The Outcast (33 page)

And as Tobias’s head bent, bringing the first touch of his cool lips against mine, the fever raged throughout my body. I knew then that whatever happened tonight, both he and I were consumed.

“Wake up.” Ida Mae pushes my shoulder. “We’re almost there.”

My eyes snap open. Pressing my body against the passenger door, I clench my forehead as tears drip between my fingers like rain.

“Rachel-girl,” she says, squeezing my knee, “they’re gonna find Tobias. Judah’s probably done found him, and in all the hubbub, they’ve just forgotten to go out to that barn and give us a call.”

I wail, “But I don’t
want
them to find Tobias! I wish he were dead!”

“Rachel Stoltzfus!” Ida Mae chides. “You can’t go wishing people dead, honey. No matter how much you might hurt. Take it from somebody who knows. That kinda hate will eat you from the inside out and leave you just a husk of what you once was. Like a locust shell stuck on a tree.”

Drawing in a shuddering breath, I wipe my face on the front of my dress. “Did you hate the Amish church for what they did to you? For making you take your child off life support?”

Ida Mae clutches the steering wheel and shifts the wad of snuff to her other cheek. “Russell Speck,” she spits, blaming him for my knowledge of her past and not Norman Troyer, the man who told me. Swatting her right blinker, Ida Mae careers her truck up Copper Creek Mountain. Her brights bounce off the narrow, corkscrewing road. “Yeah,” she says. “I hated everyone in Flat Plains so much, I wished they’d all keel over like flies. But then, after the smoke cleared and I was the only one standing there—the only one in my immediate family who wasn’t
in the grave—I realized the person I hated the most was myself. You see, I made my sons, Jacob and Daniel, go with Norman and Henry that day ’cause I wanted them out from underfoot. I packed ’em all a big picnic lunch and told them not to come back before supper. Such a wonderful day I had. I loved having every minute to myself: no cooking, no cleaning, no wiping up spills or taming strubbly hair. I took me a long nap, then went for a walk around my in-laws’ land. I had no idea that that day I ate up the quiet would be the first day of the rest of my life that the quiet reminded me of everything I’d lost.”

I begin to cry again as I watch tears wind down Ida Mae’s face. “For a long time . . .” She pauses. “For a
very
long time, I blamed myself for my sons’ deaths and for the death of my husband. And the only other person in the world who understood my pain was the man who believed he was responsible for it.”

“Russell,” I say.

Ida Mae nods. “I didn’t marry that man ’cause I loved him—’cause I sure didn’t at the time. I married that man ’cause every morning I woke up with Russell Speck in my bed was like putting flowers on my sons’ graves or taking down the books they’d made that were still at their
grossmammi
’s
haus
, laying out to dry, when that state trooper come driving up that lane and told me about the accident.”

“And the blue room? The bunk beds?” I ask, recalling how it used to look before I returned from that upsetting weekend at Copper Creek and found everything repainted
green. Everything made fresh and new like a thawing spring rain after the last winter storm.

Ida Mae drags a flannel sleeve across her nose and clears her throat. “That stuff was never my sons’. After me and Russell split up ’cause looking at him stopped being a balm and started being the knife that kept peeling scabs right off my wounds, I no longer had no monument of grief to wake up to every morning. That’s when I decided to make that blue room. I went to Goodwill and yard sales and decorated that room with everything I imagined my boys would have wanted if they’d been English.”

I ask, “What made you give it away after all that time?”

Ida Mae slows the truck. I can hear gravel crackling beneath the tires. Leaning over, she rests her weathered hand against my cheek. “You did,” she says, tears spilling from her eyes even as she takes her thumb and wipes my own away. “You and Eli did. After the doctors told us about his cancer, I realized how much I loved that little man. How much I loved
you
. I knew then I couldn’t keep living with one foot in the past and another in the grave when that little man needed me, when
you
needed me. I know it sounds awful, but Eli being diagnosed with something that could take his life gave me something to live for. ’Cause for the first time in twenty years, I had something to
fight
for.”

“So you repainted the room.”

Ida Mae smiles. “Yep. I painted over that room and burned everything I could within Blackbrier limits. Russell Speck helped me that whole weekend. He never left my
side ’cept to go home to sleep. I knew then how lucky I was to have this good-hearted man still standing by me after all these years I’d been so hateful to him. So, you see—” Ida Mae takes the left side of the lane that divides Tobias and Leah’s house from Verna King’s—“if I hadn’t let go of the past, if I hadn’t let go of all that hate and let myself love again, I’d be missing out on so many good things. Things like you and Eli and that confounded man, Russell Maynard Speck.”

She flips her headlights to low, but not before I notice Judah King leaning against his truck’s back bumper with his arms crossed and eyes squinted against the brightness. Ida Mae pulls her truck up behind Judah’s and lurches it into park. Turning off the ignition, she stares at him before looking over and touching my face. “Promise me, Rachel-girl . . . Promise me you won’t let hate for Tobias make you miss out on love. No matter what this community does or whether Leah forgives you, you gotta promise me that
you
will forgive. That you won’t live your life wishing you could do it over. That your life will keep moving forward, that your life will keep going on.”

“I promise,” I whisper.

I climb out of the truck, and my twin rushes down the three porch steps with one hand over her battered face to stifle her sobs. Closing my eyes, I pray for the Lord’s infinite mercy. Without it, I do not know how my life can keep moving forward. My life is the reason so many other lives will never be the same.

AMOS

I do not know how long I have watched Tobias run through the woods with branches slapping his face and brambles lashing his skin. But I do know that he must stop soon. His rib cage is laboring like fireplace bellows. The small portion of his body that is not stippled with blood from its collision with briars is covered with sweat that plasters his torn shirt to his chest and gleams like silver on his skin. Right after Tobias struck his wife and went charging into the night, I approached my heavenly Father and beseeched him to let me go—once, just this once—back to Earth to speak Life into my son. I could see how Death
leered down from the trees and lurked in the corners of Tobias’s desperate mind. I could see how every breath my son released into the air was putrid and as dark as the wilderness Tobias dove into.

In three days, my son had come to the end of himself. He had nothing left to live for, nothing left to gain or lose, and the voices hissing in the recesses of his mind told him that he should then choose to die. Taking death into his own hands was the one last thing Tobias could do for his wife and family, as they didn’t need such a volatile man wreaking havoc on their lives. It would be insufficient to say that Tobias was not thinking clearly as he charged into those Copper Creek woods. Tobias was not thinking at all. His thoughts had been left to their own sinister devices for so long, now that he wanted to rein them in and take control he found that he
had
no control. So he gave in to these thoughts that had wielded their power over him for years when he believed he was the one who, regardless of his dalliance with lust, still held dominance. He gave in to the thoughts that told him he should just end it. End the torment, end the suffering . . . end it all.

These tormenting voices are the reason—hours later and as winded as a green-broke horse—Tobias continues to run. The reason he runs until he doubles over and vomits the bile of his soul into the twisted undergrowth of the woods.

Please, Lord,
I plead in my spirit.
Please let me go to him.

But still, I am not released.

I grasp the gilded arm of the park bench. My son clatters down a ravine, clutching at saplings and kudzu roots to alleviate a fall. Springwater splatters his leather boots and saturates his pants up to his ankles. Tobias’s nostrils flare and his mouth gapes wide as he struggles to suck in oxygen his body is too exhausted to absorb. The waning crescent flickers through the trees hardly budded with enough foliage to shield their skeletal forms. Through this filtered luminosity, I can see the ravine—no more than a darkened slash in the earth—yawning open to a cliff whittled from shale.

A grin slithers across my son’s features, but I sense he is not the one causing its form. His troubled soul sees this cliff too, causing Tobias to believe his end is found. Stretching out his arms as if to embrace it, Tobias begins his reckless descent. I yearn to cry out, but no words I utter from this celestial park will ever reach his ears. Hanging my head, I close my eyes. I cannot watch my eldest son go over the precipice from which there is no hope of return. This is why I do not see so much as hear Tobias’s dampened feet become ensnared, and his body begin tumbling beneath a Force far more powerful than gravity. I look up. My son flips down the ravine, his white shirt and black pants a checkerboard kaleidoscope. Smiling, I think,
Your ways are not my ways, Lord.

With one wild somersault loosening pebbles and clods of decomposing earth, Tobias’s body ceases its kinetic momentum. He is so close to the cliff edge, his left arm
dangles like it is hanging over a bed. Not a finger on that hand moves, not a muscle on Tobias’s body twitches, not an eyelash flutters against his cheek.

My fatherly heart aches watching my son, yet I trust that our heavenly Father—who loves him even more than I—has allowed Tobias’s fall from such a great physical and metaphorical height. Peace floods my mind and renews my spirit. My eyes clench shut as the heavenly realm begins rushing up at me until I can hear the thunder of a thousand galaxies zipping past my ears. My eyes open. I can see years streaking by—time reduced to the tail end of a fiery comet—along with the explosion of supernovae in that unexplainable void called space. Closing my eyes again, I bow my head as I begin my journey through the opalescent haze of the Milky Way to a foreign planet I called home a mere five months before. My descent through the Earth’s atmosphere appears the same as when I check in on my family from time to time, but it does not feel the same. Not at all. Although I am not back in the flesh that once housed my spirit, my soul feels weighted with the cares of the world I hadn’t known I had left behind until now.

The greenish-gray shape of the Americas surges up at me, resembling a cookie cutout slid on a place mat of blue cloth. I spread my arms and fingers and let the air buffet against my body, easing me down through the layers as a feather floats on the wind. To my left is the spiny black ridge of the Smoky Mountains connected to the larger vertebrae of the Appalachian chain. My speed increases the
closer to my destination I draw. The must of lichen, mossy wood, and wet-weather creek beds clotted with old vegetation fills my nostrils. It is a familiar scent: the scent of my community, the scent of home.

Swooping past feathered pine boughs and hardier deciduous trees, my body comes to rest on wet grass that cushions my limbs like a quilt. I sit up and brush twigs off my clothing—the plain black suit I was wearing when Verna and I wed—and pluck pieces of fern from my hair.
My hair!
Laughter bubbles up from the well of my chest and spills out my mouth, chiming over the mountainside with the resonance of bells. I didn’t have hair for the last twenty years I was alive. Looking down, I see that my beard is the same tawny blond it was in my youth. The hands that pat at my suit are no longer knotted with arthritis and crowded with veins.

I hear a groan. My joviality ceases. My legs could carry me for ten thousand miles, but as I stand and walk over to Tobias’s prone form, it takes all my willpower not to collapse. I kneel before my firstborn. The instant my fingers touch the damp cotton covering his back, a pop of light goes off like an amplified burst of static electricity. I glance down at my hands still shielding Tobias’s spine and flex them. They do not ache, yet they look the same as when my precious wife crisscrossed them over my unmoving chest. My beard is now also long and white. The hair I have just rejoiced over has been removed from my head. Then I understand this second transformation
that is as surprising as my first: I must appear to my son as the father he remembers so that my words can be received.

Taking my newly ancient hands, I again place them on Tobias’s back. He groans and rolls over. A thread of blood unravels from the wound on his forehead.

“Tobias,” I say.

As when he was young and I would rock his shoulder and tell him I needed help birthing a calf or colt in the barn, my son swims up through the dense strata of sleep, struggling to awaken.

“You need to get up, my son. We do not have long.”

Tobias’s eyes fling back like shutters on a vacant house. His fleeting soul returns.
“Dawdy?”
He wets his lips and closes his eyes, but I am still here when he opens them again. “
Dawdy?
You—you can’t be here. You’re dead.” His eyes widen. “Am I . . . Does this mean I’m dead too?”

I do not know what to call our meeting between this world and the next. I just know it is a rare gift I do not want to squander.

“No, Son. You’re not dead,” I say. “You’re dreaming. You hit your head running in the woods.”

The pain of Tobias’s memory returns. Tears seep from the corners of his eyes. “I hit her,” he wails. “I hit my own wife.”

“I know, Tobias. I know.”

“I was just so angry. I love Leah; I do. But I didn’t want anybody finding out about—”

“You and Rachel.” It is not a question, but a statement.

My son’s face blanches above the contrast of his beard. He looks down as his tears resume their fall. “I’m sorry,
Dawdy
.”

“I am no longer here, Tobias. You do not need to be apologizing to me.”

“You mean I need to apologize to Leah.”

“Yes.” I nod. “And also to Rachel.”

Tobias looks up with that old flash in his eyes. “Why should I apologize to
her
? Rachel’s the reason this all happened!”

“Really? Weren’t
you
the one who entered her room that night?”

“Yes, but
she’s
the one who invited me in.”

“When you knocked on her door to give Rachel that quilt, you knew what you were thinking.”

“But those were just thoughts,
Dawdy
. They would’ve never been actions if Rachel hadn’t turned around with her—” Tobias shakes his head in disgust, unable to remove the images trapped within the strongbox of his mind.

“Even then, Tobias, you still had a choice.”

His forehead ripples with so much frustration, the congealing cut on the upper left splits. “A choice?” he rails. “Would
you
have turned around if you’d been in my place?”

“The turning should’ve happened long before that night. But yes, with the Lord’s help, I believe I could have.”

Tobias snorts and wipes his bleeding forehead with his arm. “Then you’re a far better man than me.”

“I wasn’t always,” I murmur, recalling how jealous I’d been watching Samuel Stoltzfus down in the New Holland show ring with
Englischer
girls prancing their gaudy feathers before him like birds of paradise. If one of them had pursued me to the same extent, I wouldn’t have tossed their phone numbers to the sawdusted floor like Samuel had. I would have taken advantage of those numbers. Lord forgive me, I would have taken advantage of the women who had written them down.

Tobias’s ragged breathing is disrupted by the throaty hoot of an owl.

“How did you change?” he asks.

“I didn’t change; I
was
changed. I realized I hated the man I’d become. But I knew I didn’t have the power to change myself, so I asked the Lord to change me.”

“That simple, huh?”

“It
could
be that simple if you’d just lay down your pride. If you would ask the Lord’s forgiveness and forgiveness from those you’ve wronged.”

“I can’t tell them what I’ve done,
Dawdy
. I can’t let Jonathan be Eli’s donor. If the community finds out, I’ll—I’ll lose
everything
. My
familye
will disown me. I’ll have to step down as bishop—”

“I won’t tell you you won’t lose everything, Tobias,” I say. “Because you might. But what are a few years of temporal loss when you have gained your eternal soul?”

The moment these words leave my mouth, I can feel something inside of me break loose as if I am fragments
pieced together by the seamstress of time. Resting my hand on my son’s shoulder, I say, “Tobias. I have to go.”

“Don’t leave,
Dawdy
!” He twines his arms around my waist even as my body splinters apart. “I can’t face this all alone!”

I hold my firstborn child as tightly as I can. “You’re never alone, Tobias. Even if I have to leave, there’s One who never will.”

My temporary body dissolves back to dust, and my spirit begins to ascend.
“Ich liebe dich,”
I call down to my son.

With his arms outstretched and tear-streaked face upturned to the heavens, Tobias’s wail echoes across the mountain ridges like a feral cry:
“Forgive me!”

I don’t know if Tobias is asking for my forgiveness or for the forgiveness of Someone far greater than I. Either way, I believe that after this night my eldest son, Bishop Tobias King, will never look at this life, or the next life, in the same way.