The Outcast (6 page)

I know this is a question I will have to answer for myself soon enough. I cannot go back to Copper Creek, perhaps not even to gather my things. If I go back, I might not have
the strength to leave. And if I don’t leave, I fear that Tobias will do as he threatens: tell my sister everything I have tried to shield her from for months. I know there is a possibility that Leah knows everything already, but I cannot take the risk that she does. I would rather live an hour from her and keep her tender heart safe than live under her roof and watch how my sins ravage the person I would do anything in this world to protect.

A train rumbles down the tracks again, causing dishes to rattle in the kitchen cupboards. The instant its whistle pierces the quiet night, I remember the Boxcar Children series Judah and I devoured that first summer he taught me how to read. I remember how those orphaned children made a new beginning for themselves out of an old boxcar they found in the woods. Although their lives were not what they once were, they were happy in their own right. Would Judah and I be happy if I said yes to his proposal of marriage and we fled the community’s ties? Would we be like those children, hacking a future for ourselves out of a worldly wilderness? Mennonite couples often marry soon after joining the church at age seventeen, but for a year afterward, they travel from community to community: visiting with friends and family, eating meals that are prepared for them, sleeping in beds whose sheets they do not change or own. How would Judah and I ever build a life outside the cloistered boundaries of the church? Judah might have a better education than most Old Order Mennonites, but what is that compared to the English?

Flipping onto my stomach, I mash the pillow over my head and groan into the mattress as my tangled thoughts continue to unwind. And if I did say yes to Judah’s proposal, what would he expect in the marriage bed? With my womb still swollen from Eli’s birth and my breasts so heavy with milk they hurt to touch, my body is not one that can bring pleasure to a man; besides, I don’t want it to bring pleasure to a man ever again. I am a mother now; that is all. I might have failed in every other area—disappointing my parents, worrying my sister to the point of death, burdening Judah King with a whiplash of gossip—but I will not fail my son, no matter what it takes. And for now that means finding a way to support our family so we can have a chance to survive.

AMOS

The morning after my sons’ confrontation, Judah awakens as the birds start twittering in the trees and slips into the spare room. He stuffs the black valise with the few garments that were folded on the rocking chair beside the bed. He grabs the crocheted blanket in the cradle and rolls it up, slipping it beneath his arm. It does not take Judah long to gather and pack the rest of the items, but he knows he must hurry before those in the house begin to stir.

Once everything is arranged, he exits the spare room just as quietly as he had entered and grabs the small bag he’d packed last night and placed outside his own room
this morning. He tiptoes down the stairs, being careful to avoid the third-to-last one, which squeaks in the center, and places the letter explaining his actions beneath the pot of rhubarb preserves on the kitchen table, where he is sure his mother will find it.

Judah has to swallow as he glances around his childhood home for what he hopes, and fears, is the final time. With the perspective of leaving, the old is changed back to new. Even Verna’s crocheted doilies draping the worn arms of the couch and the potted violets on the windowsills hold a special place in my son’s sentimental heart. The wooden floor is scarred and warped from years of abrading rocking horses and chairs and afternoons of grandchildren tromping through snow, then coming inside to thaw in front of the woodstove with a cup of Verna’s cocoa held between mittened hands. But in Judah’s biased eyes it is as unmarred as the face of an ancient lover. The miniature barn, plastic fence, and animals that have been worn smooth and featureless by our children and then our grandchildren evoke in Judah memories that he never knew he had of the two of us playing farmer together.

If Tobias had not tightened his reins on the community as soon as they were taken out of my cold hands, vowing to squeeze out anyone who had the slightest rebellious twinge, Judah might have been comfortable to remain in Copper Creek all his life. He would’ve found a beautiful, soft-spoken girl at a hymn sing, and after a few months of open-buggy courting, he would have brought his bride into
our home and raised their family in it just as his mother and I had done. But Tobias’s tyrannical actions no longer allow this to be Judah’s choice. Now all my younger son hopes for is a life with Rachel and her little boy, whose father she will never name.

The thought of their future together, even as he’s in the midst of abandoning his past, brings a smile to my son’s handsome face. Gripping the bags held in each of his hands a little tighter, a slight bounce enters his step as he opens the front door and makes his way down the long gravel lane. Judah passes the path that branches off to Tobias and Leah’s home, and then takes the main road he used to walk on his way to the smithy. The place where he worked alongside his elder brother until my death forced Tobias to sit in the schoolhouse with two other deacons and withdraw one hardback
Ausbund
from a stack of three. When he cracked the black spine scrawled with dulled gold, a slip of paper fluttered from between the deckled pages like a moth. That simple luck of the draw promoted Tobias from blacksmith to bishop, a mantle he had never intended to wear.

Now, despite the fog pouring down the mountain ridges and pooling in the fields, Kauffman’s General Store, Risser’s Sorghum Mill, Hostetler’s Bakery, Mast’s Cannery, and Schlabach’s Leatherworks all come into Judah’s view. Out toward the end of the lane—where Copper Creek would become just another dead end if not for the signs used to lure
Englischer
tourists—a white, one-room schoolhouse is
adorned with only the cast-iron bell the teacher uses to call the children back from lunch at their homes.

After taking advantage of the outhouse located behind the school, Judah settles in to wait for his driver to appear. It is impossible for an Old Order Mennonite to run away without transportation that goes faster than ten miles an hour. But when Judah learned of Rachel’s banishment from Copper Creek, he hid in the barn and whispered through the phone receiver that the driver should pick him up at five o’clock Tuesday morning in front of the school. Judah knew there was a chance the truck’s engine would be overheard, and the families preparing to open up the surrounding stores would put two and two together. But Judah also knew he would be long gone before his brother would receive the news and attempt to chase him down.

Sitting on the schoolhouse steps with the bags between his feet, Judah finds that the only person he feels guilty leaving behind is his mother, who is so burdened with grief over my death, she can barely open her eyes. For years after our first four children were born, my wife begged the Lord for another child. But nothing ever happened. Then one morning she awoke and realized she hadn’t gotten her monthly in the past three of them. At first, she credited it to the onset of menopause, but after she went downstairs and the sight and smell of Mary’s poached egg started making her sick, and the slight cramping in her stomach wouldn’t go away, she decided to visit the midwife, who confirmed my wife’s growing suspicions.

Six months later, when the improbable became possible, Verna and I could not help but love our surprising blessing all the more. Tobias, at twelve, was far too old to resent Judah, but the lack of attention he paid his brother communicated the feelings his mouth would not. To our consternation, our daughters followed their eldest brother’s lead. My wife and I tried to make up for our children’s slight by coddling Judah. We didn’t give him as many chores as the others; Verna would always keep the bread box stocked with his favorite baked goods and her ragbag heaped with bright scraps that would have been beautiful woven into a quilt but wrapped Judah’s woodland creatures instead. Rather than softening his siblings’ apathy toward him, our attention only seemed to carve it into stone. To counterbalance this, we were soon treating Judah more like a grandchild than a son. I think this is why Tobias assumed the role of the father, one which he tries to enforce to this day, and the very reason, more than any other, Judah is bound and determined to leave Copper Creek.

Ida Mae’s radio is turned as low as a hum, and she lets the truck engine purr as Judah slings the two small bags inside the cab, then climbs in behind them.

“You runnin’ away?” Ida Mae asks.

Strapping the seat belt across his chest, Judah shakes his head. “No, I’m running toward something.”

“It wouldn’t be no girl, now, would it?”

Judah looks over with frustration in his eyes. “Why do you say that?”

Pulling out of the schoolyard onto Copper Creek Road, Ida Mae hides her smile by looking out the driver’s-side window.

Judah, too tired to fall into her trap, shrugs. “I guess it doesn’t matter how you found out since you’re taking me to her anyway.”

“Oh, am I? And how do you know where this girl even is?” Ida Mae points out the windshield where the community’s peaked roofs are pricking through the fog. “She ain’t living here no more, is she?”

My son says, “No. I don’t know where she is, but somehow I’ve got to find her.”

“It won’t take you too long, I bet.”

“How do you know?”

Ida Mae doesn’t answer, just pulls down out of the mountain onto the highway. Taking a left back toward her store, she turns the radio to a country station. “Dunno,” she says and smiles. “Love’s got a way of taking us where we belong.”

Placing her hands on either side of the sink, Rachel takes a deep breath and then pulls a freckled banana loose from the bundle sitting on top of the microwave. She peels it and takes a bite. For the first time since Amos’s funeral,
her stomach feels hollow from want of food, and a piece of fruit is the only thing in this
ferhoodled haus
she knows how to give it. Rachel isn’t expecting Ida Mae to return until the store opens three hours from now, so she does not clean up the kitchen but just leaves it and pads into the blue bedroom with the glow-in-the-dark stars that have vanished with the dawn.

“How’d you get in here?” Rachel asks in Pennsylvania Dutch, shooing the feline off Eli’s bed. Jezebel bats at her with retracted claws before leaping down onto the floor and exiting the room with the miffed air of royalty.

At that moment, Ida Mae opens the front door to her house, and Jezebel is a multicolored streak who darts between her master’s legs into the fresh air outside. Ida Mae takes one whiff of the singed sugary smell pervading the room and does not blame Jezebel her hasty escape.

“What’s burning?” Judah asks, coming in behind her.

Ida Mae calls out, “Rachel?”

Not having heard the front door open or the unmistakable timbre of Judah’s voice, Rachel has no qualms about stepping from the bedroom into the living room. Her dark-blonde hair, released from its standard
kapp
and bun, trails down to the waist of her nightgown. My son just stands there with his mouth agape and eyes wide, thinking that hair and the person attached to it are the most glorious sight he has ever seen.

Clearing her throat, Ida Mae sidesteps the young couple and walks through the living room into the kitchen. She
has to smile at the pan of charbroiled cinnamon rolls and pot of jet-black coffee sitting on the countertop. She’d made just as appetizing a meal the first night she moved into an apartment on the shady side of a Tennessee town where no one knew her name or her story. Tuning one ear to the low murmurs in the living room and another to the child who is starting to whimper from his bed, Ida Mae grabs a Brillo pad and begins scouring the countertops and the burners on the stove. She dumps the pot of coffee and pan of cinnamon rolls out the back door, but even Lady turns her nose up at the pastries that look nothing like the leftovers from her master’s store.

Ten minutes later, the kitchen looks like it had never collided with an Old Order Mennonite woman’s first attempt at technology. As if on cue, Eli’s whimpers increase to outraged wails. Ida Mae wrings out the Brillo pad and sets it on top of the sink, then scurries into the blue room and lifts the infant from his makeshift bed. Startled by the unfamiliar, peach-shaped face, Eli opens his mouth to scream, but Ida Mae widens her pitted brown eyes and opens her mouth in an O that mirrors his own.