Deadline (24 page)

Tears spilled over again, but her eyes held steady with his.

“I don’t tell you these things to make you hurt. I just tell you so you’ll know. And I regret bringing this up in front of company, but these are words I’ve waited a long time to say to you. I never wanted you to go, and never God knows wanted you to stay away. But time went by, and more time, and still you didn’t come home. After a while, I knew. Somewhere out there you’d found what you wanted, and it gave you more satisfaction than what we had here. And I knew you’d not be coming back, and I’d have to resign myself to it. That’s when I decided to make some changes in the Church.”

“I’d have come visiting years ago if I’d known that.”

“Well, now you do know it.” Jacob Yoder reached across the table and covered her hand with his. “Let’s have no more talk tonight about visits and things temporary. All I want in my last years is to have my family back together again.”

Dusk had fallen on the fields, and in the yellow of the lamps their faces glowed across the table at each other. Crickets had started up. Walker could hear them right through the closed front door. Jacob Yoder threw some more wood on the fire and soon the noise of the blaze drowned out all others, and a cheery warmth spread across the room. They sat talking for a long time after Diana’s mother had cleared away the dishes. The old man and his daughter talked as if no one were in the room with them. It was almost eight by the clock on the mantel when Jacob turned to Walker and said, “How long will you be staying with us, sir?”

“I don’t know.” Walker looked at Diana, as if she should decide, but Jacob took the decision out of her hands.

“You’re welcome for as long as you want. Michael will have a room for you. I trust you’ll be comfortable.”

“I’m sure we will.”

Jacob Yoder’s eyes moved back to Diana. “You’ll stay here with us.”

He had taken charge, separated them easily and effectively. It was as if, by cutting them off from each other, he had cemented the bond between himself and his daughter. She got up at once, slipping back into her old role without question or comment. She helped her mother at the sink while Jacob escorted Walker and Joanne to the door with Michael and Trudy.

“You may put your car in the barn,” Jacob said. “If people see it in my yard, they’re liable to start thinking all kinds of things.” He went out with them and opened the barn door. Then he left them in Michael’s care. Trudy took Joanne by the hand and they stepped through a gate and into the plowed field. “It’s too dark to walk it alone, if you don’t know the way,” Trudy said. “You might turn an ankle. Here, let me show you.”

They found a path that led around the perimeter of the field. They walked under some trees and along a riverbank. Far up the hill, they could see the pale yellow of oil lamps against window frames.

“That’s Daniel’s place,” Michael said. “I’m renting some land from him, and I’m working to buy the farm next door.”

“We’ve got a nice little place,” Trudy said. “I hope you’ll like it with us.”

“I already do,” Joanne said. “You’re lovely people.”

T
HEY DIDN’T SEE MUCH
of Diana after that; didn’t see her at all the next day. Walker went over to the main house around noon, and was told by Mrs. Yoder that Diana had gone with her father. By three o’clock, the buggy still hadn’t returned.

On Sunday, just seven days after they had been taken at gunpoint from his New Jersey apartment, Walker attended church in the Amish farm country of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The families gathered in the Jenkins home, about a mile straight across Daniel Yoder’s field. Joanne asked if she could go. “In the old Church, it would have been hard,” Michael said. “But with us, the question’s never come up. Why don’t you come along and we’ll ask.”

So Walker went too. They stood out in the yard until everyone else had arrived. Diana came with her family. She wore a plain dress whose hem touched her ankles, and a bonnet tied delicately under her chin. To Walker she looked like a different person. She looked like Susan Yoder, the perfect, romanticized picture of simple Amish beauty. She smiled at him and her father escorted her in. Mrs. Yoder came along behind them. A few minutes later Michael came out and invited them inside.

There were perhaps forty people in the room, from maybe a dozen families. The room was almost identical to the big room in the Yoder house, with hard wood chairs placed in a semicircle. Walker and Joanne sat in a corner, away from everyone.

A deacon named Carl Miller gave a sermon, which was followed by a long talk from Bishop David Beiler. Neither man used notes. They looked straight into the crowd. The bishop began by welcoming Diana back into their midst. There was no mention of her rejoining the Church. That would come only after a public confession of sin and a vote of the membership. The bishop moved on to other subjects: the coming planting season and its importance in God’s framework; some of the intricacies of that framework, and how the various elements interlaced with each other to make a uniform whole. His talk went on for more than two hours. It ended with an indictment of the public school system, which had resulted in more problems for the Amish than the bureaucrats in Washington could ever know or understand. The poisonous influence of the outside had to be stemmed if the Church would survive. And while he talked, his eyes returned again and again to Diana, as the living example of what could happen outside. Her eyes remained in her lap, upon her closed hands.

By the time the service ended, it was midafternoon. In all, it had gone on more than four hours, including the bishop’s talk. Next came the social hour, with visiting and talk and piles of food. The men went outside and gathered behind Arnold Jenkins’ barn, while the women prepared the meal. Joanne Sayers, feeling part of neither group, took a walk along the riverbank. Walker stood at the end of the barn and watched her until she was out of sight.

Joanne had reacted strangely to the Amish, almost from the beginning. What had seemed stupid and archaic from a distance had become quaint and then lovely at closer view. Walker had seen her growing infatuation that first night, when Michael and Trudy had shown them to their room. The room was small and bare, like the rooms in the main house, and there were lamps for each end table. The house was cold, but Michael didn’t light the fire. He turned up the wicks on all three lamps in the living room and it made a respectable light.

Trudy brought them some warm milk and they sat in the large room and talked. Trudy sat under Michael’s arm, his chin on her head, and after a while she touched his belt buckle and doodled it with her little finger. To Walker the gesture was wildly sexual, and it took him a moment to figure out why. Back in Jersey, he wouldn’t have thought twice if a guy and girl had met at a party and five minutes later they were in a corner somewhere necking. Here, it was so different. There was no demonstration between the sexes, and what may have been a simple gesture looked to an outsider like an invitation to a love feast. As if she just couldn’t hustle him off to bed fast enough. That was it. Since his arrival, he had yet to see a man kiss his wife, or touch her hand the way Jacob Yoder had touched Diana’s hand at the dinner table. None of them demonstrated any personal feelings at all.

Michael and Trudy were different. And it was such a small thing, but so big in the semidarkness of that farmhouse room. The air in Michael’s home was heavy with love. They sat up for perhaps twenty minutes, sipping their milk and talking about the day. Trudy seemed highly progressive for her station in life. Michael nodded, as if deep in thought, and never once corrected her.

“Mr. Walker,” he said when a lull had come, “how well do you know my sister?”

“She’s a hard person to know really well,” Walker said. “Meaning no disrespect.”

“No, I know just what you’re saying. I’m just wondering if you think she’s home for good, and if she’d be happy with that.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know.”

“I hope I’ll get a chance to talk to her myself. Wasn’t she happy in New York?”

Walker thought about it. “It’s just an opinion, but I’d say no. She missed all this.”

“And now that she’s here, she’ll miss all that,” Trudy said.

Michael touched her cheek with his finger.

“I hope I’m wrong,” she said. “But I’ll bet I’m not. I’m a lot younger than Diana, but in a way I think I understand her far better than her family ever can. For a while, I wanted to be like her.”

Michael said, “You never told me that.”

“I know. I thought I’d wait till I understood it better before sharing it with you.” She looked at Walker. “Michael would go off to New York, then he’d come home and tell me about Diana’s life there, and for a while after each visit I’d lie awake at night and my soul was full of envy. I wanted what she had, and at the same time I wanted what I had. I went through the crisis in my teens, just like her. Only she went and I stayed, and for all these years I’ve been contented with my decision. Until Michael started going off to New York. It was hard after that. Diana had a…what’s the word?”

“Mystique,” Walker said. The mystique of the big time.

“It means you’ve got a certain attraction for another person, or for her way of life,” Trudy said. “And now she’s come back. I haven’t seen her since eighth grade, and I didn’t know her then. She was far ahead of me in school, and was already done with all that. I didn’t even know Michael then, except to look at. And now here she is, and there’s such pain in her that I wouldn’t trade places with her for anything. I hope she does the right thing.”

“I hope so too, Trudy,” Walker said.

The guest bedroom was, if anything, colder than the rest of the house. The double bed dominated it, flanked on either side by handmade end tables. There was no closet. They would hang their clothes, if they undressed at all, on wire hangers that draped from a wooden pole that ran across a corner of the room. They closed the door and sat on the bed.

“Now what?” Joanne said.

Walker could see her breath, and his own as he said, “Now we go to bed, I guess.”

“What a strange, wonderful journey this is.” She smiled at him. “You start out with Diana and end up with me. Who’d have thought it?”

“Listen, Joanne…”

“Oh, Walker, be still. I’m not going to make any demands on you. God forbid.”

“You know how it is.”

“No, tell me. How is it?”

But he didn’t tell her. He didn’t tell her that the aura of sex around Michael and Trudy was infectious, that he wanted her too, that she had changed forever in his mind from the gun-toting terrorist to someone much closer and more important. He didn’t even tell her that what happened to her mattered very much to him. She watched him with interest born of that primitive hunger that can never be mistaken. Finally she rolled her eyes toward the door.

“What do you think they’re doing out there in their room?”

“Sleeping. Wasn’t that the idea of the warm milk?”

“Sleeping my eye.” She turned down the bed. “Why don’t you relax, Walker?”

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can. Forget about yourself for a while. Think about me.”

“I am.”

And he was. He was remembering her in the shower, and later, patting her private parts with a heavy towel.

“You are like hell,” she said. “You’re thinking about yourself, and what’ll happen if people find out you screwed Joanne Sayers. What it comes down to is you’re a hypocrite, Walker. At the bottom of that tough-guy facade, you’re just like all the rest. You want me and I’m here, and what the hell, you’re afraid. Scared to death for all the wrong reasons. I’m really disappointed in you.”

“I’m sorry you feel like that.”

“How am I supposed to feel? What is it, Walker, do I turn you off?”

“No.”

“Then what? Is it because I’m your story?”

“Yeah, that’s part of it.”

“And I’m a fugitive.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I wonder,” she said, “if the simple act of fucking me could be construed in any legal sense as aiding and abetting. Do you think so?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“You lying son of a bitch. Or maybe it isn’t me at all. Maybe it’s your girlfriend, up there in her daddy’s house.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

“You’re such a goddamned fool. She’ll never leave here with you. Even I can see that, and you could put what I know about these people through the head of a needle. And I’ll tell you something, I wouldn’t blame her if she did stay here. I’d trade places with her in a minute.”

“I’m sure you would.”

“It’s got nothing to do with avoiding jail, so get that look off your face. Take away my so-called crimes, make me a free person and I’d still trade places with her. I’d take her family. Let her go to the big town and fight the traffic and the smog and hunt for a decent job. Let her fight off the phony cocksmen every time you turn around. I’m telling you, Walker, there’s something basic and great about life here, and I love it. What do you think about that?”

“I think you’re talking to yourself. It’s easy to love something when you’ve only known it a few hours. And when you’ve got no other choice. It takes a certain kind of person to live like this. Inside of two months you’d be ready for a straitjacket and a padded cell.”

“Maybe you’re right. At least it’d be interesting to find out. Maybe I will find out. What would you do if I decided to find out, Walker?”

“I don’t follow that.”

“If I decided to stay here. Become one of them.”

“It’s a waste of time talking about it.”

“So what? What else have you got to do? You won’t come to bed with me. But that’s your loss.”

“I’m sure it is.”

“For a little while, I could make you a very happy man.”

“You don’t make it easy, do you?”

“I sure don’t.” She stood beside the bed and began to undress.

Walker turned his eyes up toward the window.

“Walker,” she said a moment later. “Walker, look at me. I’m goosebumpy all over from the cold. Come on, warm me up. Aid and abet me, Walker.”

“I can’t. I can’t touch you, Joanne, no matter how much I want to.”