Laura Bickle - The Hallowed Ones

But the radio wasn’t playing music today. It was just a voice, broken up by static:

“ . . . curfew has been imposed. Local law enforcement officers have instructions to arrest anyone found out on the streets after sunset . . .”

I leaned on the car window, and Mrs. Parsall turned up the volume.

“ . . . again, the sheriff’s office and the highway patrol is requiring people to stay in their homes until . . .”

The station faded. Mrs. Parsall played with the dial, couldn’t find the station again. Her brow knit above her glasses. “I wonder if there was another accident? Maybe that’s why no one came for the helicopter.”

“What kind of accident?”

“I don’t know.” She chewed her lip. “I hope that it’s not terrorism.”

I knew about terrorism, in the broadest terms. I remembered when Elijah came running up the dirt road to tell us about 9/11. I’d been milking cows with my father. Well, I’d been too small to milk, so I had just held the bucket while my father did it. Elijah breathlessly announced that planes had killed a bunch of people in New York City. It seemed very remote and far away. Though our lives went on as they always had, I noticed that the English were afraid. Very afraid. Somehow, though, I couldn’t imagine anything like that happening here. Not to us. Our sect of Plain folk had not changed for hundreds of years. It would take more than a handful of men with hijacked planes to affect our way of life.

Back then my father had looked at Elijah and me and told us not to be afraid. That God would protect us, that nothing would change.

I believed him. He was my father. And he was right. He was always right.

I leaned into Mrs. Parsall’s window, watching her face wrinkle in the unnatural green light of the car instruments. I felt some of that same fear emanating from her now.

“Stay here tonight with us,” I pleaded. “You can sleep with Sarah and me.”

Mrs. Parsall nodded. She slowly turned the key to silence the engine. “I’m sure that they’ll straighten this out by morning. But . . .” She reached into her purse and dug out her cell phone. I walked back to the house to give her some privacy. I never really understood the attachment that some of the English had to their devices. But then again, everyone I needed to speak to was within walking distance. Maybe I would feel differently if they were far away.

“Can Mrs. Parsall stay tonight?” I asked my father.

“Of course. What’s wrong?” he asked, reading my expression.

“On the radio . . . it says that there’s a curfew. Police will arrest anyone on the roads. But they don’t say why.”

Herr Miller rose partly out of his chair. “Seth and Joseph are at the furniture store.”

“I can call them, see if they’re all right.” Mrs. Parsall had come inside. Her nervous fingers knit in her pink purse strap.

“Did you speak with your family?” I asked her.

She nodded. “I couldn’t get ahold of my husband. But I spoke with my son. He’s at school, hasn’t heard anything strange. He says he’s at the library.” She rolled her eyes in skepticism. “But he says the Internet is down. He couldn’t find any information on what’s going on.” She blew out her breath. “So maybe it’s minor.”

“I’m sure that everything is fine,” my father said.

Mrs. Parsall held out her cell phone to Herr Miller. “I don’t know if this qualifies as an emergency, but . . . do you want to talk to whoever picks up at the furniture store?”

The restrictions on phone use by Amish were complicated. We weren’t allowed to have phone lines in homes. But we could use the telephone for business purposes and to summon help in an emergency.

“I think . . . that I would,” Herr Miller said. “But I don’t know the telephone number.”

“I do,” Elijah announced. His father looked at him sharply.

“Bishop’s gone.” Elijah shrugged.

“Elijah,” Herr Miller said. “The Bishop may be gone. But God is everywhere.”

Mrs. Parsall gave the phone to Elijah, and he punched in the number, then handed it to his father.

Herr Miller cradled the receiver to his ear. I could hear the phone ringing. It rang for what seemed like a long time before someone picked up.

“Hello? Joseph?” A grin of relief spread across Herr Miller’s face. “Are you all right?” He nodded to himself. “ Ja, ja . . . ja. Stay there . . . I will see you then. Goodbye.”

He handed the phone back to Mrs. Parsall. “They are safe at the store. A deputy came by and told them about the curfew.”

“A deputy?” Elijah echoed. “What did the deputy say?”

“He said that there had been rioting last night the next town over. Many people were hurt and taken to the hospital.”

We all looked at Mrs. Parsall. She was our conduit to Outside.

“I don’t know. I haven’t had the television on.” She spread her hands helplessly. “I wonder if that’s what happened to the helicopter. Some unhappy rioter . . .”

“There’s no use in speculating,” Herr Miller said. “The boys are staying at the furniture store tonight. Better that they stay there than spend the night in English jail. The curfew will be lifted in the morning. They’ll come home then, and we’ll hear all about the excitement.”

My father turned up the wick on the lamp. “Everything will be all right,” he said.

And I believed him.

That night I lay in bed and stared out the window.

Night and I were old friends.

The soft darkness wrapped around me, and I heard the familiar sounds in the stillness: the creak of the house settling as the temperature cooled, my sister’s breathing beside me, the crickets that had not yet succumbed to the frost. Night was a time for rest, for reflection. Sometimes it was the only time I truly had to myself. In fall and winter, the sun stayed hidden for longer and longer. Rather than burn the oil lamps out, we simply went to bed earlier. And that left time to think. Maybe too much time.

Tonight felt subtly different. It wasn’t just being crowded together with Sarah in her bed. It wasn’t just Mrs. Parsall snoring softly from my bed. Part of it was the shock from the afternoon wearing off.

I looked out the window, at the dark hills and the slightly lighter sky. The stars shone down as they always did. But I heard no engines of cars on the highway. And it seemed that there were fewer lights in the distance than there usually were.

I pulled the quilt up close to my neck and shuddered, remembering what I had seen in the helicopter. I did not sleep at all, feeling those glowing red eyes burning into my mind. Even working a prayer on my lips did nothing to drive them from my thoughts.

I rose in the dim gray light before dawn, dressed, and padded down to the kitchen. I needed to see for myself that there was nothing there, that my stressed imagination had conjured something from nothing.

I grabbed my shoes, arranged in a neat line beside my family’s shoes near the back door. I slipped outside . . .

. . . and into the realm of the ravens.

They were everywhere: perched on our gutters, in the trees, walking along the ground, swarming in the sky. I heard them calling to one another in their raspy language, a sound that swelled the farther I walked from the house toward the field. They swirled like vultures over the corn, cawing. They swept through the sky in large black swaths.

I stared up at them. This was wrong. Ravens were not migratory birds. They stayed throughout the winter. While they formed loose affiliations with others, they did not flock. Not like this. Not in the hundreds. Not in the thousands of black specks that I could see on the lightening horizon. As the light grew, so did the cacophony of their voices.