Paradise Valley (5 page)

Only then did they recognize Mose Hershberger.

His little sister began to cry. Even the boys recoiled in horror, but none of them said a word. Rachel didn’t know what to say to this. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined that such a thing could happen to Amish children in America.

She didn’t even notice the two men standing in the doorway until one of them spoke.

“Who’s next?” the man said. They were big men, and they wore no coats or ties, their sleeves rolled up as if for work. They looked very strong.

The girls cowered. The younger ones were all crying now. The boys shrank back against the wall, the whites of their eyes showing.

“Well then,” the man said, “if nobody wants to volunteer, we’ll just pick one. You!”

He pointed at Henry and crooked a finger.

“Come with us.”

Poor shy Henry shook his head and looked almost as if he might start crying himself. When he didn’t rise from his seat, the two men came and took him by the arms, lifting him, half dragging him into the other room. The last Rachel saw of him, he was looking back over his shoulder at his brother as if there were something he could do.

And then the door closed.

Mose would not look up. His shorn head hung low, his eyes on the floor in front of him, his hands limp in his lap, utterly humiliated. What thoughts must have been going through his head! He had taken the empty seat next to Rachel, and she turned to him now to try to console him.

“It’s all right, Mose,” she said in Dutch. “There was nothing you could do. It’s not your fault. You did nothing wrong.”

He gave his head the slightest shake, a deep and genuine grief lining his young face. He would not speak, and she knew it. There were no words.

Then she looked down the row and saw Jake’s face. His jaw was set. There was fire in his eyes. His younger brother sat next to him, huddled against the wall and leaning to one side, trying to hide behind Jake. It was all too clear to Rachel what was on Jake’s mind. He would not worry about himself. Jake could endure anything, but his younger brother had always been his to watch over and it was a responsibility he did not take lightly. Jake would think only of his brother, of the humiliation that awaited him. He was searching for a way out.

Rachel followed Jake’s gaze. At first she thought he was staring at the nurse behind the desk, but then she realized he was looking at the window – and the woods beyond. An ordinary window, with an ordinary latch, on the first floor. Beyond the window, the edge of the woods lay no more than a hundred yards distant. Jake and his brother could both run like the wind. If they got a three-step head start, there was not a man in this place who would be able to catch them.

But the nurse was in the way. If Jake made a move toward the window, she would call out and the men from the other room would be on him in an instant.

The nurse raised her head and smiled compassionately at Mose. “You know, you really shouldn’t be upset, dear.” Clown red lips cracked her powdered face in a disquieting smile. “I think you look quite handsome in your new clothes. Very nice indeed.”

There was no hint of insincerity in her voice. She meant it. She had no idea what she was saying.

Jake had moved to the edge of his seat. His left hand was behind him, squeezing his little brother’s knee, making sure he was paying attention. Rachel saw the desperation in his eyes. Any second now he would bolt for the window, his only thought to get William out of this place – but he hadn’t thought it through. He would never make it.

Rachel thought, for the hundredth time, of that moment in her own living room when Jake had stood between her and the sheriff.
“Take me instead,”
he’d said.

Jake coiled himself on the edge of his chair, planting the balls of his feet squarely under him. She had to do something, and quickly.

Rachel pressed a hand on her younger sister’s knee and mouthed the word
Stay!

Then she stood up.

When the nurse looked up, Rachel smiled demurely and crept closer to the desk.

“I’m very sorry to bother you,” she said meekly, “but I have to go.”

“Go? Oh no, dear, I’m afraid you can’t go. You have to stay here and wait your turn like – ”

“No, I mean I have to
go
. You know . . .” Rachel pointed discreetly to the window and her voice dropped to an embarrassed whisper. “To the outhouse.”

The nurse chuckled. “Oh, you poor child, we have no outhouse here. This building has indoor plumbing. The facility is just down the hall to the left. I’ll unlock the door and let you go if you promise to come right back, okay?”

Rachel’s face twisted in girlish confusion. “Indoor plumbing? But I wouldn’t know what to . . . I’ve never even
seen
one of those. I don’t know how it works.”

It was a small lie – two of them actually – but she could repent of it later. Rachel had
seen
an indoor toilet, though she’d never used one, and she
did
know how it worked. Nevertheless, the nurse took pity on her, which was precisely the reaction she had hoped for. Rising from behind the desk, the nurse pulled a ring of keys from a drawer.

“Oh, all right,” she said, laughing. “Come on, I’ll show you. It’ll only take a second.”

She unlocked the door and followed Rachel out, locking the door behind them before hurrying down the hall. After showing Rachel the toilet she even pulled the chain and flushed it once to demonstrate how it worked before she scurried back to her post.

The scream reached the bathroom, even with the door closed, and Rachel smiled.

When she got back to the waiting room the only people in it were the nurse and the superintendent. Cold air poured in from the wide-open window, and in the fields beyond she could see a bedlam of grown men chasing Amish kids through the tall grass in every direction.

“I don’t know
how
it could have happened,” the nurse was saying. “I was only gone for a
minute
!”

The superintendent stood with his back to her, glaring out the window with his arms crossed on his chest. Even from behind she could see his jaw working. Rachel tiptoed into the room and took a seat, folding her hands innocently in her lap. She had promised to come straight back, and she had kept her word.

Ten minutes later her friends and sisters had been recaptured and returned to their seats in the waiting room to await their humiliation – all except for two.

Jake and William Weaver were still missing.

Chapter 4

The Holmes County jailer never had to feed his Amish inmates. He wouldn’t have been able to feed them even if he had tried, for the five Amish fathers refused to accept anything from the hand of their jailers. Every morning just after daylight a buggy would pull up to the hitching rail, and one of their wives or daughters would bring a basket of food sufficient for all five men for the entire day. She would visit for as long as the jailer allowed, and then take her basket and return home. On Saturdays they received a double portion, for no wife wanted to dishonor the Sabbath with so much work, nor would they willingly miss
gma
if the biweekly services happened to be held that day.

Early on a Saturday morning Caleb’s wife arrived at the jail lugging her large basket, her steps leaden, her face lined with grief and fatigue. There were dark circles under her eyes from lack of sleep and she was constantly fighting that rattling cough. It was unusual for her to come. Usually she sent Emma with the meals. Something was wrong.

“Mamm, are you all right?” Caleb asked her as the jailer unlocked the cell. She nodded weakly, handing him the cloth-covered basket and fussing with the handkerchief in her hands, unable to look him in the eye.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he said. “You don’t need to be out in this weather. What is it? What has happened, Mamm?”

“They have taken the children,” she wheezed.

Caleb nearly dropped the basket as his eyes widened and he gasped audibly.

“
Who
took them?”

“The sheriff.”

“Which children? Tell me.”

She named them, one by one, ending with her own. “They took them away to the children’s home,” she said, “and they cut the boys’ hair.”

“No!” The four other men, two in the cell with Caleb and two in the adjacent cell, all clung to the bars as the jailer closed the cell door in front of Martha Bender.

“They cut the boys’ hair?” Reuben Miller cried out. “My boys, too?”

Martha nodded, barely able to look up. “And they took away their clothes. They dressed them in fancy clothes yet, all of them.” Then she remembered, and caught the eye of Jonas Weaver. “But not your boys, Jonas. Jake and William got away.”

She eyed the jailer suspiciously, and Caleb read her thoughts. Even though she was speaking Dutch and was fairly certain he couldn’t understand a word, she would say no more regarding the whereabouts of the two Weaver boys. Nor did she need to. Jonas knew her well, and he would know from her tone of voice that she had spoken to his boys. They were safe, either at home or at a nearby Amish farm.

“What will we do now?” John Hershberger asked quietly from the other cell, his knuckles white on the bars.

“I think we all know what we must do now,” Caleb said. They were out of options, and he knew when he was beaten.

“Mamm, listen to me. On Monday morning you must go to the courthouse and ask to speak to the judge.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t do that!” she said, shaking her head in horror. “What would I say to him? He wouldn’t talk to me anyway.”

Caleb nodded gravely. “Jah, he will speak to you. This man knows one of us will come to him. Who do you think ordered our children to be taken away? Tell him we will do what he asks. He knows we have no choice now.”

Eli Stoltzfus laid a hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “We cannot do this,” he said, his voice thick with anger. “It is against the
ordnung
.”

Caleb’s burning eyes leveled on Eli, and he thought for a moment of saying to him, It is mighty easy for you to talk about the ordnung when your daughter is safe in Lancaster. But he held his tongue. Such words would only cause strife now, and they could not afford to be divided.

“We have no choice,” he repeated, as calmly as he could manage. “Before, we chose to be in jail rather than have our children go to the consolidated school. Now we have a different choice. We must choose whether to let our children be in the worldly school five days a week, or to let them be raised in the children’s home
all the time
. We must choose the lesser of the two evils.”

“The lesser of two evils,” Eli said, “is still an evil.”

It seemed cruel and punitive beyond measure, but when Martha Bender finally met with the judge, he gave orders for the five men to appear in court again on a day nearly two weeks off, and in the meantime the children would remain in the children’s home.

The minutes and days were as an eternity for the men in the jail, but the day finally came. They stood once again in court, this time with their heads hanging in abject defeat. The judge levied fines against them all, and they were made to say out loud in front of the court that they would agree to send their children to school and allow them to study the prescribed subjects. And then, right there in the courtroom in front of their wives, they signed a paper agreeing to do this. They had no choice. They were utterly defeated.

The next day, on a Saturday in late January, the children came home. Caleb was standing on his front porch watching, and he saw the automobile chugging up the road from a long way off. He called out to Mamm, and by the time the automobile stopped in the driveway of the Bender house, the entire family had gathered on the front lawn to welcome the girls home.

Rachel got out first, from the passenger side of the car, with her copper hair hanging down her back in long braids. She was wearing shiny black leather shoes with brass buckles, and a green gingham dress that came up almost to her knees. Her younger sisters followed her like ducklings, hiding in her shadow, clearly ashamed of the way they were dressed. The three of them walked around the car with their heads down, unable to look anyone in the eye, angling across the yard toward the steps, heading directly for the house with the obvious intention of bypassing their family while they were in such a state.