Driftless (13 page)

Over the eastern horizon, Rusty Smith’s dual-wheeled pickup came toward them, eventually turning like a bloated silver fish into the narrow tributary of the driveway. He stopped at the edge of the yard, then drove another thirty yards to the open machine shed, where he climbed from the cab and stood waiting for July to speak with him in private.

“Here’s the deal,” said July. “You can use my shop, but I don’t want any of my tools disappearing and I’ve got to talk to your parents first. I know you’re old enough to do whatever you want, but that’s just the way it is. I don’t want any trouble with your folks. And I don’t mind if you occasionally drink around here, but I can’t tolerate drunks.”

Wade left.

July swallowed the bottom half of his coffee and joined Rusty in the machine shed. They discussed the weather for several minutes, milk prices and road construction.

“Those Amish,” muttered Rusty. “When you hire them, how do they get back and forth from work—in buggies?”

“That’s right,” said July. “If you want them quicker, pick them up.”

“I’ve got a lot of work to get done. How do you call them?”

“You don’t call them, Rusty. They don’t have phones. You go over. It’s the old way of doing business.”

“I’m not saying I’m going to.”

“Going to what?”

“Hire them.” Rusty spit on the ground in an almost friendly manner, climbed back in his pickup, and drove away.

Fifteen minutes later, he turned into Eli Yoder’s barnyard. A dozen or more chickens, geese, and guinea hens performed a clamorous and feathery retreat. A black and white dog barked anxiously from a safe distance away. Stepping from the truck, Rusty looked for signs of human life among the shabby collection of wood-framed buildings, sheep pen, cement silo, and an overturned cart. Chestnut draft horses grazed beyond the barn and a curl of smoke rose from the tiny, unpainted house.

Hoping to find someone outdoors, Rusty walked to the barn. Road-hoppers flew out of his path, their papered wings rasping. A barefoot child—perhaps four or five years old—darted from a nearby shed carrying a pail. She glanced fearfully at him from beneath her white head scarf and continued running along a dirt path to the house, where she closed the door behind her.

Finding no one in the barn, Rusty followed the dirt path to the house and knocked on a windowless door. It opened and a large woman stood directly inside, holding a broom, her head covered with a coarse dark-blue bonnet with strands of gray hair poking out around the edges. A full-length dress of matching blue provided a shapeless background for the untied apron falling from her neck. Her bare feet seemed surprisingly large, imposing and immanently functional, as though two normal-sized feet were protectively hidden inside them. She did not speak but continued staring at the floor, gripping the broom with red-knuckled hands. Three children under school age stared wide-eyed from a darkened corner of the room. Rusty shifted his weight inside his cowboy boots and pulled his right ear lobe with his left hand. “I’m looking for Eli.”

No response.

“He here?”

“Nope,” said the woman without looking up or offering another explanation.

It seemed an unusually masculine reply, putting Rusty partly at ease, and he continued, “You know where I can find him?” He took a cigarette from his jacket pocket and inserted it into his mouth.

“Fillin’ silo over to Bontrager’s.”

The three children cautiously moved out of the darkened corner and were now about halfway across the little room, keeping the woman between them and the door. The boy—the youngest of the three—continued to stare at Rusty with extreme anxiety, as though Rusty were someone he had been specifically warned about. The only light in the room came through a single window, partly obscured by curtains, and the smell of kerosene lay heavy on the air. The smell nudged something loose inside Rusty—a memory he held for a moment then let fall.

“Where’s that?” he asked.

“Three places over,” she said, jerking the broom handle to indicate north. “Pumpkin patch by the road.”

Rusty lit his cigarette and blew out smoke. “I’ll be going over there, then.”

Rusty found the farm. Six buggies parked in front of the house—some with horses still in harness. Amish men were filling silo next to the barn. Several stood on a wagon piled with bundled cornstalks, feeding them into a gasoline-powered chopper. Other horse-drawn wagons could be seen in a nearby field, where more Amish loaded more cornstalks. All wore straw hats, blue coats, and black boots. The older men had beards without mustaches; the youngest were clean-shaven.

As Rusty approached, the operator of the chopper walked out to meet him. “I am Levi Bontrager,” he said in slightly broken English over the roaring sound of the chopper. “Can I be of help to you?”

“Looking for Eli Yoder,” said Rusty. He reached for a cigarette and then decided against it. Levi Bontrager turned and shouted in German to the workers unloading the wagon. A tall, thin man with a narrow black beard jumped to the ground and came forward. Bontrager returned to his position beside the chopper.

“July Montgomery said you do carpenter work. I need work on my house.”

“Jha,” replied Eli, looking out from under his hat like a badger looking out of its burrow. “What kind of work?” It was impossible for Rusty to judge his age, not only because his clothes, hair, and
facial grooming did not communicate the usual signals, but also because of his general comportment. He might be a young man unusually mature, or an older man unusually immature. His teeth, for instance, were in deplorable condition, but his posture was markedly erect; while it seemed inconceivable for a young man to have such rotten teeth, it seemed equally inconceivable for an older man to stand so straight. His eyes were proud, even vain, but not arrogant. The teeth again captured Rusty’s attention. You just didn’t see bad teeth anymore, not like you used to. Rusty’s father had bad teeth—real bad—and he quickly forced the memory away from him.

“Roof work, windows and trim, and humps in the bedroom floor,” said Rusty. “Shouldn’t take longer than a week or two.”

“When you need this done?” Eli asked, absently brushing curls of dried corn leaves from his sleeves.

“Need it done right now.”

“You say you know July Montgomery?”

“Yup. I’m Russell Smith, and my farm’s not too far from here.”

“People call you Rusty?”

“Some do,” Rusty replied, disturbed at being identified by someone he knew nothing about.

“I should take a look at what you have.”

“When can you come?”

“Right now.”

“All right. I’ve got my truck here, I mean I suppose it’s okay for you folks to ride in a truck, I mean if it isn’t . . .”

“It’s okay,” said Eli. He walked straight to the truck, climbed in, and closed the door.

Rusty hadn’t anticipated this. He was unaccustomed to sharing the interior of his truck with anyone and could count on one hand the number of times a passenger other than his wife had sat beside him. He lit a cigarette before settling behind the wheel and noticed a strong smell of human sweat mixed with corn silage.

On the road, he could think of nothing to say. Every topic seemed likely to violate some religious sensibility or unnecessarily accentuate the many obvious differences between them. But while the silence
gnawed at Rusty as if it were a rat imprisoned in a wooden box, Eli Yoder appeared unperturbed. He gazed at the passing landscape from beneath his hat, occupying his place on the seat with an indifferent ease.

“Hope the smoke doesn’t bother you,” said Rusty, nearing the end of his cigarette.

“It don’t.”

Rusty lit another and they continued until they reached the state highway.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to stop at the convenience store,” said Eli. “If you have the time.”

Rusty parked on the lower side of Kwik Trip, where posters announced cheap cigarettes, beer, lottery tickets, bananas, and frozen pizza. Eli went in. Rusty remained in the truck, wondering what business an Amish could have here. Even Rusty disliked going inside, where teenagers abounded, middle-aged women talked in shrill voices, and everyone seemed to move in a fluorescent world of forced humor and snacks wrapped in plastic. Beneath advertisements for a video featuring a blond girl screaming beneath a man with a knife in his teeth and a sale on toilet paper, Rusty could see the top of Eli’s hat. Five minutes later he came out and climbed in the truck carrying a plastic mug of coffee and a pastry filled with raspberry jam.

“Thanks,” he said, sipping from the mug. “I needed to make a telephone call and they had free doughnuts with a cup of coffee. I didn’t get any breakfast.”

Rusty backed out of the lot. “Didn’t think you people used phones,” he said.

“Try not to,” said Eli. “But you got to make a living.”

They went the rest of the way in silence.

At Rusty’s home, Eli looked up at the roof and learned that twenty-five years had passed since the asphalt shingles had been replaced.

“Fifteen years is usually the end of shingles,” said Eli. “But that steep slope I suppose added to their life. You got good surface underneath?”

“Got the old shingles underneath,” said Rusty.

“Should tear them out, put in new plywood.”

“Plywood’s blamed expensive,” said Rusty. “No sense in fixing something isn’t broke. Another set of shingles will outlast me no matter what’s under ’em.”

They walked all the way around the house, looking at the siding and paint.

“Rotten boards here,” said Eli and poked a finger into a hole beneath a window frame. “But the boards could be replaced, I suppose, without replacing it all.”

“It’s a matter of time,” explained Rusty. “This has to be done—all of it—in a month. Wife’s mother and sister are coming. Has to be done.”

Eli nodded. He understood the need as well as the deadline.

They went inside to inspect the floor in the downstairs bedroom, where Rusty explained that some minor flattening was in order. Eli began tugging his beard at the sight of the hump along the outside wall. “Don’t like this,” he said.

His fears were confirmed in the basement. “Your joists rotted off as the house settled,” he announced. “Water running down the side of the house rotted away the plate, and over here you can see all the way through to outside.”

“What we talking here in the way of time?” asked Rusty.

“Can’t tell until we get in there—new plate, break out all this old cement, hard to tell.”

Rusty felt a coiled cinch tighten around his neck. “Can you still be finished by the end of the month?”

“I should think so,” replied Eli.

“Does that mean yes or no?”

“God willing.” And he smiled a smile from which his beard seemed to be expressing more than his actual face—the kind of smile, Rusty feared, that could also be employed when everything was not finished on time.

“When can you start?”

“End of the week or beginning of next, I suspect.”

“Sooner the better. Do you have tools?”

“We have hand tools. The work would go faster with electric, but it makes no difference to us. My sons and I are familiar with either.”

“I have power tools,” said Rusty. “You can use them. How much do you and your boys charge?”

“Fifteen for myself, seven for my youngest and eight for the oldest.”

They were both distracted by the sound of footsteps on the basement stairs. “Russell? Russell, are you down here? Is everything all right?”

“Everything is fine. Go back upstairs.”

“What are you doing down here?”

“We’re almost through. Go back upstairs, Maxine.”

“Is there some problem down here?”

“No. Go back upstairs.”

“Hello, I’m Maxine, Russell’s wife,” she announced after discovering Eli standing beside her husband.

Eli looked at the cement floor in greeting. He was unaccustomed to talking with women, at least English women.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Yoder.”

“Are you here about the repair work?”

“Jha.”

“Where do you live?”

Eli turned partly around so as not to be facing her directly, but not so far as to actually turn his back to her. “Over Bundy Hollow.”

“Close to the Williams’ farm?”

“Three places south.”

“Oh, I know where you live. You have all those ducks and chickens that come out to the road. It’s a nice spot. How long have you lived there?”

“Three years in November.”

“Where did you come from before that?”

“Pennsylvania.”

“Do you have a family? That’s a small house.”

“It’s large enough for us.”

“How many do you have in your family?”

“My wife and I have seven children, and my mother-in-law lives with us.”

“Didn’t a barn burn down near you?”

“The Millers’—lost half their cows last year.”

“I heard you put the roof on the new building.”

“Along with my boys.”

“I thought that was you. Eva Miller comes into the library regular. She said you did excellent work. How old are your children?”

“Isaac is seventeen and Abraham is sixteen. The younger ones are younger.”

“Do you have any daughters?”

“Three.”

“Russell and I have two married daughters. Only two grandchildren, though—a newborn girl and a toddler. His name is Brian. Do you have any grandchildren?”

“No.”

“Is it true that your children don’t go to school past the eighth grade?”

“It’s our way.”

“Russell doesn’t even have a seventh grade education, but that was more usual in his day. It kind of limits a person’s opportunities—I mean in the modern world. You don’t have any problem with your knees, do you?”

“No.”