Keeping Secrets (18 page)

“I hate my mother. I hate her so much I can’t tell you. If I would see her again, so help me, I don’t know what I’d do.

“Why didn’t any of the church members take us children? They could have tried. Nobody did anything. We were basically cast out.

“Dat must have gone to look for my mother. I remember him dressing in English clothes, cutting his hair, shaving his beard. He would go English for her. He left me alone at night with the little ones.

“The baby would cry and I’d get up to fill her bottle with water. There was no milk. She screamed and cried. I flavored the water with strawberry Jell-o. That hushed her for awhile. Good thing we had strawberry Jell-o.

“Dat gave up then. He stopped searching for Mam. His hair and beard grew back. He got a job at a welding shop. We had milk. I learned to make soup with beans and tomato juice and hamburger. The only thing I couldn’t do was sew. Our clothes were torn and much too tight.

“I thought my father was doing better. He read his Bible a lot. He sang to us. One time his parents came. They cried. Mommy Peight brought us food, clothes. She hugged us. I think they weren’t allowed to be there and came in secret because I didn’t see them until last year when I went back.

“That day…” he began, then hung his head.

A shudder passed through him. His head stayed bent. Sadie put a hand on his shoulder and kept it there.

“Dat didn’t come home. I made soup for the little ones. We slept alone. The next morning, I searched the barn, the woods.”

There was a long pause. Sadie stroked his shoulder as if comforting a small child. Or Paris.

“He was half sunk in the water, half out of it. He was covered with algae. That’s why I didn’t see him right away. There were dragonflies on his back. Flies.”

“But, Mark, if he was half out of the water, maybe he was trying to get out. Maybe it wasn’t a suicide at all. Maybe he had an accident.”

“No. He didn’t want to live. He couldn’t handle all of us children. We were the ones that should have never been born. The counselor tried to tell me differently, but I know how it was. We were a mistake, born to two people who would have been so much better off without us.

“I imagine my mother was a free spirit, liberal, always rebellious. She gave birth one year after another, the way the church required. Dat was too simple to see it, or too much in love, whatever it was. I spent my whole life wishing they hadn’t had any of us.”

“Mark, you can’t think that way. There is a purpose for every soul brought into this world. I truly believe that. God wants you here on earth or you wouldn’t be here. He loves you as much as he loves anybody else. Likely more, even.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

“Mark!”

“He can’t. Not after what I did. After Dat drowned himself, the church had nothing to do with us. We were tainted children then. So the authorities put us into the foster system. We were all separated. I was eight.

“We became English. I went to a public school. The kids were nice enough; so were my foster parents. They drank a lot of beer. Keith became drunk a lot, but not angry drunk, just … stupid drunk. Sharon gave me good things to eat. I found out what pizza was. And cookies.

“I don’t understand what happened then, but I was suddenly placed in another home. I lived in fear of their 17-year-old son. He … well, I won’t go into detail, but when I was 12, I ran away, alone, at night. I found my way to an Amish home in another community. Betsy, the family’s mother, took pity on me and allowed me to stay. I worked in their produce fields all my teenage years. The Amish man, I think, was bipolar, schizophrenic, whatever. He had vile temper fits. Blamed Betsy for everything, but he never touched her. Never. It was always me. He beat me regularly. Either with a whip or a hammer. The hammer was the worst.

“The whip would hiss through the air, catch my legs, then my back. It burned like fire. After awhile, though, I got used to it, if such a thing is possible. I can still hear the tomato plants being whacked off by the force of his whip. I picked the tomatoes too green. Too rotten. Filled the hampers too full or not full enough. Everything wrong was my fault.

“But what he did to me was better than what the 17-year-old did to me. Sadie, I’m a ruined person, basically. I’ve seen just about everything there is to see.

“Betsy was a saint. She even baked like an angel. She lived with that man to the best of her ability, and I bet to this day their community has no idea who he is or what he did.

“The night he broke my ribs with the hammer, that was the night I left. I just walked away, no extra clothes, no nothing. The dog barked, but I didn’t care. I’d be better off dead, I thought, so I just walked. My ribs burned in my body. I couldn’t lie down, it hurt too bad, so I kept walking. Some guys picked me up. Told them I fell off a wagon. They took me to the hospital. I stayed there for two days.

“My life after the hospital was basically English. I worked odd jobs in construction, at McDonalds, anywhere I could make a bit of money to save for an apartment. I started drinking, and I can’t tell you what alcohol meant to me at that point. It was the wonderful substance that eased all my pain. It bolstered my self-confidence, it made me happy, it made me laugh, it made me forget, at least for a time. It was like a god that finally had mercy on my torment.

“You see, Sadie, I hated myself. I still blamed myself for my Dat. And that Wyle, that 17-year-old, I guess I felt that was my fault, too. I was a mess, and I don’t know why I even try to persuade you that I’ll be okay.

“Do you understand, now? Why I went back home to get away from you? I spent a whole year in rehab, a facility to help people get away from drugs and alcohol.”

Sadie gasped, “Drugs?”

Mark nodded. “I tried it all. Anything to make it all go away.

“The counselors at the rehab were wonderful. Trained professionals who are used to dealing with people who are … well, like me. Or, like I was. I came out clean, sober, and healed, to an extent, I guess.

“I always leaned toward the Amish, though. I guess they were my roots. When I left rehab, I found out that my parents’ church had sort of fizzled out. It was a bunch of radicals who had lost the
frieda
with the real Amish of that area. I visited my Grandfather Peight. My Daddy. He is the single source of my greatest healing.”

“Besides God,” Sadie said softly.

M
ARK CONTINUED, “NO, GOD
was in my grandfather in the form of forgiveness, love, tears, and a kindness so huge I couldn’t wrap my warped mind around it. He even looked like God. His hair and beard were white, his face unmarked, his eyes…”

Mark’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Sadie, if I ever get to heaven, I imagine God’s eyes will look exactly like my grandfather’s. Pools of kindness without end.

“He told me how their church fell apart, fueled by evil hatred and harsh unbiblical practices. They had no communion for years. They were being led by a group of… Well, I won’t say it. But thankfully they moved away. The rest of the church saw the error of their ways and became better people.

“My grandfather told me, if there was anyone to blame, it was him. He should not have believed these ministers. He was so glad to see me. He taught me my love of horses, how to shoe them. I stayed with him after rehab until I heard of Montana. I had some money. I just wanted to see what it was like here, you know? A young man’s yearning for adventure and all that. So I came out here by Amtrak. I was here two weeks and was taking a horse to Richard Caldwell’s ranch. It was snowing, there was a dark form on the road, a young girl waving her arms, clearly scared out of her wits, which she must not have had too many of, being out on a slippery road with a dead horse…”

“He wasn’t dead!”

Mark’s laugh rang out, his arms went around her, and he held her so close she could feel the fabric of his shirt stamped against her cheek.

“That was when my real problems began. I almost returned to alcohol. Sadie, I loved you the first minute I saw you. I did. I don’t care what people say about love. For me, it was love at first sight, and God was in that snow, too. He was pure and white and… Well, he was there.

“But since… I dunno, Sadie. It seems as if my enemy is my past and the way it makes me feel about myself. When I think of you and your family, your perfect little life, I hardly have the audacity, the daring to be with you. Or your family.”

He stopped, shook his head, his hair falling darkly over his eyes.

“Mark, don’t be sarcastic when you say, ‘your perfect little life.’”

She was hurt beyond words. As if he was mocking her for being who she was, which was grossly unfair. Her first attempt at dealing with the belittling comment was sort of soothing, assuring him they were far from perfect, to make him feel better about himself. But then she caught herself. He could not shift the blame on her.

“I wasn’t.”

“Yes, you were.”

“Oh, okay. I was. You know better.”

“Mark, perhaps I do. You carry the blame for the sordid things in your life, but you are much too eager to shift it onto someone else’s shoulders, or you would not have spoken to me that way. You drag yourself down constantly and want to drag others down with you.”

Now the sarcasm came thick and fast.

“So where did you go to college?” he asked. “You sound exactly like some trained counselor. You think you’re smarter than me?”

It was a whiplash of words, ruthless and stinging. It goaded Sadie into action. She sprang up and started running toward home. She ran blindly, uncaring, just to put great distance between them. She ran until her breath came in hard puffs, her chest hurt, and her legs felt as if the bones and tendons had liquefied.

She saw the silhouette of her home on the hillside, the driveway a winding ribbon of silver. It all swam together in the film of her tears.

She had never seen him look as handsome as he did tonight. He wore a brown, short-sleeved shirt of some rough-looking fabric, almost like homespun. His dark brown eyes matched his shirt, his black broadfall trousers were neat and clean. When he took off his straw hat and tousled his dark hair, Sadie could not tear her eyes away. There was simply no use.

Was it all because he was so handsome? Was she so shallow?

He was impossible. She replayed his words, the story tumbling through her senses. What agonies! So young!

She cried the whole way up to the driveway—for him, for the father of those children, for life’s unfairness. But mostly she cried because he did not bother to run after her. Where was he now?

When she heard a car coming, she quickened her steps. If she hurried, she’d reach the safety of the driveway before the lights approached. Reaching the mailbox and paper holder, she relaxed, slowing her pace. She turned to the right, more out of habit than anything else, to see if she recognized the car.

The headlights went out. Only the glistening of the silver on the mirrors and the bumper were visible. The steady brrm, brrm, brrm of the engine was plainly audible, and the sound indicated it was a diesel. A pickup. It was barely moving, as if it was in slow motion.

Wait!

Two smokestacks! It was the same truck! The one that had passed her with Daniel.

Fear washed over Sadie’s body in powerful chills. It sent her up the embankment where she pressed flat against a pine tree. The needles scratched her face and arms, the sticky resin stuck to the palms of her outstretched fingers.

The truck beat a loud staccato, her ears pulsed with the beating of it. Then it stopped. The motor was off.

Sadie turned, grabbed a low branch, and scrambled up the pine. The branches of a pine tree were just like a ladder, only pricklier. The branches were close together and straight so that you could climb easily.

She climbed up about 10 or 12 feet and settled herself on some thick branches. She remained as still as possible and listened. There was no sound at all.

She craned her neck, peering around the trunk of the pine tree, but there was only an incomprehensible blackness. She could see nothing, not even the silver of the mirrors.

Had she imagined it all?

Wait. Voices.

A truck door opened. As Sadie watched, the tall form of a man emerged, then turned back to help two small … what was it? She squinted her eyes and peered into the darkness. If she moved anymore, she was sure to slide sideways out of the pine tree. Shifting her weight, she leaned back, holding onto a branch above her. There. Two children.

The tall man helped them out. One of them disappeared in the thicket beside the road. He stooped to speak to the other one.

Suddenly the lights were back on, a brilliant bluish-white. They startled Sadie so much that her fingers convulsed and she lost her grip. The last thought she had before she fell was the realization that the wicked inhabitants of that pickup truck would kidnap her as soon as she hit the ground.

The thing was, she never hit the ground. Instead, she became sandwiched between two branches like a hot dog in a roll, her body doubled-up quite painfully, her breath constricted.

The truck’s engine started, revved, pulled out onto the road, and moved slowly past. Someone laughed, a voice spoke.