Paradise Valley (30 page)

“Dat, I need to talk to you about school.” This would be as good a time as any. He was tired, and she had just done him a great service.

“School?” He settled back onto his bench, directly across the table from his daughter.

“Jah, for the kinder. I would like to start a school.”

He pondered this for a minute, rubbing the back of his neck. His eyebrows went up. “Well, little Sammy and Paul are old enough to learn their letters, and Leah and Barbara could use help with Spanish. I don’t see why you couldn’t teach them if you want to.”

Miriam hesitated, not sure how to lay out her plan. “I will need some things. I will need to take a little time away from work once or twice a week, and I’ll be needing some space for the school.”

Dat shrugged. “There’s only just the four of them. You could teach them Spanish here at the kitchen table after evening chores.”

“But when the others come there will be more children, and I’m thinking I could teach them not just Spanish but reading and writing and numbers,” she said, watching his face. “I might need more time than that.”

Dat’s head tilted and he stared at her a little too long. She squirmed a little, and he read her like an open book.

“What is it you really want to say, daughter? Just say it.”

He was right; she should just get to the point. Her father always said what he meant in as few words as possible, and he expected the same from his children.

“I want to start a school,” she said, fidgeting with her kapp strings, “but not just for Amish kids. For the Mexicans, too.”

He leaned back a little, and his eyes widened in surprise. Then, as if there was a chance he hadn’t heard her correctly, he squinted and said, “For the
Mexicans
?”

“Jah. They have no school.” It was almost a whisper. She knew this was dangerous ground. The main reason the Amish had fought so hard to keep their children out of the consolidated school in Ohio was that they spent too much time mingling with outsiders, being influenced by them.

He looked away for a minute, his hand first covering his mouth and then wringing his beard.

“They have no school?”

“No, Dat. That’s why most of them can’t read and write their own language.” Sensing an advantage she pressed her point. “I thought maybe since the way they really talk isn’t like in the book, the Mexican children could help the Amish children to speak real Spanish, and we could teach them to read.”

“But are you
sure
there is no school? Schulman is always saying the mestizos are illiterate, but I thought he meant they just wouldn’t go to school, or could not be taught. Why, just today Señor Hidalgo said to me that Spanish landowners like him were the ones who brought culture to this poor country. I thought surely there were schools of
some
kind.”

Over dinner Dat had described Hacienda El Prado to his family – the flowing gardens and manicured walks, the soaring library with its acre of books and gilded ceilings covered with paintings.

“No, Dat. The haciendados keep their fancy libraries to themselves, and they hire tutors for their own children. I’ve heard that some of the Catholic churches have schools, but the one at El Prado does not. There is no school for the poor. Maybe things are different in the cities, I don’t know, but out here in the country the only ones who can read and write are wealthy landowners, Catholic priests, and foreigners like us.”

Her father sat for a long time staring at the edge of the table, thinking. She could hear him breathing. After a while he began to nod slowly. He had reached a decision.

“Then your school is a good thing, Miriam. It is a
very
good thing. What will you need?”

“First, I will need time. I’m thinking one or two days a week. And then, I don’t know how many will come, but we’ll need a place to meet.”

He scratched his bald head. “The barn wouldn’t be too good. It’s too crowded already.”

This was true. Since large timber was scarce on the nearby ridges, they had built the walls of the barn with adobe and put a gambrel roof on it to make a loft, but the adobe walls limited them to a space half the size of a normal Amish barn. And it was harvesttime – the barn would soon be packed with hay and oats.

“I guess you’ll have to have your school in the house,” he finally said, “if there’s not too many people. I hope to get a buggy shed built by spring, but I don’t know if it will have doors on it yet. Or a wood stove.”

“We’ll need paper, too. Lots of paper and pencils, and a place to write.”

“A desk?”

“No. Well, we can make benches and tables from wood scraps, but I was talking about a blackboard. And chalk.” Miriam was bursting with energy and ideas now that her dat was on her side.

“We will have to see about that. I wouldn’t know where to look for something like that in Mexico. Maybe we can get them to bring one from Ohio when they come.”

As he was saying this he yawned, and in the same instant from the next room Miriam heard Aaron’s soft snore. She was keeping her father up past his bedtime.

“It’s very late, Dat,” she said, rising. “I should be getting to bed. Thank you for letting me do this . . . for understanding.”

He didn’t make a move to get up right away. He was leaning on his elbows, his chin in his palm, looking to the side with his fingers covering his mouth. There was a peculiar sadness in his eyes.

“Dat?” she said, pausing, three fingertips resting on the end of the table. “Are you all right?”

He looked up at her then, the sadness clinging. “Yes, child, I’m all right. Just a little ashamed.”

Her head tilted. Shame was not something she associated with the image of her father.

“Ashamed? Why, Dat?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know if I have the words. It’s just . . . I try my best to be honorable, to keep Gott’s laws, live in peace with my neighbors and forgive those who wrong me, but I’m finding out it’s mighty easy to be honorable until a man steals your horse.

“My mouth says ‘I forgive,’ but my heart wants soldiers to come and do away with these bandits. All of them. That’s why I wanted to send this letter; I wanted those men to pay for taking my horse. I don’t want to see harm come to my family, and that’s good, but in my heart I
do
want to see harm come to the bandits. And that’s not right.”

His eyes wandered as he struggled to put words to his thoughts. “All these laws we try to follow, Miriam . . . they are Gott’s laws, and in my heart I believe what they’re for is to keep me humble and remind me not to be selfish. I always thought that if I could do that, why then my one short little life can mebbe push the whole world one inch to the good, in the direction Gott wants it to go. That’s all. One inch. But the change one man makes in the world is so little we wouldn’t even see it, and that’s why we need faith. If a man lives without faith, he pulls the world toward himself – only an inch, mebbe, but he makes it hard for people around him to live in faith because they learn to fear him. They are afraid to be without. If a lot of men live selfish lives for a very long time, they move their world a lot of inches the wrong way, and they end up with a country full of hungry people who steal because they are afraid.”

He waved a hand at the envelope lying on the table. “My answer to this problem is to ask the government for soldiers. Your answer is to teach them to read. It’s only an inch, but which is Gott’s way?”

Lifting the letter from the table he held it in his rough hands for a moment, feeling the thickness of it with his thumbs, and then tore it in half and dropped the pieces on the table.

“Not by power or might, but by the Spirit of the Lord of hosts,” he said. “A father is never prouder of his children than when they make him a little bit ashamed of himself.”

Chapter 32

When the first fall cold snap came to the fields around their thatched huts, the Mexicans began working from daylight to dark, pulling up bushes by the roots and piling them to dry. While the Amish farm slowly turned to shaved ground dotted with orderly rows of oat shocks, the mestizo fields yielded little mounds of uprooted bushes, tangles of leaves turning from green to gold, drying and shriveling in the autumn sun.

One day, when the men had come in from the harvest for lunch and Miriam was helping to clear the table afterward, she asked Domingo about the piles of bushes.

“They are beans,” Domingo said. “After the bushes are all pulled and piled up, you will see families in the fields every day turning the piles over to make sure the beans dry all around. It is a lot of work.”

“I have seen them. They work as if their lives depend on it,” Miriam said as she brought another pitcher of water to the table. Sometimes when the men came in for lunch they were not very hungry, but they were always thirsty.

“Our lives do depend on it,” Domingo explained, emptying his glass and reaching for the pitcher. “In bad years the beans are all we have. Sometimes rabbits are scarce in the winter, or we have no luck finding deer and javelinas. One year the coyotes took all our chickens, and another there was not enough rain for the corn to grow. But no matter what else happens, the family can live as long as we have beans stored up. With a little cornmeal or flour and some dried beans, we survive.”

Caleb held up his last bite of sweet potato and pointed at Domingo with it. “Have
you
got beans?”

“Sí,” Domingo said. “Everybody does. The three of us – me and my cousins – we have a few acres outside of San Rafael that we work together.”

“Well, you’ve been working here every day. When did you harvest your beans?”

Domingo gulped water, wiped his mouth on a sleeve and shrugged. “We haven’t yet, but they are ready. We need to take a few days off.”

Caleb laid his fork down, glowering.

“Why, that’s just not acceptable, Domingo. That’s not the way we do things here.”

Domingo’s eyes met Caleb’s hard glare. “Señor . . . you are a farmer. You know the beans won’t wait – the pods are starting to crack.”

“I know that,” Caleb said flatly. “So tomorrow morning at first light my boys will be at your place with a team and a spring-tooth harrow. They’ll have your few acres of beans out of the ground in a couple hours, then you can all come back here for the rest of the day. The next day we’ll all be there with pitchforks. How long does it take before they’re dry enough?”

“Three, four days if there is no rain.” Domingo and his cousins all sat motionless, staring at Caleb, not sure what to make of this.

“A couple hours every morning – with enough hands, that’s all it’ll take to turn them. Then we can bring in the oats in the afternoon. It’s not that big of a field.” Caleb paused, his brow furrowed. “And after the beans are dry, you separate them by hand?”

“Sí. Put the pile on the cart, take out the beans, then throw the chaff back on the ground and get another pile. It takes a long time.”

“Hmm. Shame we don’t have a thresher for that. We can all help with the shelling, even the women. Many hands make light work.”

Domingo shook his head. Carlos and Paco stared at him in disbelief. “Señor Bender, we have no money to pay for your help.”

Caleb’s eyebrows went up. “I didn’t ask for money. I told you, that’s not the way we do things. When neighbors need help in the fields, we help them.” He pointed at Domingo with his fork. “
That
is how we do things here.”

By late October the kitchen garden was spent, all except for the potatoes. Rachel had never seen so many potatoes, and so big. She’d never dug them up this time of the year either, but obviously the late start had done them no harm. The potatoes clearly loved the soil of Paradise Valley.

She was prying a tangled mess of potatoes and roots out of the ground with a stout fork when she spotted Emma coming up the road in the surrey. Emma saw her from a long way off, smiled and waved, and held up a letter. She’d made the weekly run to the hacienda village and brought back a letter from Jake. With a little twinge of excitement Rachel dropped the fork and trotted down the driveway to meet her. Emma stopped to let her climb up.

“Dat’s right up there behind the house putting hay in the loft,” Rachel said, and Emma understood. She would hold the buggy still long enough for Rachel to read Jake’s letter and put it away before they went up to the house. Rachel had been careful not to let her father find out about the boyfriend she was not supposed to have, and Emma was dependably complicit in the deception.