My mother began to untie my bonnet, but my fingers wrapped around hers. “No. I’ll do it.”
She nodded and turned her back to give me privacy while she poured a kettle of hot water into the tub. The boiling water steamed as it hit the cooler spring water. My mother topped the bathtub off from the hand pump in the floor, dipped her fingers in to check the temperature, as if I were a little girl. She’d even laid out a clean dress for me on a table against the wall we used for folding laundry. The one she picked she knew was my favorite: dark blue like the sky after sunset.
A lump rose in my throat at her kindness. It was Saturday, and bath day, anyway, but she was still trying to care for me.
She patted and kissed my cheek. “I’ll be up in the kitchen. Let me know if you need anything.”
I swallowed. I needed a lot of things. I needed to tell her what I’d learned, what I’d heard and seen with my own eyes. I needed her reassurance that all was unfolding according to God’s will, that we would be protected.
But all I could do was nod and look away.
My mother took that for modesty and left, closing the door of the spring room behind her. She left the little lamp behind to cast its yellow glow on the earthen walls. Red embers emanated from the belly of the stove, crackling with the last of the wood my mother had burned for the water. The heat caused sweat to prickle from my skin, even though my flesh was still covered in goose bumps.
I ripped the bonnet off my head, cast it on the floor. I peeled out of my filthy dress and my underclothes, kicked my shoes into a dark corner of the room where I couldn’t see them. A sob caught in my throat. I wadded up my clothes into a ball and walked to the stove. I tugged open the cast-iron door with a potholder and stuffed the bundle into it. The fire sparked and sputtered, as if trying to reject the awful, blood-spattered knowledge I shoved into its gullet. Finally, the dress caught and curled, burning brightly.
I shut the door on it, tears blurring my vision. I climbed into the bathtub, hissing as the hot water licked my skin.
I grabbed a washcloth and a bar of homemade lye soap and began to scrub, hard. I scrubbed until I was red and raw, as if I could scrape my own skin off and remove all the terrible things I’d learned today that had somehow become a part of me.
Eventually, I stopped, the water cloudy with the residue of soap. I stared up at the wooden floor joists of the ceiling in the dim, flickering light.
Was Alex right? Were we safe here, safe from those terrible creatures? I had a difficult time accepting that they were vampires, though my logic could find no other way out of the forest of the problem. Was God still watching over us? Had he chosen the Amish to be safe, here in our little community? For how long? How long until we ran out of kerosene and patience?
And what could I say . . . what should I say? I wanted to tell my parents what I’d seen, what Alex had told me. But I knew that, no matter how much they loved me, they would not defy the Elders on my behalf. No one in our community ever did, not even for their own children.
I remembered that two years ago one of my classmates had been baptized very young. He had been sixteen, insisted that he was ready, that he had tasted enough of Outside—but then he returned to the ways of Rumspringa. He moved outside our community within six months. He had come around for a while to visit his family, wearing his English clothes of jeans and T-shirts, driving his car, and talking about the job he’d found Outside in a factory. He’d also found drugs—meth. His parents kept trying to talk him into coming back, where there would be no temptation. He could go through withdrawal at home, ask the church for forgiveness, go back to where he’d started.
But the Elders said that his visits couldn’t continue. They said that the only way to bring him back into the fold was to reject him. He could not have the best of both worlds. He had accepted the rules when he was baptized, and he should know better. They were confident that the disapproval of his family and community would cause him to come back, dry out, ask forgiveness and rejoin the church, and to live happily ever after. With us.
And so they shunned him. The Bann und Meidung. Under the Bann, he was not permitted on our property. We were not allowed to speak to him, not even if we saw him Outside. We were to turn away from him, cast our eyes and voices away. We were to do nothing to help him. We were to release him to Outside like a wayward bird and let him find his way back.
It was heartbreaking for his family. I remember seeing him pounding on the door of his house, distraught, but no one would let him in. On the second floor, I could see his mother peering through the curtains, weeping. The only one who greeted him was the family dog.
He drove away and never came back. News came months later that he had died in a car accident. Alcohol was involved. His parents were not permitted to bury their son, and it was rumored that the government Outside had cremated his unclaimed remains. He’d turned against us, and his parents would never see him in heaven.
The Elders said that was God’s will. Gelassenheit.
And the Elders now said that no one was permitted in or out of the gate. I had defied those edicts twice. I had brought an Outsider in, and I’d ventured Outside myself. I could tell them what I had learned . . . that Outside suffered from a plague of vampires. But could they do anything with that knowledge that they weren’t already doing? They had placed our community in quarantine. That seemed to be working. According to Alex, it would continue to work unless someone invited evil in.
I squeezed my eyes shut. If I told the Elders, I did not know what would happen. I expected that they would throw Alex out to the monsters. For myself . . . I had never seen someone placed under the Bann until after they were baptized. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t. If they could shun someone for accepting and then renouncing the Ordnung, for the crime of being an addict, they would not hesitate doing the same to me for bringing risk to the community.
And, given what I’d seen and heard today, the Bann would mean certain death.
I sank up to my chin in the now-tepid water. I had failed to follow the Elders’ wisdom. Though they didn’t have all the information, they had chosen the correct course of action through faith.
I had no choice. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want Alex to die. I would have to keep silent.
But perhaps I could make amends to God, and he could forgive me. Perhaps he would not bring disaster to our doorstep.
I began to murmur the Lord’s Prayer, my breath pushing small ripples across the water. Maybe he would still hear me.
I walked over to Elijah’s house that evening to bring him and his father some supper. I left as soon as the bread had cooled enough to handle and the Jell-O had set. The sun was still above the horizon. I wanted to be back well before nightfall, now that I knew what dwelt in it.
I knocked on the front door, and Herr Miller called for me to let myself in. I found him sitting at the kitchen table, reading his Bible. He looked very pale and thin as his eyes moved across the page.
“I’ve brought supper. And I’ll pick up your laundry.”
“Thank you, Katie,” he murmured as I put a plate of bread, ham, and baked apples before him.
“I’ll put the Jell-O in the refrigerator,” I said. “It has spiced apples in it.” There wouldn’t be much more Jell-O, or any groceries from the Outside, in the future.