Blood of the Prodigal Page 5

  “Umhmh.”

  “In some districts, that’d be disallowed. Some bishops might approve rubber tires, but not inflated rubber tires. Just rubber pads on the rims. Others rule out rubber altogether. They use iron or wooden rims only. An inquisitive child wouldn’t understand why. But, when they take the vows, all Amish acknowledge that they have accepted the rules. That was the hard part for Jonah Miller. Accepting the rules.

  “You see it in the kids. Especially the younger ones. Like in the fifth grade. They want to know ‘why.’ Fair enough, wouldn’t you say? They just want to know ‘why.’

  “Most of them eventually accept such answers as they get, and the rules, too. They finish school, have their year or so for the Rumschpringe and then come home and take the vows. Some are ready earlier. They don’t need a year. Don’t have any doubts. No questions. No Rumschpringe.

  “But once in a while you’ll see one who needs to know more. Wants to know why. Really wants to understand why rubber tires are not to be inflated.

  “That was Jonah’s problem. He needed to know ‘why.’ Even by the fifth grade. I tried to give him something special in school, because he was so intelligent. At first, he responded well, but eventually, I lost him.”

  Donna paused and looked at Caroline again. She walked over to the desk in front of the chalkboard and stood facing out into the classroom, obviously struggling with regrets. Caroline leaned against the windowsill and gave her time. Calmly, at last, Donna Beachey began to tell what she knew of Jonah Miller.

  “Jonah was a rebel,” Donna said, “at a time in my teaching career when I was too young to appreciate what that would mean in Bishop Miller’s district.”

  She pointed into the back of the room and remembered the little desks. “When Jonah took his seat, he’d scoot the desk two or three inches to the left. Always to the left. Just enough to be out of line with the other children.”

  “You think that was important?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes, because he always watched me, to see if I had noticed.”

  “Some rebel,” Caroline said.

  “Don’t underestimate that,” Donna said. “He also began rolling his pants into a tight, high cuff. As a fashion statement. He always did it after he was on school property. Before he left, he’d roll the cuffs out again.”

  “It doesn’t seem like a very big thing,” Caroline said.

  “Ah, but he was Old Order Amish, Mrs. Branden,” Donna reminded her. “Soon after that, his father—”

  “Bishop Miller?”

  “Yes. Bishop Miller came to me after school and asked if it were true that Jonah was ‘hitching his britches up’ in school.”

  “And?”

  “Jonah never did it again,” Donna said. “The tragedy is, Jonah had intellect. He knew. Or suspected, anyway. You know —that the world holds marvels. It tormented him.”

  “He quit school like the rest do?” Caroline asked pointedly.

  “He had no choice. That’s the way of the Amish. His grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters, cousins, and neighbors all quit school earlier. If the state did not now require them all to attend, most would quit sooner.”

  “It doesn’t sound to me as if they get much of a chance,” Caroline 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. T
he 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 night-gown 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 at his computer.

  He logged onto the internet, called up a search engine, selected a people finder, and typed in a search for Jonah Miller. He chose “find it,” and they watched as the search was run. Zero hits in Ohio for a Jonah Miller.

  Branden modified the search to cover the whole nation and got only seven hits for Jonah Millers, altogether. He scanned the addresses, but found only distant states: North Carolina, Vermont, Kansas. No Ohio addresses, and nothing close to Ohio. He saved the data anyway.

  “Maybe a derivative name, like John,” Caroline said, and pulled up a little closer to the screen.

  Branden modified the search parameters to read John Miller and got sixty-two hits for Ohio. Only two were in northern Ohio, and neither of those was from Cleveland. Again, Branden saved the results. There were nine names, now, in total, and any one of them could be their Jonah Miller, he thought. More likely, none of them was.

  Casting further, he ran four more searches. Jon Millers in Ohio, 45. Jon Millers nationwide, 337. J Millers in Ohio, 819. J Millers nationwide, one thousand, plus.

  He sat there for a while with Caroline, gazing at the screen, and then printed out the seven hits for Jonah Millers in the nation, plus the two for John Millers in northern Ohio, one from Lorain and one from Sandusky.

  In their bedroom, Caroline propped up some pillows and sat back on the bed, her legs crossed at the ankles. Branden sank into a soft chair and tapped a finger on the printout.

  “This is a start, but it’s likely not going to be enough,” he said.

  Caroline said, “At least two are northern Ohio.”

  “I know, but he was only ‘seen’ in Cleveland.”

  “You think he’s living somewhere else,” Caroline said.

  “Could be anywhere.”

  “Then how’d Miller expect you to be able to find him at all?” Caroline asked.

  Branden responded with, “And why the one-month deadline?” Then, apparently offhand, he added, “I need to talk to the sheriff.”

  Caroline nodded. “I’ll start calling Jonah Millers tomorrow.”

  “Right,” Branden said and fell silent.

  After several minutes had passed, Caroline said, “Maybe we shouldn’t be looking for Jonah Miller. Maybe we should look for Jeremiah.”

  Branden mumbled, “How?” and shifted uneasily in his bedroom chair.

  9

  Saturday, June 20

  11:45 A.M.

  “FANCY pants!” Enos Coblentz shouted over the scream of the ripping blade. Branden stood well back from the saw and cupped his hand to his ear to signal that he hadn’t heard.

  “Jonah Miller got fancy pants,” Enos shouted again, watching Branden’s face for signs of comprehension.

  Branden shook his head and then Coblentz held up all the fingers of each hand, pointed to the clock, and shouted, “Ten minutes!”

  Branden nodded and walked outside where lumber was stacked, sorted by size and variety—maple, walnut, oak, hickory, and cherry. There was the pleasant aroma of freshly cut wood and a mound of sawdust outside. After several minutes, his ears began to recover from the intolerable noise inside.

  The sawmill consisted of two rough pole buildings of corrugated aluminum and a shed for horses in winter. There was a summer corral of whitewashed boards in the back and a picnic table on a patch of grass under some trees. Two customers’ buggies stood hitched in front, one horse nervously pawing at the gravel. Even at a distance, the noise of the saw astonished Branden.

  He had begun his rounds with Cal Troyer before dawn in the districts south and east of Millersburg. There had been a slow walk through a plowed field with one of Troyer’s distant cousins, an hour spent as the sun came up, retracing their kinship back to the day when Cal’s grandfather had quit the Amish life. Since then, Cal’s line had lived entirely English.

  Then there were gentle questions for the cousin’s neighbor, a brother-in-law. Branden had held back while Cal had probed delicately through a maze of family relationships, clanships, splinter groups, and the inevitable offshoots of several districts. At each step they had learned incrementally more about Eli Miller and his son Jonah. Sometimes they had found a willingness to talk forthrightly about both. More often they had not. Sometimes Cal had exploited the tendency for clannish rivalry between differing bishops. Other times he had sensed that they’d get little more than the bashful nod of a head or a silence that confirmed without comment.

  Branden also marveled that most of the folk with whom they had talked had known something of Pastor Caleb Troyer beforehand. They knew him by reputation, and they trusted him.

  When he had sensed from a wry smile or a cocked eyebrow that it would be productive, Cal had pushed with his questions into the fringe, seeking details about a man most had managed to forget. In the course of the morning they had spoken with a short man whose neck was puffed on one side by a goiter. There had been an elder Dutchman with a favorite pipe, sitting on an overturned barrel behind a hardware store in Kidr
on. A younger fellow with a denim apron in the tack shop at Charm. Someone had revealed that Jonah Miller had run with several friends—accomplices, he called them—from Sugarcreek. A visiting neighbor had confirmed it with a hesitant nod.

  And so Troyer and Branden had made their way through the morning. The wheel shop in Moreland. A harness shop south of Fredericksburg. Troyer’s bakery in Charm. A cheese factory in Sugarcreek. Well-shaded businesses with low ceilings and oil lamps, or white-glowing gas mantles hanging from ceiling fixtures. Off the tourist routes. Too far back in for tour buses. Each time learning better what to ask. What not to ask.

  But eventually, sometime toward noon, the two began to notice that the people they approached seemed somehow to have known they were coming. Word had gotten around. The bishops had passed a ruling, and the people had become less forthcoming, more suspicious. But not before Cal had uncovered the name of one man—Enos Coblentz—who would surely know, if anyone did, whether Jonah Miller had come home. Then the pastor had been called to his other duties, and now Branden stood outside the sawmill where Enos Coblentz worked.

  In ten minutes, Enos Coblentz strolled out through the large overhead door, slapping sawdust from his apron. He eased off his plastic safety goggles and put on small, round spectacles, hooking them carefully behind each ear. He pulled the ear plugs from both ears. His black hair hung precisely to his earlobes, in straight Dutch style, and his beard was full, unkempt, and laced heavily with sawdust. His face was shaved clean around both his upper and lower lips, forming an oval accent around a delicate mouth.

  “Jonah Miller got fancy pants,” Enos said again and brushed sawdust off his arms. “Near as I can remember, it started with pants. Cuffs or something like that. Can’t recall exactly. But he was told. Proper and private. Everybody knew it.”

  Branden was dressed in blue jeans, a plain blue tee-shirt, and hiking boots. As usual, the soft waves of his brown hair were slightly tousled, and his brown beard was trimmed close, showing gray at the temples. He opened a can of pop and offered it to Coblentz. Coblentz declined, and Branden said, “Are you sure? I’ve got more in the truck.”