Sergeant Williams had grunted. “That’s what your Bishop said, when I tried to explain to him what I’d been told about compensation.” He’d then shook his head. “I’ve heard that maybe the federal government is going to handle it, but everything we hear is bits and pieces. And how can they handle it, if there’s no way to get money, and no way to transfer money? I could tell him what I’d heard, but nothing more.”
Abram had then asked him if that was why Bishop Schrock was upset. The soldier had laughed, a sharp little bark. “No. No. Hard guy, that man, but he knew that was how things were. He’d asked me about martial law. About what it meant. About how it was being implemented in other places. About what I know. Damned if orders are that we’re not to say, but hell. I’m still a citizen, and if you’re giving us supplies with no idea when you’ll get paid, I owe you what I hear. What I hear ain’t good.”
And then the Sergeant had stared at his boots for a while. “This is just a hell of a thing,” he said. Then he had looked up. “You’d think people would work together. You folks know how to do that, right? But ain’t nothin’ working.”
And then Abram himself went quiet for a moment, as he paused in the retelling. “And then he told me what he had heard from Philadelphia. From yesterday. A National Guard unit had been helping with the distribution of food from a church. There were too many people, and the crowd had swollen, and then they’d run out of food.
“But some in the crowd wouldn’t believe it. Men were shouting, saying there was more food inside, that the soldiers were keeping it for themselves. Things had gotten ugly. The people began pushing, and shouting and screaming, and the soldiers had been trying to hold them back.
“But then there was a patter of shots, and one of the soldiers went down, and the crowd surged forward.
“Then the soldiers opened fire.”
Abram went quiet again. “He told me there were at least a hundred dead. At least. Many of them women and children. And then he said they had heard more stories just like that.”
And then he told me the soldier said, “It’s all coming apart. Ain’t no soldier signed up for killing kids.”
But Lancaster was not like that, Abram said. It was peaceable. Tense, but peaceable. And there was still enough food, between the soldiers and the storekeepers and the emergency stores that every wise family had kept.
We talked for a while longer, about his kids, about the wild weather, about last Sunday’s worship. It felt good to talk about other things.
October 2
It is dark in the house, and it is late, but I am awake. I am tired, because it was a long day of work, but I can’t sleep now. It was the sound that woke me.
Once, twice, and then a patter of them. Gunshots, and not all the same gun. Some quieter pops, maybe a pistol, and then the deeper tone of a shotgun. It sounded like my father’s gun, the old Remington he used for deer hunting. But no one hunts with a pistol, and it is too late in the night for hunting.
The shots were not close, maybe a mile off, and they were not really very loud. But I should not be hearing them at all.
Hannah did not wake, and I heard no movement from Jacob. It had been such a hard day, with so much work, that this was no surprise. I wished I was sleeping as they were. I lay there, but the sound had woken me from my dreamless sleep. I said a few prayers, prayers for whoever it was out there in the darkness. Then I lay there for a while, trying to return to slumber.
But I could not, as tired as I was. So I rose and lit the lamp and came downstairs. Sadie was there. She was sitting alone in her nightdress in the half-dark kitchen, holding a glass of water. I started a bit to see her, and my heart, already worried, stirred. If Sadie was up at night, that often meant bad things. But she seemed fine.
“Hello, Dadi,” she said.
I asked her what had woken her.
“I heard the shots, Dadi. That’s why you woke up, isn’t it?”
I walked over behind her and held her shoulders for a moment. I told her that it was, and then I told her that she shouldn’t worry, that they were far away.
“I’m not worried, Dadi,” she said, with a very small smile. “But I think they aren’t as far away as we’d like them to be.”
I laughed a little bit, because it struck me as funny. Then I asked her how far away that was.
“So far away that we couldn’t hear them,” she said. “But we don’t have a choice about what we hear. Sometimes we have to hear things even if we don’t want to. Because they’re there, aren’t they, even if we don’t want them to be.”
She got up, and turned around, and rested her head for a moment against my chest. Then she stepped back a half step. “But it is quiet now. There will be no more sound tonight, I think.”
She yawned, and her bright eyes were dimming with sleep. “I will go to bed.” She stepped forward again, and I kissed her on the top of her head. “Good night, Dadi. Maybe you should write a little bit. It will help you sleep.”
And so I have. Dear Lord, but I am tired now.
October 3
In the early afternoon, I went downstairs into the larder. With Sadie’s help, Hannah had been working hard these last few weeks to be sure we were ready for the coming of winter, and she showed me what she had so far accomplished. That work does not only come in fall, of course. To prepare for winter, you need to be preparing the whole year. It is part of one’s mind all year long. It must stay on your heart all of the time. And so it is with us. Always aware of what is coming.
The jars were there, hundreds of them. Corn and tomatoes, pickles and beets and beans, all neatly organized on the shelves. Each had been harvested in season, but our little patch of land has always yielded more than we need for the right now.
Hannah has been so competent at this, a good gardener, and a very diligent organizer. She is an excellent wife, she is, and I tell her so. She is a blessing.
Jacob and I have especially been helping her with the beef, the meat from the steer we slaughtered in August, and the two pigs. We had been storing it over at the Schrocks’, in their large walk-in freezer. That compressor failed with everything else. That was a loss, a difficult one, not just for us but for everyone.
The community had agreed, years ago, that while all should not have refrigeration, it would be acceptable for us to share something. If we all had refrigeration, then it would tell us that we were each separate from one another. It would stir our pride, make us selfish, and let us pretend that we were each free of each other. But just one, shared among us all, owned by all of us together? That would be different.