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Overview
1867. Growing up among the Pennsylvania Amish, eleven-year-old Joshua knows that his father is a respected church deacon who has the ear of God. But he’s also seen his father’s weakness for drink, and borne the brunt of his violent rages. In the aftermath of a disastrous fire, Joshua fears his father’s reprimand enough to run away from home. Having never experienced the ways of the English, Joshua now embarks on a decade-long journey to California, where he’s heard it’s always summer.
His mother, Miriam, is forced to take on the unusual role of head of the family when her husband is unable to recover physically, emotionally, or spiritually from the fire. As mother and son each find themselves in uncharted territory, they must draw on strength and forgiveness from within. Urged by everyone to accept her son’s death, Miriam never gives up hope of seeing Joshua again. But even as her prayers are answered so many years later, Joshua’s reunion will require him to face his father once again…
READERS GUIDE INCLUDED
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780451469991 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 10/06/2015 |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
PART I
The Road
CHAPTER 1
The Graveyard
Joshua urges his horse through the iron gate. Hoping to find his father’s headstone, he dismounts at one slab not yet covered with lichen and reads the name. It’s not Father’s. He reads it again. Hand to his beard, he compresses his lips. The name is his own.
He never imagined this welcome, or the chiseled inscription: Beloved Boy, 1872. The year he ran from Father and the farm.
Beyond disquiet, he lingers on the hill overlooking his family’s stone house and white barn, the rebuilt woodshed, all at peace as it should be, no hint of demolishing flames. Only birdsong greets him, and air fresh with the tang of falling leaves.
Quiet surrounds him, the shouting over long ago.
He lets himself revel in the spread of quilted fields, this Amish land woven into the chambers of his heart along with Mama and his sisters. They draw him, but he stays in the graveyard. His horse crops the grass.
A runaway no more, after ten years and six thousand miles, he has returned ragged in brown castoffs, his beard matted. He shakes off hesitation.
Gathering the reins, he girds himself against Father, the Deacon of their Plain Fold, the one who propelled him, eleven and alone, into the arms of English.
In their Gomorrahs Joshua resisted what frightened him most: the advent of hate. Yet try as he might, he fell from grace, another man’s blood on his hands.
At twenty-one, he has come to reclaim the boy he once was. He wants to earn the Plain jacket, pants, and hat, black as Mama’s blackberry jam. He wants his family. But first comes Father. Face-to-face.
CHAPTER 2
Where the Road Began
Tucked in his narrow bed, Joshua listened to Father slam through the kitchen. Father, back from prayer in the barn, head full of God; on his breath the liquid of visions, the smell sharp as a snake’s tongue.
As if in the room, Joshua saw him, smelled him, coming through the dark. Father but not Father, shoulders hunched, wet hair streaming into his collar, dripping off his square beard. His boots squelched with rain, and he kicked the logs stacked for the morning fire. Joshua heard them roll onto the hearth, and, clang, the iron fork fell on stone. A great clomping followed. Father kicked at the oak table. Its legs chattered along wide-board floors. He tripped into the parlor, shoved a straight chair, and lurched to the steps. Stomp on the first—stomp, the second—his knee hit the third. Slap, slap, his hands on the sixth, the seventh, he dog-paddled to the landing.
Joshua knew the sounds. He’d seen Father, how he would slide his bulk up the wall, shoulder first, legs wobbly, pushing himself up the last steps to the hall.
“Isaac.” Father’s voice hoarse. “Where are you?” More and more nights, he wasn’t himself, and Father called Joshua Isaac, though he’d been Joshua all his eleven years.
Pulling a patchwork quilt over his head, Joshua prayed, Please, please, let me be but a mote in his eye, ever hopeful that this time Father would stagger past the door. But he paused. His boots regrouped at the top step.
Silence. Then, along the wall, Father’s hand slid toward the bedroom. Joshua peered from under the quilt. Father pushed the door and pawed the opening. A waft of manure filled the room, and big as a tree, he toppled onto the bedside.
He sank to his knees. “God.” Father struck the mattress, his left fist a finger’s width from Joshua’s head, his breath a slap. The bed shook. Joshua inched to the farthest edge, belly to his backbone, eyes squinched.
Father wept. “Dear God . . .”
And it seemed God answered, as He would, Father being Deacon.
“Yes,” Father said. He and God agreed. They were as one, and Joshua less than crumbs under their table. He knew because Father had told him often enough. Crumbs. Though he strove to be the whole loaf Father wanted, a slice would have done.
Breathing heavily, Father gripped Joshua’s shoulder, raised one knee, and, dragging his boot beneath him, heaved to his feet. He yanked Joshua’s arm, the shoulder fit to pop, and hauled him off the bed, his legs tangled in the quilt.
At the end of the hall, Father took the steps two at a time, Joshua’s bare feet bumping the treads, down, down, through parlor and kitchen, his knees cracking against chair legs, the table leg, and out the door into the blowing rain.
Father had him by the hair, head pressed against Father’s jacket sharp with sweat and the stench of wet wool. Joshua’s nightshirt clinging like a second skin, they splashed across the dooryard.
Wild with what might come, he drove his heels into the mud, plowing crooked furrows. “Oh please,” he whispered.
Father wrenched him toward the woodshed. Joshua yowled. Luke yowled in return, the black dog latched in the toolshed.
Luke, Joshua’s confidant, a ready ear those nights after Father beat him in the woodshed. “Why does he hate me?” he’d ask as he curled on the dog’s bed, and the dog would lick his face.
Luke whined and scratched against his confinement, until Father, dragging Joshua, slammed the woodshed door, the world shut out.
One-handed, Father pushed aside the chopping block, an oak stump with the hatchet whacked in the end-grain. Blood and feathers marked the morning slaughter.
The speckled rooster had run headless circles, unaware the worst was over. Now gutted and plucked, he hung in the rafters by yellow feet, the shed smelling of blood.
Father lit a candle on the stump next to the hatchet. With a black boot, he kicked the floorboards free of kindling, and knelt, saintly in the candle’s radiance. From nowhere, he held a quart jar brimming with clear liquid. “Communion cider,” he always called it. “Pray with me, boy.”
Hard fingers dug into Joshua’s elbow, hauling him to his knees, and Father lifted the jar to his lips. He took a long swallow. Another, and he grimaced, lips off his teeth.
The liquid didn’t look like cider. Didn’t smell like the cider Joshua and his sisters tapped from the barrel outside the pressroom. Only Father went inside to the press; his job alone, the making of cider.
“Lord forgive this boy,” Father said.
And Lord only knew, Joshua wanted forgiveness. He needed forgiveness for reading books beyond the Bible, for woolgathering when he should have been working.
But the other faults? Soggy fields, seed rot, rain—? If those powers were his, surely he could loosen Father’s grip, rise, take up his fright, and walk from the woodshed.
Looking like Sunday, Father intoned a prayer, the man upstanding as a white board fence, hair trim at the earlobes, his marriage beard square, upper lip razored smooth—all according to the Ordnung. He kept to the Plain rules.
His fingers bit the back of Joshua’s neck, while the other hand held fervently to the half-empty jar, and through the window, distant as someone else’s life, the house stood outlined in the dark: the steep slate, high chimneys, Joshua’s bedroom dormer, his sisters’ dormer. If he listened intently, he might hear their sleep and Mama’s.
On the first floor, no lamp on the table, no square of window glowed orange. There’d be no light or way to bed for him.
Father’s grip loosened as his prayers droned, “. . . for I am Yours unto the flesh of my flesh, my Isaac, should You ask.”
Isaac again. But would God stay Father’s hand as He’d stayed Old Testament Abraham’s? That son saved before the knife descended.
As Father’s grip eased, Joshua shifted sideways. But a quick twist of his ear brought him to his back on the floor, the jar by his head.
Father patted the floorboards beyond the candle’s glow. His hand came up empty, the usual apple switch not found, and this fault was Joshua’s. He’d burned the switch that morning.
Father searched with the other arm. “God bless it.” And for a moment Joshua seemed forgotten in the candle’s flicker. The blade of the hatchet glinted.
Joshua spidered backward, arms cocked, palms down, feet under his rump. One outflung foot caught the jar. The remaining liquid ran rat-quick under the dry woodpile.
Father bellowed. He lunged for the jar and missed as an unsplit log rolled beneath his foot. He landed hip first, his face so close, Joshua could have kissed his cheek.
Father had him by the shirt; in the pit of his eye, no hint of reprieve. Joshua saw only his own reflection: the open mouth, panicked eyes. Even God Himself couldn’t stay this Abraham’s hand.
Joshua closed his fists in Father’s long beard and pushed. Straining against Father’s chin, his arms shook, but Father’s grip wouldn’t loosen.
Letting go, Joshua flung his arms above his head, fingers locked together. He wrenched side to side, frantic to break Father’s grip, and oh God, his locked fists slammed Father’s face.
Together they jolted against the chopping block. The block wobbled.
Above their heads, the candle toppled and rolled onto the blotchy floor. A whoosh of blue flame leapt around them, yet Father’s grip fiercened. Joshua’s shirt tore.
The flames leapt up their clothes. A hand passed Joshua’s lips, and he turned badger. All tongue and teeth, he bit. In the Devil’s own rage, Father lifted Joshua out of the flames and threw him through the window, shoulder first, head bent, shattering mullions and glass. He landed in a sea of mud.
Searching for breath, he curled on his side. The dark house shimmered.
He wiped his eyes. The woodshed wall sheeted with flame, and from the door came a separate conflagration like a burning bush. Dear God. And there in the midst of the burning, what did Joshua see? Father? God the Father?
The apparition fell, groveling in the wet. Just a man, he beat at his clothes, splashing until the flames snuffed, and he lay quiet in the roar of the woodshed.
A bell rang, a rapid clang-clang, clang-clang. Someone—it had to be Mama—whipped the rope, the clapper slung rim to rim.
Locked safe in the toolshed, Luke yowled high, keening among the shouts of the faithful as they ran over the fields and down the lane, buckets clunking. Fast they came, rousted from bed, running in answer to the iron bell, the insistent clangor sounding fire.
Father stirred. He rose to hands and knees, hair plastered to his head. Smoke billowed, and he pointed a shaky finger. “You!” Father reared, hands reaching.
Joshua’s head filled with its own clangor. Run, run, and, jumping to his feet, he ran behind the barn, flying across the harrowed fields, hedgerow to hedgerow.
He hadn’t meant to hit Father. He hadn’t meant the candle to fall. Yet who would believe him over the word of their Deacon?
Out of the fields and into dark woods, he entered the slap of branches, his chest filled with a white fire at every breath, his legs weak as a new lamb’s.
“Oh, Mama.” Eyes and nose leaking, he stumbled through windfallen limbs.
Father thundered in Joshua’s ears, long after the voice faded—He’ll find you.
The moon slid from banked clouds. And there they were waiting, tall shadows by a road cutting the woods, as if Father’s Flock knew right where he hid.
CHAPTER 3
Miriam
Peace without end, a blessing Miriam had been too blind to fully savor. It came unquestioned with her Plain faith. Until contentment ended, she’d never thought to look for hints of ruin.
That spring, rain had lashed the windows and soaked the farm’s hundred acres. In occasional sun, the big chestnut spread shade between house and barn, the massive trunk at the center of their circling lane. Lush oaks edged the narrow way, but the once slow creek crowned, overflowing its banks. Mosquitoes whined in the lowlands as seedlings drowned, a time so wet, Noah would have risen, taken up adze and mallet, and built himself an ark.
Of the Old Order, she’d lived Plain in black. Along with Abraham and the littles, she’d bent her back to the land. Pledged never to raise a hand against another, they dwelt in post and beam, fieldstone and mortar, keeping separate as the Ordnung demanded. Separate and safe in Abraham’s Flock, the outside world a mystery best left to itself.
• • •
Joshua’s last morning, Miriam had slaughtered a rooster for supper and they all—Adah, strong at thirteen, Emma, Mary, and little Rebecca—spent the day in the side field, mud to their ankles, draining puddles of standing water. Abraham, Miriam, and Joshua dug trenches, and the girls swept brown water into the hedgerow, their black clothes spattered with mud.
By evening, quivering with exhaustion, they rinsed off at the pump. They ate pickled pig feet and yesterday’s corn mush, no time or inclination for more. They could cook the rooster another day.
Miriam tucked in the littles, hung damp clothes and her white prayer cap on a hook. She changed to a white nightdress, then unwound her lifelong hair, plaited it in a single braid, and fell into bed. Sleep swamped her before Abraham finished bedding animals in the barn.
Raccoons screeched through her dreams. Wind knocked at a loose door. She tossed under the spring quilt and, with a jolt, woke from her dead sleep. It felt like all the mud she’d moved that day now thickened her legs. She sat up and sniffed. “Smoke.”
They hadn’t cooked, so— She reached for Abraham’s shoulder. “I smell—” Her hand fell on the cold sheet.
She swung her feet to the floor, and a flicker of yellow launched her to the window. The woodshed.
She jammed her feet into boots, not bothering with laces. He should have woken me.
“Joshua,” she shouted as she ran downstairs, white nightdress rippling at her legs. “Fire! Everyone up.”
Out the door, she dashed to the iron bell, rain in her eyes. She hauled on the wet rope, and the night filled with clang. Flames rose over the woodshed roof; the barn would be next.
“Abraham!” At the pump? No. “Joshua!” Where were they? She’d work the pump herself, but the bell—she had to keep the neighbors coming. “Joshua?” she shouted into the rain. Her braid slapped across her back. Loose strands stuck to her face.
“Mama.” Adah joined her on the pull. “I’ll do it.”
“Me too.” Little Rebecca tugged at the knotted end. Mary and Emma, like their sisters in braids and white nightdresses, crowded ready.
Miriam fled across the dooryard. “Faster,” she shouted at Adah. And the rain came faster.
Mud beneath her boots, Miriam slid to a stop at the trough as her closest neighbor thundered in on his horse, a bucket in each hand, reins flapping.
“Whoa, boy.” Before the horse stopped, Zeke swung a leg over the animal’s neck and slid to the ground. Together, he and Miriam scooped the buckets full and ran, water sloshing their legs. At the shed, they flung what was left at the flames.
Behind them more neighbors flooded in. On horseback, they came shouting. They came in carts, on foot across the fields, down the road, buckets clanking. “Here,” one called, “line up.”
“You pump,” another yelled above the din, and grabbed Miriam’s bucket. She worked the metal handle, water in the trough barely keeping up with the long brigade. She thought she saw Joshua, a flash of yellow hair, at the other end of the line. He’d be with Abraham in the cluster of black-clad men.
“Inside,” a man called. “Douse the inside—we’re gaining.”
Women in white prayer caps stationed themselves by the barn doors ready to get the animals out. Their worried faces glowed orange above black dresses.
Breathing hard, Miriam kept her eye on the smoke. Through dark billows, sparks danced like fireflies, until the smoke paled to white, the flames tiring.
Hands pulled her from the pump while others set to on the handle. “It’s Abraham,” Hannah said. “Zeke’s with him.” She pulled Miriam around the corner of the shed toward a group kneeling in the mud, their backs to her. Hannah’s husband motioned her over.
Miriam searched the backs, none as big and square as Abraham’s. The men parted, their pale faces turning her way.
She no longer heard the bell, the shouting, the roar of the fire. She didn’t see the flames or feel the rain. She saw only the mud-blackened shape, square and solid, lying on the ground.
“Abraham.” She rushed to him. One of his eyes opened, the white bright in the mud-dark face, the pupil darting. His lid clamped shut. A cough racked his body.
“He’s burned,” Zeke said.
Miriam knelt, her hands wandering above him, unsure where to start. “Water,” she said, and tore the sleeve from her nightdress. Zeke held out a bucket. Miriam squeezed the cloth, dribbling water over Abraham’s face, mud running off his bubbled skin. Wincing, she dipped the cloth again. “More.”
Zeke tilted a slow stream, which Miriam guided through Abraham’s melted hair, over his forehead, and neck. Hannah opened his burned shirt. “Let’s get him inside.”
Abraham struggled to sit. “No, I’ve got—”
Two men slipped arms under his and lifted him to his feet. He howled. They retreated from his flailing arms, and his legs buckled, bringing him to hands and knees. “Find—” He gagged. “Save him—” His back humped. He wavered, tipped, and splashed on his side.
• • •
At the worktable in the crowded kitchen, women doled food off platters they’d brought from home. They kept their backs to the dinner table, where the men had laid Abraham, his body doused and dripping. Hannah and Miriam worked at his clothes, cutting and lifting burned strips, baring his mottled skin. Miriam sluiced the yellow blisters on his chest and rinsed char from the cooked flesh. Down his belly and legs, meaty patches gleamed red.
He moaned, his voice hoarse, words more and more disjointed. He shouted for Isaac. An angel, perhaps, who’d flown through a window. Abraham did have visions.
“It’s the burns,” Hannah said. “I’ve seen it before. He needs liquid inside as much as out. A wash in chestnut tea.” Hannah took a lantern from the sideboard. “Collect leaves,” she directed one of the women, and to another, “In the cellar, we need potatoes. Lots. I’ll make a poultice.”
“No, no.” Abraham struggled. His leg dangled off the table.
Hannah blocked his fall, and three of the servers grabbed ankles and wrists. Pinned to the table, he shrieked.
Miriam steeled herself against his cries and tweezed bits of black skin along with shreds of cloth resistant to water. The tiniest scrap or drop of mud could kill if left buried in raw folds under his arm, behind a knee, in the curl of his blackened ear. She bent closer, and more candles appeared, held high without being asked for.
Thank heaven for Hannah and the Flock’s many hands. One family, they belonged to one another the way pieces of grain gave themselves to be bread. Hannah and the Flock would take care of them, the way Miriam and the Flock had taken care of Hannah and Zeke when their first infant passed. No one had to ask, no one beholden.
A thudding of logs sounded in the dooryard. Someone had planned ahead, a place where her thoughts wouldn’t have gone, not until the cook fire dwindled and she remembered the woodpile, another thing they’d lost along with the shed.
God had been watching out, and God would see Abraham through. He had to. The Lord and Abraham had each other’s ear. They always did.
Abraham’s faith drew people to him, had drawn Miriam, not just his full lips and the dent in his chin now covered with his marriage beard.
Grateful for blessings, she felt her eyes well. She pursed her lips, cleared her vision with a shake of her head. This was no time for tears.
She poured more water from a pitcher over the ravaged side of Abraham’s face. She dabbed gently with a wad of lamb’s wool, working around the puffing blisters, the features blurred as if she’d stuffed him in a sausage skin. “Oh, Abraham,” she whispered. “What happened?”
He twisted under the women’s muscular arms, no sign of hearing, and with greater care yet, Miriam dabbed where he had no skin at all. He gave another agonized cry.
The girls burst through the door, pressing in beside Miriam. Bending over Abraham, Rebecca choked and turned away, then back, her palm cupped over her nose and mouth.
Until then, Miriam hadn’t noticed the smell of burned hair and, worse, the scorch of meat. Emma ran from the room followed by Mary.
“Adah,” Miriam said. “Take Rebecca upstairs.” This was no sight for a four-year-old. “Get everyone to bed.”
“But—”
“I’m seeing to Papa. I’ll come later.” Light would likely come first, for dawn already seeped at the edge of eastern fields.
“Where’s Joshua?” Adah paused at the bottom step. “Bed for him too?”
“I’m sure he’s with the men,” Hannah said. “Clearing the fire.” She waved the girls up the stairs. “Off now.”
Abraham moaned. “Hurt—he’s—”
“Shhh, Abraham.” Miriam blinked hard. She’d do anything to ease his writhing. How could tea help, the burns so deep, so widespread?
“He needs a pallet down here,” Hannah said. “He can’t be upstairs.”
Abraham struggled onto his elbows. “No.” Swelling lips muffled his words. “Find him.” His elbows slid, slamming his back to the table. One eye stretched wide, the brown center rolling under its lid, left a sightless white pebble. His body went slack.
• • •
A rosy glow filled the parlor’s east window while the women grated mounds of potato. One by one, the men, having knocked down the fire, came for breakfast. They ate hurriedly, and collected their wives, except for Hannah, who continued grating.
“I’ll tend the animals,” Zeke said.
Miriam looked up from bathing Abraham with cooled chestnut tea. “Bless you,” she said. She could hear impatience in the cows’ lowing. “Joshua must have started by now.”
“I didn’t see him.” Zeke rubbed his beard. “Not at the fire either.”
Miriam frowned. Hadn’t she seen him in the line? “He has to be there. He wasn’t in his room.” Looking from face to face, she gripped the edge of the table.
“Go,” Hannah said. “We’ll set the poultice.”
Miriam threw a black shawl over her muddy nightdress and ran. She cut across the circling lane, Zeke behind her, both of them calling, “Joshua.” His voice low and rumbling, hers growing higher and higher.
Cows in a line at the barn’s side door turned their heads expectantly. Joshua wouldn’t be inside if the cows were out; he hadn’t started. She called again, her voice a squeak.
Luke barked. Of course, he’d be with Luke. She flung open the toolshed door, and the dog shot out. He circled the lane sniffing.
By the charred woodshed, he stopped under the shattered window. He whined, sniffed the air, sniffed the wet ground in widening circles, and returned to the window.
“Zeke,” Miriam said. “Abraham must have thrown him from the fire—that’s what he meant. We have to find him. He’s hurt.”
She ran to the bell again, ringing in the neighbors. By full light, they’d gathered, black figures fanning out across the fields and into the hedgerows.
“He can’t have gotten far,” Zeke said. He and Miriam parted the brush and peered for any hidden sign. “Not with burns like Abraham’s.”
She pushed his words away. “I’ll try the barn.”
She passed the waiting cows and opened one stall after the next, praying she’d find Joshua feeding the horses.
In the lofts, she turned over hay while Zeke saw to the cows. She headed behind the grain bins. He wouldn’t be there past the hexing of pitchforks, but maybe. She had to look everywhere. Uncrossing the pitchforks, she leaned behind the bins. Nothing but a line of corked jars. Where is he?
Outside again, the girls, now in black day clothes, gathered to Miriam. They latched on as a drowner would, clutching her. Rebecca wrung Miriam’s nightdress.
Men and women called, “Anything?”
Others answered, “Nothing here.” “Nothing here.” “Nothing here.”
“Try by the yearling pen?”
The girls followed her to the pens behind the toolshed. “This one?”
“No. Not here either?”
They swung back to the lane. “Where next, Mama?” Where indeed?
The barn, as if Miriam hadn’t checked every loft and corner. The edges of her vision darkened with panic. She used to wonder how horses could be so senseless. Having been led from a burning barn, they’d return to the flames if they weren’t blindfolded. She closed her eyes. Think now.
She’d been looking for her boy in black. He’d be wet, limping, sitting perhaps, cradling a broken limb.
No—what was she thinking?—not in black. Like herself, drawn from bed, he’d be in mud-soaked white, if his shirt hadn’t burned away, his body bubbled and torn like Abraham’s.
“Abraham.” She ran for the house.
No, Hannah would have him in hand. “Girls, help inside. I’ll be in in a minute. Go.”
They’d seen Abraham, and she didn’t want them finding anything worse. She dreaded the glimpse of cloth in a hedgerow, a charred knee poking from behind a fallen log, yet any sighting would be better than none.
• • •
All day in her nightdress, hair unkempt, Miriam ran circles. Centered on the huge chestnut, she veered off to the beehives behind the shed of yearling sheep, back to the tree. If only she could climb it and see the whole of their land.
Off to the barn. A third time? She might have missed—something, anything.
The cider room? No, Joshua wouldn’t. The room sacred, only Abraham allowed.
She unlatched the door, the room a jumble of barrels and jars, the big press and odd equipment, things her father had never used for cider. But no Joshua.
Out the door, she ran to the henhouse, to the old well. The stone slab, too heavy for one person to lift, lay firmly atop the hole. A small relief.
In the hedgerows with her neighbors, her mouth a fearful desert, she searched more slowly. God bless Zeke and the Flock taking her chores on top of their own. Bless Hannah shooing her out to search. Hannah, her elder by four years, had a steady hand on the girls and Abraham.
• • •
The sun fell behind the grave-covered hill, and dark closed over the farm. Lamps glowed through the kitchen windows. On her way to the house, Miriam, in a last look across the fields, watched her neighbor’s torchlights bobbing near the woods.
So like lightning bugs the littles loved to chase on balmy summer nights. If only those lights were lightning bugs, she’d be sitting on the porch amidst the day’s harvest, hulling peas and limas or shucking corn, a wealth of food for winter. By fall she’d have a cellar full of jarred vegetables of every color. If only this could be last summer.
She hated the thought of Joshua lost in the trees, fear and the night chill adding to his pain.
She swayed, her legs gelatinous. Zeke hurried across the lane and took her arm. “Inside now. You need rest.” They entered arm in arm as others came out.
“We’ll keep looking,” the men said.
The murmur of voices went quiet. Her girls threw arms around Miriam as neighboring women loaded more plates and passed them to the crowded men who stood, hasty forks making quick work of their meal. And finished, they put their plates in the washtub, touched Miriam’s shoulder in passing, and headed out again.
Hannah sat on a chair close to Abraham’s pallet. She’d set it in a corner away from the hearth, a cup and a pitcher of water by her feet. “I think he sleeps,” she said. “You should too. I’ll keep watch.”
All eyes followed Miriam, the center of this unwelcome world of attention. She led the littles to the stairs. Murmurs followed them to the second floor.
In the girls’ room, Miriam left a burning candle on the windowsill, and lit a stub in her own room. Maybe the light would draw him. Or maybe she needed the light.
When he was small, Joshua liked having a candle, the way shadows flickered on the walls and ceiling. He saw Noah’s animals, giraffes grazing in the treetops, lions stalking in long grass. The teacher, Frau Lentz, had filled his head with a peaceable kingdom that lit the dark so feared by other children.
But now, Miriam couldn’t see his kingdom. She saw the plain walls boxing her in, the room no longer a place of comfort. Lying on her back in a dry nightdress, she stared at the ceiling above her like a plaster lid, and below, her black dress and apron hung limp on their pegs. Lifeless, the dress mocked her.
When she finally dozed, Joshua haunted her dreams. He called, Mama, and she followed his faint voice. His pleading drew her down a hall of locked doors. Finally setting her shoulder to one, it opened and—oh, Joshua—there he stood, nightshirt in shreds, his body weeping with burns. She reached for him, gathered him in her arms, relief throbbing through her.
Mama, he said, and dissolved. She woke gasping, a sheet clutched to her breast.
On the windowsill, the pooled candle guttered to nothing. She shifted under her patchwork quilt, the straw in her mattress doing nothing to shush the stampede in her head. The moon cast dim shadows.
Miriam threw off the covers. She took clothes from the pegs where she’d hung them before the fire, and dressed, a shawl over her shoulders. Tiptoeing, she passed the girls’ room and down the stairs and into the kitchen.
• • •
Hannah sat by Abraham, her eyes closed, head leaning against the wall. The others had left. Miriam should send Hannah home, but she knew she wouldn’t go.
Continuing to tiptoe, Miriam slipped outside, closing the door softly behind her. She held a lamp, the light bathing her hands, her skirts, and a small pool of ground around her boots. The light made the surrounding dark even darker.
Alone, Miriam probed the night.
CHAPTER 4
Sweet Chariot
Joshua tripped. With each painful step, tangled brush gave underfoot. Panting, he fell. Twigs dug at his burned legs. He shrieked.
The men waiting by the road, surely they’d seen him cowering in the woods, but the shadowy figures didn’t move. “Take me. Be done.” He waited for their crashing footsteps through the woods. It didn’t matter. Only the pain mattered. His head buzzed, eyes filling with an ocean of silvery minnows, and darkness swallowed him back to his bed.
He heard Mama’s voice from down the hall: “Abraham, Jesus waits.” As if Jesus stood in the room, tapping His foot; she with a braid to the waist of her long nightdress, Jesus beside her, His hair loose to His shoulders, robes to the floor, ready as Mama to turn the other cheek. Forgiveness. Joshua snuggled in, forgiveness deep and soft as straw ticking.
• • •
But the ticking heated hotter than a frying pan, hot as the forge. Was he shaping horseshoes in bed? Coals tipped onto his legs.
He lurched to his feet, shying from his mattress of sticks. Home, his bed, the forge, gone, yet fire stuck to his legs. He staggered in the dim morning woods till he touched the smooth road and remembered the men.
About to run, he saw at the road’s far side not men at all. Nothing but a windbreak of cedars.
A rumble came from around the curve, the beat of hooves, and a wagon broke into view. Joshua jumped for the trees, Father’s voice in his head—He wants you.
God wasn’t his worry. Father was.
Fearful of eyes seeking a burned boy, Joshua hobbled on, hair in his face, torn nightshirt, bare feet bleeding. Drizzle started. A vine snared his ankle, and falling, every briar in the woods pounced, vicious as hornets.
• • •
Days and nights floated together. In sun and rain, in patches of moonlight, dusk and dawn he startled at the snap of sticks.
Eyes closed, he ran. Trees ran with him, harsh breath in his ear, heart-hammered chests fit to crack. Trees and boy, limbs waving, sap flowing. Visions of Father high on a lathered horse pressed him onward.
He ran dizzy, ran dark, ran sun, the fields as strange as the roads he’d never seen. Though not expressly forbidden, he had never ventured past the ridge. For all he knew, he could be in Egypt. He, like all the Plain, stayed separate, uninfected by rabble English living in their run-down farms and godless Gomorrahs.
Joshua’s head overflowed with he-devils and she-devils in flame-lit finery, a seething mass dancing around a pen of stray children fattened for roasting. Yes, far-fetched in the light of day, yet the images haunted him.
The only sure thing: dawn at his back, the day setting in his face, and another fitful night of burning legs.
Worry of all he’d left undone swamped him: Mama at the plow, at cooking, baking, sweeping, hauling water from the pump to the house, chopping wood, driving the hay wagon. Adah mucking and milking.
Never look back. Joshua knew he’d turn to a pillar of salt, and still he cast back to last Sunday, how his sisters had teased him, chirpy and laughing, while setting up benches for service, their turn hosting that week. Adah had said, “You’re too pretty for a boy.” The girls, miniatures of Mama except for their black prayer caps, laughed and twitched long skirts. “You should wear these.”
“Nooo,” said Mama. “Too much muscle for a girl.” She’d brushed yellow hair from his eyes and kissed his forehead. He wrapped his arms around her, holding to her softness, the smell of stew and corn bread in her clothes.
She gave a hug to each of the black-capped girls. “Hurry now, it’s time to ring the bell. Rebecca, your turn. Remember, slowly; you’re calling the faithful to church, not a fire.” No fire, how he wished it were true.
Forget the house. Forget Rebecca cheeping like a fuzzy chick. Forget Emma and Adah shaking rain from their skirts the way ducks shiver water from their feathers. And Mama, forget her teasing smile, the safety of her arms.
Joshua had no horses to feed, no sheep to shear, no barn peeling in the heat. Those burdens theirs, all he needed was another puddle to sip, a few twigs with bark new enough to chew.
He thought himself all cried out, but his cheeks stayed wet.
At a scabby farm scratched into the hillside, Joshua dared not test for kindness. Not this farm or the one before it. The lighted windows spoke of home, but these English were no kin to him. And if kin lived there, worse yet.
His legs burned as if the flames that took the woodshed licked him to the bone.
• • •
Another day, and shivery-hot, Joshua found a place so neglected—a gaping roof, fences down, the gate cockeyed on one hinge—it had to be abandoned. Vines choked the porch; a plow rusted in the field; a wagon missing a wheel tipped on its axle. He couldn’t imagine what lash would put an entire family to flight.
Joshua sidled clear of the house. Maybe English lived like that.
Crouched low, he came behind a mossy trough, looked left, looked right, before dipping his cupped hands. Water dribbled. His head jerked at the noise.
All was quiet. He leaned on the trough and pressed his lips into the heavenly water, gulp after gulp till his belly could hold no more. He splashed his legs. Mud flowed down his shins, exposing char and yellow blisters. Dizzy, he hunched over the trough edge, so like Father had after a night in the woodshed.
Father had smacked the reflection with the flat of his hand, groaned, and dunked his head. He came up, his hair dripping, and from a bucket, he’d taken a bristle brush. He scrubbed his face, scoured hard on the back of his neck, under the beard, over a shoulder, and down each arm. While he scrubbed, he chanted hymns of suffering, how the bodies of Old Order ancestors had been stretched on the rack. He scrubbed until he was clean and pink as a newborn pig.
• • •
Joshua tried the barn door. It wouldn’t budge, the door too heavy on a rusted track. He crept around to the other side.
At the back, once-red boards curled, leaving a slip-space big enough to wedge his head. He wormed on through, careful not to let his legs touch the boards.
Inside, open beams rose to a roof where light shone through. Slanted rays full of dust landed on burlap sacks piled in a corner. Mice rooted for a few remaining oats. He shooed them and plucked each grain, popping the dry morsels in his mouth. Cow on a cud, he chewed, forcing himself not to swallow until the grain turned pulp.
He spread the sacks on a skim of straw. Cold and hot at once, he covered his chest. The rough cloth fell against one leg. He howled and sank again into glimmering minnows. So many fish, it had to be Frau Lentz’s California, his beloved teacher’s land of plenty.
• • •
Hordes of mice burrowed under his back, and raising him, they carried his white and naked body into unbearable brightness. God’s face? One look could mean blindness.
A sound sweeter than birdsong filled the air. “Swing low, sweet chaaaa-riot.” A dark figure on either side carried him from the barn.
“Watch his head.”
“Oh—” A jounce. “Jesus!”
“Bet that hurt.”
They backed up and started again.
“The sack don’t work. ’S too small.”
“Wish we had a litter.”
“I wish we had fried chicken, grits, and redeye gravy.”
“No hope there.”
Hope—food for the living. And being in heaven, Joshua had no need. This had to be heaven. Maybe not Father’s, that gate too strait for the likes of this son.
The spirits passed his body through a mess of rooms. Paint curled off the walls, chunks of ceiling on the floor. They stomped up a flight of complaining stairs.
“Careful now. Watch the rail.” They gentled him onto an iron bed of twisted white flowers.
In the bedroom, the figures came clearer like dark angels, a great white wing between them. Waving it, they cooled the boy, these angels with brown faces and hands. Close to black. Heaven for the burned?
Or some other burning place, said Father’s voice. And he saw Father with his Lord in tow. It seemed they sat at the foot of the bed. God in white robes made a throne; Father in his usual black sat in the Lord’s lap.
Father’s beard, gray as God’s own, wagged with each word, a sneer to his smooth upper lip. Heaven’s not for you, boy. Let me tell your angels the murderous truth.
And Father told Joshua’s angels about the fire. Told it in sorrow. He rode on a sea of humble regret, looking to be the gentle man his Flock knew, a man selfless in the service of others.
“No,” the boy cried.
Yes. On purpose, you tipped the candle. You burned the woodshed. Tried to murder your father.
“Nooo!” The body on the bed thrashed. “Not on purpose.”
Oh yes! Father’s accusations tore the room, but the angels reached right through him as they worked.
“. . . trouble,” the big one said, and scratched short curls tight as a black lamb’s. The small, ropy-haired one said, “How can you tell? He sleeps.”
They waved their shared wing.
“Good Lord—you saw his back.”
Keepers at the Gate saw things even mamas missed. At home he’d bathed alone since the age of nine, never let Mama see the welts.
And there she was, Mama standing at the foot of the bed, Father’s arm locked through hers, his other around her shoulders. In black, one body, two heads.
Come home, Joshua, her head pleaded. You didn’t mean the fire. A moment of anger is all. And your father forgives you. Father could make her believe anything.
Abraham. She strained at his arms, her eyes red rimmed. Please, Joshua, your sisters need you. I need you. Father shut her in the folds of his clothes.
A new fear racked the boy. Who would collect Father’s wrath? Luke? Joshua’s sisters?
Mama had questioned Father once. “What prayers take you to the barn at night?” she’d said. “Is God deaf in the day?”
“Tend your tongue,” Father had told her. “God’s word is my command.”
Mama struggled beneath his cloak. Father gave a wolfish smile, and drew God’s beard around their shoulders. The boy kicked and screamed.
The rope-haired one sat on the bed beside the boy’s body and dispersed Father with a wet cloth. “Yes,” she said to her husband. “I saw his back. I saw the scars. So like yours, and were you trouble?”
He rubbed the top of his head. “So they say.”
“Did I believe them?”
“Best damp the curtain. He still feels hot.”
Hotter than August, Joshua floated in a cloud of stinging insects, no more smell of soup, no visage of God too bright for mortal eyes.
“We’ll take him north,” she said.
“He’s trouble, I tell you. He stays here.”
Where’s here? At the window, a half curtain hung in shreds.
“Trouble or no, he’s not ours. Someone’s hunting him, and if he’s found, we’re found. On that day, Georgia will look like paradise.”
She laid a cool hand on Joshua’s forehead. Another at the back of his head, and a cup to his lips; thirsty as he was, his mouth wouldn’t answer commands. Water dribbled his chin and neck.
Joshua wanted to meet their eyes, that they might know his gratitude. His lids stayed shut. His stomach growled.
“One day, we’ll have our own boy,” the man said.
“And you’d abandon this one?”
“We’ve no choice. He’s too sick to move, and too little food for us, much less him.”
“May as well lay him in the road,” the higher voice said. “Let the crows have at him; all out of his mind, he’ll never know.” Feet scuffed the floor. “With luck, his hunters will find him while he still has eyes.”
“What luck is that?”
“You think on it.”
• • •
“I’ve thought,” the deep voice said low as if soft words would soften the message. “The boy can’t walk, and I can’t carry.”
“And if we leave him?”
“It’s up to God.”
She dampened the curtain again, and laid it on Joshua’s legs. She filled a tin cup by the bed. The man brought a chunk of crust.
She said, “All of it. We’ll find more.” Her lips mothering-soft, she kissed Joshua’s hair. The man slung a sack over his shoulder.
“May Jesus keep you,” she said.
The stairs creaked. A door swung shut, and Joshua dreamed of Mama ladling corn soup in a bowl. He dipped his spoon, sipped. After chewing tender kernels, he washed them down with milk, and banged his empty cup on the table.
• • •
Silence like a person in the room, Joshua rose on one elbow and blinked. A torn curtain waved in the wind from a broken pane. He smelled lilacs gone by. A tin cup rested on its handle in the dust of the bedside table, no noises from downstairs.
In need of the night-jar, he threw off a moth-chewed blanket and sat on the side of the bed. He gasped, pain shrieking up his rag-covered legs. The dizzies spun him.
He waited, propped on scabby arms, and when he could lean without falling, he retrieved the night-jar from under the bed and used it. Clearly he hadn’t always managed, the mattress rich with his mistakes.
At the foot of the bed lay clothes neatly folded and smelling of the outdoors. Sliding a crusty arm into the stained shirt, he balked at buttons. The frayed pants had them too, and a hole in one knee.
He mustn’t wear buttons, though these hadn’t so much as a hint of the fancy. Nothing prideful about them, two broken, the rest chipped, one missing completely.
His choice came down to buttons on clothes or a fig leaf. Not that he could find a fig tree or even a needle and thread to sew the shirt closed. Buttons it would have to be.
Unaccustomed, he fumbled each one through the opposite hole and closed the shirt. The pants more difficult, he slipped them over rags sticky with salve. The sharp smell of herbs came off the bindings as he worked. Fortune smiled. The pants big around, and once they were pulled up, the hurt lessened.
Rag boots showed below the too short pants. He held the wide waist and hunted for rope, the blanket slung over his shoulder.
Downstairs, he kept an eye out for food as well as string or anything else useful. A few broken dishes sat on a doorless hutch. Ashes in the fireplace cold.
He turned and turned in the middle of the room, and stopped facing a washstand with a bowl and pitcher empty except for a dry cloth. It would have to do.
Tearing it in three strips, twisting and knotting them, he tied the cloth around himself, tight, with the top of the pants folded over. He could then walk without holding on.
Alone in the house, yet he called through the rooms. Warm sun streamed in the windows, lighting the curled paint. Striped wallpaper spoke of long-gone care, the stripes milky and faded.
If it weren’t for the bandages, he’d have wondered if his angels had ever been there, their squirrel soup and gentle touch pieces of dream.
Thirst drove him from the house. He stood on the porch in the shade of leafed-out roses, the buds just starting to open. By the look of the flowers he’d been weeks on the bed.
He hobbled down three rickety steps to the trough, the burns on top of his feet nothing to the stab in his legs. Slurping from the trough, he craved signs of his dark angels, but a searching eye found only the fallen fence and the weed-grown lane.
He’d starve if he stayed, so he took to the afternoon road, blanket under his arm, sun in his face. He was Daniel in a den without walls, Daniel waiting for the lion.
CHAPTER 5
The Lion’s Den
Father’s reach stretched. Joshua had to put Pennsylvania between them.
The first day from his angels, he hobbled, maybe a mile. None the second. Half a mile the third. By the fifth, maybe a mile and a half, but where was he?
He pictured the schoolroom map. Frau Lentz had drawn Pennsylvania and pinned it to the wall, rivers in squiggly lines, mountains full of triangle trees, black circles for Philadelphia, Lancaster, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh. A tiny dot for New Eden, just west of Lancaster. She hadn’t drawn California, but it was in his head, a heaven she had given him. The place he went when Father’s switch cut his back and his legs, a land of year-round sun, a farmer’s dream. No matter what Father had said, Joshua was a farmer.
• • •
Before dawn, his last morning at home, Father had caught him reading on his bed. Dressed only in a shirt, Joshua wished he could shrink into the mattress.
“Wastrel.” Father strode across the bedroom. “You’ll never make a farmer.”
Joshua gripped the book Frau Lentz had slipped under his arm after school. How could reading make him not a farmer? When plowing, he angled the team across crest and swale, never a rill after he finished. He reveled at earth between his fingers, the planting of corn in rows, wheat seeds scattered. Joy came with the greening fields.
Father had grabbed the book. Now Frau Lentz would never loan another. There’d be no more showing maps, thrilling him with stories of the outside world. No more telling him her secret dream: California, a place where summer never ended.
“The Inferno, is it?” Father said with a grunt. “Inferno it shall be.” Pages fanning, he flung the book into the fire. The paper curled black at the edges.
Eyes closed, Joshua thought on the shimmering West, where he could walk in sun, raise sheep in lush pastures, sit beside the still waters. Father couldn’t burn those.
• • •
Surely if he made it to Pittsburgh, almost three hundred miles across Pennsylvania, he’d be safe. Or prayed he would.
Hills rose. The Susquehanna lay behind him, where a wide ford had been deep to his chest. After another week, maybe more, the hills might be the start of the Tuscarora. They gobbled the summer sun. Cold stones waited sharp in the shadows and bit through his tattered bandages. A two-day thirst nagged him.
Joshua’s ear, usually bent for the rumble of wagons, now listened for water, and once again, leafy hardwoods hung over the road. A light breeze picked up, and on it the sound of peepers. They talked water, and he could smell it.
Funny, at home the creek had been a cheerful burble, good for cooling milk in the milk house. The fish he caught, a nice change from dinners of chicken or lamb.
Around the next bend, he followed a whisper into the woods. Blessed water, and down on his knees on the bank, he buried his face in the flow and drank.
He stretched on the ground in a moment of well-being, before his stomach complained, water no substitute for food. He returned to the stream, hoping he’d find minnows or a low-lying catfish.
One hand propped on a rock, he took a breath, held it, and with the other hand swept what he prayed was a catfish bedroom. His fingers clamped on a wiggly soft something. Quick out of the water, he slammed it on a rock. No more wiggle, and he held dinner up to the fading light. A frog hung from his fingers, its belly smaller than his big toe, limp legs, its tadpole tail not quite gone.
At first, chomping raw flesh put him off his feed, but hunger ended squeamishness, and he dropped the frog, legs and all, into his mouth. One quick chew and he swallowed, then another to get the toes down.
Sitting on the bank, he picked at his bandages. The dirty cloth stuck as he unwound the strips. Underneath, new pink skin rippled around red centers.
Road dust muddied the water as he scrubbed the cloth between his fists, a sorry wash for shreds serving as bandage and boot. He wrung them and laid them on branches to dry. If they lasted the week, he’d be lucky, not that he knew the end of one or the beginning of the next, all his attention on water and food and his slow-healing burns.
At home, time had been told by hungry sheep, or tolled by the school bell, or Mama on the dinner bell. His sisters announced mealtime with the clatter of forks, spoons, and knives as they set the table.
He missed Father’s sermons ending the week. How strange. He missed Sunday dinner at the long table, the buzz of the Flock’s talk, friendly visits on Sunday afternoons.
He rested his head on his knees. No use crying; he’d think on California. But home insisted on creeping in.
At dusk, Father would be bedding the horses, Mama peeling the last squash from the cellar, cutting it into the evening’s stew. The littles and Luke might herd sheep, penning them for shearing the next day, now long past warm enough. He worried about who would tip the full-grown ewes and drag them to Father on the shearing platform.
Adah was quick, but not strong enough. Mama would have to do it. Emma could tend dinner. Mary probably kneaded the dough. Poor Rebecca had to collect eggs, even reaching her little hand under the red hen, the one with fierce yellow eyes and a beak sharp enough to draw blood. He should be there.
But if he went home, he knew he’d find Father in the lane, scythe ready, the blade sharp. He’d never see Mama or the littles. Father would cut him down.
• • •
It hadn’t always been so. Father and Joshua had worked the land together, Father teaching the motion of tools, the blessings of rich earth, and its care. They pulled horses through colic, birthed calves and lambs, mourning the ones they couldn’t save.
Each year he could remember, Joshua had ridden Father’s shoulders downstairs for a birthday breakfast, piggyback when he grew too big. And he’d grown big for his age, and strong, he and Father a team sharing the notion of years to come, as it should be, world without end, amen. And yet now, he couldn’t go home.
• • •
Each day Joshua’s feet hardened a bit more. He didn’t mind the road, but in the woods, his legs suffered the branches. He wound the blanket around his middle like a skirt. If they saw him, oh, how his sisters would laugh.
Weeks and weeks of the same shirt, the same baggy pants. Thank heaven they couldn’t see him, all filth and stink. Worse yet, the colors and buttons.
Hunger wouldn’t quit, not on roots and ferns and bark. In those scraggy foothills, he needed a working farm.
The ground steeper by the day, the nights grew cold, mountainous roads narrower, the woods thicker. Late afternoon, a wagon scared him into the trees, and again a quick wrap in the blanket. His pace slowed; no wonder girls didn’t run in the woods.
Something skittered. A ground squirrel? A snake? Turning, he found a farmyard showed through the trees. He crept closer. Not really a farm, just a patched cabin and a split-rail fence surrounding a garden. His prayer answered.
The cabin squatted in a circle of beaten earth where chickens scratched for bugs. A shed tilted at the circle’s edge, and beside it a stack of logs fell into knee-high weeds.
Near as he could tell, two more hours of light. A thief in the night had to wait for night. He waited.
• • •
Dusk hung in the woods when the cabin door opened. An old man, as run-down as his home, stepped out. He limped toward the woodpile and stopped. Peering into the woods, he raised his nose like a dog sniffing the wind. Joshua stooped in the underbrush.
Scanning the woods, the man shook his head, lifted a small log from the pile, and split it with a hatchet. Thin slivers fell under his weak strokes, slivers he gathered in the crook of one arm. He shuffled to the cabin, and kicked the door shut.
Soon a plume of smoke drifted from the chimney, followed by the smell of frying eggs. Joshua chewed his tongue in a covetous fit he knew would make the Devil smile.
Patience, he told himself, be the old catfish at home in the creek. That fish knew how to wait, taking nibbles of worm, while younger fish gulped Joshua’s hook.
What People are Saying About This
Praise for An Unseemly Wife
“Top-notch historical fiction...its characters will live with me always.”—Jenna Blum, New York Times bestselling author of Those Who Save Us
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