Blood of the Prodigal Read online

  It was the same for his wife, although she never spoke of it. He knew that she never would. That was their way. So it had always been. Es steht geschrieben—it stands written. So it shall always be. From this, he assured himself, they drew strength for the life of separation. For the one true path to salvation.

  Bishop Miller found himself staring down blankly at the reins. He forced himself upright and snapped the whip grimly. His son had been lost more than ten years ago. “Lord,” he prayed today, “not my grandson too.”

  He had started out before dawn, carefully traveling the remote gravel roads and township lanes in southern Holmes County, heading up out of his Old Order Amish district, toward the city, where greater prosperity had enticed the brethren into easier lives. Into compromises with the world. It was the city that had drawn too many of the brethren away from the paths of righteousness.

  Today was Thursday, a day for labor. He’d not normally have forsaken the chores of the farm for a journey into town. But the deacons had agreed. In point of fact, they had urged him to go.

  After days of prayer, he had relented. The child had shown promise with the Word. Jeremiah’s gift was to speak of the Book. He’d surely be called, in his day, to be a Diener zum Buch—a preacher. An interpreter of God’s character in the scriptures. And he must not be sacrificed to the world. Not for so much as a single summer.

  On the south edge of town, Bishop Miller watered his horse at the buckets set out in front of the Wal-Mart store and pulled the buggy into the parking lot of the Pizza Hut on the other side of the street. He stepped down and around to the back, lifted a faded green canvas feed bag out of the buggy, and walked to the front to hang the bag over the horse’s ears. He tied the reins around a light pole next to a telephone booth, and then he ran his hand along the rump of the horse, reached up into the seat of the buggy, and lifted out his black metal lunch pail.

  As he lunched with the horse, a teenage girl came out of the Pizza Hut and sauntered over to the phone booth. She looked him over disdainfully, made a quick call, and then stood impatiently beside the phone until a rusty truck arrived, driven by an older man in a ragged tee-shirt. As she got in, he gunned the engine, popped the clutch, sprayed gravel toward the bishop’s buggy, and drove away shouting vulgarly out the window.

  The bishop shook his head, took down the feed bag and carried it wearily around to the back. Then he tightened the lathered hip straps at the breeching, dried his calloused hands on his trousers, climbed back into the buggy, dropped the plain black curtains on the buggy’s windows, and teased the horse into awkward back steps. Once clear of the phone booth, he snapped his whip, brought the horse to a determined pace, drove further north into town, and turned onto a side street in a working-class neighborhood. He traveled several steep blocks through the hills of Millersburg and pulled into the gravel parking lot of a white frame church. Out front there was a plain white sign that read: “Church of Christ, Christian. Pastor Caleb Troyer.” It gave the times of the Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night services. A color poster planted on the lawn announced the details of this year’s Vacation Bible School.

  The bishop entered a side door of the small church and remained inside for nearly an hour. When he emerged, he turned around on the steps of the church to study the pastor’s face. Cal Troyer was a short man with a round, leathered face that marked him in those parts of Ohio as likely descended from the Amish. He had flowing white hair and a heavy, tangled white beard with no hint whatsoever of its original color. He was dressed in workman’s blue jeans and a denim shirt. He had a carpenter’s belt strapped to his waist. A ladder stood against the gutters of the church house, where he had been working earlier that morning.

  The bishop took his hand and shook it firmly, gratitude showing openly on his face. He gazed an extra moment into Pastor Troyer’s eyes. With proper grooming, once shaved around the mouth, Cal Troyer would easily pass anywhere for Amish. Perhaps his hair was too long, but that was easily remedied. The deep tan on his face and the powerful muscles in his short arms had always brought him respect with the Gemei. Troyer was a preacher, but he earned his way in life as a carpenter. And the way the bishop figured things in these perverse times, that was not far at all from the true calling.

  In truth, it was Troyer the bishop had wanted, but he was resigned now to the fact that, with the preacher leaving in a few days for a missions conference, that wouldn’t be possible. But Troyer had vouched solidly for the professor, and the bishop had taken him at his word. The deacons had agreed. They would place their trust in Professor Branden if Troyer would assure them that they could do so. If not for that, the Bishop would have driven home and closed his doors, resolved to ride it out alone, without the aid of any English at all.

  But, as he walked to his buggy, the bishop’s hopefulness began to fade. Whatever else, wasn’t Cal Troyer still one of de Hochen, the high ones, the “English”? Wasn’t he of the proud people, not the plain? Not of our people, unser Leut. And if not plain, then perhaps not entirely trustworthy. He turned at his buggy and glanced back at Troyer on the steps of the small meeting house. A line from the Liedersammlung song book came to the bishop’s mind. “Demut ist de schönste Tugend”; humility is the most beautiful virtue. He gazed a moment longer at Troyer and was reassured by what he saw. Cal Troyer was not schtolz, not proud. Rather, he was possessed of deep humility. Staring at Troyer from the seat of his buggy, Bishop Miller resolved finally to rest his hopes in the hands of Professor Michael Branden, on the word of this humble country preacher, the least prideful of all de Hochen the bishop had known—a fitting resolution of their dilemma, considering that all of their trials had begun, nine years ago, with the death of little Jeremiah’s mother, the most profane of all de Hochen the bishop had ever known.

  3

  Thursday, June 18

  II:30 A.M.

  A MILE or so south of Millersburg, in the wooded hill country sheltering the largest Amish settlements of Ohio, Cal Troyer eased his truck over the berm onto an isolated lane and dropped into a hidden glade near a long forgotten farm pond. Tranquil glens tucked away in nearly every corner of Holmes County hold spectacular bass ponds, made available to only a select few, and those few almost exclusively Amish. This particular pond, stocked years ago with fingerlings, had been fished by only Pastor Caleb Troyer and Professor Michael Branden.

  They had acquired the privilege while working for a farmer who could not otherwise have paid them. “Working a case,” as the professor’s wife Caroline liked to tease. It had concerned a chemical problem with fertilizers used on a nearby English farm, plus runoff disputes, and the EPA. Children had taken sick. Farmers in the valley had been blamed. The EPA, it developed, had been wrong, at the cost of several livelihoods.

  The bass pond had been Branden’s idea. He and Cal Troyer would accept no fees. But, in return for their help, they would fish the pond for life. The land would never be sold without provision for this.

  Cal dropped the truck into low and chuckled, thinking it no surprise to find Mike Branden fishing here, today, working the far edges of the pond with a spinner bait. Troyer parked in tall weeds at the tree line, eased himself out of his rusty truck, and leaned back against the hood, watching, his short arms folded across his chest. His thoughts drifted to the first summer they had spent here, and his eyes turned up to the dilapidated farm house on the hill.

  Branden cast into the shallows at the opposite edge of the pond and retrieved the spinner quickly, churning its blade just beneath the surface. At a point where the color suggested deeper water, a surge erupted under the spinner, and the bait jerked sideways under the impact of a strike. He played the bass on his arching rod, brought it steadily to him, lipped it with his thumb and forefinger, and held it up for Troyer, who acknowledged it with a wave, as Branden extracted the hook with a quick twist and tossed the fish back into the pond.

  As Cal watched, Branden worked around the pond toward him, casting into each irregulari
ty at the bank. He cast over weeds, tree roots, and stumps, the sport completely absorbing him. Here, nothing of Branden’s academic life could reach into his mind. Neither the petty politics of academia nor the inflated egos of his colleagues. No pressure from the administration for speeches to rich alumni groups. No endowment headaches. No urgent phone calls from the dean. No manuscripts to review. No campus mail. No committees.

  Today, he had nearly managed to forget the Federal Express envelope that lay unopened on his desk. A phone call yesterday from a southern university had prepared him. He was to be offered an endowed chair in the history department. Prestige and money he’d never known. Reduced classroom duties. “An escape from the small college arena” was how they had worded it. Now Branden wondered if he was obliged even to open the envelope.

  To open it would, perhaps, prove altogether too complicated. Caroline was strong again. They had buried two children, now, each miscarried without warning, and he and Caroline had sunk their roots deep into Millersburg during their grieving. People like Cal Troyer and Sheriff Bruce Robertson, both childhood friends of Branden, had helped them carry their burden of sorrow and loss, and slowly the void in their lives had filled somewhat, and healed over. So the question for him wasn’t about prestige and money, anymore. At one time it might have been. Not now. Still the offer lay on his desk, and sooner or later Caroline would hear of it. Then the question would be, would it matter to her?

  Branden glanced with a smile across the small pond at Cal Troyer. Branden knew that Cal would have his gear out soon. But not too soon. First Cal’d simply watch. See how they were hitting. Then, when he was ready, he’d have a go. They had fished summers together since they were boys, and, over the years, they had developed an abiding competition. Biggest bass. Most bass. First bass. Last bass. In this, at middle age, they were still precious little more than boys.

  How long till Cal noticed that the strikes were falling short today, Branden wondered. Short strikes that hit only the trailing skirts of his lures. The first hour had brought him no luck. Then he had solved the puzzle. The bass were on an early spawn and striking territorially, not feeding. So he had trimmed the skirts back, added a stinger hook, and scored half a dozen in as many minutes. As he worked toward Cal, he bagged two more and released them.

  At the pastor’s truck, Branden leaned against the hood next to Cal. “I thought maybe you weren’t coming,” Branden said.

  “Just held up, is all,” Cal replied. He studied Branden’s lure with unconvincing disinterest, saw the trimmed skirt, tapped the hemostat clamped to Branden’s vest, and asked, “Short strikes?” as if it’d be obvious to anyone.

  “Not at all,” Branden said. Then he shrugged a smile and ambled over to the water.

  Troyer followed.

  “You’re not fishing, yet,” Branden offered. “I know you too well, Cal. Something’s on your mind.”

  Troyer picked up a stone from among the tall weeds that had overgrown the lane next to the pond. He tossed it absently into the water and answered, “It’s a missing child.”

  “How old?”

  “Ten.”

  “How long?”

  “About a month.”

  Branden wound slack line onto his reel. He thought for a moment and then said, “Police aren’t involved?”

  “It’s Old Order Amish,” Cal said. “Bishop Eli Miller. One of the strictest in Holmes County, though his sect isn’t the most backward in the county. His grandson has turned up missing. He knows who has the boy, just doesn’t know where. He wants to meet you.”

  “How would he know anything about me?”

  “I reckon word gets around.”

  “I reckon you’ll have told him something.”

  “Told him you’re a mostly harmless, absent-minded professor who has little better to do in summers than wet an occasional line.”

  “He’ll think me a shirker,” Branden complained with a laugh.

  “He did say something about idle hands doing the devil’s work. So I told him of the various people you’ve helped over the years.”

  “We’ve helped.”

  “All right, we’ve helped. I could have told him more, but he seemed satisfied.”

  “I’m supposed to have used my summers to think deep thoughts, write papers, attend conferences, that sort of thing,” Branden offered. Then he grinned, held up his pole, and said, “Tenure does have its benefits.”

  “I leave Tuesday for the missions conference. I can help you get started locally, but that’s about it.” Cal shrugged and smiled apologetically.

  “A missing Amish boy?” Branden asked.

  “Kidnapped, essentially.”

  “Old Order?”

  “Moderate Old Order. Weaver branch. One of the strictest bishops.”

  Branden’s gaze drifted to the long-deserted farmhouse on the hill. Gutters sagging, paint chipped, shutters fallen down. “Remember the summer we worked here, Cal?”

  Cal nodded silently.

  “That case was also tangled up with the Old Order.”

  Cal held his silence, waited.

  Branden mulled it over. After a few minutes, he asked, “And I’m to talk with the bishop?”

  Cal nodded. “He’ll be at Becks Mills. At the general store in the Doughty Valley, about an hour from now. I’m to bring you there, and then he’ll want you to ride with him a spell. He said something cryptic like ‘in a month, none of this will matter,’ so we’ve only got that much time to find the boy. But, still, the bishop will want to take some time to get to know you, sound you out. It may take a day or two, I don’t know. He explained the whole thing to me as if time were short, but I gather he’s already sat on his hands a good while, as it is.”

  Branden thought about that while toying absently with the line on his pole.

  Cal explained a little further. “Look, Mike. We’ve known it was like this with the Old Order since we were kids. It’s just the Amish, that’s all. He came to me, but he’ll accept you. And you know it’s flat-out amazing that he’s come into town to ask for anyone’s help. So I imagine there’s more to this case than he’s told me. It’ll take time before he trusts us enough to bring us all the way in. For now, we’re going to have to handle this the Amish way. Say little. Listen a lot.”

  “And what’ll you do while I clatter around in his buggy?”

  Cal reached down to Branden’s lure, lifted it on the tips of two short fingers, noted where the skirt had been cut, and then grinned and helped himself to the hemostat clipped to Branden’s fishing vest.

  4

  Thursday, June 18

  I:00 P.M.

  BRANDEN rode with the bishop on the plain buckboard seat of the buggy, through the remotest Amish valleys of Holmes County. From Becks Mills, they took a circuitous route out onto 83, north to Township Road 122, dropped through Panther Valley, and traveled south on Route 58. Where 58 broke into the Doughty Valley, they crossed Mullet Run and followed Route 19 over the Doughty Creek itself. From there, they continued south and west and eventually wandered into the farms of the bishop’s district. They rolled slowly past both luxuriant farms and ramshackle affairs, what the bishop called kutslich, sloppy, ill-tended. There were tall, splendid farmhouses, with no electric service. Immense bank barns and long runs of wooden fence. Pastures and fields of barley, oats, and corn. Small bridges over rain-swollen streams. Manure spreaders with their distinctive aromas. Children at play under clotheslines, with their fluttering splashes of rich Amish blues, greens, and rose. And everywhere tall windmills, Belgians hitched to slow and ponderous wagons, and light buggies pulled by spirited horses.

  As they drove the narrow lanes of his district, the bishop questioned Branden about his family. About his friends, and about his profession. So Branden told how he and Cal Troyer had grown up together, fishing on summer ponds. And how Branden and Sheriff Bruce Robertson had spent winters hunting deer in the glens of the hardwood lowlands and pheasant along the hilltop pasture fence lines. And he
explained how Cal Troyer had been changed—called to the ministry—the day Branden’s parents had died in a highway crash, as an impatient tourist had swung out around a buggy in a no-passing zone and hit their car head on.

  When Branden began to speak of his job at the college, the bishop questioned him sternly on his studies of war and the weapons of war. So Branden explained that his fascination with the Civil War arose from a scholarly desire to understand the origins of conflict and the impetus to arms. And how his fifth-grade teacher had sparked his interest in the Civil War by assigning a paper on the battle of Gettysburg. How his grandfather had taken him to a rifle range with a muzzleloader when he was ten and started Branden on his quest to understand the firearms of the period.

  The bishop drove and listened as Branden rode on the buckboard seat beside him and told of his cannon, fired each Fourth of July as much to commemorate Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as to celebrate Independence Day. He spoke passionately of the eloquence of Lincoln. Of the valor of soldiers, and of bravery among common men. Of the memories his grandfather had cherished of summer afternoons spent on a country porch, listening to the ancient, grizzled veterans of that war. Stories told in turn to a young Michael Branden. Memories that now spurred his research into the letters and journals of Civil War soldiers.

  As time passed, the bishop’s attention seemed to stray, and Branden fell silent. On a long, uphill stretch of a gravel lane, the bishop let the reins go slack, content for the moment to have the horse trudge along at its own pace. He leaned back heavily against the buckboard and sighed like a man who had endured a surpassing loneliness.