It was not hard for Tom to imagine his father being kind to Claire. Jeremiah had always had more patience with his daughter, Faye, than with his two boys.
“I’ll be happy to take it.”
After she left, Tom tried to convince himself that he didn’t care one way or the other. He meant nothing to Jeremiah, and Jeremiah meant nothing to him.
It didn’t work. His pulse was pounding as he carried the basket of food to the car.
Tom had many good memories of being a boy on his father’s farm. Eating his mother’s baked oatmeal each morning in a kitchen kept warm with a woodstove. Arm wrestling with his brother, Matthew, for the last piece—and Matthew letting him win. His little sister’s face shining from their mother’s washcloth, her brown hair tightly braided and held with many hairpins, all covered by a minuscule prayer
Kapp
. He missed many things from his former life. Not all of it had been bad. Only those last few days.
Going to his father’s home now was like picking up crumbs from the kitchen floor when one craved a full meal. His father would be as polite to him as he would be to any stranger. That was the most he could expect. His father had made it clear that he had no son named Tobias. There would be no Prodigal Son ending to this story. There would be no loving father waiting and watching, running to greet
him
with gladness in his heart.
The only way he would ever receive a prodigal welcome was if he came home willing to blindly accept a culture and rigid belief system that he knew he would not be able to tolerate.
And yet he could not turn down Claire’s request. It was such a simple thing she had asked of him. Drop off a basket of food for a neighbor who wasn’t feeling well. She had no idea how complicated this small task felt to him.
His father was plowing with a two-horse team when Tom arrived.
As he approached the fence, he held up Claire’s basket for Jeremiah to see. His father tied the reins to the plow handle and walked over the raised furrows to where Tom stood. “What is that?”
“Supper.”
“Supper? Why are you bringing me supper? Aren’t you
that Miller boy that was here a few days ago asking about my Matthew?”
“Yes. I’m renting an apartment from Claire Shetler. She asked me to bring this over to you. She is under the impression that you are ill, and that you need nourishment.”
“One visit to the doctor and a few heart pills, and everyone starts talking,” Jeremiah grumbled into his beard.
“I’ll let Claire know you’re feeling better.”
Jeremiah spat a stream of dark red tobacco juice at a weed near the fence. “How do you come to be renting from Claire?”
Tom had almost forgotten the Swartzentruber affection for tobacco. His father’s ability to nail any target at which he aimed had fascinated him as a child. No longer. He wondered if that lifelong habit had anything to do with his father’s need for heart medication.
“I ran into Grace and Levi the other day. She and I discovered we used to work together in Afghanistan. I was looking for a place to rent, and they recommended Levi’s old apartment.”
“In what way did you work together?”
“She was a medevac nurse. Most of the helicopters she flew on were unarmed, but the enemy fired on them anyway. I flew a Cobra gunship alongside of them when they had dangerous extractions.”
Jeremiah’s face never changed expressions. “War is a bad business.”
“I could not agree with you more.”
A wind had kicked up, and the leaves on the tree above them began to rustle.
“Looks like we’re in for some rain. This is good. The crops have been thirsty,” Jeremiah said. “Are you in a hurry?”
“No. Why?”
“Come inside.” Jeremiah nodded toward the horizon where
rain clouds were scudding toward them. “We will
katsche und schmatze
. Talk and eat. Claire always did make too much.”
There was a hint of kindness in Jeremiah’s voice, and it reminded him of the father he had once known, before his mom passed.
There had been a time when Jeremiah had been a man much given to hospitality, who had delighted in having a table filled with relatives and friends. Tom remembered sitting on his father’s knee as a child, leaning against his strong chest, basking in his embrace, falling asleep, while the adults’ laughter and voices swirled around him, flavoring his small world with a feeling of contentment and safety.
What would it be like to enter that door again?
“I would like that.”
He knew he would end this charade soon and tell his father who he was, but, as with Claire—not yet. For now, he wanted a chance to pretend, just for a few minutes, that he was truly welcome at his father’s table.
Soon, Tom was standing in his mother’s kitchen, trying to fully absorb the fact that he was here, in his childhood home, and his father was heating up Claire’s chicken and dumplings for their dinner.
• • •
It was hard trying to pretend to be a stranger in a house where he knew every nook and cranny right down to the spot in the kitchen, next to the table, that still had a squeak in the floorboard.
“Been meaning to fix that,” his father said, as he placed two bowls on the table.
Tom was tempted to smile at that comment. His father was a hardworking man, but he had been meaning to fix that squeak for the past thirty years.
The house that had once been filled with voices was now painfully quiet. The giant table that could seat a family of twenty had only two places set at right angles to each other at the far end.
After they had a silent prayer, he lifted his head to find his father looking straight at him.
“Do they hurt?”
“What? These?” Tom instinctively touched his face. “Yes, but they’re getting better.”
“I have a salve that might help.”
This felt so familiar. The Amish had salves and potions for everything.
His father rose from the table and left the room. He came back in a few minutes with a large white bucket with a yellow label.
“This is B and W salve,” Jeremiah said. “Betcha never saw it before. I use it for my livestock.”
No surprise there either. He remembered once when his
daed
dosed himself with antibiotics he’d purchased for his cows, trying to rid himself of a bad case of bronchitis.
The Amish were so vested in alternative medicine that they would probably choose a chiropractor over going to a hospital even if they were in the middle of a massive heart attack.
His father went to the cupboard and pulled out a clean jelly jar, which he filled half full of a substance the color of beeswax with the consistency of axle grease.
“There. Take that home with you and use it.” Jeremiah sat the jelly jar in front of him. “It cleared up a bad place on one of my cows last week when she cut herself on an old nail.”
“What is in it?”
“Honey mostly, and a few healing herbs. Supposed to be for burns and wounds. That’s the reason for the B and W
name on the label. Some Amish man developed it after his child got burned. A lot of our people swear by it. Says it helps take away scarring, too. Some soak burdock leaf in sterile water and use it as a bandage over it. Burdock is supposed to be healing, too—but I never set much stock in it.”
Tom had trouble visualizing himself walking around with a wet burdock leaf on his face, but he would definitely try the salve, even if he already had been cared for by the finest surgeons at the Army’s disposal. He knew there was no way this little jar was going to make the scars disappear, but he would use it anyway—just because his father had cared enough to give it to him.
“That’s kind of you,” he said. “I’ll try it tonight.”
“Might help.” Jeremiah shrugged. “Might not. Probably won’t hurt. If you like it, you can come by and get more. Most of us with livestock keep a bucket of it around. Cheaper that way, instead of buying it in the little bitty jars they sell at the whole foods place in Mt. Hope. Sometimes it saves us the cost of a vet bill.”
Jeremiah ladled chicken and dumplings into Tom’s bowl and then his own. Aromatic steam rose from the homemade wooden bowls.
Tom tasted it and discovered that Claire had seriously undersalted it. Probably in case Jeremiah had to be on a salt-restrictive diet.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to be quite that careful yet. He reached for a jar of salt sitting on the table, took a pinch, sprinkled it over his food, and tasted it. Perfect.
He ventured a question. “Do you happen to know a Henry Miller?”
“I do, why do you ask?”
“Claire is concerned for her sister. From what I gather, Henry has been neglectful of his family of late.”
“I have heard that an
Englisch
driver picks him up on Tuesdays right outside Lehman’s Hardware and takes him to where no one knows.”
“You’ve given me some valuable information, thank you.”
“So you fly the helicopters, huh.” Jeremiah was obviously finished with the subject of Henry. His father had never been a gossip. “Why?”
“The mechanics of flight have always interested me.”
This was a true statement, and the explanation he always gave.
What he never told anyone was that he simply loved to fly. Being in the sky brought him a rush of freedom he never experienced on land. There was a purity in being so high in the air that buildings and traffic and people disappeared and it was just he and his machine waltzing with the clouds or following mountain streams through canyons. Even the unforgiving valleys of Afghanistan held a rugged beauty from the air. On foot, however, the poverty was so great, he often had to deliberately switch off any human feelings of compassion in order to function.
The rain that Jeremiah had predicted began to beat against the tin roof of the farmhouse as his father gazed off into the distance. “My youngest boy was interested in flight. He would lie on his back as a child and look up into the sky for hours, watching barn swallows swoop and soar, hoping for an airplane to fly by.”
Tom did not remember doing that. It surprised him that his father had locked that memory away.
“He used to fold bits of paper into airplanes and try to fly them from the top of that maple tree out front. He was always good at making up his own toys.”
Tom’s throat had suddenly gotten so tight he had to clear it in order to speak. “Is that Tobias you’re talking about?”
“Jab.”
“I thought you said you didn’t have a son by that name.” His heart was in his mouth as he waited for the answer. Could there possibly be something redemptive his father might say about him?
“Tobias ran off when he was seventeen.”
Tom decided to step carefully around the next question, but he had to know. “I heard a rumor that your son had been banned from your home.”
“He was,” Jeremiah said. “We were instructed by our bishop to have nothing to do with him—not even to eat with him or take a cup of coffee from his hand.” The old man looked straight at Tom and spoke the words that shattered his heart. “That didn’t mean I didn’t care about him. I never stopped loving my boy or worrying about him. There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t pray for my Tobias.”
The words brought a lump to Tom’s throat so huge he could barely swallow. It was all he could do to keep from breaking down completely and confessing everything to his father. But the stakes had gotten too high. He wanted more time with this man, but if his father knew who he was, he would be obligated to kick him out unless he promised to live a faithful life from that point on.
A faithful life, by their definition, was being a Swartzentruber. Returning to the Swartzentruber faith would mean taking on the full regalia of legalistic dos and don’ts, in addition to never being allowed to fly again under any circumstance.
It was too great a sacrifice to contemplate.
Hearing his father say that he loved and prayed for him every day was a balm to his soul that he would cherish for the rest of his life. Those words alone had been worth this entire trip. Someday soon, he would tell his father and accept the
consequences, but not now. For now, he wanted to savor the unexpected gift of this evening.
While life-giving water pelted the sturdy old house, they talked of many things. As a pacifist, Jeremiah was not interested in hearing about the military. Instead, he wanted to hear stories about the countries Tom had traveled to and the various customs he had witnessed. The time passed so quickly, Tom was surprised when the old windup clock struck eight o’clock. He glanced at his watch, then back at his father’s wall clock.
“My watch says it’s nine o’clock,” he said. “Is your clock slow or is my watch wrong?”
“Our people do not observe the world’s ‘fast time.’ ”
He’d forgotten that the Swartzentrubers refused to accept daylight saving time. Everyone else in the United States might be “springing forward” in the spring and “falling back” in the fall, but not his father’s people. The Swartzentrubers plodded on, keeping the same time all year long, never adjusting to anyone else’s frivolous notions of moving time around.
“It is getting late.” Jeremiah yawned and picked up a kerosene lantern from a side table where it had made flickering shadows on the wall all evening. “I will go to bed now. Milking time comes early.”
“I know.” He well remembered getting up at four in the morning, even on school days, to help his father milk.
“You have knowledge of milking?”
“I used to help my father.”
“Four o’clock is early,
ja
?” Jeremiah’s voice sounded almost hopeful.
“I don’t know anymore. I seldom sleep that long. My dreams bother me.”
“You have seen much battle?”
“Too much.”
“So that is how it is, then.” Jeremiah looked at him, as though weighing something in his mind. “You are welcome to come milk whenever your dreams awaken you early. All those early-morning hours should not be wasted.”
“I appreciate that, Jeremiah,” Tom said. “I’ll probably take you up on it.”
“Good. Milking is sometimes tiresome, but it has never given me bad dreams.” Jeremiah picked up the lantern. “I will walk you to your car. You
Englisch
are not used to the darkness.”