“Thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done.” Ginger put a shaking hand on my mother’s. “I mean no disrespect.”
My mother bent to kiss Ginger on the prayer bonnet she wore askew on her blond hair. “I know.”
She went outside. Through the kitchen window, I saw her step up into Star’s saddle. My mother and the horse headed north, to the next cluster of houses.
I stared at Ginger, incredulous. She took off her glasses and wiped them on her apron.
She looked at me through reddened eyes. “Now is the time that you and I have to get our stories straight. Or we’ll both be dead.”
“I think . . .” I blew out my breath. “I think we’re dead already.”
She leaned across the table and poked me in the sternum, blue eyes blazing. “Don’t you dare say that. I wouldn’t want any of my children to give up, and I won’t let you do it, either.”
I stared down at the table. There seemed precious little to live for.
“Hey.” She pressed her hand to my face. “We are going to survive this. But you’ve got to fight for it.”
Numbly, I nodded.
“Okay. We need to work out a timeline . . .”
And Ginger began to teach me how to lie.
***
The Elders and a handful of other men of the community descended upon our house. My father came with them. His face was tight and creased.
He grasped my hand. “Lead them to what you found.”
I walked before the phalanx of men. I could feel their stares boring into my back. I forced my eyes forward, put one foot in front of the other, until we reached the field. I stopped at the edge of the fence, went no farther.
The men filed past me. The Elders surrounded the fallen cattle, whispering among themselves. After some time they finally nodded at one another, then streamed out.
The Bishop said to my father and the other laymen: “Burn them.”
They walked back toward the house. The Hexenmeister remained behind, leaning on his cane.
My father asked: “What shall I do with the rest of the cows?”
Herr Stoltz frowned. “Put them in a barn. A barn with a Hex sign on the door.”
“What did this?” my father asked.
The Hexenmeister gazed back at the dead cows with rheumy eyes. The other men were cautiously approaching the bodies with wood.
The old man looked back at me. “The Darkness. The Darkness took them.”
“I don’t understand.” My father looked confused.
The Hexenmeister’s face crumpled in heavy sadness. “You will.”
He limped on after the others.
***
The Elders crowded into our kitchen, listening as Ginger recounted her story.
I noted that Ginger kept her story closely aligned with the truth. She clasped her hands in front of her on the table, telling them earnestly how it was God’s providence that she had found the car charger buried in the junk under her seat. I corroborated her story, feeling guilty for throwing her to the wolves, but not wanting any of the attention to fall on me or my wanderings Outside.
“I don’t know what to believe,” she whispered. “Dan says that there are monsters out there. Vampires.”
The Elders traded glances.
“And you said that he told you that people on holy ground are safe?” the Bishop asked her again.
“Yes,” Ginger said. “As long as the evil doesn’t find a way in.”
I looked down at my shoes.
The Bishop nodded. He and the other Elders stepped outside to confer privately.
I stared through the kitchen window. I could see a smoke plume at the horizon where the cows were burning, like some offering to one of Alex’s old gods.
Alex. My jaw tightened at the thought of him, and my palms began to sweat.
My father leaned against the table, rubbing his brow. My mother went to him, touched his sleeve. “Was it bad?” she asked.
He nodded. “Yes.”
Her gaze rested on Ginger. “Do you believe her?” Her fingers tightened on his sleeve.
My father frowned. “I will believe what the Elders tell us to believe.”
The Elders returned to the kitchen, their heavy footsteps creaking the floorboards. The Bishop stared long and hard at Ginger before he spoke: “There will be no more discussion of vampires. Or the Outside. Is this clear?”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“You will surrender your cell phone, and it will be destroyed.”
Ginger gasped. She blurted: “But that’s the last lifeline I have to my husband, my children . . .”
The Bishop was unmoved. “It is a link to Outside. If you want to stay, it must be destroyed. Otherwise”—the Bishop shrugged and looked out the window—“you are welcome to leave.”
Ginger squeezed her eyes shut, and tears dripped down her pale face. They tapped on the tabletop for a long minute before she finally agreed: “Okay.”
“Go get it.”
Ginger pushed away from the table, went upstairs to collect it. I could hear her footsteps on the wood above me, and my heart ached for her. This seemed such an unnecessary cruelty.
I opened my mouth, but my father shook his head. There was no undoing this.
Ginger slowly descended the stairs with her phone in her hands. She placed it before her on the table.
The Bishop nodded to one of the other Elders. He swept it to the floor and stomped on it. I could hear the crunch and shatter of plastic parts as the pieces skittered across the floor.
I put my arm around Ginger as she sobbed. The Bishop opened the back door to the throng of Plain men and women who had gathered in our backyard. They knew that something had happened, and I could hear the thickness of the rumors buzzing through them. I saw the Hexenmeister at the fringes, leaning on his cane. Elijah stared hard at the kitchen door, Ruth and Herr Miller flanking him. I looked away. The Elders would tell them all what was happening. I could feel the weight of guilt already being removed from me. One less secret to keep.
The Elders stepped down to the yard, the Bishop at the center.
“Brothers and sisters,” the Bishop began. “Thank you for your concern. But there is no need to panic. God is with us. We have nothing to fear.”
“But there is an Outsider among us,” Elijah grumbled loudly. I shot him a murderous look. “An Outsider who speaks of vampires.”
The crowd murmured.
The Bishop lifted his hands in a placating gesture. “We should offer our sympathies to the woman. The stress of the last week’s events has caused her mind to become unhinged. She imagines fearsome things, things that are not real.”
I gasped, stared at Ginger beside me at the table. Her face crumpled.
“She deserves our sympathy and our charity and our prayers that she should be restored to sound mind in accordance with God’s will.”
Another man shouted from the back. “What about the cattle?”
The Bishop shook his head. “Wolves. They have become bold. I entreat those of you with animals to keep them in the barns at night, to keep them safe.”
My hands balled into fists. The Bishop was lying to them. I moved forward, but Ginger grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t,” she hissed. “Better that they think I’m crazy than both of us dead.”
“But . . . we’re all in danger!” I whispered back.
She grasped my hand and squeezed it. Hard. “No. Be quiet.”
I bristled. All my life, people had been telling me to be quiet. To obey. And it had never gotten me anywhere.
I took a deep breath and stepped forward to face the crowd.
The Hexenmeister hobbled forward with his cane before I could speak. He faced the Elders. “The Darkness is coming.”
The Bishop glared at him. “There is no Darkness, except for the poisonous thoughts of Outside.”
The Hexenmeister pointed at the smoke plume in the distant field. “The Darkness is here. Someone has let it in.”
“We are safe. God has chosen us . . .” the Bishop began.
The Hexenmeister had the temerity to interrupt him. “God has chosen those who will not listen to die.”
He turned around and stumped away from the gathering. The crowd parted to let him, leaving the Bishop to fume impotently on our back step.
Chapter Sixteen
Nachtesse was brutally silent that night.
My mother and father did not speak, and Ginger sat at the table, staring at her chicken casserole. We were out of butter and ate our biscuits plain. Sarah, oblivious, filled the void with chatter until she realized that no one was responding. She settled down to push her casserole around with her fork, quiet like the rest of us.
After we ate, my father retired to his favorite chair by the fire to read the Bible to Sarah. Ginger slipped upstairs to go to bed. I wished that I could have done something to soothe her, but I could not have predicted today’s events. I only know that I felt pity for her.
I helped my mother with the dishes, washing and rinsing while she dried. We worked mechanically until she spoke.
“I know it’s difficult, liewe,” she said.
I stared down at the dish that I scrubbed. I doubted that she understood any part of what I was going through.
She kept going. “I was jealous, once, of a girl your father used to know. She was a nurse.”
I looked sidelong at her. Hard to imagine my father casting an eye at anyone other than my mother. “Oh?”
“Yes. Her name was Mindy. She was much more intelligent than I was. Better spoken.” She rubbed at a spot I’d missed with a striped dishtowel. “She was prettier, too.”
I crinkled my forehead. Mindy wasn’t a traditional Amish biblical name. “How did he meet her?”
“On Rumspringa. We went to one of the nearby towns, a large group of boys and girls. He met her at the bowling alley. I think some of the other boys had a taste for English, and they egged him on.”
I swallowed. “How did . . . how did you deal with that?”
She smiled into her reflection in a glass. “There is only one way to a man’s heart. Through gentleness. Not by getting angry or jealous.”
I frowned. “I don’t understand.” Maybe I didn’t want to.
“Elijah still cares for you. Else, he wouldn’t come around.”
“I think he just wants to control me.”
“He just wants to know that he has a place in your life, now that things have changed.”
My fingers wrapped around the neck of a jar in the sink, hidden by the suds. “He has chosen to change things. I was happy with the way things were.”
“You need to grow up. Things change. Once you accept that, you’ll be happier.”
I felt the jar collapse soundlessly in my hands, the glass bite into my palms. I lifted my hands from the water, speckling the suds pink.
“Oh no.” My mother wrapped the dishtowel around my hands, pressing them together. The red soaked through the cloth, and she called for my father to get some bandages.
I passively watched my mother bind my hands, clucking under her breath. My father looked on anxiously, the worry mark between his brows deepening.
I looked from one to the other. I could not now imagine Elijah and I having what they did.
I began to cry. My mother held me, thinking it was from the pain of the cuts.
I let her, too exhausted to resist.
***
Night called me.
I lay in bed, listening to the soft settling noises of the house, to Ginger’s snores, to the sound of the breath whistling through the gap in my little sister’s front teeth. I could hear the crickets and the sound of the breeze through the trees.
Beyond that . . . I heard something more.
I wrapped the pillow around my head, muffling the night sounds so that I could hear my pulse thumping in my ears. But I still heard it, that strange sound in the darkness I’d never heard before. It was eerie. Seductive.
One of my classmates who’d gone on Rumspringa last year had brought back a shell. He’d gone as far as the ocean. He said that I could hear the sound of the ocean in the shell. Swallowing my jealousy, I pressed the shell to my ear, heard that soft roar. I closed my eyes, listening to that sound that was not unlike blowing across the lip of a bottle, that distant hiss of ocean captured in a pink whisper. I listened to the shell for an hour, imagining what that vastness must be like in person. I wondered what that broad blue horizon would smell like, how the sand would feel between my toes.
This was like that, that soft summoning. I could hear it in my bones, no matter how hard I tried to muffle it.
I rolled out of bed, padded across the floor. I shook Ginger’s shoulder to wake her, to ask her if she heard it too. But she was deep in slumber and just mumbled and turned over.
I went to the window, slid it open. Cool dark air washed over me. The moon above had burned through the clouds, sketching out the landscape in black and white. I saw no sign of anyone in the yard below, only a rabbit hopping out of my sister’s pumpkin patch.