Читать книгу Blood of the Prodigal - P. L. Gaus - Страница 20

9

Saturday, June 20

11:45 A.M.

“FANCY pants!” Enos Coblentz shouted over the scream of the ripping blade. Branden stood well back from the saw and cupped his hand to his ear to signal that he hadn’t heard.

“Jonah Miller got fancy pants,” Enos shouted again, watching Branden’s face for signs of comprehension.

Branden shook his head and then Coblentz held up all the fingers of each hand, pointed to the clock, and shouted, “Ten minutes!”

Branden nodded and walked outside where lumber was stacked, sorted by size and variety—maple, walnut, oak, hickory, and cherry. There was the pleasant aroma of freshly cut wood and a mound of sawdust outside. After several minutes, his ears began to recover from the intolerable noise inside.

The sawmill consisted of two rough pole buildings of corrugated aluminum and a shed for horses in winter. There was a summer corral of whitewashed boards in the back and a picnic table on a patch of grass under some trees. Two customers’ buggies stood hitched in front, one horse nervously pawing at the gravel. Even at a distance, the noise of the saw astonished Branden.

He had begun his rounds with Cal Troyer before dawn in the districts south and east of Millersburg. There had been a slow walk through a plowed field with one of Troyer’s distant cousins, an hour spent as the sun came up, retracing their kinship back to the day when Cal’s grandfather had quit the Amish life. Since then, Cal’s line had lived entirely English.

Then there were gentle questions for the cousin’s neighbor, a brother-in-law. Branden had held back while Cal had probed delicately through a maze of family relationships, clanships, splinter groups, and the inevitable offshoots of several districts. At each step they had learned incrementally more about Eli Miller and his son Jonah. Sometimes they had found a willingness to talk forthrightly about both. More often they had not. Sometimes Cal had exploited the tendency for clannish rivalry between differing bishops. Other times he had sensed that they’d get little more than the bashful nod of a head or a silence that confirmed without comment.

Branden also marveled that most of the folk with whom they had talked had known something of Pastor Caleb Troyer beforehand. They knew him by reputation, and they trusted him.

When he had sensed from a wry smile or a cocked eyebrow that it would be productive, Cal had pushed with his questions into the fringe, seeking details about a man most had managed to forget. In the course of the morning they had spoken with a short man whose neck was puffed on one side by a goiter. There had been an elder Dutchman with a favorite pipe, sitting on an overturned barrel behind a hardware store in Kidron. A younger fellow with a denim apron in the tack shop at Charm. Someone had revealed that Jonah Miller had run with several friends—accomplices, he called them—from Sugarcreek. A visiting neighbor had confirmed it with a hesitant nod.

And so Troyer and Branden had made their way through the morning. The wheel shop in Moreland. A harness shop south of Fredericksburg. Troyer’s bakery in Charm. A cheese factory in Sugarcreek. Well-shaded businesses with low ceilings and oil lamps, or white-glowing silk mantles hanging from ceiling fixtures. Off the tourist routes. Too far back in for tour buses. Each time learning better what to ask. What not to ask.

But eventually, sometime toward noon, the two began to notice that the people they approached seemed somehow to have known they were coming. Word had gotten around. The bishops had passed a ruling, and the people had become less forthcoming, more suspicious. But not before Cal had uncovered the name of one man—Enos Coblentz—who would surely know, if anyone did, whether Jonah Miller had come home. Then the pastor had been called to his other duties, and now Branden stood outside the sawmill where Enos Coblentz worked.

In ten minutes, Enos Coblentz strolled out through the large overhead door, slapping sawdust from his apron. He eased off his plastic safety goggles and put on small, round spectacles, hooking them carefully behind each ear. He pulled the ear plugs from both ears. His black hair hung precisely to his earlobes, in straight Dutch style, and his beard was full, unkempt, and laced heavily with sawdust. His face was shaved clean around both his upper and lower lips, forming an oval accent around a delicate mouth.

“Jonah Miller got fancy pants,” Enos said again and brushed sawdust off his arms. “Near as I can remember, it started with pants. Cuffs or something like that. Can’t recall exactly. But he was told. Proper and private. Everybody knew it.”

Branden was dressed in blue jeans, a plain blue tee-shirt, and hiking boots. As usual, the soft waves of his brown hair were slightly tousled, and his brown beard was trimmed close, showing gray at the temples. He opened a can of pop and offered it to Coblentz. Coblentz declined, and Branden said, “Are you sure? I’ve got more in the truck.”

“Thank you,” Enos said, “but I have lunch in the buggy.”

Branden followed Coblentz to a black one-seater parked beside the corral. It was of the classic Ohio style, the sides slanting in at the bottom to meet oval springs. Branden noticed the rubber-padded rims on the wheels and tapped at them, not thinking anything in particular, but aware nonetheless of their significance. Coblentz was not Old Order. At least not conservative Old Order. Surely not from Eli Miller’s district.

Coblentz eyed the professor and then said, almost grinning, “Can you think of a reason why a buggy shouldn’t be comfortable?” Then he lifted a black metal lunch pail from the buggy and ambled to the picnic table under the shade of a willow. A push mower leaned against the trunk of the tree. A quiet stream lapped past the exposed roots of the willow. Branches mingled lazily into the water and gave the small glade a peaceful, easy quietness, the saw having been stopped for lunch.

“I’ve been at it all morning,” Branden said, “and you’re the first person who’s been willing to talk much about Jonah Miller.”

“I’m not surprised,” Coblentz said while unwrapping the wax paper on his first sandwich.

“Can you tell me about the ban?” Branden asked.

“What’s to tell?” Coblentz remarked. “Jonah asked for it.”

“Then can you tell me what actually precipitated the ban?” Branden said.

“Pride.”

“How so?”

“Like I said. Jonah took to fancy dress. He was admonished. Everyone knew it.”

“Yes, but what else?” Branden instantly regretted his impatient tone.

Coblentz ate slowly. The tranquillity in his eyes gradually gave way to an expression of rising inner turmoil. “It was a long time ago,” he said eventually. “I can’t recall everything that happened, but the way I see it, the ban actually started most of Jonah’s problems.”

He glanced into the corral and said, “See the bay? How she trembles there, standing? She don’t like people much. Mostly just likes to run. Too spirited for her own good. That’s the way Jonah was.”

Coblentz fell silent again, and Branden waited, standing at ease beside the rough-cut picnic table, watching as Coblentz ran the puzzle of Jonah Miller through his mind. A breeze pushed delicate branches of the willow into Branden’s hair, and he absently brushed the slender leaves aside.

Coblentz laid his sandwich down on the smoothed-out square of wax paper and stared unseeing at the cluster of standardbred horses and a single Morgan in the corral.

“I do not think Jonah was really so bad,” Coblentz said. “First it was only simple matters, but in Miller’s district, any indiscretion was invariably handled decisively. Chastised for small mischief, there. Do you realize, Professor, that I am not Old Order?”