Karen Harper - Fall From Pride

At the Esh table the number of guests swelled, but then Mamm and Lizzie had sent over enough fried chicken, biscuits, gravy, applesauce, chowchow, dandelion salad, schnitz pie and rhubarb crunch to feed an entire work crew. Churchwomen were taking turns sending a noon meal to the bishop’s family for a while. The Eshes had insisted that Sarah, Nate and Mike Getz, who showed up and had just done an interview with the Cleveland TV station, join them. Also, two church elders, Reuben Schrock and Eli Hostetler, who both had Sarah’s squares painted on their barns, dropped by in time for dessert and coffee.

Sarah saw that Nate ate like a field hand, after they’d just had that talk about his gaining weight. And she also noted that Nate watched Mike Getz like a hawk.

“I know now it was a bad move,” Mike, a big guy with a shaved head and goatee, admitted. “I shouldn’t have rushed inside to try to pull some of the buggies out, but the barn looked like a goner and I wanted to save something.”

He ate with his left hand since his right was in a cast. Sarah could see the clean, white plaster had writing on it already, including in pink ink, “Love Ya! Cindee” and a large heart. Mike’s head seemed to sit directly on his broad, slanted shoulders—a man with no neck, and not, she thought, a lot of sense.

“But a broken bone’s a small price to pay,” he went on, his mouth partly full, “to help a neighbor.”

Strictly speaking, Mike wasn’t a neighbor of the Eshes but lived much closer to Elder Reuben Schrock and his family, over on Fish Creek Road.

“Have you rushed into other buildings on fire?” Nate asked. The entire Esh family, along with Sarah and Nate, had eaten first and it was mostly men at the table now, with Sarah and Esh daughter Naomi clearing dishes and serving more pie and coffee. Naomi was betrothed, and Sarah knew how badly she missed having her older sister Hannah here to help plan for the big event next autumn. Well, Sarah thought, maybe she and Ella could somehow convince Hannah to attend that day—if Sarah could talk Ella into building bridges with Hannah.

“I’ve always done what I could,” Mike Getz was telling Nate. “I’ve been working with the volunteer department since I was twenty—for six years. Man, I think your job must be really fascinating, Mr. MacKenzie.”

“It is,” Nate said, “and I’d be happy to talk to you about it. I always like to meet dedicated firefighters.”

Mike Getz just beamed. As she stood in the doorway to the kitchen, Sarah wondered if Mike had just gone to number one on Nate’s list of suspects.

“We have something to announce,” Reuben Schrock said, and cleared his throat. “Bishop Esh, we would like to hold a barn raising soon as possible with an auction of goods even sooner to raise some cash for the project and to build up the alms fund for the rebuilding and other needs.”

“We are grateful,” Bishop Esh said, his voice quiet, his face serious. Sarah could hear his wife, Mattie, standing beside her, sniff back a sob.

The other elder, Eli Hostetler, spoke. “Date for the raising to be determined, when we can clear the space and order the wood and all. But we’ll be announcing the auction for next weekend at the schoolhouse, lest it rains.”

Sarah knew her family and others would donate quilts and that outsiders would snap them up. For once, she almost wished she liked quilting bees, but she never had, standing out like a black sheep among the other skilled-at-stitching Amish sisters. At least some of Daad’s birdhouses would be for sale, a few things she had decorated. She wished she could contribute some painted quilt squares on wooden wall plaques, but her father had said he didn’t think it was a good idea for her to be branching out too much.

When everyone rose from the table—still not hurried—and Nate passed Sarah, he whispered, “So is that alms fund like Amish insurance? Will you explain later?” He kept moving, not waiting for an answer.

They all gathered outside where Nate, standing knee-deep in the black bones of the barn, took over. The TV reporter, a blonde woman, scribbled notes while her cameraman held out a microphone on a long pole. The bishop had asked them not to film, and they’d agreed. It wasn’t so much, Bishop Esh had explained to the reporter, that the Amish saw still or moving pictures as making graven images, which the Bible warned about, but that having one’s picture taken or being featured in a magazine or newspaper story could make one prideful—that is, feel better than or separate from the community.

Sarah thought again of her interview with Peter Clawson, who had just come roaring in in his truck. Had she been prideful to speak to him and to be so pleased with the printed color pictures of her quilt squares adorning Amish barns? Community oneness was everything to her people, their essence, their very survival. So why couldn’t she squash her desire to paint entire pictures of the Amish? Defiant independence to chase a personal dream fueled by a God-given talent had ruined Hannah’s life so far.

Word really must have spread that the arson investigator was going to give his verdict. Most of the Lantz family from the third adjoining farm buggied in, including Sarah’s friend Ella, her parents and four of her siblings. Sarah noted that Barbara, nearly sixteen, went over to stand by Gabe, but he shook his head at something she said and shifted a few steps away. Ella came over to stand by Sarah, linking arms with her as Nate’s voice rang out in the hush. It was disturbed only by the spring breeze turning the windmill, birdsong and the occasional snorting of the buggy horses tied to the fence rails near where Hannah and Sarah had stood together just last night. She should be here, Sarah thought, and whispered that to Ella. “Ya, Hannah should be home with her family and you and me, just like in the old days,” Ella whispered as Nate’s deep voice rang out.

“Arson is often proved by investigators finding a path of foreign accelerants that ignited, then spread, the flames. Accelerants can include grease, kerosene, gasoline and paint thinner, but I’ve been able to eliminate the accidental spill-age of those or even the presence of those. Besides finding a bunch of matches—unlit—outside of the barn, I found evidence of accelerants within, so let me explain and point that out.”

His cell phone tone sounded. Sarah noted he ignored it.

“The front door frame,” he said, pointing to a big, tumbled beam with a blackened metal handle on it, “shows what we call alligatoring—shiny blisters.” Several people leaned closer. The Cleveland reporter and Peter Clawson scratched away on their notepads.

“This indicates a rapid rise in temperature of the blaze, so nothing really smoldered. Evidence here,” he said, continually moving through the debris and pointing things out, “indicates it spread unusually fast, which eyewitnesses corroborated. These beams were from the roof—third or loft floor. Also, the fire seems to have started in more than one place, one at the back of the barn near a window, another near the east side window. Multiple V-pattern burns are also major clues pointing to arson.

“But how did someone reach those high windows to get the fire going in the loft where hay was stored? I’m surmising that the arsonist used one or both of the ladders that were on the ground outside the barn, which were then destroyed in the fire. In that respect, the arsonist either knew the ladders were available or stumbled into being able to use them. It meant he or she could stay outside the barn rather than going in and climbing the built-in ladders within to start the fire.”

The arsonist had used her ladders! Why hadn’t he told her that—warned her he’d say that? At least no one but Mattie Esh so much as glanced her way, but it made her sick that her equipment might have been a part of this—and that Nate had not confided that to her earlier when he told her it was arson.