Paradise Valley (8 page)

“I miss walking to school with you,” Rachel told him, “but I’m glad you don’t have to go anymore. I only wish I didn’t have to.”

Caleb Bender watched his daughters leave the house every morning, strolling down the road on their way to school, swinging their lunch pails. When he saw them, no matter where he was or what he was doing, he stopped, took his hat off and held it against his chest while he said a brief, earnest prayer asking his Gott to show him another way. And it wasn’t just his own children he prayed for, but all the others who were being trained and immersed in worldly ways every day, abducted from their parents’ upbringing against their will. He could see no end to it. It would never stop. This would go on and on, with his children’s children, and their children too, and so on until there
were
no more plain people. To outsiders it seemed innocuous enough, but Caleb was wise enough to see that if Amish children were forced to spend most of their time in English schools, in a generation or two there would be no Amish left.

It broke his heart, and it hardened his resolve.

When he had finished his brief, hard prayer he would put his hat on and turn his hands to whatever the day demanded of him. But Caleb Bender had been a farmer all his life and his hands, like a well-trained mule, knew their own way. His work seldom required much of his mind, so while he walked a fence line with a pair of pliers and a roll of wire, he was free to think about the school dilemma. While he chopped up a dead fall for firewood, he was probing, and while he worked a new horse or roamed the woods hunting deer, his mind was ranging far and wide searching for a way to rescue the children from the grip of the world without breaking his word. In time it became inescapably clear that as long as he stayed in Ohio he would be bound by the law, and by his promise.

He was not averse to leaving Ohio – after all, it was persecution that drove the Amish to America in the first place. But history also told him that even a move to another Amish settlement in Pennsylvania or Indiana would provide only a temporary solution. If one state passed such a law, sooner or later they all would.

He just couldn’t see a way out.

Caleb’s mind was occupied with these things on a Thursday morning in mid-February when he hitched up his buggy and drove down to Kidron for the livestock auction. At the auction he spoke with at least a dozen brethren he knew very well, and all of them were scratching their heads and wagging their beards over the same issue. It was the main topic of conversation at the sale, yet none of them could see a way out.

Caleb found nothing he wanted at the auction – it was always a little slow this time of year – but when the sale ended he was deep in discussion with his good friend the blacksmith, so he walked with him over to the hardware store. The blacksmith needed to buy a new knife for trimming hooves. He weighed various knives while they talked, hefting each in his hand to gauge the strength and balance of it, and when he had made his choice he went to the counter to pay for it. Caleb waited for him by the door, staring absently through the glass. As he stood there an Amish girl passed by on her way home with a lunch pail in her hand, and from the back she looked so much like his Rachel that he instinctively pulled the hat from his head, right there in the store, and sent up a silent, fervent plea for his Gott to show him another way.

Then he put his hat back on his head and turned to his right where he saw his reflection in the glass case covering a bulletin board. It was just a cork board with pieces of paper pinned to it announcing horses and mules for sale, offering the services of cobblers and tinkers and well diggers. But there in the middle of his face, as his eyes refocused to see the board behind the glass, was a folded piece of paper bearing a bold one-word headline that caught his eye and would, he knew instantly, alter the course of his life.

MEXICO.

Underneath that, in smaller letters, were the words
LAND
FOR SALE
.

It was an answer, a sign – he recognized that still small voice, the incendiary subtlety. A little shiver ran through him.

Caleb swung the glass door open by its wooden knob, and his hand shook as he reached in and pulled the tack from the pamphlet. He didn’t wait for Irvin. Holding the paper close to his face with both hands he hurried outside into the bright sunlight so he could read the small print without his glasses. The front page said:

Paradise Valley
–
five thousand acres of prime, flat, fertile farmland
nestled in the Sierra Madre of northeastern Mexico, only a
hundred miles from the American border
.

Five thousand acres. Enough for
many
Amish farms. Before now, he had not thought in terms of a whole group of Amish migrating to another place, but if there was plenty of land, why not? There were lots of others who felt the same way he did.

And then another thought struck him, and it brought a tear to his eye.

Martha.

Mexico was a dry place! In Mexico, his Martha might be able to get better!

This was too good to be true, too perfect. Opening the pamphlet he read the finer print on the inside, skipping and scanning in a feverish search for hard facts.

Ten dollars an acre
, it said. Cheap. There had to be a catch. Probably desert land, where they would all starve.

Green pasture. Elevation six thousand feet, spring-like weather
year round, long planting season. Warm days, cool nights.

Green pasture. Caleb looked up with a kind of wonder in his eyes, and his lips worked silently over words from the
Heilige
Schrift
, words in High German so ingrained he could not remember a time when he didn’t know them.

“
Er weidet mich auf einer grünen Aue.
”

He maketh me to lie down in a green pasture
.

Flipping over to the back of the brochure, his forefinger traced a line to the bottom, where he found what he was looking for.

Laredo Land Brokers, Ltd.
Laredo, Texas
Local agent: Avery Fiedler
Morgan-Fiedler Real Estate
109 Main St.
Kidron, Ohio

Less than two blocks away. Caleb headed down Main Street with a fire in his heart and a purpose in his stride, the pamphlet clenched tight in his fist. Only when he laid his hand on the doorknob of the Morgan-Fiedler Real Estate offices did he look back up the street and remember that in his haste he had simply walked off and left his friend in the hardware store.

Avery Fiedler was not what Caleb expected in a real-estate agent, a man who sat behind a desk and made his living by selling other people’s homes. He was a tidy, clean-shaven little man in a three-piece wool suit, but despite his prim appearance and his office job, Fiedler gave a firm handshake. The office was neat and clean too, the desktop clear but for a blotter and inkstand. The walls were mostly covered with maps of the surrounding countryside dotted with stickpins, marking, Caleb assumed, the properties Morgan-Fiedler represented.

“What can I do for you?” Avery asked. He asked this quietly, sincerely, without the proud, brassy tone Caleb had come to expect from salesmen.

Caleb held out the brochure. “Can you tell me about this?”

Avery took the pamphlet from his hand and opened it.

“I sure can. A Mr. Marlon Harris, from Laredo, came by here on his way to Canada last week and left this with me. I figured the best thing to do was post it at the hardware store where some Amish farmer might see it.” He smiled at Caleb, and it seemed a very genuine smile. “It appears I was right.”

“This Paradise Valley,” Caleb said, “have you seen it?”

“Oh no, I haven’t been to Mexico, but Mr. Harris said he went down there and looked it over. He had nothing but good things to say about it. There’s a road right down the middle of the property, longways. Lots of road frontage on both sides. Perfect climate. Even though it’s south of the border, it’s not too hot because it’s so high up, but not too high to grow crops. Mountains on three sides and good black dirt, he said. Volcanic origin, if I understood him right. He said you could grow just about anything there if you knew how to irrigate. If there’s a drawback to the place, I guess that would be it – there’s not much surface water. No creeks or rivers on the land at all.”

“How much rain do they get?”

“Enough, I suppose. All I know is it’s not desert. From what I understand the really arid country is in the lowlands, not the mountains. Right now this parcel belongs to some Mexican cattle baron who used to use it for pasture, and Mr. Harris said it was greener than anything around Laredo. Big ranch called Hacienda El Prado.”

“Why would this Harris fella come all the way to Ohio to try and sell a piece of Mexico when he lives right there in Texas?”

“What he told me, Mr. Bender, is he figured it might be a hard sell because, well, you know . . . it’s in Mexico.” He said this with raised eyebrows and a little shrug. Something in his eyes led Caleb to wonder if maybe there was something he wasn’t saying.

“Besides, everybody wants electric lights these days, and this place is out in the middle of nowhere in the mountains where, who knows, they might
never
get electricity. But Marlon Harris, being an enterprising young man, knew this wouldn’t be a concern for the Amish. Since he was heading to Canada anyway, and his train would be passing through Amish country, he figured it wouldn’t do any harm to put the word out.”

Fiedler’s explanation seemed sensible enough, but the land itself still sounded too good to be true.

“If the land is so gut, why would they sell it so cheap?”

Fiedler took a deep breath, blew it out through puffed cheeks. “That I honestly don’t know, friend, but I try not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Maybe the owner is in some financial difficulty, who knows? But if it’s anywhere near as fine a parcel as Marlon Harris claims, then I’d say their loss is your gain.”

Caleb stood there thinking, holding the brochure open in his rough hands, studying it. There was even a crude map on the inside.

“What about schools?” he asked.

Fiedler scratched his head, winced. “I wouldn’t know much about that,” he said, “but I suspect they’re not going to be anywhere near as good as what we’ve got in the States. Our neighbors to the south are a little behind us in some ways. For all I know they may not even
have
a school system.”

“You don’t say.” A little smile relaxed Caleb’s face, studying the brochure.

“Oh, wait . . .” Avery Fiedler said, and the light of recognition came into his eyes. “I read about the problems between the Amish and the school system. It was in the papers. Some of your people were arrested, weren’t they?”

Caleb nodded. “I was one.”

“Ahhh.
Now
I see. So you’re wanting to know if there’s any chance you might run into the same problems in Mexico. To be honest, Mr. Bender, I don’t know what their laws are in that regard. But Marlon Harris can answer your questions a lot better than I can. If you’re seriously interested, I might be able to arrange a meeting next week. When his train comes back through I can probably hold him here if you want to talk to him.”

Caleb nodded firmly. “Yes. If you could do that, I would like it very much.”

Chapter 8

Caleb Bender stopped off at four different farms on his way home from Kidron that Thursday afternoon, showing them the brochure and spreading the news of his discovery. He could hardly contain his excitement. The prospect of good, rich, cheap land in Mexico, where the government would not force its schools on Amish children, kindled a fire in him.

He said nothing to his neighbors about the other reason for his excitement – his wife, Martha. Caleb tended to keep such thoughts private, for he had been taught from birth that whether one lived or died was entirely in the hands of Gott. But Caleb adored his wife. He was terrified of losing her and he thought, just maybe, the brochure was Gott’s way of telling him how to save her.

The meeting with the land agent from Texas was only a little more than a week away, but all he had to do was put out the word on Sunday and let the Amish grapevine do its work. The news spread like a prairie fire.

The following Saturday afternoon a line of buggies stretched down Caleb’s back lot well past the barn. Chairs and benches from every part of the house were packed into the living room, and there was a great scraping of wooden chairs as Amishmen filed in and found seats. Precisely at one o’clock, as promised, Avery Fiedler’s automobile pulled into the Benders’ driveway and the two real-estate agents made their way into the crowded house.