Abandoned Prayers (2 page)

Stutzman was on his way to the home of a Kansas man he had met through a magazine’s personal ads. The man was someone he could suck off, lie to, use for a place to crash and a meal. He might even be able to get some of his money. But, most important, the man was someone he could practice his story on. He was someone Stutzman didn’t know.

The smoky, sweet taste of chewing tobacco filled his mouth; country music, coming over the radio, filled the car. Having driven all the way from western Wyoming, where he had stopped to pick up his son, Stutzman was tired and his eyelids drooped. However, the cold air leaking in from a broken window, plus the business at hand, kept him wired.

He had business in Thayer County. He needed a place
to get rid of Danny. He knew the kind of place he was looking for—the same kind of place he had dumped the other body: off the main highway, in a roadside ditch. Remoteness and no ID had been his protector then.

Would it work again?

His faded gray car sped through the county’s biggest town and county seat, Hebron, situated in the center of the rural valley of the Little Blue River. Christmas lights glowed from condensation-streaked windows of storefronts. Leaving the Hebron city limits, the Gremlin continued south on 81.

With what he had in mind, Stutzman hoped he wouldn’t be noticed, but he was. At 4:36
A.M
., in a routine check of out-of-state cars, a Thayer County sheriff’s deputy ran the Gremlin’s New Mexico plate, HPG 183. Nothing came up and the deputy went home. He didn’t get close enough to see the glazed, soulless look of Stutzman’s eyes or the other passenger in the car.

Stutzman knew what he’d say to people when they asked about his son. Skiing was the answer that had come to him the week before.
“Danny wanted to stay in Wyoming skiing with friends.”
The lie came easily. Lies always had. Questions could be answered with canned, pat responses as though all of his speech were programmed.

“But missing Christmas with his father?”

“He loved to ski.”

“But, Eli, Danny hadn’t seen you all summer!”

“You know kids. Danny wanted to ski.”

Though his words were scripted and he practiced them in his head over and over, Stutzman usually failed with delivery. The expressions on his rigid face and in his blue eyes seldom tracked quite right with the words.

Look sad now, Eli, you’ve got to get rid of the boy
.

Your wife is dead
.

Your roommate is dead
.

Don’t forget the story about your partner at the ranch. Don’t forget who you told which story. Most important, look sad—turn on the tears, if you can
.

Through darkness as black as truck-stop coffee, Stutzman went east off 81 and turned south on a farm road north of the village of Chester, just shy of the Kansas state line. He searched for a suitable place, headlights reflecting off white snowbanks. When he opened the door, the air bit him through his red plaid flannel shirt and down vest. Danny wore a thin blue sleeper Stutzman had picked up in a New Mexico K-Mart.

The boy, of course, wouldn’t need extra clothing.

“What kind of a barbarian would do this to their kid?”

—Thayer County Sheriff Gary Young

December 24, 1985

It was time for a haircut. Chuck Kleveland felt the annoying fringe of sandy hair crowding his ears and knew that with the approaching holidays he couldn’t let it go much longer. He kissed his wife, Kathy, swallowed his last bit of coffee, and put his shotgun in the gun rack of his ’83 Ford pickup. He planned to do a little hunting on the way to the barber in Hebron.

It was 10
A.M
., Christmas Eve.

Kleveland, age 44, pulled out of the driveway of his ranch-style home in Chester, a dozen miles due south of Hebron. Chester, a tiny town whose skyline consists of a pair of grain elevators, is within spitting distance of the Nebraska–Kansas state line. To nonresidents, the town doesn’t seem like much, except maybe a good place to gas up or pick up a pack of cigarettes.

Hebron and Chester used to be the kind of nice, friendly prairie towns where people spend their entire lives. Now they are the kind of towns young people abandon for careers in Omaha—or, if they can bear to pull away from the heart and soul of their parents’ and grandparents’ birthright, they move away even farther, to one of the coasts. Family-owned farms have grown more scarce; a few are fallow.

Kleveland was of the generation—the
last
generation, some claimed—that still envisioned a good life on the bleak
prairie of rural Nebraska. Although he had studied business at the university in Lincoln and lived in New York for a couple of years, Kleveland had returned to Chester, where he owned and ran Foote’s Truckstop in Chester and a similar business in Kearney, a couple of hours to the west.

Kleveland drove east on Harlan Street before turning north on U.S. 81, a trace of snow mottling the road’s shoulder. He could have stayed on 81 and been in Hebron in fifteen minutes, but instead he made a quick right on a farm road bordering a local corn grower’s spread. Kleveland knew the field was a good place to find orange and gold ring-neck pheasants—stray grain kernels littered the ground and provided fodder for game fowl. His wife had another Christmas menu planned, but she would make room for the pheasants on the holiday table. Kathy Kleveland liked the way her husband fixed them.

He took a left and drove north, squinting as he scanned the slightly hilly terrain. The icy earth bristled with hard, dead cornstalks, their frosty surfaces sparkling in the cold, even light. No birds were startled into flight by the noise or movement of the cherry-red pickup.

The jangly sound of steel guitars from a country music radio station broke the bleakness of the morning.

From the corner of his eye Kleveland saw a small bit of blue against the brown and gray field. The color was out of place in the dull winter landscape. He braked to a stop and backed up to get a closer look. When he stepped from the cab, the 30-below-zero wind chill slashed through his parka. Standing at the edge of the roadside drainage ditch, he looked into the field and immediately spotted what had attracted his attention. Partially hidden in a brambly nest, the spiky remnants of yard-tall prairie grass, was a dead body.

It appeared to be a little girl dressed in a blue, one-piece blanket sleeper. Her hand was glazed over with ice and her body lay flat and stiff on the frozen ground. The child’s dark hair was clean and neatly parted, but her head was tilted back, so Kleveland couldn’t quite make out her face.
From his vantage point on the roadside, it appeared that the child’s hand had been placed over her heart.

Kleveland had seen enough. He did not move closer to the small corpse, which lay only fifteen feet from the roadside. He didn’t want to mess up any footprints or other evidence, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be
part
of any evidence. He studied the field, then looked down the length of the dirt road. He wondered if whoever had left the child was still around, watching, as he walked back to his still-running pickup. Picking up the mike of his commercial two-way radio, installed to communicate with his truck-stop fleet of tank wagons, he called his bookkeeper in the office at Foote’s.

“Joyce?” His voice was steady. “I think I found a dead body out here. Call the sheriff.” He stopped short of giving the exact location. There were plenty of police scanners in the small, neatly painted homes in Thayer County. Kleveland knew that if word got out—and in Chester and Hebron one could bank on that—bystanders would be out at the scene in five minutes.

“I’ll be on the highway, a mile north of town,” he said.

Kleveland stared at the corpse. He had seen dead bodies before; he had picked them up when he worked as a volunteer for the local ambulance service, and he had found his mother when she died at home. But this was different, and unsettling in a different way.

You don’t put a child’s body out in a ditch
, he thought,
unless you’ve got something to hide
.

Kleveland drove back to the highway and waited for the sheriff on the northwest corner of the square-mile grid where he had found the body.

Wayne and Holmes counties, in the Ohio Amish Country, are aligned vertically, with Wayne to the north. The landscape is pastoral, with steel and wood buggy wheels slicing through the rich earth like cleavers through paraffin. Whitewashed picket fences and farmhouses mark the line where nature ends and man’s influence takes over. Yet, in Amish Country the demarcation is subtle. Fields are still plowed with horses; oat, corn, and hay crops are rotated; the land is cared for with the love and respect that outsiders reserve for humankind. No telephone poles, electric power lines, or television antennae clutter the sky.

Although adult Amish dress in black and white, their world is one of vivid color. Farms are planted in a quilt of green. Amish girls are allowed the deep hues of aqua, purple, and celery for their long dresses, secured by neat rows of straight pins instead of buttons. The men, however, are allowed hooks and eyes as clothing fasteners. Buttons are considered worldly, even militaristic.

Since draft horses are used for plowing, farms are appropriately small, with few topping eighty acres. The twicedaily milkings are done by hand. Most Amish farmers own fewer than ten dairy cows. Due to the antiquated milking methods, and the people’s refusal to pasteurize, Amish milk is sold solely for cheese-making.

The Amish, descendants of Dutch and Swiss Anabaptists
—“rebaptisers”—might have drowned in their own blood, so much had been spilled during the Protestant Reformation. The first Amish came to Penn’s Woods in America in the 1730s; a century later, they migrated across the Alleghenies to Ohio, where the world’s largest settlement continues to thrive.

Tourism bureaus would have people believe that all Amish people are the same, cut from the same nondescript pattern, but that is not the case. However, all do live by strict interpretation of the Bible. The Amish believe in adult baptism, nonresistance, and separatism from the world. Many of the forty different sects are named for their founding bishops—Troyer, Beachy, Swartzentruber, and so on. Different groups have their own ways, their own quirks. Yet, nearly all resist change. “Where is it written in the Bible that we should change?” they ask.

The Swartzentruber Order founded settlements in the Ohio villages of Apple Creek, Kidron, and Fredericksburg. This ultraconservative group took the most rigid stance against change, curling up like potato bugs to shut out the modern world.

While the rules of Scripture never changed, the
Ordnung
—the rules of the Order as set by the church’s district bishop and its members—did. The
Ordnung
accounted for some of the differences among Amish church districts; for example, the fact that some men are allowed only three-inch hat brims while others are allowed four or even five inches, and the fact that some could use farm machinery with rubber tires while other were permitted only wooden or steel ones.

As other Amish orders slowly made concessions to some modern ways and methods, the Swartzentrubers remained true to centuries-old traditions. They were considered “low Amish.” Those who used some modern conveniences were considered the antithesis; when an Amishman left for the modern world, others said he “went high.”

Strips of deep purple and blue fabric used as wicks float loosely in the base of the gas mantle lanterns Amish use to
illuminate their homes. Kerosene burns fast, and its smoky vapors discolor and stain walls and ceilings. The smell of the burning fuel, along with the aroma of hearty foods cooking, fill Amish homes.

Many Amishwomen use pressure cookers to preserve chicken and beef, although some of the more progressive rent freezers in town for storage. This practice is less common among the Swartzentrubers than higher Amish. Still, at the end of winter, many wonder where all the food has gone. “A whole cow should last us the winter, but with nine kids it doesn’t,” they say.

Photographs are banned, and Amish girls play with dolls that have no faces. Such representations are in conflict with the commandment forbidding graven images. Small boys play farmer, sometimes using old batteries to mimic milk cans. The batteries are for flashlights, a convenience the
Ordnung
allows.

At home, the Amish family speaks a dialect of German and Swiss with a little English mixed in—outsiders call it Pennsylvania Dutch, or Deutsch. It is only during dealings with the outside world that the Amish speak English to
Englischers
, or non-Amish.

The Amish seem nearly communal, with several branches of a family often sharing a farm. The
Grossdaadi
, or “grandpa house,” is a smaller dwelling, often attached by a breezeway, where the grandparents live. In Amishland, grandparents never suffer the humiliation of a rest home.

Church is held every other Sunday in the homes of the congregation members. It is an all-day affair, starting about 9
A.M
. and going into the afternoon. The words of the preacher, spoken not in Deutsch but in “high German,” are often unintelligible. The Amish hymnal, the
Ausbund
, is better known for its bloody recounting of the lives of the martyrs than for its melodies. Hymns are long and dirgelike and, to children, tedious.

On Sundays no work is done, no money exchanged. The only chores permitted are those involving the care of animals.

The “in-between Sundays” are for visiting, a favorite pastime in a world without telephones.

Like a collection of scattered, great white boxes, the Eli H. Stutzman farm sits on a grassy hill above Welty Road in Apple Creek. The ruts of buggy wheels reveal that the home is Amish. No power lines mar the clear Ohio sky. The middle initial on the mailbox is an essential clue in discerning who resides there—the
H
stands for Harvey, Eli H. Stutzman’s father. With families sometimes having a dozen or more children, such initials are a necessary kind of brand. Stutzman’s roots were in the Amish settlement outside of Berne, Indiana, although his father moved the family to a farm a mile or so from Kidron in 1929.