The Names of Our Tears (2 page)

Standing on his front porch, Mervin listened with satisfaction to the familiar sounds of morning chores, the rhythms of family life on the farm. In his day, when the farm had been theirs, he and his Leona had been accustomed to early rising, too. They had owned the farm for forty years, and then they had lived together for seven more happy years in their little Daadihaus, watching Daniel and Becky raise their own, in the same home where Mervin and Leona Byler had raised their twelve. It’s fitting, Mervin thought. The old move aside for the young, who in turn honor their parents with the gift of a new home.

Byler sighed and thought about Leona, gone for nearly three years. So fine a woman; so many good years. Now their little Daadihaus was a lonely place for him, and Mervin had fallen into slack habits. Most would say it was shameful, the way he ignored the chores. He slept in, and he got up when it suited him. Mervin Byler figured he had earned his rest.

Truth be told, Leona might say it was a bit much. When they had retired, she had insisted that they rise with the others and tend to their share of the chores, too. But now Mervin gladly let the sons plant and harvest the crops, tend to the livestock, handle all the duties on the farm. Mervin Byler was retired, and he had fun and suitable places to be, never mind what the gossips
might say about the widow Stutzman. He felt young again, and he knew with the wisdom of age that that feeling was not to be squandered.

With great satisfaction over his prospects for the morning, Byler noted that the stiff breeze was snatching a thin gray line of smoke from the chimney of Becky’s kitchen stove, at the back of the big house. The fire is still going, he thought. As late as it was, there would still be hot coffee in her pot. Maybe he could take some of Becky’s biscuits, too. Wrap them in a towel for the trip. Byler considered it briefly.

But his best mare was already hitched and waiting on the drive, shuddering from the energy bottled up in her limbs. Just like Mervin, she was eager to begin.

Mervin clipped down the wooden steps on his new leather soles and climbed into his Sunday buggy, laughing at himself. Thinking that he could already hear the chatter. Knowing what the valley gossips would say if they ever got a look inside his cupboards, stuffed full to bursting with Coblentz chocolates of every kind. They would be asking themselves why an old man needed to be driving back to Walnut Creek again when his cupboards were already shamefully overstocked with more sweets than any sensible man could eat.

For the fun of it, he ought to drop a hint somewhere along the line. Put it out there among the talkers that he didn’t really like chocolate that much. Truth be told, he favored salty chips more than sweets. Wonderful, crunchy, salty chips of every kind.

Just tell one of them, he thought, and soon they’d all be a-chatter. He’d make a few trips into Walmart for a dozen bags of Ruffles, and that news would be singing like electric in the wires.
Why, don’t you know?
Mervin doesn’t really like sweets at all
. Then he could enjoy the sparks. He couldn’t remember a time when he had felt so young.

But don’t kid yourself, Mervin smiled. Today I’ll just tap the glass. See if she’ll come around to the tourists’ gallery for a chat. Maybe he could visit on Sunday with the North Walnut Creek Lehmans, and stay after services for the social. Then his
valley would sure be all a-buzz. Was it the Coblentz chocolates or the widow Stutzman? A Sunday visit in old Ben Lehman’s district would settle it for sure. They’d all be talking for over a month.

Mervin climbed up, took the reins, and walked his buggy out to the lane in front of the big house. He turned right to follow Township Lane 166 toward the north, thinking that maybe she’d give him a look today. Something to help him make up his mind. But hadn’t she done that already the last time he had visited? Mervin wasn’t sure. Was it a look, or was it a smile? Maybe it was just a glance.

Yes, at the time, he had thought it was just a glance. Now it seemed to him that it might have been more than that. Was it really encouragement for a suitor, or was she mocking an old fool?

Never mind, he told himself. I’ll tap on the glass today. Then she’ll give me one look or the other look, and I’ll know if I should bother with any more chocolates from the Coblentz store. Not that there’s room in my cupboards.

He set a good pace for his horse and took the reins in his left hand. With his right, he fished his money roll out of the side pocket of his denim trousers. It was a suitable sum, he thought. Four hundred and eighty-seven dollars, most of it in tens and twenties. He wouldn’t need nearly that much. Still a man ought to be prepared. Maybe after he stopped in Walnut Creek, he’d run up Route 39 to the Walmart in Millersburg. That’d put him home after dark. Smiling broadly, he thought how that news would spread itself around among the folk. Up to Walnut Creek for the widow Stutzman and way over to Millersburg just for chips? There’d be no end of the talk.

At the intersection with Township 165, Byler turned left and took the gravel lane where it cut a gap in the remote southeastern corner of Holmes County. Exhausted from a brutal winter, most fields lay bare on the rolling hills, but some had been plowed already, their tidy rows of newly turned earth looking eagerly dark and moist for planting.

On the slope to his left, he saw the new shoots of winter wheat promising the harvest in July. Ahead on his right stood the stubble of feed corn cut last autumn, the arching rows of blunted shafts curving gracefully over the crest.

Take the back roads today, Byler thought. No sense getting out on SR 39, where the traffic is so crazy. When had the tourists discovered Walnut Creek? Twenty years ago, there hadn’t been anything at all in the little town. Now it was overbuilt for commerce, and the traffic was incessant, with out-of-state plates and buses from all the big cities.

Mervin frowned. He gave the reins a determined slap. Back roads will take longer, he told himself, but the trip will be safer, and you’ll get there in one piece, you old fool. So stick to the backmost roads.

The narrow wheels of his buggy cut fine, wavy lines into the gravel and mud of the lane, and he gave the reins another slap to encourage his horse. The whisper music of his buggy wheels running in the wet gravel and the clipping rhythm of his horse’s hooves spoke peacefulness to him. Coblentz chocolate and the widow Stutzman. Who could ask for a better morning?

Following the creek that was fed by the spring on the Yoder farm, he traveled generally north and west, and made the sharp right turn where the road curved to the north. The glade that lay ahead to his left was lined by sycamores whose old roots sank deep into the rocky cut of the creek. A stand of barren maples beside the road sheltered the little glade from view at first, but soon he reached the clearing beside the road, where the Yoders maintained a service road for an oil well. Behind the low knoll, Byler could see the top of the wellhead where the Yoders took off their natural gas feed, and beside that stood a green tank for the oil that was being pumped slowly out of the ground.

As he skirted the glade, however, Byler saw a horse and buggy standing at the back of the clearing, beside the bend in the service road. The horse was tethered to a sapling, and it was bucking wildly in its harness, its head popping up and down and back and forth as it whipped the leather reins that were tied to the tree.

Byler stopped, climbed down from his rig, and circled around through tangled brush to reach the front of the horse, not wanting to agitate it any further by coming up on its rear. As he approached, he called out to the horse, “Hey there! Hey, big fella! Whoa!”

But as he pushed through the brambles, his feet crunching twigs and fallen branches, the horse bucked and danced all the more, its hooves striking strangely to the right and left, as if it were trying to sidestep a rattlesnake. As if it couldn’t bear to let its footfalls touch the ground.

And that’s when Byler first saw the girl lying underneath the rear hooves of the horse. An Amish girl in a forest-green dress, wearing the black denim jacket of a man. Sprawled under the hooves of the frantic horse. Trampled facedown in the mud beside the spring. Clothes caked with bloodied mud, arms and legs sprawled to the sides like broken twigs. The hair at the back of her head matted with blood from a gaping hole in her skull. The frightened horse pounding out its terror on her back.

Byler stepped up to the sapling and drew his pocketknife. He cut once at the reins wrapped around the trunk, but failed to sever the hold. He cut again with more force, and the leather gave way, but still held. Then he slashed with his blade a third time, and the reins snapped free, sending the horse bolting off to the side, dragging the wheels of the buggy sideways over the body of the girl, flipping her onto her back. The horse and buggy disappeared around the curve of the lane. Staring down at the trampled body of the girl, Byler could hear the plaintive cries of the horse as it struggled to free itself from the harness. He knelt to brush mud from her face and felt a round wound in her forehead.

*   *   *

Each time the buggy bounced out of a chuckhole, it seemed to Byler that it actually flew. He whipped the horse again and tried to keep his seat as he raced back home to the phone booth beside the road.

Thirty yards out, he started slowing the horse, but he overshot
the phone. Not bothering to steady or tether the horse, Byler hopped down beside the picket fence in front of Daniel’s house, let the horse pace forward to stop on its own, dashed into the phone booth, pulled the receiver to his ear, and tried to turn the dial. His fingers were shaking badly, and it took him three tries to swing the dial around to get 911.

Groaning as he waited for an answer, Mervin’s feet marched out a manic step in place, inside the tight confines of the little shed. When the operator answered, he shouted, “Dead girl!” as loud as he could, and repeated it, saying, “I found a dead girl!”

He dropped the receiver, pushed back through the door, and ran for the house, shouting, “Daniel! Becky! Get help!”

Then he remembered the phone and ran back to the booth. When he picked up the receiver, the operator started asking him questions, and he answered them as best he could.

“Beside the Yoders’ spring.

“Yes, it’s Holmes County. At the big bend of Township 165 and 166.

“She’s dead, I tell you. Get the sheriff!

“Because I felt a hole in her forehead! When I tried to brush the mud out of her eyes.”

Then, with his thoughts muddled by adrenaline, Mervin answered several more questions, while Daniel and Becky stood outside the phone booth with anxious questions in their eyes.

Mervin finished his call, laid the handset back on its cradle, and stood alone inside, trying to understand how he could manage to do what the man on the phone had asked him to do—to go back, to wait there, and to talk with the deputies when they arrived.

He turned in place, opened the door, and stepped outside to tell Daniel and Becky what he had seen. But several of the children had gathered with their parents, so he drew Daniel aside to whisper.

As he did so, Mervin Byler couldn’t remember a time when he had felt so old.

DETECTIVE SERGEANT Ricky Niell followed a circuitous route to meet Mervin Byler. When the call had come in, he had been in Berlin, to the north, taking a statement from a local who had been knocked down by an impatient tourist hurrying to park his car in a prized spot at the curb. The injured man was sitting on a bench in front of the old Boyd and Wurthmann Restaurant while paramedics splinted his ankle. All around him flowed the early morning circus of a society gone hideously commercial, with English tourists thronging the sidewalks, cars and tour buses clogging the main road and all of the side streets, and garish music playing from loudspeakers outside the trinket establishments that so many English folk considered to be authentic country treasures.

Frustrated by the spectacle, Niell left Berlin abruptly. He followed SR 39 south and east out of town, dropped down off the crest at Walnut Creek, pushed around the long, sweeping curve, and turned south on TR 420. He needed to hurry, but the country lanes were narrow, pitched steeply, and curved dangerously. With mounting urgency, he forced his cruiser around a series of sharp turns and switchbacks, traveling deeper into the secluded hillside pasturelands north of Baltic. TR 420 to County
140, then TR 141, TR 164, County 70, back onto TR 164, and finally left and south again on TR 165, driving ever slower as the lanes constricted and turned to gravel and mud.

After another tortuous quarter mile of frustration, Niell stopped, punched up a wider view on his GPS display, and studied it to see how deeply into the isolated countryside he had managed to penetrate. Once he had confirmed his location, he rolled his cruiser forward with guarded satisfaction, came over a rise, and dropped into a pocket between the hills.

Directly ahead he saw a black buggy parked on the road, with a short, round, white-haired Amishman holding the bridle of his horse. The man waved to him somberly, and Niell rolled forward and stopped ten paces from the nose of the horse. Then Niell called in his location on his radio and got out of his cruiser, zipping up his duty jacket out of a habit grown to ritual after a long and hard winter. But once out of his cruiser, he realized that the cold spring breezes that were stirring over the high grounds at Berlin and Walnut Creek weren’t reaching into the deep draw where he had parked, so he unzipped his jacket, took it off, and tossed it onto the front seat.

As fastidious as ever, Niell was dressed in designer slacks, with a coat and tie. He had his badge clipped to his belt in front. His black hair was longer than he liked and parted on the right, the way his wife, Ellie, preferred. His mustache was still black and pencil thin. Otherwise, he was clean-shaven. His shoes were polished and fashionable, and unsuited to the terrain, so he sat on the edge of the driver’s seat to change into a pair of work boots.