The Outcast (14 page)

Leah says, “I’m going to bed.”

I bid her good night and carry Eli’s car seat into my
mamm
’s reflexology office. Stretching my son out on the pallet already prepared on the floor, I tuck the afghan under his chin and lean in to kiss his cheek. It is then I hear the wheezing of his breath despite all the precautions I have taken to keep him from catching another cold. I climb onto the narrow cot and bunch the quilts around my shivering frame. Perhaps it is the panic coursing through my veins like caffeine serum, juxtaposed with the calming scent of echinacea, oregano, and olive-leaf extract wafting from the green and blue bottles lining the dusty walnut shelf, but my weary mind soon drifts to the holistic
doktor
, Norman Troyer.

For years, my family’s purse remained weighted only
with my
dawdy
’s debts until the afternoon my
mamm
visited a little hovel next to the sprawling Masonic Lodge in Elizabethtown. Cluster headaches had plagued her for as long as my sister and I had been alive, but the only reason she wanted to address the ailment now was because of its thwarting her ability to work. We were not with
Mamm
that summer day she met Norman Troyer. Still, I can imagine her skepticism as he picked up a cheap flashlight from his desk and used it to peer at the navy rimming the irises of her cornflower-blue eyes. After five minutes of perusal not involving a single touch, Norman pinpointed the source of my
mamm
’s cluster headaches: a pinched nerve on the side of her neck, which she’d probably strained giving birth to twin daughters thirteen years before.

To this day, I do not know what made that renowned holistic
doktor
take my mother on as his apprentice, teaching her everything he knew, then—when the Muddy Pond Community objected to the prospect of a woman iridologist—giving her textbooks on reflexology that she could market as a foot massage instead. Maybe it was the hunger Norman Troyer read in her eyes—physical hunger, yes, for she encouraged Leah and me to take seconds before she had even had firsts—but there was another hunger present, an insatiable hunger, a thirst, for knowledge beyond what the mundane tasks of an Old Order Mennonite woman required, and alternative medicine soon became her never-ending smorgasbord.

AMOS

The New Holland sale, where Samuel Stoltzfus’s horses and tack will be auctioned off to the highest bidder, takes place the morning after Tobias and the twins arrive. Because of the auction, both Samuel and Helen are out working in the barn when everyone else wakes up. Eli and Jonathan will not stop
brutzing
during breakfast, where the adults eat banana nut muffins and fruit that Helen has prepared. Nobody mentions it, but after having spent the previous day on the road, they are as tired and irritable as the children. Thankfully, Gerald Martin has agreed to shuttle everyone around rather than spend the three days with his
extended family in Lititz, so Tobias and the twins will not have to leave the
haus
for another hour.

But Rachel finds no rest, since Eli’s breathing is becoming more labored. After his bath in the
becken
where Helen gave her twin infants theirs, Rachel rubs Eli’s body down with grapeseed oil to try to soothe him. She turns him over to massage his back and sees the buttonlike protrusions of his spine. Tracing her hand over them, she runs fingers along his hairline and the small column of his neck. That is when Rachel feels it: a knot tucked in the hollow of his clavicle, no bigger than a pea.

A shard of worry wedges itself between Rachel’s shoulder blades as she recalls the severe cold her son just cannot seem to shake. The only reason Rachel has not taken Eli to see the
doktor
is that none of his coughing fits have been as bad as that night she and Ida Mae spent in the bathroom. Well, that, and the fact that Rachel believes, just like her
mamm
, that
Englischer doktors
will only pump children full of antibiotics—killing the good bacteria along with the bad, hampering their bodies’ ability to fight back before they have learned to fight at all.

By the time everyone, including Helen and Samuel, loads up in Gerald’s van and heads toward the auction, Rachel has tried to put her fears regarding her son’s health to rest. But as Eli holds on to one of her fingers with all of his, her worries awaken anew; even his grip seems to have weakened since the night before.

“Mamm?”
Helen turns toward her. “Is Norman Troyer still around?”

“Of course,” she says. “Why?”

“I thought I’d get him to look at Eli while we’re up.”

Seated in the passenger seat as he was on the journey from Tennessee to Pennsylvania, Tobias says, without shifting his gaze from the windshield, “Isn’t he that powwow
doktor
over near the Masonic Lodge?”

Helen says, “No, Tobias, Norman just
looks at the whole body when
finding a cure.”

Her son-in-law says nothing, nor does Rachel.

It is a quiet drive until they reach New Holland.

The New Holland auction is a flea market that sells animals rather than antiques. Outside the enormous tin barn housing the sale, vendors layered in wool and checkered flannel sit behind tables, hawking cut-rate goods. Just outside the huge double doors that have been slid shut to block the cold, a young Amish boy with Judah’s fair coloring stamps his feet and blows into chapped hands while a snow globe of flurries swirls around him. In front of the boy, a folding table is crowded with Christmas poinsettias featured in pink, yellow, and red, along with a heavy metal box. The poster board taped to the front of the table, which conveys the price of the
blummen
for sale, is misspelled and written in a child’s hand. Just observing for five minutes, as my
loved ones unload from Gerald Martin’s van, the boy has six pictures taken of him and two cups of hot cocoa placed on the table beside his money box.

Only one
Englischer
buys his
blummen
.

Shifting my attention, I watch Leah and Rachel enter the barn, carrying a bundled child each. The main arena has been mucked and covered with sawdust. Thick corral gates and a holding pen, where the horses wait their turn to be led out by the trader and pranced around the ring, bracket off this area from the bleachers flanking each side. Although the auction has just begun, Amish and Mennonite men—each wearing different-width
hut
brims according to their bishops’ varying stipulations—are already clustered around these gates, their mud-crusted boots hooked over the bottom rung. A few of the men have pipes or cigars clamped between their teeth, giving the air a smoky, festive scent contrasted by the manure swathing the grounds.

Hemming in the outskirts of this arena is a section stacked with cages of live chickens, turkeys, peacocks, guinea pigs, guinea hens, bunnies, and bleating sheep accompanied by collie pups supposedly trained to guard them. Beyond even this, in cramped wooden stalls lit by a row of low-watt bulbs, is the place that broke Judah’s heart when he came here as a child, the place where horses not fit for auction are kept. They are the ones with bad feet from years of hauling buggies and clomping over paved roads, swaybacks from being ridden too early, or joints weakened by age. I often glossed over the truth by telling young Judah that these
horses would find good homes when the fact is most, if not all, would end up at local dog food companies.

But the Amish and Old Order Mennonite farmers (and the
Englischer
tourists who are hoping to spot the Amish and Old Order Mennonite farmers) do not often go to this area. Instead, they remain gathered either on the corral gates or up in the stands eating hot dogs piled with sauerkraut and mustard, sloppy joes that more than live up to their name, chicken
welschkann supp
from deep Styrofoam cups. Sloshing this assortment down with birch beer or root beer, they then unwrap the cellophane around whoopee pies that have crumbled from passing through so many hands.

Their bellies thus filled with this typical auction menu, they sit back in the stands and wait for the horses. Sometimes in the arena you can spot the poor creatures that have been drugged. Their heads will hang, lips droop, legs splay wide in a subservient gesture out of place in an area considered the show ring. Back before the price of land increased so much that our community had to leave Lancaster for the South, I used to have Amish and Mennonite friends who were horse traders at New Holland. But they knew the tricks of the trade that did not involve drugging the animals or risking the life and limb of the
Englischers
gullible enough to purchase the strangely docile horses. No, these friends of mine used vegetable oil to buff their horses’ coats until they gleamed. They rubbed their hooves down with this same oil and washed and brushed
the manes and tails so many times that the wiry hair hung like a skein of silk.

If an animal could be trusted not to spook, my friends would get their young daughters or sons to slide off the rumps of the horses or run a hand over the animals’ twitching bellies or flanks—proving to the awestruck crowd just how safe these auction horses were. With every stunt like this, the price of the horses would increase. The quicksilver mouth of the auctioneer would become parched as it struggled to keep up with the climbing bids. And once that card-flashing frenzy began, there was no stopping it. I remember sitting up in the stands (the left side, I think), watching Samuel Stoltzfus play that crowd into his hands as effortlessly as a circus master under the big top. Even then, years before we became
nochberen
, I did not think he was your typical Old Order Mennonite man. He strutted too much, leading those flashy sets of matching ponies and the jet-black stallions with the white socks and brilliant starburst blazes. His clothes, though cut from the same cloth as mine and patterned after the same style, somehow accentuated his broad shoulders that tapered down to a lean waist in a way that seemed far more worldly than Plain. He didn’t have a beard then, as he was not yet married, and I remember how his pink lips would peel back and his white teeth flash as he took that crowd into his hands and had them begging for more than an auction, had them begging for a show.

An introvert who did not understand the personality
type opposite mine, I knew, as I watched Samuel lather that crowd up into a horse-buying frenzy, that he and I would never really become friends. I thought of him as a
schwindler
, someone who would do anything, say anything, just to make a sale. I watched how he manipulated the female portion of that audience, both Plain and
Englischer
alike. How he would whip his wavy black hair to the side and smile, his blue eyes flitting up into the stands to see if they were watching, which they somehow always were. I remember how he would touch his crop to the hindquarters of those mares to prove his control. How, in response, they would prance their oiled hooves through that sawdusted earth, tossing their glistening manes and whinnying as if they were enjoying the show as much as their master was.

Once these horses had all sold for astronomical prices, auction after auction I would watch the
Englischer
women march down out of the stands in their tight-fitting jeans and ruffled shirts and introduce themselves to Samuel. He would then take on another role and leave the one of the ringmaster behind. From high up in those stands, I saw how those women ate up this new role as much as Samuel’s old: the blushing, stammering Mennonite boy who needed to be shown the ways of their carnal
Englischer
world. By the end of this awkward exchange, the women would be scribbling down numbers on crinkled hot dog paper or napkins and passing them to him. Samuel would take that paper into his hands and smile. But after they’d left, he would throw their numbers to the sawdusted ground now
sprinkled with manure and bottle-green flies. He did not care about the prize of the women so much as his conquest of them. Plus, there was no way Samuel could call; he didn’t have a phone.

Looking back on the days I sat up in those New Holland stands observing and judging Samuel, I understand that I was jealous of him. My being a blushing and stammering Mennonite boy was no convenient role I knew the
Englischer
women would love. I was so shy, I couldn’t even open my mouth at our community hymn sings if Verna Fisher was there, and I knew it was going to take a miracle to open my mouth when asking that dark-haired woman with the soft brown eyes if she wanted to court. Yet at the ripening age of eighteen, Samuel Stoltzfus made everything I struggled with seem so easy. And up until the point we became
nochberen
, and I understood his swaggering self-confidence masked insecurities far greater than my own, I envied him for it.

The auctioneer’s strident voice causes time to zip forward again, covering half a century in seconds. I look down—not from the stands as I had before, but from a height far greater—and see that Samuel’s slot in the New Holland horse sale has begun. There is not an ounce of malice in my heart (for who can be malicious where I am?) when I say these forty years have not been kind to the blue-eyed ringmaster with his penchant for matching ponies. Samuel still has a head full of hair, which I could not boast of fifteen years back, but his broad shoulders have collapsed in on
themselves like two halves of an accordion, his lean waist expanded with years of hearty Lancaster County fare, his swaggering stride reduced to a hobbled-over shuffle.