Beacon of Light, page 9
THE STERILE SOLITUDE of Clara’s house was filled with the smell of Johnson’s baby powder, of clean flannel diapers brought in on washday, of a smattering of tiny nightgowns and swaddle blankets hung on a wooden rack by the kitchen range to dry at the edges.
Clara cooked nourishing meals, turnips and carrots from the cold cellar, beef and potatoes, eggs and whole wheat bread and cereal. May’s appetite increased, her cheeks blossomed with healthy color, and all her days were spent in deep and abiding contentment and praise to her Heavenly Father. She had never imagined such goodness, such unabashed forgiveness and acceptance, a life lived free from repulsive feelings, guilt, or fear.
On days when her old demons would return to haunt her, she would pray, try to rise above the abyss of her past, but it wasn’t always possible. Clara would know, when she came in from the barn and was met by a May without life, her vibrancy gone, her face drained of color, her eyes darkened by the terror of past memories.
Today, she sat beside the still, small form, took her hand and leaned forward.
“May?”
“Yes?”
“Are you having a bad day?”
“Only a little.”
“How bad? Come on, just let it out.”
May shook her head, bit down on her lip, before the gush of tears and the shaking, heart-rending sobs began. She groaned and swayed, held her arms tightly to her chest, her face tortured with remembering, afraid of unforgiveness and a headlong pitch into hell. Clara held her shoulders, blinked furiously at her own tears, and wondered what could cause this indescribable agony. She continued supporting her until she cried herself out. Finally, May sat back on the couch and breathed deeply, a sodden handkerchief twisted in fluttering fingers.
“I just don’t know,” she whispered.
“What don’t you know?”
“If it was all my fault.”
“What was your fault?”
May shook her head as a fresh sob tore through her lips. Clara sat back, stared into space. She told herself it was best to wait, let her speak when she was ready.
She thought of her own despicable years.
Finally Clara got up and put on the kettle, clanked the lid of the kitchen range, and thought she must find a way to keep these thunderous, defeating memories at bay. Her own words were as inefficient as a stale breeze.
“Come, May. I’m putting the water on.”
May turned her face away, then went to the bathroom with heavy steps, like an old woman, her back bent as she swabbed at her cheeks with the handkerchief. Then she returned to the kitchen.
“Here.” Clara set down the cup of steaming chamomile, pushed the honey jar her way. No use asking her to eat something when one of these times struck unexpectedly.
“I don’t know, Clara,” May said suddenly. “I just don’t know. Why do I feel so overwhelmed with it all?”
“With what? You mean, running off with Clinton? Or was it his death or the times afterward?”
“I don’t know.”
A deep sigh, then a visible effort to pull herself back to the present, a cry from the bedroom where little Eliezer had been sleeping. May’s face brightening as she hurried to hold him, to love her infant son with a fierce possessiveness. And Clara watched her go, and wondered.
THE FIRST WOMAN who dared come for a visit was none other than Abe Weaver’s wife, Betty, bringing a casserole, a stack of newly sewn diapers, and a blue rattle to take along to church.
She viewed Baby Eliezer with the same gaze one would reserve for a two-headed calf, although she caught herself in time to comment on his healthy status and brown eyes.
May took it in stride, hadn’t expected more, and thanked Betty for her kind gift. But Betty was obsessed with procuring information on whether she would be attending services with Clara in two weeks. She’d heard about the ministry bending themselves to May and her colored baby. And he was that, the color of dark honey, that broad nose and thick lips. What would become of him?
“So, are you planning on staying with the Amish?” she asked finally, when all her hemming and hawing brought no results.
May’s brown-eyed gaze was lifted honestly, her eyes as clear and as liquid as spring water. “I am.”
“Well, but, what about little . . . uh . . . the boy?”
Clara’s hackles rose. “What do you think, Betty? We’re going to feed him and bathe him and nurture him, after which he’ll go to school and grow up to be a young man. Maybe he’ll even share my love of horses.”
“But . . .”
“No, no buts. He’ll wear a little round straw hat and denim trousers with suspenders like everyone else.”
“But he’s not really white.”
There, she’d said it.
Clara looked at her with fiery eyes. “I’m not either. I’m red, in between the white spots.”
Betty glared back at Clara, not finding this self-demeaning information humorous at all, and turned her attention to May. She asked if she’d had any trouble getting him started nursing. May answered honestly—a little, but he was doing okay now. Betty wished for a fortifying cup of tea and a few cookies, but when she saw none would be forthcoming, she took her leave, regretting that she had no firm answer on whether May and the baby would be at church in two weeks. She went home and told Abe something was a little off with that Clara, the high and mighty thing. She needed a husband to bring her down a notch.
Abe smiled to himself, wondering how any husband brought his wife down a notch, knowing this had been impossible in his own experience. When Betty got on her high horse, it was best to become increasingly dutiful or disappear altogether, the latter choice usually the best one.
He could imagine his wife’s chagrin at the healthy baby’s arrival, the church’s acceptance of them. These days, Clara’s kindness was being spoken of in quiet hushed circles. Whereas before Betty worried what people would think if May stayed with them, now she worried what people were saying about her having left their home.
Abe had always sympathized with May, now more than ever, but to disclose this bit of information to Betty was like throwing gasoline on fire. You were in too much danger of being burned yourself.
So he smiled, kept his peace, the way he always did. He was glad to hear the outcome of the ministers’ meeting, glad to know love and mercy were alive and well. He had no doubt in May’s ability to be a supporting member of the Amish church and wished her every blessing in the coming years. He listened to his wife’s account of her visit with Clara, then got to his feet, clapped his hat onto his head, and thought it wouldn’t be very long before the ground would be dry enough to get out the plow and the Belgians, his favorite job on the farm.
The dark days passed, and the brilliant spring sunshine became a healing antidote as May gathered strength after Eliezer’s birth. Every day, she gazed into his darling face and murmured, “Little Clinton. Clinton.” She wondered if Clinton was an angel, if he could look down and see his son. Sometimes he seemed very near, and at other times, she could barely remember his face, but always, she carried his memory close to her heart, her lips whispering words of love to the remembering of his life, their time together.
“We should call him Elly for short,” Clara remarked one evening, as May sat by the sputtering yellow glow of the kerosene lamp.
May was horrified. “A girl’s name? All Ellas are called Elly.”
“Well, you know. Elly-ayser is the pronunciation, and Elly is better than Ayser.”
May laughed. “Just call him Eliezer, like my father.”
“I remember your parents. A better couple could not be found. And I remember you, as a child. You and your brother, Obadiah. Such beautiful children. The white blond of your hair is so remarkable.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Same as my mother’s hair.” May lifted the baby to her shoulder, arranged the blanket around his shoulders, then spoke softly. “Losing my parents was very hard, but our life afterward was even harder. Sometimes I don’t understand how our relatives could have been so cruel.”
Clara nodded. “You know, Gertie was never a blooming rose. What I mean, she was the kind of girl no one would ask for a date. Like me. She wasn’t very bright. An old story circulated among us that she was dropped on her head as an infant. Some say she never spoke a word until she was close to five years old, never got through school the way other children did. So when Melvin asked her, he was a sort of hero, everyone saying how Melvin saw deeper than the outward appearance, that he saw her good heart. And perhaps he did, I don’t know.”
May said nothing, her eyes veiled.
“She was obedient,” May said finally.
“I imagine she was.”
“In her own way, she loved the boys. Especially Leviticus.” A sadness crept over May’s features. “I feel responsible for those boys. I feel as if I left them to fend for themselves. I find myself praying for them every night.”
“They are not your worry, May. God will take care of them.”
May nodded, but the sadness remained.
“And Oba,” she said suddenly. “I feel as if he died, although this not knowing is almost worse. He was so full of rage, unwilling to believe in God after we . . . he was mistreated.”
“But he had the teaching when he was little. Perhaps that foundation will enable him to come back to God at some point in his life.”
“I can only pray, right?” May asked, a kind of fleeting hope erasing the sadness in her eyes.
AS THE DAYS went by, May regained her strength and began to help with the cooking and cleaning, allowing Clara to spend more time working with the horses. As the days turned warmer, May joined her sometimes when Eliezer slept in his small cradle, his dark head showing above the clean blankets covering his little body.
The days were alight with spring sunshine, breezes scented with the growth of violets along roads and fencerows, fat yellow dandelions with their brilliant yellow blossoms among the purple of the violets. The earth was changed into an explosion of green, buds turning into fresh new leaves, thick alfalfa and timothy grass growing with the nutrients from well-watered soil, rays from the sun adding the boost the fields needed. Farmers walked to the edge of their fields, chewed on fresh new blades of spring grass, and counted their profits. Sweating horses drew the one powerful blade of the plow through rich soil the color of fine mahogany, the lone man with his hands clenched on the slick wooden handles, staggering behind in the uneven furrow.
All over the Amish community, new life and fresh vigor was taken up each morning as men rose from their beds and went forth into the scented dawn to greet wobbly calves only a few hours old, or a sow with a litter of bumbling pink piglets, squealing and shoving their way to their food source. The metal milk cans filled with buckets of frothy white liquid from freshened cows; manure piles were leveled as the spreader sprayed it all over the old corn stubbles, ahead of the plow.
Women bent double, placed precious seeds in furrows drawn with the edge of a hoe, the frisky spring breezes whipping their wide skirts around their bare ankles. Little boys clapped their bow-shaped straw hats to their heads, their mouths open, laughing as they ran barefoot across new grass and soil not yet warmed by summer’s sun. In the evening, they would sit on the back stoop, a steaming granite dish of soapy water on the step below them, allowing their feet to be washed and dried before they scampered off to rest in their beds upstairs.
For May, standing at the fence, her arms draped across the top board, the scent of fresh soil and new grass brought sharp memories of her mother, her sturdy back bent over her work. When her mother straightened, she would watch the sky, her eyes following the cloud pattern, the ripple of heavy grasses, before telling May to come look at the bunnies, playing at the edge of the hayfield.
A sense of deep sadness overtook her at times, remembering the joy of childish things, the freshness of her innocence. She felt tainted, forever soiled, no matter how she clung to her faith in the power of Christ’s forgiveness. She would always pay the price, carry the burden of Eliezer’s birth, belong to a community while still being an outcast.
She never wanted to return to a world she never understood, the life of die Englishy (the English). For her, there was safety here among her people, in the rolling hills of Ohio, the birthplace of her parents, of her and Oba. She would merely need to accept her lot, prepare herself for silent ridicule and barbed glances.
But was it fair to Eliezer, her beautiful baby?
CHAPTER 8
BETWEEN THEM, THEY DECIDED TO STAY IN DAWSON CREEK for a month and let the worst of winter to blow itself out. George had no room for them, he allowed, but there were rooms above the old livery on Clark Street, which Jonas took into account, and they left one gray, cloud-scudded morning to see where they could be comfortable for a while.
He was in a jovial state of mind, joking and carrying on with Oba, trying to draw him out of his reclusive state. He walked with his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched, the cold infiltrating every inch of his body. It seeped into his collar, his ankles, the tips of his toes. His eyes watered, his nose felt as if a hot iron was held to it, his cheeks on fire. This was a cold that could only be described as merciless, brutal, an assault on humans and animals alike.
The light of the sun was obscured by a thin gray veil of clouds, the wind moaning and hissing around corners of buildings, seeping into every crevice and lashing out as they walked by.
And to think those dogs were out in this stuff.
“Dogs are probably froze solid,” he muttered, then wished he hadn’t spoken, the way his teeth turned into painful lumps of ice.
“What? Speak up,” Jonas shouted. “You’re finally saying a word, and of course I can’t hear it in this wind.”
“The dogs,” he yelled.
“What about them?”
“Frozen, aren’t they?”
“No, not the dogs. They’re built for this. They’re insulated with two layers of fur, so many hairs nothing can get through them. They curl up in the snow, stick their noses in the warmth of their own bodies, and they’re fine. They just need plenty of good dog food. Protein. Fish.”
The apartment was disgusting, cold as a block of ice, with no furniture to speak of. Oba shivered in the cold smelly room, kicked at a tin can, and sent a paper bag flying in its wake. He eyed the cast iron radiator, green paint peeling from the filthy coils, the grease surrounding the apartment-sized electric stove, mouse droppings, and dead flies on the narrow windowsills. He’d been in some fairly cheap places, but this beat anything he’d ever seen.
“Ain’t much. But it’s here or nothing. I gotta have enough money to outfit you. The bush is not a place you can take risks.”
“We can’t live here,” Oba growled.
“You wanna sleep with the dogs, go right ahead.”
THEY DID LIVE there. They hoisted a couple of mattresses up the narrow stairway, borrowed blankets and pillows from George’s ex-wife who was half Indian and who frightened Oba with her snapping black eyes. She reminded Oba of the ravens that flew over the cotton fields in Arkansas, their beady eyes swiveling from left to right as their rough-throated cries tore across the sky.
With a card table and two broken chairs, a set of chipped dishes, a few pots and pans, and towels and soap thrown into the box, they took up life above the livery. They’d swept, wiped off the grease, cleaned off the chipped windowsills, and settled in. The old radiators groaned and pinged their way to life, after which Oba felt the faintest warmth coming from the iron. After a while there was a gurgling, thumping sound, more pinging, and more heat.
Oba stood with his back to the sound, his toes as if in a cruel torture device that was clamped to all of them, his teeth chattering, his knees shaking with the misery of being so cold he thought he would never warm up.
But they had a place to sleep, some food in boxes, a table of sorts, and for all of it, he felt a fuzzy relief. It wasn’t that he was turning soft and thankful—it was just good to be away from the dogs and George. He knew Jonas had business to attend to, which would leave him in solitude, a luxury he craved.
He trusted no one. This Dawson Creek place was crawling with shifty-eyed, slouching individuals who appeared to be half frozen all the time. Even the little children playing in the snow wore big parkas with fur-lined hoods, the heavy bristles around their faces as if they grew there. Oba thought you’d have to be crazy to choose to live in a place like this. He realized that might mean that he himself was crazy. But did he really have any other choice?
Jonas seemed to know everyone—business owners, shopkeepers, pedestrians—and he thrived on the affable greetings of old friends. He was always introduced as “Oba, my buddy,” which did nothing to endear him to the many curious onlookers who were faced with a hot, dark glare of mistrust and anger.
With all the old man’s talk about money running low, it seemed as if he unearthed a cache of it somewhere in this frozen land. He bought things almost every day. First came a gun for Oba, a long sleek oiled rifle with a gleaming wooden stock. He bought knives and clothing, boots and lace-up leather shoes with heavy soles. But for a coat, nothing would do except a parka made by George’s ex-wife, which required a visit to her house on the outskirts of town.
It was twelve degrees below zero and windy when they began their walk. Jonas strolled along as if it was the middle of summer, but Oba was bent at the middle, his head lowered, shoulders hunched. He hated the endless squeaking of frozen snow, bit down on his teeth to be able to bear it. He would never get used to this frozen, inhospitable world, where everyone went about their lives as if the unrelenting cold was perfectly fine and dandy.
“Look at that!” Jonas stopped, held an arm out like some explorer, seeing a rare sight for the first time. “Just take a look, buddy.”
