Chapter 21
Jojo left the resort as soon as she was allowed because she wanted to get Miriam home. She was sure that her sister and her brother-in-law had heard what had happened and were frantic with worry.
At some point, she didn’t remember when, she had pulled out her cell phone and called the phone shack at the bottom of the lane where her sister and brother-in-law lived.
She left a message on the phone there to tell them that Miriam was uninjured, and she would bring her home as soon as she was able.
Of course, once word of what had happened at the resort spread through the county, the roads were clogged with cars and buggies, people frantically trying to find out about loved ones.
It was long past daylight when Jojo got home to her uncles’ house and had to tell them what had happened.
By then, everyone in the county had heard about it.
She told them as little as she could because there was no sense in polluting their minds with the images that were in hers.
They’d taken the news stoically, as she knew they would, asked few questions.
“They’ll be having visitation this afternoon for them has gone on to Glory,” Uncle Jonas said and turned to Jojo. “I’m glad for you to come with me, Joanna, if you’ve a mind.” Inviting her to go with him was a kind gesture from one who didn’t offer up many of those.
Then Jojo went into her glorious bathroom, closed the door behind her, ran steamy hot water into the big clawfoot bathtub and sank down into it.
The faces of the people who had been killed elbowed their way to the front of the stage in Jojo’s mind and she was too exhausted to stop them.
The face of the child, the little girl who had been murdered, blazed so bright, Jojo almost squinted from the glare.
And then she allowed herself to cry. She sobbed and sobbed until her chest ached.
Later that afternoon, she dressed in a simple black dress.
It was longer than traditional English dresses, her compromise so as not to stand out among the Amish.
She pulled on black stockings and her snow boots, and wrapped around her a heavy woolen hooded cape her grandmother had given her for Christmas, pulling the hood up over her head for warmth.
They rode in Uncle Jonas’s boxy enclosed buggy.
The black paint was chipped, but it was in strict working order.
There were small sliding windows on each side and a reflector triangle polished bright on the back.
They were New Order Amish, and they were allowed the reflector triangles.
There were also oil lamps and a worn cushion on the seat with a cracked Bible tucked into a corner.
The buggy was drawn by a horse named Lightning, a black Morgan gelding with a white star on his forehead.
He was strong and spirited and a little high-strung, a horse that demanded a firm hand, and her Uncle Jonas was just the man for the job.
The old man was dressed in his black suit and black felt hat when he climbed into the buggy to take the reins, carried himself with an erect, unyielding posture.
“Giddy-up, Lightning.” He slapped the reins on the horse’s back. The gelding did not need to be guided along the driveway to the small road. Then Uncle Jonas surprised her by reaching out a callused hand and patting her knee gently.
“I’m glad you’re all right, child.” He paused. “When we first heard, Levi and I prayed you’d be spared. And the Lord saw fit to answer our prayer.” He withdrew his hand then and slapped the reins again. That was all he had to say on the subject.
Jonas Yoder was gruff, blunt, and easily irritated.
He was quick to scold, a man who believed that his way was always the only right way, and muttered disapproval at anything he saw as foolish or too modern, even though they were New Order Amish.
But beneath his sharp tongue was a fierce loyalty to his family and to the farm, and his bark was always worse than his bite.
Jojo both resented and respected him. His constant criticism wore her down, but his was a strength she could lean on, and she was glad he was here, seated beside her in the buggy today.
Amish wakes were held in the home of the person who died, as soon after death as possible. She and Uncle Jonas had to park their buggy almost half a mile from Clarence Yoder’s house because the roadsides were filled with other buggies.
The whole yard was full of people, gathered outside because the house was so crowded inside, standing alone or in small groups in the frigid cold.
She and her uncle crunched through the snow, nodding quietly to the people they knew, positioning themselves in the informal line leading up to the porch.
It took them a while to make their way through the door and the parlor into the living room, where the coffin sat on a table in the middle of the room.
Luke Fisher, one of the carpenters who had been at the ski resort the night before, a master craftsman of fine furniture, had built it and she was sure she’d see more of his handiwork at the homes of the other two shooting victims. The furniture in the living room had been pushed back, and benches brought in, the backless benches that were used for church services.
The focus during the hours of visitation—that went on all day for two days before the funeral and burial—was not on the deceased.
Unlike visitation hours in the funeral homes in town, where the English were gathering to mourn the deaths of their friends and loved ones, there would not be outbursts of loud grief.
“We mourn, but not as the world mourns,” Scripture says.
Neither would there be flower arrangements, each with an attached card identifying the person who was expressing sympathy, lining the walls and surrounding the shiny metal caskets and filling the air with the cloying aroma most people unconsciously associated with death and dying.
The atmosphere was somber but not hushed, quiet conversation and comforting words.
The women of the community had prepared large amounts of food: baked chickens and vegetables canned from their gardens, and pot roasts along with sandwiches, pies, cookies, coffee, and tea.
Meals were served in shifts as people came and went.
It was common for hundreds of people to attend, and eating together was as much about comforting the family as it was about necessity.
The emphasis was on simplicity and humility—no eulogies, no praising the deceased’s accomplishments, only comfort through faith.
As Jojo and her uncle entered the living room, a man in the corner stood up with a Bible and began to read aloud in German, and all conversations ceased.
People stopped and folded their hands and listened to the scriptures.
When he was done, the woman standing next to him began to sing, and the other people in the room joined in the hymn.
Jojo and her uncle passed respectfully by the coffin, where Clarence Yoder looked like he was asleep.
He was a relative by some connection—Jojo’s mother had been a Yoder as were half the Amish in the county, but Jojo couldn’t ever recall meeting him.
She and Uncle Jonas made their way through the crowd and out through the kitchen, picked up sandwiches to be polite though Jojo had no appetite. There were still two more wakes to go.
There were more farm trucks and pickup trucks at the Borntraeger farm than there had been at Clarence Yoder’s because Susanna Borntraeger had had more English friends.
Jojo did not know Susanna well, but she had been among a handful of teenagers who had sought Jojo out when they were on rumspringa to talk to Jojo because she had done it, had left the Amish, and she had come back to full fellowship because she’d never joined the church.
That would be the ideal they all sought if they did not remain Amish.
That was the rub, though. What was it like out there in the big world?
Susanna had come to her right after Jojo had returned to Somerset County from Chicago while her mother was still living, and she was caring for her.
She’d sat with Susanna over a cup of hot chocolate at the coffee shop owned by Jojo’s best friend.
The shop was a melting pot, a place that always seemed to have a smattering of Amish among the English, younger people mostly, because it served what Starbucks served for half the price.
Susanna was a pretty girl in the scrubbed-up Amish way. She had chestnut-colored hair, bright blue eyes with long black lashes and a heart-shaped mouth with full lips that men out there in the world went all stupid over.
“When you were on rumspringa, did you … go on dates … with boys?” Susanna’d asked her.
“Sure. I did. I didn’t find any I particularly liked. Have you been dating?”
Susanna had turned four shades of red. “Well, yes.”
“Have you found someone you like?”
She had reddened some more. “He’s English … and we’ve been dating for the last three months. He comes and gets me and we ride around in his car.” She’d paused. “He says he loves me.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Oh, it’s wonderful.”
“And do you love him?”
“I like him a lot, but I don’t know that it’s what love is … what I see in my mother and father and my sisters and brothers-in-law. That seems to be a deeper thing than having fun riding around in the car and listening to weird music you’ve never heard before.”
Jojo laughed. “I can’t help you much there, but I can tell you that out in the world, boys …
men are not as serious as they are in our world.
A lot of them don’t know what they want and what they’re going to do with their lives.
They have trouble with commitment, some of them, find it hard to stick with one girl and one relationship, getting married and having children.
It’s hard for them because they weren’t raised to do that.
They were raised to pick and choose whatever suits their fancy from among all the flowers in the garden. ”
“So you wouldn’t marry someone who’s English?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that! It comes down to you deciding what you want in life. Do you want some excitement? Adventure? To do new things and see new places and meet people like you’ve never met before?” Jojo paused. “That’s what my brother wanted.”
“And what did you want?”
Jojo chuckled. “I wanted to be like my brother, and that was really a stupid reason to do what I did! But it accidentally turned out to be a good decision because I loved the military. I loved being a police officer. I loved all of those things that I never would have had if I had joined the church and remained Amish.”
“I’m not sure what I want. I want to be a wife and a mother with children to care for—someday. I don’t want to go through life by myself.”
Susanna had suddenly realized she might have offended Jojo. “Oh, I don’t mean there’s anything wrong with not getting married or?—”
“It’s okay. I picked this life. And you need to pick yours. Decide what you want. If it’s family, then you need to count the cost of leaving the Amish because the Amish value that way of life—motherhood and stability.”
“And the English don’t?”
“They do. Just not in the same way, and not all of them do. Where you can pretty much count on an Amish to have your values, the people you meet out in the world could value money or fame or possessions or girlfriends—all sorts of things that might not be important at all to you.”
Jojo knew she had given the girl something to think about. Then she had heard the girl had joined the church and was engaged. And now she was dead.
Uncle Jonas parked the buggy, and they got out and walked up to the house where a crowd of Amish were coming and going, paying their respects.
As they crossed the yard, she saw a group of half a dozen English young people standing together, looking awkward.
Obviously, they had been Susanna’s friends during the years when she’d gone to sample what the world had to offer.
Jojo knew a couple of them—a boy, Zack, or she thought that’s what his name tag said.
He worked the window at McDonald’s. There was a girl who’d worked for a while as a waitress at Coffa Cupee, and a young man she recognized as Jason Crawford.
He’d helped install the plumbing in her bathroom—had been terrified of Uncle Jonas’s bull, Roosevelt.
She’d seen him and Zack at Royal Oaks. Jason had been handing out helmets.
She and her uncle moved slowly forward in the line going into the house, drawing closer to the group of teenagers standing together. Perhaps they’d already been in, or perhaps they didn’t know how to go in, so they just stood there.
As she passed, she heard snatches of their conversation.
“… shouldn’t have gone back to the Amish,” said one of the boys, Jason or the one she thought was Zack.
One of the girls agreed. “If she’d stayed in the world like normal people, she’d be alive.”
“That’s not true,” said another one of the girls. “All kinds of people got shot. Mr. Dalton who owns the resort. Being out in the world didn’t save him.”
“She was … our age … and now she’s dead.” Jojo could hear disillusionment in the boy’s voice, and a dawning understanding that youth didn’t make him bulletproof.
“She wouldn’t be dead if she hadn’t gone back,” said the other boy, and there was bitterness in his voice.
Then she and Uncle Jonas moved on, and she couldn’t hear them anymore. When she and her uncle emerged from the back door after making their way past the body of the dead girl in the parlor, the other teenagers were gone.