The Hallowed Ones (20 page)

He came up beside me and caught my elbow. “Hey. What happened?”

I bit my lip. I could feel the tears prickling hot behind my eyes, and I couldn’t trust myself to speak again. My hands shook, and I let the blanket fall.

“Did somebody hurt you? Did the vampires—?”

His eyes were bright with such sympathy that I couldn’t stand it. I shook my head, covered my face with my hands, and sobbed.

He put his arms around me while I cried against his chest. His shirt smelled like soap and sweet straw and dog. Familiar. He didn’t say anything, just held me until my tears faded to hiccups. I grimaced when I saw that a smudge of pink makeup had smeared his white shirt.

His hands rested lightly on my shoulders. “What happened?”

I released a short, bitter bark of laughter. The end of the world had happened, and I was bawling over a boy. Maybe, but that boy had been a very large part of my very small world. “It wasn’t vampires.”

His brow creased. “What, then?”

I drew back, and his hands fell. “I don’t think you’d understand.”

He folded his empty arms across his chest. “Try me. I’ve got nothing but time.”

I blew out my breath. “The man I . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say “love.” “The man I’m expected to marry got baptized this morning.”

“Okay.” He looked at me blankly. “That’s normal in your culture, right? You come of age, and you get baptized in the church?”

“Well, yes.”

“A lot of places don’t do it that way, you know. They baptize babies.”

“So I’ve heard. But here you have to choose to join the church of your own free will.”

“And . . . he joined the church?”

“When you join the Amish church, you are required to follow their edicts. It is putting an end to
Rumspringa,
to all earthly desires.” My vision blurred.

“It put an end to your relationship.”

“
Ja.
At least, it must change form.” I rubbed my eyes. “It’s stupid, I know.”

“What’s stupid?”

“Being . . . being jealous of God.”

He shook his head and laughed. “No, it’s not stupid. Religion is a big deal for couples. You guys have to be on the same page.”

I sighed. “We always . . . we always dreamed of
Rumspringa
together. Our parents dreamed of us married. Now
Rumspringa
is impossible. And . . .” My hands fell open and I took a quavering breath. “It seems he has found a more suitable girl. Ruth is . . .”

“A more suitable girl?” Alex laughed softly. “What does that mean? More pious, more obedient?”

I nodded, staring down at the floor. That was it, exactly.

“Look, I, uh . . . don’t know the guy. But he sounds like a jackass.”

My gaze flickered up, and I cracked a smile. No one had ever called Elijah anything like that. “He has his moments.”

“I mean . . . c’mon. Is he that threatened by a woman who thinks for herself?”

I’d never been called a “woman.” I expected to be a “woman” after
Rumspringa
and marriage. I still thought of myself as in that in-between liminal stage: too old to be a girl, but without the responsibilities of adulthood.

“If he’s looking for a . . . a mouse, I’m sure that there are plenty of them about. But you’re not a mouse. You’re intelligent, brave as hell, and you’re cute.”

I blinked at him. “I’m not any of those things. I’m supposed to be obedient. Yielding.”

Alex shrugged, as if it were a matter of objective fact. “Well, you are those things. I’m no expert in relationships, but . . .” A shadow flickered across his face, and I supposed that he was remembering Cassia. “As cheesy as it sounds, if it was meant to be, he’ll come back.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “You’re invoking
Gelassenheit?
”

“Yeah, I guess I am.” A lopsided smile crossed his face. It was then I noticed that it was speckled in tiny cuts: two on his jaw, one on his cheek.

“What happened to your face?” I asked.

His hand flitted to his chin, and his smile turned sheepish. “I, uh, kinda suck with that straight razor you gave me.”

I smiled. “You’ll learn.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “So . . . would you like some applesauce? I still have some left.”

“
Ja.
I would like some applesauce.”

I carefully took the lantern from its hook and followed Alex back to his nook in the barn. It looked as if he’d been restless there. His blanket was folded in a corner, food in another, comic books stacked in a third, and soap and clothes in the fourth. I felt a pang of sadness for him. These were the four corners of Alex’s world. And
I
mourned for how small
mine
was becoming.

He sat down, unscrewed the cap on the jar of applesauce, and handed it to me with the spoon I’d left him.

“Thank you,” I said. I dipped the spoon into the sauce and tasted the cinnamon apple mixture. It soothed me, stopped the hollow rumbling in my stomach. After a few bites, I handed it back to him. He tucked into the jar with the same spoon clinking against the glass.

He gestured to the stack of books. “Interesting reading material.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I tried to read your
Ausbund,
but my German’s really bad.”

“You speak some of it?”

“I did take it in high school. Don’t remember anything but bits and snatches. But I recognized the Lord’s Prayer.”

“Ja.”
I nodded. “That’s the one I think we use most.”

“Read Revelations in the Bible again. Depressing.”

I put my back up against the wall, curled my arms around my knees. “Do you think that’s what’s happening? The Rapture?”

“If so, it would be a funny kind of Rapture, with all the holy folks kept on earth, don’t you think?”

“I suppose. But it still feels like the end.”

“Since neither one of us contemplates God having a perverse sense of humor like that, I’m gonna have to stick with ‘don’t know’ as an answer. At least until the Four Horsemen show up. Then I’ll revise my opinion.”

“Do you . . . do you believe in God?” I asked. Everyone I knew did, even Outsiders like Ginger, but I couldn’t tell if Alex did.

His eyes narrowed in thought. “I think I do, after a fashion. I’ve just never had any personal experiences with a god. God has never spoken to me like he apparently spoke to Joan of Arc. I’ve never seen an angel or gotten a warm, fuzzy feeling in a church.”

“God has never spoken to me, either.”

“No angels?”

“No.”

“How about the fuzzy feeling in church?”

“Sometimes, when we’re singing. It feels like there’s some kind of spirit there. It’s hard to explain. You can feel it moving through you, buzzing around you. It’s like . . . when the locusts come up in summer, and you can feel the vibration in the ground.”

He seemed to chew on that for a while, handed the jar back to me. “Most cultures do pick one or more deities, so the prevalence of the idea suggests that it could be real.”

“Hmm. It wouldn’t be easy to follow the edicts of more than one god. One is difficult enough.” I couldn’t believe I’d said that aloud, but here, in the small circle of light in the falling darkness, I felt like I could be honest.

Alex plucked a comic book from the stack. “Wonder Woman has a whole pantheon to please.”

“Well, not
all
of them. Ares isn’t usually too happy with her.”

“Ares was like that. He was the god of war. That was his shtick. But Athena and Aphrodite and Hera have her back.”

“It’s all fiction anyway.”

“Hera and Aphrodite were gods that people actually worshipped for centuries.”

“I could never imagine that.”

“Imagine having a pantheon of gods?”

“Well, that. That and being able to call upon a god and . . . and to have them help you.” My voice sounded very small.

“Yep. A lot of older Western religions tend to buy into the idea that God is the clock-maker. He sets the clock of the world in motion and then steps away from it. He created the world and let it run.”

I rested my chin on my hand, considering. “
Ja.
I think that’s what we believe.”

“A lot of old pagan religions and some of what I call the shake-your-pocketbook forms of Protestantism believe that God can be appeased or bribed to grant favors. There’s a whole idea that God is really concerned with personal happiness and he’ll make you happy and shower you with riches if you tithe enough.”

“We don’t take up collections, except on rare occasions. Baptisms, yes. Money goes to buy church benches and things like that. When there’s a death or when someone’s house burns down, yes. The money then goes to the family or for building materials.”

“Yeah, but you Amish don’t have a physical church with big television screens and sound systems and a pastor who feels that God wants him to have a Mercedes. You guys don’t have to support all that.”

“Hmm. I can’t see how God would need money.” Nor could I imagine what place a television would have in a church.

“Yeah. That’s my issue with a lot of organized religions, anyway.”

I lifted a dubious eyebrow to him. “But Ginger says that many different religions were saved.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Sounds like it. But if the human race survives, I’d be tempted to see if there’s any statistical analysis done on whether megachurches were safe from vampires. To see if God really is indiscriminate.”

“Will you also include the pagan church in the strip mall?”

“Yep. I’d study that. See if yelling, ‘Hera, help me!’ actually worked against the vamps.” He put his wrists together as if flashing magic bracelets against an assailant.

I smiled. “It worked for Wonder Woman.”

“Yeah, well, Hera had a lot on her plate. I’m amazed that she had time to spend helping Diana out.”

“Well, being queen of Mount Olympus must have had a good deal of responsibility.”

“There’s that, sure. But I think she was busiest keeping an eye on Zeus.”

“Oh?” I’d never seen Zeus appear in the comic books.

Alex scraped the bottom of the empty applesauce jar to get the last of the cinnamon from the bottom. “Zeus was a ladies’ man, always chasing women and siring illegitimate children. He’d even go so far as to take the form of a swan or bull to seduce women.”

“Ew.”

“Yeah. That’s how he got Hera. He took the form of a wounded cuckoo, one of her favorite birds. She felt sorry for it, picked it up off the ground, and the next thing you know, Zeus is up her skirt and on her.”

I wrapped my arms tighter around my knees. “Lovely.”

Alex continued, “Zeus was never satisfied with having one woman. He was really the scariest serial rapist of the ancient world. He had dozens of children with other women: Hercules, Aphrodite, the three Fates, Apollo and his sister Artemis, Perseus, the three Graces, all nine Muses . . . he was a busy beaver.”

I shuddered. Though the Amish had many children and did not use birth control, we didn’t violate one another like that. It seemed the very definition of evil.

“Hera was understandably the jealous sort. She was the goddess of marriage and unable to keep her own marriage together. She heckled Hercules for years, starting with sending serpents to kill him in his crib. When Zeus loved Lamia, a queen of Libya, Hera murdered her children and turned her into a monster.”

I squirmed. I was a bit uncomfortable hearing this, these tales of other gods. But I convinced myself that they were simply fiction. Like Wonder Woman. None of the Greek gods were swooping in to save the earth from vampire attacks. But the thrill of hearing this bit of blasphemy quickened my blood.

“My favorite myth about her, though, was the story of Io. Io was a priestess of Hera who’d caught Zeus’s wandering eye. Io wanted nothing to do with him and rejected his advances. Zeus then sent the oracles to pester Io’s father, who eventually kicked her out of the house. Poor Io was walking through the fields alone when Zeus came upon her and tried to seduce her.

“Hera very nearly walked in on this. To avoid being caught, Zeus transformed Io into a very beautiful white cow.

“Hera, however, was familiar with Zeus’s shape-changing tricks and demanded that Io be given to her as a gift. Zeus was stuck between a rock and a hard place; he handed the cow over to Hera.

“Hera, determined to keep Zeus and his would-be mistress separated, gave the cow to a giant named Argus the All-Seeing. Io was chained to a sacred olive tree at one of Hera’s temples. Argus was a pretty good guard, since he had a hundred eyes and never closed all of them. He could sleep with a few of them open at any time.”

“What happened to Io? I mean . . . I imagine that Zeus moved on to the next conquest.” I rested my chin on my knee. No one had really told me stories since I was a child. I knew all the old biblical stories by heart. This was new. While reading was a common pastime among Plain folk, that interest rarely extended into fiction. The dogs ambled in and lay beside me. Perhaps they liked the rhythm of Alex’s voice. I thought that he would make a good professor.

“Well, Zeus ordered the messenger god, Hermes, to kill Argus. Hermes showed up to the tree in the disguise of a shepherd. He managed to lull Argus to sleep by speaking magic incantations, then slugged him with a rock, killing him.”

“And Io? Was she free?”

“Eh. She was free but stuck in the form of a cow. Hera sent a gadfly to harass her for the remainder of her days and prevent her from resting. So, Io wandered until she came to the ends of the earth. For the ancient Greeks, that was pretty much as far as what’s now Turkey. Zeus transformed her back into a woman when Hera wasn’t looking. She conceived a daughter by Zeus’s touch. Io gave birth in secret and hid her daughter with a nymph who raised her while Io continued to flee Hera’s wrath.

“Io continued to run—ran as far as Egypt. Pimp-daddy Zeus came by and laid the golden touch on her again—
bam!
—and she’s pregnant with child number two. She gave birth to her son, Epaphus, in the Nile. Hera found out about this one. She had the boy abducted. But Io persevered. She searched far and wide to find him in Syria.

“By this time, Io had had truly enough of the Greek gods. She returned to Egypt and swore them off, asking instead for the protection of the Egyptian goddess Isis.”