Amish Country Read online

table’s edge and waited.

  Again closing his eyes, he remembered Joules and himself stopping for lunch at a north-side eatery where you could sit at the counter or in a booth and look through the large front windows onto Main Street. Even now that stretch of town still looked predominately like the main street in pictures of old, with its nickel parking meters and wide sidewalks shaded by stately broad maples, where one section of yellow brick paving remained still intact and enduring despite the ubiquitous and ever-encroaching application of asphalt nearly everywhere elsewhere. They had chosen a booth where on a tall stainless steel hanger they hung up their hats—the one stiff black felt, flat at the wide brim and narrow top; the other more compact, wool tweed, formed with a deep crease in the crown—and sat down to order, choosing Texas Hots and Cokes in the presence of a white-dressed waitress who wrote down their request on a little folded-back notepad and then walked away singing along as a jukebox played a tune courtesy of somebody else’s money. Joules showed him as they waited how the different artists and songs could be selected by flipping through stiff metal-framed pages contained in a shiny chrome and glass case fixed to the wall at the enclosed end of the table. Jacob had long since forgotten the song titles he’d read off that day, but what stayed with him, what he could never forget, was the gravelly voice of one Joules called “The Man in Black” whose cruel refrain (I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die…) seemed all the more menacing as time passed.

  For weeks after, he experienced dreams constructed on a recurring theme of being chased through a dark wood. The primal fear of being hunted approximated, he imagined, what men feel engaged in—seemingly trapped in—battle and war. Maybe the sensation of vulnerability in his dreams felt all the worse for his being unarmed, for he took the admonition against killing so seriously that he had little use for a rifle or gun. In waking life he avoided the woods for a very long time, and did not go out in them at night for years after. But he so enjoyed walking the woods after dark that eventually he resumed what had been his former habit; yet now he would not enter at night the most familiar of woods without carrying some manner of armament, though he had no interest, and never would, in coon hunting.

  Jacob knew it meant the first submission to temptation, but his hunger persuaded him anyway to cut the cellophane ring on his yogurt with the sharp edge of a thumbnail. After a pause he removed the lid and stirred the contents, intending, he thought, only to watch the larger white part on top redden as the fruit mixed up into it with each turn of the spoon. At first he watched the transformation with detached interest. He imagined himself a giant and omnipotent being stirring a human-sized and thus correspondingly small pail of paint. But then, intending to take but a single taste, he succumbed to temptation. By the time the women returned he’d half finished.

  He imagined seeing them coming up the path from the small woods as he heard them approach, the older one, his wife, in traditional black and white, attended by their daughter, attired in a less severe evergreen-hued long dress.

  “Ach, that is better,” he heard his wife, Sarah, announce. Coming near for the soap that lay still wrapped in tinfoil at the edge of the bench seat, she paused, remonstrating quietly: “I vish, Jacob, you vould not be in such hurry, once.”

  She turned away unwrapping the soap, shaking her black bonneted head and setting the ties dangling free at the sides of her face gently swaying; Jacob put a hand on his thigh and half turned to watch her, reminded suddenly that the return to “Dutch Country” had rekindled in her the old manner of speaking, a linguistic relapse that caused Jacob to smile. He wished to remark upon this change reinforced by long talks with her sister, but immediately thought better of it. Acknowledging such a thing would like to destroy it, and he rather enjoyed the unselfconscious affectation.

  To her criticism of him not waiting he had nothing to say either except, somewhat obliquely, “If the restroom doors were open we would be eating already.” But neither wife nor daughter gave any indication they heard his retort—as properly they shouldn’t, for their going off to attend to a base physical need merited no acknowledgement. And so they started washing their hands as if he had said nothing.

  For a moment he remained half turned away, watching as Leah carefully removed and put down her bonnet. Wetting the tips of all eight of her fingers, she smoothed back a few wayward blonde strands sprung loose from where, when still a waif-like version of her grown self, she’d styled her fine-spun golden hair either in an up-turned wave or tightly plaited.

  After Jacob gave thanks for them all, they ate silently, indulging a normal inclination to introspection; it seemed held memories of Lancaster County stayed quietly with each one of them, the embers of which continued to glow in their thoughts even as they made their way northward towards home.

  “I like your sister’s rye bread,” Jacob said finally, “almost as good as store bought.” He remembered how Esther had baked extra loaves for them to take back from her kitchen, as a remembrance of their all-too-brief stay in Oriole Township. He wished now, for his wife’s sake, they could have remained longer, even as he fought to put from his mind the disturbing incident that occurred the previous night when a car stopped with a squeal of tires on the quiet street below their cracked window. The disgorged occupants, an angry young man and his woman, profaned the silence with repeated, damning references to God. Jacob shook his head, trying to dislodge the incident from his mind, preferring instead to remember the oriole nest he’d found fallen the next morning, lying like a balled clump of gray web in the back yard beneath the big oak tree. He looked across the gravel parking lot, a glint of mischief mixing with mild remorse in his eyes as both his women responded, as one, with an aggrieved sigh at his teasing.

  “Oh Father,” Leah protested. “You don’t even know what is good!”

  “Yes Father,” Sarah added, in support of her daughter. “But do you remember the days of selling here, in this place? The bread and pies and noodles back then?”

  “Those were days,” Jacob nodded.

  “The vwoman who started the market, her name vwaz Nancy I t’ink?”

  “Yes, Mother, I think so.”

  “She vwaz goot lady.”

  The final pronouncement needed no defense or elaboration; and so they again fell into silence, each remembering individually, according to inclination, that year they participated in the fledgling Farmers’ Market, arriving each Thursday by paid van to set up under a gently-peaked canopy folding tables on which to display their transported baked goods. The women had all long ago discounted their long preparatory hours laboring in the kitchen. Jacob, for his part, recalled with equal fondness an earlier foray into selling breads and pies at the little white-painted covered stand he’d set up initially where the county road intersected the state route just south of Belfast. It still gladdened his heart to think how the English would flock to his site, forming a jostling crowd, calling out eagerly, as friends: “Jacob, I’ll take two loaves of salt rising bread” or “Jacob, your wife makes the best cherry pie.” And sometimes he would smile and call back, not proud, but just to say so and give credit: “That’s my daughter too that makes the pies.”

  One time a man called back in response, “I should tell my son about her; he needs to find a good woman to marry!” and they all laughed, Amish and English, together.

  Then coming in the night soon afterwards somebody burned up the little white stand; so thereafter Jacob concentrated his efforts on just operating the sawmill, and so it came that one Saturday morning, when previously he would have been hawking baked goods, he set out to make another sort of delivery. With horse and lumber-laden wagon he turned up the dirt road from the twin singing bridges (named for the humming tune, like a chorus of angels he told his young daughter it was, rising most audibly on still summer nights as tires from automobile traffic crossed over and strummed their metal grid decks) to the top of Tibbet’s Hill where, four miles farther on, he came to a sight that transformed him. Looking down on the
misty, early lit valley from that height infused him with such a renewed sense of wonder that on the way back he stopped to survey the burned-out location nearing the hill top where a neglected barn and fields stood alone as testament to the former life of an old abandoned farmstead. That very day when he arrived home he announced to Sarah they’d be moving once more.

  And so they had transitioned to the high country, but not before Jacob first relocated his mill and built their new home with the willing help of neighbors, using lumber sawn from trees felled in the back woods. The back woods were just that, a stretch of trees growing back of the last field, woods that continued over hill and valley, unbroken for miles.

  The metal tonk of an aluminum bat hitting a baseball brought Jacob’s thoughts back to the present and he focused on a young man standing in front of home plate in the ballpark across the way. The young man waited with the bat at his side for the ball he hit to be caught before tossing another up over his head. As it fell towards the ground he swung, making contact halfway down; preceding by half a second the same hollow tonk of the bat as before, another ball shot arching up and fell gradually