The Outcast (30 page)

The past three months Leah hadn’t gotten her monthly, she dared not hope that she had conceived again. But then—in the midst of nursing her other child—she recognized the
brief flutter in her lower abdomen that was the slightest stirring of life, a butterfly unfurling inside her womb. Jonathan’s violent birth had scarred her insides so much, the
doktors
didn’t think she could conceive another child. They’d also cautioned her and Tobias that it would be wise not to do so, even if a miracle took place and they somehow could. The wall of Leah’s uterus was so thin and pocked with holes, one stout kick from a fetus’s limb could puncture through it; the
doktors
told her that she would probably have to be on bed rest not just for the last five months as she’d been with Jonathan, but for the pregnancy’s entire duration.

In spite of these worries, I’ve noticed that Leah has told no one she is expecting—that, according to her estimations, she is already three and a half months along—for the pleasure of it is almost sweeter unshared. Each morning she awakes, rather than becoming torn between the pain she feels for her nephew and sister’s plight and the pain her own husband and sister have caused, Leah instead thinks about this child—this miracle child—who is already finding his or her way inside her heart and swaddling a balm of peace around her mind. Taking a nine-by-thirteen pan of baked oatmeal laced with apple
schnitz
out of the oven, Leah places a hot pad on the table and slides the pan, wrapped in an old tea towel, onto it. Beside this, Miriam sets a crock of
millich
from the Guernsey and stirs it with a long wooden spoon to keep the cream from separating. A mason jar of
abbel budder
is opened along with a jar of
crunchy peanut
budder
made from last year’s crop. The four older children take their usual seats on the benches flanking the long pine table, their faces scrubbed after early morning chores, and clean hands folded in their laps although their feet tap the floorboards with an impatient staccato.

Leah waits five more minutes for Tobias to return from the barn. When he doesn’t—the first time he has been late for breakfast in two years—she bows her head for the silent blessing, then motions for the children to begin dipping up their bowls. Even Miriam, who is too old to be excited about such a treat, smiles as she swirls
abbel
and peanut
budder
in her baked oatmeal, then pours on top of the steaming square
millich
that puddles around it as thick as whipping cream. My daughter-in-law knows she must act nonchalant for the children’s sake, but inside she is wondering where Tobias could be. Before dawn, he awoke and went outside to milk and feed the animals, a chore that takes, at most, two hours.

After the dishes have been cleared and washed and Miriam has finished feeding Jonathan his own serving of oatmeal softened into a pasty mush, Leah asks Miriam to watch the children and heads outside to find her husband. She checks the barn first, but it is only occupied by the Guernsey, Mabel, whom Tobias keeps around for the extra cream so their family can have fresh
budder
, and a gray cat eating table scraps. Exiting the horse stalls, Leah walks past the sixty-foot Harvestore silo with rust streaking down the navy metal like dried
blut
. The air holds only vestiges
of winter’s chill as the weather catches up with spring, but Leah shivers once, twice, as her mind searches over the many places her husband might be.

Since that night Leah attempted to use her body to awaken her husband’s love, the two of them have not really talked or touched. Still, she can see how her husband has aged in just a few months. Leah hears the words Tobias mumbles in his sleep when he stops tossing and turning long enough to tumble into restless dreams. Sometimes my son continues the conversation my abrupt death stopped. Sometimes he talks to Leah, the tone of his slumbering voice far more gentle than when he is awake. Sometimes he even talks to Rachel, but any word he utters is always barbed with anger.

Leah is on her way to Schlabach’s Leatherworks when she changes her mind and walks to the schoolhouse instead. She does not know what leads her there other than the fact that her husband, in his distress, might return to the place where I had preached for years. The place where Leah and Tobias were married, the place where Tobias’s peace used to be both sought and found. But besides a rabbit with a twitching nose and cotton-ball tail, there are no signs of life in or around the one-room building. Leah is about to resume her walk to the smithy when she hears a muffled sob coming from behind the schoolhouse. Thinking it is a child, Leah lifts her dress to her knees and dashes around the building toward the community graveyard. And although the sobbing does sound like it is coming from a
child—from a broken child—it is not a child who is crying but a full-grown man.

Closing the wooden gate so its creaking does not disturb the mourner, Leah softly calls, “Tobias?”

But the person sprawled over my grave is not my elder son. No, ever since the first fingers of light prodded awake the nighttime sky and helped it change into dawn, Judah has been out here talking and crying to me, his earthly father, and railing against his heavenly Father for the pain being dealt out to the child and the woman he desperately loves. My youngest does not know why he felt so compelled to come back to a square, unmarked stone stuck above my sunken grave. He just knows that after Rachel told him about Eli’s need for a bone marrow transplant—its substantial risks and exorbitant costs—he wanted the comfort of his father’s touch, the comfort of his father’s words. But that is something I can no longer offer him, and the grave where my earthly body rests is the closest he can come to being close to me again.

“Judah?” Leah takes small steps toward him. “You all right?”

My son sits up and wipes his face with the back of his hand, smearing the red earth that has turned to mud from his tears. Shaking his head, his breath twists in the frigid morning air. “The chemo didn’t work.” Judah looks to the side, at the other simple gravestones wedged in the soil like rows of teeth. “The doctors are going to have to do something else.”

“Do they think that . . . that he’ll still make it?” Leah isn’t even aware she is crying until the wind hits her tears’ salty warmth and turns them to twin streams of cold.

“They’re talking about a bone marrow transplant,” Judah says. “But first, they have to find a donor.”

“A donor? For bone marrow?” Leah tramples the sodden ground and kneels before her brother-in-law, not even caring about the dirt that is grinding away the flowered pattern of her dress. “Can anyone be a donor?” she whispers. Her mind cannot traverse the conundrum of the medical field, but somehow her spirit knows that everything that has taken place until now—all the heartache, the tears, the emotional pain bringing with it an onslaught of physical repercussions—has happened for a reason.

Trying to recall what Rachel tearfully revealed to him last night, Judah says, “No, not anyone. It has to be someone whose bone marrow is an exact match for Eli’s.”

Leah swallows and shifts her right knee that has found a pebble lodged in the earth. “Like a parent?”

Judah shakes his head, and his sister-in-law finds momentary relief. Perhaps that premonition she had felt had been nothing; perhaps this new turn of medical events will not bring everything into the light that is safer kept in darkness. Even secrets kept from a husband by his wife. For Leah—sweet, naive Leah whom Tobias would never suspect of deception—has secrets of her own.

“No. A parent wouldn’t be a close-enough match,” Judah says. “The best donors are usually siblings.”

“Siblings,” Leah breathes, the fear of her words trailing on the wind like smoke.

Judah’s eyes are so swollen that he cannot see the panic flaring up in hers. “But since Eli doesn’t have any siblings, he’s been put on a waiting list to try to find a match. Now we just have to hope one is found before it’s too late.”

“You don’t mean that . . . Eli could die?”

“Rachel didn’t say as much last night, but she wouldn’t be this bad if Eli had hope beyond a transplant.”

“How long since she’s known?”

“Rachel?”

Leah nods.

“A few weeks.” Judah sighs. “She kept it from us for as long as she could.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I guess she didn’t see any point in telling anyone, since Eli has no siblings. And Rachel’s had to carry so much on her own, she didn’t think one more burden would make any difference.”

Leah can hear the accusation threading my son’s innocent words: that she hasn’t been to the hospital since Rachel and Eli have been in there; that she hasn’t helped support her sister’s burden even after Rachel moved down from Pennsylvania to help support the weight of hers. But Judah does not know the whole story; he does not know the secrets that were created beneath Leah and Tobias’s roof. Leah springs to her feet. She marches toward the
gate with old leaves clinging to her dirtied dress and determination hardening her spine.

“Where are you going?”

But Leah does not stop. Opening the graveyard gate, she lets it slap shut behind her. “I’ve got to get back to the barn. To make a call.”

“Wait!” Judah cries. “Use my cell phone.”

Leah freezes before she turns back to face him. She accepts the small flip phone that Judah is holding out. “Do you have Norman Troyer’s number?”

Nodding, Judah steps so close she can smell his lemon aftershave as he helps her scroll through the programmed names to the one she wants.

Leah takes a deep breath as she looks at Norman’s office number. “I’m going to need some privacy,” she says.

Five minutes later, after Leah has confirmed her mounting medical suspicions with the only medical professional she knows besides her
mamm
, she steps from beneath the pine tree overshadowing Abram Beiler’s grave and squints up at the bleached disk of sun. The juxtaposition of light and darkness has never felt like such a presentiment to Leah before; that soon—perhaps within weeks, perhaps within days—the truth is going to be illuminated for the entire Copper Creek Community to see.

“Judah,” Leah calls, and then pinches her lips to stop their quivering.

My son stands from the resting place of his brother’s first wife, Esther, and brushes from his hands the vinelike
tendrils that had been crawling up around her gravestone’s simple base, threatening to erase the proof of her short existence until he plucked them all away.

“Can you take me to the hospital, Judah?” Leah asks before her resolve has a chance to fail. “Can you take me to see my sister?”

Rachel

Three weeks have passed since Dr. Sengupta placed my seven-month-old son, Eli Michael Stoltzfus, on the bone marrow donor list. Yet nothing has changed. Even the oncology nurses seem subdued by this endless purgatory of waiting. Red-haired Leslie no longer prattles about her boyfriend, who picks her up on his tandem bicycle with a wire basket in the front. Even Donna files in and out of Eli’s hospital room, smiling her dimpled smile but not meeting my troubled eyes. It is as if they fear my sorrow is catching, but I know they just do not know what to say.

I don’t know what to say either. I don’t know what words of comfort to give my
mamm
, Ida Mae, or Judah because I fear that whatever I tell them will only be false hope and lies. All I do know is that every day when I wake up on that pullout bed and watch the sun rise over Nashville, I pray that Dr. Sengupta will come up and tell us that a bone marrow donor match has been found. But then the hours drag by.
I flip through one of the hardback classics Judah brought, which I am too tired to read, or I look at the TV, although my eyes cannot focus long enough to watch. And as the city lights flicker on to dispel the gathering darkness, I know that we are one day further from hope of finding a donor and one day closer to the death of my son.

My eyes are scanning the litany of
Faith, Hope, Love . . . Faith, Hope, Love
stamping the chapel walls in cursive script when my head sinks down onto my chest, and I find that I am softly snoring without my mind being fully disengaged in sleep. Stirring myself, I drape my body across the upholstered seats. The chapel was deserted when I entered, and I haven’t heard anyone enter since. Perhaps I can take a short nap and then return to Eli’s room before the milk shake I purchased for Ida Mae is completely melted.