The Tavernier Stones (29 page)

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Authors: Stephen Parrish

BOOK: The Tavernier Stones
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Clothing, mostly blue and black, hung on a wire to dry. A pair of horses stamped the earth outside their stable and breathed lustily in the clean country air. Parked next to them was a solemn gray buggy outfitted with a bright orange warning triangle.
Clarence Graf was in the habit of milking his cows before sunrise, to conserve daylight for other purposes. The barn could be lit with a propane lantern, but work in the fields required the sun. After lunch, he liked to do chores around the house. Late morning was therefore the most convenient time for John to visit; the old man would be nowhere in sight.
“Hello, Becca,” John said hopefully when his sister answered the door.
Rebecca said nothing but left the door open as she returned to the kitchen.
Inside the kitchen, John found the walls still the same old shade of pale green, and still bare but for an unpretentious seed company calendar. He knew the rugs covering the plain wooden floor would be rolled up and stored away were visitors expected. They were hand-made wedding gifts, intended to last a lifetime, and could not be subjected to the risks of inconsiderate guests.
On the kitchen table was a copy of
The Budget
, an Amish newspaper.
Martyrs Mirror
, a thousand-page tome chronicling the persecution of Anabaptists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, occupied a dry sink in the corner.
Rebecca sat stiffly in a straight-backed chair, facing away from John.
“How is Father?” he asked.
“He’s the same.” She spoke tersely, her lips closing promptly, clipping the very idea of unessential commentary. John was nevertheless happy to hear her strained words; she was the only family member who would talk to him.
“Does he ask about me? Has he mentioned my name?”
“No.”
Clarence Graf had become a minister shortly before John left the community. Unlike most organized religions, whose leaders were appointed and trained, the Amish chose ministers by divine lot among the community lay population. When a position became vacant, an ordination ceremony took place during the next available mass. Each adult church member whispered a nomination to the deacon, who in turn passed it to the bishop. The bishop kept count of the nominations; any man receiving three or more became a candidate.
Songbooks were then lined up on a table, one for each candidate, and the men were asked to take their pick. Tucked into one of the songbooks was a piece of paper containing a verse from the Bible. The man who drew this book became the new minister.
He could refuse neither the nomination nor the selection, since during baptism he had vowed to accept the office should God bless him with it. Nor could he aspire to the office, not only because doing so was haughty, but because the lot, not a power play, chose the minister. The choice was in God’s hands alone.
When Clarence Graf learned he had received the requisite three nominations, he stood before the congregation trying, John thought, to look humble. When the old man had opened his song-book and removed the slip of paper, his entire family and even some of the neighbors had shed tears. It was, after all, a great honor.
John watched his father’s face quiver as he tried to contain the emotion. For despite admonitions against coveting the office, John knew he had wanted it badly.
To Clarence Graf, the greatest conceivable crime was leaving the church. But John was also sure his father could not reconcile himself to the loss of a son. Because the second greatest crime, in Clarence’s view, was disowning one’s offspring. The dilemma was the root of all conflict in his life.
A large, bony man with thick gray hair, crinkled eyes, and powerful, broad hands, Clarence Graf preferred to suffer the dilemma rather than bend one way or the other.
“He should be less stubborn,” John told Rebecca.
“You should be less radical.”
“Come on, Becca. You of all people can appreciate the absurdity of this situation. Wasn’t it you who complained to me—back when you talked to me,
really
talked to me—that because our society is patriarchal, the concessions to modernize always favor the men? The men get the modern farm equipment to make their work easier, the women continue to mow lawns with push mowers. If men mowed the lawns, you argued, they would surely allow gas-powered mowers.”
“So I’m to abandon my family and faith over lawnmower technology?”
“Don’t take a single example and expand it to represent the entire issue.”
“Isn’t that what
you
just did?”
“Besides, I didn’t abandon my family or my faith. They abandoned me.”
“Oh, yes. Anyone can see that. We’re all here, and you’re way over there. Obviously the community got up and walked away from you. That explains your isolation.”
John didn’t let the sarcasm get to him. His sister was suffering from the same opposing forces he had suffered from: a magnetism to the church and community, and a need to explore the outside world. The difference between the two siblings was that she wouldn’t admit the latter. He knew she admired him for his voyage of discovery but couldn’t bring herself to pursue one of her own. The only possible resolution, in her mind, was John’s return home.
Rebecca was a plain Jane in her early twenties. She seldom let her auburn hair down, but when she did, it was long and lustrous and a real asset to her looks. She was waiting for the right man and the opportunity to have his babies. Forks in the road only spelled trouble: she preferred the road to be straight, narrow, and well illuminated. Her only real dilemma was having a choice at all.
“My isolation wasn’t my decision,” John said. “A house doesn’t have to get up and move to lock out one of its occupants.”
Rebecca finally turned to face him. “The doors aren’t locked, John. All you have to do is knock.”
“And change who I am, or else no one will answer.”
“Not at all. Change back to what you were, to what you really are.”
“Is that what you want? For me to give up the work I love, come back here, and sing the
Lob Lied
every Sunday? Wash my neighbor’s feet every fall and spring?”
“It’s what Father wants. And I think, deep inside, it’s what you want too. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“But what do
you
want?”
She turned away again and faced the wall. “I want this never to have happened. And I know that can’t be.”
John circled around to the front of the chair and stood before her. He put his finger beneath her chin and tried to lift it, to make her look at him. But she resisted and stared down at her feet instead.
“I’ll tell you what I want,” he said. “I want you to come with me.”
“No.”
“It’s a big, exciting world, and not nearly as wicked as they make it out to be.”
“How would you know? You haven’t ventured very far into it. Even when you went off to college, as you like to say, you didn’t go any farther than F & M.”
She’s right, John thought. He had only moved from Bird-in-Hand to Lancaster, from farm labor to craft labor. He still acted like an Amishman, living as he did on the fringes of Amish country and lifestyle. And the further away from the church he got—especially in his pursuit of the lost Tavernier stones—the more the church tugged at him to return. The tension was increasing like a rubber band slowly stretching.
His desire to hunt for the stones was, on the surface at least, an expression of greed. He had to admit that. The hunt was disrupting the precarious order in his life, his carefully balanced arrangement of compromises. As such, it had a price. He looked at his little sister looking at her feet. He wondered if the price was too high.
“Why do you come here, John?” she asked. “We have the same argument every time you do. Why do you keep coming back, dressed like that?”
He bent over and hugged her. “To tell you the truth, I guess I want it both ways.”
“So do I, believe it or not. But we can’t have it both ways. Neither of us. I walk past jewelry stores too, you know. I see beautiful objects I have no right to even dream about.”
“Please tell father I came by.”
She looked up quickly, realizing he was about to leave. “I’ll tell him, but he won’t say anything.”
“But he’ll hear you.” He kissed her on the forehead. She neither resisted nor returned the affection. “I love you,
Schatz
.”
In the yard, John paused briefly and watched a gravity-fed water wheel turn a crank that ran a pump. He smelled pungent and familiar odors drifting over from the barn.
He drove past his old one-room schoolhouse, where at any given time three dozen or so pupils in all grades from one to eight studied arithmetic, science, history, and geography. It was here he had first learned English. He could remember his teacher, herself a distinguished graduate of the eighth grade, pronouncing words for the class to mimic.
School had been mostly about learning how to add and subtract and do practical things like tell time and tie shoes. It had been little more than an extended kindergarten, and he hadn’t really learned anything.
Why, then, was he so fond of the memory?
 
While John was stepping into the Graf family kitchen, David was parking his VW Beetle on Nouveau Street in Lancaster, a couple hundred yards away from John’s row house. He had circled the block several times to get comfortable in the neighborhood and to make sure John’s car was nowhere around.
After climbing out of the Beetle, he pointed at its front left hubcap and said, “Stay.”
No one answered when he knocked on John’s front door. He was grateful for the small entry porch sheltering the door, because he didn’t want anyone to see him breaking in. If someone should wander by, he would merely knock again and pretend to be waiting for an answer. And if John should suddenly appear at the door, he would pretend to want a meeting.
David already knew from his first break-in that the lock was a common pin tumbler. He unfolded his leather tool wallet and selected a diamond-shaped pick and a torque wrench. He was about to go to work when a wild idea suddenly occurred to him.
He turned the knob. The door opened.
All of John’s work on the lost Tavernier stones was spread out on his coffee table or stacked on the floor nearby. David went through it methodically, separating documents and notes that invited additional scrutiny. John had clearly made more progress than he was willing to admit. The jackpot was a hand-written analysis of the grid pattern on Cellarius’s last map—the very clue he claimed not to have resolved.
Hills on the Palatinate map seemed to have been placed arbitrarily. This was routine among cartographers of the time, according to John’s notes, but not characteristic of Cellarius. As it turned out, terrain peaks appeared only in the
center
of certain grid squares and did not correspond in any way to the actual terrain.
And the pattern was suspicious. If one counted grid squares starting in the upper left corner of the map, and began with 1006, one greater than the number of Solomon’s songs, the peaks appeared only in prime-numbered squares: 1009, 1013, 1019 …
The twenty-by-twenty array consisted of 400 congruent squares. There were 54 prime numbers between 1006 and 1406, therefore terrain peaks appeared 54 times in the array.
The pattern served as a guide to constructing a locator grille.
David copied all the information into a notebook. By the time he was finished, his stomach was lodging complaints with audible growls. He searched the kitchen for something to eat but found only microwave meals.
“How can the guy eat this shit?” he wondered aloud.
He got himself a drink of water, placed the unwashed glass back in the cupboard, and left the house after making sure the piles in the living room looked more or less the same as he had found them. When he returned to his car, its hubcaps were gone.
TWENTY-SIX
 
THE NEXT DAY, TAKING a walk in Lancaster Cemetery, John stood over the graves of the Winterbottoms, wishing they were still among the living. Wishing they—someone—could tell him how to travel two divergent paths at once. Or whether it was even possible.

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