Driftless (14 page)

“That’s good. Russell can hardly walk, I’m afraid. Can I get you something to eat or drink?”

“No.”

“Well, I’ll leave you two men alone to do your work. It’s been nice meeting you, Mr. Yoder. I suppose Russell explained that the old wood shingles will have to be taken off the roof and new plywood put down. My sister says that’s absolutely essential, and she’s in real estate. And we need roof vents.”

Maxine labored with thick steps up the creaking staircase.

Rusty and Eli did not look at each other and continued discussing the rotted joists.

On the way back to Eli’s house, Rusty was surprised when his passenger asked—without the slightest embarrassment—if there was time to stop at the feed mill for a bag of ground corn, a roll of
fencing, and a pair of sheep shears. The sheep shears had apparently been left by another Amish living on the other side of the county and waited to be picked up. Yes, there was time, Rusty said,
my time.

When they arrived at Eli’s little house, the frowning older woman appeared again in the doorway—still barefoot and still clutching her broom—and three little children bolted past her, rushing into the yard in wild anticipation. Ignoring Rusty as if he did not exist, they seemed delighted with the arrival of the items from the feed mill. Only the little boy shot him a quick, fearful glance. Eli lifted the chicken feed and wire out of the back and placed them in the children’s eager arms, and they staggered off happily toward the rickety outbuildings. Rusty did not get out of the cab.

On the way home, he stopped at the lumberyard to order the needed materials.

“I hear you’re hiring Amish,” said the lumberyard owner.

“Who told you that?”

“July Montgomery was in here a while ago and said you were going to hire Eli Yoder.”

“Something wrong with that?”

“Not a thing.”

“Make sure these materials are delivered before Thursday,” said Rusty. “And put a tarp over them when you drop them off. I don’t want them rained on.”

PERPETUAL PERISHING

G
RAHM SHOTWELL WAS RUNNING LATE. WHEN THE LOADING-DOCK worker threw the last sack of ground feed onto his pickup and the box sank another coil spring groan lower, three o’clock had become a pillar of the past. His children, Seth and Grace, were out of school, pressing papers and books against their jacketed bodies, looking for him. He was seven miles from home and ten miles from the school. “Put this on account,” he told the mill hand.

“Can’t do that,” said the young man, climbing back onto the loading dock and taking off his dusty hat in a gesture of apology. “Talk to them in the office. I don’t make the rules.”

Grahm hurried around to the front of the building and into the office. The owner and the owner’s cousin, Mildred, sat behind a long counter layered with papers. Both looked up, Justin from the telephone cradled beneath his jaw and Mildred from an adding machine with a scroll of white tape arching up and onto the floor like a paper fountain. “I guess I need to talk about my bill,” said Grahm.

Mildred lowered her head to signal that talking about bills did not fall under her department. Still, her eyes darted up from time to time from beneath her reading glasses. Justin rustled among the papers before him and in a darting movement seized a small pink sheet as though it was attempting to escape. “You’re getting a little behind, Grahm,” he said, pointing at the bottom line on the paper. “You haven’t made a payment in a couple months.”

“I’ve always paid.”

“I guess you have, Grahm, but I don’t remember you ever being this far behind.”

The two men looked at each other. Grahm broke the silence: “I haven’t got the checkbook with me. I’ll stop in tomorrow morning and settle up half. Pay it all after corn’s in.”

“See you in the morning,” said Justin, lowering his head and resuming his telephone conversation. Mildred punched a number into the adding machine and the paper fountain jumped a notch.

Grahm glanced at the clock on the wall as he went out.

Inside the pickup he was confronted by the edge of his checkbook sticking out from the sun visor. He didn’t remember putting it up there, pulled it out, and turned toward the office. Then he stopped, consulted his watch, took off his hat, adjusted the sizing band, and climbed back into the pickup.

On the highway, Grahm pushed the accelerator to the floor. The pickup gained speed, noisily, until the speedometer hovered between fifteen and twenty miles per hour above the posted limit, a full thirty miles per hour faster than he usually drove with a load of feed.

He considered the likelihood that driving this fast was reckless. The ton of additional weight seriously lengthened the distance he needed to stop. If anyone pulled in front of him, turning quickly to either side would be impossible without rolling over. But he was late, and if nothing bad happened it would mean something good.

Late
had recently become a habitual companion in a more general condition of dread. He felt unable to remain completely sane. He drove himself so hard it seemed he was being driven by outside forces. His inner life felt like a theatrical production in which the major players did not even bother to show up and the minor players attempted to continue without them. Everything he touched stole from his center, until nothing remained except an exhausted emptiness, a perpetual perishing. The nightmare that waits for young people to grow old before visiting them with visions of permanent inadequacy visited Grahm on an hourly basis. He had contracted the penultimate social disease—falling behind—and had joined the infamous ranks of people predetermined to fail.

Grahm remembered several reprobates from his childhood, men who could not keep body and soul together and for whom disorder and distress seemed a way of life, and he shuddered to think he could now be seen standing among them. Tim Pikes, for instance, had lost his farm outside Words. “A poor manager, but a good drinker,” the neighbors had said before Pikes moved his threadbare family to
somewhere else, leaving a broken-down farm and two acres of trash. Septic with failure, the old Pikes place had remained for sale a long time before July Montgomery finally bought it after the bank had auctioned off most of the land. Everyone else feared owning it.

As a small child Grahm had attended the Pikes’s auction with his father, and he remembered walking through the farmyard where the things to be sold were sprawled out in ragged, rusting rows. It seemed like a battlefield after the dead had been removed. All that remained were the last things the soldiers had touched before they died—weapons and helmets that failed to protect them. There were tractors, household appliances, tools, furniture, dishes and silverware, farm machinery of all descriptions, miscellaneous boxes of junk, wagons, vehicles, children’s toys, light fixtures, motors, welding equipment, and items too numerous and varied to recall. His father had taken his hand and moved carefully along the rows as if picking his way through a warehouse of leaking chemical drums. They left without bidding, and it seemed to Grahm that his father had been afraid of bringing anything infected with the inefficiency disease home with them.

Grahm continued at full speed. In his farmyard, he bailed out of the still-moving truck, ran into the house, shed clothes through three rooms, and climbed into the shower. Five minutes later, he was in the station wagon, back on the road.

Just before the school, Grahm slowed down to keep the tires from squealing around the corner. He saw his children at the edge of the deserted schoolyard, Seth standing on the curb and Grace sitting in the grass, both wearing masks of fatigue over worried eyes. His love for them swelled up in his throat. They were so vulnerable, their future so unformed, their purchase on life so uncertain that it seemed they could easily cease to exist—evaporate like mist—without fundamentally disrupting the laws of nature. They were too fragile, too good, to be living in such a corrupt world.

At the same time he understood the resiliency of children, a survive-at-any-cost capacity that had allowed the human species to slosh through eons of muck, drought, starvation, plague, and war. Children and beasts had more in common than anyone usually cared
to acknowledge, and it was only during the first few years of life that they required enormous amounts of nurturing. After that, they were able to ascertain and secure the elemental necessities, endure unspeakable hardships, and face the cruelest realties. In fact, if parents abandoned their offspring as soon as they could adequately balance on their feet, the human race would not cease to exist; in overwhelming numbers, survivors would plod inexorably into the future. Gone, however, would be anything resembling civilization—so it was not species survival that engendered the nagging worries about his children, but the preservation of a world worth surviving in. The compulsion to protect children from physical and psychological damage provided the cornerstone upon which all civilization had been built, one guilt-ridden decision at a time.

Seth and Grace clambered into the car beside their father, their expressions somewhat improved due to the novelty of sitting in the front seat. (Their usual driver—their mother—always relegated them to the back seat, where according to official safety reports they were more likely to survive an accident.)

“Guess what!” said Grahm.

They couldn’t guess what. They were entirely unfamiliar with their father picking them up at school and felt speculation to be pointless.

“It’s your mother’s birthday! We’ve got to get over there before she leaves for home. We’ll surprise her and go out for dinner. Won’t that be fun?”

Seth and Grace regarded him silently, knowing about their mother’s birthday but confused about why he intended to play a part in it. Grahm looked back at them and knew himself to be far out of character, no longer the deaf, dark shape that lumbered through the house without speaking. He wanted to plead for understanding: this was how desperate people acted just before things got better.

EPIPHANY

W
INIFRED SMITH GOT UP BEFORE THE SUN—A HABIT FORMED early in life after her mother had found work cleaning motel rooms. She settled onto her prayer mat, lit a candle and placed it on the floor beneath the east-facing bedroom window, arranged her shawl around her thin shoulders, closed her eyes, and centered her mind. In a rhythm created by her heart and lungs she silently repeated: Now I am breathing in God’s good and wholesome spirit; now I am breathing out God’s good and wholesome spirit. When other thoughts intruded, she nudged them aside, shooing them away from her consciousness as if they were downy chicks in the path of bare feet. With equal care she crept past her most obstinate enemy—the possibility that lifeless subatomic particles moving in monotonous paths of least resistance explained everything—arriving safely in the space of mystical freedom beyond.

Satisfied with her progress so far, Winnie prayed for individuals, holding their names and images before her, hoping Grace and Light would enter their lives. If they suffered from a known infirmity or some other circumstance that needed correcting, she held these problems before her mind. By doing this she did not hope to actually heal or improve another life per se; neither did she presume to direct the attention of an absent-minded Being. She prayed in order to participate in the Activity of God, much like a daughter who dutifully cans vegetables—not because she likes vegetables or contributes significantly to the canning process, but because she wants her mother’s company. She then prayed that her father be forgiven for his vast cruelty, deserting Winnie’s mother when she became sick and forcing Winnie into foster homes. In considering him, which sometimes attracted so many hateful emotions that they ended her
devotions altogether, she thankfully experienced a bit more ease and softness of heart.

Finished with her prayers for others, she then prayed for herself. She repeated
Jesus Christ, Son of God, have Mercy on me
until these words also dissolved, without residue, into her breathing, and entered a state of consciousness that both dreamed and did not dream.

After she had been sitting for about forty- five minutes, distant stars began to disappear beyond the bedroom window, obliterated by light growing beneath the horizon. Morning was arriving. She then prayed that someday, somehow, if it was God’s Will, she might have children, or at least have one child of her own. As soon as the plea escaped—as soon as she thought it—she tried to take it back, but of course she couldn’t. Her selfishness had, once again, shown itself. Her greedy nature wanted things that maybe she was not meant to have, maybe she didn’t deserve. She blew out the candle and went down the narrow staircase.

While she was making tea and toast in the narrow parsonage kitchen, she recalled her dreams from the night before. In one, she had woken up in her earliest home, where she lived before her parents divorced. The house seemed much bigger than she remembered, with many large, interconnected rooms so elaborately furnished that it took her a long time to find her way out. One room led to another, and another, each filled with a Byzantine, hysterical splendor.

When she finally stepped out the back door, she encountered an enormous, cloudless blue sky. The blue was of such intense, absorbing interest that for a long time she could not look away from it. Unlike the hysterical splendor of the rooms—which upon study revealed even more inextricable patterns—this blue only persisted in itself, growing more and more deeply one color. Then she noticed that from horizon to horizon, about two feet above the ground, flew winged creatures, birds of all descriptions—hawks, robins, eagles, hummingbirds, finches, doves, and owls. And though they were of different kinds, they were all pure white and flew silently in one direction, their wings beating in a slow, noiseless rhythm. They converged
into a single point on the edge of the horizon, plunging into a hole in the rim of the sun.