The Search (17 page)

“Mebbe you should have tried that in math class,” Mammi said.

Bess paid no attention. She was getting used to her grandmother. “I just don’t know what else we can do about Blue Lake Pond. Billy and I have tried to get the attention of the right people, and they just don’t seem to care.”

Mammi’s brow was furrowed and she rubbed her forehead, thinking hard. Then a look came over her. You had to study hard to see any expression at all on Mammi’s face, but it was a look Bess was coming to know. She could tell Mammi was having one of her sudden thoughts. Mammi slammed her palms down on the table, stood, grabbed her bonnet off of the hook, and opened the door. “You coming?”

Bess followed behind her to help get the buggy ready. It wasn’t long before Mammi went flying into town and pulled the horse to a stop at the sheriff’s office.

Bess’s heart nearly stopped. “Oh no. Oh no no no. I am not telling that sheriff about this. I don’t want to get the law involved and then have to testify and . . . oh no.” Bess crossed her arms against her chest. “I am staying right here.”

“Suit yourself,” Mammi said agreeably. “Here he comes now.”

From across the street came Sheriff Johnny Kauffman. “Well, well, well. It’s Miz Riehl and her granddaughter. Out on another crime spree?”

Mammi ignored his question. “Johnny, it’s time you came out to dinner at Rose Hill Farm. I was thinking catfish. Battered and fried.”

The sheriff’s eyebrows shot up. He was practically licking his chops. “Your cooking is legendary, Miz Riehl.”

“Saturday lunch then. We’ll be looking for you.” She climbed back in the buggy. “You wouldn’t mind bringing the catfish, would you? You being such a dedicated fisherman and all. From Blue Lake Pond? No better catfish than Blue Lake Pond.”

The sheriff looked pleased. “I haven’t been out that way all summer.” He clapped his hands together. “What time you want me at your farm?”

Mammi whispered to Bess in Deitsch, “What time does that paper truck make the drop?”

“Two on Saturdays,” Bess whispered back.

“Twelve noon,” Mammi said decidedly. “I want those catfish still jumping.”

“I’ll be there, Miz Riehl.” He looked pleased. “You can count on it.”

As they drove off, Bess tried to object, but Mammi waved her off. “You leave him to me.”

Bess spent the drive home trying to think up Mammi-proof, ironclad excuses to absent herself from Saturday’s lunch.
Nothing.
Nothing came to mind.

On Saturday morning, Mammi picked out two plump chickens to roast. By eleven, they were plucked, dressed, and in the oven. At twelve thirty, the sheriff turned into the drive at Rose Hill Farm and parked, all riled up.

“There wasn’t a fish to bite,” he told Mammi. “Something’s
wrong
with that lake.”

“Do tell,” Mammi said, looking surprised. “Why, just last week, Billy Lapp said there’s no birds out there anymore.” She shook her head. “It’s a misery, all right.”

“She means mystery,” Bess whispered to the sheriff.

“No, she’s right,” the sheriff said, looking quite bothered. “It
is
a misery. I sure was looking forward to Bertha Riehl’s catfish, battered and fried.”

“We’ll have to make do with chicken,” Mammi said. “Bess, go call your dad from the barn. Tell him dinner is ready.”

The sheriff ate heartily, but as he left, Bess and Mammi noticed he turned left instead of going right into town. Mammi said she had a hunch he was heading back out to Blue Lake Pond.

Early Wednesday morning, Billy came running up to Rose Hill Farm, hollering for Bess at the top of his lungs. Bess and Jonah and Bertha were having breakfast. He burst into the kitchen.

“Look at this, Bess!” He held a newspaper up in his hands. The headline read “Schwartz Paper Company Fined for Poisoning Blue Lake Pond.”

“Somehow, it worked!” Billy was overjoyed. “That Eddie Beaker took the bait!”

Jonah asked what bait he was talking about and Billy tried to explain. Bess opened her mouth to interrupt and point out that the story wasn’t written by Eddie Beaker at all but by another reporter. But before she could cut a word in edgewise, Mammi shot her a silencing glance.

Jonah read the article aloud: “ ‘The Schwartz Paper Company has been fined for discharging millions of gallons of untreated paper pulp into surface water at Blue Lake Pond. Sheriff John Kauffman of Stoney Ridge blew the whistle on one of the worst pollution offenders in Lancaster County. While fishing one day, he noticed that the lake seemed to be absent of fish. The sheriff began an investigation and discovered that the Schwartz Paper Company had been dumping gallons of untreated pulp straight from their mill into Blue Lake Pond.’ ” His voice picked up the pace as he read through the more factual parts of the story: “ ‘Tremendous amounts of material discharged into the lake used up the oxygen in the water. Fish and aquatic life died from lack of oxygen. Mill wastewater also carries large amounts of suspended solids, such as wood fiber, that could smother underwater habitat for scores of fish and invertebrates such as insects and mussels . . .’ ” His voice trailed off. He scanned to the end of the article. “The company has admitted negligence and will pay the costs to return the lake to its original pristine condition.” Jonah put the paper on the table and looked up. “The sheriff’s been given a special commendation from the governor.”

After Billy had left the kitchen, Jonah stroked his beard. “Curious, isn’t it? Sheriff was here on Saturday. Story broke on Monday.” He cast a sideways glance at his mother.

Mammi paid no attention. She stifled a rare smile and appeared pretty satisfied with the way things had turned out. “Well. That’s that.” She nodded, as if a great mystery had been solved.

Jonah had to leave a contact number for the hospital to call about the results of the blood test, and Lainey had offered the bakery’s phone number since Bertha didn’t have a phone. Plus, she said, someone was at The Sweet Tooth most every day. So Jonah had quickly slipped into the habit of dropping by the bakery very early in the morning—just to see if the hospital had called—when the town was still sleeping and Lainey was already at work. He would sit at the table by the window while she baked, and they would talk. Too soon, they would hear the noises of Stoney Ridge waking up, of the squeaky bicycle wheels that belonged to the paperboy as he rode down the street and the thump of the newspaper as it hit the shop doors. Of a car engine sputtering to life. Of a dog barking excitedly and another answering back. And then Jonah would get to his feet and prepare to go. He had to make himself leave. It seemed to him that the sweet smells that came out of that bakery—well, they could make a man forget everything in the world and follow its fragrance wherever it led.

As he shaved his cheeks, getting ready to head out the door this morning, his eyes fell on Sallie’s letter, received just yesterday. It made his stomach hurt a little.

Dear Jonah,

It has been more than two weeks since you left for Pennsylvania. Mose Weaver is working full-time taking care of your furniture business. I’m worried about the poor man, he works so hard. You left an abundance of undone work for him. I need to bring him lunch each day just to keep up his strength so that your business doesn’t suffer.

Fondly,

Sallie

P.S. I went ahead and planted celery. It is starting to come up. Plenty for the food, plenty for the table decorations.

He thought he would try to call the shop today and speak to Mose, just to make sure he wasn’t overwhelmed by the workload. He was going to need to stay in Stoney Ridge awhile longer. For his mother’s sake. For Bess’s sake.

Oh, who was he kidding? It was for his sake. He couldn’t get Lainey O’Toole out of his mind. It thrilled him to death. It worried him to death.

______

Early one morning, Mammi stood at the foot of the stairs to give Bess a wake-up call. She banged a spoon against a metal pan. “And bring down your sheets,” she hollered up the stairs.

“I’m doing the laundry today,” Bess hollered back down the stairs. Lainey had the morning off and was coming over. For once, Bess knew something that her grandmother didn’t know. Lainey had told her she spoke to the bishop about going Amish, and Bess was so thrilled by the notion that she quickly offered to help. Today, she was going to give her a lesson on how to work a wringer machine. They had talked yesterday and picked out today for a laundry lesson because Jonah would be gone all day at an auction with Caleb Zook. And Mammi had plans to go to a neighbor’s for a quilting frolic. Lainey wanted to keep quiet about her interest in going Amish. Bess wasn’t sure why it was so important to keep it mum—she thought it was
wonderful
news—but she respected Lainey’s wish.

“Good! I’ll go back to bed and sleep till noon!” Mammi called out.

“Thought you didn’t sleep at all!” Bess yelled back with a smile in her voice.

“Mebbe I’ll just have to give it a try one of these days. See what Ohio folks find so appealing about it.”

Bess laughed out loud. She looked out the window and saw her grandmother cross the yard to go to the henhouse, as she did every morning. A feeling of love for Mammi swept over her. How could she have ever been so frightened of her? She thought of those first few days when she arrived at Rose Hill Farm. She had been deathly worried her grandmother would be relentless about her getting a blood test for bone marrow to help Simon, but she never mentioned it after that first time. Not even when her father arrived in Stoney Ridge. She knew her grandmother continued to visit Simon at the hospital once a week, but she never discussed him with Bess. She didn’t even ask Bess to go with her. In fact, Bess had nearly forgotten about Simon.

When her grandmother disappeared into the henhouse, Bess turned her attention back to her project. She had just finished writing out another list of Deitsch vocabulary words for Lainey to memorize. She looked the list up and down. Earth.
Erd.
Mountain.
Berig.
Ocean.
See.
It struck Bess that this might have been what Adam and Eve felt like, having to learn the names of everything. The first job God gave Adam: inventing language.
Not
math. She’d have to remember to point that out to Billy Lapp.

She folded up the list and stuffed it in her pocket. She glanced out the window again and saw Lainey coming up the street with a pink bakery box in her arms. Mammi saw her too. Good. Maybe Mammi would be too busy thinking about what was in that box to wonder why Lainey was here.

Not likely. Her grandmother didn’t miss a thing.

Lainey had spent a week now going without any electricity in her little rental room. She had to admit, it was harder than she thought it would be. Bess was a big help, showing her that it didn’t have to mean living
without
power—she just had to do things differently. Bess loaned her a gas lamp with a fierce-looking fabric wick and showed her how to fill it with kerosene. They bought a little propane camper stove to use for heating food.

“It’s a small version of what we use,” Bess told her. “If you can start getting comfortable with kerosene and propane, you’ll find that most everything else comes easily.”

Lainey had tried to make chicken corn rivel soup for dinner last night using the propane stove. The soup wasn’t so bad, but the rivels were inedible. Instead of turning out like dumplings, they tasted like lumps of school paste.

One thing that took getting used to was sitting in a room so dimly lit. She kept the gas lamp close to her so she could read, and it cast its glow in a circle around her while the rest of the room remained dark. It seemed so different from the English way of lighting up the entire room and then some, especially on a rainy day.

Bess gave her fifty words to learn each day, then quizzed her on them and corrected her pronunciation. She said the easiest way to learn a language was to be just like a toddler again, matching words for objects, so your ear became attuned. Bess was a hard taskmaster, Lainey thought with a smile. Lainey had taken German in high school, so she had a head start, but Deitsch was a dialect of German. Similar but different. Everything was slightly skewed, like how you felt when you looked in a wavy mirror.

This morning, she followed Bess down to the basement. Two large galvanized tubs were waiting, side by side, filled with hot water that Bess had brought down from the kitchen. On one of the tubs was fastened a wringer.

Bess tossed in some shavings of Mammi’s soap and swirled it around until it lathered. “Mammi’s soap lathers up real good. Vile smelling, but it does lather up.”

Bess took a sheet and placed it in the tub. Lainey’s eyes went wide when she saw Bess pick up a plunger to swirl the water.

“I’ve only used that to unclog a toilet,” Lainey said.

Bess snorted. “Not around here. Mammi still uses a privy.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ve tried talking her into letting Dad put in indoor plumbing till I’m blue in the face. Now it’s Dad’s turn to persuade her.” After a few minutes of plunging, Bess fed the sheet through the wringer, then put it in the second tub to rinse it. Again, she plunged and plunged, then fed the sheet into the wringer.

Lainey helped with the next sheets. By the end of wringing them, she was panting hard. “This takes some muscle, doesn’t it?”

Bess laughed at that. “This is just bedding for three people. Imagine what it’s like for most Amish families.”

Now Lainey understood why she saw clotheslines up at Amish farmhouses every day of the week except Sunday. It must take an Amish housewife hours every day to keep a family in clean clothes.

Bess looked up at her over the wringer. “How do you do your laundry?”

“At the Laundromat. You have to sit there for a few hours so no one steals your clothes.”

Bess’s head snapped up. Lainey could see that the thought shocked her. Stories about the English fascinated Bess. To her, they seemed so complex, so filled with odd contradictions. Lainey knew what Bess was thinking: how could it be better to use electricity when it meant you had to worry about your clothes getting stolen?

By the time they got the big basket of sheets outside and hung on the line, the sheets were half dry and Bess and Lainey were wet through. Lainey’s black hair hung in damp tendrils. Bess’s blond hair was flying every which way out from under her prayer cap.

Lainey slipped a clothespin on the last sheet. The wind pushed against the damp sheet, making it fluff and lull in the air like a sail on a ship. The scent of roses lingered around them. For some odd reason, the morning’s work was deeply satisfying. Far more satisfying than she ever felt at a desk, listening to people complain about their purchases. Their stuff. She wondered what Robin and Ally would say to that. They loved their stuff.

The Amish used time in a different way, Lainey thought, walking back to town after the laundry lesson with Bess. As she had watched Bess work, she noticed that her movements were unhurried. She never seemed to be rushing through a task so she could get on to something else, something better. To Bess, it was all good, all worth her time. Lainey thought of how she and her English friends would jam their schedules full so they could fit in more. And yet they were always running out of time! The Amish had the same amount of hours in a day, lived busy, productive lives, but somehow they seemed to have an abundance of time for all that really mattered. Lately, she felt as if she were on a fence, in between Amish and English worlds. Watching, evaluating. With every passing day, Lainey felt herself drawing closer to the Amish way.

Jonah had come up with an idea to build Mammi a roadside stand so folks wouldn’t always be wandering up to the farmhouse. Bess knew Mammi didn’t like to have English strangers wandering around Rose Hill Farm, mostly because they interrupted her work and they talked too long. Mammi was so pleased with Jonah’s suggestion that she decided to expand her line of rose products to sell at the stand. Besides rosebushes, she sold rose petal jam, rose petal tea, potpourri, rose water, and now, she decided, she would add rose-scented soap.

Mammi had always made her own lye soap. It smelled like woodsmoke and could take the top layer of skin right off of a person. Bess thought it was a fine idea to try rose-scented soap.

Jonah told her that if she wanted to sell the soap, she should probably stop using animal fat and switch to vegetable shortening or coconut oil. Mammi looked shocked, and it wasn’t often that she could be shocked.

“Where did you learn so much about soap making?” Mammi asked Jonah.

He told her he might have learned a thing or two in his life, and Bess thought he was starting to sound an awful lot like his mother.

When Mammi started to collect ingredients around the barn workshop for her rose soap project, Bess had a hunch she was going to have the raw end of this new business prospect.

To be sure, the very next morning Mammi set Bess to the chore of cleaning out the old soap kettle. That ancient kettle hadn’t been thoroughly scraped out since it was new. Bess had to roll the cast iron kettle in the grass and climb halfway in with a wire brush to loosen the clinging, foul-smelling lye soap. Even Boomer wouldn’t come near her. Blackie came to investigate, then scampered away before slowing to a stiff walk, his white-tipped tail arrogantly upstanding.

Near the barn, in the shade of a big tree, Billy was helping Jonah build the roadside stand. He walked past her once or twice and shook his head. It was hot and sticky work, and by the end Bess reeked of old lye soap.

When the kettle was finally scraped clean to her grandmother’s satisfaction, Mammi brought out the ingredients for the rose soap. She cooked the soap outside, over an open fire, despite weather that had turned beastly hot and humid. The air felt so heavy it was hard to breathe, but Mammi soldiered on, which meant Bess had to also. Mammi experimented until she was satisfied with the right blends. Using rose water instead of plain water at the end of mixing the glycerin and oils together gave it a heavenly scent. Mammi wanted to get it perfect before they poured the soap into molds and let it cure in the barn for a few weeks. At last, she had the perfect combination.

“I need a victim,” Mammi said, eyeing Bess’s prayer cap. “Let’s wash your hair.”

Bess smelled of such sour smoke that she was happy to get her hair washed, but she hoped to high heaven Mammi’s soap wouldn’t leave her bald in the process. Mammi brought out a new wash pan and filled it with fresh water from the pump. Jonah and Billy had finished the stand and were building a foundation for it down by the end of the drive, so the two women had plenty of privacy. Bess pulled out her pins to let down her hair. Her hair fell to her waist. She bent over a big washtub and Mammi lathered her head.

“That burning your scalp at all?” she asked Bess.

“So far, so good,” Bess said. Actually, it felt good, so good, with gentle suds and a sweet smell.

Mammi rinsed out her hair with clean water, again and again, until it squeaked. Then she took the tub and leaned it upright against the house before she went back inside. Bess wrung out her hair and let the air dry it. She sat very still, with her back to a tree, staring into the sky as she combed her hair out. The clouds were scudding overhead. There was quiet, and soft summer air, and time to think. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, and drifted to sleep.

Moments later, or maybe an hour, she opened her eyes and there was Billy. He was smiling at her with his thrilling white smile. She hoped her white blond hair looked like shining waves of water, blowing gently in the breeze.

Her eyes closed again, and when she opened them, he was gone.