| |
“I can’t,” I say, my voice louder and quicker, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Liar,” Lester says, pointing an angry finger at my face, “sinner, whore, murderer!”
“What—? How dare you—?”
“You claim not to know who you are,” he says, “so how would you know if it ain’t true?”
“I ... ” My mind reels, my brain throbs, but I could never the that confused. “It’s just not true; I know it in my heart.”
“Because yer know’d darned well who yer really is, and this is all some fancy hoax!”
“What?” My mind is crackling with confusion now, my heart pounding with fear. “What kind of person would—?” Something sparks in my memory, but I can’t quite place it; something nagging and familiar.
Lester just leans back and chuckles. “Sure, little miss innocent, yer don’t know a dang thing, do yer?”
“No, I really ... I really ... ” But as I think about it, flashes of images streak across my mind’s eye. I’m Amish, and I’m alone.
I’m alone.
I say, “My Daed’s gone,” bones chilling at the words as they tumble out of my mouth. “Whole family.”
“What’s yer surname then?”
I think hard: Brooks? No. Banks? No, they found me on the riverbanks.
But I just shake my head and shrug, my brain throbbing even harder. Rubbing my temples does no good.
“Nice try,” Lester stays, crossing the shack for a brown jug. He pulls the cork, balances the jug on his elbow, then lifts his elbow to fill his mouth full of whatever’s in the jug. A bit of the clear liquid drips down his chin before he lowers the jug. He offers it to me, but I shake my head. “All right then,” he says, lowering the jug as if satisfied in some way.
Then, after a wordless exchange with his wife, Lester looks me squarely in the eye. I half-expect him to pull out a hunting knife and cut my throat. Instead, he has a different approach in mind.
“Name Bethany ring a bell?”
Bethany? I repeat silently, repeating it again several times as my heart beats faster and my blood runs warm again. “Yes, Bethany, that’s me, I’m Bethany!” Everything in my memory opens up now, a tide of images I can hardly withstand. “I’m Bethany Zook, from Smicksberg! And my Daed and I ... we ... ”
My blood runs cold again. I hear the scream before I can identify it as my own; but as soon as I do, I realize that I can’t stop screaming.
Miriam rushes over to me, saying, “Take it easy, sweetie, calm down!” as she guides me back to the bed and sits me down.
“Can’t you shut her up?” Lester says, “stuff a washcloth in her mouth or something?”
“We’ll do nothing of the kind,” Miriam says. At least, I think that’s what she says. I can barely hear anything beyond the shrill, throat-rending tear of my own wailing.
Finally, my heartbeat returns to normal, my mind slowing down, the images of the Westington mob fading, rifle shots and that long, terrible fall into the river.
I remember it all now.
They killed Daed and wanted to kill me.
I’m Bethany Zook.
And I was murdered.
***
I am wandering in a wheat field. I’m completely alone. Around me in every direction, the wheat field is like a golden ocean, the wind pushing little ripples along its grainy surface. The sun is warm against my skin, the breeze makes my plain dress flap idly against my legs. I walk on, in no particular direction and in no particular hurry.
I don’t think.
But there is a cold dread growing in my gut.
I keep walking, losing my balance a little bit. Where am I? I wonder. How long have I been here? My confusion only worries me more, and my growing fear feeds off that negative energy. I try to keep calm, reminding myself: For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
But even the words of Ephesians 2:8-9 can’t soothe me. And they don’t seem to offer very much in the way of direction either.
I hear sounds in the wheat around me, but I can’t make them out; crackling stems, the wind between the stalks? Not sure, can’t tell.
Mustn’t wait around to find out!
I keep walking, picking up the pace a bit. But I’m practically blind in the tall wheat, my surroundings blurring, tilting, and spinning. Am I going in the right direction? I have to ask myself. Have I wandered off? Am I lost?
Lost forever?
I start running now, my heart beating faster, sweat collecting along the ridge of my spine and dripping down my back. My legs start to pass each other even faster, pushing me through this golden haze. I clutch my plain cotton skirt, pulling it up to keep from tripping all over it.
I have the distinct feeling that something is chasing me, and getting closer.
Something ... or someone . . . dark and menacing
I glance behind me, but there’s nobody in pursuit, at least not that I can see. But the sounds are louder, and they’re everywhere. A black crow caws overhead, wheat cracking and breaking beneath my own frightened feet as I run.
Running for my life.
But this unending wheat field just seems to expand around me, impossibly big, and the thing behind me is getting closer fast, about to pounce.
I turn and look ahead, but I freeze with a quick panic, my legs stopping so abruptly that I nearly fall forward. Managing to stay on my feet, wrestling with my own panted breath, I look up at a tall man standing in the wheat right in front of me. He wears a white robe, and has a long, graying red beard growing from his craggy, sorrowful face.
We look at each other for a moment or two. I don’t recognize him, but he is the one to ask, “Who are you?”
I have to think about it for a second, then for a moment. Then that moment stretches on in front of me, around me, within me. I’m struck cold with a devastating nervousness.
I don’t have any idea who I am.
Seeming to realize this, the man asks me further, “Quo Vadis?” I tilt my head to express my confusion. Clarifying, he asks, “Where are you going?”
I stand in the echo of his question. It beguiles me, because even though I cannot answer his first question, I can answer the second. I may not know who I am, but for some strange reason I know exactly where I’m going. Without even giving it a second thought, I raise my arm and point west.
And where there’d been nothing before, just the expanse of golden wheat, there is now a stunning purple mountain rising up, and a golden city on its pinnacle. I point to the city on the hill.
But the old man shakes his head, raising his own arm to point in East. I follow his finger, but I don’t see anything, no other mountain or opposing city. Confused, I turn to ask the old man to explain, but he isn’t there anymore.
I’m alone again.
No, I realize, not alone.
I take a step and I hear it; the lion’s roar. It’s loud and long, strained and scary, ringing loud and near from the tall wheat around me. It sends a ripple of frightened shock through my body and I freeze.
I take another step and another lion’s roar bursts out unseen, this time a male lion with a low, thunderous growl.
I’m frozen where I stand, but I can turn enough to see the tips of two lions’ tails peaking up from the wheat, brown tufts at their ends. They’re only a few yards from one another, and just a few yards from me.
And they’re getting closer fast.
I back up, but another lion’s scream hits me from behind. I spin around to see another tail approaching, flicking as its unseen master stalks me, closing in for the kill. A few yards to the left another tail appears out of the wheat, and still another just a few feet behind that one.
I turn, looking for an escape, but the lions are closing in from every direction now; tails pulling down, wheat snapping and falling in trails that are leading directly to me.
“But the Lord stood by me and strengthened me, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed and all the Gentiles might hear it. So I was rescued from the lion's mouth,” I mutter.
But the words of 2 Timothy 4:17 won’t stop the beasts, and one of them screams to the others, a signal for the final assault. That blood-curdling wail echoes in my heart, nearly stopping it cold, and I can feel a shift in the ground as the several heavy beasts launch themselves.
Be sober, Peter 5:8 reminds me, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.
They appear like a flash out of the wheat, white teeth and black muzzles, paws reaching out with curved claws.
“Who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions ... ”
Their screams deafen me as their heavy bodies push me to the ground.
***
After recalling who I am, and everything that had happened to me, I’d passed out. And when I return Lester is waiting for me. Not to be outflanked by his wife again, Lester is hovering nearby, watching me as he smokes a foul-smelling pipe that’s filled with something rotting and probably animal in nature.
After Miriam brings me some hot tea in a metal cup, which is surprisingly hearty and invigorating, I look up at Lester and he down at me. He’s waiting, but I’m not.
Not anymore.
I tell him my story, everything from Margaret’s death to the present day, as much as I recall it. Those things which are foggy in my memory get clearer and clearer the more I think about them, recall them, explain them. Lester is calm and precise in his questions, like he half-believes me.
It’s the other half I’m increasingly worried about.
“First of all, I know’d yer all big into Jesus and thems, but I don’t want yer spreadin’ no more o’ that Bible nonsense around my family, git me?” I search my memory for precisely what I might have said, and I recall talking to Miriam about prayer. “Don’t sit there like some halfwit; you know what I’m talking about. Yer can think what ‘cher want, but don’t you be fillin’ my family’s heads with it!”
I nod. “It’s your family,” I say, “your rules—”
“Dang right it is!” Lester sighs, the smell of his rotting teeth filling the air in front of me.
“Well, if you let me go,” I say meekly, “you won’t have to worry about me saying anything to them about it ... by accident, I mean.” But his hateful glare warns me that I better not have any accidents of the sort.
“Thing is, you and yer pa’re actually quite ... well, I don’t wanna say famous, but yer all over the news, turns out.”
“We are?”
“Sure, big dust up. Y’all’re bone fide missing persons, no two ways about it.”
“Well, um, great, that’s great news!” Praise God, I think silently, I knew you’d not forsake me! The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil, I repeat, from Psalm 121: 7-8, he shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.
But to Lester, I say, “Wow, Lester, look, that is great news. And I am so grateful for everything your family has done for me, I can’t tell you.”
“Ain’t gotta,” Lester says.
I look at Miriam and the boys, who don’t seem nearly as happy about all this as I feel. And that gives me a creeping suspicion that there is a lot more to be revealed.
I only have to say, “What, what is it?” before their guilty, suspicious stares reveal that I’m too right.
Lester says, “You heard about these lyin’ sons of rascals, goin’ round pretending to be Amish, right?”
I have, and I recognize this. “The people in Westington said the same thing,” I say, “but they knew all along that they were the real criminals. They worst they suspected us of being ... was FBI or, what was it, DOA?”
“DEA,” Lester says. “I was thinking maybe IRS.”
I shake my head, but still can’t quite get my head around what he’s saying. “See, I got ... issues with the government,” Lester says. “I gotta be wary of anybody comes pokin’ around my life I don’t know. Right?”
My fear wells and subsides, confused by my shifting situation. “Oh, well, look, I’m not from the IRS, I’m Amish! We don’t even pay taxes!”
“And that’d make it the perfect cover, wouldn’t it?”
“Well, no, it wouldn’t,” I have to say after giving it a little thought. I also don’t like where this is going. And the more I recall about myself, the more I’m reminded that I don’t like to be bullied. Though I do recall it’d be best if I learned to be a little savvier about the way I deal with it.
I say, “It’s ... I’m not spying on you! You found me, isn’t that what you said?”
“I said it,” Lester snaps at me, “and it’s every word true! Unlike the feeble stories you tell.” I cannot answer, and I do not have to. He goes on, “Yer tellin’ me you fell from the top of a cliff into that water? Ain’t no point less’n five hundred feet off those cliffs and just about any point in that river.”
“God was protecting me,” I say.
“Don’t you blaspheme in my house,” Lester snaps back.
“Look, I don’t know,” I say. “I guess I landed in a deep part of the river, didn’t drown because I was drifting on my back.” He sneers at me, unconvinced. So I add, “You found me, not the other way around! How could I know that would happen, or what you’d do with me? And don’t you think if I were some government spy that there’d be others nearby? You think they’d just leave one of their own people in some shack for ... um, how long has it been?”
“Three weeks,” Lester says with a slow blink of his eye, unimpressed with my efforts to turn this around. “Anyway, yer right about all that. Turns out yer no kinda agent, way too young. What’re you, sixteen?”
“Then ... why can’t you take me to Smicksberg? You can drop me off outside of town and I can walk in alone.”
“Maybe, if you could walk, which you can’t.”
“So put me on a horse, we’ll send it back, I promise!”
“Ain’t got n’a horse!”
“Oh, come on,” I say, my voice getting louder, higher pitched, more frightened. But my confusion pushes me past the point of caring. I know they think I’m afraid.
I am afraid. But who else other than an innocent person would be?
I say, “Look, those people in Westington, they’re very dangerous, they tried to murder me, like I told you!”
“I know you told us that.”
“Well, I haven’t lied about anything else, have I?”
Lester shrugs. “Not that we know’d fer sure.”
“Well, what do you think? Look at me, I’m not dangerous, I’m no criminal. I’m a frightened, lost young woman, an orphan now. Can’t you find it in your hearts to help me?” They linger in the long, considered silence. I add, “Please! My Daed is back there. He might even be alive! We have to get to help so they can go find him and get him out of there!”
“If those Westington folks is all you say they is, what makes you think yer pops’s still kicking?”
“I ... I don’t know, not for sure. But if there’s even a chance—”
“The chance is a lot bigger for me than for you, honey.”
“No, it’s not! This is a human life we’re talking about! So what if you don’t pay your taxes? You’ll work something out!”
“Sure, me dyin’ behind bars. I got boys to raise, can’t you see that?”
“And I don’t want to intrude upon that, I really don’t! Can’t you just get me close enough to town, somebody’ll find me? Drop me off and I’ll wait a few hours so you can get safely away. I’ll tell everyone I’ve been foraging, sleeping in a hollow log—”
“You think they’ll believe that?”
“They’ll believe it if I tell them! And if you help me get home and save my father, I’ll tell them anything you want!”
Lester nods slowly, chewing his own tongue as Miriam shakes her head. Lester says, “See, now, that’s the kind of thing a cold-hearted lying murder like yourself would say.”
“What? How can you—?”
“You just admitted you’d say anything you had to, that you can get people to believe your satanic lies, just because yer so pretty and baby-faced and yer goodie-goodie fake Amish nonsense! You’re a two-faced lying murderer and yer gonna pay fer yer sins, child ... starting right now!”
Miriam screams out, “No, Lester, don’t!”
Lester grabs his Springfield rifle from one corner of the shack and, in a flash, has it cocked and pointed right at me.
Miriam shouts, “Please, Lester!”
But Lester’s murderous attention is fixed on me. “Now you tell me the truth!”
My blood is cold, my limbs numb. I sit, barely able to speak, much less run or defend myself. I know I’m only a hair’s breadth away from being killed. And all I can do is say, “I did tell you the truth!”
“Lying harlot! Godless slut!”
“Why would you call me that? Why would you think that?”
“What kind of a person would murder an innocent old Amish woman in her bed, usurp her family, carry on like the child-bride of the devil himself?”
I can barely answer him, and the only thing I can offer is another question. But there is no question big enough, no single answer to unwind this horrible riddle.
Or is there?
Finally, Lester explains, “The name Sarah Zook ring a bell?”
“Yes,” I say softly but without any pause or doubt. “Yes, she’s my aunt. We were on our way to live with her in Somerset, but—”
“But you decided to murder her first?”
“Stop saying that!”
“Well, you didn’t do it personally,” Lester says. “You played your part out here, while your so-called Daed went up to Somerset and did the deed. Pretty convenient, him being disappeared and stone dead and all ‘at. He’s out d’ere now, something else I gotta worry about, plus there’s you. Maybe you have an escape, or I march you back into town personally, you pin the whole murder on me. Then you meet up with him and make off with the goods.”
“What goods? My aunt doesn’t have anything worth stealing.”
Oh no, I think, not Aunt Sarah too! God, why?
But I say, “No, that’s not true! Why would we kill my aunt?”
“‘Cause she ain’t ‘cher aunt! Are we still playing this game? Yer no more Amish’n I am. We’ve heard about you Westington types, now we finally caught one o’ya.” I sit terrified, my body shaking at the end of that rifle. There’s no convincing this man, not now. I’m so horrified by the news of Aunt Sarah’s death that I can hardly collect myself to try to convince him of anything.
But I know it must have been somebody in Westington. “We told them about her,” I say as I work it out, “they knew we were expected. After they killed Daed and thought I was dead, they knew they had to silence her or she’d bring in a whole investigation looking for us.”
“And how you figure they made it look like you did it?” Lester asks me.
“Well, you said it yourself. It’s pretty convenient, with Daed being disappeared and all. This way we’re the guilty ones, no matter what. Least this way we’re not the victims, and nobody’s looking for anyone who might have buried us in some nearby woods.”
Lester, Miriam and the boys look at me as a silent shroud falls over me. Lester doubts, but at least I feel that he’s not certain of my guilt, and that’s something. Trapped out here with them, at the mercy of that rifle and of Lester’s angry judgment, that’s all I’ve got to keep me alive.
