Down from the Mountain (8 page)

December

Ten

The tension in our chapel is electric. The Community Concerns Meeting is about to begin. I’m even more nervous than I was when I thought Esther might turn me in for disobedience. Ezekiel’s mood makes him unpredictable. He’s angry and suspicious all the time. And this new obsession with guns makes me think anything can happen.

Mother Martha takes the seat directly behind me. It’s as close as we dare get to each other. She knows when something’s wrong with me. She always knows. But I’m not about to tell her about Ezekiel’s cruel words to me when we told him about the stranger. I’ve tried to shake it off, really tried. I tell myself he doesn’t want me to get conceited about my jewelry-making skills, and that’s why he put me down. But the contempt I saw in his eyes makes my heart hurt. And I feel so ugly.

Annie takes the seat on the other side of me. She smiles, trying to get me to smile back. I try, but I know she’s confused about why I’m so down. I’ve been too ashamed to tell her.

It was even harder to face Rachel after that. She heard everything he said, of course.

“Nothing like shooting the messenger,” she’d said after breakfast this morning.

I must have looked puzzled. “Sorry. I forget sometimes and use heathen expressions. It means that you shouldn’t take out bad news on the person who gives you the information.”

“Oh. I get it. But you were the messenger too. Why didn’t he take it out on you?”

Rachel had put her arm on my shoulder. “Because I’m not the one who makes exceptional jewelry.” She lets out a breath. “But I’m sorry he made that disgusted face when he looked at your body.”

Her caring attitude brings tears to my eyes.

“Ezekiel’s coming,” she whispers. “Gotta get a seat.”

Rachel hurries to take a seat because Ezekiel is approaching the altar.

“Let us pray,” he says. We all kneel for the typical prayer. “Lord, make us clean and holy. Let us be like Jesus who, in his righteous anger, overturned the tables of the money sellers and banished them from his temple. Let us weed out any sin among us in this, your new temple. Guide our actions so that we do what it takes to make this a stronger faith community for your sake. Help us to punish the sinners, and help them change or banish them if they fail to change. We do this in your name. Amen.”

It looks like we’re about to get another lecture about our failings. Ezekiel has told us again and again that when an intruder interrupts our lives it’s because we haven’t been strong enough in our faith. He talks about the intruder constantly, even though we haven’t seen or heard anything of him.

Jacob suddenly appears at the chapel door—so late I’m embarrassed for him. The women start chattering, tsking, and rolling their eyes. He plunks down in the first empty seat he can find. The twins giggle. I dare to look at Ezekiel and draw an involuntary breath. He is darkness. This could be really bad.

“Confessions,” Ezekiel calls out, staring dull eyed and hard chinned at Jacob. This first part of our bimonthly meetings gives each of us a chance to come forward with our faults. Confessions are way better than someone turning you in. The punishment is lighter because it shows that you’re trying to perfect yourself. After confessions come the reports. It’s not a perfect process. If someone’s mad at you or jealous, she may look for an infraction to turn you in.

Jacob stands. “I accuse myself of arriving late for this meeting. I apologize to God, to Ezekiel, and to all of you.”

I notice that Jacob’s voice remains deep throughout. I’m not sure that’s good or bad since an adult voice may mean an adult-sized punishment.

“Thank you, Jacob,” everyone says.

Jacob continues to stand. He looks tall and stoic. Too stoic, I think. I wish he looked more penitent.

“How many times have you confessed this infraction, Jacob, hmm?” Ezekiel asks. His voice is calm and the room is completely still, like right before a tornado.

“Many times, sir.”

“And what punishments have you received?”

“Many different punishments, sir.”

“Name them.”

“I have been assigned extra cleaning chores. I’ve had to write prayers over and over. I’ve had to apologize to each individual community member. I’ve lost meals when I was late for them. I’ve sat alone in a dark room for hours contemplating my sin.”

Though Jacob looks like he’s still thinking, Ezekiel breaks in with the inevitable question. “What punishment would finally help you change?”

“I truly don’t know, sir.”

I’m shocked. His tone is far from apologetic. It actually sounds arrogant.
Oh, Jacob, what are you doing?

“Well, think of something, Jacob. Think of something
now
,” Ezekiel thunders.

This seems to anger Jacob. “A paddling, I guess.” He has the audacity to shrug his shoulders and look straight into Ezekiel’s face—challenging him. The community holds one collective breath. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen Jacob do, and I have no idea why he’s doing it. I brace myself for what will come next.

“Come up here,” Ezekiel says.

Jacob tries to hide how scared he is as he walks to the front of the room, but his hand is shaking when he hands Ezekiel the paddle and bends over the front table. Ezekiel seems to whack harder than ever before. I bow my head and pray for Jacob, hoping he can take his punishment in silence. But by the third whack Jacob is crying out, and by the fifth he is screaming in pain. I pray that he can bear all thirteen whacks—one for each year of age.

Someone sobs loudly. I turn to see Jacob’s mother holding a hand over her mouth. My eyes burn from unshed tears.

I have never seen anyone get hit that hard. I’ve never seen Ezekiel use so much power that he was out of breath when it was over. Jacob takes several minutes to raise himself from the table he’s bent over. He struggles to return to his seat.

Finally Ezekiel composes himself enough to continue the meeting. “We have allowed Jacob’s behavior to go on for far too long. Anytime that Jacob is late from now on, he will be paddled right then. We will not wait for a Community Concerns Meeting to administer punishment.” He pauses and takes in a deep breath. “We do this out of love for Jacob.”

But I don’t believe him. For the first time ever, I just flat-out don’t believe him.

The way he looked at Jacob before and during the beating was not as a caring disciplinarian sadly administering a punishment to a child who needs to learn a lesson. The look was sheer hatred.

“Other confessions?” Ezekiel asks.

The room is silent except for the muffled sobs of Jacob in the back row.

“Concerns, then.”

After a pause, Mother MaryAnne stands up. My thoughts return to the kitchen that day when I was talking to Mother Martha and she came in. She hadn’t seemed upset about us talking privately, but maybe she was waiting for this meeting. I wonder if Mother Martha is thinking the same thing.

“Forgive me, Ezekiel, I meant to stand up during confessions.”

He nods. “Go ahead, Mother MaryAnne.”

“I accuse myself of having been wasteful. I misplaced a bag of potatoes and, thinking they were gone, allowed them to rot in the basement.”

“How did that happen?” Ezekiel asks.

“It’s dark downstairs, Reverend, with only one overhead light.” Her lips quiver and her voice sounds like a plea. “I must have placed the bag against the wall where the light doesn’t shine. Then I just forgot them.”

“Who thinks we should give Mother MaryAnne a pass for this transgression? After all, it’s dark in the basement and she didn’t mean it.”

To me his voice sounds sarcastic, but apparently Annie doesn’t catch that, and she raises her hand. Behind me, the twins have also apparently raised their hands, which I learn when Ezekiel addresses them.

My heart sinks. I can see how the twins fell into this trap, but not Annie. Surely she must see that Ezekiel is out for blood today.

“So Daniel and David, why do you two think Mother MaryAnne shouldn’t do penance when she wasted a bag—how big was it, Mother MaryAnne?”

“Ten pounds,” she replies.

“She wasted ten pounds of potatoes!”

Annie’s breath becomes raspy as she realizes her mistake.

“So, Daniel, why shouldn’t she be punished?”

“She cooks good food,” Daniel says, eliciting a brief smile from several people.

“She didn’t mean to,” David says.

“And you, Annie? Now don’t pull that breathing crap on me. Tell me why she shouldn’t be punished.”

“She, she …” Annie gasps. “She made a mistake.”

I squeeze Annie’s hand to show support, but let go immediately. I don’t dare get caught comforting her.

“My family,” Ezekiel continues, “we face a long winter ahead. God is testing us with the meager resources we have. We must account for every ounce of food and waste none. We cannot be allowed to make mistakes. For this offense, Mother MaryAnne, you should go without dinner for ten days, one for each pound of potatoes. But because you confessed before God and your community, I will reduce your dinner penance to five days.”

He turns to Daniel and David. “You must also learn that waste, intentional or not, is a crime against the community that cannot be tolerated. Because of your ages, Daniel and David will only lose dinner tonight. But Annie, who is older and knows better, will lose three dinners.”

We are a sad, somber group. Mother Helen, Jacob’s mother, has been crying since he was paddled. Now the twins are crying and Annie still struggles to breathe.

“Any other community concerns?” Ezekiel asks. If he feels bad at all for the punishments he’s doled out, he certainly doesn’t show it.

I’m thankful when the meeting ends. I’m eager to minister to Annie and to check on Jacob. But Annie wants to be alone with her bruised feelings, and by the time I get back to where Jacob was sitting, he’s gone.

Eleven

The steps on the side of the old hayloft are rusty. I hope they will hold me. They’re also slippery because of all the snow. I climb them anyway.

“You’re early!” Jacob hollers from the top. “I have another thirty minutes.”

“I know. I want us to have some time to talk.” I’m focused on climbing the stairs so I don’t see his face, but he makes a disgruntled sound, letting me know he doesn’t like the idea. I’ve wanted to talk to him since he got paddled, but he hasn’t been willing to talk to anybody. I’m not surprised. He’s been silent and withdrawn from everyone since the paddling ten days ago. At the top of a silo, with no one else around, maybe I can find out what’s going on with him.

The smell of wet hay makes me sneeze. I can hear the scratching and occasional squeaks of mice—I pray it’s only mice—inside the hayloft The sound makes me cringe a little.

Jacob reluctantly scooches over to make room for me. At first I don’t look down because the height scares me. But slowly I begin to enjoy how well I can see the whole compound from this perspective. To our left is the original farmhouse where we had to knock down the walls dividing the living room, dining room, and kitchen to make one big dining hall. The house has three additional rooms on the first floor: a laundry with two washers and two dryers, and two small bedrooms that became the craft and sewing rooms when we moved in. Jacob and Paul sleep in a bedroom upstairs. Next to that is the tiny classroom.

To our right is an outhouse that was here before plumbing. Thank God we don’t need to use it to go to the bathroom, though several of us have been isolated inside as punishment. Then there are all the trailers—two women’s trailers, the kids’ trailer, and Ezekiel’s trailer in a half-moon shape next to the long driveway. In the summer you can distinguish the garden from the cornfields, but right now all you can see is white, white, white.

It seems especially quiet because of the heavy snow that continues to fall silently, keeping everyone inside except us. The plume of smoke rising from the chimney of the farmhouse is the only indication of life.

“Have you seen anything suspicious?” I ask.

“Nothing,” Jacob says. “But don’t you worry. If I did see something out of the ordinary, I have this to protect us.” He holds up a whistle and rolls his eyes.

I burst out laughing. “Wooh! I wouldn’t want to fight you when you’re armed like that.”

Jacob laughs too, a kind of deep, guttural laugh that I’m not used to from him. “Brother Paul has the only gun, and he’s using it out back somewhere to give lessons.”

“I hear you’re a pretty good shot,” I say.

Jacob glows. “Yup, Brother Paul was impressed. When Ezekiel gets back from his trip, Brother Paul wants him to see firsthand what a good shot I am. But I doubt there’s some kind of dangerous intruder.”

“Shhhh. You’re in enough trouble. And you know how dangerous it is to disagree with Ezekiel.” I can’t imagine why he’s doing it.

I change the subject. “I’m glad to see you’re walking better,” I say to him. “You’re practically your old self.”

He nods, looks straight ahead, and casually chews on a piece of straw. “You’re gonna freeze up here.”

I notice then how raw red his nose and cheeks are. He’s wearing paper-thin gloves with a hole in the left one. His cap barely covers the tips of his earlobes. “You can go a little early,” I say.

He throws a clump of hay in my face. “Don’t baby me. I can take it.”

I take a clump and stick it down his back before he figures out what I’m doing. I laugh as he wriggles around trying to get the itchy stuff off his skin. “I wouldn’t baby you. You’re practically grown.” I fall back onto a bale so that he can’t shove hay down my back. We’re both giggling like old times.

“Sit up and take it like a woman,” he says. He’s holding a huge wad of hay. I don’t sit up. I dart from side to side to avoid his revenge. Finally he mushes the hay in my face. It goes up my nostrils, fills my mouth, even jabs my eyes. I gasp and choke trying to get it all out. Hay is stuck in my throat. I can’t cough it out, and I can’t swallow it.

“I’m sorry,” he says. He hits my back, and some hay comes flying out of my mouth. He gently wipes it out of my eyes. He tries to pull some out of my hair but I push him away. I’m so angry that I could hurl him to the ground, but the twenty-foot drop would injure him or worse. Instead I punch his arm a few times until he grabs mine to stop me.

He reaches for his thermos. “Here, it’s not hot anymore but it will help,” he says.

I guzzle the cold tea. “Why did you do that?”

He shrugs his shoulders and looks away.

“I don’t understand, Jacob. You’ve been so bitter since you got paddled—no—since before you got paddled, and let’s face it, you practically dared Ezekiel to do it. It broke my heart to see you get hit like that.”

“I know.”

“Jacob …”

Suddenly he pushes me back into the hay and plasters a hard kiss on my lips.

“Stop,” I say. He’s hurting my mouth and squeezing me so I can’t breathe. “Stop!” But now his kiss turns gentle. His lips barely graze my forehead. He kisses the tip of my nose, each cheek, my hands. “Stop,” I say again. But my voice has no fight in it and I’m confused by the new feelings rising inside me.

He pulls me up into a sitting position. I watch his face turn from soft to hard again. “That’s what’s going on,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. I want him to say more, to put words to his feelings. Instead he changes the subject.

“Remember Matthew?” Jacob asks. He breathes into his hands to warm them.

“Of course I do—it hasn’t been that long since your brother left.” I’m struggling to sort out what just happened and what it all means, and he brings up Matthew who has been gone since just after we moved here.

“Do you remember how Ezekiel acted when he said he was leaving?”

I nod. We were all grieving. No one wanted to see Matthew lose his soul by leaving, but Ezekiel did nothing to stop him. He actually seemed happy when Matthew was gone.

“Eva, he was my age when he left. Do you remember how he used to follow Rachel around?”

“I guess. Rachel was brand-new, and I don’t think she was married to Ezekiel yet. So why …?”

“That’s not the point. Ezekiel wanted Matthew to leave because Matthew had feelings for Rachel. Ezekiel wanted her for himself. I think he hates me because I’m getting older. I think he knew what I was feeling for you before I did. As soon as my voice began to change, he started yelling at me for every little thing. And all of a sudden it was like he hated me. Don’t you see? He wants all the women for himself.”

My head is spinning. “God determined what wives Ezekiel has. Why would he need to be jealous? Or don’t you believe that?” There’s a strange ringing in my ears, and it’s like somebody stole all the air.

“Calm down, Eva! I’m not saying that at all. Yes. Ezekiel communes with God but he’s also human and capable of mistakes.”

It sounds like heresy to me. Yet something about it sounds right. I think about how mean Ezekiel was to me when Rachel and I told him about the stranger. I think about how he’s gathering guns for everyone because one person inquired about Righteous Path, and it doesn’t seem so preposterous.

“Look, what I want more than anything is for Ezekiel to care about me. It’s okay by me that he’s human.”

I focus on a rabbit hopping through the snow. He stops, sniffs, and continues to hop. Falling snow quickly covers the paw prints, leaving no evidence of the rabbit’s recent visit.

“Oh, Jacob, I’m so sorry how he’s hurt you—not just the paddling but the rejection.”

His eyes meet mine. “Thanks, Eva. Have you ever seen anyone get hit that hard? It wasn’t a paddling. It was a beating. I had welts and open sores. If Mother Miriam hadn’t filled bucket after bucket with hot water and Epsom salts for me to sit and soak, I probably would have had a terrible infection. Vaseline is the only thing that kept my clothes from sticking to me when the sores oozed like that.”

I’m speechless. Because what comes to mind for me to say is what I’ve been taught—that the paddling was for Jacob’s own good, that the pain inflicted on his body was for the sake of his soul. But I can’t say that. Because the beating was not to save Jacob’s soul. Ezekiel beat him because he was threatened by Jacob growing up.

Jacob interrupts my thoughts. “You probably think I deserved it because I was, well, a jerk, I guess.”

“Of course I don’t think you deserved a beating, Jacob. I couldn’t understand why you were so flippant or why you seemed to bait him, but nobody deserves to be hit that hard.”

Jacob lets out a sound. It’s laughter, but bitter, hard laughter that comes from pain. “When I came late to that meeting I knew he’d be furious. I thought that if I gave him something to be angry about, maybe he’d get it out of his system once and for all.”

“How awful, Jacob,” I say. I try not to cry.

We talk through our eyes for a while because neither of us knows what to say.

Finally I break the ice. “Jacob, this is scary. We can’t talk like this. We can’t be alone like this anymore.”

He looks like a wounded puppy. “I know,” he finally says.

I shake my head emphatically. “Ezekiel would kick you out so fast—and probably me too.”

His laugh is harsh. “He wouldn’t kick you out, Eva. He’d marry you.”

I gulp a mouthful of air. The idea of marrying him makes me shiver.

“He’s got so many wives. I thought he was done marrying now. He’s getting so old.”

“I don’t think so.” He looks sad.

“Eva, I keep thinking that I should run. But I’d be lost out there. I have nowhere to go and no one to be with. And then there’s the whole thing about hell. If Ezekiel’s got it right and I run, I’ll go to hell.”

“I think you need to figure out a way to get along with him. It’s the only way.”

Jacob says nothing. So I nudge him. “You have to go now.” I say it softly. “Your shift has been over for a while.”

He pulls himself around to the top stair but pauses before he descends.

“Pray for me,” he says. “I sure need it.”