The Healing Read online

  The characters and events in this book are the creation of the author, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  THE HEALING

  Copyright © 2018 by Linda Byler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Good Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Good Books books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Good Books, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  Good Books is an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®,

  a Delaware corporation.

  Visit our website at www.goodbooks.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-68099-394-3

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-68099-402-5

  Cover design by Jenny Zemanek

  Printed in the United States of America

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  The Story

  Glossary

  Other Books by Linda Byler

  About the Author

  CHAPTER 1

  THE LATE SUMMER HEAT SHROUDED THE RURAL PENNSYLVANIA VALLEY, the humidity sapping the enthusiasm of teachers and children alike.

  Flies droned through the classroom, distracting the perspiring upper graders who had just come in from a round of baseball. Boys swiped at uncomfortable curtains of hair that hung to their eyes, rolled up sleeves, yanked at collars with forefingers, raised flapping hands to ask to be allowed to go for a drink.

  Although every window was open, there was no hope of a breeze, so the boys lifted sweating palms, gripped slippery pens, and set to work on their vocabulary.

  The teacher, Anna Beiler, was tall, and of considerable weight, circling the room the way John Stoltzfus imagined a commander of an army managed his troops. There was no getting away with anything, certainly not in this heat. The teacher’s face was the color of a Concord grape, more or less.

  John settled his thick, wire-framed glasses farther up on his nose and swatted viciously at a fly that had settled on his textbook, resulting in a loud whopping sound that brought the teacher to a standstill.

  “John.”

  His name like a crashing cymbal.

  “Explain yourself.”

  “The fly sat on my vocabulary book.”

  “The sound you just made was unnecessary.”

  John sat, eyes downcast, tried to make himself agree, then discarded that idea when he felt her perspiring presence beside him.

  “Apologize.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  It was spoken through a thick net of rebellion, but still spoken. He held his breath till he sensed her large form moving on, then sighed a long, deep breath and leaned forward with his head bent over his workbook, thinking that was the third apology he had uttered that day, and it was only early afternoon. Likely there would be a few more before the day was over.

  His life as one long string of apologies stretched before him, an endless river of failures that cropped up with regularity.

  The youngest of a family of ten kids, with six brothers in various stages of single, adolescent, teenaged, or hoping to be married. He also had three sisters who had all found a “chappy” somehow, married, and left the house in the wake of Tupperware and Pampered Chef, quilts and sheet sets and new furniture, wedding gifts packed into sturdy banana boxes, directions scribbled with black Sharpie markers, corners crammed with crumpled newspaper for the trip to Kentucky.

  He could hardly believe his good fortune, every one of them moving to Kentucky, marrying Yoder cousins endowed with a pioneering spirit. Good riddance.

  John navigated his world of brothers as best he could.

  Often teased, and always hovering on the edge of a world inhabited by bigger, smarter, better humans, John felt himself an afterthought. He felt mostly forgotten, easily dismissed by a preoccupied father who had too many cows and was farming too many acres. The boys took no interest in the old ways of driving six mules across the land and tearing up thin strips of soil when the tractor on the neighboring farm hummed effortlessly across fields, drilling corn seeds into the ground using the no-till method.

  Why toil endlessly, with ever thinning profits, if there were newer methods of making a living? Wouldn’t it be better to go to work and come home at the end of an eight- to ten-hour day and relax with your family? Better, even, to start up your own business, draw blueprints, write estimates, take that chance of making a quick ten thousand?

  Or lose a quick ten thousand, the father reminded them.

  All this John heard from the outskirts, forming his own opinion, his nose in yet another book, one leg draped over the arm of the recliner.

  “You know you’ll turn into a marshmallow,” Abner muttered, taking his book between thumb and forefinger, flicking it across the room.

  “You need to walk behind Dawdy’s plow,” Amos snickered. “Fat. You’re getting fat.”

  They’d tease and roughhouse him good-naturedly, but John heard the undertones, the things left unsaid, Mam’s presence his only guardian.

  So he ate shoofly pie in creamy oatmeal loaded with brown sugar and rich milk from the gleaming bulk tank in the milkhouse. He ate rounded, crackled molasses cookies rolled in white sugar like diamond crystals; bacon sandwiches, the thick homemade bread toasted in the oven broiler, spread with mayonnaise. He ate chicken potpie with applesauce and rolls with strawberry jam.

  He pulled in his stomach, measured the snugness of his trousers by inserting four fingers, yanking on his elastic suspenders. He never wore T-shirts beneath his shirts—why add an extra layer to make his clothes even tighter?

  His mother had given up sewing shirts years ago, with seven boys growing like jimsonweed, yelling about hand-me-downs and tight underarms, faded colors and popped buttons. She bought them by the armload, those blue, gray, green, and white button-down cotton shirts from Walmart.

  She was as Amish as they come, but she had to cut corners somewhere.

  Three times a day, there were meals to prepare. Not just a small amount of food, but large quantities for seven hungry boys. His mother often wondered why God had chosen to give her the three girls first then present her with seven boys in quick succession, sturdy little chaps that arrived into the world red-faced, already hungry and squalling.

  Oh, but she loved her boys and suffered right along with them when they were dealt blows, heartaches, longings. Especially during the teenage years. Navigating the world of girls was a rocky journey, like shooting down wild rapids in an untrustworthy boat.

  She prayed, she worried, she placed her trust in God alone, most of the time, although sometimes she sank beneath waves of anxiety. There were whole days smothered in the pressing duties around her, sometimes resulting in short barks of frustration or eruptions of emotion.

  She knew Abner longed to be dating at twenty-two years of age. Knew, too, the fair Malinda would not have him, but was holding out instead for his cousin Elvin Fisher. The whole situation wouldn’t be so trying if it wasn’t her own sister’s boy, and her with that calm unruffled exterior, that certain superiority that irked Mary like a pin that jagged from her apron.

  And here she had six more boys to go.

  The Stoltzfus farm was located in southern Pennsylvania, nestled in the picturesque hills and valleys of Jefferson County, close to the wide and meandering Juniata River, surrounded by the
mountains named Tuscarora by the Indians of a bygone era. Folks from Lancaster County became restless from time to time, acknowledging the fact they were being hemmed in by the tourist industry, as well as the growth of the many Amish churches called districts, stretching from Ephrata to the Maryland line. So in the ’90s the Jefferson County settlement began, started by three pioneering families looking for good soil at a reasonable price.

  Pleased with the area, they put down roots, buying farms for less than half of the price of a farm in Lancaster County.

  They cleaned, painted, built dairy barns and horse barns, tilled the soil, became acquainted with the ausry—the English, as they called them, meaning the non-Amish.

  English farmers with thumbs hooked in overalls straps stood for hours with Henry Lapp, Rueben Fisher, and Davey Beiler, sharing local wisdom, took them to town for calf starter, taught them the maps of the towns surrounding them, which feedstores delivered free of charge, which lumber company would present them with the most lucrative deals.

  The community flourished as more men came to check out Jefferson County, bringing wives and children with varying levels of compliance.

  Homesickness was not uncommon for many, usually assuaged by the hiring of a van and driver to convey them back to Lancaster County to spend time with mothers and sisters. Having been able to hitch a horse to a gray carriage and travel a few miles to see family—even less, in most cases—had been a way of life taken for granted.

  Never again. Hearts yearned for chvischtot; bonds became stronger, the distance of over a hundred miles between them a buffer for any petty grievances one had toward another.

  Over 130 households inhabited the valley from Dexter Falls to Rohrersville, a distance of roughly twenty-five miles. The Amish farms and homes were tucked into wooded nooks, or sprawled along busy Route 365 where the land was mostly level.

  The English learned to adjust (with varying amounts of patience and forbearance) to the sign of a slow-moving emblem on the back of the gray buggies with canvas tops, the gleaming black wheels traveling at a pace of ten to fifteen miles an hour. Of course, some folks became openly annoyed and gunned their mufflerless pickups past a doddering horse in hopes of frightening the lazy animal, but that was to be expected.

  The hitching posts sprang up at the local Lowe’s and Walmart, and the proprietors learned to scoop up horse manure with wide steel shovels.

  Retired men recognized the part-time side job, bought fifteen-passenger vans to haul the Amish, making a dollar a mile, or eighty-five cents for a minivan. All through the community, lists of Amish drivers appeared in phone shanties, the small buildings where telephones rested on shelves, a posterboard of phone numbers written with a black marker tacked to the wall. Telephones in the house were verboten, an unnecessary luxury in the opinion of the ministry. The elderly bishops were strong on church history, and liberalism was eyed with suspicion.

  A telephone in the house would bring hours of idle gossip, and the women were doing too much of that already. As it was, the ones prone to loneliness spent hours in the cold phone shanty wrapped in heavy fleece comforters, wearing a coat, scarf, and gloves in winter.

  In summer, the door was flung open, skirts adjusted, brows mopped as they told their sisters they had no idea what was wrong with the pea crop this year. The well-meaning sister threw caution to the wind and told her outright if she wouldn’t be so dick-keppich and used lots and lots of granulated lime, she’d have a bumper crop, which resulted in a short goodbye, a clapping of the receiver, a miserable afternoon till a message was left on the well-meaning sister’s voice mail, a sort of apology (the kind that justified its actions).

  There were those, of course, who had telephones in offices close by, and these days some folks even had mobile phones that were easily hidden, easily procured, and an ongoing, thorny issue that refused to go away.

  Since human nature is unavoidable, no matter the religious sect, cell phones were acquired in secret—the guilt-ridden individuals knew they were forbidden, but found too much enjoyment, too much handiness and knowledge at their fingertips.

  Among the liberal rumschpringa, they quickly became prevalent, bringing contention and judgment from many of the more stalwart church members.

  How to cling to the old ways of the forefathers with so strong an adversary in the form of technology? This was the lament of the godly clergy, deciding among themselves how to address the problem.

  For one man’s conscience is unlike that of another. Ordnung were observed stringently by some, and not so much by others. And with wisdom sought, with love and admonishment, the Amish church strove to keep the ways taught to them generation after generation.

  Elmer Stoltzfus raised his boys with strict but loving discipline. At twenty-two, Abner had given his life to God, was baptized, and became a member of the Amish church, shunning all technology, as did his brother, Amos. Upright and honest, they drove their high-stepping Friesian-cross horses to the youths’ suppers and hymn singings, played volleyball, never made any undue sorrow for their parents.

  Marcus and Samuel were different, going away to the Saturday-night volleyball games that invariably turned rowdy, texting their friends on their cell phones, slouching at the breakfast table with red swollen eyes and unhappy expressions every Monday morning. Allen hovered between the two brothers, unsure which path he would go down.

  It was a large group of youth and some were conservative and some liberal. When the parents saw a need to separate the two, there was a division, a friendly, amicable split, the gehorsam forming one group to socialize with and the more liberal folks another.

  And so time moved on in the Jefferson valley. The sun rose and set on the righteous and the unrighteous as it had been since the beginning of time, God presiding over all, the final and ultimate Authority, the beginning and the end of each man’s faith.

  And so John Stoltzfus scootered home from Hickory Ridge School, one leg up on the iron bar between two bicycle wheels, his sweating hands gripping the handlebars, one leg propelling him forward, his lunchbox just barely fitting in the wire basket attached to the front.

  It was so hot. He yanked his straw hat off his head, gave up pedaling, and walked the rest of the way up the steep grade. Below him, a gaggle of children on scooters was an accident waiting to happen, laughing, talking, distracted by each other, oncoming vehicles the least of their concern.

  The top of the hill meant a long, cool breezy ride to the bottom, so John pedaled furiously to gain speed for the full benefit of his downhill coast. He hoped he would not have to chop corn when he got home, although he could see no way out of it. His mother planted so much corn she may as well build a silo for it. If he mentioned it, she tsk-tsked the very thought of less corn, saying the vegetable was the boys’ staple, their favorite, and if she froze a hundred quarts it was barely enough from year to year.

  The boys. He often wondered where he came in regarding the pecking order of the boys in the family. The caboose? The tail end? Barely attached, for sure, more like running on behind, calling out for everyone to wait up. Really, he just wanted to be noticed from time to time. His thoughts were not mired in self-pity—that’s just how it was, but he did wonder how many of the boys would be married before he qualified as a real person to his family.

  All he ever heard was his nose was like Samuel’s, his hair like Abner’s, he had Allen’s build, long in the torso, long legs, big feet.

  He was also a chunk. Decidedly overweight. Heavy. Glasses as thick as welder’s safety goggles. Hair that sprang out of his skull with no clear direction, without having the normalcy of curls.

  “Wavy,” Mam said. “You have wavy hair.”

  He seemed to have cowlicks all over his scalp, a bunch of hair growing left, another one in the opposite direction, and yet another group growing straight up, not even thinking of being wavy until the very end, where they should have lain flat against his neck. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror he wondered if he was actually born
mildly handicapped and everyone was too kind to tell him.

  He knew he was odd looking, for sure, with those colorless eyes squinting out from the thick lenses of his wire-framed glasses. As if the glasses were not enough, his teeth protruded in front, much like a rabbit’s.

  He remembered a picture of the mice in the Cinderella story, those little chaps that wore hats and dresses and sewed the ball gown for her. Their two teeth hanging from their upturned noses always brought a fear of his own growing teeth. What if those two front teeth went right on growing until they hung over his lower lip like that? He used to check their progress, daily, secretly, pulling back his upper lip, knowing with a kind of clammy fear that, yes, in a week’s time, his teeth had grown. Until suddenly, they stayed the same and his life took on little moments of gladness in the belief that he was normal after all.

  Excluding the hair, of course.

  Now that he was in eighth grade, a whole new set of problems reared their frightening heads. Small red pustules appeared beneath his bangs, five or six of them, before being joined by another bunch on his chin.

  He envisioned acne, pocked cheeks like a sea sponge, fissured with tough, scarred rivulets that stayed his whole life.

  That’s what people would remember him by. Oh, Elmer’s John. The one with the abnormal skin. Oh yeah. Him.

  So he squeezed the life out of the intruding monstrosities, which resulted in a dozen more, red and angry looking.

  Finally, unable to contain all the misery of the boiling pimples, he asked his mother to buy something next time she went to Walmart. She took his chin in her hand, turned his face right then left, peered through her bifocals, said “Tsk-tsk. Pucka.”

  She bought him some kind of orange, grainy gel to wash his face, a lotion to put on after, a vile-smelling beige concoction that dried on the surface of his skin like plaster. Before a week had passed, the brothers were ribbing him about wearing makeup, laughing uproariously at their own jokes.

  John learned early in life that it was easier to be carried along, mock punching, laughing with them. The tears only surfaced at night, in the privacy of his own bed, until his own humiliation at being a crybaby stopped them.