Shunning

 

Joseph marched with his graduating class. Anyone seeing him in the line of black-robed seniors would have thought he was just one of the guys. Anyone who didn’t know he could no longer go home to see his parents and siblings. He’d defied his father to complete his high school education and now there was a rift he didn’t know how to heal. No Amish people, including his own family, would speak to him or receive him in their homes. Joseph was shunned.

During the day he was busy with his school studies and working with the local general practitioner, Dr. Lanahan, and he could keep the fear and loneliness at bay. At night when it was quiet, the reality of his situation couldn’t be ignored.

He’d had to find shelter after Pop told him he could no longer live at home, and Dr. Lanahan offered the room above his garage. It was unheated, but since it was already April Joseph could get by without heat. Doc made it clear that Joseph was not part of the family – yet – although he knew Joseph and his daughter, Patty, intended to marry some day.

“I won’t have Patty be the subject of gossip,” Doc told Joseph. “So if you stay in my garage, you’ll have to live independently.”

Living independently meant a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches consumed over an open textbook. It meant schlepping to the coin laundry instead of finding freshly washed clothes in his bureau. It meant seeing Patty mostly at school instead of hanging out next door

One day he saw the long wagons containing the church benches rolling toward Pop’s farm, and he knew it was his family’s turn to host the congregation. His throat ached because he wouldn’t be helping arrange those benches row by row, wouldn’t hear the plain chant that began each service, wouldn’t see Mom and his sisters setting out church food on oil-cloth covered tables: coffee, homemade bread, peanut butter spread, jams, ham, cheese, pickles, red beets and pie. He wouldn’t be welcome.

Joseph was grateful for the room and the small stipend Doc paid him for working in the clinic after school and on Saturdays, but he was used to being part of a family. To fight his feeling of isolation, he harnessed the work ethic he’d been taught all his life. Joseph put his head down and studied.

Of course, the Amish community was abuzz with the scandalous news about the Hostetler boy. He’d gotten an English haircut, they said, and wore jeans and tee-shirts instead of Amish clothing. He thought he was going to be a doctor! There was general sympathy for his parents and solidarity in shunning Joseph until he got back in line. If it hadn’t been for Patty, he felt he couldn’t have endured it.

“It will pass, Joe,” she’d say every day. “When they see you’re serious, they’ll come around.”

With high school behind him, he had to figure out what to do next.  He couldn’t go on shadowing the doctor for the rest of his life, but there was no money to do anything else.  Maybe he should just go home, hitch up those horses and forget about being a doctor. It was a crazy dream, anyway.

Doc asked him to stick around after office hours one day. He poured them both a cup of coffee and settled with a long sigh in his desk chair. Never a man to mince words, he dived right in.

“Joe, you want to go to medical school, right?”

“Yes, sir, but I don’t see how I can.”

“I’ve got it all mapped out. It’ll save money to spend the first two years at the local college and get through basic curriculum. Then you’ll transfer to a good university pre-med program. If you continue to work as hard as I’ve seen you work here, you’ll get into medical school.”

“But Doc, I can’t afford…”

“I’m paying.”

“I can’t let you do that.”

“I look at it as an investment in my retirement. I’m educating the doctor I hope will be my future partner and son-in-law. My repayment will come when I can retire and hand over my practice without worry. Can you make that commitment to me?”

##

To be continued. Final chapter next week.

If you missed the first installments of Joseph’s story, you can catch up: Feb. 11, The Sojourner; Aug. 26, No Time for Sergeants; Oct. 7, Rumspringa; Dec.16, Anatomy Lessons; Dec. 23, Hard Choices.

Hard Choices

The pus shot from the boil and instinctively Joseph ducked. Dr. Lanahan nodded and Joseph applied the sterile gauze to the now-open and draining wound. He fastened it securely with surgical tape, smiling briefly into the relieved face of the patient.

Life in a doctor’s office was fascinating. No matter how noxious the ailment, Joseph wanted to see it. No matter how disgusting the clean-up, he was happy to do it. The privilege he’d been granted, shadowing the doctor an hour a day, was expanding his world in ways he’d never dreamed.

“Okay, Joe, one more patient, then your hour is up and you’ve got to scoot back to school,” Dr. Lanahan said. “Now, this next one is tough. Little kid’s got advanced leukemia. Not much I can do for him at this stage, but I see him whenever his folks want to bring him in. We can’t offer much more than moral support.”

The small Amish boy sat on the end of the examining table, his skinny legs dangling. His mother and father stood next to him in their best black clothing, heartbreak written in their faces. Joseph knew what it had taken for them to get there: asking around for a lift from neighbors with cars, arranging for someone to milk the cows, riding at sick-making speed with their child limp in their arms.  Now in intimidating medical surroundings they stood shoulder to shoulder, made brave by love.

Joseph spoke to them in Dutch, and they answered in a grateful torrent of words which he translated for Dr. Lanahan. Doc had some grasp of the dialect and could speak and understand a few words, but nuance got lost along the way. The child leaned against his father’s arm, his eyes tracking the speakers. His face was as white as the paper lining the table.

“So he’s lost a couple of pounds since his last visit,” Dr. Lanahan said, gently stroking the little boy’s head. “Have you changed your mind about pursuing further treatment? Chemotherapy might prolong his life.”

“But it would make him feel even worse, yah?”

“Yes, probably.”

“And then…the end would be the same?”

“Yes, barring a miracle, the course of his disease is too far advanced for remission.” Doc believed in being honest with his patients.

“Then we will follow God’s will for our boy,” the father said with dignity, tears in his eyes.

“Will you allow him to have a blood transfusion? It will make him feel better for a while.”

The parents turned to Joseph.

“I think it would be good,” he said to them in Dutch. He felt the power that his association with the doctor conveyed, and it humbled him to think these grown-ups looked to him for guidance. What must it be like to know yourself worthy of such trust?

~*~

“Hey, thanks for translating for that family. They felt more at ease speaking their everyday language. That’s something you could bring to your community, you know, if you were to become a doctor.” Dr. Lanahan didn’t look up; he was shuffling the files on his desk. “See you tomorrow.”

Joseph could recognize seed-planting when he heard it. Still, that seed fell on fertile ground. Practicing medicine was a dream he shared with no one except Patty. Since she was a doctor’s daughter, she understood what that life was like and it held no mystique for her. A doctor was simply a fixer of humans. Her faith that Joseph could do it was matter-of-fact.

Joseph’s work-study semester was coming to an end, and with it his ability to spend an hour of his school day with Dr. Lanahan. So far, his Pop and Mom knew nothing about it. He’d never kept such a big secret from them before, except, he thought guiltily, for his relationship with Patty. Two life-changing secrets were gnawing at his insides. He had one more semester, and then he’d graduate. After that, the future was unclear. He knew it was time to talk to his parents.

~*~

Mom cried. “I told you,” she said to Pop through her tears, “I told you he’d change if he finished high school, and now look, his head is filled with nonsense.”

Pop looked sterner than Joseph had ever seen him. “Joe, I can’t allow this. You deceived us by studying with the doctor and courting his daughter without our knowledge. You don’t belong in their world. It’s time for you to come home.”

“I’m sorry, Pop, Mom, I know I did wrong by not telling you. But I think I could help our Amish community if I continued my studies. I could speak to them in Dutch and help them understand medical procedures. Maybe I could learn to be a healer.”

“Only God heals,” Pop thundered. “When I said come home, I meant right now.”

“But I’ve got one more semester until I graduate…” Joseph said.

“You’ve got no more semesters. The horses you hitch to the plow don’t care whether you have a high school diploma or not.”

“I can’t drop out now,” Joseph said, his face and body pulled taut by anguish.

“You will obey me.”

“I…won’t, Pop. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

To be continued next week. 

The story of Joseph is being told in seven blog installments. You can read the previous  posts on  Feb. 11 (The Sojourner), Aug. 26 (No Time for Sergeants), Oct. 7 (Rumspringa), and Dec. 16 (Anatomy).  The story continues on Dec. 30 and Jan. 6. Joseph’s name has been changed and this story is fiction, but it’s based true events.

 

Anatomy Lessons

Joseph was fascinated by human anatomy. Not in the usual way of teenage boys, who preferred to study their anatomy in the form of girls. No, Joseph liked to see the ways the body fit together, all the veins and nerves and muscles and bones and ligaments working in harmony as if…as if there were a master plan. He wasn’t sure how a master plan related to life, his life anyway, but it was reassuring to see how it worked in bodies.

Having been granted rare permission from his parents and the church bishop to finish high school instead of dropping out at age sixteen like the rest of his Amish community, Joseph gobbled up all the learning he could. What he was going to do with it after he returned to farming, he didn’t know. He tried not to let that worry submerge his joy in learning.

“Joe, my dad wants to talk to you,” Patty said just before the last class of the day.

“Sure, but I’ve got to get home, though,” Joseph said. Curiosity about what Patty’s father wanted vied with the knowledge that his Pop would be waiting for him to help in the fields. Joseph was careful not to do anything to jeopardize his privilege.

“I’ll take you home after. You’ll get there faster than if you took the bus,” Patty said. She was right about that; the school bus stopped dozens of times on its circuitous rural route to his farm.

Patty’s father was the town’s doctor. Joseph had met him a few times when he’d stolen an hour at Patty’s house. He’d felt so intimidated by the house itself – Television! Telephones! Electric lights! –  that it almost cancelled out his shyness at meeting the doctor, who was the local demi-god of learning and authority.

“Call me Doc,” he’d said, which was nice and friendly, but hard for Joseph to do.

Joseph knew that Dr. Lanahan could easily have forbidden his daughter to date an Amish boy, and he was grateful for the older man’s tolerance. Joseph and Patty were the oddest couple at their high school. She was smart and funny with all the resources that money and a good home provide. The world lay open to her like a present. Joseph was an Amish kid with his life tightly circumscribed: marry an Amish girl, live on a farm, have as many children as God sends.  And yet, Patty said she loved him and Joseph knew for sure he loved her. The culture divide was another one of those problems with no solution that he tried not to think about.

When he and Patty walked into her house after school that day, they found Dr. Lanahan gulping a cup of coffee in the kitchen. There were still cars in the parking lot of his office next door so Joseph knew he’d left patients waiting. Dr. Lanahan came straight to the point.

“Joe, Patty tells me you’re a bright kid, especially in science. Is that a special interest of yours?”

“Yes, sir, uh, Doc. I love it, especially as it relates to how the body works and what can go wrong with it.”

“Have you ever considered a career in the medical field?

“Oh, no,” Joseph laughed a little. “My Pop expects me to work with him after I finish school. That’s what Amish boys do. Well, you know that.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

Joseph paused, searching for an honest answer that wouldn’t be disrespectful to his parents. “I guess if I had the choice I’d be interested in medicine, but that’s impossible for someone like me. Even if the bishop said it was okay and my folks wanted to send me to college, there isn’t enough money. And I don’t know if I’m smart enough to make it.”

“You are, Joe, I know you are,” Patty said loyally.

“Here’s what I’d like to propose,” Dr. Lanahan said, with a glance at his watch. He had to get back to his patients. “I’ve had a chat with your principal. He and I agreed that it would be beneficial for you to shadow me for an hour a day. See how you like the actual practice of medicine up close. He’s arranged for you to have a work/study semester to do that if you want to. I’d be glad to talk to your folks about it.”

Joseph glanced at Patty, dumbfounded. He had no words. The vista that the doctor’s words opened up before him was so bright it hurt his eyes. His face must have told its own story, because Dr. Lanahan laughed and clapped him on the back.

“Get back to me on it, Joe,” he said, and then he was out the door and hurrying across the lawn to his office.

Joseph knew one thing: he wouldn’t mention it to his parents.

(To be continued)

Joseph’s story started in my blog post of Feb. 11, 2018, The Sojourner, continuing on Aug. 26, No Time for Sergeants, and Oct. 7, Rumspringa. This is the fourth in a series and is based on a true story.

 

Murmuration

 

Photo by freestocks.org on Pexels.com

The flock wheeled and dipped, guided by some unseen signal. Muriel watched the black cloud of birds insert themselves into the towering lodge-pole pine. Settling on branches like ornaments on a Christmas tree, they talked softly among themselves. She imagined the conversations.

“Where are we heading?”

“No idea. I’m just following everyone else.”

“Who’s leading?”

“Who knows?”

And yet for all the anarchy of their system, it worked beautifully. Muriel wished her own life system worked as well. Her children had departed in much noisier fashion than the birds, one by one flying off to college, their own apartments, their significant others. They came home for holidays and the odd visit, circling the house and flying off again before she could acclimate to their presence. Her empty house was quiet. Sometimes she didn’t speak all day.

Muriel read the articles about empty nest syndrome. She noted the advice to join a group, take a class, exercise, get out more. Deeply shy, she couldn’t imagine herself doing any of it. Aside from her weekly trips to the library to renew her stash of novels and the necessary forays to the grocery store, Muriel kept to herself.  Every surface in her house gleamed, every weed in her garden was plucked, but there was still so much time.

Outside, the blackbirds murmured, discussing flight plans, no doubt. Inside, Muriel looked at the dull November landscape and said aloud, “Why don’t I fly away? I’ve got the money and the time. No one would miss me. Why don’t I just go – somewhere?” For a few minutes she sat wondering where she’d go, theoretically speaking, if she went. Tropics? Europe? Asia? Impulsively, she picked up her cell phone and searched for travel agents.

~*~

The heat nailed her when she stepped off the plane. She felt her careful hairdo go flat instantly. The water in the bay cast a ferocious light that was painful to her eyes. Sweat popped out on her upper lip.

What have I gotten myself into? I hate to sweat!

But she was here now and there was nothing to do but make the best of it. She dragged her suitcase to the row of taxis and climbed into the first one.

The cottage she’d rented proved to be just as pretty as the pictures, though rather more rural than she’d thought. She liked the wonderful view of the water and the short walk to the beach. She liked the little green salamanders that zipped about on the patio.

She liked less the pack of dun-colored dogs that milled around in the space between her cottage and the beach. They had ribs like corduroy and curved tails that whipped the air above their backs. Clearly, they were strays wanted by no one. Muriel had to admit she felt a certain kinship. When one of the dogs, a little yellow female, worked up the courage to approach her as she sat on the patio, she shared the last bite of her sandwich with it. The dog’s tail went into hyper-drive and she smiled – no other word for it – up into Muriel’s face. Muriel bought a bag of dog food in the local bodega.

The dogs became her pack then. Every day they waited on the patio, sniffing at the sliding glass door until she emerged. They were always hungry, but waited politely while she filled the assorted coffee cans and flower pots with food and water. Surprisingly, they never snarled or fought for position over the food. After they ate, they approached her one by one for a scratch behind the ears, a long stroke down a washboard back. Then, replete with unaccustomed food and affection, they stretched out on their sides and slept. She named them; she knew she shouldn’t, but she did.

Every day Muriel walked along the beach with the dogs in sunlight that now seemed like a benediction. When she got hot, she waded into the surf. Her pale skin turned red, then golden. Her mousy brown hair developed blond streaks.  She felt better than she had in years,

She met the same beachcombers most days and they’d pause to chat. Her shyness seemed to fly away on the ocean breezes. Maybe she’d forgotten to pack it. There was one man, Andre’, whom she came to think of as a friend. She talked to him about the worry that pressed on her mind. What would become of the dogs when she went home?

“Do you have to go home?” he asked.

“Well, of course…” she began, but stopped short, silenced by the thought of gray, empty days.

“Here you have sunshine, friends,” Andre’ said with a shrug.

A cloud of ebony wings – starlings, red-winged blackbirds, grackles, cowbirds – swept the sky, their soft cacophony falling to earth.

Andre’ sighed with pleasure, tipping his head back. “Ah, a murmuration of blackbirds.”

Muriel listened to what they said.

“Do you think she’ll stay?”

“I think she might. I think she very well might.”

 

Gas Man

Even burglars grow older. Take Casco. He was still as skinny as he’d been at eighteen –  almost, anyway – but at forty-nine he’d definitely slowed down. He’d never admit that robbing a place took him much longer than it used to and carried an uncomfortable amount of risk get-away-wise. However, it was the only trade he knew. He told himself he had to rely more on brains now than speed. But brains had never been his long suit.

That’s why, when he had the brilliant idea of knocking off the pawn shop in a way that had never been done before, at least not to his knowledge, he got excited. It would require careful planning. His father always said Casco couldn’t plan a one-car funeral. Well, he’d show him.

He started by gathering intelligence from his neighbor, Jack, who worked for the gas company. “So Jack, you know a lot about heating systems, being in the gas business and all, right? How big would you say a commercial building’s heat ducts are?”

Jack looked at him like he was nuts. “Depends.”

“On what?”

“Hell, I don’t know. How big the building is, what kind of heating system it has, stuff like that. It’s not really my line, I read gas meters.”

Intelligence gathering wasn’t much help, so he decided to rely on his gut instinct. That hadn’t proved totally reliable in the past. There’d been a couple of little prison stints. But this time it would be different; he’d really think things through.

He didn’t mention his plans to Louisa. She worried about him when he was out on a job. So when she served up his favorite meal of red beans and rice the day of his intended foray into crime, he had to eat his usual heaping plateful washed down with a few beers so she wouldn’t suspect anything.

With what he considered a stroke of genius, he’d snagged a set of Jack’s work clothes from the backyard clothesline. The gray shirt had Municipal Natural Gas stitched on the pocket. The pants were too big, but he tucked them into his boots and cinched his belt. In that uniform he was just another invisible worker bee going about his job.

The pawn shop was located on the ground floor of a grungy two-story office building long past its glory days. There was no security of any kind when Casco slipped into the lobby late in the day. Walking around looking official gave him a chance to scope out the place. He found a cramped supply closet where he waited until everyone was gone. When there was no more noise and the security lights were the only ones left burning, he carefully stood and stretched.

Fortunately, there was a step ladder in the closet; he’d forgotten that in his planning. He set it up, ascended carefully, and removed the ceiling tile. There it was, the air duct that snaked its way throughout the building. It wasn’t as big as he’d hoped, but he was a wiry guy. Casco stood on the top step of the dangerously tippy ladder, cut an opening in the duct and squirmed his way in. He inched along in the direction of the pawn shop.

“Dang, it’s dark as the inside of a billy goat,” he muttered to himself. He had a flashlight, but it was in his back pocket and his arms were pinned at his sides. He wished he’d gotten one of those headlight thingies, but too late now. He continued to worm his way toward his goal.

Surely the duct wasn’t getting narrower? His belt kept catching on ceiling vents and then he’d have to perform a kind of shimmy to get it loose. Finally, he judged he was over the pawn shop. He peered down through another vent. Yes! The cash register was directly beneath him, glowing in the yellow night-light like a treasure chest. All he had to do now was…was…get down there somehow. But how? He was stretched full-length in the duct with no space to move his arms. The ceiling vent was maybe twelve inches square and the only way down was head-first.

Casco paused to have a little think. It was warm and his belly was full of beans and beer. His eyelids fluttered, then closed. He slept.

“Do you smell something?”

The voice jolted Casco awake. He must have been asleep for hours because daylight seeped through the vent. The pawn shop was open for business. A need to pee made itself urgently known. And not only that, his gut rumbled ominously. “Red beans coming through,” it warned. He clenched every muscle in his body.

“Yes, I definitely smell something.”

“Well, it wasn’t me. Check the bathroom, maybe the toilet backed up.”

“Nope, everything’s okay, no back up. You know, guilty people always say ‘it wasn’t me.’”

“Yeah, and guilty people always act innocent and blame someone else. There’s just the two of us here so it had to be either you or me, and it wasn’t me.”

“Dang it, I’m tellin’ you – .”

“Wait a minute. Did you hear that?”

Bickering stopped while both heads cocked to listen. There was no mistaking the sound.

“It’s coming from up there.”

When Casco saw the upturned faces he knew he’d be spending more time as a guest of the state. Maybe he’d use this stretch in the joint to learn another trade. Even burglars grow older.