Читать книгу Blood of the Prodigal - P. L. Gaus - Страница 18

7

Friday, June 19

3:00 P.M.

DONNA Beachey stood awash in memories at a dirty window in Leeper School and watched a horse-drawn wagon roll along slowly in a distant field. She ran a finger along the dusty sill and then absently brushed cobwebs away from a corner of the glass.

She turned to Caroline and said, “I can tell you exactly why they sent you to me. It’s the same reason I asked you to meet me here. The story of Jonah Miller starts here, with me, and they all know it.”

Donna glanced around the single room, seeing a grade-school classroom, filled with happy Amish children of all ages. “This was my first teaching assignment. One of the last groups of children to have been taught in Leeper School.” She wondered, somewhat amused with herself, why she had agreed so impulsively to this meeting.

Her hair was tied neatly in a bun under a white Mennonite prayer cap. She smoothed out the plain apron in front of her pleated aqua dress and walked slowly to the chalkboard at the front of the classroom. There was still an eraser in the tray, and she picked it up out of habit, lost again in memories.

Caroline stood quietly in the middle of the empty room and waited. She had interviewed three teachers today. Two had mentioned Leeper School. The third had also spoken, in hushed tones, of Miss Donna Beachey.

“Funny,” Donna said, “how you forget.” She dropped the eraser back onto the tray and dusted off her hands with a somewhat wilted expression. “That was almost twenty years ago.”

“Why did you want to meet here?” Caroline asked, glad at last to be talking.

“This is where it started.”

“That’s what I’ve been told,” Caroline said, delicately.

Donna Beachey noticed Caroline’s restraint, and smiled appreciately. “I’m surprised you don’t have the whole story,” she said. “There used to be better gossips in these parts.”

“I know very little, really, if anything.” Caroline held back, wondering what she’d learn from the one person who evidently knew it all.

Donna Beachey returned to the window with an air of resignation. She was surprised by how much she had forgotten. Being here again, and using her old keys to open the schoolhouse door, had brought it all back. She had cherished the feel of the curved sandstone as she had climbed the worn steps outside. The familiar noises the hinges had made as the front doors swung open. The aroma of chalk dust and the creaking wooden floor. She stood at the window for a long time, with her memories upwelling.

Caroline let the minutes pass quietly. In time, the teacher motioned for Caroline to join her at the window.

“It’s pushing twenty years since they closed this little school, but the view here hasn’t changed in the slightest.”

Caroline stood behind her and looked out over the top of Miss Beachey’s head covering. Rows of hay, recently turned, lay in the fields beyond. A few shocks of corn stood along a fence where they had been stacked last fall. A flatbed wagon with large black rubber truck tires eased along silently in the distance, drawn by two Belgian draft horses. The driver sat lazily on the plain wooden buckboard, dressed in a summer hat, white shirt, black suspenders, and denim trousers. He held a whip, tassels high overhead, but seldom employed it.

“I was a rookie teacher then, Mrs. Branden. They usually had their own. It would be one of the young mothers from a nearby farm, or an unmarried daughter with time on her hands. In earlier days, the teachers might not have had much more education than their oldest pupils. I think it’s better now, and sometimes there will be one with an actual teacher’s degree. But for a spell, it was the Mennonite colleges that sent most of the teachers here, like me.

“Now as far as Jonah goes, by the time I started, he was in the fifth grade, and already reading at a high school level.” She turned to look at Caroline, wondered briefly if she would understand, and then turned back to the window with a sigh. “The Amish choose a lifestyle that seems backward, but that doesn’t mean they choose to be stupid. It just means that they have different rules.

“Take that wagon,” she said. “See the rubber tires?”

Caroline nodded.

“See how they’re inflated?”

“Umhmh.”

“In some districts, that’d be disallowed. Some bishops might approve rubber tires, but not inflated rubber tires. Just rubber pads on the rims. Others rule out rubber altogether. They use iron or wooden rims only. An inquisitive child wouldn’t understand why. But, when they take the vows, all Amish acknowledge that they have accepted the rules. That was the hard part for Jonah Miller. Accepting the rules.

“You see it in the kids. Especially the younger ones. Like in the fifth grade. They want to know ‘why.’ Fair enough, wouldn’t you say? They just want to know ‘why.’

“Most of them eventually accept such answers as they get, and the rules, too. They finish school, have their year or so for the Rumschpringe and then come home and take the vows. Some are ready earlier. They don’t need a year. Don’t have any doubts. No questions. No Rumschpringe.

“But once in a while you’ll see one who needs to know more. Wants to know why. Really wants to understand why rubber tires are not to be inflated.

“That was Jonah’s problem. He needed to know ‘why.’ Even by the fifth grade. I tried to give him something special in school, because he was so intelligent. At first, he responded well, but eventually, I lost him.”

Donna paused and looked at Caroline again. She walked over to the desk in front of the chalkboard and stood facing out into the classroom, obviously struggling with regrets. Caroline leaned against the windowsill and gave her time. Calmly, at last, Donna Beachey began to tell what she knew of Jonah Miller.

“Jonah was a rebel,” Donna said, “at a time in my teaching career when I was too young to appreciate what that would mean in Bishop Miller’s district.”

She pointed into the back of the room and remembered the little desks. “When Jonah took his seat, he’d scoot the desk two or three inches to the left. Always to the left. Just enough to be out of line with the other children.”

“You think that was important?” Caroline asked.

“Yes, because he always watched me, to see if I had noticed.”

“Some rebel,” Caroline said.

“Don’t underestimate that,” Donna said. “He also began rolling his pants into a tight, high cuff. As a fashion statement. He always did it after he was on school property. Before he left, he’d roll the cuffs out again.”

“It doesn’t seem like a very big thing,” Caroline said.

“Ah, but he was Old Order Amish, Mrs. Branden,” Donna reminded her. “Soon after that, his father—”

“Bishop Miller?”

“Yes. Bishop Miller came to me after school and asked if it were true that Jonah was ‘hitching his britches up’ in school.”

“And?”

“Jonah never did it again,” Donna said. “The tragedy is, Jonah had intellect. He knew. Or suspected, anyway. You know—that the world holds marvels. It tormented him.”

“He quit school like the rest do?” Caroline asked pointedly.

“He had no choice. That’s the way of the Amish. His grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins, and neighbors all quit school earlier. If the state did not now require them all to attend, most would quit sooner.”

“It doesn’t sound to me as if they get much of a chance,” Caroline said.

“That’s just their view of life,” Miss Beachey explained. “There are two Amish proverbs. First: ‘The Peasant Believes Only the Father.’ Second: ‘je gelehrter, desto verkehrter.’”

Caroline waited for a translation.

“The more learned, the more confused.”

“You said that was your first year teaching,” Caroline remarked, “almost as if you have learned better in the years since then.”

“I have,” Donna said and laughed almost inaudibly.

After a pause, Donna meekly said, “I had forgotten some of these things, Mrs. Branden. Our memories are carefully selected, it seems, but well preserved.”

She looked disconsolately around the empty classroom and out through the open front door. Her hand slipped beneath her apron, and she drew a plain white handkerchief from a pocket in the side of her dress. She pulled herself up straight, and held the handkerchief briefly to her eyes.

“Jonah was different. I could tell it as early as his fifth grade, even if I was only a novice. And not just because he was my first bright student.

“He never could have lived truly Amish. I believe that, absolutely. Like with the cuffs.

“And I saw it in his schoolwork. He was a scholar. And a dreamer. He asked about the stars, about ships at sea, Indians, everything. Sometimes I’d find him on the steps of the school when I arrived in the morning. Always so full of questions.

“And I encouraged his studies, not realizing, then, what that would do to him.”

She stopped and straightened the front of her apron, only a little bit self-conscious, now. She looked at Caroline and wondered anew what it was that had caused her to speak so freely. Perhaps it was being in Leeper School again. Funny that she had kept the keys. It was even stranger, she thought now, to have asked Caroline Branden to meet her here.

“With Jonah,” Donna said, “well, I thought I was making a difference. But now I realize that I only accentuated traits that his father considered to be flaws. I encouraged attitudes in Jonah that ended up driving him from his family.

“At the end of his fifth grade, I gave Jonah a book of American poems. You know—Whitman, Sandburg, that sort of thing. And two novels, Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohicans. Then I transferred to Massillon, to be closer to my congregation, and soon after that they closed this little schoolhouse. Jonah went on to another parochial school.

“Years later, on the day after Jonah’s sixteenth birthday, Bishop Miller drove his buggy into Massillon and waited for school to close. After the children had left for home, he walked into my classroom and laid those very same volumes on my desk.

“Then he said: ‘You’ll remember, I’m sure, Jonah Miller. You gave him these books when he was in the fifth grade. Jonah is beyond his school years, now, Miss Beachey. I intend no disrespect, but Wir sind Bauern. Verstehen Sie Bauern? Do you understand? We are Bauern, peasants. We have chosen this life freely. It is our hope that Jonah will choose it too. As peasants, we have a saying: ‘The barn is not to sit in, and books are not helpful in plowing.’”

“He brought back the books that you had given Jonah?”

“More than that,” Donna said. “He wanted me to know that he intended to put a stop to Jonah’s ‘overly inquisitive nature.’”

AFTER Miss Beachey had left, Caroline sat on the steps of the one-room schoolhouse and tried to imagine an Amish bishop making the forty-mile drive into Massillon simply to return three used books. In the end, she decided that she could not imagine the scene at all. As she left, Caroline came down the worn sandstone steps slowly, thinking about the schoolhouse. Thinking about a fifth-grade boy whose life as a rebel had started in the tiny, one-room Leeper School.

She walked around to the playground at the side of the schoolhouse and stood under a tall silver maple. There was an old rusty swing set with patches of mud underneath, and she walked absently over to it. There were small footprints in the fresh mud. Children still came here to play.

She sat on the swing and, side-stepping the mud, gave a gentle push with her toes. She closed her eyes and felt the slight, passing breeze on her face. She remembered her own cherished playgrounds and the long-forgotten, joyful sounds of children at play. The faces of childhood friends, the pleasant aroma of newly sharpened pencils, and the soft texture of wide-lined paper under her fingertips.

She opened her eyes and swung peacefully for a while gazing at the small schoolhouse, red brick walls patched in earlier days with white concrete. Lately, it hadn’t been patched at all. The square belfry needed white paint. One of the gutters had swung loose and now hung from the roof at an angle.

A small figure wearing suspenders appeared around the corner of the schoolhouse, and Caroline waved. The child retreated bashfully behind the building, and Caroline thought again of Jonah Miller in the fifth grade. Of Donna Beachey and the things she had said.

There was more to what she had said than the mere words she had spoken. For one thing, she had said that she remembered a single student from her first year of teaching. Evidently, she remembered Jonah Miller well. She had also plainly said that she had unwittingly given young Jonah Miller something that would eventually drive him from home.

But Caroline also found herself thinking about the things that Donna Beachey had not said. Had she forgotten them, or simply avoided them? Probably the latter. At any rate, others this morning had seemed to have little trouble remembering. They had whispered it all to her eagerly. They had remembered and so, surely, did Donna.

For one thing, Donna Beachey hadn’t mentioned that Jonah Miller had fallen openly in love with his fifth-grade teacher and that the boyish crush had not ended when she left the district. She hadn’t mentioned that he had ridden to see her several times the next year at her new school in the city. Or that ever since the fifth grade Jonah had taken to questioning his father about all matters Amish and not Amish. That his year of the Rumschpringe had come when he had finally quit school, and that Jonah Miller’s year of decision had exploded into a decade of rebellion.

Finally and most significantly, Donna Beachey had not mentioned that she alone had visited him in jail.