Paradise Valley by Dale Cramer Read Free Book Online Page B

and they are buried here, along with my first wife and two of my children.” He wagged his head, deeply aggrieved. “It is too much of a price to pay, Caleb.”
    Caleb laid a hand on Jonas’s forearm and replied gently, “What price would you put on living as Gott would have us live? What is heaven worth?”
    The bishop and the minister nodded somberly. The results of such decisions could be the difference between heaven and hell for many.
    One of the men who was young and sometimes a little hasty said, “Mebbe we could get our people to vote, this once, to elect public officials who think as we do and who will change things for us.”
    Caleb had heard this argument before. Some of the more liberal sects did not prohibit voting, but this branch of the Old Order Amish was firmly against it.
    The bishop leveled a hard gaze on the young man, and for a moment Caleb thought there would be a tongue-lashing, but the bishop was old enough to be patient with the young.
    “Would we try to rule as the greedy do?” he asked. “Will we try to grab power over other people’s possessions? What fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness, and what communion hath light with darkness? On the day we do such as that we become like everyone else, and the battle is already lost.”
    “There has to be a way,” Caleb Bender said, shaking his head. “Mebbe Gott will show us.”

    The boys split up into cliques after lunch as well, the younger ones playing some kind of chasing game up near the house and the older ones in a group down beside the barn. Rachel could see Jake from a distance, leaning back against the wall of the barn, one foot planted against the boards, his hands in his pockets. She could tell just by watching the other boys in the group, the way they all looked to Jake, he’d gained a new stature among them by virtue of his harrowing escape from the children’s home. By now he’d probably told the story a dozen times. He was a hero.
    In midafternoon Rachel saw her father coming around the barn with the surrey, so she said a quick goodbye to her friends and followed her sisters up toward the driveway. She didn’t see Jake until she was crossing the yard behind the house and he casually stepped out from behind a tree, nearly bumping into her. As if it were accidental.
    Their paths only intersected for a second, and Jake was glancing around, looking everywhere but at her. She didn’t know if he would even acknowledge her until he whispered, with his eyes elsewhere, “Will you be here tonight?”
    The singing. The youth always gathered on the Sunday evening after church services for singing. She had heard Emma say she was coming.
    “Jah,” she said, and their eyes met for a split second.
    “Gut.” Jake nodded, and moved on. He barely even smiled, and then he was gone. She understood his caution; on Sunday, among the church crowd, nothing went unnoticed.
    But sometimes, after the singing, the chaperones looked the other way.
    Bundled with her sisters in the back of the surrey on the way home, Rachel could hardly contain her excitement. Though only for a moment, he had made contact. He had spoken to her. That was all that mattered.

Chapter 6
    There were chores to do even on Sunday, so Rachel kept herself busy most of the afternoon, although it didn’t help all that much. She hummed constantly as she went about her chores, counting the minutes until she could go back up to the Mullet farm for the singing, and every time she thought about Jake Weaver it seemed her feet barely touched the ground. She dreamed of a time when they would be older and able to be together, perhaps to hold hands in the back of a buggy on a chaperoned date. She dared not think of kissing. Even the thought, at her age, was surely sinful.
    Time dragged by until finally the hour came and Emma called to her. There would be three others with Rachel in the surrey – Emma, at twenty practically engaged to Levi Mullet; then Miriam, eighteen and