Chapter 12
Jojo pulled open the back door of her uncles’ house on Whippoorwill Hollow Road and out ran a little brown dog with a whole chicken in its mouth.
Her cousin, Ruth Glick, was hot on his heels.
Uncle Levi’s only daughter, she and Uncle Jonas’s two daughters, Rebecca and Esther, alternated doing chores for their fathers.
Jojo’d agreed to live with the two old men so they could remain “independent,” but her cousins would do the laundry, cleaning, and cooking.
It appeared Ruth had planned on baked chicken for supper—until the dog made off with it.
Ruth hollered at Jojo as she ran past. “What’d you open the door for, Joanna?”
Jojo sputtered, “Well, you know, it’s kind of hard to come in without—” She let the rest of it go as Uncle Levi elbowed past her.
He hollered, “Mephibosheth! Mephibosheth! Come here, boy! Come here!”
The dog no longer answered to that name, but her uncle didn’t remember the new one Jojo’d given him.
The drama of dog, chicken, and pursuit tumbled down the back porch steps and out into the snow-covered lawn. The dog didn’t make for the trees with his bounty, though. He got as far as the edge of the yard, then turned around and started running in circles around his pursuers.
“You give me that!” Ruth yelled, reaching down, trying to grab hold of either the dog or her chicken. She missed both.
As a rule, the Amish didn’t have pets. They had cats to catch mice, and dogs sometimes to help herd the cattle and sheep.
Those animals were considered livestock and slept in the barn.
The little brown dog with the chicken in his mouth slept in the bed with Uncle Levi.
The story was that the old man had simply come home one day with the puppy.
Something was wrong with the dog’s right front paw, making him limp in an adorable lopsided little shuffle.
She had to admit he was a cute dog, with a curly chocolate brown coat that had light brown and white markings.
But it was his eyes that were arresting.
She didn’t even know dogs had green eyes, but this one did.
One look from those green eyes would melt her Uncle Levi into a puddle on the floor.
Uncle Levi refused to say where he’d gotten it.
The dog was a mini bernedoodle—didn’t shed, hypoallergenic—Amish farmers in Lancaster County made good money breeding and selling doodles, but Uncle Levi wouldn’t admit buying it.
Or bartering for it. He merely voiced a variation of: he followed me home, Mom, and I’m keeping him and the matter was settled.
Uncle Levi was way too stiff and slow to apprehend the little critter, so he stopped in the middle of the yard and as the dog ran around and around him, he shouted, “Stop! Come here, boy, come to Papa, bring me the chicken, come on, Mephibosheth, be a good boy.”
Mephibosheth. The grandson of King Saul in the Old Testament, he was invited to live in the court of King David to honor David’s friendship with his father, Jonathan. Oh … and Mephibosheth was crippled.
Jojo’d informed her uncle the first night she’d stayed in the house that Mephibosheth was a terrible name for a dog. How could you even call him? “Here Mephibosheth, Mephibosheth!”
Uncle Levi had cocked his head to the side. “I don’t have to call him. He’s always right by my side.”
The dog had chewed the laces off Uncle Levi’s boots during supper that night and stolen Jojo’s house shoe before bedtime, so she had to hop around on one foot to keep from touching the cold hardwood floor with the other bare one. She’d given the dog a new name on the spot!
Jojo stepped to the edge of the porch, watching the scene for a moment, trying to keep a smile that was flirting with the edges of her mouth from bursting out onto her face.
She looked down at Trident, pointed to the little dog running around in circles, and told Trident, “Hold.” It was a command that meant pursue and contain but not bite.
Trident turned from her side, leapt off the porch, raced in front of the little dog, and cut him off.
The dog tried to get around him, but Trident was too fast, blocking his path, holding him in place like a cattle dog with a stray calf.
Jojo crossed the yard as Trident held the dog in one spot, reached down, grabbed the dog’s collar, and pulled from his mouth the remains of the chicken.
And it was just remains. Pieces of it had fallen off as he’d run his circular pattern around his pursuers.
There was a chicken leg lying beside the bottom step.
Jojo didn’t think the “thirty-second rule” would apply to it or any of the other pieces.
Holding the squirming little dog with one hand and the disemboweled chicken carcass in the other, she listened to Ruth and Uncle Levi talk over each other to explain what had happened.
“I’d just gotten that chicken out of the oven and put it on a plate. Barely turned?—”
“He was fine. Just sitting beside me. Such a good boy before?—”
“—couldn’t have been two seconds. And then I heard the plate clunk on the floor and I knew?—”
“Little fella musta smelled that chicken. Wasn’t his fault.”
“Not his fault, Papa? He ate your dinner …”
Jojo stood where she was, listening to the garbled accounts, when what she wanted more than anything was to go in the house where it was warm.
Seemed like she’d been cold all day. When she’d leapt out of the truck at the traffic accident on the highway, she hadn’t thought about it, but standing there talking to the state trooper, the cold had seeped into her bones even in a ski jacket, and she’d had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering.
Now, the cold wind was whipping around the yard, scurrying in little whirligigs of snow in the corners of the house.
Maybe her thermostat had gotten a reset during all those months at various duty stations in the Middle East. She couldn’t remember even noticing that it was cold when she was a kid, and now it bothered her not to have a heater in her truck.
She burped out a laugh. She’d grown up riding everywhere she went in an Amish buggy, and there were no heaters in Amish buggies.
Her uncle and his daughter continued to argue.
Jojo stood in the cold, waiting for them to wind down.
Not exactly how she’d imagined she’d be spending her time when she returned to Pennsylvania in February after her father called and said her mother had cancer.
Jojo had come home immediately and cared for her mother until she died, assuming she’d go back to Chicago afterward, or at the very least get an apartment of her own here.
She never imagined moving in with her two elderly uncles, but her father had pleaded with her to take care of her mother’s older brothers, and he didn’t ask much of anybody.
“If you don’t live with ’em, they’re gonna have to go live with their kids, and you know what a strain that’d put on Levi’s boy Luke, not to mention Jonas’s daughter and her nine kids.”
It was the right thing to do. You helped out family when they needed it.
Family was everything. She agreed, on one condition—indoor plumbing!
Old Order Amish brought water from a well into the house in buckets.
New Order Amish had well water piped to a hand pump in the house.
But both of them had to heat the water on a stove to take a hot bath, neither of them had flush toilets, and there was no such thing as a shower.
A group of Amish carpenters converted the big closet in Jojo’s bedroom into a bathroom in one weekend.
Atticus Crawford and his son installed the plumbing, including a small hot water heater that operated off propane gas canisters.
She was surprised by how easily she’d fallen back into the rhythm of life in rural Pennsylvania.
The furrows that habit, home, and familiarity had plowed in her psyche were deeper than she’d imagined, and within a month after her mother had passed, she’d moved bag and baggage into her uncles’ hundred and fifty-acre farm on Whippoorwill Hollow Road.
The farmhouse was a weathered two-story white structure with peeling paint, and of course, there was a red barn and silos and fields and livestock, and a broad front porch where you could sit in a rocker in the evenings and listen to the whippoorwills call at dusk.
And she had gotten a job as a sheriff’s deputy, found it was more policing than she was up to, so she hired on as a security guard at First National Bank in Somerset.
“… hadn’t been for Trident, we’d still be chasing that mutt around the yard …”
Twice in one day, her dog had distinguished himself above and beyond the call of duty. He’d strutted his stuff, making all those long hours, days, weeks, months of training worth it.
She thought about the look on the trooper’s face when he removed that door panel and saw the bag of …
powdered sugar. What was his name? Something Irish.
Mc Something. McCall … no. McCaffrey, that was it.
Lieutenant McCaffrey. The jury was still out on how she felt about the man.
He could have shot her, might even have gotten away with a “righteous shoot” ruling from Internal Affairs for doing so.
But he’d backed off, and she did respect …
and appreciate … his forbearance. He didn’t understand the Amish, though, that was clear, and it was a skill he’d better develop if he expected to enforce the law in Somerset County.
“… poor little Mephibosheth was just hungry …”
Uncle Levi was calling the dog by his old name.
Obviously, the old man wasn’t having one of his good days.
He was in his early seventies, stooped and wiry with a shock of thinning white hair that stuck up no matter how often he combed it.
His face was deeply lined, sun-weathered, and his pale blue eyes that used to be so bright when he was telling stories to the children were faded now and had grown cloudy and distant.
He’d once been steady and dependable, but dementia had softened him into a gentle but confused old man.
He drifted between moments of clarity and childlike forgetfulness.
He could remember farming wisdom with startling precision, things his father had taught him when he was a boy, but he also lost track of who it was he was speaking to sometimes and was prone to mumbling half-remembered Bible verses as if he were speaking to somebody only he could see.
Jojo found herself feeling equal parts protective of him in his declining years and heartbroken by all that he’d lost. She had to admit though that he was one of those old people whose dementia was charming and entertaining.
Oh, Uncle Jonas didn’t find it so. Uncle Jonas found it annoying on a good day and maddening on a bad.
But then Uncle Jonas had always been a grump.
In his mid-sixties, he was stockier and stronger than his older brother, Levi, with broad shoulders and thick arms hardened by decades of working on the farm.
His beard was gray and bristly, cropped short, and his dark eyes were sharp under heavy brows.
He had the flat nose of a prizefighter, though it had been the swing arm on a hay baler not a punch in the face that broke it.
Jojo shivered. The house was warm, and here she stood out in the yard with her uncle, her cousin, two dogs, and a dead chicken.
“Time out!” she shouted at the top of her lungs, and her cousin Ruth paused mid-shout. Before Uncle Levi could respond, Jojo said, “Enough. We’re done. In the house, everybody.”
To Ruth, she said, “I’ll help you whip up something else for supper. There’s spaghetti in the cabinet. And tomatoes from last summer’s garden. I know an easy sauce recipe.”
She set the puppy on the ground and handed the remains of the chicken to Ruth. Hooking one arm in her uncle’s and the other in her cousin’s, she marched the humans into the house. When she got to the porch, she stopped, turned and called, “Trident, come,” and the dog was instantly at her side.
The puppy remained in the yard, his tail wagging, waiting for the fun and games to resume.
“You, too,” she said. “Come on in the house … Rascal.”