out.”

  “I didn’t want to figure something out! I wanted to make my own way—”

  “But to marry a man you did not love—you do not love!” I cry. “That is no way to begin a life!”

  The cot threatens to collapse as Le
ah flips to face me. “I do love Tobias,” she says. “Maybe not like I imagined as a little girl, but I never really expected to have that kind of love, that kind of marriage. All my life it seemed like everything was lined up for you, and I had to scrape by on what remained. I guess I never expected my marriage, my love for my husband, to be any different. I dreamed it would be different, yes. But I never expected it. I never expected to have a marriage or a love like the one I knew you would have.”

  “Look around you,” I command, pointing to the floor where Eli sleeps. “I have no marriage. I have no home. I don’t even have the benefit of a good reputation. You have all this and still you think that I—I am the one whose life is lined up for her? The one who gives you the leftovers?”

  “You don’t think our parents chose their favorites from our birth? That I was our mudder’s Jacob and you, our vadder’s Esau?”

  “No. I don’t. You had Dawdy’s attention in a way I never did. You were his precious, delicate Leah while I was less like his dochder and more like his field hand.”

  “I tried . . .” Leah chokes down a sob. “I tried to help him, but he’d always send me away. Tell me to go back to the haus and do something with Mamm.”

  “That’s because he wanted to protect you.”

  “Protect me?” Leah resentfully asks. “From what?”

  I realize then that Dawdy’s pushing Leah away perpetuated in her the same rejection that I always felt. Are these complicated childhood scars the reason I wanted to be more than just the daughter who could never be the son, or the daughter who could never be her sister, but rather everything one man had ever wanted, even if only for one night?

  “I don’t know, Leah,” I say, sorrow burning my eyes. “I think . . . I think Dawdy wanted to shield you from the realities of life found in that barn. Horses sometimes hanged themselves after their bridles got tangled up in the cherry trees in the pasture. Our Brown Swiss, Bossy—you remember Bossy, the one Dawdy said he sold at New Holland?” Leah nods. “Well, she wasn’t sold. She really sliced open her stomach on the barbed-wire fence and was put down, then eaten for supper that night. And that was just the beginning. We had colts that were stillborn. Colts that were born premature and had to be bottle-fed for weeks, only to die after I had grown attached enough to name them. Glimpses of life and death were everywhere in that barn. Dawdy didn’t let me work beside him because he loved me more; Dawdy had me work beside him because he didn’t care if, even as a young child, I could handle that level of labor and stress or not.”

  “I never knew.” Leah tries to muffle her cries with the pillow. “I never knew any of this.”

  I run my fingers through the tangled tresses of my sister’s hair. “How could you have known? I never told you, and you never told me that you felt I was Dawdy’s favorite.”

  “I didn’t want to . . . to ruin your relationship with him,” Leah says. “I thought you would’ve given up your time in the barn; you would’ve tried to get me to take your place. And that—that scared me more than anything. I didn’t know him at all. He was a stranger to me.” She pauses and wipes tears with her sleeve. “He is a stranger still.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I’m about as comfortable around him as you are.”

  “But why? Why was it like that, and why is it like that now?”

  I stop scratching my sister’s back and ponder the question I have asked myself so many times. “I think it’s because we never talked to Dawdy, and Dawdy never listened. He never asked how our day was or what we did. He never told us about his day or what he did. It seems simple, I know, but all that time we were out in the barn, he never made an effort to establish any kind of relationship with me. He only saw me as an extra set of hands, as a strong back, not as his dochder.”

  “Is that why you did what you did?”

  My spine stiffens. “What do you mean?”

  “Did you sleep with Eli’s father because you were looking for the father you never had?”

  Closing my eyes, I see myself as that naive, pigtailed girl who hauled water and mucked stalls, polished tack and picked hooves for the payment of glimpsing her reflection in her father’s smiling eyes. Ten years later, that girl became a woman whose pigtails were kapped. Deep beneath the layers, though, I remained that scarred little child, scrambling for her father’s approval. And though I knew it was wrong, I relished the fact that even when my sister and I were in the same room, in her husband’s dark eyes I saw only me.

  “I don’t know,” I say, hedging truth. “I could ask you the same question: Did you marry Tobias because you thought in him you could find the father you never had? The one who would pay attention to you; the one who would draw you out, let you talk and he would listen?”

  Leah’s stifled sobs are the only reply. I feel guilty for once again answering her question with a question of my own, but I can’t answer hers. Dawdy might have been an emotionally absent father, yet I have free will, and I am the one who fell. He did not push me.

  I turn onto my side and face the wall to hide the hot tears streaming down my cheeks in accord with Leah’s sobs. I act like I am asleep, but in light of my culpability, sleep will not come.

  AMOS

  Early the next morning, Samuel Stoltzfus is released from the hospital. Everyone surrounding him is still glassy-eyed from sleep deprivation and achy from having sat in one position for too long. Samuel, on the other hand, slept through each of the night nurse’s checkups. He whistles as he runs a comb over his hair and tugs his suspender straps up over his shirt.

  “You think you could make me some pon haus mit abbel budder when we get home, Fraa?” Samuel asks, then sneers at the purple Jell-O cubes still on his tray. “After this hutsch, I’m right hungry.”

  Norman Troyer looks over at Samuel in shock. The way Helen stands with her body slanted against the wall makes it obvious that she really needs to be lying down. Her hair, which has thinned at the temples from being pulled into a bun for so many years, is oily and strubbly, her face creased from having slept with it pressed against the pullout chair. But Samuel doesn’t notice this. He has not paid attention to his wife’s appearance in thirty-some years; why should he pay attention now?

  “Jah, Samuel,” Helen says, giving her husband a smile that only emphasizes the bags beneath her eyes. “I’ll make you some pon haus when we get home.”

  Samuel nods in satisfaction. Tobias comes into the room with Gerald Martin.

  “You all ready?” Tobias asks. Looking at the expressions on everyone’s faces, he already knows the answer.

  Because of Samuel’s heart attack, the plans regarding the Stoltzfuses’ move have changed. Helen cannot pack up the haus and also take care of her husband, and Tobias and Leah cannot leave their other children in his sisters’ care long enough for Samuel to recover and make the arduous journey from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. Listening to this deliberation over the past three days, Rachel has known what the easiest solution would be.

  But that does not mean it is an easy choice.

  During the time when Rachel needed her parents the most, she was abandoned by them. But now that they need her, she feels compelled to help—and she knows she will feel guilty if she does not choose to remain behind while everyone else goes home. Rachel knows there is another answer to this quandary: she could travel back to Tennessee and take care of Tobias and Leah’s other children, but after Tobias’s behavior the night after Samuel’s heart attack, she knows he would never allow Gerald Martin to drive her down to Tennessee unchaperoned. For that matter, he probably would not want her watching over his children, even for such a short time.

  So, after much inner turmoil and one phone call to Ida Mae, Rachel chooses to stay and help her mudder pack. She’s hoping that if they both work, they can finish within the week. This would get Rachel back to Tennessee in time to tend to her reflexology patients and schedule a doctor’s appointment for Eli, whose cold has left but whose inflamed lymph node has not.

 
Watching Gerald Martin’s van drive away with her sister, brother-in-law, and nephew inside, Rachel recalls another morning—a humid spring morning the very opposite of this—when Leah left for Tennessee. Rachel had no idea when Leah climbed into the van and waved from behind the window that she was only doing so because she knew her mamm and sister could not see the tears streaming from her eyes. Seeing those tears would have lessened the sense of betrayal Rachel felt, but it would not have cured it. Only a week in advance, she’d been told that the next Monday her twin would be moving to the Copper Creek Community in Tennessee. When Rachel had asked why—perhaps thinking her sister had obtained a teaching position at the schul—she learned that a mere two weeks after that, Leah would wed a thirty-year-old widower with four children. This widower had been their nochber on Hilltop Road, but neither Rachel nor—if she were honest—Leah could remember Tobias King except for the fleeting image of a dark-haired man who wore a leather apron over his pants and pounded hot metal in a wooden lean-to attached to the barn.

  Rachel suspected that Leah hadn’t told her because Leah feared her sister would talk her out of the only decision she had ever made without Rachel’s consent. Still, Rachel would have appreciated being let in on the news sooner than she was. Perhaps, given more time, Rachel could have resigned from her position at the Muddy Pond schul and moved down to Tennessee as well. She would never have lived with Tobias and Leah, but she could have lived close enough that she and Leah might see each other more than twice a year.

  But without time, that could not happen. None of that could happen. So Leah moved to Tennessee, and two weeks later, the wedding took place as planned. Two months after that, when Leah revealed that she was with child and asked her sister to move down, Rachel felt like everything was working out as it should have all along. She resigned from her teaching position, paid a driver to take her to Tennessee, and moved into Leah and Tobias’s white farmhouse—into the very room next to where Leah and her newlywed husband slept.