Chapter 14
“You excited, honey?” Jojo asked.
“Well, duh,” the ten-year-old replied, using the kid-speak forbidden in her home.
Miriam was shaking, cold in the unheated truck though she was wearing the heaviest cape she owned—handmade, of course, from heavy black wool and lined with flannel.
She absolutely would have frozen into a popsicle on a ski lift, with the wind whipping for-real snow in powdery white gusts.
But the resort was supplying all the necessary equipment to the guests they’d invited to their Appreciation Celebration.
And as they drew nearer to the resort, the sound of the snow machines was joined by another sound that was equally unpleasant: the chants of protesters. A small group of eco-terrorists had shown up to rain on the resort’s parade. Their chant greeted Jojo as she pulled into the parking lot.
“Hell no!” a voice called out.
“Hell no!” the group responded.
“Royal Oaks has got to go,” cried the first voice.
“Royal Oaks has got to go,” roared the response.
The group of protesters and their signs lay between them and the ski resort, but the demonstrators were required to stay on public property, which meant they had to remain on the street or in the parking lot.
They couldn’t follow some poor soul into the bathroom waving a sign: “Planet Earth, there is no Plan B.”
Jojo and Trident got out of the driver’s side of her truck. Miriam got out the other door, but before Jojo could make it all the way around to the passenger side, Miriam had been confronted by a lone, angry protester.
“You shouldn’t be here, little lady,” he growled at Miriam. “Go on now, go home.”
He reached out as if to grab Miriam’s shoulder, but Jojo caught his wrist, twisted it around, and yanked his arm up painfully behind his back.
“Don’t touch this little girl.”
The man was wild-eyed, his dirty brown hair shot out from under a light blue toboggan hat with an incongruously merry red ball on top.
“Let go of me … Hey, that hurts, stop.” He tried to wrench away, but the motion only increased the pressure on his twisted arm.
He let out a cry of pain that became a growl.
“You don’t understand. It’s the young ones like her who’ll have to fix the mess we leave them.
They need to understand what’s at stake here. They need to pick the right side.”
“And you need to keep your hands off children.”
He stopped wiggling, because it increased pressure on his twisted arm. But he didn’t back down. “This is a public street, and I have as much right to be here as anybody else.”
“And we have the same right you do. Just once, how about you pretend to be a decent human and move aside.”
The man glared at her. “Eleven-eighteen. Don’t you understand? Eleven-eighteen!”
“Eleven-eighteen what?”
“I’m warning you—the words are right there—eleven-eighteen.”
Jojo leaned close so only he heard the rest. “Don’t make me embarrass you in front of your friends. Back off!”
Though no one else could hear her words, her body language made it clear that she meant business. The other protesters, who had let their chant dwindle down to a few of them mumbling words, stepped back.
“Looks like you’re all by your lonesome now.”
“I’m not alone! I am a legion of one.”
“Do you even know what a legion is?”
“It’s a unit of the Roman army. Six thousand Roman soldiers. Each one of us is six thousand Roman soldiers, and we will carry out the command of eleven-eighteen.” The man turned his head toward his dispirited fellow protesters, just standing idly by, signs limp at their sides.
“We are mighty, strong, and we will prevail. We must stand together?—”
Jojo took the opportunity to end the stalemate. With a shove, she pushed the man away. He stumbled and fell to his knees, turned to glare hatred at her as she took Miriam by the arm and steered her around the man and through the crowd away from the protesters, who soon resumed their chant.
“Hell, no!”
“Hell, no!”
“Royal Oaks …”
The words were quickly gobbled up by the joyful pandemonium of the crowd. There was a festive Mardi Gras feel to the event once you got past the protesters. The ski resort sat at the foot of the mountain with the panorama of the ski slopes spreading out on the mountainside above it.
There were three slopes. The center slope, the only one operational tonight, was lit by tall lights on poles.
It ran directly down the mountain to the ski resort.
The other two slopes angled down to it. Different sets of ski lifts took skiers up to the different slopes, and once the resort was fully operational, sections of the side slopes would be cordoned off for ski classes and bunny slopes for new skiers.
Of course there was a large open area, probably half the size of a football field, at the foot of the slopes where skiers congregated and where the lifts made their turnaround at the bottom of the mountain disgorging one load of passengers and loading up another.
You couldn’t see the top of the mountain from that area because the slopes undulated like an old-fashioned rub board.
Tables had been set up in that area to dispense ski equipment—piled high with black hooded jackets with Royal Oaks Ski Resort stenciled in respectable letters above the front pocket, helmets and gloves—all arranged by size.
Of course, the tables where the smalls and mediums were located already had lines in front of them because far more women and children would be riding the lifts than men.
Many, if not most, of the English people who were present were skiers themselves.
They outnumbered the Amish in a slightly smaller proportion than in the population of the county, and they had their own equipment.
Jojo stepped on an icy spot and plowed right into one of them, a big man carrying a ski case, though he wasn’t headed to the lifts but away from them.
He grabbed her arm and kept her from face-planting—a performance Miriam would gleefully have broadcast far and wide on the Amish-kid network, ensuring that every person who drove a buggy for fifty miles in every direction would know about it before noon tomorrow.
The English skiers were bedecked in all the finery of ski jacket-dom.
It seemed to Jojo that ski jackets were the most colorful of all sporting outfits, perhaps because they stood out in such contrast to the white snow.
And maybe skiers wanted the bright colors so if they ever got stranded, they’d be easy to see from a helicopter.
Whatever the reason, there was no peacock/rainbow/tropical fish color not represented in the jackets of the people gathered in the area below the ski slopes.
Jojo had grown up believing that there were only eight colors, the ones in the original Crayola box.
Anything beyond that had not been a part of her school experience in an Amish school.
She recalled going into a department store and seeing displays of school supplies for the first time when she was seven or eight years old, and she’d stood gawking at the array of Crayola boxes—not just eight colors but sixteen, thirty-two, and sixty-four.
She’d pulled out one of the crimson shades from the sixty-four-piece box and looked at it in awe and wonder.
But even though she’d fallen in love with color in all its gloriousness right there in that department store, she’d still had to twist her own arm up behind her own back and kick her own butt with her own boot to make herself buy and wear a red ski jacket.
Jojo directed Miriam to the small/medium ski jacket line.
Then they would have to get in the much longer line nearby where volunteers had been recruited to help hand out helmets.
Not everybody needed jackets, but helmets were required.
She glanced at that line and saw a girl she knew step to the head of it.
When the girl was on rumspringa, she had sought Jojo out for advice. A lot of young people did.
“Where’s Jakob?” the boy dispensing helmets asked her.
“He didn’t want to come,” said the girl, obviously uncomfortable.
“Aw, that’s a shame.” He held out a helmet to her, a smile lighting his pimpled face. “Have fun tonight.”
The jacket line was inching forward. Jojo reached down and stroked Trident’s head, and when she looked up, she saw Jedidiah Glick making his way through the crowd, somehow managing to pass judgment on every man, woman and child he saw, Amish and English alike, without ever saying a word.
Jojo had once opened the top of the standup piano in the meeting hall and looked inside at the strings and the little hammers that hit them to make notes.
She noticed immediately that the strings for the very high notes looked as thin as a strand of hair and were pulled very, very tight.
That’s what she always thought of when she saw Bishop Glick.
He was skeletally thin, and he was stretched oh so very, very tight.
She couldn’t imagine what he was doing here.
His was among the handful of dissenting voices in the community when the discussion about the celebration was at its height. He’d preached against it one Sunday.
She had only actually met the man a couple of times, but one of them had been when she was with Liam.
He’d been in his Navy uniform, and he had taken her to town in his car!
She had felt like the queen of the universe.
They’d been walking down the street, Liam holding her hand, when they met Bishop Glick.
“Good afternoon, Bishop Glick,” Liam had said.
The piano-string bishop had stopped dead, as if Liam’s words had slapped him in the face. “I don’t ever want to hear my name on your lips again,” he growled.
The look of hatred on his face would have curdled new milk.
When she’d asked Liam why the man had been so mean and nasty, he’d told her, “He believes I’m a paid killer.” That part hadn’t surprised her. She knew Liam being a Navy SEAL upset some people. What Liam said next, softly, did surprise her, though. “… and maybe I am.”
She would never forget the look of triumph she’d seen on the bishop’s face at Liam’s funeral.
He was glad her beloved brother was dead, and she hated him for that.
Whenever she returned home on leave, she made it a point to wear her uniform in town, hoping she’d run into Bishop Glick.
She was defiant, wanted him to disapprove, wanted an excuse to skewer the old man with decades of stored-up venom.
But she had never had the chance. And now here he was, served up to her on a platter.
Well, she wasn’t in uniform, but she was wearing a flaming, candy-apple red ski jacket—with her vicious-looking, dangerous, probably murderous dog at her side. He couldn’t miss that! He’d flick his disapproving ashes all over her and Trident and she would …
She looked down at her niece, her beaming face framed by a dark blue bonnet. Right, Jojo would … what? Spoil the innocent joy of the night for Miriam?
“What size?”
Jojo realized she was at the head of the jacket line.
She looked from Miriam to Bishop Glick, then back at the Royal Oaks staff member.
“Large,” she said, snatched a coat off the table beside it with the bigger sizes, and shoved it on over her own jacket.
“Aunt Jojo, why are?—?”
“It’s a game, Sweetie. Hide and seek. And I’m hiding.
” She pulled the hood up over her head, grabbed a small jacket for Miriam and moved out to disappear in the helmet line.
A crowd of people had gathered at the nearby hot chocolate table, waiting for the welcome address by Rick Dalton.
When the man stepped up on the small dais to speak, Jojo looked at her watch.
It was eight o’clock. The Amish people here would normally have been in bed shortly after the sun went down.
“For those of you who couldn’t make the dinner earlier, I’m Rick Dalton and I’m the CEO of Royal Oaks Ski Resort,” Dalton said.
“I promised when I spoke at dinner that I’d give a brief welcome and thank you before we turned on the lifts.
” He paused. “I’m a man who keeps his promises.
” He cleared his throat. “So … welcome and thank you.” He smiled, turned from the microphone without another word and headed toward the steps.
When the crowd realized he really wasn’t going to drone on and on, they applauded wildly.
He went down the steps, posed for a moment for a picture at the bottom with the heads of the builder’s supply and construction company then headed to the ski lifts in the front of the parade of people who’d soon be gliding up the mountain.
Jojo and Miriam would be among them.