The Alliance Page 9

  Yesterday, I worked up the nerve to enter the living room and change the sheets on the couch bed. I also worked up the nerve to inspect her prescription bottle while I was there. When Melinda first arrived, the tiny blue pills appeared to be a full month’s supply. Now, nine days post-EMP, she has only enough to last her until the end of the week. I have little tolerance for someone who relies on escapism to dull their pain. But whenever I feel frustrated with Melinda, I try to remind myself that being around our family must bring the loss of her own family back, not to mention the loss of being able to come and go as she pleases.

  She whispers beside me, “I wish I were dead.”

  How do you respond when someone makes such an admission? Any uplifting platitudes would sound dull since I have no hope to offer. So I say nothing. I stand beside her in silence and stare down at my coffee, which seems a frivolous indulgence in comparison to her plight. When I risk glancing over at her again, she’s looking at the sun without blinking, as if she’s willing it to permanently burn memories from her mind’s eye. The stark illumination reveals the faint etching of lines around her mouth, the freckles spanning the bridge of her nose, the unruly hair reclaiming her perfectly shaped brows.

  The building blocks fortifying Melinda’s life—her family, her money, her power—have been demolished, leaving her standing in the center of the devastation, bare and exposed. I cannot claim to possess any of the assets she has in abundance, but I do have a family. Despite our brokenness, they bring me security. It hurts me to envisage standing where Melinda’s standing right now, knowing that this security is gone, that this is both the beginning of a life . . . and the end. “I’m sorry,” I murmur. “I know this hasn’t been easy for you.”

  Melinda finally closes her eyes, the lashes fluttering against the changing light like moths. Tears cling to the individual strands, but she looks upward at the sky’s faint tracing of stars and doesn’t let them fall. “Thank you,” she says, and then turns and walks back into the house, closing the door so quietly that I think, for a moment, I dreamed her standing beside me.

  Jabil must’ve been watching our interaction. Less than five minutes after Melinda goes back inside, he crosses the field with a scythe across his shoulder. His suspenders are straight and his hair is combed. But his eyes—even from this distance—are bloodshot. I wonder if he misled his family, telling them he wanted to get an early start cutting the hay field between our houses, and yet I fear he really wants to talk to me again about combining our homesteads.

  My mouth goes dry as I watch him tread through the grass, his footprints cutting a darker pattern as they strip away the dew. Forcing a smile, I hold up my cup—diluted coffee, once more the only balm I have to offer—but he shakes his head. He sets the scythe down and climbs the porch steps. He doesn’t offer a greeting, just looks at me with his signature austere expression before glancing toward the kitchen window that is backlit by the kerosene lamp.

  “Someone reported seeing Moses leaving the community,” he says. “My uncle and the deacons came over to our house this morning. To ask where he went.”

  “There is no crime in leaving. We are not on lockdown.”

  Mt. Hebron has no enforced curfew. But it’s understood that nothing moral happens after midnight. Therefore, the only law we broke last night was illicitly entering the museum—and, discounting the jar of buttons Jabil poached for me, only the attempted theft of the tractors. Yet I know there is more to it than that. It took only nine days post-EMP for me not only to violate physical boundaries, but also to violate my ethical parameters. This is why I had such trouble sleeping after our return from Liberty, even as my sister was nestled without fanfare in our bed. I can blather on about my desire to provide for my family, but the truth is that when life becomes hard, I am no different from my vadder. I am willing to do almost anything to avoid feeling out of control.

  I glance down at my mug, but anything acidic would just combine with the acid climbing up my throat. Leaning over the rail, I dump the rest of the precious coffee on the ground, aware—even as I watch it seep into the earth—that I will soon regret the impulse when we have no coffee left. I ask, “Do they know we were trying to take a tractor?”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “I mean . . . yes. They know that Moses attempted to steal a vehicle, but he wouldn’t say we were along.”

  Jabil studies me with those somber, dark eyes, but I am unable to decipher them. What do they convey? Sadness, jealousy . . . a fusion of both? He shifts his gaze away. “I overheard that they’re thinking about expelling him from the community, allowing him to take only his belongings like the edict says.”

  My protective instinct rises up, righteous and maternal. “Forget the edict! He can’t be expelled. He can barely walk! How’s he supposed to survive in a place like we saw last night?”

  Jabil shrugs. “He should’ve thought it through. We all should’ve thought it through. It was an unlawful attempt: trying to get ahead by taking what is not ours. If I could do it over, I wouldn’t have gone along, and I wouldn’t have let you go.”

  “‘Let’ me go?” I repeat, incredulous. “Moses was right: it’s not your place to tell me what I can or cannot do, Jabil Snyder, just as it was not your place to vote on my behalf. You know I’m not interested in courtship, and yet you still try to tell me what to do and think.”

  Jabil folds his arms, his eyebrows raised in shock. I take my glasses off and stare up at him in defiance, forcing him to blink first. He turns from me to stare down the lane, his breath coming out hard and fast. I feel a bittersweet satisfaction, knowing I have the upper hand.

  The silence continues. I turn to stare down the lane as well, trying to comprehend how someone could’ve spied on us when we left so early in the morning, since even dairy farmer Elias Lehman would have been asleep. “Wait. Did you tell on Moses? Did you turn him in?”

  Jabil doesn’t say anything, only stares at the pilot’s wreckage with his jaw throbbing.

  “Are you jealous of him? Is that it?” I step closer until I can smell the unwashed tang of his skin. Our breaths rise, the morning sun knifing between our bodies. “You thought that because I turned you down, I must be going after someone else?” I stare at his profile until he looks over at me. Then, guiltily, he looks away. My body trembles with rage at the hypocrisy of this man standing before me, pacifist though he might be, who would wield his power to crush a man he perceives as his foe. It seems I know the real Jabil as little as he knows the real me.

  He says, “I’m just trying to protect you.”

  “I don’t need protecting.”

  Jabil pivots from me, his face stricken. “I hope you’re right,” he murmurs, so quietly that I have to strain to hear. We don’t say anything else, just stare at the field between our two houses, as if joined and separated by the wreckage of Moses’s plane.

  I cannot stay here once Jabil begins cutting hay, but neither can I go back inside to face Grossmammi’s inquisitive expression. So I cut across the yard and stride down the lane, not aware where I am headed, just aware that I need to put as much distance between Jabil and me as the community’s perimeter will allow. The fog has mostly dissipated, yet the sun struggles to shine through the embellishment of stiff, meringue-white clouds. The workers’ hammers ring across the valley like the repetition of a gong bidding us to come and dine on whatever food is to last us until planting season comes again.

  The Snyders’ chimney is devoid of its spool of smoke, the hitching post lacking the horse and buggy typically waiting in their yard, leaving me to assume that everyone has left. Perhaps Moses has left as well. My heart sinks at the thought, deeper within myself than I would care to admit. I should’ve never let him close enough to have that kind of power over my emotions.

  I walk up the back porch steps, which are laid out identically to ours, and enter the kitchen after knocking on the screen door. Moses is seated at the table, dust swirling in the natural light filtered through the smudged windowp
anes. A plate of food is before him: sunny-side-up eggs with toast, tarnished pepper and salt shakers beside a tin cup of coffee. Other than the eggs, every bit of that fare should be rationed, and I wonder if anyone else in our community has reached that level of comprehension of what is soon going to be lost. But I imagine that Widow Snyder, Jabil’s mother, would give Moses her last scoop of coffee grounds and granule of salt because she is as besotted with the pilot as I, regretfully, am.

  “Hey, Leora,” Moses says.

  I don’t look at him but focus on the backpack leaning against the wall beside the pile of scuff-toed shoes displaying the age range and sex of everyone living in this house—a backpack with a green bedroll attached to the bottom and a stainless-steel canister with a black, screw-on lid. This must be all Moses could salvage from his plane. I stare at these items, yet remain clinging to the doorframe. When I glance inside, Moses is watching me too.

  “Where will you go?” I ask.

  “Join the locusts, I suppose.” He smirks, but his light eyes are dim.

  “We were accomplices.” My vison blurs, voice breaks. “It’s only right that if you get punished, we get punished too.”

  Moses shakes his head. “It was my idea. . . . Let me take the blame.”

  “I’m not just thinking of you.” I point to the line of shoes, as if they are filled by the children who own them. “What will happen when the locusts come? When we only have three men in the whole community who are willing to fight back?” These are contradictory words for a pacifist. But suddenly my genuine convictions are unveiled, even to me: though I would probably never lift a hand in violence, I do not mind if others lift theirs to protect those I love.

  “Maybe you should learn how to shoot.”

  “My vadder already taught me how to shoot.”

  Moses unfolds his hands and leans back in the chair. “Why are you so defensive?”

  My eyes burn. I stare through the Snyders’ window to our house, which my vadder painstakingly built and then abandoned. I look back at him. “Because you’re cornering me.”

  “I’m just asking a question.”

  His doggedness is infuriating. Having nothing to lose, because he’s leaving anyway, I snap, “If I’m defensive, it’s because I have to prove my self-worth.”

  “Prove to whom?”

  “‘Prove to whom’?” I laugh. “To myself, the community, strangers on the street. It doesn’t matter who it is. I feel like someone’s always judging me . . . about to take away everything I have left.”

  “Why would they do that, when you’ve done nothing wrong?”

  “But I have, Moses. I was supposed to be watching Anna that day she fell in the barn, and she almost died because of me.” I stop, hungry for absolution.

  He says nothing. Reaching beneath the table, Moses brings up his revolver. He sets it on the table with a thunk that causes me to step back, as if the impact might cause the gunpowder to explode. “You weren’t punished or a punisher, Leora. Pain happens. It’s a fact of life.”

  He stands to holster the revolver. Then he stops—still holding the gun—and walks around the kitchen table, actually two tables turned lengthwise and pushed together so that all eight family members can sit in between the kitchen and the dining room during meals. He stands directly before me. A ray from the early morning light falls upon his head, igniting the blond hair with a tongue of fire. He holds the gun out in his cupped palms, an offering of reassurance, but it feels more like the apple Eve offered to Adam before the two of them fell.

  “Think how you could protect your family,” he says, “when these locusts come, or whoever comes bent on hurting you.”

  I don’t look at him as I take the revolver and readjust my grip to accommodate the odd dimensions and weight. The metal is cool to the touch. I run one finger along the sleek bottom of the barrel until I come upon the trigger. I shudder, envisioning the sleek bullet, the catalyst that would launch from its chamber if I switched off the safety and pressed down. A curve of metal that possesses the power to extinguish a life. I look up at Moses and am unable to tell if he is evil or good. Perhaps he is neither; perhaps—like my vadder, like all of us—he is a mixture of both. I say, “God will protect us.”

  Moses takes the revolver from me, sliding it down into his holster and snapping the top. His impatience is evident as he asks, “What about King David? Wasn’t he considered a man after God’s own heart, even though there was blood on his hands?”

  Once again, I am surprised by Moses’s familiarity with the Bible, since that first day we spoke on the playground, he told me he was not a man of faith. Perhaps he has head knowledge, just not heart knowledge. But am I not the same? My pacifist viewpoints were solid only because they had never been rocked by real-world events. Now I have desecrated their foundation by taking a revolver in my hands. And yet, my Anabaptist ancestors were driven from their homeland without protest. They were burned alive without protest, some even singing as they walked toward the stake. How were they able to move knowledge from their heads to their hearts? Or did this conviction come only after they saw their companions’ devotion and then felt the scorching heat of their own flames?

  I stare into the middle distance over Moses’s shoulder, envisioning every trial that has yet to take place. Eventually, thwarting the quiet, I reply to his comment about King David. “We’re not living in Old Testament times. There’s no more need for that kind of violence.”

  “So tell me,” Moses says, leaning closer, his breath evocative of coffee and mint. “What would you do if someone came up that lane wanting to murder your family?”

  His words, though gentle, hit me like a blow from the hand. I stare at Moses Hughes, again trying to discern whether God sent him here to keep us safe, or whether he is being used by a malevolent force determined to destroy our community from the inside out. And yet . . . how would it feel to be able to protect my family in the way I have always longed to? Just because I harbored a weapon, it wouldn’t mean that I would have to inflict violence. . . .

  I can feel Moses watching me, searching my face for a sign of what I am about to say. But even I do not know what I’m about to say. I just know I cannot imagine taking another’s life, even to preserve the lives of my family.

  “I don’t think I could do it, Moses.” I swallow a sudden welling of tears for the second time today. “If someone came up that lane intending to harm my family, I would first invite them into our home and I would prepare a meal for them. We would sit around the table, give thanks, and talk. If, afterward, they wanted to take my life, our lives, even after we’ve been so kind to them, then—I guess—so be it.”

  Moses peruses me, aghast, and then he looks down at the scarred hardwood floor. “Well—I would say you’re a far better person than I am. But I’m not sure whether allowing someone to come into your home and destroy your family is wisdom or foolishness.”

  Moses picks up his backpack and slips his arms through the straps.

  “You are going to leave?” I ask. “Just like that?”

  “The Snyders said good-bye this morning, before they left for work at Field to Table.” As if I am not worthy of a good-bye at all.

  He moves into the foyer and opens the front door. I gaze at him and at his backpack, edged by the frame. For an instant, I contemplate leaving with Moses, knowing my future is insecure whether I go or stay. But I know it would be selfish to leave. My family needs me.

  Moses steps onto the porch. I come outside. The screen door taps shut. It is strange to stand on the front porch of the house Jabil would have me occupy, and instead stand by someone I know he does not like, mostly because he perceives Moses as a threat against him. Against us.

  Moses and I peer out at the community, our thoughts muddled by everything that has—and hasn’t—been said. I wonder if his knowledge of the EMP has him envisioning where we will all be in a year: Malnourished? Displaced? Scraping by on the remnants of what we harvested this year? It’s hard to foresee where
Mt. Hebron will be by then; it’s scary to wonder who will compromise their ethics in order to remain.

  At the entrance of the community, the Mennonite men are working side by side with the Englischers whom we did not know nine days ago. And, honestly, whom we do not know now. From this vantage point, you cannot see any nuances in their appearances, only their joint zeal to fortify the perimeter by nailing coils of old barbed wire along the top—knowing that wire alone cannot stop intruders but will at least slow them down.

  The Mennonites are going against the bishop by not leaving the construction project to the Englisch. But this is no rebellion. My Mennonite neighbors began working on the perimeter yesterday when, according to Moses’s timeline, they realized we are soon going to need protection from the locusts who are rumored to be coming.

  Moses adjusts his pack and begins descending the steps. He turns and raises his hand to shield his vision. Through the lattice of his fingers and the shadows they create, I can see the brilliant hue of his eyes. “Thanks for everything.”

  I nod, powerless to speak. The pilot nods as well and begins walking up the lane. His stride is made uneven by a limp, though his ankle is almost healed, so I surmise it must come from some previous injury. I watch him traverse a few more yards—my own eyes shaded from the sun—and conclude that Moses Hughes is carrying far more baggage than what is visible on his back. In this, our unseen scars, he and I are the same. I look to my right, at my patch of land, where Jabil is cutting down the grass that would’ve soon withered in the field.

  Our eyes meet. The scythe flashes in his hand.

  Moses

  Holstering his hammer in his tool belt, Christian strides across the scaffolding. “Hey, Charlie,” he calls. “You heard anything about letting the pilot past the perimeter?”

  Charlie adjusts his grip on the rusty twist of barbed wire and looks down from the scaffolding, narrowing his eyes. “Haven’t heard a thing.”