The Face of Heaven (4 page)

Lyndel used the banister to navigate the staircase from the third floor to the second. At that point, the light from below was sufficient for her to see where she was going. The men’s voices were clear and she sat down on the landing where she couldn’t be seen.

“There was slavery in our Lord’s day,” she heard one of the ministers argue. “He did nothing about it. Neither did Paul. We have verse after verse where Paul tells slaves to behave, to obey their masters, not to cause trouble, and by so doing set a good example as followers of Christ.”

“True.” It was her father’s voice. “But Paul also said if a slave could obtain his freedom he should do so. Clearly he didn’t consider slavery to be an ideal state for a human being.”

“Nevertheless, he didn’t tell Christians to go to war over it.”

“Oh,” her father said sharply, “who is talking about going to war, Samuel? We’re discussing how we should help these two men.”

So, Lyndel realized, the one arguing with her father was Samuel Eby. Samuel spoke up again. “You have fed them and bandaged their wounds. You have given them a room at the inn, so to speak. Fine. Now it’s time to drive into Elizabethtown and tell Sheriff Jackson.”

“Why is it time?” She recognized the voice of one of the other ministers, Abraham Yoder, whose carriage she had watched pull into their yard. “What’s the hurry? We’ve scarcely begun to discuss this issue. Why is there a fire in your britches, Samuel?”

“I don’t want the sheriff to think we’ve been keeping something like this from him. After all, these men are breaking the law—they belong to the owners of a plantation in Virginia. And they’re breaking the Word of God as well—they are to be good slaves and carry out their duties in obedience to their masters. Not to engage in this act of rebellion.”

“So you would like to be a slave, Samuel?” asked Pastor Yoder.

“No, I should not like to be a slave. But if I were a slave, I would carry out my duties with reverence and respect to my God and those he had placed in authority over me.”

“If you feel that way perhaps you could trade places with them.”

“
Vas
?”

“Sure. You go to the sheriff and tell him that when the slave hunters show up from Virginia you are substituting yourself for them. They wish to be free and that will secure their freedom. Meanwhile you can show us what a good slave looks like in the eyes of God.”

“Do not talk such nonsense, Abraham,” Lyndel heard Samuel fume. “God did not make me a slave. He made me Amish.”

“He made you a man.” Lyndel sat up. It was Nathaniel’s voice, calm and clear. “He made these others men as well. Human beings fashioned
in his image. It is for freedom Christ has set us free. How can you place them back in the yoke of slavery, Pastor Eby?”

“Paul is talking about spiritual freedom,” came a new voice that Lyndel recognized as Solomon Miller’s. “There is no talk in any of his letters about striving for physical freedom for slaves. It’s their hearts that are to be free in Christ. Not their bodies.”

“No talk in any of his letters?” Lyndel detected a slight rise in Nathaniel’s voice. “So when was it you last read Philemon, Pastor?”

“Gently, Mr. King,” interjected Lyndel’s father.

“I have read Philemon,” retorted Solomon Miller. “I read the Bible through twice every year.”

“
Gut.
Then you will recall that Paul sent the slave back to Philemon a brother in Christ. And by so doing sent back a man who was his equal.”

There was a moment of silence. Then Samuel Eby spoke up again. “Still, Paul sent him back a slave.”

“No. That is precisely what Paul did not do. Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit—we all agree on that, yes?” Nathaniel paged through his Bible, which he had set on the table during the discussion. Reaching his place, he continued, “Paul plainly said,
Receive him back not now as a slave but above a slave, a brother beloved specially to me, but how much more unto thee, both in the flesh, and in the Lord? If thou countest me a partner, receive him as myself.

“Paul said no to slavery. He said it here, he said it when he declared a slave should try to win his freedom, and he said it when he told us there was neither slave nor free but all of us are one in Christ. How can we say we live the gospel of our Lord Jesus and keep men and women in bondage? How can we say we follow the Word of the living God and deny those made in his image the liberty to live as we here in Elizabethtown have the liberty to live? Did our forefathers not come to America from Europe so that they could have this liberty? Yet we will not give that same freedom to men like us sleeping in the room upstairs.”

His voice was still not that loud but his words struck her heart with what seemed to her the very fervor of God. How was it possible that all these thoughts had been locked away inside him and she had never
known about it? But how could she know? Nathaniel was just her brother’s friend, it was all he had ever been, never anyone special to her or she to him. Yet now all sorts of feelings stormed through her, most of them to do with what he was saying to the Amish leaders, but others touching on feelings she had never experienced before for any man in the community. She closed her eyes and put her head in her hands. What was happening?

This time the silence after Nathaniel’s words was even longer. Finally Samuel Eby spoke again. “Still, we are commanded to obey the law of the land. It is Paul himself who tells us that in Romans.”

Lyndel lifted her head from her hands in surprise. Now it was her brother, quiet Levi Keim, who was talking. “Pastor Eby, we Amish do not obey the law when it comes to war, do we? The government tells us we must fight, but we say no, we will not fight. Why do we not obey the law then, Pastor Eby?”

The pastor didn’t respond. Lyndel listened to her brother answer his own question. “The law of the land tells us to go to war but we do not go to war because we say God’s law is higher and that he commands us not to kill. So do you not think God requires us to answer to a higher law when it comes to slavery? Do you not think we should obey God rather than man, as Peter and John argued in Acts? Do you not think we should treat slaves as fellow human beings in the eyes of God and grant them the same liberties we enjoy since they are made in his image just as we are?”

Nathaniel spoke up softly as Levi finished. “The Scriptures say that God ‘hath made of one blood all nations of men.’ ”

“Not to mention,” Lyndel’s father said in the hush that followed Levi’s and Nathaniel’s words, “that Paul tells us in Timothy that the law is not made for the righteous but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and the sinner, for the unholy and profane. And he includes murderers among those who are lawless and unholy—he includes those who commit adultery, those who commit perversions, those who are liars and perjurers. He includes those who are slave traders—yes, slave traders. He reached for Nathaniel’s open Bible, now setting again on the table. Reaching his place, he read, “
Knowing this,
that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient…for menstealers
—slave traders—
and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust.
”

“Amen.” Lyndel just made out Abraham Yoder’s whisper.

Suddenly there was hammering at the door. Without thinking Lyndel shot to her feet. But none of the men saw her—they had all turned toward the door and several were out of their chairs. Lyndel’s mother was rushing down the staircase without her candle and she cried, “The yard, it is full of men with torches and guns!”

Lyndel watched her father swing open the door to Sheriff Jackson. The sheriff had a grim look on his face. Behind him several men were clutching blazing torches in one hand and long rifles in the other.

“What is it?” Lyndel’s father demanded. “Why do you come to my house at such an hour and in such a manner?”

“Bishop Keim,” the sheriff replied in a dark voice, “it’s my understanding that you are harboring fugitives on your property. I must order you now, in the name of the law, to give them up to these men so they can be returned to their rightful owners in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

3

L
yndel’s father stood firmly in the doorway and would not move.

“This is a matter we have just been discussing among our leadership,” he told the sheriff. “We will need a bit more time.”

“A bit more time for what?” growled a man with a torch just behind Sheriff Jackson. “To make sure our slaves get clear to the border?”

“Are they in the house, Bishop Keim?” asked the sheriff.

Lyndel’s father hesitated. “They are resting.”

“Where are they resting?”

“In a room upstairs. They cannot be disturbed. One of them is wounded.”

“Cannot be disturbed?” The man behind Sheriff Jackson mimicked the bishop’s voice. “Who do you think they are? Lords and masters of a Virginia plantation?” He shouldered past the sheriff and shoved Lyndel’s father to one side. “We’re wasting time. And you’re breaking the law.”

Lyndel watched Nathaniel spring to the staircase, blocking the man’s path. The man stopped, surprised. Then he handed his torch to one of his companions, all of whom were crowding into the house. He swung the stock of his rifle as hard as he could into Nathaniel’s stomach. Lyndel cried out and rushed down the staircase as Nathaniel gasped and his knees bent. But he would not fall and he held his ground, glaring at the slave hunter, his green eyes on fire.

“Why, ain’t you a tough one for a Yankee.”

The man swung his rifle into Nathaniel’s stomach two more times
as fast as he could. This time Nathaniel groaned and collapsed. The slave hunter ran up the stairs followed by six of his companions. Once they reached the second floor they began throwing open doors and brandishing torches and pointing pistol and rifles. Lyndel’s younger sisters began to scream. Their mother ran up the steps, calling out in Pennsylvania Dutch for the men to stop, and the bishop bolted up the steps behind his wife. Lyndel knelt by Nathaniel and lifted his head as the slave hunters charged to the third floor and one of them shouted, “Well, boys, look what we have here! What’s the matter, Charlie? Ain’t you happy to see me?”

The man tugged Charlie out of bed and pushed him roughly toward the stairway. When they arrived at the second landing, the man shoved him forward down the final set of stairs and the slave landed with a cry of pain on top of Nathaniel. Immediately behind, Moses came tumbling down the steps after him. He had taken a gun-stock blow to the head. Tears streaking her cheeks, Lyndel covered all three men with her arms and shouted at the slave hunters, “Leave them alone! They have done nothing wrong!”

The man who had struck Nathaniel with his rifle laughed from the second landing. “Why, yes they have, ma’am. Them slaves is plantation property, no different than the horses and cows and cotton fields. They ran, and that runnin’ is against the law. And your beau, well, he tried to prevent me from takin’ ’em and that’s what the legal folk call obstruction of justice.”

He walked down the stairs, his boots thudding on the wood, his men behind him. Hauling Charlie and Moses upright he shackled their hands and their feet while another held his torch and gun. On the second floor Lyndel’s mother was hugging and kissing the three girls and telling them everything was going to be all right. Moses looked straight into Lyndel’s eyes, and at the pain in his eyes, she felt things falling down and breaking apart.

“Back home, we’d burn your house to the ground for harborin’ and abettin’ fugitives,” the leader of the slave hunters said. “But ye’re godless Yankees and you don’t know no better.”

Levi and the ministers had stayed rooted at the table during the forced entry into the home. Now Abraham Yoder stepped forward.

“We need no lectures from you on godliness, you who would desecrate a man’s home and frighten his children and treat the guests sleeping under his roof worse than brute beasts.”

The slave hunter grinned. “Why, they ain’t nothin’ but brute beasts, mister. That’s God’s truth.”

Now Levi shook off his fear and shock and stood beside Pastor Yoder. “I will tell you what God’s truth is—there are neither slaves nor freemen but all are one in Christ Jesus. And I will tell you something else that is God’s truth—no slaveholder has a place in heaven.”

The slave hunters’ faces darkened and Lyndel saw their fingers move in and out of the trigger guards of their weapons. She saw the leader’s face twitch between annoyance and anger and rage. Finally he jerked at the door and told his men, “Get our property out of here and into the wagon.” The men dragged Charlie and Moses through the doorway in chains. Charlie glanced at Lyndel with a look she knew she could never erase. Nathaniel, finally coming to himself, stood to his feet.