A Rose Revealed (10 page)

Becky told us she found Old Nate when she went downstairs to get a root beer.

“I only had a small flashlight, and I almost stepped on him in the dark,” she said and shivered. I shivered too. What a terrible mental image that was.

“Root beer at this hour of the night?” Harry asked.

Becky shrugged. “I had been up with the baby and was thirsty. I often get a bottle after a feeding. Grandmother Annie makes wonderful root beer. It’s been one of the pleasures of staying here.”

Becky kept watching her grandmother with worried eyes. “After I wakened Grandmother Annie, I ran down the street to the phone shanty and dialed 911.”

She went over to Annie and knelt beside her rocker. She spoke softly to her grandmother for a moment and then went to the kitchen. I could hear her preparing something for Annie to drink.

“You’d think,” muttered Harry as he leaned against a wall, “that after all the medical problems with the baby, they’d get a phone in the house.”

“Against the
Ordnung
,” I muttered back.

“What’s more important?” he asked, disgusted. “Law or life?”

“It’s a matter of opinion. And to some people they’re the same. Besides, a phone in the house might not have saved him anyway.”

We would wait as long as it took for the coroner to arrive, Harry and I. While I as a nurse and both Harry and I as EMTs could declare a person dead, we needed the coroner because of the unknown cause of Old Nate’s death. He would also oversee the removal of the body. Though there was no evidence of a crime, there was no one who had witnessed the death, so we treated the situation as a crime scene. It was the old better-safe-than-sorry philosophy.

I stared with interest at the benches lined up in the living room and the kitchen.

“They were supposed to have church here tomorrow,” I said softly.

Harry nodded. “They’ll all come anyway. It’s proper to come sit with the bereaved. She won’t be alone from now until the funeral.”

Harry was a lay scholar, full of information about all kinds of arcane cultural things. He was a Mennonite farmer, raised in Lampeter just down the road. The only time he’d been out of Lancaster County was when he’d done alternate service as an Army medic during Vietnam. There he found he loved helping people in so practical a manner.

“Just like a Mennonite,” I often teased him. “Always taking care of the world.”

He’d grin and say, “Well, someone’s got to do it, you know. The rest of you Christians are so busy arguing among yourselves that we peaceable Mennonites have the helping fields to ourselves.”

While we both knew that these were gross overstatements, we also knew there was a painful amount of truth there.

“How come you’re not burned out yet?” I asked him one time as I studied the circles under his sixty-five-year-old eyes. “How many gruesome late-night accidents can one person take?”

“I ought to be burnt to a cinder by now,” he agreed. “But, boy howdy, I love this rescue work. Don’t tell my pastor, but I thank the Lord for the Army every day. If I hadn’t become a medic, I’d have missed all this great stuff!”

Quite simply, Harry was wonderful.

“What will happen after Old Nate’s funeral?” I asked him now, as Becky handed her grandmother a mug of what turned out to be hot water laced with honey. “Will they still care for her then?”

“There are probably relatives who will stay for a while. When they leave, the district will see she’s taken care of. The Amish treat widows with great respect.”

I watched Annie, gently and mindlessly rocking, her face a study in sorrow. I wondered what ramifications Old Nate’s death would have for her personally beyond the obvious loss of a life’s mate. While respect was wonderful, it would only go so far. Then what did “taken care of” mean?

The Stoltzfus house was large and old and must need constant upkeep. From where I stood, I could see a splintered window pane and a water stain in the ceiling. The linoleum on the kitchen floor was ancient, cracked, and discolored. I doubted Annie was up to caring for these things and the myriad others that would develop over time. I knew Becky’s family lived in Ohio, too far away to step in.

“Are there other children besides Becky’s father?” I asked Harry.

“It’s Becky’s mother who’s the Stoltzfus’s daughter. She just happened to marry another Stoltzfus, no relative.”

“Ah.” In a community where many were closely related and surnames were often the same even without relationship, things could get confusing, especially to an outsider like me.

“There is a son,” Harry said slowly. “His name is Davy. But I don’t know if there’s been any contact with him since the day he was shunned.”

I blinked. “A son who was shunned?” Was that why Old Nate was so unforgiving toward Becky? “What did he do?”

Harry grinned. “He’s a driver on the NASCAR circuit.”

“He races automobiles?” I was flabbergasted.

“Our own Richard Petty,” Harry said, “though not as successful. At least not yet.”

Just then I heard the clop of hooves, the rattle of a buggy, and the jingling of a harness.

“How do they know so fast?” I wondered as I peered toward the window.

“Becky,” Harry called, “did you phone the bishop when you called us?”

She turned toward us and nodded. “Grandmother Annie gave me the number of his next-door neighbors. I called them, and they said they would get him for us.”

“Good girl,” I said, thinking what a jolt that call must have been to the sleeping neighbors. But such was life in Lancaster County. “Is there anyone else you want to call? I have a cell phone here.” And I pulled my phone out of my backpack.

“Nein,”
she said.
“Denki.”

Annie touched the girl’s hand and whispered something.

Becky turned to me. “Maybe later?”

I nodded.

Becky rose and got a scrap of paper and a pen. She returned to her grandmother and was soon writing down something Annie told her.

Becky had just put the pen down and tucked the scrap of paper away when two older couples came into the house without knocking. The women went straight to Annie, but the men checked when they saw Old Nate still lying on the floor where he’d fallen.

They spoke quickly to Annie in Pennsylvania Dutch, a language I couldn’t understand. But Harry could.

“They want to put him to bed to prepare his body,” he muttered to me as he pushed off from the wall. “They think it’s undignified that he’s lying there.”

“It is,” I said as Harry walked across the room and stood by Old Nate.

“We can’t move him,” he told everyone. “We don’t know what killed him. It’s not like he died in his bed from an illness he’d already had. The law requires the coroner take him and determine what happened.”

“He fell,” one of the men said.
“Iss
what happened.”

“Probably,” Harry agreed. “But we don’t know that. Maybe he had a heart attack. Maybe a stroke. Maybe he heard something down here and was coming to see what was wrong and missed his footing.”

The Amishmen didn’t look happy, but they knew they had to accept our presence and its consequences. I was sure they wished we hadn’t been called. How much simpler to carry Old Nate to his bed and go on from there.

One of them turned to Annie and must have asked who called for us. Annie spoke and everyone looked at Becky. She blushed and looked uncomfortable as she stood quietly beside her grandmother. Her long hair hung down her back in a braid, and she was wearing a flannel gown and robe. Her grandmother had on much the same thing, and it was a sign of her grief and disorientation that she didn’t even realize her head was uncovered.

Suddenly pitiful little cries sounded.

Becky turned immediately and raced for the stairs. She stopped a minute with her foot on the lower tread.

“Will you come with me, Rose?” she asked. “Every time I go into his room, my heart beats with fear for what I’ll find.”

Becky turned to her grandmother’s visitors. “Rose was Trevor’s nurse,” she explained. “She knows how to help me with him.”

The women nodded as though they knew Becky needed help.

“Go on, Rose” Harry said. “I’ll call you when the coroner comes.”

We both knew that might be a while yet. The big pile-up on the Route 30 bypass had all the emergency services stretched. The fact that the coroner had been called to the scene of that accident did not auger well for the victims—or for a quick resolution here.

I picked up my backpack and followed Becky upstairs and along the hall to the little room she shared with Trevor. It was a far cry from the room I’d had as a fifteen-year-old, a pink and white Victorian excess, much to the dismay of my friends who were into hard rock and the color black. Then there were my TV, stereo, computer, and private phone line to say nothing of a closet stuffed full of clothes. One thing I could say for Mom. She had always given me everything I wanted—except affection.

It was a matter of more than typical Amish Spartan furnishings that set Becky’s room apart. It was the tattered quilt on her bed when I’d seen beautiful new quilts on the beds in the two large, airy, empty bedrooms we passed to get to her tiny closet of a room. It was the wicker laundry basket that was the baby’s cradle and the faded blankets that covered his wasted little body. It was the pathetic stack of worn, gray, holey diapers that Becky hand washed and hung on the line daily because she had no funds for disposables.

The truth was obvious to any observant person, even if I hadn’t already known the facts. Becky was not welcome in her grandparents’ house. They were highly embarrassed to have her here, first as a pregnant girl and now as an unwed mother. For someone as filled with moral rectitude as Old Nate apparently had been, Becky was a blot on the family name, a name already blackened by Davy, the race car driver. But even Old Nate realized she had to live somewhere. She was simply too young to be on her own.

The thing that always amazed me about Becky was her lack of bitterness. If I’d been as obviously rejected by everyone I held dear, I’d have shriveled up and died. I felt like doing that sometimes anyway, and my mother was always excruciatingly polite to me, never indicating that she thought I didn’t belong in her home, no matter how painful the memories I evoked.

Becky and I walked into the little bedroom, and she picked up the baby. Her face was filled with love as she held the wailing little boy, a child who was not attractive by even the kindest criteria. His frail little fists with their cyanotic nails waved in the air and his cry was more like that of a lamb’s bleating than a two-month-old’s usual wail.

“Hello, my Trevor,” Becky crooned to the baby.
“Ich leibe dich, mein liebchen, mein bubbli.”

She laid him gently on her bed, placing him in the indentation her head had left on her pillow. He rested there a minute before he resumed his thin cry. She sat on the bed, leaned against the headboard, and picked him up. He began to nurse with more energy than I expected.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, the only sound that of Trevor’s suckling.

“Rose, can you do something for me?” Becky asked suddenly.

“If I can,” I said.

“I need to contact my Uncle Davy and tell him his father died. All I have is this address that Grandmother Annie gave me.”

I looked at the scrap of paper she handed me and saw that Davy and Lauren Stoltzfus lived in Denton, Texas.

I nodded and took my phone out of my backpack. I dialed 411 and got Information. I felt certain the number would be unlisted. After all, Davy was a race car driver. Wouldn’t he have fans he was trying to hide from? I was surprised when I got the number immediately.

I dialed, knowing it was an hour earlier in Denton than here, and it wasn’t even dawn here yet. A woman’s voice answered, remarkably pleasant for being wakened.

“May I speak to Davy Stoltzfus?” I asked.

“I’m afraid he’s out of town. May I take a message?”

“Am I speaking with Lauren?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Lauren, I’m going to hand you over to Davy’s niece Becky who has some news for Davy.”

I handed Becky the phone and listened as she told Lauren about Old Nate’s death.

“I don’t know when services will be,” Becky said. “Probably Tuesday.”

“Tell her I’ll call her when we know,” I said. “And give her my number.”

Becky did so, hung up, and looked at me in surprise. “She said to tell Annie she loves her.”

“That’s nice,” I said, missing the implications of that innocuous comment.

“But how does Lauren even know Annie?” Becky asked. “Davy met her after he left home. At least that’s the gossip I heard. She’s from Texas. Is that far?”

I blinked. “Yes, it’s pretty far.”

“Do you think…” Becky’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Do you think maybe Grandmother Annie has been in contact with Davy and Lauren all these years? I mean, how else would Lauren know Annie well enough to say she loved her?”

“Would your grandfather have allowed it?”

Becky shook her head emphatically. “Absolutely not.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Grandmother Annie’s gone behind his back!”

“Now you don’t know that,” I cautioned.

“But she had the address right at hand.”

We looked at each other and grinned. Wicked, wicked.

Trevor gurgled and Becky looked down at him. She smiled and ran her finger softly over his nearly bald skull.

“All I ever wanted was to have a baby,” she said. “Lots of babies. To be a
mutter
.”

“But you’ve done it the hard way, honey.” I sat on the edge of the bed, filled with regret on her behalf.

“True,” she said. “And I’m sorry about that. But I’m not sorry about you, Trevor, my sweet. You are just wonderful.”

I smiled at them. “You’re wonderful, Becky. You do far more than any fifteen-year-old could be expected to do, and you do it so capably.”

Becky cleared her throat. “You need to know something, Rose.” She looked at me, her brown eyes filled with resolve and something I read as trust. “I’m not fifteen. I turned eighteen last week. They said I was fifteen when I came because it made everything look less like a willful sin and more like the foolish mistake of an ignorant girl. But I knew what I was doing, and I know what I’m doing now.” She paused. “And I know my baby is going to die.”