Paradise Valley (3 page)

An honest shrug. “No.”

The judge waited a beat and prompted, “
Your Honor
. . .”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Well then, let me tell you. They did it in an effort to curtail child labor practices. It seems a great many people have been subsidizing their family income by putting their own children to work as early as eight or nine years old. We had eight-year-old boys losing fingers working on factory assembly lines, ten-year-old girls plucking chickens or sweating over sewing machines twelve hours a day, six days a week. Last year in West Virginia, boys as young as eleven died in the coal mines.”

The judge clasped his hands in front of him and peered for a few seconds at each of the five men.

“Let me ask you one question,” he said, “and I want each of you to answer it individually, yes or no.”

The five Amishmen stood shoulder to shoulder, Caleb Bender in the middle. Caleb looked to his right. Reuben Miller would be first. Reuben’s eyes widened and his face, already ruddy, flushed even redder at the prospect of having to speak out loud in a courtroom.

The judge pointed to Reuben.

“Mr. . . .”

“Miller. Reuben H. Miller.”

“Mr. Miller, I see here you have three children between the ages of six and sixteen.”

Reuben nodded.

“Now, specifically regarding these three children that you are accused of keeping home from school in contravention of the Bing Act – did you work them on your farm during the days when they were supposed to be in school?”

Reuben Miller’s brow furrowed in confusion, staring at the judge, and he hesitated. Caleb was afraid he might have to explain the question to his friend, whose English was worse than his own, until Reuben Miller finally found his nerve and stammered out an answer.

“Well, yes I did, but – ”

The judge threw up a hand instantly, palm out, cutting him off.

“No
buts
, Mr. Miller. A simple yes or no is all I want. Just the truth.”

Caleb sensed a trap. In his experience the truth very often lay not in the yes or the no, but in the
why
behind it.

The judge moved on to the next man, who also stated that, yes, his children were indeed expected to work on the farm on the days they were not in school. Caleb answered the same. They all did.

“So,” the judge said, with an air of smug finality, “now that all the cards are on the table it seems that you have violated not only the letter of the law but the spirit of it, as well. If you men need farmhands, I would suggest that from now on you
hire
them.”

Caleb Bender looked up sharply, his jaw set, a dangerous amount of white showing in his eyes.

The judge glanced at him and apparently noticed the look on his face.

“Mr. Bender, I get the distinct impression there’s something you’d like to say.”

“There is more to it,” Caleb said.

“There’s more? Well then, by all means, enlighten us!”

Caleb Bender was not an eloquent man, but he was as he chose to be – a simple man who saw eloquence as a delicate flower, shriveling in the sunlight of plain truth.

He glanced sideways, waved his hat toward the men standing with him and said, “We are here because we are fathers and we want to teach our children what is best. Who is better to decide what to teach a child than his father? The Bible tells us we are to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, so this is what we try to do. We teach them to love Gott and neighbor, to work hard, to care for the land, to provide for their family, to cooperate with their neighbors and to help widows and orphans. A little schooling is gut, but your consolidated school is full of the world. If we leave our children so much time in the school of the world, they learn other ways. They learn . . .” Caleb leaned his head toward Jonas Weaver, who stood at his right, and whispered, “
Konkurrenz
. . .”

“Competition,” Jonas muttered.

“They learn competition,” Caleb continued. “Not working together, but
against
one another. They learn to be selfish. So then it seems to me we are bringing them up in the nurture of the world. We fear for our children. We fear for their minds and hearts because we don’t know what they will be taught in your schools.”

Caleb Bender’s eyes had grown sharp and fierce, his breathing heavy. His jaw worked as if he were chewing small seeds.

“So much time in your school,” he finished, in a voice hard as iron, “makes them greedy and lazy, and fills their heads with foolishness.”

The judge removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes with a thumb and forefinger, then sat staring into space for a moment, his chin resting on his fist. Finally, he put his glasses back on and spoke to Caleb Bender and his brethren.

“Gentlemen,” he said, with a curious mixture of anger and regret in his voice, “I suspect we are at a cultural impasse, and that is a pity. The thing is, there will be others who will no doubt wish to do as you are doing, and what we decide here today will have a bearing on how those cases are treated. So I will explain the law and its consequences to you as best I can and then let
you
decide how you wish to respond.

“Unless they are sick, the
law
says – not me, not the sheriff, but the
law
, voted upon and approved by the good citizens of Ohio – stipulates that
for the good of the children
, they must attend school and study the prescribed subjects. This law – and it is a
law
, Mr. Bender, with concomitant penalties for noncompliance – applies to every citizen of the state, regardless of religious affiliation.”

The judge paused for a moment to let this sink in, and then asked, “You
are
a citizen of this state, are you not?”

Caleb couldn’t help noticing the twinkle in the judge’s eye as he drove home the question like a nail. Judge Etheridge’s delivery made it clear he considered this the very linchpin of civilization.

Caleb hesitated. His head, bald but for the ring of graying hair dutifully cut in a straight line below his ears, tilted down. His troubled gaze studied his own plain clothes, the coarse white shirt, the broad suspenders, the black wide-brimmed hat hanging in his work-worn hands, the scuffed black work boots on his feet. A chasm of history yawned wide between his brethren and the officials of the state – a history of persecution wrought by worldly governors terrified of the Amish because they did not understand them, because they mistook simplicity for anarchy and so felt threatened by the least threatening people on earth. The judge had unwittingly asked the one question that did in fact pierce straight to the heart of the matter, and yet, like Pilate’s ironic question, it was one whose answer the judge would never understand. In the end, life had taught Caleb Bender it was not his responsibility to be understood, but only to speak the truth. The eyes Caleb raised to the judge were clear and calm, inscrutable. His wispy gray-tinged beard kept time with his words.

“Your Honor, I am not a citizen of this
world
.”

The judge sighed heavily.

“Then you leave me no choice.” His voice contained only sadness and resignation now, the anger all but gone. “I’m going to find all of you guilty as charged and sentence you to sixty days in the county jail unless and until you each pay a fine of twenty dollars per child, plus expenses,
and
submit a signed statement agreeing to comply with the conditions of the Bing Act by seeing to it that your minor children attend public school five days a week, henceforth.”

His proposal drew nothing but blank stares from the five men.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Caleb nodded once. “We understand you want us to sign a paper promising to send our children to school every day.” The rest, in Caleb’s opinion, was trivial.

The judge peered warily over his glasses.

“And will you agree to do this?”

Caleb did not hesitate, nor did he need to confer with his brethren. There was nothing to discuss.

“No, Your Honor. We will not.”

“
Sixty days
,” the judge pronounced, and banged his gavel. “Gentlemen, I’m very disappointed. You should think more of your children’s futures. Rest assured, you have not heard the last of this. Bailiff, remove the prisoners.”

They were allowed to stop on the way out and speak, only for a moment, with their wives. There were a few tears, but mostly what Caleb saw in the eyes of his wife, and the others, was pride.

Chapter 3

Three days had passed since the trial. Fifty-two days remained until Rachel’s father could come home. There was a little more work to do with Dat in jail, but not so much that the family couldn’t split it up and make light of it. It was a small price to pay. Rachel was up well before daylight doing chores – feeding the livestock, helping Emma with the milking, forking down fresh hay through the hay hole in the mow while her brother Aaron cleaned out the stalls.

After breakfast she rode with Aaron on the wagon when he went to spread the manure on the winter-brown stubble of the cornfield. Some steel part had broken in the spreader and they would have to do the job by hand until they could get a part made by the smith.

Working alongside her twenty-one-year-old brother, Rachel was always vaguely aware of standing in the shadow of his departed twin. They had been like a team of matched horses, Aaron and Amos, working shoulder to shoulder right up until the Spanish flu felled Amos three winters back, and left Aaron to grieve.

They were identical. The family had been able to tell the twins apart most of the time, but others found it easier to identify Amos by his harmonica. No one knew where he’d gotten it, but Amos loved to play the harmonica when he and Aaron were out working in the fields or riding someplace in the wagon, and Aaron loved to hear it. Their particular Old Order sect maintained a strict ban on musical instruments, but Amos never played his harmonica anywhere near the house, and if Caleb ever knew about it, he chose to look the other way. Right or wrong, Aaron loved it. Only Rachel and Emma knew that Amos went to his grave with his harmonica in his pocket. They were the only ones who saw Aaron put it there, and they would never tell.

Even now, after three years, Aaron would occasionally pause for a second, his head would come up and his eyes would scan the horizon as if he’d heard some distant music, but then he would close his mouth without speaking and darkness would cover him for a while. They had laughed constantly, Amos and Aaron, always playing pranks. If they weren’t playing a joke on one of their sisters, they were doing it to each other.

When Amos was alive.

Aaron didn’t laugh much anymore, and he always seemed to be looking for something, as if part of himself had gone missing. He could have easily handled his chores alone, but Rachel had gotten in the habit of keeping him company when she could see the loneliness on him. Anyway, it wouldn’t have made sense for her to be inside helping wash dishes and scrub floors while her father was in jail. Aaron and Harvey had the men’s work to do all by themselves now, and there were six sisters still living in the house.

Rachel and Aaron were in the north field, slinging straw and manure as far as their shovels would throw it, from opposite sides of the wagon. The horses, a pair of old Belgians long accustomed to this work, plodded straight down the row at a snail’s pace exactly as they had been trained to do. Rachel could hear the rhythmic scrape of Aaron’s shovel, and she matched it. It was more difficult for her because she was smaller and weaker, but her dat had always said hard work only makes you bigger and stronger. She tried to match him toss for toss.

But then he stopped. The sound of Aaron’s shoveling ceased, and in the next few seconds she heard the soft whistle meant for the horses’ ears. The two big Belgians halted in their tracks, heads down. When Rachel turned to see what was the matter, Aaron was leaning on his shovel gazing across the fields to the road, staring at a spot a half mile away, down by the cow pond.

“What is it?” Rachel asked, glad for the small breather but too proud to admit it.

Aaron pointed, and then she saw him – an Amish boy, running. He was charging up the slight grade toward the Bender house, one hand pressing his hat to his head, running as if his hair were on fire.

“That’s Jake,” she said, and her pulse quickened. She thought again of that day in the barn when their fathers had been arrested, when Jake had held her in his arms and comforted her. Like a man. The look in his eyes, his genuine heartfelt concern for her, brought the butterflies to her middle even now, and made her face flush. Since then, except for her dat in jail, she had thought of little else.

“Jah, I think mebbe it’s Jake, all right,” Aaron said, “but he should be home doing chores at this hour. Especially now, with his father away.”

“Look how
hard
he’s going!” Rachel said. “He must be bringing news.”

Aaron nodded slowly. “That must be it. Something has happened. You go and find out. I’ll finish here.”

Rachel hit the ground flying, hitching her skirts up so she could run flat-out.

She arrived at the back door at almost the same moment Jake arrived at the front. Her mother and sisters brought him into the living room, where he stood gasping by the wood stove, bent double. He was still trying to catch his breath when Rachel came running in from the back. She was winded too, and she stopped in the kitchen doorway with her hands on her hips, her chest heaving, waiting to hear what Jake had to say.