Paradise Valley Read online

  Rachel understood. The others ignored him, figuring Aaron stayed at his post looking out through the slats because he didn’t want to miss anything, but Rachel looked in his eyes and she knew. Every mile carried him farther away from Amos. She didn’t say anything; there was nothing to say. Aaron understood that his twin brother was gone and that Gott had allowed it, but leaving Amos’s body so far behind and going so very far away felt a little like a betrayal nonetheless. She stood beside him for a long time holding on to the slats and looking out just as he was doing, her forearm barely touching his. But touching.

  A hundred times since leaving home Jake’s face had come to Rachel and twisted a knot in her heart, but it occurred to her after a while that when she touched the edge of Aaron’s pain it helped her forget about her own hurts and desires.

  As the steam engine struggled up a grade in western Tennessee, trailing a plume of smoke, an endless mist of deep pink blooms lined the forests overhanging the tracks.

  “Redbuds,” Aaron said. “I never seen so many in my life.”

  “Everywhere I look, I see new things,” Rachel said quietly, the passing wind ruffling her skirts.

  Aaron nodded, and said with an oddly regretful smile, “This is a truly beautiful country.”

  The next time the train stopped, Rachel went back to the boxcar where her mother and sisters stayed most of the time. Miriam was there, sitting in a corner watching through a crack as the green hills rolled past. Rachel sat on a nail keg beside her, not saying anything at first, just watching through the same crack. But Miriam barely acknowledged her, and after a while Rachel began to sense a melancholy even deeper than Aaron’s. She touched her sister’s knee.

  “Miriam, are you all right?”

  Miriam nodded and forced a small smile, but she didn’t look at Rachel. The train rocked gently, wheels clacking rhythmically as the daylight faded and a sifting rain obscured the landscape. Ada, who had finally stopped crying for a little while, sat holding a skein of yarn while her mother knitted. She was humming a simple children’s song, and even then the worry never left her puffy eyes. Mary napped beside her boys. Emma and Levi were sitting in the far corner of the car where a small table and chairs had been arranged, studying a book of Spanish phrases together. Rachel looked again at the suppressed sorrow in Miriam’s eyes. Gently, she touched her sister’s shoulder.

  “Talk to me, sister. What’s wrong?”

  And then she waited. She knew her sister well. Miriam was quiet and studious, but underneath she was fiercely independent, scrupulously honest, and too smart for her own good, which went a long way toward explaining why she didn’t have a boyfriend. Rachel knew Miriam would eventually say what was on her mind, but she would always choose to think first, to arrange her thoughts and understand them clearly before she put words to them. In a moment Miriam turned to look at her, and there were lines of silver in the bottoms of her eyes.

  “Mary has Ezra,” she said softly. She turned away to look outside again, but she kept talking and Rachel knew she had looked away because she didn’t want the tears to come. “Lizzie has Andy. Now Emma has Levi, and even you have someone, Rachel. Though you can’t speak of it, and you won’t be with him for a while, you have him yet. At least you have hope.” Now she turned again to look Rachel in the face, and a tear trickled down her cheek. “What hope do I have?”

  She had never come right out and said this before, though even Rachel knew she had to be thinking it. Miriam was almost eighteen. She’d been eligible for nearly two years. A few boys had tried to court her, but Miriam had dismissed each of them in turn, saying only that they “played games” and their interest in her was for all the wrong reasons. After a while the others shied away, somehow intimidated. And that was at home, where there were lots of boys. Now she was moving off to another country, where the only Amish people within a thousand miles would be the ones in her family.

  “They will come,” Rachel said gently. “In a year or so there will be lots of others. You’ll see. Oh, Miriam, we’ll have a fine community in Mexico! Why, they’ll be standing in line to court a beautiful girl like you.”

  Miriam looked down at her lap and a tear clung to her nose. “I’m not beautiful.”

  Rachel stared at her in disbelief. She had always envied Miriam’s dark complexion, her coal black eyes and natural plum lips, her silky raven hair. Especially the hair. Rachel, with her mop of red, had always loved her sister’s hair, though no one else ever saw it let loose outside her kapp. And then she remembered what Jake had said that night, walking in the moonlight, about seeing her own red hair flashing in the sun like spun copper. What it proved to her was that, like Miriam, her image of herself was shockingly different from the way others saw her.

  “Miriam,” she said, putting an arm about her sister, “Gott made someone for each of us, didn’t He?”

  A sniff, a shrug.

  “Well, I believe it,” Rachel said. “The man Gott made for you has a heart that will search and will not be satisfied until he finds you. Only you. When he sees you he will know. You will take his breath away, and he will say he has never seen a sunset more beautiful.”

  Miriam didn’t answer for a long time. Finally she said, “Those are pretty words. I would love to meet that one, but no boy has ever taken the trouble to know me.”

  “He will,” Rachel said.

  But Miriam only sighed and kept staring out the crack, watching the world grow dark.

  Rachel found a private corner that night and did some crying of her own. Her heart ached for Miriam, and trembled in fear for Emma. She cried for Aaron, for poor confused Ada, and lastly for herself. Already she missed Jake and feared she would never see him again. In the wee hours, somewhere near Memphis, the train car finally rocked her to sleep.

  When she awoke the train was sitting still, taking on water and switching cars in the humid low-country air of New Orleans. Everyone did their chores, and after breakfast Harvey and Aaron found a pumping station where they refilled the water barrels before the train got under way again, heading west.

  In the afternoon the lowering sun swept ever more to the right as the train curved southward. Just after sunset the steam engine hissed and slowed and lumbered into the freight yard at Laredo, an expansive flat on the edge of town with cattle pens all around it, packed with hordes of longhorn steers that made a great lowing racket through the night.

  Caleb paced and fumed for two days while they were stuck on a siding in hot, dusty Laredo. It took one day for the Mexican customs officials to show up and inspect their livestock and passports, and another to come back with official papers saying the Benders would be allowed to pass into Mexico.

  Still, there was a promising sign. Mamm’s cough had worsened almost immediately as they were leaving Ohio in the drafty train car, and she had to sit upright all night in the humid air of New Orleans to relieve the pressure in her chest. By the time they reached Laredo her eyes had sunk into her face and she was weak, barely able to stand. But in the dry air of south Texas, parked on a siding in Laredo, for the first time in a week she slept soundly and awoke feeling a little better. Maybe the doctor was right.

  The morning they left, an American customs agent showed up and reinforced Caleb’s nagging sense of foreboding. The agent, making his rounds in a dark blue uniform, came to check their papers and peek into the cars. His great big handlebar mustache reminded Caleb of the policeman who had escorted him to jail – was it only three months ago? The agent carried under his arm a black leather book where he wrote their names and whatever else he thought was important.

  “That’s some fine draft horses you got there,” he said, eyeing Caleb’s Belgians, absently twisting the end of his mustache around a finger. “Looks like you’re planning on farming.”

  Caleb nodded. “Jah. That’s about all we know how to do.”

  “Got folks down there?”

  “No. It’s chust us, yet.”

  The agent bit his lip, frowning. “Mind if I
ask whereabouts you plan to settle?”

  “Paradise Valley,” Caleb said with a touch of pride.

  The agent squinted. “Never heard of it. What’s it close to?”

  “Agua Nueva.”

  A blank stare. “Don’t know that one, either.”

  “Well, there’s another town – Saltillo.”

  “Ah! Now, Saltillo I’ve heard of. Decent little place from what I hear. Not as rough as the border towns, but it’s still Mexico. South of the border, things can get a little scrappy sometimes.” He eyed Caleb and his family closely, and a worried look came into his eyes. “How you fixed for firearms?” he asked, his gaze sweeping at waist level across the men in the group.

  “You mean guns?”

  A nod.

  “Well, we got a shotgun for rabbits and squirrels, a rifle for deer.”

  “No side arms?”

  Caleb had already noticed several cowboys on horseback that morning, riding around the stockyards wearing pistol belts. They had all noticed. The customs agent’s question made Caleb a little uneasy.

  “We have no need of a pistol,” he said flatly. “A rifle is better for hunting.”

  The agent eyed them all again for a long moment without saying anything, taking in the plain clothes, the prayer kapps and aprons, the wide-brimmed farmer’s hats. He shook his head, took a deep breath, blew it out and offered Caleb a parting handshake.

  “Best of luck to you, then, Mr. Bender. I sure hope you make friends easily. I expect you’ll need ’em.”

  Chapter 15

  The Mexican National Railway hooked them up and dragged them across the trestle into another country. Soon they were breezing along through the Mexican countryside, but as the sun rose higher even the wind of the train’s passing did little to blunt the oppressive heat. What lay around them was a desert, pure and simple. It wasn’t perfectly flat; the land rolled gently, and they crossed an occasional small canyon or creek gorge, but it was all terribly hot and dry, a place of sagebrush and cactus, snakes and scorpions.

  In midmorning they passed through Monterrey, a fair-sized city on the edge of the mountains. Great, long ridges of jagged rock loomed over them in the west, mostly green on the lower slopes, with patches of red rock showing through near the peaks.

  “We still have a ways to travel,” Emma’s voice said. She had come up behind Rachel and laid a hand on her shoulder as she stood looking up at the mountains through the slats of the cattle car. “But we’re headed up into the mountains now. Soon we’ll be a lot higher up, where it’s cooler.”

  “I sure hope so,” Rachel said, fanning the neckline of her dress in a vain attempt to cool off.

  “How are you holding up?” Emma asked.

  “Me?” Rachel tried to act surprised. “I’m fine, why?”

  Emma’s head tilted and she smiled gently. “You must miss him very much.”

  She could never fool Emma. Rachel studied her toes for a minute, determined not to cloud up. The best she could manage was a weak nod.

  Emma put her arms about Rachel’s shoulders, touched her forehead to Rachel’s temple and said, “You won’t believe this now, but the time will pass and you’ll be together again before you know it. I’m sorry it’s so hard for you right now. I wish there was something I could do, but when you’re sixteen time just moseys along like a tired old horse, doesn’t it?”

  Rachel nodded weakly. “But you’re only four years older than me, Emma.”

  Emma chuckled softly. “Yes, and already, for me, the horse has begun to canter. Grossmammi says when you’re old the years go by like fence posts.”

  “Well,” Rachel said with a sad smile, “I wouldn’t mind a quick trot just now.”

  Emma’s arms tightened about her younger sister’s shoulders. “The year will pass soon enough, Rachel. Keep yourself busy and before you know it the others will come, and Jake with them. Gott knows your heart.”

  It helped a little. It wasn’t so much the things Emma said that made Rachel feel better, it was just that she was always there. She was always Emma.

  “And how are you doing these days?” Rachel asked, glancing at Emma’s belly.

  “Oh, not so bad. I’ve been a little queasy on the train, but Mamm thinks it’s motion sickness. In another month or two I’ll start to show a little bit, but I think I can hide under this dress for a while yet.”

  The train climbed steadily, its steam engine laboring sometimes on the grades. They passed through tunnels and along the edges of steep cliffs, through a world of cleft and chasm like nothing Rachel had ever seen, a world apart from the rolling green hills of home.

  The train made a brief stop in Saltillo to pick up mail and unload coal; then the engine hissed and chugged and climbed even higher. In midafternoon they pulled into the station at Agua Nueva, where the three cars of the Bender family were uncoupled for the last time on a siding at the far end of the little station.

  The towns had gotten smaller and poorer at every stop since they left Laredo. Monterrey was smaller than Laredo, but still a city. Saltillo was half the size of Monterrey, and Agua Nueva half the size of Saltillo. There were no grand government buildings here, only a few small stores, a blacksmith shop, and a scattering of houses along the tracks and up the sides of the hills. Most of them were mere shacks of adobe, gray unvarnished wood and rusting tin, a few with makeshift goat pens in back. There were chickens running loose everywhere. One or two rangy dogs paced warily along the dry dirt streets, and half-naked children stopped what they were doing to watch every move the foreigners made.

  They were deep in the Sierra Madre now, and the air had cooled noticeably with the altitude. Rachel had been wearing her coat since they left Saltillo. She busied herself helping her mamm and the other women pull all their belongings together and box everything up, all the hundred little necessities that had gotten them through the days and nights on the train. And they were Amish women. It was a point of honor to leave the boxcar cleaner than they had found it.

  While the men and boys hauled out the wagons and began putting them together, Dat went up the platform to the little ramshackle station to inquire about Herr Schulman. While he was gone, a big mule-drawn wagon turned a corner and rumbled down the service road beside the tracks. When the wagon drew even with the Benders the driver hauled back on the reins and stopped.

  “Sind sie Herr Bender?” he said to Aaron, who only now looked up from pinning the tongue onto the front of his own wagon. Rachel was already up in the wagon, catching and stacking.

  Aaron straightened up and hitched his suspenders, eyeing the newcomer warily.

  “Er ist mein Vater. Ich bin Aaron,” he said, trying not to sound too Dutch. Rachel smiled, for she knew High German didn’t come easily to her brother’s tongue. “Er ist dort.” He pointed toward the station, where Dat was just emerging from the door and coming down the platform.

  As he tied off the reins, the German looked back over his shoulder and spotted Dat. He jumped down from the wagon and pulled off his hat, a shapeless felt thing, badly frayed along the edges and corners, deeply stained with sweat. Standing on the ground next to Aaron, Rachel could see that Herr Schulman was a big man, broad in the shoulders, with a shock of light brown hair and a ruddy-cheeked, distinctively German face. He wore heavy wool trousers, a brown corduroy coat and hobnail boots that looked like they’d spent plenty of time behind a plow.

  Herr Schulman stuck a big hand out to Caleb Bender when he walked up. “Herr Bender? Ernst Schulman! Wie gehts?”

  Dat was far more comfortable with High German than his son, and he told Ernst Schulman all about the trip from Ohio while the whole family lined up shoulder to shoulder to meet their new neighbor. Dat introduced them all, one by one, and each of them gave Herr Schulman a good, stiff, one-pump Amish handshake.

  A cart about half the size of Schulman’s wagon rumbled down the service road and came to a stop behind the other one. The cart was drawn by a small slow-footed ox – a relative rarity at home,
though a few people kept them just for fun – and driven by a young Mexican. The driver jumped down and stood by the wagon, one hand casually draped over the front wheel, watching Schulman, waiting. He didn’t say a word, nor did he make any move toward any of the Benders. He didn’t even look at them.

  Rachel stared. The Mexican’s loose-fitting pants had once been white, made from some sort of heavy native cotton, and the waist was tied with a piece of thin hemp rope. He wore a dark brown hat with a flat brim just like an Amish hat, only with a taller crown. His jet-black hair was long like a woman’s, and it hung straight down past the shoulders of a threadbare poncho and a shirt made from the same heavy cloth as his trousers. There were dusty sandals on his feet instead of boots. He was taller than many of the local people, longer of leg than the average. But something about him struck Rachel wrong. He seemed relaxed almost to the point of boredom, yet his dark eyes were alert and focused. There was just something arrogant in the way he carried himself.

  “Pelao!” Schulman yelled, switching to Spanish. “Don’t just stand there. Get up here and help load the wagons! Quickly!” Schulman shook his head. “One thing I cannot get used to in this country, Herr Bender – everyone moves like molasses. These people are so incredibly lazy. They just don’t care.”

  Pelao remained motionless for a moment, just long enough for his inertia to become a statement. When he was good and ready he sauntered casually over to one of the boxcars to help Aaron haul out the riding plow and heft it up onto the hay wagon. Even then he didn’t speak.

  With Schulman’s help, all the wagons were loaded and tied down in less than two hours. While Levi and Ezra brought out the draft horses and hitched them to the larger wagons, Pelao led one of the standard-bred horses out to where Harvey was assembling one of the surreys. Rachel watched as he backed the horse into place and hitched it up, his movements unhurried but precise. At least he knew what he was doing. When all was ready he leaped back up onto his oxcart and sat holding the reins loosely, waiting, a faint smirk on his lips.