Amish Country Read online

towards a small scattered group of young men in the outfield, each waiting his turn to catch. It reminded Jacob of the young Amish boys of a few days before, all dressed in some variant of a nearly uniform attire—straight-legged black pants held by suspenders going straight down the fronts and crossing in back of their white shirts—boys playing an impromptu, somehow reassuring, game of ball in the field across the road from where the infamous single room schoolhouse had once stood—a site now restored to greening pasture in an effort to cleanse it of the connection to slaughter. How any man—a man with young girls himself, none the less—could do such a thing, Jacob could still not comprehend. But it was not his duty to understand, only to have faith that all things worked together for good, for those who trusted in God. Of that horrible occurrence Jacob decided, looking away, there could be no adequate earthly explanation. And because he lacked the understanding to know why omnipotent God could allow such evil to prevail, he made a conscious decision to put the event from his mind, and not remember any more.

  His thoughts settled instead on happier thoughts, on his daughter’s first romantic infatuation. He remembered the young man his daughter met that first year of the farmer’s market nearly ten years before. Perhaps, Jacob mused, they had even sat briefly, covertly, with each other at this same table. In any case it became clear over the course of the following summer they’d become very friendly.

  Though early on he’d stopped briefly to admire his cabinetry, Jacob couldn’t distinctly remember meeting the young man for the first time; his daughter, meanwhile, protested indifference towards both the young man himself and his offerings. “Oh Papa,” she’d told him, when he suggested they go together and have a look at his furniture, “I haven’t any interest in woodwork.” And yet, he smiled to think, she and the young man did come to interest each other, very much. And so occasionally, as if by accident, they also somehow managed to meet up between booths, if only to exchange a few lines of cursory, preparatory banter. Fancy meeting you at this place, or perhaps, as an excuse to meet later, I’ll trade a Shaker pegboard for a half bushel of near day old bread. Jacob imagined their initial interactions being comprised of just so much nonsense. But since he departed with his fishing pole soon after arriving to spend each market day on the river, he knew nothing of the details of these initial events and little, either, of later proceedings—until his wife mentioned one evening after they returned home that Leah might soon entertain a gentleman caller.

  With further elaboration his understanding evolved. And on the last day of the year for the market, his daughter informed the young man, handing him printed directions, where he might, if he so desired, some time in the future, purchase one of her pies, “straight from the kitchen.” He had to finally admit, though he frowned upon such direct boldness, Jacob saw no reason beyond mild pique at his daughter to forbid such a visit. Actually, in his private moments, he thought the young man might even make her a good husband and be a useful son-in-law to his wife and himself. Yet above all, he wished only for his girl to be happy—even if, in the event, it meant her taking on his English ways. But all Jacob’s weighty thinking on the matter, as well his daughter’s pensive waiting, amounted to nothing, for in the end the gentleman never came to call.

  Two summers later Jacob saw from a distance his betrothed daughter approach the cabinetmaker through the milling crowd at Angelica Heritage Days. He watched her introduce to the fickle and inapt suitor the Amish man she would in another month marry. Later that same day, as father and soon-to-be son-in-law walked together across the rising back field, Joshua confessed bafflement at the forced exchange of greetings.

  “It seemed she wanted to show me,” suggested the future bridegroom, “more than just introduce me.”

  “Joshua, I think you are right. But more, she wanted to show him.”

  Jacob felt an empty sadness inside as he looked again across the park at the ballplayers.

  “I think I shall go look at the river,” he said, quietly determined. Rising off the bench seat, he placed a hand on each side of his hips and leaned back, arching his torso. But then straightening, he took a further moment to refold the newspaper off which he had eaten. Placing it back inside the picnic basket, he offered a benediction of wisdom both learned and lived: “No waste, no want.”

  “First,” Leah told him, having risen too, “you need to drink.” Pulling the top cup from three stacked inverted, she filled it from the metal Igloo at the end of the table.

  As she reached, leaning, across the tablecloth to hand him the full cup, Jacob took notice where the table’s edge and rounding belly of her long blue gingham dress lightly touched.

  “Danke,” he whispered, before more clearly adding, translating his thoughts: “Thank you, good daughter.”

  The van-car sat parked with the sliding side door open, through which he could see his daughter and wife sitting and waiting. Their good friend and driver, Mr. Felder, looked in the rear view mirror alternately listening and talking as Jacob approached. He slid the side door closed and opened the front, climbing up into the co-captain’s chair on the passenger side as Felder turned the key on the steering column, and restarted the engine.

  He offered Jacob a slice from his dinner, telling the women behind them, as he looked again in the rear view mirror, to pass forward the thin box of leftover pizza. But Jacob politely declined, saying, “No, I’ve had ample for now” and the hands holding the box forward withdrew it. When they were once more on the main road, heading home, the sound of the road combined with his sated stomach and the long day of travel caused his eyes to grow heavy until, sometime after he laid his head back, he fell imperceptibly asleep.

  He dreamed he was again a boy in a short sleeved blue shirt and blonde straw hat selling green-striped red apples piled up in white, freshly made half-bushel baskets. He sat at a bench beside a green barn nearly the color of deep water and set on four-foot thick walls of fitted white stone. A man stood before him eyeing and touching the apples until, finally taking one to his mouth, he bit; his teeth cracked the skin, shockingly penetrating the clean white interior. A clear juice stream dribbled from the open corner of the man’s mouth and down his chin as he mused, idly, “Strange names you all have here.”

  “For instance?” the boy said, defensive, almost impudent. The man scared him a little but he would never let on.

  “Oh well, for instance: Bird-in-Hand, Intercourse, Blue Ball…” The man paused; his mouth gaped even more as he winked: “Paradise.”

  “Oh,” Jacob heard himself say as, with a start, he awoke, dimly aware of being called out.

  “I said,” Mr. Felder repeated, “They are calling for snow later.”

  “You don’t say,” Jacob said, feigning interest. He cast a quick glance across the open space above the dividing console; meeting the other man’s near eye he noticed again the large mole, like a bruise of rot, just beneath it. He forced himself to ignore the defect as he smiled before turning away to look out the hazy glass of the side window.

  “That’s how the waitress told it at the Pizza Hut, anyway.”

  Felder then reached forward and turned on the radio, tuning it to a country station, and they listened in silence as the car-van retraced the path Jacob remembered first taking so long ago, following the northward course of the river that wended, sometimes near, sometimes far, through fields and narrow bands of woods to his right. They passed through one small town and another and then eventually turned left, going away from the shady piece of river lawn where his daughter and son-in-law married and afterwards knelt by the river together as the Deacon ladled up water, pouring it into the Bishop’s cupped hands, who in turn let it fall down on the bowed heads of the new husband and wife, a blessing of mutual commitment.

  Jacob remembered the big picnic thereafter and then the long single-file procession of buggies headed back, dwindling in number each time they passed a simple white house with neither aerial or wires attached, decorated if at all with a painted blue door out
front. A hand-lettered sign at the roadside of one such simple abode advertised metal work; another, bent hickory furniture; yet another, Amish Quilts (No Sunday Sales). Jacob leaned back in the cushioned seat and smiled with contentment, imagining the goings-on inside these houses they passed, each one in part a product (he hoped it was not prideful to think) of his own industry. He closed his eyes long enough to envision a scene wherein Clara Lingenfelter sat with quilt in progress draped over her knee, stitching another colored patch, while her husband, Isaac, having rolled another log onto the tarnished and soot-darkened brass andirons keeping the fire, resettled back into a shiny, newly varnished bentwood rocker made by his own hands. When they came upon an Amish carriage where the road curved they had to slow and wait before passing; Jacob watched as the legs of the trotter, paired side to side, alternately swayed loosely inward; watching the buggy’s slow progression from this rearward vantage gave him opportunity to understood a little more of how and why “plain people” such as himself were viewed curiously by the English as “quaint” and “old-fashioned”—their ways foreign and different from the ways of the wider and more modern world.