The Crepes of Wrath (18 page)

His face clouded. “Maybe.”

I sat back. “Maybe won’t do. They need to be told before I tell the police.”

“Ach!” They both gasped, and although all the windows were open, I felt a surfeit of oxygen.

“Of course. Surely you know that buying drugs is against the law. Do you sell drugs as well?”

I don’t think they heard me. “The police,” Seth moaned. “The police.”

I’m sure my critics would say I should have had more sympathy for the boys, coming from such a sheltered environment as they did. But I came from a sheltered environment too, and I’ll tell you this, I still knew right from wrong.

“Look, guys, you are in serious trouble. It can go one of two ways. Either you fess up and come clean—er, I mean tell the whole truth—and
maybe
the law will go easier on you, or you can give me and the authorities a hard time, in which case, you’ll get hard time right back.” I chuckled at my little pun.

“Ach, Miss Yoder, you laugh?” Seth’s normally pale face had been drained of any color, except for the blue tint of a myriad of tiny veins. He looked like the photo of a newborn baby from which someone had deleted the color red.

“I made a little joke,” I explained. “I wasn’t laughing at you. In fact, I feel very sorry for you.”

“Then say nothing,” Elam urged. “We will stop with these drugs.”

“Yes, but you’ve tried, and it didn’t do any good.”

“I will try harder this time. And Seth, he is not—uh, how do you say?”

“Addicted?”

“Yah. So I will try, yah?” He sounded desperate to end the conversation right there.

“I’m sure you will, but from what I understand, that won’t be enough. Besides, it’s not just you and your brother. What about the other kids? Can you be so sure none of them are addicted? Or that maybe some of them are just so turned on by the whole experience, they’ll just keep getting deeper and deeper into it?”

Seth was nodding his head. “Barbara Troyer, she has this problem.”

“Shut the mouth, Seth!” Elam’s dark eyes were flashing. He’d raised a hand as if to strike his brother, and then jerked it back.

“But it is true. You said so yourself.”

“I have a fool for a brother.” Since those are the harshest words an Amish boy can speak to his brother, I was not surprised when they brought a torrent of tears.

“Ach, what have we done? Poor Papa. Poor Mama.”

“And poor you,” Elam said bitterly.

I felt sorry for Seth then. He was not, as I saw it, as responsible for his actions as was Elam. He was also more contrite. But most importantly, he was willing to cooperate.

“Maybe you’d like to take a little walk, Seth,” I said kindly. “Elam and I will work things out.”

“Yah. Go, baby,” Elam said.

Seth needed no further urging. He stumbled from the car and staggered into the cemetery like a drunk man. It wasn’t the drugs that made him stagger—I was pretty sure of that—but the tears that kept flooding his eyes.

We watched in silence as he made his way slowly between the stones, finally selecting one upon which to sit. I must confess that this shocked me almost as much as the fact that such a sweet-looking boy would take hard drugs. I had been raised to never sit on a headstone, and
in fact, to never even step on the ground above the actual grave. Once when we were visiting Grandma’s grave, Mama brought that lesson home to me with the back of her hairbrush. For Seth’s sake, I could only hope that it wasn’t Mama’s stone he was sitting on.

When Seth was settled, I gathered my skirts and climbed into the front seat. Just to be on the safe side, I buckled myself securely before turning to face Elam. I was not surprised to see that in the interim his smooth dark face had hardened, like maple sap on a cold day.

3 tablespoons chopped onion

4 tablespoons butter, divided

1
¹
⁄2 pounds zucchini, sliced

¹
⁄2 cup chicken broth or water

1 egg

1 cup grated Cheddar cheese

¹
⁄2 cup fresh bread crumbs

Sauté onion in 2 tablespoons melted butter. Add zucchini and broth. Cover and cook for about 10 minutes or until zucchini is done. Remove zucchini and onions to a mixing bowl and mix until zucchini is broken up. Drain any liquid from bowl. Add the egg and cheese; mix well. Spoon the zucchini filling onto 12 crepes, fold them into desired shape. Mix remaining 2 tablespoons of butter and the bread crumbs and sprinkle over the crepes. Bake at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes.

“Well, well, well,” I said. “It seems to me like you’ve got a problem.”

He said nothing.

“I know it seems like an impossible thing to do—turning yourself in. I know you think it will hurt your parents. But look out there, it’s already hurting your brother, and your parents
will
find out about this.”

“Maybe not,” he muttered. Lips don’t move on a face that stiff.

“What do you plan to do, kill me?”

My words shocked him into pliancy. “Ach, not me!”

“Oh, so you plan to have someone else do it? You want that on Seth’s conscience as well.”

Elam softened further. “I love my brother.”

“That’s a hoot!”

“But I do.”

“Then why are you willing to risk his life?”

“Ach, I would not do such a thing.”

“Wrongo! Every time he participates in one of your little drug parties, his life is in danger.”

“It is his decision,” Elam said, gathering strength like a worn-out hurricane traveling back over warm water.

“Just out of curiosity, who started in on drugs first, you or him?”

“He asked.” Elam’s eyes were flashing again. “I did not push this on him.”

“Yeah, well, I noticed you have some very little brothers. If one of them asked for matches to play in the hay barn, would you give them to him?”

“That is not the same.”

“Bull.” That is not a swear word, but a gender-specific term for the male bovine. “The newspapers are full of stories of people dying of drug overdoses and drugs laced with other dangerous chemicals. What makes you think your brother isn’t going to get hold of some lethal substance one of these days?”

He shrugged sullenly.

“Don’t think for a second that you can trust your supplier.”

“I do trust him.”

“Well, what’s his name—” I let my voice trail off, hoping he’d be tricked into filling in the blank.

“Miss Yoder,” he said instead, “I must be going now. It is light already. Papa will worry because we are not there to do the chores.”

“I’m sure he is worried. Although I should think he’d be used to it by now. Anyway, before I let you go, I’m going to offer you a deal.”

“Deal?” he asked in surprise. “Elam Keim never makes deals.”

“He does now, buster, and here it is. You tell your parents what you’ve been up to,
and
you tell me the name of your supplier, and I’ll do everything that I can to see that the law goes easy on you and your brother.”

Elam laughed. “This you can promise?”

“I know Judge Greenburg up in Bedford, and he likes to give deserving kids a break,
if
he’s convinced they’re deserving. That’s where I come into the picture. I can be very persuasive.”

“I think maybe you talk like a sausage,” he said, using
an idiomatic expression I find particularly offensive. He leaned out the window. “Seth! Come now! We go.”

“You don’t sound convinced, dear. So, I guess I’m going to have to put a little more effort into this.”

“You speak in riddles again, Miss Yoder.”

I glanced at the Timex my parents gave me for a high school graduation present. It is my only piece of jewelry, if one can call it such, and has been more reliable than any number of friends. It’s kept right on ticking, while I’ve taken a number of lickings.

“Six o’clock this evening,” I said. “That’s twelve hours from now. That’s how long I’m giving you. If you haven’t told your parents by then, I will.”

Elam paled, his dark skin a sickly shade of beige. “It will kill them,” he whispered.

“And you or Seth dying from an overdose won’t?”

“Please Miss Yoder, Seth comes now.”

I glanced out the window. “So? He’s going to have to know. One way or the other by six o’clock.”

“Please.” For the first time I heard pleading in his voice. “I will do it my way.”

“As you wish.”

Seth was beside the car then. He peered in the window and seemed almost surprised to see me. Perhaps he had been using his time in the cemetery praying that I would disappear. If that was the case, I knew how he felt. The day after I discovered I was a bigamist, I refused to wake up to a world gone haywire. I’d open my eyes, willing everything to be the way it was a mere twenty-four hours earlier, and at the encroachment of the first painful memory, I’d close them again. Over and over I tried to manipulate reality this way. By the end of that day I had not stirred from my bed, but both my bladder and my eyes got a thorough workout.

Poor Seth didn’t even get a second chance to wish me away. “Get in the back, Seth,” Elam ordered.

“No.” I opened the door, and jumped out. “Ride up front, Seth. I’m going to walk.”

“Ach!” the boys squawked in unison.

“Well, it is a nice day,” I said. “And I could use the exercise.”

“But Miss Yoder,” Seth protested. “You are—uh, you are old, yah?”

“Old, no!” I snapped. “I could walk circles around you if I wanted to.”

Elam was stupid enough to take drugs, but not dumb enough to look a gift horse in the mouth for more than a few seconds.

“Have a safe walk!” he yelled, and the second his brother shut the door, Elam pressed the pedal to the metal. The ancient yellow Buick shot forward, spraying my poor, but sturdy, ankles with stinging gravel.

“Remember,” I whinnied, “six o’clock!”

The car disappeared in a cloud of dust.

My intention was to initiate a couple of mountaintop chats before descending into the chaos of the world below. If I had to follow through on my threat to Elam, I was going to need a lot of emotional support. Dealing with the Keims was going to be one of the hardest things I’d ever done, of that I was sure. I may not know what it is like to be a disappointed mother (Little Freni brings me only joy), but I am the world’s expert on disappointed sisters. Pain is pain.

At any rate, the first of these chats was with my Maker. I do this on a regular basis, by the way, and not just in church or on mountaintops. Okay, to be totally honest, these aren’t so much chats as they are opportunities for me to demand answers, but you get the picture. At least I make an effort to communicate. The Good Lord, however, has never once bothered to answer me in an audible voice. This frustrates me to no end, and I’ve gone so far as to take up the matter with my pastor who, as it turned out, was not nearly as sympathetic as I had hoped. Pastor Schrock merely smiled and said that if the Lord ever did speak to me in an
audible voice, I’d either die of shock, or shock treatments in a rubber room.

Maybe the Reverend is right, but I still think it would be nice if God communicated more directly. If He would just give me a sign, a
single
sign, like He gave the Israelites of old, I would never ask for another. And I’m not talking about plagues, of course, but maybe a little handwriting on the wall, in a neat legible cursive. Or maybe a nice block printing.

So, not really expecting an answer, I demanded of God a very clear path to follow in the Keim case and asked whether or not anything would come of the blossoming romance between me and Gabriel Rosen. I reminded the Good Lord that Gabe was one of His kinfolk, and that I wouldn’t be at all averse to Him shutting Lodema Schrock’s big mouth, just like He shut lions’ mouths for Daniel.

As usual, God did not answer, so I went over to chat with Mama. I don’t pray to her, mind you, because that would be idolatrous. Instead, I inform Mama of everything that’s been going on in my life, and allow her to vent. You might find even that notion sacrilegious, but you don’t know Mama. Not only can I hear her responses in my head, but I see them with my eyes, and hear them with my ears. Unlike the Good Lord, Mama is not opposed to dispensing signs and wonders to the present generation of believers.

She didn’t have much to say about the Keim kids, but she had plenty to say about Gabe. She was, if you’ll pardon the pun, dead set against him. She made that clear by the brief downpour that materialized out of an only partly cloudy sky and drenched me the moment I mentioned his name.

“But he’s a doctor, Mama. A heart surgeon. That means he’s saved many lives.”

The sun appeared just as suddenly and warmed the back of my neck.

“But he’s retired now. He wants to write mysteries.”

The sun popped behind another scattered cloud and a chill wind blew across the top of Stucky Ridge.

“Writing is a worthwhile profession too, Mama. Isn’t reading a better way to escape than, say, drugs or alcohol?”

Mama must have heard about the mimosas, because at the mention of alcohol, the wind picked up considerably. I huddled next to her stone.

“That was by accident!” I wailed. “You should know that. And I promise it will never happen again. If these lips of mine as much as touch a drop of alcohol, I’ll tell everyone I know that you were absolutely right about everything we disagreed about, and I was wrong.”

Immediately the wind abated and the sun shone warmly all over my body. Steam rose from my clothes. Still, I had been chilled to the bone and, despite the sudden increased temperature, sneezed.

“Bless you.”

Mama’s voice was deeper than I remembered, but perhaps the grave does that to one.

“Thank you, Mama.”

“I am not your mother.”

“You mean I was adopted?” I asked hopefully.

Mama laughed. “Magdalena, you’re such a hoot. Have I ever told you that?”

I whirled. Mama would never call me a hoot.

“Gabe!”

He grinned. “Who else?”

“But—but—” I struggled to my feet. I was tempted to make a run for it. Thanks to the rain, I was a mess. My hair, which I normally wear in a very neat bun, was wet and stringy, and only the mere remnants of a bobby pin–encrusted lump remained, clinging precariously to the left side of my head like some horrible growth. My white prayer cap was nowhere to be seen. My dress clung to me like a second skin, and underscored in embarrassing detail the sturdy underpinnings of a pious, albeit small-bosomed woman.

“You’re something else,” he said, the admiration in his voice unmistakable. “I bet there’s never a dull moment living with you.”

“Well, you’d bet wrong.” I clawed wet hair away from my face and tried to fluff the bodice of my dress. At least the bra was thick enough to hide the fact that the wetness had created mountains where only molehills had been.

“Aaron Miller was a lucky man. A fool, of course, but lucky nonetheless.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “What on earth are you doing up here?”

“I came up to see the view I missed the other evening.” He chuckled. “You were right, it certainly is beautiful.”

“How did you get here? Where’s your car?”

“I parked it over on the other side, by the picnic tables. I’ve never been up here. Thought I’d explore around a bit, see the view from both sides, and voilà, there you were, talking to a gravestone.”

“I
wasn’t
talking to a gravestone.”

He grinned again. “I’ve got good ears, Magdalena.”

“Then you should know I was talking to my mother, who incidentally disapproves of you.”

The grin widened. “Because of my religion?”

“That, and the fact you’re now a writer. More specifically, a mystery writer. Mama never read a book of fiction in her life. ‘What’s the point?’ she’d say. ‘It’s all made up.’ ”

He laughed. “She sounds like a hoot too.”

“Shhh!”
I held a bony finger to shriveled blue lips. “Talk about good ears,” I whispered, “she can hear a toad belch in China. She wouldn’t approve of being compared to me.”

“I see.” His gorgeous brown eyes were still laughing. “Mrs. Yoder,” he said in a loud voice, “you are incomparable. I wish I could have met you. I’m sure we would have gotten along very well.”

As Gabe is my witness, that very second the sun hid its face behind a thimble-size cloud. Dr. Rosen the mystery writer was alone in the shadow.

“You see?” I said. “She doesn’t like you.”

“That’s just a coincidence. Mrs. Yoder,” he practically shouted, “if that’s really you, then I’m disappointed. I thought you could do better than that.”