The ground was near frozen, hard and unyielding, and the work was slow going. We labored in silence, only the sounds of our shovels against the soil.
I looked up from my work, and there was Sadie. I had not heard her come, or seen her.
She was kneeling by the shrouded corpse of the boy, her back to me. In her slight voice, she was singing that lullaby again, with words that meant nothing to me.
She was not wearing her kapp on her head, and the wind played with her long hair, twisting it, tangling it. I set down my shovel, and walked to her, and put my hand on her shoulder.
The wind rose up, stinging my face.
The air filled with leaves, torn down from the trees by the thousands. Like rain, dancing down all around us, brown and brittle. They filled the air, hissing, like dried cat bones through the sky. They eddied over the opened ground of the grave, and skittered like the husks of insects across the shroud.
One caught in Sadie’s hair. She reached back, absently, thoughtlessly, took it, and then closed her pale, delicate fingers around it.
It crumbled like nothing in her hand. Then she opened her hand, and the pieces leapt away in the wind.
Her head turned to me, and her eyes were bright.
“Oh, Dadi,” she said.
October 28
This morning, I felt so tired. Like the life was out of me, like my heart was full of molasses. I woke, but it was hard.
Mike was up, and a good help, and Shauna was in the kitchen with Hannah. Tad is helping Jacob. Derek was with Sadie, helping with the milking and her other chores.
I did what needed to get done, but my thoughts kept returning to that boy. And that man. I will not ever know their names, I don’t think. The man, like a wolf, his eyes just filled with simple violence.
But the boy? It was like Sadie said. He was just a boy. And yet there he was, living because of the hate of the man, being fed by the violence. I cannot stop thinking about it, and it is distracting me. I read and reread what I wrote yesterday, about burying him. I see the bloody sheet, feel the hardness of his body.
I must stop writing now. I must stop reading now. There is work I must do.
SADIE HAD VISITORS THIS afternoon, Liza Schrock and Rachel Fisher, as have so often come. But others, too, a dozen. Almost every wife of the community, and some of the girls. And Shauna. She was there, and my Hannah. They sat in the grass out by where the late-season kale still grows, women all in a circle.
Sadie seemed calm, at ease, different than she had been. It was hard to say in what way, but she did.
I could not hear most of what they were saying, but there was much talking. What I heard, a snippet here as I passed, was about the boy and his dying. They huddled and leaned in close as Sadie talked, like being gathered around a campfire on a cold night. I saw that Shauna was crying, but I could not tell why. Others were crying, too. Hannah looked distant, sad in the way she shows her sorrow, by going deep inside.
I felt like a busybody watching them, and there was a pig to be slaughtered, so I went about my business.
I TALKED TO SADIE, there in the kitchen, as she was preparing dinner. Hannah was distracted, slow, moving the way that I have felt these last two days. Sadie, though, seemed fine. Just peeling potatoes, quick and nimble, just like everything was normal.
I asked her what it was about, what the women wanted to hear from her.
She looked at me, and her eyes were sad.
“Oh, Dadi, you know. You know what some people think. That I know things.”
I asked her if she did.
She sighed, and her hands paused in their task. “It’s like sometimes my soul is all lit up, like lightning on a summer night, in a cloud without rain.” She suddenly looked very old.
I told her she hadn’t answered my question.
Her eyes flitted downward, to the potato in her hand. “I know I haven’t.”
I asked again. “What were you telling the women?”
“I think we have to go.”
“Go where?” I asked.
“To where it isn’t safe.”
I was going to ask what that meant, but Hannah came over, and chided me for distracting Sadie.
“Dinner’s got to be made, Jay. Let a woman do her work!” She tried to say it with humor, but she just sounded tired and frustrated.
So I let them work.
October 29
Last night, distant gunfire woke me twice. Tocktocktocktocktock, like many men nailing boards in a barn all at once. It went on for a while each time. I had trouble returning to sleep. Fortunately, Hannah slept through it.
It was cool this morning, neither hot nor cold. There was no frost in the ground. So hard to predict. This time last year, it was hot every day. And now I worry about the last of the crops, the greens and the late potatoes, but the frost has not yet taken them.
They have not been easy, these last days. I find myself still so distracted, so full of myself and my own pride. I know that there is work to do, that I have my duty to perform. But I feel weakened. Bloodless. My mind is listless, and this is not good.
Twice now this morning, I found myself here with this diary in my hand. I sit and I read, when I know there is work to be done. I am reading back, and seeing the picture of the boy in my mind’s eye. I wonder who he might have been, among the English. I wonder about who his parents were, and when they last saw him.
I think of Hannah’s hand, tightening in my own. Her gasp. I see the man fall, and hear the ragged breath of the boy, and smell the scent of his blood in the air. I can see the tremble in my hand as I wrote about it, how my letters are shaky and uncertain. I feel my hands, cold as they wrote it. Reading it, I feel that day again, just as strong.
Maybe stronger. It is like alcohol, as the memory ferments in me.
AFTER THE WORK OF the early day was done, I took Nettie and rode to visit Asa in the late morning. I wanted to talk, hear what Liza was telling him, and ask about what he was thinking.
As I rode, I passed a man walking. He was very thin, like a rail, and his many layers of clothes were dirty. He wore a backpack, heavy with things. It looked like it had been very nice once, and his boots were fancy hiking boots, expensive in the way of the English. Or they had been. Now they were as dirty as his face.
“Can you spare anything,” he asked, in a voice that was frail and brittle. “Please. It’s been days. I . . . please.” He looked furtive. Ashamed.
I had a couple of apples, brought for my lunch, and some meat. I gave him one of the apples, and he was thankful. He ate it carefully, slowly. It seemed that it hurt him to eat, perhaps his teeth. And it was a firm apple.
I asked him his name, and where he was from, and he told me.
Doug. From Philly. He was thirty-two, and his parents lived in Florida. He used to be a vice-president of a company that used to do things with investing. I don’t remember exactly.
His girlfriend was, he said, nearby, where they’d set their tent. Too tired from nights and days of walking. She must be hungry too, I said, so I offered him half of the meat I had brought, and he hesitated.
“She . . . she’s a veeg.” He paused, like his throat had closed around the word.