J. Wachowski - In Plain View

Getting Jenny to school had been even harder than usual this morning. She was slow, then she was sick, then she was “bored with school. It sucks.” I heard all about how her mother would leave her home alone if she promised to just lie on the couch and watch TV.

Right. My bullshit meter was pinging red-red-red, then she missed the bus and I saw red-red-red. I don’t really remember my mom hollering at me before eighth grade. Jenny won’t remember either.

The Jost farmhouse appeared as Ainsley and I rounded the tree line, exactly as white as the sun on a cloud, except for the windows. Glare made the glass a one-way mirror to interior shadows. I scanned the windows and continued walking. As we passed the chicken hut, there was a burst of cackling clucks and crows.

“That’s weird.” Ainsley jabbed at me with his elbow.

“The watch-chickens?”

“No. That.” A car was parked almost out of sight, around the side of the house that led to the barn. It was a modest gray Toyota-about as Amish as you could get in a car.

We both stopped to stare. Then the front door of the farmhouse banged open and out comes a guy in a suit coat with a briefcase the size of a dog kennel and a wad of manila folders. He’s clearly pissed and rushing to get out. So naturally, the folders slip and stuff shoots everywhere in a papery blizzard of fifty-two pickup.

The guy shouted something fairly common, but definitely not Plain language.

“Go help him. See what you can find out.”

“Me?”

“I’m going in to see Mr. Jost.” I held out the box in my hands.

“Trespassing, breaking and entering-” Ainsley ticked off the words on his fingers.

“Not ‘breaking.’ Guy left the door open, see?”

“-being a public nuisance.”

I blew him a kiss and stepped around the mess to get to the front door.

Behind me, I heard Ainsley offer, “Let me give you a hand.”

The door swung open with the slightest push. I could hear Rachel’s voice in the room beyond the entrance hall.

“-don’t understand.”

“Understand this!” her father shouted back. “I will have nothing of his. Nothing.”

I wonder sometimes why other people back away in retreat when they hear the sounds of an argument. Is it fear? It can’t be only that. I am something like afraid when I walk toward trouble. But I still can’t turn away. As a kid, I slept with the closet door open and staged routine falls off the bed to stare into the dark beneath.

The world is too full of things to fear. A fight gives you a chance, at least.

From the doorway of the dining room, I saw Rachel gather her apron in both hands and cover her face. She looked like a small child hiding her eyes in the hope of not being seen.

Jost was the opposite. He wore no hat now and the blunt cut of his hair and wiry beard made me think of old photos of Rasputin. His face was burning, blotchy red, squeezed in a vise-grip of strong emotion. When he looked over and saw me, I thought he’d blow his last gasket.

“What are you doing here? Get out of my house!”

Rachel dropped her apron in shock. She covered her mouth with her hand and gave the smallest shake of her head.

“I brought you something,” I said. The room was an echo chamber of flat, reflective surfaces: hardwood floors, bare walls, a long dining table with bench seating. My voice sounded loud and hollow.

Jost looked at me like I was a lunatic. “I want nothing of yours.”

“It’s not mine. It’s yours.”

10:47:41 a.m.

“The rumspringa. It’s a fascinating contradiction. Follow me. We have to be quick, I have a patient coming in fifteen minutes.” Dr. Graham pointed us up the corridor, making us work for every second we recorded. “The Amish way of turning teenagers into responsible adults is to set them free. One day they are completely under the rule of their parents and then they turn sixteen and suddenly, they aren’t.”

Ainsley danced around trying to stay ahead of her, or at least in profile. I was lugging the separate audio track. It was a good test of College Boy’s mobility skills. But I hated traipsing through the hospital. The place gave me the creeps.

“Both the boys and girls?” I asked.

“For the most part. The commitment to their church must be made by an adult. Parents cannot force children to enter the church. In a way, it’s also a test of the parents.”

“If I were sixteen and somebody said I could do all the crap I’d ever wanted, I’d have been gone.”

“That’s how a lot of boys feel,” Dr. Graham said. She stopped to let a gurney pass and smiled at Ainsley. “I knew a boy about your age who acted out quite a bit when he turned sixteen. He even bought a truck so he could be the one to haul kegs to their parties.”

“What happened?”

“He’s married. His wife gave birth to their third child last May. Cute little girl.”

Ainsley looked horrified. “Are you kidding me?”

“No.” She laughed. “That young man, everyone he knows-his family and friends, his peers-they’re all Amish. He fell in love. But there is no marriage in the Amish church until both members commit themselves to the community. The truck was sold. The keg-hauling stopped. He started a family. Life went on.”

Hospital people stopped to stare as we bumbled along the hall. The doctor walked slowly, enjoying her moment of fame. She may not care about television in general, but she enjoyed showing her colleagues that she was TV material. More power to her.

I couldn’t help wondering which of the people we passed might have known my sister, worked with her, spoken to her in this very hall only a few months ago. Focusing on the doctor, I pulled an imaginary string with my fingers, reminding her to speak in full sentences. “What about Tom and Rachel? Could they have gotten married outside the church?”

“A couple who married outside the community would be put in the bann. They would be shunned by other Amish, a very different life from the one Rachel expected. Normally, a young couple lives with their parents until a child is born, then they move to a separate household.”

“No way,” Ainsley said.

“Enough with the commentary.” I had a hand free, so I smacked him. Quietly.

“While they live with their parents, working the farm, they receive a share of any profit and save for a home or farm of their own. If it’s a dairy operation like the Jost family runs, young couples will often build on the same farmstead, so they can be nearby to help.”

Jost’s family farm was a dairy operation. But Tom was not invited to work the farm and build a home there. He’d gone off and made the fire service his home.

In the end, both families had turned on him.

The corridor the doctor led us down seemed impossibly long. On camera, it would read like the Flintstone’s house. I held that image in my head to ward off the shivers. The smell of the place reminded me of my sister’s house. She must have used the same cleaning liquid.

“Can they leave the community during the rumspringa? ” I asked. “Go live in the city for a while?”

“Certainly. Many do. Especially the boys.”

“Really?” That confused me. “A man could leave the community before being baptized, go make a living in the world and then return, years later?”

“It’s possible,” Dr. Graham said. “But experience changes everything. One of the paradoxes that the community creates for itself is raising people of such strong convictions that when they choose to stand apart, it can be very difficult to heal a breach.”

Tom’s ghost must have hovered nearby. I felt the tickle of hair rising on the back of my neck.

“Especially after they’ve had cars, broadband and safety razors,” Ainsley said.