Sandra Hill - [Jinx] (7 page)

“Ain’t this jist wonderful? Me, I gots a good idea. Let’s have us a reunion party,” Tante Lulu suggested. “A real
fais do-do.
I bought me a boatload of okra. So we kin have gumbo.”

“A what dodo?” he asked.

“A party down on the bayou,” LeDeux interpreted, grinning.

“There’s no bayou here,” he argued.

“No bayou? Whaddya call that over yonder?” Tante Lulu pointed to the creek. “Mebbe there’s no gators or crawfish or hangin’ moss, but where I come from, thass a bayou.”

“You tell ’em,” Abbie said, speaking for the first time. She was blowing smoke rings while she talked. “We haven’t had a party here since Mark went off to war.”

A moment of silence followed in which everyone turned with sympathy to a mortified Mark.

“There is
not
going to be a party,” Caleb insisted. “We have work to do.”

“You know what they say ’bout all work and no play?” Tante Lulu turned to Abbie, and they began discussing a menu.

He put his face in his hands.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Tante Lulu. You won’t be seeing me at any party,” Mark said.

“Is that so?” Tante Lulu put her hands on her tiny hips. “Someone oughta tol’ you a long time ago ta not let the seeds spoil yer melon. Just spit out the buggers.”

“What . . . what does that mean?”

“It means it’s time ta shake off yer troubles and enjoy life. Ya cain’t unscramble yer eggs, boy, but ya kin make a darn fine omelette.”

Mark was too flabbergasted at her nerve to respond.

“I’ll be in charge of music,” LeDeux said. “There’s gotta be dancin’, or it won’t be a party. Maybe Claire knows some hot babes.”

“I don’t know any hot babes.” Claire glanced at Caleb. “Except for me.”

“Very funny,” he replied.
But true.

“No problem. If there are hotties within a twenty-mile radius, I’ll find ’em.” Humility was not one of LeDeux’s attributes. “I might even find an overaged one for Mister Fuddy-Duddy Professor here. I get first dibs on the oversexed ones.”

Famosa just shook his head, already used to LeDeux’s antics.

“Behave yerself, boy,” Tante Lulu told her great-nephew.

He just winked at her.

“I dairsent dance,” Jonas remarked, still appearing stunned.

“Ah, sweetie,” Tante Lulu said, coming up and patting Jonas on the shoulder. She had to reach up to do so, since she was about five foot zero, and Jonas matched Caleb’s six foot four. “I’ll teach ya.”

“I didn’t mean . . .” Jonas glanced Caleb’s way for help.

Caleb shrugged. There was no stopping the stubborn Cajun lady when she got a bee in her bonnet.

“Are ya married?” Tante Lulu asked Jonas.

“
Jah.
”

Tante Lulu’s wrinkly face sagged with disappointment.

“Actually, I’m a widower.” Jonas was clearly uncomfortable with the personal question, as evidenced by the flush on his face that soon covered his neck and ears, a trait he shared with Caleb.

The old bat lost a few wrinkles. She was no longer disappointed, if that wily gleam in her eyes was any indication.

Caleb hadn’t even been aware that Jonas had married, though the Amish—and Mennonites—married young. Jonas had probably been married for more than ten years. He wondered idly if he had children but had no chance to ask.

“
Mais oui!
Now I understand. Thass too bad.” Tante Lulu patted Jonas’s shoulder some more, then cackled with glee. “Ya got a hope chest, boy?”

Everyone laughed. Including Caleb.

Until Tante Lulu added, “I never put together hope chests fer twins before.”

Jonas’s glance to him was a plea for rescue. Like he could do anything to stop the Cajun tornado!

“An’ dontcha go slinkin’ away, Mister Feel-Sorry-fer-Myself war hero. Me ’n’ St. Jude gots plans fer you, too.”

A lot of groaning and grinning followed from the victims and bystanders, respectively.

Tante Lulu was oblivious to it all. “Whoo-ee, this oughta be fun!”

It was no joke . . .

Jonas kept glancing over at Caleb, and it saddened him that he did not know this man, his brother.

They were twins, but he could not imagine that he bore any resemblance to this hardened man with the close-cropped hair and English clothing. Practically joined at the hip, Mam usta say about them. How could they have grown so far apart?

“Are ya married, Caleb?”

Caleb never took his eyes off the road. His right hand held the steering wheel of his vehicle, and his left elbow rested on the open window frame. “No.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Why?”

“Never found anyone I wanted to spend more than a weekend with, I guess.”

There was such a sadness in Caleb. In his eyes. In the tightness of his mouth that smiled sparingly. There had been a time when the two of them were so close they finished each other’s sentences. They’d even felt each other’s pain from a distance. Eventually, the shared sensations wore off. But once, five years ago, Jonas had suddenly got a pain in his thigh, so severe his legs had buckled under him and he’d fallen to the ground, and he’d wondered if Caleb might have been injured somewhere.

Everything came back to the shunning and what happened seventeen years ago. When the two of them were seventeen, in the midst of their second year of
Rumspringa,
the sanctioned running-around period for young Amish, Caleb got drunk from beer he’d bought from some Englishers over in Tyrone and raced his buggy. He was struck by a car coming in the other direction when he failed to make a curve in the two-lane road. He was uninjured, but Hannah Yoder, the girl he’d been courting and expected to marry, died in the accident.

“I am so sorry, Caleb. I shoulda said it ta you back then, but I was scared. And I was hurtin’.”

“It’s too late for apologies, Jonas.”

He shook his head fiercely. “It’s never too late.”

“Okay, answer some questions, then. Did you know Hannah was pregnant? Were you in love with her? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

“
Jah,
I was in love with her, but she was yers first. And her family wanted her to marry you, since you was gettin’ the farm. I had ta step back. And no, I didn’t know she was pregnant. I’m not sure she knew.”

“But you let everyone assume the baby was mine. You let them shun me for not apologizing for something I never did.”

Jonas hung his head in shame. He had been living with the weight of his sin for seventeen years now. Yes, Caleb had been responsible for the accident that led to Hannah’s death, but he’d let him take the blame for the pregnancy, too. “I did finally tell everyone what I did, but you were already gone by then, and I couldn’t find ya.”

“You tried to find me?”

“I did. For weeks and weeks. I even went to Lancaster, thinkin’ ya mighta gone to Cousin Moses’s place.”

Caleb let out a whooshy exhale. “Well, it’s all water under the dam now. At least I beat the crap out of you before I left. I always wondered why you just stood there and took it. You were feeling guilty.”

He nodded. Their father, Samuel Peachey, a deacon in Sinking Valley’s Amish order, had punished Caleb relentlessly at the time. Not just for the drinking and the accident and the sex outside marriage that resulted in a baby—all considered worldly and sinful by their conservative cult—but the violent, one-sided fight that had followed with his brother.

And Caleb, mule-headed as ever, had refused to participate in the kneeling ritual whereby he would confess all his sins to the congregation. Instead, Caleb had adopted the English motto “If you’ve got the name, you might as well play the game.” He became the wild, worldly boy their father had accused him of being. So, at the age of seventeen, he had been exiled from his family and Amish community.

“If you finally confessed that the baby was yours, why did you get shunned?”

“I did a lot of yellin’ and demandin’ that the
Bann
be taken offa you, and when they wouldn’t listen, I started drinkin’, too. A lot. They put the
Bann
on me then. Eventually I found my way to a Mennonite church and settled down. We heard the next year that ya entered the Navy. After that I gave up on gettin’ yer
Bann
lifted, ’cause there’s no way they woulda taken ya back then lessen ya confessed till yer knees was bloody.” He looked at Jonas and waited for him to look back at him. “Can ya ever forgive me?”

“Ah, Jonas, of course I can. You’re my brother. We both screwed up.” Caleb reached over and squeezed his hand.

In the silence that followed, Jonas blinked rapidly to prevent the tears in his eyes from welling over. Once he’d calmed down and the lump in his throat disappeared, he said, “Ya mentioned ya never got married. Is it because of the
Bann?
”

“Huh? What would the
Bann
have to do with my getting married? It didn’t stop you, apparently.”

“
Jah,
but it affected me awful much. And it musta been harder on you, goin’ away and all.”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t think about it anymore. Yeah, in the beginning I was so angry and pissed with the world that the least little thing would set me off.”

“Is that why ya went into the military? To get back at Dat . . . and the others?”

“Probably, but the Navy was good for me. And I don’t apologize to anyone for serving my country.”

“Not even the killin’? It wonders me how ya could kill people, Caleb.”

Jonas’s question cut Caleb to the quick, and he had to restrain himself from saying something really nasty. All the peaceniks in the world thought the terrorists would go away if the USA just played nice-nice. Hah! All these sign-carrying hippies were Pollyannas. Besides, most times they wanted the bad guys gone, but they didn’t want to do it themselves or know the details. Let the special forces do the dirty work.

When his temper was tamped down, he replied, “How could I kill? Let me ask you this, big brother, do you have any kids?”

“
Jah.
Twelve-year-old Sarah. Nine-year-old Noah. And eight-year-old Fanny. My wife—do ya remember Annie Stoltzfus?—died seven years ago of the cancer.”

“And you’ve been raising those kids yourself? Shit! Your little one couldn’t have been much more than a toddler. No help from Mam and the family?”

He shook his head. “I tol’ ya, I’m under the
Bann,
too. Oh, they talk to the kids, and invite them to weddin’s and such, but never me.”

Caleb took his eyes off the road and stared at him for a long moment, as if finding it hard to believe his words. Yeah, they shunned him, but Jonas was in their back yard. They had to be freezing him in person. “Back to your question about my not being sorry for killing. Suppose a group of men kidnapped your Sarah, and not just raped and sodomized her repeatedly and forced her to give them blow job after blow job, but then buried her alive. Or suppose someone stuck a bomb inside your Noah’s ass and forced him to walk into a busy marketplace to explode himself and everyone around him. What if Fanny were sold as a sex slave to a prostitution ring? And yes, there are grown men who get their jollies from girls that young. If any or all of those things happened to your children, would you sit back and turn the other cheek? Or would you want to wipe such scum off the face of the Earth?”

“Have you truly seen such things?”

“I have, and much worse.”

“But to kill—”

“Listen, we’re going to have to agree to disagree on the pacifist thing. I did the necessary job other Americans don’t want to do.”

“Then why did you quit?”

The car stopped in front of Jonas’s small farmhouse in Sinking Valley. It was set back a ways from the highway, fronted by a dozen green houses. A corrugated metal building and an ancient pickup truck bore signs that said “Peachey’s Landscaping.” In the dimness he could see vast numbers of burlap-bundled trees, bushes, and flowers that Jonas must sell here, mainly to En-glishers. He’d done well for himself, despite the shunning.

All the lights were on in the house, he noticed, and laughter came through the open window of one of the upstairs bedrooms, even though it was past bedtime. At the sound of popular music, Caleb arched his brows as if scandalized. “Could that possibly be Mariah Carey?”

Jonas cringed. “That would be our sister, Elizabeth. Lizzie is nineteen now, going on thirty. I’ve told her not to bring her radio over here when she comes to babysit, but she never listens. Dat would have a fit if he knew she even owned a radio, let alone danced and sang worldly songs.”

Caleb grinned.

“She’s prob’ly teachin’ the girls how to ‘boogie’ again. I told her not ta do that, either. The first time I heard her say ‘Let’s boogie,’ I thought she said
booger.
Noah has been sayin’ ‘booger, booger, booger’ over and over, just to annoy his sisters.”

Caleb grinned some more. It felt good to be sitting here next to his brother.

“Back to my question. Why did you leave the military if you consider it noble work?”

“Why did I quit the teams?” Caleb sighed deeply. “My belt fell apart from all the notches on it.”

“Aaah, Caleb,” Jonas said, squeezing his shoulder. “Sad it is ta see ya so world-weary and unable to smile.”

“Who says I can’t smile? I smile when I have good reason. You tell me something funny, and I damn sure will smile till my lips get tired.”

“How ’bout this? Do ya remember Lizzie at all?”

Caleb frowned. “Yeah, I remember Lizzie, though she was only two when I left.”

“Well, Lizzie is nineteen now, and still in
Rumspringa.
Dat threatens to end her running-around days soon if she doesn’t take church vows. Either that, or marry up with Abram Zook . . .
jah,
the dog-breath fella who usta eat snot when we was kids. He’s almost thirty years old now.”

“And Lizzie getting married is a problem,
why?
” Caleb knew that Amish girls mostly married up with men their parents chose, or at least approved of.

“Because Lizzie considers herself an Amish J-Lo—”

Caleb’s jaw dropped. “You’re joking, right? How the hell would she, or you, even know who J-Lo is?”

“—and she wants to be a contestant on
American Idol.
”