Separate from the World (2 page)

“Yes, Albert?” she said. “You can see I am busy with breakfast.”

Albert nodded gravely, swallowed his consternation, and said,
“Benny vill net schwertze.”—
Benny won’t talk.

His mother said, “We’re all busy with chores, Albert. Go wash your hands, now, and mind the stove.”

Albert kept his gaze on her for a spell, and then shrugged and moved off to the low sink, skirting the wood stove. He was both perplexed about Benny and unhappy with his mother. She didn’t have to remind him like that. He’d been burned once, when he was a baby, but he wasn’t a baby anymore. He knew about baking biscuits for breakfast. So
die Memme
really didn’t have to warn him about hot stoves. He should tell her that, he thought, but when he turned back to show her his pout face, he lost his grasp on his reasons for complaining.

At the sink, he put all of his little weight into pulling down and pushing up on the black iron pump handle, and he rinsed his hands in the cold well water. There, he thought, drying his hands on his pants. Good enough to pass
die Memme
’s inspection.

Albert turned from the sink and went over to his Aunt Lydia at the long kitchen table. He popped up onto the chair beside her and watched her spoon butter into a bowl of fried potatoes.

When she glanced at him, he said, “
Benny kan net laufe.
”—Benny can’t walk.

Lydia chided, “You know his legs are stiff, Albert,” and got up to pour whole milk from a pail into the dozen glasses set out the night before.

Albert watched her work with the pail, thought about his problem, and decided to tell one of his older brothers. He found Daniel coming into the mudroom with another pail of milk, and he told him,
“Benny kan net tseine.”—
Benny can’t see.

Daniel nodded, swung past him with the pail, and didn’t reply.

So, Albert took his coat and hat off the wall hook and went back outside. He saw a lantern glowing orange in the barn and decided to try to explain his alarm to the
Big Daddy.
Standing outside the milking stall, Albert called out,
“Benny is net u mova, Vater. Her liechusht stille.”
—Benny is not moving, Father. He lies still.

For his troubles, all Albert got was, “Albert, tell your sisters to get out here. This milk’s going to curdle in the pails.”

So, young Albert Erb shrugged his little shoulders, crossed the gravel driveway, and took the sidewalk over to the family’s grocery store. Going in at the back, he felt his way down a dark aisle between tall shelves, bent over beside his uncle Benny, and shook his shoulders. Then he pushed on Benny’s chest, and nothing happened. Albert sighed, got up on his feet, left the store, and walked back to the big house as the sun streaked a faint line of rose over the horizon. There had been that English aroma again, he realized. He wondered what that meant.

When he took his place at the breakfast table, Albert said to his sister Ella, older than he by two years,
“Benny vil net schwetze.”
—Benny won’t talk.

Ella laughed and parroted,
“Benny vil net schwetze. Benny vil net schwetze.”

With an indignant scowl, Albert stood on his chair and stomped his boots on the wooden seat. When his mother turned to reprimand him, he flapped his arms up and down at his sides and shouted,
“Benny kan net hicha!”
—Benny can’t hear!—determined to make his point.

Before his mother could scold him, Albert’s father came into the kitchen with a basket of brown eggs and asked, “Has anyone seen Benny this morning?”

Thus Albert concluded that no one had heard him. Or worse, that no one believed him. He knew he wasn’t allowed to be a chatterbox. Didn’t Uncle Enos call Benny a chatterbox all the time?

Really, Albert wasn’t supposed to talk to grown-ups at all, unless one spoke to him first. Children were meant to be seen, not heard. How many times had they told him that! So this might get him in trouble with the whole family. Maybe I’ll take a ribbing from the other kids for this, Albert worried. Maybe I’ll have to work all day like the grown-ups. Even though I am only four years old. It might be the last thing I’m allowed to say the whole rest of the day. But it didn’t matter. Even in the dark, Albert could tell that there was something dreadfully wrong with his Uncle Benny.

Standing on his chair, with his fists planted on his hip bones, using all the resolve he could muster, little Albert Erb announced, in his very loudest, sternest voice: “
Benny ist im schloffa in die stahe! Al set net das Oatmeal um zie Kopf hawe.”—
Benny’s sleeping in the store! He’s not supposed to have oatmeal on his head like that.

PROFESSOR MICHAEL BRANDEN sat at his battered walnut desk, facing a stack of ungraded blue-book final exam essays, in his office on the second floor of the history building. His mind wandered as he stared at the essays his students had written the night before. His thoughts this morning were not focused on grading, and his concentration hadn’t improved in the two hours since he had walked over to campus. For the first time in his life, he wondered if he could face another year as a professor at Millersburg College.

Branden’s academic career was well into its third decade, and the years he had spent in the classroom were starting to weigh on him. Perhaps he should have taken that university post, after all. Or maybe he should have followed his father into the insurance business. He might have fared better. But now his beard was shot through with gray, and he was weary of grading like never before. He wondered whether the college would still pay him if he just let the grades slide a week or so.

The seniors’ exams were finished—they weren’t the problem. Earlier, he had transmitted grades for graduating seniors to the registrar. Instead, Branden was stalled on the final exams written by the other students, in the lower classes, who didn’t really need their grades for several months. They could wait all summer, if need be. They would all be back in the fall.

Branden pushed back from his desk, turned his chair to face the windows behind it, and gazed across the main academic quadrangle of the college. Commencement would be held Monday, in three days, in the oak grove beneath his office windows, but why should he bother again? Would it be any different this year? Maybe he wouldn’t attend. It wasn’t that he begrudged the students their moment on the stage. Rather, it was that the ceremony was so numbingly predictable.

The president would make interminable announcements and proclamations. The speaker would drone on about youthful opportunity, duty, and promise. The chaplain would rehearse a prayer more erudite than honest, and the students would realize afterward, in stunned dismay, that their college years were over. Branden could remember thinking like this in recent years; he really did not like commencements anymore. Maybe that was why the morning had gone so badly for him. Another class would soon disappear. Already, the high school seniors were forming the new class of freshmen, and soon enough they would disappear, too.

Lawrence Mallory knocked abruptly and pushed through Branden’s office door, saying, “I’m making coffee, Mike.”

Branden shook himself loose from his stupor, turned his chair, flipped his grading pen onto the stack of essays on his desk, and said to his assistant, “Make it strong, Lawrence. It’s got to carry me through forty-five more blue books by suppertime.”

Mallory eyed the blue books and said, “You haven’t finished, Mike?”

“Seniors, yes,” Branden replied. “I got them done this morning. But I haven’t even started on the others.”

Mallory stood in front of Branden’s desk, waiting for an explanation.

Branden got slowly to his feet and said, “I don’t have it in me, Lawrence.”

The professor was of average height and moderate build, though not as slender as he once had been. His salt-and-pepper beard was trimmed to a neat and orderly shortness, and his brown hair was parted, but characteristically ruffled. Today, his eyes carried a weariness that Lawrence could see.

“Once you get started,” Lawrence offered, “it’ll go fast enough —the same as usual, Mike.”

Branden hesitated a moment before meeting his assistant’s gaze. “I’ve been thinking about retirement, Lawrence.”

“I don’t believe you!”

The thump of heavy boots approached the professor’s door. Branden nodded at Mallory and called out, “Come in.” When Mallory stepped aside, Branden saw an extremely short man in a hand-made blue denim suit of the Old Order Amish.

The dwarf’s graying chin whiskers were long and unruly, lying on his chest. On his head was a black felt winter hat with a perfectly round, three-inch brim and domed crown. His white peasant blouse was tied loosely at the neck. Over it he wore a black vest fastened with hooks and eyes. His work boots were muddy, and his clothes, though not too worn, carried the look of constant labor. Round silver spectacles sat on the end of his nose, and the tops of his white ears poked out through his hat-matted hair. His stunted fingers, creased and calloused, were accented under the nails with the rich black loam of a peasant farm.

Branden stepped around his desk, bent at the waist to offer his hand, and took the little man’s puffy palm and stiff fingers into his. The dwarf seemed embarrassed to shake hands, but he shook nevertheless, and asked, in a high, reedy voice, “Are you that professor friend of Cal Troyer’s?”

Branden offered the Amish man a chair in front of his desk, and said, “I am Professor Michael Branden. Cal Troyer is my best friend. And this is Lawrence Mallory, my assistant.”

Mallory eased past the little person, saying, “I’ll check on that coffee,” and disappeared into the outer office.

The Amish man nodded gravely to Branden’s answer and hopped up onto the front edge of the seat. With his legs swinging free, he asked, “What about Sheriff Robertson?”

Branden laughed, the first relaxed and unguarded thing he’d done that morning, and said, “The sheriff is my best friend, too.”

The little man gave a shrug that said, “That seems reasonable, I guess,” and followed that with, “I know Caleb Troyer. Can’t say as much for the sheriff.” Smiling, he added, “It’s a happy man who has two best friends.”

Branden pulled a wooden office chair over, sat down beside his visitor, and said, “I expect you’re not here to question me about my friendships.”

“Just wanted to be sure I had the right professor,” the Amish dwarf replied.

Branden held his peace, and watched the man turn the brim of his black felt hat through his hardened fingers. The professor knew not to push. This might take some time; it might require the
Amish
kind of time. This fellow would surely need some encouragement before he warmed to his purpose. Branden happily mused that he would have to wait the Amish man out. In truth, he was grateful for the distraction of a slow, deliberate conversation—an oblique Amish-English give and take, until the man was certain that Branden could be trusted. The dwarf would take it slowly, and Branden’s morning would not spin along on rapid English time. There was good reason now to ignore those remaining blue books on the desk behind him. At least for a spell.

But Professor Branden was wrong. Direct as an Englisher, and blunt as a cold stone, the little man fixed his gray eyes on the professor and said, “I think my brother was murdered.”

WHEN LAWRENCE brought in two mugs of coffee, Branden was studying the Amish man’s eyes for the turmoil and intensity behind the dwarf’s surprisingly frank words. But that very English frankness had quickly been replaced by Amish diffidence—the plain people’s peaceful resignation to life, which accepts tragedy and fortune as flip sides of the same coin. It is a particularly Amish brand of fatalism, bordering on Zen, and Branden knew it well.

In his Amish self, this man would consider that life and death signified nothing more remarkable than the chance flip to heads or tails. Flip the coin one way, and there was life; flip the other way, and there stood death. We live; we die. It is in God’s hands. To understand this is to practice humility—
Demut
—the most beautiful virtue—
de schönste Tegund.

But Branden had also seen a flash of English hunger when the man had spoken. It was a cold, hollow hunger for English justice, and it would be a sin of contemplation if shown openly to his Amish brothers and sisters. The little man had come in search of the kind of justice that the English world could give him. That Branden, Troyer, and Robertson could give him. And this was a very non-Amish thing for him to have done.

Cocking a hip off his chair, the dwarf fished in his side pocket for a wadded cotton handkerchief. He took off his spectacles, cleaned the glass, and stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket. Palms raised, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “No one knows I am here.”

Branden accepted a mug of coffee from Lawrence and asked the Amish man, “Do you like coffee?”

The man smiled, said, “Yes, it puts a bounce in my step,” and accepted the other mug from Lawrence. Finding the mug too hot, he handed it right back to a startled Lawrence and again fished his handkerchief out of his pants pocket. Then he reached out for the mug, taking the handle in the stubby fingers of his right hand and cradling the bottom of the mug on the wadded handkerchief in his left palm. As Lawrence was leaving, he turned in his chair and said, “Thanks for the coffee.”

Mallory stopped in the doorway to say, “Sure. There’s more, if you like it.”

The professor set his mug on the front corner of his desk, and said, “You have the advantage of me, sir. You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

The little man laughed, hoisted his mug to his lips, sipped, and said, “Enos Erb. Of the Samuel Erbs. Brother to Israel and Benjamin. I’ve got the farm across the road from Israel’s, out at Calmoutier. He’s farming the homestead lands. It’s Benjamin, ‘Benny,’ who’s dead.”