Fire in the Night (13 page)

Sarah and Priscilla were mute with fear.

“
Selly glaenie hausa
! (Those little rabbits!)” Levi growled. “Always making trouble.” He bent his head, shaking it from side to side, making clucking noises, as if that alone could bring them safely into the house.

The rain still came down steadily but with less force, as Dat and Mam splashed from haymow to implement shed, garden shed to corncrib and back to the garage, calling, calling.

When Sarah could not stand another minute of waiting, she joined her parents, dashing senselessly after them shouting, “Suzie! Mervin!”

There is nothing emptier than the emptiness of a missing person. The very atmosphere is depleted of rationality when someone cannot be found.

Sarah’s mind absorbed this emptiness, this wet, watery world without Mervin and Suzie in it. She imagined them, soaking wet, stranded behind the Stoltzfus barn where the road turned sharply upward. She imagined them sitting beneath Hannah’s porch roof, safe and warm and dry. She’d give them a cupcake with white frosting on top. She imagined the small winding stream of water between them, so small it didn’t even have a name. Surely they wouldn’t have tried to go to the Stoltzfus place in that rain?

After searching every corner of every building, there was nothing to do but huddle under the porch roof and begin meaningless suggestions born of raw fear.

No, not the police. They didn’t need to know.

There was a certain unwillingness to let their neighbors find out. Not us, again. It’s embarrassing.

These words were not spoken, only thought, but they were thought together—a bond of understanding encircling them. As long as they didn’t know for sure, why trouble anyone?

It was when Mam began to cry that Dat sprang back to reality, put a hand on her shoulder, and said everything would be alright. Mam jerked her shoulder away and yelled at him in a voice tinged with craziness.

“We have to find them, Davey!”

Sarah thought of the crows cawing from the oak tree and felt the hopelessness, the first slice of dread cutting into her heart.

Suddenly, a thought sprang into her mind. Why had God kept the knowledge of the fishing poles from them? She knew before she went to see, the fishing poles would not be there.

They had told only Levi. Levi remembered everything, didn’t he?

Sarah rushed at him, grabbed his shirt front, hauled his big head around, and glowered at him.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” she hissed, overcome with dread.

“I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t say if I forgot.”

Levi cried. He begged Sarah for mercy.

Sarah stormed to the porch, a weeping Priscilla in tow, and in a terrible, hoarse voice told Mam and Dat.

“No! No!”

Mam sank to her knees pleading to her God to spare her little ones, please, please. Dat looked across the porch, seeing nothing, his straw hat dripping dirty water, his beard beaded with rain. And then they moved as one, back out into the rain, knowing their search must go on.

As Sarah opened the gate, she saw the slippery mud and the fullness of the cow’s udders as they stood patiently by the barnyard. She knew they should be milking. But she and Priscilla, Mam and Dat followed the cow path in the dripping aftermath of the storm, stumbling over tufts of grass as they spread out, unwilling to see, unable not to.

Ah. The creek had risen to a heart-stopping muddy flood that tumbled and churned behind the wild rose bushes and tall weeds immersed by the rising waters. They ran up and down its length, calling, calling, calling.

“Mervin! Suzie!”

They were wet, their shoes sucking the mud, their throats dry with apprehension, and still they called. Finally they stopped and looked at each other.

“We need help,” Dat said calmly.

They cried together but differently now, a sort of acceptance settling itself over the hysteria, quenching it. Their heads bent, they walked back to the house. Dat moved to the phone shanty like an old man, bearing the weight of his missing children.

The medics were the first to arrive in their red and white vehicle equipped to save people’s lives and a driver and an assistant blessed with helpful knowledge to relieve the pain of people in accidents, old people in cardiac arrest, or stroke victims. In this situation, they could only wait and talk into squawking devices or cell phones.

Many vehicles followed. Large green SUVs with blue lights rotating on their roofs, fire trucks, black and white police cars. Again.

Amish folks arrived, on scooters, walking, with umbrellas. Elam Stoltzfus and Omar Zook from across the pasture. Hannah came, sloshing through the rain, her flowered umbrella a bright spot of color in the gray evening.

Someone started the Lister diesel, its slow chugging a comfort of normalcy. Men were milking, doing Dat’s chores, as others formed an organized search party.

The light was gray as the storm wore itself out in small showers and slivers of light to the west. It seemed the world had been scrubbed and tossed about, then righted and patted dry, as if the countryside had emerged from a huge washer.

Sarah stood with Priscilla, numbly watching the scene with eyes that were still clouded with refusal to believe. They couldn’t have been swept away. That creek was not high enough. Suzie could swim. She was quite good at diving and swimming at their cousins’ pond. She would have made her way safely across, even if the creek was rising fast.

All that evening they searched. So many men. Why couldn’t they find anything? At least a fishing pole, a tackle box.

Panic became a constant foe, successfully fought back only to advance again with reinforcements of alarm, trepidation, and horror.

It was the failure to know for sure, the overwhelming doubt, that was hardest.

Hannah, her daughters, Matthew and Rose, women from neighboring homes and businesses—all came and went, their voices reassuring the family with genuine kindness.

Mam remained in her hickory rocker by the stove, a figure bent with restrained panic, her eyes wild, showing white. The frightened look stung Sarah’s heart.

In the gloom, they sat. Mam’s lips moved as she prayed. Someone wiped a furtive tear.

Hannah brought her forest green container of coffee. Sylvia Esh contributed a stack of Styrofoam cups, a tall plastic container of creamer, a glass sugar shaker, and some plastic spoons. An English woman dressed in a pants suit brought a large white cardboard box containing doughnuts from the bakery in Bird-In-Hand. Hannah promptly opened the lid, chose a custard-filled one, cupped her hand underneath it, and turned her back to take the first bite.

She should turn her back, Sarah thought. Then because she was guilty of spiteful feelings, she began to weep softly, wiping her nose furtively when no one was looking.

Priscilla glanced at her sister, bowed her head, and wept quietly with her.

Outside the commotion heightened with those milling about on the porch, an increased flurry of activity, and Mam shot out of the hickory rocker, her mouth open as if to cry out, but no sound emerged. The hand she lifted to her mouth was shaking so badly she could not keep it there, so she clenched both hands at her waist, the nails digging into each palm.

What was it?

Sarah got up and moved stiffly to the screen door. In the near darkness, a great shout went up, an exultation of humankind, a victory over fear and anxiety.

A burly fireman, his brown canvas raincoat dripping, his large face wreathed in smiles, carried a form wrapped in an orange blanket.

Suzie!

Sarah rushed to her, clawed at the blanket, and found a white-faced, wild-eyed Suzie, her hair matted to her head with silt and mud and water.

Mam grabbed Sarah by the sleeve, pushed her aside, and murmured incoherently as she tore the child from the fireman’s arms with a wild possessiveness. She sat down on the porch chair and let the blanket fall away, touching Suzie’s face and dirty hair as she checked for injuries.

“Suzie. Oh Suzie,” she said over and over.

Dat and Priscilla and Sarah crowded around, reached out, touching, reassuring, as Suzie burrowed her head into the rough, orange blanket against her mother’s shoulder. She cried and cried, then said she was thirsty.

Thirsty! And all this water.

Only forty-five minutes later, they found little Mervin’s lifeless form washed up against the large culvert that went beneath Abbot Road, about a mile downstream.

He had been carried to an eddy, where dead leaves and stalks swirled and caught against the side of the large, concrete culvert that was normally more than sufficient to let the meandering little stream run through.

With Suzie on her mother’s lap, sipping hot mint tea with sugar, and the women crowding around the scene of deliverance, the arrival of Mervin’s body was a hard blow of cruelty.

Another fireman, another orange blanket. But this time, no cry of victory, no shouting, only a solemn handing of the small still form to his father, who lowered his face, his straw hat hiding it, the only sound a paroxysm of loss and love for his small young son.

Mam bore it stoically, although her tears would not stop flowing all through the evening.

Dat carried Mervin in and laid him tenderly on the kitchen sofa. Slowly, reverently, they folded the blanket away, revealing the face of their beloved Mervin, his features perfect, showing no signs of suffering or struggle. Sarah gazed on the sweet face of her brother, so angelic in death. She cried as if her heart would break.

Why? Always the questioning, the constant chipping away of faith.

When Suzie was strong enough, she began to talk. She and Mervin had told Levi but left quickly, knowing it was soon chore time. They’d only wanted to catch a few of the fallfish that swam in small creeks in spring.

They had waded to the other side, then decided to follow the bend in the creek. They probably went farther than they thought, catching fish. When the storm came, they were scared. Afraid Dat would be angry, they had waited too long. They hid beneath some trees, then panicked, and tried to cross. A wall of water caught them, tumbling them about.

She did have Mervin’s hand. When she realized the situation was dire and the brown water had much more power than she expected, she struggled to save herself and her brother. When she crashed into an overhanging tree and Mervin was whirled away, she figured she’d probably drown, even though she so badly wanted to live.

She had caught the low branch of the tree, but she didn’t know she’d have to cling to it as long as she did. The water rose fast. She had to continually creep her hands up the branch to keep her head from going under.

She knew Mervin had been torn from her grasp, but hope kept her outlook bright. She talked to herself, telling herself to hang on, another five minutes, then another, and when the huge spotlight shone on her face, she thought she yelled. But in reality, she could only make weak mewling sounds, like a kitten. Her hands were scratched and broken open, her fingers stiff with cold and fatigue, but she was alive.

The coroner came, a small portly man who gravely performed his duty, nodded, and left.

They took Mervin away, still in the orange blanket, wearing his black trousers and gray suspenders over the blue shirt with two buttons missing. Dat and Mam felt him all over, as if to remember every inch of him. They kissed his beautiful, cold face.

“Goodbye, Mervin,” they said and then turned away to hide their faces, their shoulders shaking with the force of their sobs.

Quietly, Hannah produced a box of Kleenex from the light stand, letting her hand rest on Mam’s shoulder.

The boys came again from Dauphin County with their wives and children, crying, hugging, saying, “Thy will be done.”

They sat around the kitchen table and talked, while Mam, seemingly stabilized by these motherly duties, helped organize blankets and air mattresses, extra pillows.

Suzie had a hot bath, shampooed her hair, and reappeared, dressed in a clean flannel nightgown, her eyes still wide with fright. They plied her with chicken corn soup and a toasted cheese sandwich.

Hot chocolate? Shoofly pie? No, she could not eat.

Finally, she asked if God could forgive her for letting Mervin drown in that awful brown water. Everyone shook with sobs.

Mam gathered her up in her arms and held her as if she would never let her go. Dat hovered over her and said she was not responsible, little Mervin’s time to go had come, all designed by the Master’s hand.

She cried then, in great, shuddering sobs, a tremendous healing balm for a young child of ten.

“Well,” Dat said, blowing his nose. “Well, there’s no use asking why these things happen. It seems harsh, one chastening gone and another bitter one arriving so soon after. But we want to accept, examine our hearts, and repent of any wrongdoing. Hopefully, from this we will learn lessons, have our views and values widened, and our spiritual needs fulfilled. In all things, there is a purpose, and we don’t question.”

Sarah listened, frustrated. We don’t question? How could he say that?

Dat was a good, kind person, and so was Mam. They lived righteously and worked diligently at home and in the church, striving to secure the love that binds. And this was their reward?

Nothing went right, not one thing. How could God look down from his throne and call this fair? He must be strict, she thought. And besides, she prayed and prayed and prayed for Matthew, and He never answered her. Her yearning heart was now filled with grief.

Chapter 10