FOUR DAYS HAVE PASSED, and we’ve not seen anyone besides the two neighbors who have stopped by. But both Brian Mendenhall and Richard Murphy were seeking answers to the same questions we have been asking ourselves. Jabil told me that, with Bishop Lowell’s permission, he invited them and their families to join our community. He thought we could benefit by having some Englischers on hand whom we could trust, and that the families would benefit by feeling more secure, shielded inside our walls. Mr. Mendenhall and Mr. Murphy, to Jabil’s surprise, refused his offer. Also anticipating looters, they said their families must stay and defend their land.
This lull is virtually as debilitating as the fear of seeing masses of people swarming on the horizon. In the interlude, all we can do is brace ourselves for a horror we’re not sure exists. So, though it is the Sabbath, we are trying to take our minds off of it by staying busy. Busy for the men means siphoning gas from the otherwise-useless vehicles and using it to sustain the generators, so they can run power tools that will help them construct the perimeter at a far more sufficient pace. Busy for the women means heeding Moses’s advice and scrambling to distribute whatever meats and cheeses are left in the industrial cooler, which is no longer cooling since the backup generator’s being used for the construction.
I am the only one who has not been busy by any definition of the word. Anna’s routine-oriented nature has regressed a year for every day since the electrical grid stopped working, rendering us post-EMP housebound. Somehow Moses learned why I have not been at Field to Table. Yesterday, when I was sitting on the back steps braiding Anna’s hair, I heard a noise and turned to look. Moses was coming around the corner, limping, his shoulders and forearms straining with the weight of two old log-stain buckets crammed with leftover pine boards.
“Found some paint and stuff when I was over at the pavilion looking for nails.” He set the buckets against the greenhouse. “Thought you could maybe make some signs for the perimeter, warning that the property’s under surveillance.”
“Thought that, did you?” I wasn’t sure if my tone was coy or annoyed. Moses didn’t seem to know either. He shifted his weight and pushed back his baseball cap. A piece of hair was pasted to his forehead with sweat. Should I be grateful that he singled me out?
Eyes stinging, I lowered my gaze, acting preoccupied with my sister’s hair, which I could fishtail braid in my sleep. Anna slapped my thigh as I, again, pulled it too tight around her ears. “Sorry,” I murmured, relaxing my grip. I looked back at Moses. He was watching my sister with the bewildered expression I’ve witnessed many times before. So far he hadn’t had enough interaction with her to notice anything other than the fact that Anna possesses our mudder’s head-turning beauty. Now he saw the truth.
“She had an accident when she was six,” I explained. “Fell from the barn loft. She’s never been quite right since then.”
A line appeared between Moses’s brows. His pupils telescoped in the light. “I’m sorry.”
“No need,” I reassured him—I reassured myself. “She doesn’t know anything’s wrong.”
But I knew something was wrong; I remembered life before, when she was all right. We went from telling knock-knock jokes while we ate breakfast that morning, to me standing over her pediatric bed in Cleveland Clinic Children’s Hospital that night, staring at the patch covering the burr hole in her skull, which the neurosurgeon had drilled to access the hemorrhage on the surface of her brain. That instant was the most defining of my life, for just as there was such a stark contrast between how my sister’s day started and ended, I knew the rest of my own days were never going to be the same.
“I guess not knowing anything’s wrong does make it easier for her,” Moses agreed. “But I imagine it can’t be all that easy for you . . . to remember how she was before the accident.”
I dropped the pretense of studying my sister’s hair and met his gaze. He smiled sadly. I found myself smiling in return—amazed that someone I just met could read my mind when no one else made the effort to understand me. Touching two fingers to his hat brim in a halfhearted salute, Moses Hughes left his buckets behind. Did they symbolize a proposal of friendship? Or did his singling me out mean something more?
I dared not hope the latter. It scared me to watch him limp away and realize I did.
Moses
“Too tall?” Charlie bellows. “You kidding me? We don’t want people jumping over the perimeter like pole-vaulters!”
Jabil holds his ground. “All I’m saying is that we don’t want to waste logs if we could use them someplace else.”
Charlie finally stops hammering. “Someplace else? This is our main defense against bloodthirsty thieves, and you want to go build yourself a cabin?”
Jabil sighs. “Don’t be irrational, Charlie. Nobody’s building a cabin. But if we cut the logs down from fourteen feet to eight, we could use that six feet to build outhouses.”
“They can use the woods!”
“We’re talking women and children and elderly, Charlie. Not men who could care less.”
Charlie steps away from the perimeter. “What you tryin’ to say?”
Jabil lifts his hands. “Just that it’s time to think of the community’s immediate needs for a change, rather than putting all our efforts into a project that might not need to be done.”
Charlie’s eyes glitter. He stalks across the flat stretch of earth and hovers over Jabil. The difference in height doesn’t make Jabil look small as much as it emphasizes how huge Charlie is. He spits, “You haven’t lifted one finger doing this ‘project,’ while the four of us—” he juts his chin at Henri, Sean, and me, who are watching this exchange like it comes with popcorn—“have been out here in the heat, working like dogs. So unless you’re ready to climb down from your ivory tower and get your namby-pamby hands dirty, I say it’s high time you kept your trap shut.”
The air crackles like the prelude to a storm. Jabil lifts his chin and meets Charlie’s gaze. “And if you can’t converse in a civil manner, you can pack up your things and leave.”
The veins pulse in Charlie’s arms, as if the blood is feeding the muscles contracting his hand, wrapped around the hammer. I’m about to step in, to keep Jabil from getting his head bashed, when Charlie yells and throws that hammer as hard as he can into the field. It flips end over end for yards—the worn metal glinting—before it’s swallowed by the grass.
All five of us stare in disbelief at that area of grass. Even Charlie looks shocked.
Tossing my post-hole digger, I pick up my crutches. “Well, think it’s time for a water break.” I take two steps toward Field to Table and then stop. “By the way, Charlie . . . if pole-vaulting over the perimeter doesn’t work out, you might have a career in discus.”
Leora
There’s nothing like the demolition of modern society to make me want to clean house. The past two days, under the guise of ascertaining how much food we have, I’ve organized our cellar and pantry. Under the guise of trying to let in as much natural light as possible, since we’re conserving the oil in our lamps, I’ve used vinegar and newspaper to scour our windows. I have no real excuse to clean baseboards, but it’s soothing to get down on my hands and knees and use an old toothbrush to eradicate the grime, which accumulates so quickly because of the firewood brought in twice daily for the cookstove.
The women in our community clean like this once, maybe twice, a year. I do it every month. Sometimes twice a month if I’m assaulted with some peculiar angst: Anna having more bad spells than good, Seth talking back to me like a teenager, another birthday celebrated without my parents—all of these disparate events making me feel incompetent until I clean.
The living room is the only room in the house I haven’t touched, as I make a habit of avoiding the place where my mother died, as well as avoiding the memory of finding her. Biting the inside of my cheek, I remain standing in front of the cracked living room door, debating about going inside, regardless of whether Melinda from Colorado is up for company or not. She chose this room rather than sharing a bed with Grossmammi Eunice, who surprised us all by granting permission for a stranger to stay in her midst. But even though I love my grandmother, I wouldn’t sleep a wink if I were forced to sleep in her room.
Though I do want to clean, dust accumulation is not the only thing I’m worried about. Melinda’s been wearing the same outfit since the EMP. Despite expensive tailoring, the clothing is beginning to soften with body oil, the pressed creases on the silk short sleeves and linen slacks reducing to a wilt. I offered to heat water on the woodstove to fill the tub for her. I explained to Melinda that she could first bathe in the tub and then use the water to wash her clothes. She didn’t say anything, but her expression conveyed that she thought taking a bath in a place where stereotypically “dirty” Old Order Mennonites have been bathing for years would be as barbaric as piercing her lip with a bone. Therefore, for the past three days, she has not washed her clothes or bathed—which I think makes her the barbarian, not us.
Decision made, I take a breath, open the door wider, and step into the room. Melinda sits up and finger-combs hair from her eyes. She hasn’t moved from the couch except to use the bathroom, and then she had the audacity to complain that the toilet didn’t work. She said this although I’ve told her countless times that the pressurized tank located at Field to Table, which supplied water throughout the community, has also shut down due to the electrical failure. So, if she needs to use the toilet, she must carry a bucket of water in from the hand pump to flush the bowl. Needless to say, she hasn’t. I’ve had to clean up after her every time.
She squints at me. “What time is it?”
“Two o’clock. You hungry?”
“No.” Turning, she stares at the window like the curtain’s not obstructing the view. “Thanks, though. Maybe in a little while.”
There is at least a fifteen-year gap between us, but I feel decades older. Just as Melinda’s made no effort to follow my instructions, I’ve made no effort to conceal my resentment concerning her helplessness. If I can just get her to eat, to bathe, to go for a walk, it will feel like I am stabilizing this Tilt-A-Whirl, if only for a moment.
Melinda takes a sip of water. Her fingers tremble as she sets down the glass. She sees me looking at the prescription bottle magnified behind it and says, “I can’t sleep otherwise.” She dabs sweat from her lip with her knuckle and reclines on the couch again, careful not to move her upper body, as if it’s been injured in a wreck. “I don’t have pictures,” she says. “They’re all on my phone.” I glance at her, stunned that she’s trying to communicate something other than a complaint, but then look away—her vulnerability as shocking to me as nakedness. Tears are trickling from the woman’s eyes, darkening the oily temples of her hair, and yet her expression remains the same. “Nobody carries around pictures of their family anymore. Have you noticed?”
I shake my head while continuing to stare at the curtained window. I have not noticed. No one in our community carries pictures at all, since they’re considered graven images, and the Englisch customers who used to come to Field to Table never bothered to share their family photos with me, as I was just a quaint, kapped anomaly who sometimes bagged up their sandwiches and homemade bread. But Melinda does not care to hear this. She is not speaking to me as much as she is verbally processing the EMP that, for her, brought far more hardships than hauling water and fairly distributing food. For her, the EMP created a vast canyon separating her from her family, a canyon that might never be bridged.
For the first time since Melinda’s arrival, compassion overtakes my resentment. I take an afghan from the cedar chest. She murmurs as I spread it over her shoulders, smiling lazily, as if already sedated by the prescription drugs. “Thank you, Leora. Really. You’ve been so kind.” My throat burns with guilt. At a loss for words, I nod and stride out of the living room. I turn before I pull the door behind me and see that her breathing is already deepened by sleep.
Leading Anna over to the kitchen table, I pour a glass of water for her, which she drinks in one long swallow, smacking her lips afterward to show her satisfaction. My sister hasn’t learned to speak beyond basic sentences (“Read to you?”) and requests—yes, no, some for food, ’side to go outside, and our names, including the ones she’s bestowed upon our animals. But now Anna’s handicap has turned into a blessing. For she is the one who continues through this altered world—unsettled by the changes in her daily routine, yes, but without being hampered by worry concerning the morrow—while I remain disabled by our uncertain future.
I let the kitchen door open to cycle some fresh air through the house, and maybe entice Melinda from her torpor long enough to venture outside; then Anna and I go down the porch steps. Jabil Snyder is in our side yard, digging a hole for the outhouse that we dismantled less than four years ago. I am sure the deacons and bishop now regret their decision to allow the community to have running water in our homes. Since the EMP has rendered indoor plumbing obsolete, we are forced to go in reverse in order to move forward.
Wiping his brow, Jabil sips from his canteen and takes off his straw hat. He pours some water over his head, the excess spattering the ground between his feet. I study him a moment—the liquid trickling down the strong planes of his face and turning his white collared shirt into a translucent skin—and try to see if I can conjure forth that same level of admiration I felt for him a few days ago. But I cannot.
Jabil must feel my gaze, for he puts his hat back on and watches me walk through the uncut grass. Behind me, Anna sings nonsensical lyrics and skips in bare feet across the length of weathered porch before descending another step, an impromptu game of hopscotch. She loves the different textures against her toes, just as she loves the feel of different quilting scraps—velvet, corduroy, satin, silk, lace—that I obtained through a ragbag of Englischer castoffs someone left at Field to Table and turned into a quiet book to keep Anna occupied during church.
“How’s the roommate working out?” Jabil calls, jutting his chin toward our house.
Embarrassed about how I’ve been treating Melinda, I say, “Great. How’s living with the pilot?”
He drops his gaze and sinks his shovel into the earth. He leans on it, his forearm gleaming with sweat. Jabil looks years older than he is; perhaps that’s because, since his father’s death, he has had to carry a mantle of responsibility similar to the one I also shoulder alone.
“How’s it living with Moses, you mean?” He and I both know full well the person to whom I’m referring.
“Not too many other pilots around here.”
My joke falls flat, the silence looming between us like the person who altered my world at the instant everything around us crashed. It’s not that I long to be with Moses, a stranger, and not with the good-hearted man standing before me—the good-hearted man I’ve known for years. Jabil may believe that before Moses arrived I would have been open to his courtship; after all, I have been studying him as covertly as he has been studying me. We are two young people of the opposite sex living in an isolated community—and, even better yet, we are not related, which has become something of an issue for the spearheading Snyders. Mt. Hebron families have been intermarrying since the brothers Lowell and Jacob Snyder, Jabil’s uncle and father, moved from Lancaster with a few other families and founded the community in Liberty, Montana, in 1988. Thus, this intermarriage has narrowed the scope of finding a mate who is not kin.
But my decision not to let Jabil court me wasn’t made by Moses’s arrival. It was made by my vadder’s disappearance and my mamm’s subsequent death. Ever since that time, I’ve realized I’m not cut out to perform the normal roles of wife and mother, as I am too busy trying to give my orphaned siblings the semblance of a normal home. I wish I could be courted by Jabil, because I know he senses that to marry me would be to claim my family as his.
Now that the EMP has revealed an unexplored dimension of life, I’m no longer sure I can remain content with the status quo, even if the status quo is more predictable than the alternative. What if the unpredictable road leads to the only destination worth reaching in the end?
I look over at my sister, feeling as confused and exposed as Moses must have felt when he was bleeding on our kitchen table, gripping my hand and begging me to tell him where he was. I am so disoriented that I cannot understand what I’m doing in this altered world or where—in its daily rotation—I really am.
Jabil turns and cuts the shovel hard into the earth before jumping on top to drive it farther down. He stays quiet as he gathers the dirt and dumps it onto the pyramid beside the widening hole. He always assumes this taciturn state whenever he has nothing to say or is simply too disturbed for words. I am aware that Jabil longs for more than what this communal earth has to offer. I could see it in his sure, quick movements as he extricated the pilot from the wreckage and instructed the men on how to take him inside. I also saw it when he sliced the shirt from the pilot’s skin and studied the flesh for abrasions that might reveal a greater internal wound.
“Moses doesn’t say a whole lot,” Jabil continues, breaking into my thoughts. “But we might have to start halving the community rations just to keep him fed.”
I conceal my smile by turning toward the meadow where the yellow plane is out in the elements. I wonder when Moses will come back to sift through whatever survived the crash. It bothers me to think that he’s been here already, and I simply missed his arrival. It bothers me that I would like to be here when he comes. Of all the places he could have landed, why did he choose our field? Or did Gott choose it for him?
When I glance back at Jabil, he is watching me again, his eyes moving from my eyes and traveling down to my mouth like he’s trying to read my lips, although I am not speaking.
Taking off his hat, he wipes the dampness from his hairline and tosses the hat on the ground. Gripping the end of the shovel, he continues pawing the ground and dumping the dirt into a pile. We are the first house to receive outdoor plumbing. I know Jabil has overseen this project for our family, while the rest of the men are working on the perimeter that will encase our community like a fort. Jabil says, “Who knows where Moses comes from.” When I glance at him, he will not meet my eyes but keeps staring at the ground. “Last night, he woke up yelling and then rattled downstairs with his crutches. I looked out the window and saw him stumbling up the lane. I’m not even sure he’s all there . . . to be honest. I’d be careful if I were you.”
“Didn’t you tell us this community is supposed to be about peace?” I glower at Jabil until he rises to face me. “Just because you . . . you may not like Moses,” I stammer, squinting up into his dark eyes, “doesn’t mean you need to turn this into some kind of competition.”
Jabil puts the shovel down. We continue staring, our bodies mimicking each other’s rapid inhalations. Since when did he become Mt. Hebron’s sole judge of character?
A droplet of sweat trails down his jawline and glistens on the protruding cords of his neck. “Leora, I didn’t mean to talk . . . badly of him.” He extends a hand toward mine.
Anxiety envelops me. I listen to the chickens squawking in their coop, to our windmill’s irregular creak, to the women coming back from Field to Table for lunch, their laughter reminding me of bygone days. I move away from Jabil and call for my sister. She ducks out of the miniature greenhouse. The tomcat scampers along behind her, his bottle-brush tail tipped with white. The apron of her cape dress is filled with green tomatoes. But her smile is so satisfied, I haven’t the heart to explain why the red tomatoes are the only ones ready to be picked.
“’Ora! ’Ora!” she cries, running to me. In her haste to show me her treasures, a few of the tomatoes bounce out of her apron and roll across the grass.
“Kumm, Anna,” I call.
I slide her premature tomatoes into my apron pockets and take her hand. I look back at Jabil and regret my skittish reaction to his kindness and touch. I must not punish every good man simply because one man let me down. But I also do not want to make the same mistake my mamm made by leaping headlong into a relationship I might live to regret. So I will continue guarding my heart while relinquishing my viewpoint of every man as guilty until proven otherwise; I will simply view them as I view myself: trying to do the right thing by those I love.
Before I lose my nerve, I turn and call out to Jabil, “Thank you!”
I cannot see him looking because of his hat brim, but I can feel it. He raises his hand briefly in acknowledgment and then sinks his shovel once more into the earth.
The men have decided to use the large pile of logs, originally destined for someone’s dream home, to fence in the property—creating the “perimeter” Moses suggested. In four days, how have we, the Gentle People, allowed ourselves to become so debilitated by fear that we’ve formed an alliance that is based not on what each can give, but on what each can take?
Really, in this way, how are we any different from the locusts we are trying to protect ourselves from? But when it comes right down to it, I am just like everyone else: I do not want marauders pillaging our land, consequently forcing me to watch my little brother and sister starve, so I would have made the same decision if I were in Bishop Lowell’s shoes.
Anna, beside me, continues waltzing down the graveled drive. She is blissful, unaware that the world spinning around her spinning body has changed beyond recognition. Shading my eyes, I look at the wall being constructed and see that the bearded Englischer, Charlie, has paused in his work to watch. I remind myself not to view every man as guilty, and that I should be accustomed to deflecting the attention Anna garners. Yet my stomach still tightens as I see my sister’s cape dress lift and swirl around her strong, tan legs.
“Anna!” I chide and move my body in front of hers, blocking Charlie’s view.
She stops spinning, and I bat down her skirt.
Moses must have heard me call out, for he hobbles over on the crutches Myron Beiler’s letting him borrow and says, “I want to thank you for the signs. They look great.”
I smile stiffly in return and take Anna’s hand. Glancing over my shoulder, I see that Charlie has turned back to the wall to continue hammering. But I keep watching him, wondering if he’s constructing this perimeter to protect us or to keep us from escaping. The tops are sharpened to pencil points, upended as if to pierce the endless sky.
“Everything all right?” Moses asks.
I do not know Moses well enough to confide in him my fears. Then again, I do not confide my fears to anyone, so the risk is no greater with him than it would be with Jabil, whom I’ve known for such a long time. “Know anything about Charlie?”
Moses lifts his shoulders. “He’s single. Was living in some underground house before the EMP. Has a temper that boils like a hot pot. He’s good at taking initiative.”
“Like how?”
“I dunno. He found some construction cones and a sign that says ‘Road Out Ahead.’ He set them up at the end of Field to Table Road.”
“Not sure you can call that initiative.”
“At least he’s trying. Got any better ideas to keep people from coming back here?”
Moses’s voice is thick with frustration. Switching tactics, I ask, “How far did he go?”
“Only to the end of the road. . . .Why?”
“It’s about ten miles until you get to the first major town.”
“They got any antique car dealerships?”
“Not that I know of. Just used lots. What would you want with an antique car?”
He points over to the lane, where the Englischer men have pushed the cars and trucks that were in front of Field to Table into a sentinel-like line, so the useless can be used as part of the blockade. “Anything older wouldn’t be fried like the rest of these vehicles with computers.”
I say, “Don’t know about any old cars, but the museum has some old tractors.”
“Now we’re talking. I wonder if any of them run.”
“Why? What could you do with a tractor?”
“Everything. Drive for supplies . . . scout the area. If we could find implements for it, we could use it to work the ground too.”
“You’re not serious. You’re going to steal a tractor from the museum?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “I am. Unless somebody’s already beat me to it.”
“But you still want to try to go get one?”
His reckless grin is answer enough. I think of Anna and Seth and the supplies a tractor might gather that—a few months from now, when our storehouse is empty—might fill their hungry mouths. I tell him, “I could show you where they are.”
Moses tilts his head toward me. “I know it’s a small town, but we’ve no idea how dangerous things have gotten. You sure you’re up for something like that?”
A question much like Jabil’s before he checked Moses for injuries. “I wouldn’t have offered to go if I wasn’t sure.”
Moses appears taken aback by my brusqueness, as he should be. “I—I’m sorry,” I stammer, face growing hot.
“No harm, no foul. Just want you to know the risks before you’re in over your head.”
“These days, life itself is a risk.”
He smiles. “Won’t argue with you there.”
Moses
I hobble down the Snyders’ steps without my crutches, though I can tell within a few feet that I still need those things bad. If I squint, I can see Henri up the lane, leaning against a beam holding up the pavilion. He’s as recognizable from his hat as from the smoke twisting up from the spark pinched between his fingers. We’re not supposed to meet until midnight, a half hour from now, so that means I don’t have much time to talk Leora out of coming along on this trip.
I look back at Henri one more time before I continue walking, and it’s like looking at an aged version of my father. Boredom doesn’t sit well with someone with a mind like a machine and a body used to working sixty-hour weeks, as Henri once did as an experimental wielder for New Holland. I could tell his grease-stained hands were going to be itching for another project as soon as we finished the perimeter. He even talked about continuing the perimeter along the other side of the property, although it already has a six-foot-tall fence where forest land bumps up against the community, making it difficult for someone—to put it in Charlie’s terms—to “vault.” So two days ago, to keep Henri occupied, I told him about my plan to filch the museum’s equipment.
I also flattered him a little by telling him he was probably the only one around here who could figure out how to get the old tractor engines running, if it was possible at all. He eyeballed me a second, sucking his cigarette like it was the straw in a drink.
The greedy old codger knew he could get more from me if he said nothing, so—as always—I couldn’t stare right back and wait him out. I caved. I told him if he helped me, in repayment I’d try to find a gas station along the way, which pretty much means we’ll have to loot a few places before we can find Henri one pack of cigs. At least his cigarette stash held out until we finished the perimeter today, or else he probably would’ve taken off without me.
I knock lightly on the Ebersoles’ screen door and then open it when no one responds, because I don’t want to keep knocking and wake up the family. Leora seems unsettled when I enter the kitchen and see her using a toothpick to administer glue to a wooden dollhouse. By the lamplight, I watch her lips press together, so I know she’s heard me come in. She lets go of the dollhouse long enough to turn her face toward the shadows, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her dress. I remove my shoes and cross the room over to where she’s standing.
“It’s for my sister,” she says, without looking at me. The glued truss falls, hanging from the gable end like an appendage. “It broke a few years ago.”
“What made you decide to fix it now?”
“Because it’s about the only thing I can.”
We’re no longer talking about wood glue and dollhouses. I step closer and reach for the toothpick. Leora flinches, and then releases it. I dip the toothpick in the open container and dab more glue along the end of the truss. “You push against that side,” I instruct, “and I’ll push against this one.” Leora presses against the left side of the truss and looks at the space behind my head, so I look too as I press against the right. She’s staring at the grandfather clock that stands like a guard in between the kitchen wall and the sitting area, where I’ve heard the Colorado woman sleeps all day, as if compensating for the rest of us who can’t.
Turns out, watching glue dry is about as entertaining as watching paint dry, so my mind wanders, letting me forget how awkward this feels. What would my mother think of Leora if the two of them could meet? No doubt she’d appreciate Leora’s individuality and spunk, which caused her—that first day—to stand up and vocalize her thoughts like a woman, and then go outside to swing beside me, a stranger, like she was nothing more than a carefree child.
My mother was once full of individuality and spunk as well. She met my father when he, a graduate assistant, came late to her senior thesis presentation in a political science class at Rutgers University—a calculated move because he wanted to take her out for coffee to make it up to her. She was going to become a human rights lawyer, but his charming gaffe won her heart, and they got married right after graduation instead.
The fumes must be getting to me, because I hear myself speaking these thoughts aloud. “You know, you kind of remind me of my mom.” Leora’s head remains forward, but she looks at me from the corner of her eye. “What?” I quip. “You didn’t think I have one?”
“No. Just can’t imagine what I could have in common with your mudder.”
“Well, her life didn’t turn out the way she expected it to, either. She gave up her dreams of law school to stay home with my brother and me since our father was gone all the time.” My mother claims that the decades of war have changed him, that he wasn’t so abrasive and withdrawn when they fell in love over textbooks and coffee. I can’t remember him that way, but I also can’t remember our mother being as beautiful as pictures prove she was.
“Your vadder was gone a lot?” Leora asks. “Did he abandon you?” I’m not sure if I’m imagining her defensive tone or if she’s just curious.
“You could say that.” I shake my head, wondering how we ever got onto this topic. But now that I’m this far in, I might as well tell her the rest. “When I was a junior in high school, my brother and I came home from practice and found her sitting in a rocker on our porch, knitting a pink sweater. She told us to sit down. So we sat. Then she told us that our father had a son in Afghanistan, apparently fathered when he was stationed there. Four years old. Just a baby, really. Then she went right on knitting, like she’d told us we were having pork chops for dinner or something. Later, I saw a baby at Mass wearing that pink sweater.”
“So your vadder left after that?”
“Strangely enough, no. I mean, no more than he ever did, being overseas so much. Maybe that’s another way you remind me of her. Her beliefs kept her faithful to my dad when anybody else would’ve been divorcing him in a minute, kind of the way your beliefs set you apart from the rest of the world.”
The front door opens. Jabil steps into the kitchen’s dim nimbus of light, holding his straw hat to his chest. He looks at me and Leora, this broken house between us, and his lips press together in a masculine form of Leora’s earlier expression. Jabil studies me, trying to get down through my layers to find out who I am. He’s going to be looking awhile. Whenever I peer in the mirror of my shaving kit, I can’t recognize myself. And it’s not just the long hair and beard replacing my military cut; in my pupils, I can see the soul reflection of that little boy in the desert whom I irrationally tried to protect.
Jabil says, “I told Leora the only way I’m letting her go into town with two strangers is if I ride along.”
I look at Leora. Her smile appears more like a grimace. I say, “Shouldn’t you ask her what she thinks before you start telling her what she can and cannot do?”
The brim of the hat bends in Jabil’s hands. “We know nothing about you, Moses.”
“And your point is . . . ?”
I know what Jabil’s point is, and if I were in his shoes, I’d want to protect Leora from someone like me as well. Regardless, I still bristle at being seen as the bad guy—especially when Jabil considers himself the good. If our lives weren’t so messed up, he and I could maybe become friends. But since we’re coming at this EMP from opposite sides, so to speak, it’s a little hard to meet in the middle. Tension’s not only rising between me and Jabil but between the Mennonites and the Englischers, exemplified by Charlie’s hammer incident. If we can keep up a steady balance of give and take, we might be able to get along. I don’t want to have to find this balance, but—as always—it looks like I’m going to be the one who has to compromise. Either this is a side effect of being a little brother, or I’m more into nonresistance than I thought.
Leora murmurs, “Stop, just stop,” and lets go of her side of the dollhouse. The truss falls. I watch her face and see that her puffy eyes are looking at nobody but him.
“We’ll be taking my wagon,” Jabil says.
Moving to the front of the dollhouse, I hold the truss together on my own. Only now, looking at it from this angle, I see that it’s a smaller replica of the house I’m standing in—down to the picture window facing the meadow and the long pine table where I woke up to find Leora holding my hand. “Did you ask your uncle if you can ride with me, Jabil?” Try as I might, I can’t keep the derision from my voice. “I’d sure hate for you to get in trouble.”
Jabil looks like he wants to spit. Instead, he walks over to Leora. “Ready to go?”
She nods and says under her breath, “Don’t be rude,” before crossing the living room, and I am unable to tell if she’s talking to me or to him. Either way, I watch them go and then look back at the dollhouse, which I’m holding together like an idiot. The plastic windows on either side of the door resemble eyes, staring at me, trying to figure out what I’m hoping to accomplish. That’s just the thing: I don’t know myself.