1. The day before she meets Amos, Rebecca has one of her spells. She is in the creamery beside the milk house when the world draws itself into her, slows, sharpens. Her body tingles deliciously. She can savor everything, every smudge on the sun-lit glass, every glisten on mounds of butter on the table, even the tiny hairs on her sister’s cheeks moving in the wind as she churns. And there it is, the warm and irrepressible smell of cut grass rising and circling around her, even though it is November, and the yard is full of a crusted snow and, under that, hard mud.
Bliss. Frölich pfleg ich zu singen Wenn ich solche Freud betrach, she thinks, a line from a hymn she’d forgotten for months, since the last time they sang it at the service at the Yoders’. Bliss, it means: Joyful, I take to singing when I behold such bliss.
Hearing the whisper, her sister turns toward her, slowly. Slowly reaches out her hands and catches Rebecca as she tips forward and closes her eyes. Brushes Rebecca’s dark blonde hair from her beating temples until she knows she isn’t going to slip into a seizure. Then the warm lips on Rebecca’s temple, and the cool floor on her shoulders.
When Rebecca opens her eyes, there they are around her, her father with his suspenders and beard, her mother’s spectacles fogged by the cold, her littlest sister in her starched prayer-veil, sucking her little finger with wonder. When her two brothers rush in from the barn, filthy with horse-muck, excitable, a goose steals in with them and pecks at her shoes. Rebecca closes her eyes again with pleasure. They are all around her. She is warm in the circle of her family; she is not alone, not now.
2. She is the axis of wheels spinning within further wheels: her bed a clockwise turn, the house counterclockwise, her community clockwise again. Her whole town, her whole county spins in its own anachronism, a throwback within the wider world. They wear the 18th century on their backs while the rest of the world has spun almost halfway into the bad 20th, and Rebecca has no vocabulary for the times. Her world has not just been at war, horrors have not been perpetrated before her; she knows nothing of any of this. For Rebecca, there is what there has always been, the music woven of voices, the steam from the cows’ breath as the girls open the barn doors in the frosted morning. There are starlings and apples and fields, pies and children, butter and starlight, a rainbow in a dewdrop on one broken stalk of barley.
3. If she never had a spell that day, perhaps she never would have considered Amos. True, there is something about him, and he would pay her a lot of attention, and she is as vain as an Amish girl can be, which isn’t really very vain at all. But she would have considered and rejected him if she hadn’t had her spell of the day before. These spells are private and golden, and she treasures each one, collecting them. She takes them more seriously even than the dark, warm farmhouse where her family sleeps that night. More seriously than the ghosts she sometimes sees passing through the walls of her house after her spells, dear ancestors meaning no harm, she knows. More seriously than her own skin, which she makes shiver now, just barely touching the fabric of her nightdress as it just barely touches her, up and down the long length of her body, hands gliding under the sheet, for hours, as her sisters breathe in their sleep beside her.
4. Rebecca is a good girl. Her father thinks this, looking at her working the bread dough in the kitchen the next morning. He shouldn’t have favorites; it is a sin not to love his children equally; but she is pretty, a strange trait in this family of thick people with huge chins, and tall like her mother, and kind. But not sugary, unlike some of those simpering girls her age. She has a streak of naughtiness that always makes her smile to herself, as she is smiling right now, privately, over something that amuses her alone. A little queer, a little touched in the head, the jealous ones say, because of her spells. But her spells only make her quicker and brighter, her father thinks fiercely. She will make a wonderful wife, a leader of the community. Of all his children, Rebecca will be the one who will make him proudest.
“Rebecca,” he says in the Deutsch they speak, “You are a good girl.” And she turns to him with her slow smile and green eyes, and throws a little ball of bread-dough at him, playful as a kitten.
5. The next afternoon is warmish, after a thaw, but bright. There is a skin of ice over the puddles. Frozen mud, glossy crows falling into the field. Her prayer veil askew, Rebecca, chasing her sisters and brothers back from the school where she teaches the children until grade eight, when they stop school and work all day on their farms.
There is that devastating smile on her face, her hair like spun gold, her high voice singing a church song so loud, so joyful, she is sure it is a vanity. The muddy hem of her skirt. The dazzle by the road: the Stoltzfus greenhouses, all cold glass, sunbright.
Rebecca drops behind her brothers to stay with her sisters. She grabs their hands, and together the three girls leap the fence into the road, blooming, pink. Ahead, the boys hurdle piles of manure in the road.
Amos is working at the end of the greenhouse. He is strong, with the shoulders of a bull, strong jaw, strong features just short of handsome. He sees her coming. He stops breathing. The fern in his hand swings, scattering dirt on the floor, and around him, heat, lush green, the carnations’ sticky smell, droplets of water coursing down the window.
Rebecca in the frozen road doesn’t see him. How avid he is, how he watches her, how he turns, blindly, walking beside her and her sisters down the length of glass. On his side, steam and heat, and Amos wades down the aisles of forced Easter lilies, the orchids, the daisies, beside Rebecca as she strides outside in the cold. And when Amos reaches the end of the greenhouse, Rebecca keeps walking, and he is left at the end of the glass, fern shaking in his hand. Ten feet down the road, she feels his eyes and turns around. Sees his one hand pressed to the moist glass, and feels the heat come to her cheeks. She gives him a small smile, and turns back to her sisters. Amos watches Rebecca walk until she fades out of sight, and continues to watch, even when she’s gone.
6. It takes a week of these looks, and then, during a light snowstorm, Rebecca steals back out over the drifts and cuts through the fields to the greenhouses. Amos is inside, repotting some Christmas cactuses with delicate purple blooms. Most of the other greenhouse workers are on a trip to Florida to pick up the Christmas poinsettias, and so he is alone. She stands outside the window watching his broad shoulders and the delicate movements of his hands, and then gives a little tap. She is smiling when he looks up, startled.
It takes him less than ten seconds to fly through the greenhouse and come out to where she is. And she scolds him in Deutsch to go back inside and get his coat. “Silly,” she says, laughing. “Don’t you know you’ll freeze to death on our walk without a jacket?”
Though he has long made a vow to never speak Deutsch again if he can help it, Amos finds himself walking through the fields with this pretty, tall girl in her purewhite prayer veil, his mouth chattering so fast his mind can’t catch up. “The weather,” he says. “It is lovely, is it not?” When she doesn’t answer, just slides a sideways look at him through her eyelashes, he stops speaking abruptly, furious with himself, and Rebecca doesn’t seem to mind. She keeps walking, patting the stone fence with her mitten, the hem of her dress sweeping the snow from the weeds.
At last, she gives a cry, and points up the field, beaming. He squints to see, and laughs: It is only a large bunch of deer. Common, especially in these fields near the woods. But then he looks harder, and sees how they look frosted, how there are dozens of them, maybe hundreds, most hidden, all feeding in the drifts, in the sifting snow. He looks at Rebecca, how she is watching them, rapt. He can’t help it, he leans forward to kiss her.
She swats him with her mitten, and snow sticks to his cheek. She is frowning and he flushes. But a change comes over her face, and she looks amused. She leans forward and gives him two soft kisses at the corners of his mouth. Draws her head back, looks at him for a few breaths. Places one long kiss in the center of his lips, and he can feel the sharp edge of her front teeth on his lip. Her breath tastes sharp, of the sweets she eats all day, the sugar that will someday rot her teeth. She laughs and turns and keeps walking, straight into the masses of deer, and they let her, they raise their heads and watch, tense, but still.
It is only when Amos can find his legs and run after her that the deer turn their elegant heads and disdainfully spring across the field. Amos can’t blame them; he wants to do the same, take to his feet, float over the banks. Float.
Part Two
7. Er es ganz ab, the old-order Amish in Blue Ball say about Amos Esch. He is crazy. During his Rumm-Schpringa, the traditional time of exploration at sixteen years old, he hitchhiked one day to Lancaster City. The convertible that picked him up was driven by a drunk college boy with a drunk friend. They took Amos to a bar, thinking it a hoot to get the Amish kid soused, and Amos drank and was intoxicated, not just by the alcohol, but also by the jukebox with its strange, pulsing music, the instruments, the beat. The tight and glossy clothes on the girls that showed their breasts. Amos could see the breasts clearly, could feel them pressed against him when he danced — danced! — with them. The girls, the curl of cigarette smoke over their upper lips, their hips, their heavenly scents. Oh, the girls.
The boys left him in a field five miles from home. As a parting gift, they gave him the denim jacket he had borrowed all night, plus a titillating Dipsy Doodle calendar two years out of date that they found under a seat. On the walk home, he played with the buttons on the jacket, stopped in the middle of the road to gawp at Miss Dipsy Doodle, January 1944.
He stank of whiskey when he came in the door but felt his head was clear. Everything around him seemed small, even dirty, though his mother was redoubtable with her broom. All he could smell was the hens’ stink, the cheese ripening in the cellar. Because Amos couldn’t sleep, he sat at the kitchen table, near a guttering candle. He looked at the rear of Miss Dipsy Doodle, August 1944, and that’s how his mother found him in the morning, his forehead stuck on the indecently exposed thighs of a redhead.
Amos, Amos, she shrieked, batting at him with her broom, and the whole house rushed down then, and his brothers, his father, all circled him, his brothers flushing bright when they saw the calendar blonde.
Amos looked up, blinking. And that’s when he told them, quite calmly, “I am leaving.” For a moment, they gazed down at him, mouths agape, frozen. He, the eldest son, the eldest boy, not handsome, no, but harder than his family, the lone Esch in three generations, who could castrate a calf without blinking. This was entirely unexpected. His father smacked him a good one. Amos’s cheek bloomed red. And that was that. Amos was shunned.
His community in Blue Ball reassured itself that he’d been a good boy until that night, but the drink did him in. When Amos left, he took nothing with him but the clothes on his back. And, on his forehead, the tantalizing pubic triangle of thighs and hotpants, transferred to his skin with his sweat and weight of his head.
He was lucky, they said, that Stoltzfus was hiring, and luckier that Stoltzfus, too, knew what it was like to leave the fold. Amos would have been back in a week had he not found that job, they said. He was not cut out for English life.
But the truth, as usual, is not what they said it was, not exactly. Amos’ departure had been cooking in him since he had, at seven years old, accompanied his father to Philadelphia in the middle of the night to deliver three sides of beef to a restaurant. And when he found himself in the hue and folly, the great surge of energy with its zip of speeding, blaring cars, in the colors and the beautiful girls, that’s when Amos decided. Not at sixteen. At seven.
Only Amos ever knew this. Only Amos knows, too, that there was one time when he was ten that he approached a group of Englischers picnicking at the end of his family’s horse pasture. The group lolled in the grass, took pictures with their cameras, ate from nifty little boxes, laughed like fools. Their car was cream and tan. Little Amos went up to them and, in English he’d been practicing in secret for three years, asked them to take him with them. They looked at the earnest blond boy, so hungry, and they almost said yes.
Now, here he is, twenty years old. Proud owner of a 1945 Pontiac Silver Streak, one of the first postwar models, firecracker red. He is the heartthrob of the naughtiest Anabaptist girls around, though nobody from his old community ever will speak to him.
At night, he does one of two things. He either eats a cold dinner from a can at the kitchen table of the rented house where he lives, or goes to play poker and drink whiskey from the jovial Englischers who also work at the greenhouse.
8. It is February and Rebecca loves how serious Amos’ face becomes when he speaks English, though she doesn’t yet understand a word. She loves the red car he has saved three years to buy, the gloss and chrome, how forbidden it is, though she has not yet had the courage to climb inside. She loves how, as the snow melts and dusk falls later and later, he brings her into the greenhouse and steals a carnation for her that wilts even before she comes home and that she feeds to her favorite sheep; she loves the warm smell of the greenhouse, the smell of deep summer, the way her skin feels fresher when she leaves. She loves how he looks starved before she knocks on the glass and he looks up, and how sated he looks after he sees her. She loves the warm rush in her belly and groin when she sees him working without knowing she is watching him. She loves the idea of him in his cold, rented house down the lane from the greenhouse where, it is unspoken, but he won’t take her, not yet, and she loves the thought of him thinking of her all night as he sits alone in the brightness of his electric lights. She loves the buttons on his jeans. As spring draws nearer and the geese come honking back overhead, she loves it, loves him, loves the soggy fields, has never looked so pretty in her life.
The Yoder boy begins to tell her how interesting it would be to marry her, tentatively. Bring together their two wealthy, good, old families. She compares the Yoder boy — pimply, good, boring — to Amos — strong, plain, thrilling — and even the comparison, like gruel to blackberries, makes her laugh.
“Amos,” she says. “Do you miss your family?”
“Rebecca,” he says, warning in his face, “I am an Englischer, now. I will never be Amish again.”
And she laughs, and says, oh, yes, she knows. He will be back, she thinks. Already, only four months into their courtship, and he has told her how he sometimes slips under the window of his parents’ house and listens to his father give the grace before supper. How he once walked through the barn, kissing each cow that he knew well from his childhood, and wept when he found one gone, the oldest Jersey in the barn. He tells her these stories, and she thinks she knows he will be back. For her, if not for anyone else. And they will marry.
9. Happy. She is happy. She is so happy that the tiny wraith-ghost of a young ancestor who was killed by a kick from a cow sometimes comes near her, pulled to her happiness. The little ghost sometimes wails in the cowbarn and frightens the cows. One day, Rebecca looks up at this ghost that only she can see or hear and puts a finger to her lips. It shuts him up, makes him spin, makes him disappear. The milk no longer curdles in the udders. Her sisters laugh at Rebecca’s outlandish boast, but are secretly delighted.
10. Rebecca has agreed to it, and so she goes. Now, her trembling limbs, now her sisters’ even breath, up she goes, ghostly, nightgowned, patter down the wood steps, out she slips, the grass burning her feet with cold. The red car glinting down the road under a hassock. A good girl, still. But with this click of the door, a sweet slide, she’s gone bad. Warmth of Amos, his Englischer soap, she breathes it in, all his musk and wintergreen. Her hands on his face, shaved clean — she marvels — like a boy, not like a man — all the men she knows have beards, all are married. His rough hands on her skin. Her tongue on the zipper of his jacket, tasting the small metal teeth, delighting in the prohibited. His hands on the long, warm slide of her legs, under her nightgown. She feels the hard muscles of his back as they move under her palm. The leather of his seats like warm bare skin on her skin. He, a warm bird in her hand. Her brain detaches, flies up into the branches, watches from above. She doesn’t know it is supposed to hurt. It never hurts; if it had, she would have remembered it was a sin.
After, she can’t help it. She laughs. He strokes her hair, feels her so small on his chest. When she has stopped laughing, he confesses: He can’t not, it pours from him, an upwelling.
“Rebecca,” he says. “You were not my first. There were others. But not like you, nobody like you.”
So stupid: What has he done? Her little face pales now in the moonlight. She is hurt. She slips from his hands before he can stop her, and she is gone.
All the next evening, he waits for her, and she doesn’t come. He shivers in the car, sees the frost slowly brocade the windows. He is frantic with sorrow, ponders slipping into her house, grabbing her up, stealing her away, his hand clasped against her mouth. He thinks of the sure squeak of the floorboards, her light bones in his arms. He rests his head against the wheel.
Then the door clicks, and it is Rebecca in her nightgown, a blast of cold. She in his arms again, shivering, and he can feel her eyes blink against his shirt on his chest. He sees her laugh, and he presses her to him with wonder. He is forgiven. And how can she be so good to forgive him? He tries to ask her, but she slides a hand over his mouth, and it smells of soap and dishwater and yeast from the bread she baked that day, and he says nothing at all.
11. All day now, every day now, it is spring. She feels as if she is in one of her spells all day, every day. That one song from the Ausbund, the Anabaptist hymnal, circling in her head as if sung by her own tiny a cappella choir up there; Frölich pfleg ich zu singen Wenn ich solche Freud betrach, they sing, over and over and over.
Frölich pfleg ich zu singen.
Zu singen Wenn ich solche Freud.
Solche Freud. Freud. Freud.
Bliss.
12. The mornings now, as Rebecca washes before awakening her sisters and brothers, before the morning bustle and roar, her body feels light and boneless under her hands.
13. Then the day comes. Rebecca arranging the pork chops on the platter for dinner, the men coming in from the field from a long morning of sowing, ready for food and a nap before the afternoon work. She had just run inside, after having briefly run outside, after having felt nauseated, after having vomited in the orchard. Every day now, she is vomiting. It would be easy to understand, if she allowed herself such thoughts. But she doesn’t. No thoughts. No questions. She is not stupid, but she is young. Sixteen.
Her mother comes behind her, puts her strong hands on Rebecca’s hips. Rebecca’s sisters in the house across the yard, laying the table, laughing at some joke. Her mother turns her around. Pressing Rebecca against the pie cupboard with her own long, thin body, Rebecca’s mother takes her daughter’s face in her hands, and squeezes her face up to her daughter’s. Her spectacles are spotted, and behind them, her eyes are stern and filling. She doesn’t blink. The eyes overfill, the glasses catch the liquid and hold them against the cheeks, and still she holds herself there, mother’s mouth on daughter’s mouth. Nose on nose. Like this, she holds her daughter against the pie cupboard until she forces the knowledge into Rebecca’s eyes with her own, until the men clamber into the mudroom across the yard, knocking the rich mud off their boots, and her mother releases her, wipes her eyes with her apron, commands the men to wash their hands at the pump, and eat, eat, eat.
Rebecca stands in the summer kitchen, twisting her own apron in her hands. The trees have frilled themselves out like primping maidens, but Rebecca couldn’t see a thing.
14. Before she tells Amos, she has a vision of the worst that he could do. Make a sudden, ugly face at her, ugly as a pig. Turn his back. Slide out the car, and open her door. Wait until she climbs out, then shut it, go back into his side. Turn on the car, and drive off, leaving her there to watch the red car in the moonlight glistening as it pulls away.
15. She slides into his car and immediately says, in English that she has practiced all day, “Amos, I am with child.”
He looks at her, blinking for one second. And then kisses her full on the mouth, slides out of the car, and dances so wildly in the moonlight there that she shrieks. She is shaking with laughter when he comes back into the car and tells her his plan.
“I will pick you up tomorrow at noon,” he says, in English. She has begun to understand the language, but cocks her head, unsure.
“You…” she trails off.
“I will pick you up and we will go to Lancaster City and I will take you to the judge and we will be married. You will come home with me. We will be married! Tomorrow. Oh, Rebecca, how you have made me happy.”
“I,” she says sliding back into her tongue. “But. We will not wait? To be married in church? You will not come back?”
Amos frowns and sighs a little impatiently. “Oh Rebecca,” he says. “I am Englischer now. You will be Englischer tomorrow. I cannot go back. As my wife you will have to turn your back on the Amish.”
She feels herself a fool. She had assumed he would come back with her. But, no. She considers herself brave, but has never considered this.
Amos is speaking to her softly now, “Oh, Rebecca,” he says. “This is very difficult for you, isn’t it. This will be very hard. But don’t worry, don’t worry. I will be there for you. You will have me. I will be enough for you.”
“You,” she says. “Yes. You will be enough.”
And though for the rest of the night, Amos speaks wildly, of the washing machine that he is going to buy for her and the telephone he will have installed and the child’s name and the trousseau he’ll buy for her, she can’t listen.
She thinks of how, tomorrow, her sisters will lie down in bed, and she won’t be there to lie down beside them.
“Rebecca,” says Amos when he kisses her just before dawn, when she climbs out of the car to run back inside and upstairs. “Today will be hard for you, I know. But we will be so happy together, we will be so happy.”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “It will be hard but good. I know.”
Part Three
16. When she tells her father that morning, he is tying his boot, ready to go back to the cornfields. He does not look up. He brushes away the arms she throws passionately around his shoulders, he turns away. Only his beard, quivering, shows what he feels now as he walks toward the barn. Ever after today, only the slump in his shoulders.
17. This is shunning: When Rebecca comes downstairs, the bundle of clothing in her arms, her mother is scrubbing silverware. Her sisters are hanging sheets so they glow in the sun like lanterns. Her brothers are shoveling manure as quickly as they can, flinging shovelfuls onto the garden. Her father has his face buried in the warm flank of a cow, breathing in the good cow smell.
When Amos pulls up in the red car and makes a tiny, respectful honk, Rebecca turns, looking to say goodbye. Nobody looks at her. Only her littlest sister runs out onto the porch and wails, grabbing Rebecca’s leg, not understanding. “Nein, nein,” she screams as Rebecca kisses her, pulls her arms away, whispers in her ear.
Rebecca walks away and slides into the car. And when she turns around in Amos’ front seat and watches the large farmhouse grow smaller and disappear down the dirt road, her family is studying things they never thought they would study. The older sisters are looking at the even weave of the sheets, the hairlike shadows of the threads. Her brothers are staring down at the intricate design of the tender beanplants in the soil. Her father sees how each follicle in the cow’s hide hosts multiple hairs. Her mother sees nothing but red, having closed her eyes and turned her face to the sun.
18. The trousseau of Rebecca Esch (née Beiler)
All purchased in the afternoon of August 13, 1946 at The Lovely Lady department store in Lancaster City, half a block from City Hall. The groom picked everything. The bride stood in a corner of the store, her hands before her burning face, looking at the thin bars of light and dark before her eyes.
1 crystal honeybee brooch with nifty wings that flap as the wearer breathes.
1 pr. red 4-inch high-heeled shoes
3 crêpe-de-chine skirts with rows of pearl buttons; 1 brown, 1 navy, 1 black
2 gauze shirts; 1 yellow, 1 white, 1 pink
2 nightgowns (red lace)
3 slips (white silk)
3 pr. brassieres, silk and lace, 1 black, 1 white, 1 pink
4 pr. lace underwear, 2 black, 1 pink, 1 white
5 pr. silk stockings, with garters and a belt
19. It is the first night away from her family and Rebecca cannot sleep. First, because Amos is in the bed with her, and because she has both too much room and too little. The bed is large, and there are two, not four people, but because Amos is used to sleeping alone, he spreads his limbs out. And the house. The strange furniture with its ugly colors, the puce greens, the sickly yellows. The teaspill waterstain on the ceiling above the bed. The radio with the frightening music, all horns and drums, instruments Rebecca has never before heard. The electric lights. The plumbing. The house seems cold, without the requisite ghosts. So, Rebecca sits outside on the old swing in the oak and tries to think through her marriage day. She sits there all night. She is determined not to cry.
The sky lightens with dawn, and she is there, shivering a little, when Amos comes out to find her in the morning.
He kneels down before her, and takes her around the waist. He buries his head in her lap. “I woke up,” he says, with his mouth moving warmly on her leg, “and you weren’t there. I thought you were gone.”
“Were you sad?” she says.
“Terribly,” he says. “It was the worst feeling of my life.” And he smiles at her gently, and leads her inside, and sits at the table watching her as she makes his breakfast.
“Rebecca,” he says. “It will become easier.”
“Yes. So I hope,” she says, and then she has to turn away.
20. One day, in Lancaster City, Rebecca sees Amos without him seeing her. She is buying fabric for the baby clothes, comes from the store with her arms full of softness. He is on the streetcorner, looking over the top of a newspaper, staring at a clump of girls. They are laughing loudly, sausage-curls in their hair, lips red as his car. They are breathing smoke, cigarette smoke licking up from their lips toward their noses like extra tongues. They are showing off for the muscled, gawking boy. Rebecca, arms full of softness, steps on Amos’ toe as she passes him, and the girls giggle their smoky red giggles.
21. The end of August, and she is busy, busy, fresh raspberry pie from the brambles by the woods, painting the walls of the little cottage, banishing the waterstains under a thin wash, stitching curtains, stitching baby clothes with ant-print stitches, ironing diapers. She pauses over the board, weak for the moment, patting sweat from her forehead. The weakness passes. She picks the iron up again. No time, and the baby is kicking, and she feels herself a human drum.
It is late before Amos comes home, almost dark. He is taking more time at the greenhouse, counting the money under the bed, ridges creased in his forehead. Rebecca watches him worry, rubbing her swollen feet. She does not think of her family; she would not stick a hand in a fire. On weekends, she closes the door and tries on the clothing Amos bought her on their wedding day. She can still fit, but barely.
When Amos comes home, he finds her in the kitchen fanning herself with a teatowel, staring out the window, but she is frowning. He is startled: Rebecca does not frown. He buys her a sow the next day, brings the sow home with a bow on her neck, the fine black and white beast with the gentle eyes. Rebecca claps her hands, and dances in the drought-crisp grass in the front yard, throws her arms around Amos, and then the beast, and then Amos again.
She says, “You bought me a friend!” And Amos feels sad, he feels so sad, but he can only smile as she stands by the pigsty, patting the pig on her tough mottled hide.
22. September, and Rebecca learns how to drive, the red car bucking to Bird-In-Hand, the red car bucking back, Amos insisting, so she can drive to the hospital if he is at the greenhouse, and the baby begins its push into the world. Rebecca loves it, the power under her hands. At home, the broccoli and the tomatoes in the garden overwhelming, she puts them up, cans and cans and cans of tomatoes. And then come the zucchini, and she feeds the zucchini to the sow. Amos is taking more hours, Amos counting the money under the floorboard under the mattress, “Oh, Rebecca, I will buy you a week in the hospital in Lancaster City, you will see, the best for my child, modern hospitals!” And Rebecca cannot say no. She has no midwife, no mother, no sisters, and so she says yes, though she is privately dubious: the iodine stink, the cold tile at the hospital make her yearn after a visit, make her hungry, make her cut pies in the nighttime and stuff them piece by piece into her mouth. Amos’ face always dark now, always preoccupied. Amos, counting the money in the hot bedroom, resting his face on the pillow: It is not enough, it is never enough.
Unseasonable warmth at the end of September, and she saw her family from afar on Sunday going to church in the gray buggy, Zeke the gelding shaking his head at the bluebottle flies. She is fat as a gourd, about six months huge, and wearing an old Amish dress with its pins, standing in the garden, barefoot, busy, and, upon seeing her family in the buggy, going to church, she begins to smell fresh grass in the day. Goes inside to put a cold cloth on her face, to put her feet up, to keep the seizure at bay.
When Amos comes home, she is up, she has made bread and cold chicken and zucchini salad. She does not speak when he tells her of money. He wipes his mouth: The Englischers at the greenhouses, he says, are playing poker tonight. He has a good poker face, he says with great caution; he has never lost more money than he has won. It will be more money for the baby, he promises
“Money, money, money,” Rebecca thinks bitterly when Amos comes back in and kisses her at night, thinking she’s asleep. She smells the whiskey on his breath, the cigarette smoke in his clothes. All night, she aches in the belly, and is awake, furious, thinking of the party. The cigar smoke, the whiskey, the shadowy forms of women in the corners. With red lipstick. With their hair in curls. With their lips wrapped around their cigarettes. Oh, she has seen them, in the calendar under the oilcan in the barn near the garage; she saw Amos staring at them on the streetcorner. In her mind, Rebecca says terrible things to the women on the streetcorner, and they are in an English pure and clear.
There were no women at these parties, just half-drunk men, but Amos neglected to tell her. With no other women around, he forgets how jealous she is.
23. This was one of his co-worker’s ideas, an Englischer who is kind to Amos. The steakhouse that night, a party to introduce all the wives and girlfriends, because Amos had confided that he thought his little wife might be lonely. But the time their steaks are served, Amos can barely look at Rebecca, for pain; he can see the smile aching her cheeks, the way the conversation is lobbed so fast above her head that he sees her a child in a game of keep-away, grasping for the ball and never quite touching it. Without words, it seems she has no personality, her quiet cheer is lost in the noise and smoke. She is dull. The women have already given her all the pregnancy advice they have, and she has nodded and thanked them, and now they are talking amongst themselves, gossiping. One lady leans over to Amos and blows smoke from the corner of her mouth before speaking.
“What a dear little child your wife is,” she says. “So very pretty. Like the porcelain dolly I had when I was little. I just loved that doll.”
And though Amos thanks her, his stomach gives a little flutter. He wants nothing more than to move over to Rebecca, stand before her, shield her from those curious eyes, those mouths with their sharp, Englischer teeth. He catches his wife’s eye and holds it for a moment, and for a brief interlude, her smile loosens, becomes the slow and striking one he first saw on her face. But then she looks away from him, back down at the steak before her that glistens in its juices, a cut so thick she has barely tasted it.
24. October. Rebecca has nothing to do. The garden is dead. The house is as neat as she can make it. The baby clothes are done. She is a cow. Everything hurts.
One afternoon, she goes into town. To escape the chill in the air, the woodsmoke that makes her head spin, she enters a five-and-dime. The boy at the ice cream counter is so startled by her — a hugely pregnant girl in Amish garb but red stilettos — that he allows the soda to overrun the ice cream float and pool frothily on the floor. The little girl he was making it for spins around on her stool and gapes. An old woman, toothless, with a great ribbon in her hair, beams her pink gums at Rebecca and follows her around the store. Rebecca touches things — a wooden horse, a set of clothespins, a leather change-purse — and as she touches each good, the old woman nods and grins and babbles something.
At the perfume counter, the old woman reaches to touch Rebecca’s taut belly, and Rebecca looks away, takes a few steps backwards. But the old woman’s hands are firm, and she coos up into Rebecca’s face, and she allows those old hands to tremble on her navel for a moment.
But at last, Rebecca sees the way the matrons are whispering behind their hands and shooting amused glances at her, toe to crown. In her confusion, she goes to the counter to find something to buy and be able, at last, to leave, and discovers a pack of cigarettes in her hand.
“I take this,” she whispers to the cashier, a woman with grim lines etched beside her mouth. The woman takes Rebecca’s dollar, and presses the change back into her hand. All the way on the drive home, Rebecca can feel the firm push of the pads of the woman’s fingers on her hand, and is glad for the warmth.
At home, Rebecca sits on the sow’s trough and looks into the soft eyes and talks about the baby as she tries to smoke.
“Soon,” she says, in her guttural English. “Two months, he will be here soon.”
“He will be a boy,” she says, “A good, big, smart boy. I will call him Amos Jr. Amos the little. He will be my friend.”
“Soon,” she says, “the boy will be here, and I will not be alone.” The sow, at last bothered by the smoke, turns her back and wobbles away.
“I do not care if you do not care,” Rebecca calls out to her departing friend. “I will soon to not need you.” She flicks the lighter and stares at the circumflex of the barn roof, the way it accents the sky.
25. Late October, and the blackbirds thrown against sod. Frost shattering the dry cornstalks. Rebecca, staring out the window, nothing to do. Smoking now, all day. Amos, counting money on his Sundays, counting, recounting. He wants to weep. A child coming, and they have nothing. Nothing. A bare hundred dollars, no cushion, really, at all. Every time he looks at his wife, he feels as if his skin has become unbearably tender, as if there were nothing between it and the elements but the smallest breath of air. It makes Amos feel ill.
26. Late October, and Rebecca is listlessly wringing out the laundry when, here it is, the sudden glassiness to the day. Everything goes crystalline: the sheet in her hand, the slow zip of the fabric in the wringer, the suds. There, the upswelling of grass smell. Rebecca closes her eyes to it, opens herself to it.
It is nearly evening when she finds herself on the floor. Her head is wracked, she has soiled herself, her very bones feel bruised. The baby is beating her, hungry. She climbs slowly to the bedroom and washes herself. She puts herself to bed without eating.
When Amos comes in, to find the kitchen cold and there is a bolt in his gut. He runs upstairs, trailing mud from the roads behind him. When he sees Rebecca, a lump in the bedclothes, he takes off his own clothes. Slides in behind her. Holding her, he speaks into her neck, the warm, sour smell of her.
“Rebecca,” he says, “Meine boppli. My sweet. I know you are sad. I know you are sad. It is all right. It will be better, I promise. I am doing my best, and it will be better, and you will be happy. One of the men at work is getting married, and you will soon have a friend. It will be better.” On and on he talks into the small hairs at the nape of her neck. She doesn’t listen, she can’t. She lets Amos’s words wash over her, and she is not happy, not unhappy. She is nothing.
27. She does not get out of bed until November.
Part Four
28. November, a day she is feeling better. There has been some sun sliding itself through the windows like contraband recently, and it has inspired her to rise. Rebecca is up in this opaque morning, making Amos’ breakfast of gruel and ketchup. Amos comes downstairs and watches his wife moving slowly, heavily, seeming to pivot around the belly.
“Rebecca,” he says. “I have to tell you something.”
She looks at his face. She sits down, pot in hand. She doesn’t even reach for a cigarette. He takes this for encouragement, though it isn’t.
“Rebecca,” he says. “I was asked yesterday. One of the Englischers broke a wrist. I was asked to go on the annual poinsettia run. To Florida.”
“Florida,” she says.
“I said yes.”
“No,” she says.
“I must,” he says. “We have little money. The baby comes in a month. Mr. Stoltzfus, he will give us four hundred dollars. Four hundred, Rebecca. Four hundred dollars for little Amos Jr.”
“No,” she says again.
“I am sorry,” he says, and pulls from behind his back the blue cardboard suitcase he had bought once on a whim in Harrisburg when he was young and a spendthrift. “I have packed already. You do not need to pack for me. I will be gone only a week. I will be back before you know it. I am so sorry, but Mr. Stoltzfus, he has asked his wife already to come visit you every day. We will be fine. I will telephone, I have tested it yesterday, and it works. Think, Rebecca, four hundred dollars.”
“No,” she says, but he is already beside her. He kisses her gently on the head.
“I know this will be hard,” he says, “but you must be strong for our son.”
And then he is at the door. Through the door, cold blast in the kitchen. Down the lane, waving at the neighbor’s buggy clipping along. The Stoltzfus truck roars up, chugging in the lane, and Amos turns around, and sends Rebecca a kiss, and he leaps up into the truck, and then he is gone.
29. Rebecca is alone in the doorway of a cold house, at the end of a lane that gives onto a desolate field miles from her family who believe she is a breathing ghost, in a county filled with people whose disappointment scorches her every time they look at her. Alone, a speck, a nothing, in the cold morning. Her long hair comes unbound and falls across her shoulders, down her back, to her knees. Darker at the crown, dandelion blonde at the little-girl ends.
30. Oh, yes, she does her best, for five good days. She eats enough to make the baby happy, though she tastes nothing. She is scrupulously clean, although she can barely see the broom on the floor. She scrubs herself raw in the wintry mornings. She has taken to talking to herself aloud, mumbling more. Rebecca is seventeen years old, so Mrs. Stoltzfus must believe she is too young to visit. She never visits.
And then, slowly, others do. Not real ones. No.
They are beautiful, these girls. They have red lips, and smoke spills from their noses like bulls’ breath in a cold morning. They follow her around, mocking. They have holes where their eyes should be.
“Leave me be,” Rebecca sometimes says, and then looks up to realize she is alone, she has been alone, those girls were never in the room.
31. Day seven, and Amos calls. Rebecca has never heard the telephone, and so she does not know what it is; she thinks dogs have gotten into her sow’s pen and are murdering her friend with their dagger teeth. She rushes downstairs with a flatiron to beat them off, only to find the telephone jittering on the wall.
She picks up the receiver, dangling it before her. “Yes?” she shouts at it.
“Rebecca,” says Amos’s voice, “Oh, it is so wonderful to hear your voice. The baby has not come?”
“No,” she says. “Amos? Are you coming home now?”
“Good, good,” he says. “Listen, this is expensive, my sweet. I have but one minute. I must speak fast. I must tell you that Mr. Stoltzfus has asked me to stay for a week, work out the shipping of Easter bulbs to the greenhouse. I shall return by train next Friday. Have you heard? Do you understand?”
“No,” she said. “You will come home now. The baby is coming.”
“Do not argue me,” he says. “I am your husband, I tell you what is what. I stay. It means four hundred more dollars for my baby. For Amos Jr. Do you understand? I shall be back soon.”
“No,” she whispers at the phone. “How can you?”
But he must not have heard, because she could hear him talking to the operator on his end. “I must go now. Rebecca? I love,” and then the phone dies and Rebecca is stuck there, staring at it in her hand, swinging like a rat by its tail.
32. Ten minutes later, she has replaced the phone, but is now holding her belly, considering the ground. She traces a knot in the pine floorboard, then shakes her head.
“No,” she says. And that is enough for her. Rebecca runs upstairs as fast as her belly lets her. She scrubs herself raw, then puts on the clothes Amos bought her. A brassiere shamefully small for her now, panties, ditto. Skirt, shirt, neither of which she can button fully, so her belly is sticking out before her, goose-pimpled, exposed. So then, a sweater of Amos’s, huge on her as a dress. The red high heel shoes on her swollen feet. The bumblebee brooch, flapping its wings in a distressed manner with her quick breath. The red lipstick. Her hair twisted into a knot, and then she digs up the floorboard under the mattress with her nails. Up she comes with handfuls of money that she shoves into the pockets of the sweater, and then, kicking the floorboard back into place, out she goes first to free the sow, and then to the car.
Rebecca thrusts open the barn doors into the cold and bright morning, to show the car there, dust on its hood, the chrome dull. She climbs in. And with a snap of the car door, and a roar of the engine, off she swerves into the lane, she scares a herd of turkey, she roars off and away from Blue Ball.
She has never been away from Lancaster City, and here she is, spinning southward. She has no idea, but still she is going. Rebecca, so young. Alone.
33. Soon daybreak, and the sun about to strike sulfurous against the hard red soil of Somewhere, South Carolina. Rebecca has driven all night. She does not know why the world now takes on this glossy craquelure.
See her, how beautiful. Seven months pregnant, her long blonde hair whipping in the wind from the cracked window (green, the smell, this…). The car purring southward under her one hand; there is a cigarette in her mouth; she has the other hand on her thrumming belly, bare so that she can feel the beats with her palm. She is tired from driving all night, exhausted but elated, singing.
Frölich pfleg ich zu singen Wenn ich solche Freud… bursting over the South Carolina fields, the sunrise. It fills her window, fills her face with light. She squints. The long ash of her cigarette falls on the taut skin over her belly. She swerves as she pats the ash out. The tires pull on the shoulder, and she swerves again.
Into the other lane, this time.
Green, the smell of grass.
Swerves. Right into the shining grille of the onrushing milk truck.
And the crash, glass splintering in the sunlight, the smell of grass.
She floated there, up off the seat, in mid-air, in a frozen confetti of sun-bright debris.
34. The white. The white, and a little black. Red. The smell of iodine. White above red within black above white. The sweet face of a black nurse with lipstick coming back over her, coming back over her, coming back.
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Part Five
35. It has been two weeks when, heavy with pain, she opens her eyes and remembers herself. Half her body as if rooted in mud. Tapping along with her fingers, she feels the cast. The pain makes her sleep again. She awakens. Taps the cast. Remembers something, pricking at her more painful than the pain. Sleeps. Awakens. The nurse is hanging over Rebecca, smiling down, saying something with a voice so soft it is as if her tongue were dipped in butter, but Rebecca can’t understand it, it is no language she knows. Sleeps. Awakens to the nurse. Rebecca remembers then, and says, “My baby.”
“Lord almighty,” the nurse says. “Well, she speaks at last. Bless, you child, we thought we’d lost you. First all of you. Then your brain. But you’re back. Wonders never cease,” shaking her head, clicking her tongue.
“My baby,” says Rebecca. Her fingers have just now crawled over the spot where there was once a bulge and now there is a plain.
“Oh, sweetheart, you just get your rest,” the nurse says in her buttery way. She turns. She leaves, though Rebecca calls after her.
36. Rebecca does not rest. Every hour, she shouts for her baby, every hour the nurse comes in, more and more frazzled, until at last, she brings the needle.
Then the doctor, after a half day of this. Small man, evasive as a mouse. She says “my baby,” to him, softly, reaching out. He sighs and rubs his tired head. It has been a long week, a terrible week in this backcountry clinic. There has been an explosion in the migrant pickers’ church, a bomb, fifteen dead so far, and many burned. There are still wounded bodies in the halls. He has no personnel, hence that black nurse, borrowed from the state hospital forty miles away; nobody in his town would allow for Negro care unless it were essential. This week, it has been essential. He tells the broken girl all of this, but at the end, all she says is “My baby?”
He holds the pretty little girl’s hand in his sticky one and hesitates. He has heard something in her voice. Something German? He holds the hand that had been blasted in half in the Ardennes behind his back, self-consciously.
“You a foreigner?” It is not that he does not like foreigners. Well, Krauts, that’s another matter, but this girl, well, there’s no saying.
Rebecca thinks of the sunrise coming up over Blue Ball, the moment before dawn when her family is sleeping, their breath in the old house. She thinks of the wail and shock of traffic around Washington D.C., her one body in her one car among all those other cars.
“Yes,” she says. “I am Deutsch.”
“Ah,” he says. “Well.”
“And my baby?” she says. “I have heard a cry down the hall.” And she has, and she is reasonably convinced it is not the cry of a ghost but of a real baby.
“Ah,” he says, and remembers the newborn, the one that has kept him up in the night on the cot beside his room, the strong little boy they have been watching until a place could be found for him. “Ah.”
“I may have him?” Rebecca blinking fast, looking up at the doctor. “Please, doctor. My son.”
37. The doctor will never know how it happened. One moment, holding the girl’s hand. The next, it is already nighttime, midnight, and he has risen from his bed and is walking to the door, down the hall, past the four lesser burn victims, to the storage closet where the two-month-old baby is sleeping now. Left at the hospital in the middle of the night a few months ago, lucky a raccoon didn’t get near his tender little face. That baby nose the right size for a snack. The little brown baby, left behind. A migrant worker, probably, a secret child, unwanted. A good, dear boy with long eyelashes like lace on his cheeks.
The doctor has held this child in his arms as if it were his own. He has privately named the child after himself.
The doctor watches himself from afar as he picks the child up. He is right, he is convinced, but knows somewhere deeply, he is not. He carries the child back through the hall. He stands at the door. He watches how Rebecca’s lovely eyes light up and she stretches out her arms.
38. It is the barest breath of a second, and Rebecca knows something is wrong. A two-week old should not be so heavy, especially one that was a month early. She has held many new babies, and this is not right. She unfolds the blanket from his little sleeping face, and sees. The almond-shaped eyes with the thick black lashes. The tan skin, tan as suede. The lips sucking in their sleep at an imaginary nipple.
39. She looks up at the doctor and Rebecca now feels an emptiness in her, and it is hollow, and it echoes. The doctor’s face has grown red. He bends to take the baby back.
But when Rebecca looks down, the boy’s eyes have opened. His black little eyes are fixed on her face, his tender hand is grasping a strand of her hair, and pulling it. He kicks his little feet in delight. He opens his mouth, and shoves the fist with the hair into it. She sees how he is starving for the taste of her, though she will have no milk for him. It seems the world slows, begins to sharpen before her, and she closes her eyes and breathes to keep the fit at bay, to keep herself here, for the baby is so breakable in her arms.
In this moment, Rebecca can see her life at home, after she is well, after she has been sent back to Amos without a child. The rise and fall of the seasons, the empty house, the phantom pains of a lost pregnancy, the heaviness between them, sticky, and every time they fight against it, it binds them more and more. The sadness. Rebecca sees herself sitting at the window, alone, waiting for her husband to return from work. Every day, like that. Sitting.
40. And so when the doctor kneels to take the baby back, looking furious, apologetic, she stops him. “No,” she says. “He is my son. His name is Amos.”
And the doctor, surprised, backs toward the door. He won’t say another word to the girl, not when the cast is cut off of her in a few months, not when he inspects her, like goods, to make sure she is healing well, not when he administers vaccines to the child and kisses it lingeringly on the head. Only years later will the doctor be drinking a midnight whiskey and remember the girl and the child, and begin his big, booming laugh, laugh so hard he wakes his invalid wife in her room upstairs, he will laugh so hard the tears slip down his face.
41. The Ausbund is the Anabaptist hymnal, used in their simple services, sung a cappella. The songs inside have no musical notation, relying only on the community’s memory of their melodies. In Pennsylvania Deutsch, the word Ausbund means “a select selection.”
42. When Amos is found at last, when they have called the phone in Blue Ball for the hundredth time, he picks up, heartbroken, having found his wife somehow gone, having looked for her in the barn, in the fields. He listens and asks a few questions and feels a wash of something cold in him. He puts down the phone and sprints down the lane again and borrows a truck from Mr. Stoltzfus, who had barely just come in his own door, and drives down to the small South Carolina town in a night, only stopping for gas. When he runs into the little hospital, his Rebecca is sitting at the window, a cast all the way to her hip, the baby in her arms, smiling at him. He kisses her face twenty times, and sits heavily on the bed, his head on her knee, shaking.
“I thought you gone back to your parents,” he said.
“No,” she said. “I tried to go to you in Florida. I am sorry for the car. Now, say hello to your son.”
And Amos reaches out for the child, feels the good weight of the baby in his arms. But when he looks at the small brown face, he looks back up at his wife, confused. She just squeezes his hand. She just smiles that long smile of hers.
And so Amos puts the baby on his knees, and brushes his finger against a cheek. The child gives a little kick in his swaddling clothes, and Amos finds himself loosening them. Silently, he unwraps the child, pulling out the arms from the cloths, pulling out the bare legs, revealing his knotty little belly button. He unpins the diapers, and the baby is naked and so little there on his lap, kicking upwards, making fists, all folds and roundness, all smooth. Amos slides his hand under the baby’s back and lifts the naked child out of his wrappers.
It is only when he holds him now that Amos understands how this is right, how a triangle is stronger than a straight line, and that he won’t ask a single question, not ever.
43. Rebecca will have pink scars like embroidery running up the length of her legs. She will have a hobble, even by the time Amos leaves her in fifteen years to live with a woman he met in Florida on a poinsettia run for Mr. Stoltzfus. That time, he will call her with the news, and she will look at her boys, playing a board game on the living room floor, and hang up silently, too tired to speed down to retrieve him again. In a month, Rebecca will hobble around the diner, smiling kindly at any of the bleary truckers who come in to eat her eggs and drink her bitter coffee, and she will tell them of her sons. She will tell them she has five sons, all fine boys: Amos and Peter and Douglas and George and Bradford.
“They are all beautiful boys,” she will say, and the truckers will be gallant with her. She will hobble, true, but she will still be beautiful, even after five boys whom she worries all those long nights how to feed. She will blush and duck her head, shy in this world where she never would grow entirely at ease. They will be charmed, and some will ask, jokingly, for her to marry them.
And sometimes a trucker who has been in many times, who finds himself pulling in for one more piece of pie, will ask Rebecca which of her sons is her favorite. She will think, immediately, and without delay, Amos, of course. Amos, the son who is shorter, darker than his brothers, who had learned early to hold her head in his lap when one of her spells came on. The one who, after his father left them, would stay up at night to wash her uniform and press it dry, who cooked the other boys breakfast so she could have fifteen more minutes to sleep. They will all protect her, the boys, translating the modern world so it’s easier for her. But it is Amos, Amos whose tongue has always been far too thick for his mouth, who loves her so fiercely that she can’t not love him back the same way. Since he was little Amos would hand her everything that was precious to him: blocks, nests, cookies, and then, later his paycheck from the quarry, without which she couldn’t send her bright younger four to their Waldorf high school. When she was asked who her favorite was, she would think Amos, whose hunger matched hers.
But she wouldn’t say that. She would laugh a little at the question. She would give the table a few extra wipes. Then she would say, “Oh, sir. I love all my sons, all the same. I can’t help but. They are all my sons.”
This will be the only time in her life that Rebecca will ever tell a lie. She will pour more coffee. She will drop her eyes from the trucker’s face. And then, in the end, she will turn away, head down, go about her business.
