THE OUTCAST

My face burns with the heat of a hundred stares. No one is looking down at Amos king's handmade casket because they are all too busy looking to me. Even Tobias cannot hide his disgust when he reaches out a hand, and then realizes he has not extended it to his angelic wife, who was too weak to come, but to fallen twin. Drawing the proffered hand back , Tobias buffs the knuckles against his jacket as if no clean them and slips his hand beneath the bible. All the while his black eyes remain fixed on me until Eli emits a whimoer that awakens the new bishop to consciousness. Clearing his throat, Tobias resumes reading from the german bible: “Yea, though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death. . ." I cannot help but listen to such a well-chosen verse, despire the person reading it. I feel I am walking through the valley of death even as this new life, my child, yawns against my ribs. Slipping a hand beneath Eli’s diapered bottom, I jiggle him so that his ribbon mouth slackens into a smile. I then glance across the earthen hole and up into judah king's staring, honey- colored eyes. His are softer than his elder brother Tobias 's: there is no judgement in the, only the slightest veiling of confusion not thick enough to hide the pain of his unrequited love, a love i have been denying since childhood. Dropping my gaze, I recall how my braided pigtails would fly out behind me as i sprinted barefoot down the grassy hill toward ten-year-old Judah. I remember how he would scream, "Springa! Springa!" and instead of being caught by Lea and Eugene or whoever was doing the chasing, I would run right toward the safety of base and the safety of him. Afterward, the two of us would slink away from our unfinished chores and go sit in the milking barn with out sweat- soaked backs against the coolness of the storage tanks. Judah would pass milk to me from a jelly jar and i would take a sip, read a page of the hardy boys or the boxcar childer, and then pass his contraband book and jelly jar back. Because of those afternoons, judah taught me how to speak , write and read english far better and far earlier than our Old Order Mennonite teacher ever could have. As Our playmates were busy speaking pennylvania Dutch, Judah And I had our own secret language, and sheathed in its safety, he would often confide how desperately he wanted to leave this world for the larger one beyond it. A world he had explored only through the books he would purchase at Root's Market when his father wasn't looking and read until the pages were sticky with the sweat of a thousand secret turnings. Summer was slipping into fall by the time my mamm, Helen, discovered our hiding spot. Judah and I had Just retuned from making mud pies along the banks of the King's cow pond when she stepped out of the fierce sun into the barn's shaded doorway and found us sitting, once again, beside the milking tanks with the fifth book in the Boxcar Children series draped over our laps. Each of us was so covered in grime that the jelly jar from which we drank our milk was marred with a lipstick kiss of mud. But we were pristine up to the elbows, because judah feared we would damage his book's precious pages if we did not redd up before reading them. that Afternoon, all my mamm had to do was stand in the in the doorway of the barn with one hand on her hip and wag the nubby index finger of her other hand (nubby since it had gotten caught in the corn grinder when she was a child), and i leaped to my feet with my face aflame. For hours and hours afterward, my stomach churned. I thought that when dawdy got home from the New Holland horse sales he would take me out to the barn and whip me. But he didn't. To this day, I'm not even sure Mamm told him she'd caught judah and me sitting very close together as we read from our Englischer books. i think she kept our meeting spot a secret because she did not want to root out the basis of our newly sprouted friendship, which she hoped would one day turn into fully grown love. Since my mamm was as priate as a woman in such a small community could be, I never knew these were her through until nine years later when i wrote to tell her i was with child. She arrived, haggard and alone , two days after receiving my letter. When she disembarked from the van that had brought her on the twelve-hour journey from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, she walked with me into lea and tobias's white farmhouse, up the stairs into my bedroom, and asked in hurried Pennsylvania Dutch, "it judah the vadder?" Shocked, I just looked at her a moment, then shook my head. She took me by the shoulders and squeezed them until they ached. "If not him, who?" "I cannot say." "What do you mean, you cannot say? Liza, Iam your mudder. You can trust me, jah?" "some things go beyond trust," I whispered. My mamm's blue eyes narrowed as they bored into mine. I wanted to look away, but I couldn't, Although I was nineteen, I felt like I was a child all over again, like she still held the power to know when i had done something wrong and who i had done it with. At last, she release me and dabbed her tears with the index nub of her left hand. You're going to have a long row to how", she whispered. "I know that, too." "Did you tell Lea?" Again , I shook my head, My mamm pressed her hand against the melon of my stomach as if checking its ripeness. "She'll find out soon enough." She sighed. "What are you? Three months, four?." "Hide it for two more. 'til Lea and the babyare stronger. in the meantime, you'll have to find a place of your own. Tobias won't let you stay here". "But where will i go? Who will take me in?". Even in my despondent state, I hated the panic that had Crept into my voice. My mamm must have hate it as well. Her nostrils flared as she snapped, "You Should've thought oh this before, Liza! You have sinned in haste. Now you must repent at leisure!". This exchange between my mamm and me took place eight months ago, but still haven't found a place to stay. Although the Mennonite do not practice the shunning enforce by the Amish Ordnung , anyone who has joined the Old Order Mennonite church as I had and then Falls outside its moral guidelines without repentance is still treated with the abhorrence of a leper. Therefore once the swelling in my belly was obvious to all, the Copper Creek Community, Who'd welcomed me withsuch open arms when i moved down to care for my bedridden sister,began to retreat until i knew my child and I would be facing our uncertain future alone. Tobias, more easily swayed by the community than he lets on, surely would have cast me and my bastaed child out onto the street of it weren't for his wife. Night after night I would overhear my sister in their bedroom next to mine , begging Tobias, Like Esther Beseeching the king, to forgive my sins and allow me to remian sheltered beneath their roof- at least until after my baby was born. "Tobias, please," Lea would entreat in her soft, high pitched voice, " if you don't want to do it for liza , then do it for me!"