Blood of the Prodigal. P. L. Gaus
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said.
“That’s just their view of life,” Miss Beachey explained. “There are two Amish proverbs. First: ‘The Peasant Believes Only the Father.’ Second: ‘je gelehrter, desto verkehrter.’”
Caroline waited for a translation.
“The more learned, the more confused.”
“You said that was your first year teaching,” Caroline remarked, “almost as if you have learned better in the years since then.”
“I have,” Donna said and laughed almost inaudibly.
After a pause, Donna meekly said, “I had forgotten some of these things, Mrs. Branden. Our memories are carefully selected, it seems, but well preserved.”
She looked disconsolately around the empty classroom and out through the open front door. Her hand slipped beneath her apron, and she drew a plain white handkerchief from a pocket in the side of her dress. She pulled herself up straight, and held the handkerchief briefly to her eyes.
“Jonah was different. I could tell it as early as his fifth grade, even if I was only a novice. And not just because he was my first bright student.
“He never could have lived truly Amish. I believe that, absolutely. Like with the cuffs.
“And I saw it in his schoolwork. He was a scholar. And a dreamer. He asked about the stars, about ships at sea, Indians, everything. Sometimes I’d find him on the steps of the school when I arrived in the morning. Always so full of questions.
“And I encouraged his studies, not realizing, then, what that would do to him.”
She stopped and straightened the front of her apron, only a little bit self-conscious, now. She looked at Caroline and wondered anew what it was that had caused her to speak so freely. Perhaps it was being in Leeper School again. Funny that she had kept the keys. It was even stranger, she thought now, to have asked Caroline Branden to meet her here.
“With Jonah,” Donna said, “well, I thought I was making a difference. But now I realize that I only accentuated traits that his father considered to be flaws. I encouraged attitudes in Jonah that ended up driving him from his family.
“At the end of his fifth grade, I gave Jonah a book of American poems. You know—Whitman, Sandburg, that sort of thing. And two novels, Moby Dick and The Last of the Mohicans. Then I transferred to Massillon, to be closer to my congregation, and soon after that they closed this little schoolhouse. Jonah went on to another parochial school.
“Years later, on the day after Jonah’s sixteenth birthday, Bishop Miller drove his buggy into Massillon and waited for school to close. After the children had left for home, he walked into my classroom and laid those very same volumes on my desk.
“Then he said: ‘You’ll remember, I’m sure, Jonah Miller. You gave him these books when he was in the fifth grade. Jonah is beyond his school years, now, Miss Beachey. I intend no disrespect, but Wir sind Bauern. Verstehen Sie Bauern? Do you understand? We are Bauern, peasants. We have chosen this life freely. It is our hope that Jonah will choose it too. As peasants, we have a saying: ‘The barn is not to sit in, and books are not helpful in plowing.’”
“He brought back the books that you had given Jonah?”
“More than that,” Donna said. “He wanted me to know that he intended to put a stop to Jonah’s ‘overly inquisitive nature.’”
AFTER Miss Beachey had left, Caroline sat on the steps of the one-room schoolhouse and tried to imagine an Amish bishop making the forty-mile drive into Massillon simply to return three used books. In the end, she decided that she could not imagine the scene at all. As she left, Caroline came down the worn sandstone steps slowly, thinking about the schoolhouse. Thinking about a fifth-grade boy whose life as a rebel had started in the tiny, one-room Leeper School.
She walked around to the playground at the side of the schoolhouse and stood under a tall silver maple. There was an old rusty swing set with patches of mud underneath, and she walked absently over to it. There were small footprints in the fresh mud. Children still came here to play.
She sat on the swing and, side-stepping the mud, gave a gentle push with her toes. She closed her eyes and felt the slight, passing breeze on her face. She remembered her own cherished playgrounds and the long-forgotten, joyful sounds of children at play. The faces of childhood friends, the pleasant aroma of newly sharpened pencils, and the soft texture of wide-lined paper under her fingertips.
She opened her eyes and swung peacefully for a while gazing at the small schoolhouse, red brick walls patched in earlier days with white concrete. Lately, it hadn’t been patched at all. The square belfry needed white paint. One of the gutters had swung loose and now hung from the roof at an angle.
A small figure wearing suspenders appeared around the corner of the schoolhouse, and Caroline waved. The child retreated bashfully behind the building, and Caroline thought again of Jonah Miller in the fifth grade. Of Donna Beachey and the things she had said.
There was more to what she had said than the mere words she had spoken. For one thing, she had said that she remembered a single student from her first year of teaching. Evidently, she remembered Jonah Miller well. She had also plainly said that she had unwittingly given young Jonah Miller something that would eventually drive him from home.
But Caroline also found herself thinking about the things that Donna Beachey had not said. Had she forgotten them, or simply avoided them? Probably the latter. At any rate, others this morning had seemed to have little trouble remembering. They had whispered it all to her eagerly. They had remembered and so, surely, did Donna.
For one thing, Donna Beachey hadn’t mentioned that Jonah Miller had fallen openly in love with his fifth-grade teacher and that the boyish crush had not ended when she left the district. She hadn’t mentioned that he had ridden to see her several times the next year at her new school in the city. Or that ever since the fifth grade Jonah had taken to questioning his father about all matters Amish and not Amish. That his year of the Rumschpringe had come when he had finally quit school, and that Jonah Miller’s year of decision had exploded into a decade of rebellion.
Finally and most significantly, Donna Beachey had not mentioned that she alone had visited him in jail.
8
Friday, June 19
9:30 P.M.
JEFF Hostettler’s news that Jonah had been seen that spring in Cleveland was Branden’s first hard fact in a case that offered no sensible beginnings. Notwithstanding Caroline’s information about Donna Beachey’s somewhat nostalgic recollections, and beyond the details of Jonah’s troubles that she had been able to provide, Branden thought, he still had only Hostettler’s slim lead on Miller, and everything else pointed to trouble.
Bishop Miller’s account of his son had been bleak enough, and yet he hadn’t said a thing about Jeff Hostettler’s sister, Jeremiah’s mother. Nor had he mentioned how she had died, despite Hostettler’s assertion that “they,” whoever they were, had pretty much killed her themselves.
The custody battle over Jeremiah, no doubt heated, was another thing the bishop had neglected to mention. That, together with what the teacher had told Caroline, had put a nervous kink into Branden’s spine, and the mysterious reasons for the bishop’s one-month deadline heightened his concern.
From the second-floor bedroom Branden used as his study, he called out to his wife through the walls. “Caroline. Did Donna Beachey say she had any idea where we might find Jonah Miller?”
Caroline came into the study dressed in a summer nightgown and said, “No. She did say on the phone that she got a call from him, once, from Texas. That’s all.”
“Too far away,” Branden said. “He was in Cleveland last May.”
“I really didn’t make a point of asking her,” Caroline said, and pulled up a desk chair beside him