The Outcast (36 page)

Perching the basket on my hip, I scale the porch steps and enter the kitchen, letting the screen door slam. I dump the pole beans in the sink and set the basket on the countertop. Keeping my back to Alice, I start snapping.

Her hands, which have been slicing flattened dough into squares, grow still. “People need to know we’re out here, Rhoda.”

“They already do, or they wouldn’t’ve sent that journalist.”

“They don’t give real journalists these kinds of stories.”

“If she’s not a real journalist,” I say, “then why’d you bother talking to her?”

“I had to. Something’s gotta change.”

The beans are so dehydrated from the sun, I have to score my thumbnail into the flesh to sever the ends. But nothing can be wasted. Not anymore. “We’re fine.”

“You keep saying that, but pregnant girls can’t live on potpie and green beans alone.”

I toss a bean into the bowl and grip the edge of the countertop. Stress coils around me until every ligament in my body feels like a bowstring. “I
know
what they need.”

“Of course you do.” Alice walks over and places a hot, floured hand on my arm. It is all I can do not to swat it away. “The Lord knows you took good care of me and Uriah,” she says. “But times—they were different then. We had more food. We had more help. And your job was just to take care of us girls, not manage a farm at the same time.”

I stare down at the old stone bowl I’ve painstakingly filled with shriveled beans and resist the impulse to knock it to the floor.

Nineteen years ago, former head midwife Fannie Graber suffered a slipped disk while helping maneuver a posterior baby down the birth canal: a painful graze of nerves against bone, forcing her into early retirement and forcing me into her former position at the tender age of twenty-three. Ever since that night when I found myself doing what I never thought I would, I’ve been caught between my desire to make Hopen Haus a success—by begging the Old Order Mennonite church to let us have electricity and state-of-the-art equipment—and my desire to keep Hopen Haus as archaic as possible, so that my previous life and the secrets pervading it can remain sheltered from the outside world.

But now that a majority of the Dry Hollow Community has left—seeking promises of better jobs and fertile land—I still find myself crouching behind a list of rules no bishop is here to enforce. Perhaps we should have gone with the community as they wished, yet I couldn’t. And although the invitation remains open, I still can’t. Hopen Haus is not my life; it is the place where my life ended. Haunted
by memories made stronger by the location in which they were formed, I cannot leave.

Formerly
Englisch
, Alice does not understand this. She does not understand why we did not leave when most of the community did. She does not understand why I demand that our lives and the lives of the girls who come here remain Plain—though we enforce no dress code beyond modesty—nor does she understand my hesitance to ask the townspeople for help.

I should not expect her to understand. Eighteen years ago, I helped birth Alice Rippentoe’s illegitimate child, Uriah: a long-limbed woodland creature whose stormy disposition belies the meaning of his name, “My light is Jehovah.”

If Hopen Haus draws publicity and a real journalist digs deeply enough that the skeletons in my life are revealed, it will not dramatically change Alice’s life. But me? This life, ushering other mothers’ children into the world while never having a child to call my own . . . this is the only life I’ve got.

Supper at Hopen Haus is a family affair. Everyone is required to attend, even if battling late-afternoon nausea that redefines morning sickness. I take my seat at the head of the two tables made uniform with mismatched cloths and watch the girls clamber over the benches at speeds proportional to their bellies’ sizes. Everyone quiets as I lower my head to signal the silent grace. Afterward, the girls begin to talk and
greedily consume the meal: sautéed kale doused with vinegar,
grummbeere supp
, and radish sandwiches stuffed with crumbling portions of the goat cheese Uriah pasteurized before he went on a trip with Gerald Martin.

My appetite has vanished. I have a difficult time being grateful for such meager fare. Hopen Haus is at its lowest occupancy since Fannie Graber founded it twenty-five years ago, yet we cannot take many more boarders without someone going hungry. I look down the table again, trying to imagine where these girls would live if we were forced to close our doors.

Charlotte mistakes the reason for my sullen demeanor and reaches over to pat my hand. “Maybe they won’t use it,” she soothes, a natural
grossmammi
, even though she’s never been married nor had a child.

She goes back to spooning her soup. I pull both hands below the table and curl them into a fist. To my right, Alice’s gaze brands my skin. When I meet it, she shifts away. Her guilty silence speaks volumes.

“Oh, they’ll use it,” I say, watching as below her white
kapp
, the tips of Alice’s ears turn slowly red.

Alice Rippentoe was baptized into Dry Hollow Community’s Old Order Mennonite church one year after I was. But differences of opinion, such as her wanting publicity for Hopen Haus and my despising it, have cropped up countless times since we became midwifery peers. I am grateful for that night, a few months before Alice’s arrival,
when a slipped disk christened me as reluctant head midwife and gave my opinion more weight than hers.

She darts her eyes to me again, their color like a thundercloud. “I didn’t know the news would pick the story up. Okay, Rhoda? I just thought that journalist from the
Auberson
—”

“Well, they did,” I interrupt. “They picked the story up, and now they’ve got our pictures, too.” When I went outside to send the Channel 2 News team away, an attentive cameraman had taken my photo.

Charlotte shakes her head, heavily buttering a piece of salt-rising
brot
and layering it with red-veined radishes. “Ach, such a shame,” she murmurs.

Unlike orthodox Charlotte, who’s never once stepped foot outside Old Order Mennonite parameters in her fifty-seven years, I am upset not because I believe any captured image is idolatry, but because for the past nineteen years, I’ve been using this cloistered lifestyle to conceal my past. Now, with that one brilliant flash, everything I have worked so hard to keep in darkness may be revealed.

“Can’t we just talk to them?” Alice asks. “Ask them not to air the story due to our religious beliefs?”

I pull my fist from beneath the table and hammer it on the surface.
“No!”
Panic makes my voice louder than I intend. “Telling them we don’t want the story aired will make it seem like we’ve got something to hide, and they’ll come back here to find out what it is.”

I shake my head. “No, all we can do now is wait . . . and hope it blows over.”

I was born
on a hot August day in the heart of Amish country. My family moved to Tennessee when I was only three years old, but my childhood was filled with stories of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors hiding TVs from bishops and concealing permed hair beneath
kapps
. However, this unique heritage did not interest me. Instead, I pouted as my mother divided my waist-length hair into plaits and then forced me to change from purple overalls into a jean skirt and sneakers in preparation for a visit to our Plain friends—knowing, even at the tender age of six, that this combination was a fashion faux pas. Playing hide-and-seek or kick the can with my Old Order Mennonite peers, however, I soon became grateful for that skirt, which helped me transition from Southern
Englischer
to intimate friend.

Years passed. I knew my Mennonite playmates had traded braided pigtails for
kapped
buns, yet on a visit to the community, I rebelled against my mother’s instructions and arrived with unbound hair. During supper, which was
eaten beneath a popping kerosene bulb, the hostess came and stood behind my portion of the bench. She slid out my blue satin ribbon and plaited my hair as I stared into my bowl of
grummbeere supp
accented with homemade
brot
.

The winter of my seventeenth year, I returned to the community to visit a once-raucous playmate whose ill health had transformed her into a soft-spoken friend. The whites of her deep-brown eyes had yellowed from liver complications. Her family and my own gathered around her bed, which was heaped with spinning-star quilts, and sang hymns whose Pennsylvania Dutch words I did not know, but whose meaning struck my heart with such clarity, tears slid down my cheeks.

One week later, I stood beside her grave, wearing a thick black headband to hide my newly pierced ears with the fake diamond studs that stabbed the tender skin of my neck, giving me a migraine further magnified by jaw-clenching grief. I remember how the somber community huddled around her family as if their physical presence could shield them, not only from the slashing wind and sleet, but from the reality that the body of their
dochder
and
schweschder
was about to be placed into the cold, hard ground.

I left for college that summer, almost eighteen years to the day after I had been born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the first person in my immediate family to attempt a higher education. As I unpacked my flared Lucky jeans and beaded sweaters into wobbling dorm drawers, I thought I was leaving my Mennonite heritage
along with a certain broad-shouldered, hazel-eyed man whose father had attended my father’s Mennonite high school.

Three years, one death, and two lifetimes’ worth of tribulations later, I realized that I had not lost the precious attributes surrounding my Plain heritage so much as I had needed to go away in order to find myself.

In the cool autumn of 2008, I married my broad-shouldered, hazel-eyed Dutchman, thus making my last name as difficult to spell as my first. I kept wearing my Lucky jeans and layering my wrists with jewelry, but I was also drawn to a simple life, reminiscent of the one I had once tried to flee. My husband and I purchased a forty-acre valley nestled at the base of softly rolling Tennessee mountains.

Upon moving into the
haus
my husband built with determination and his own two hands, I began to write a fictionalized version of a story that had once been told to me—a story regarding the power of desire and the reverberating cost if that desire is left unchecked, a story that, shockingly enough, took place in an idyllic Old Order Mennonite community.

In Nashville, I was introduced to a genial, white-haired man who was as excited to hear my Dutchy last name as I had been to hear his. He had attended the same Mennonite high school as my father (and my husband’s father) and, as a literary agent, he was interested to read the portion of the story that I had completed.

He read the first twenty-five thousand words while flying home from a book festival in Brazil and wanted to read more. I continued to write as my expectant belly continued to grow. Two months after the birth of our daughter, Tyndale House accepted the manuscript; they were as excited to promote my modern retelling of
The Scarlet Letter
as I had been to write it.

And so, wearing Lucky jeans (the same pair, actually), chandelier earrings, and un
kapped
hair, I continue writing stories about the Pennsylvania Dutch heritage that once brought me acute embarrassment but has now become a creative outlet with no closing doors.

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

Jolina Petersheim
holds degrees in English and communication arts from the University of the Cumberlands. Though
The Outcast
is her first novel, her writing has been featured in venues as varied as radio programs, nonfiction books, and numerous online and print publications. Her blog is syndicated with the
Tennessean
’s “On Nashville” blog roll, as well as being featured on other creative-writing sites. Jolina and her husband share the same unique Amish and Mennonite heritage that originated in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but now live in the mountains of Tennessee with their young daughter. Follow Jolina and her blog at
www.jolinapetersheim.com
.