A Prayer for the Night (7 page)

When both men were seated again, the bishop said, “We’ll hold the services for John Schlabaugh as soon as we can. The Schlabaughs are on hard times, as you know, from their daughter’s medical bills, so they’re going to need help with the food for the day.” When he had handed each Amish man a slip of paper with figures written out for their family’s contributions, he finished by asking Niell, “Will we be able to have the body soon, Sergeant?”

“I can’t say, Mr. Raber,” Niell said. “The coroner will make that decision.”

Willis Stutzman and Albert O. bent to each other’s ears and whispered in dialect.

The bishop said, “We shouldn’t be rude.” To Niell he explained, “The men were commenting that the coroner is a woman.”

Niell nodded, and said enthusiastically, “She is. She’s Sheriff Robertson’s wife. And she’s the best coroner in any county around here. The body will be released just as soon as she says it’s OK.”

“Then we may have to go forward with the memorial services without a body,” the bishop replied. “We need to do this so that the Schlabaughs can come to grips with John’s death. To give them some closure. A period to grieve.”

Niell nodded and pursed his lips. “I’ll find out what I can and let you know. What’s the best way to reach you?”

Bishop Irvin Raber cast an amused glance at each of the three Amish men. He said, “Each of these men has a cell phone. I suppose it’d do to call one of them, if they’ll be forthcoming enough to give you their numbers.”

While Ricky Niell wrote down phone numbers for the cell phones, Bishop Raber drew Cal aside on the lawn in front of the porch and offered to drive the pastor back into town in his buggy. Understanding the meaning of the bishop’s offer, Cal accepted and suggested that Niell go back to town ahead of him.

As Ricky was getting behind the wheel of his cruiser out on the lane, Cal ducked down and whispered urgently, “Ricky, you didn’t get the whole truth back there. It’s typical Amish caution, wanting to avoid entanglement with the law. But, Sara Yoder didn’t just get in a car with two English men the way Miriam said. That’s not what the boy told her. The boy told her that the two English men pulled Sara out of that Firebird and forced her into their car. A big white SUV.”

“She’s been kidnapped?” Ricky said incredulously.

“That’s the phone call I made while you were talking to Miriam. To tell Robertson that she has been abducted.”

Ricky shook his head, angry at the backwardness that had caused the bishop to withhold crucial information. “When are they ever going to trust us, Cal?”

“I’m gonna work on that right now,” Cal said. “Try to coax Raber into a better posture toward law enforcement. But I can’t predict how he’ll respond. I know these people out here. They’re not at all big on government authority.”

Ricky tapped the steering wheel with both of this thumbs. “How long’s it been, Cal? An hour and a half since you saw her?”

“About that.”

Ricky shook his head again.

Cal said, “It’s slow with the Amish, Ricky.”

“Do they all understand, you think, that she was abducted?”

“I’m sure they do.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“They don’t easily trust English, and they don’t trust law enforcement at all, Ricky. They have long memories of their martyr history in Europe before their ancestors came to America.”

“I’m still going to knock on some doors out here, Cal. See what I can learn.”

“OK, Ricky. I’ll have Raber drop me off at the jailhouse when we get back to town. But, take it slow with these people. You’ve got two strikes against you just by wearing your uniform.”

Friday, July 23
11:30 A.M.

 

 

SLOWLY, Troyer and Raber paced down the gravel lane to its intersection with County Road 68, near the little iron bridge where the creek crossed the valley. There the bishop had his house and a small furniture shop. His buggy was a simple open hack, and it took little more than a minute to harness a chestnut Standardbred to the rig. Riding high on the buckboard, the two men headed back toward Salem Cemetery on Mechanic Township Lane T-110, the bishop letting the horse set an ambling pace.

As they rode, Bishop Raber and Cal talked about the twenty-three families in the bishop’s small church, many of whom Cal knew well. The mothers and fathers and grandparents. Courtships, children, troubles with health, genetic concerns, and infractions of a slight and a sometimes serious nature. Raber told how the church had been supporting one family whose father had lost an arm in a sawmill accident. How the man was expected to find suitable work once he had mended. How the older boys would have to take up the slack until that happened.

He told of the precocious young girl with the withered leg who probably never would be able to marry, not so much because of her physical infirmity, but because of her fatalistic outlook on life. He spoke of the prevalence of certain hereditary traits in the small community. There were three dwarfs in the church. There were also exotic genetic disorders that researchers from Ohio State University wanted his permission to study. And Raber spoke poignantly of the heartache several families were enduring, a heartache made infinitely worse by the day’s events, as their children stretched their Rumschpringes to lengths that were not believed to be reversible.

He came eventually to the subject of John Schlabaugh, not because of John’s open rebellion, but, surprisingly, because of the abundant crops John was able to bring in for the farmers in the church, using the tractor he had bought after selling his land.

Cal asked about that, and Raber explained. Young Schlabaugh had inherited a patch of arable land in the prosperous Doughty Valley, to the south of the high ground at Saltillo. He kept the barn and a single-wide trailer on two acres and sold the rest of the land for a handsome price. And that, Raber explained, was the problem. The very root of it, as far as he was concerned. A young man with nothing to do and too much money on his hands.

Cal listened and gradually came to appreciate the true nature of the dilemma the bishop faced. Before today, John Schlabaugh’s fate could have swung one way or another, and it would have signified nothing more than the good or bad standing in the church of a single boy. They had lost others to the world before, and knew that heartache well. They had learned how to go on. But if Raber, as bishop, were ever to have ruled against Schlabaugh’s tractor, the men of the whole church would have lost the advantage at harvest that the tractor, hired out to each family in rotation, had provided. That would have put a stop to the extra cash crops the men were able to plant each year. And without the money from those crops, the families who needed cash in emergency rooms could not be helped. The doctor bills for a girl with a withered leg could not be paid. The families would not have the ready cash the bishop would need for the farmer whose barn burned down after a lightning strike. Or for funerals. The social fabric of his district would start to unravel at the economic seams. To rule against the tractor had never been practical.

Still, young Schlabaugh had proved himself a ne’er-do-well, and the allure of his rebellious fife had piped too many children into rebellion. All this Cal surmised, and more.

At a pause, Cal asked, “Maybe the tractor could be sold to a cooperative English family?”

Bishop Raber tightened the reins and brought the buggy to a halt at the intersection of T-110 and County 19, just west of Becks Mills. Here was the center of the long Doughty Valley, where the barns were, for the most part, tall and new. Bright red in the summer sun. Fields planted luxuriantly in all directions. A lazy, sandy stream cutting a meandering channel through the fields. A lone hawk, circling in the blue overhead. Cars as rare here as buggies were in town.

Beside the bishop’s buggy, a white board fence framed a pasture where three Belgian draft horses nibbled the grass, tails swishing. A lad on a flatbed wagon, pulled by a Halflinger, turned into the lane with sacks of dogfood and grass seed stacked behind him on the rough boards. Two Amish kids rode by on expensive bicycles, new and shiny. Bishop Raber took in the surrounding countryside and said, “My district stops here, Cal, at County 19. John Schlabaugh’s place is up the way, left a quarter mile, on the left side of the road. At least that’s where he’s been living since he left home.

“The Schlabaughs are good people. There are six boys and four girls so far, and every one of them toes the line. Everyone except John.”

With that, the bishop fell silent and started the horse again. Taking 19 west, he came to the intersection where County 58 dumped out into the Doughty Valley, west of Panther Hollow. The bishop stopped the buggy again, on the flat bridge over Mullet Run. He looked up at the blue sky overhead, and then let his eyes drift down to the stream coursing under the bridge.

Cal asked, “Who will get John’s property, now that he’s gone?”

Raber answered, “Who would expect an eighteen-year-old boy to have written out a will?”

“Would his father try to keep the tractor?”

Raber shook his head and said, “I have decided to rule out tractors. Whatever the hardship, we have got to go back to the land. To tend the land as our fathers did. No, tractors are out. When harvest comes, we’ll help each other bring in what crops we can, and then the English can take the rest for a price. Next year, we’ll plant only what we need.”

“John Schlabaugh blazed quite a trail through your district, Irvin.”

Raber nodded sternly. His fingers tightened on the reins. With ire, he said, “I’ve still got kids at risk. As if it weren’t already bad enough, nobody has seen young Abe Yoder for over a week.”

“Irvin, I’d like to talk to the other kids in Schlabaugh’s gang. And we’ve got to find Sara.”

“Some of the younger Yoder boys saw her drive off with two English.”

“That’s not quite right, Irvin, and I suspect you know it. What I heard the boys tell Miriam was that those men forced her car off the road and pushed her into the back of a white SUV. I phoned the sheriff immediately, and they’ll have been looking for her all this time.”

Raber shot Cal an alarmed look. Troyer held the bishop’s gaze sternly.

Raber said, “You’re right, Cal. I got pretty much the same story earlier.”

Gently, Cal said, “Irvin, you’ve got to start trusting the law. You can’t fix this on your own. It’s too complicated.”

Raber took the whip that was clipped to the side of the buckboard and tapped out a faster pace for his horse. “I didn’t know what to do, Cal.”

“It’s a mistake to think that the law is always against you, Irvin.”

“We are descended from those who were persecuted in the old countries, Cal. In our time, we will be persecuted, too, even in America. All our martyr hymns teach us to distrust secular authority.”

“Sara has been abducted, Irvin,” Cal said forcefully. “Sheriff Robertson is her best chance for a rescue.”

Irvin groaned, “It’s not that simple. We are devoted to self-sufficiency. To our separated lives. Letting the sheriff into our world cuts against the grain.”

“You’ve got to start trusting people, Irvin,” Cal said softly. “You need the help.”

Raber implored, “How, Cal? Tell me how.”

“For one thing,” Cal said, “you could round up those kids. Under the circumstances, I doubt any of them would balk. You could tell them all to talk with the sheriff. Tell him everything they know that could help find Sara. Then you could get the Schlabaugh family, or one of those kids, to let the sheriff into John Schlabaugh’s trailer back there.”

“How’d it get to be this bad, Cal?

“Maybe your families have let the Rumschpringe go too far.”

“Then that’d be my fault,” the bishop said. “I hold the ultimate authority. You know that, Cal. But the kids have to be free to test the English world. Otherwise, they won’t know for sure that they want to be Amish for the rest of their lives. They won’t come to their faith through an honest repentance.”

“Maybe they don’t all need to see the world before they know they want to live Amish.”

“It’s not like we kick them out of a buggy in front of a town bar, Cal.”

“I know. And I’m not saying you do. But now, you’ve got to accept some help. Trust the sheriff, Irvin. Start by helping us find Sara and Abe Yoder. We’ve wasted too much time as it is.”

Friday, July 23
12:25 P.M.

 

 

RICKY NIELL was on foot, going from house to house in Saltillo, up on the high ridge. He had talked with almost a dozen people so far. Wives and grandfathers. Older children tending to their chores. A young woman cutting grass with a gas mower. An older fellow sitting on a porch bench. Everywhere, the story had been the same. Yes, John Schlabaugh was rebellious. No, they didn’t know anything about Sara Yoder, or where she might be found. Kids on the Rumschpringe, you see, were pretty much left alone.

At the edge of town, he found a six-year-old boy in Dutch attire, perched on a white board fence. He sat silently, merely nodding his head as Ricky walked up. Tired from walking the hills, Ricky leaned back next to the lad to rest, both of them gazing out over the hills to the west.

Several minutes passed silently. Several awkward minutes for Ricky, who was used to at least a greeting. Eventually, Ricky adjusted to the moment. No need to talk. Sociable enough just to rest together on the fence.

The boy plucked a well-chewed straw from his mouth, tossed it into the grass at his feet, and pulled a fresh one from the pocket of his vest. He offered one to Niell, and Niell took it without comment. Together, for five minutes or so, they worried their straws around with their teeth, and occasionally spat out a sliver.

As he handed Niell a second fresh straw, the lad said, “Heaven’s in a box.”

Niell nodded, took the new straw in his teeth, and said, “How do you figure?”