The Novel is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
2014 Dial Press Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 1991 by James A. Michener
Cartography © 1991 by Jean Paul Tremblay
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Dial Press Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
DIAL PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, in 1991.
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-5155-9
www.dialpress.com
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Maps
I: The Writer Lukas Yoder
II: The Editor Yvonne Marmelle
III: The Critic Karl Streibert
IV: The Reader Jane Garland
Other Books by This Author
About the Author
I
THE WRITER
This Tuesday morning, 3 October 1990, at half after ten, I typed the last sentence of the novel that will complete what the critics have taken to calling ‘The Grenzler Octet,’ as if I had planned from the beginning to write eight interrelated books on the same theme. No, that came about by accident.
In 1967, when I was forty-four, I imagined a compact little enclave in the Pennsylvania Dutch country, sixteen miles east to west, ten and a half north to south, tucked in between the three well-known German cities of Allentown, on the north, Reading, on the west, and Lancaster, on the south. It was such a well-defined area and so filled with fascinating rural people who adhered to ancient German ways and speech that, after defining it rather solidly in my first novel, I made use of it in the works that followed. I gave it a made-up regional name, Grenzler, and visualized myself as living within its boundaries, so that by the time I started this book, which I’m calling Stone Walls to evoke the obdurate nature of my beloved Dutchmen and their relationship to their land, I could imagine writing about no other part of the world, or of the United States or even Pennsylvania. As so often happens with writers, my imaginary terrain had become more real to me than the physical one that surrounded me.
Patting the completed manuscript as if to give it my final approval, I left my study, came downstairs to the kitchen, and shouted the great news: ‘Emma! It’s finished! Now we can start living again.’
My wife could not quite echo my enthusiasm, for she remembered the drudgery that had been required to polish my seven previous novels: ‘I know what lies ahead. It’s October 1990. We’ll have a year of clean-up work—suggestions from New York, revisions, then proofreading—maybe a printed book this time next year. October 1991.’
But she did not wish to dampen my triumph, so with a bright smile she pointed to her oven, from which came one of those unequaled smells that make a Pennsylvania Dutch kitchen a hallowed place. It could have come from the making of apple butter, or the concocting of rich mincemeat or the baking of a pumpkin pie with nutmeg; this particular one was in my opinion the best of all: the tantalizing smell of rice pudding baked in the traditional Dutch way.
Opening the front door of her oven and using heavy woolen mittens, Emma drew out a handsome German cooking bowl of heavy brown ware, fourteen inches across and six inches high, flared at the top, so the sides were not perpendicular. In it she had prepared one of the glories of Dutch cooking, golden brown on top, speckled with raisins beneath the crustlike surface.
An Emma Yoder rice pudding was not one of those characterless affairs made with rice already boiled and a milky-thin custard with no raisins but maybe a little bit of cinnamon on top. For her no boiling but baking only, and that took time, plus careful attention as the pudding neared completion. That was why the container in which she baked it had to be much deeper than one might have expected, for after the hard grains of rice had cooked slowly for several hours until soft, and the raisins had been thrown in, and then the cinnamon, real cooking began, and at ten- or fifteen-minute intervals a beautiful brown crust would cover the top, the color coming from caramelized sugar in the mix. Then, with a long-handled spoon she would stir the forming crust back into the pudding, so that in time this tasty amber richness was mixed visibly throughout the entire pudding.
The art of making a true German rice pudding lies in starting with the right proportions of uncooked rice and rich milk; at the beginning it looks very watery, but as it bakes and the excess liquid vanishes in steam, the milk, eggs and sugar combine magically into one of the choicest custards of all cuisines. But what makes the German pudding so wondrous to the taste is the intermixing of caramelized crust and the raisins into the custard. A union like that does not happen accidentally.
‘Make open the refrigerator,’ she directed, falling back on a Pennsylvania Dutch idiom of her childhood, even though she had taught English in nearby Souderton during much of our married life.
‘All right yet,’ I said, mimicking her, but before she placed the pudding inside to be cooled she filled two small cups with the steaming richness; these she and I would eat as part of a ritual we had honored since the completion of my first novel decades ago. As we sat in our colorful kitchen—where we seemed to spend most of our lives—waiting for our feast to cool, she asked: ‘Will the editing be easier this time?’ and I said: ‘Harder. As you grow older you have more to lose.’
‘Were you serious when you said this might be your last one?’
‘Positively. I wouldn’t have the energy for another big one … nor the courage.’
Aware that these were moments of special meaning, she stopped behind my chair and placed her hand on my shoulder: ‘Eight novels. First four so poorly received. Last four such triumphs.’
‘Hold everything. I have serious doubts about this one.’
She sniffed: ‘With your track record?’
‘A writer’s only as good as his next one. And I’m a bit uncertain about this one.’
‘Is it so different? From your last three winners?’
‘Yes. This time there’re no personal antagonisms, as with the suspender men in Shunning, and no Pennsylvania Dutch mysticism, as in Hex.’
‘You’re turning your back on what made those books so popular? Is that wise?’
‘I’ve pondered it a long time and I’m sure it’s wise. This book’s about the Grenzler land and how we Dutch cheat ourselves if we either abuse it or stray too far from it by breaking down our historic stone fence lines, our barn walls.’
‘The ecology kick? Are you sure your readers are ready for it?’
‘It’s my job to make them ready.’
‘Good luck, Roger Tory Peterson.’
It might seem strange to an outsider that I could be so far along in the writing of a manuscript without my wife’s knowing much about it, but in our family we followed a strict tradition. I wrote my books alone, telling no one, not even my editors, what the subject of the next novel was. So Emma never knew until it was completed: ‘I’ll lend you my copy after I take Zollicoffer his, and mail a copy off to Kinetic Press in New York.’
‘Sight unseen, I predict it’ll be a smasheroo.’
‘I like your elegant vocabulary.’
Gently she pressed my shoulder as she took her chair: ‘When you teach high school kids, you adopt their vocabulary or they tune you out.’ I said that I had supposed
it was the teacher’s job to impose her vocabulary on the class and she laughed: ‘You really are from another generation.’
As we waited for the pudding to cool, I realized again how passionately I loved this little Dutch woman—she five feet two, I five five—for in the bad years when I could sell nothing I wrote she had enabled me to continue by teaching school in Souderton, and after each of the first four disasters she had said: ‘Lukas, you’re a real writer and that’s a fine book. Sooner or later America has to realize it.’ She had never wavered in her determination to support me during those years, and her words had been as important to me as the modest income she provided from her teaching, because she was a graduate of Bryn Mawr, one of our best women’s colleges, and she knew what good books were. Sometimes when I worked alone in my study while she labored in her classroom, tears would come to my eyes, for I knew that she had wanted to pursue some career more glamorous and demanding than teaching in a rural high school, but she never uttered one word of complaint. She had given herself the job of keeping me alive so that I could write my books, and without complaining she had hewn to that line.
I have become impatient in recent years when I read of a sickness that seems to be infecting the young medical doctors of this nation. Before entering medical school, a would-be doctor marries a young nurse who will earn a small salary and support him till he gets started in his profession. Then, when the money starts rolling in and he finds himself at the center of his community’s social life, he awakens to the fact that his wife is merely a country girl with no advanced education who does not do him justice in his new position. So he divorces her, shares none of his wealth with her, and replaces her with a younger and better-educated wife, with whom he can dominate the country club set.
Emma did exactly what the young nurses do: she enabled me to learn the skills of writing. Also, she was a better person than I in almost every respect. She went to a much better college—I attended the nearby Dutch school, Mecklenberg, which is a fine little college but no Bryn Mawr—and she had far greater inner courage and determination. Made of rose petals and granite, she kept us alive.
In a significant way, Emma had engineered the miraculous change in our lives, for when my fourth novel earned virtually nothing—certainly not enough for us to live on—she cried: ‘Lukas, we’re hexed.’ I remember growling: ‘You don’t believe in that hex nonsense,’ and I added: ‘Our Dutch do themselves damage believing in witches and hexes—painting their barns with mystic signs to keep away devils,’ and a spirited argument followed.
Emma’s family history is a curious one. Her Stoltzfus ancestors, back in the 1650s, had lived in the Palatinate, the section of western Germany squeezed in between the Rhine and the French areas of Alsace and Lorraine. Illuminated by the religious fires ignited in the previous century by Martin Luther and Huldreich Zwingli, they had become fervent Anabaptists, who preached that it was both stupid and unbiblical to baptize children at birth: ‘Only at age seventeen or eighteen is a human being old enough to understand the meaning of Christianity. Only then is he or she eligible to make a commitment and be baptized.’ And they cited John the Baptist, Jesus himself and Saint Paul to support their claim.
On this fragile point of doctrine, plus their aversion to war and political interference in their personal lives, the original Stoltzfus clan was so persecuted, with some members even being executed, that they emigrated from the Palatinate, along with several thousand Yoders, Beilers and Zooks. William Penn, the inspired English Quaker, hearing of their plight, invited them to settle in Pennsylvania, which they did in 1697, when they promptly separated into two radically different religious sects. The Amish in Lancaster County adhered to the most rigorous biblical conventions—no buttons on clothing because soldiers’ uniforms were crowded with them, no ostentation in dress or furniture, no mechanical contrivances that presumed to do a better job than God intended a man to do unaided, and little or no education because none was needed to farm and acquiring it made a person vainglorious—while the others who settled in my Dresden became Mennonites, who, like their Amish cousins, dressed mostly in black and favored chin beards but no mustaches, and allowed a much freer pattern of living. They could use buttons, musical instruments in church, and mechanical aids in farming or, in my day, automobiles, which were still fiercely opposed by the Amish.
Emma’s entire Stoltzfus family from 1693 through 1890 were strictly Amish; my Yoders, from the same starting point to this day, have been Mennonites, who did not object when I said at age seventeen: ‘I want to go to Mecklenberg College.’ How Emma was able to leave her rigorously Amish family in Lancaster and attend Bryn Mawr is a magical story that I won’t go into here. But she did. We met, discovered our mutual German background, and married. I never made a better move.
When I teased her about believing in hex signs to ward off evil influence, especially barn fires, she had said: ‘You know, Lukas, if that word looms so large in discussions about our way of life, why don’t you use it as the title of your next book and explore its significance?’
At first I dismissed the idea, but she returned to it repeatedly and some of the reasons she gave for deeming it viable stuck in my mind. One spring day, when Dresden looked like an enchanted place with blossoms, green fields and bubbling creeks, I reached a firm decision: ‘I’m going to try the hex novel. And in your honor I’m going to name it just that.’ But even so I had not allowed her to read it as it progressed.
My fourth novel, Shunning, which was entirely my creation, sold 1,607 copies. My fifth, Hex, which she had inspired, sold 871,896. Little wonder I respect her counsel.
Now as we prepared to dig into the cooled pudding, I warned: ‘This could be a difficult year. Lots of pressures,’ and when she asked why, I explained: ‘People will suspect that this might be my final book. They’ll want to mark the occasion in some way.’
‘I didn’t realize you were serious. This really is your farewell?’
‘You know what our friend Zollicoffer says: “One too much is already three too many.” ’
Dipping with enthusiasm into the rich golden custard, I said: ‘Granting that this is my last effort, I want to give it every support I can. Help it reach its proper level.’
‘At the top, like the last three.’
‘I don’t mean in sales. Let Kinetic worry about that. I mean in the way the public sees the rounding out of my series.’ As Emma rose to remove the little dishes, I caught her arm, drew her to me and kissed her: ‘Thanks for helping me get this one finished.’ Then I set in motion the ritual that had marked the completion of each of my previous novels: ‘Let’s get three bowls for what’s left of the pudding. One for Zollicoffer, one for Fenstermacher, one for Diefenderfer. They’re my living hex signs. They bring me good luck.’
It was ten o’clock before I pulled out of my driveway in our 1986 Buick and headed the short distance north to the farm of Herman Zollicoffer, carrying with me not only the three bowls of pudding but also two copies of my completed novel.
It had been my habit from the start of my career to take everything I wrote about the Pennsylvania Dutch to Herman for vetting. On that first day I had said: ‘Please read this and check every word I say about us Dutch to see if it’s right and in no way offensive.’ Herman leaped at the opportunity, for he was a proud old Dutchman who wanted the language and traditions of his people to be honestly reported to the world.
Now as I neared his farm I reflected on the precarious situation every writer, even a successful one, finds himself in when he thinks his manuscript is completed. It must pass muster with an outside expert, in this case Zollicoffer; it’s then torn apart by the editor; if it deals with especially contentious material, lawyers must scan for assertions that could be libelous; and finally some word wizard must check every sentence, every spelling. And when the book finally does appear, after all that loving attention, it can still fall flat on its face. I winced as I thought of famous American writers whose last offerings had bee
n disasters. And I chuckled as I remembered the advertisement my neighbor Oscar Hammerstein paid for in Variety after his chain of awesome box-office successes, such as Oklahoma! and The King and I. In bold letters it proclaimed: I DID IT ONCE, I CAN DO IT AGAIN, below which he listed with title and dates of opening and closing some seven or eight of his earlier flops. If I were so inclined, I could run the same ad with the record of my early books. That would prove I had reason to be apprehensive about any manuscript I thought was ready for the printer.
These nervous thoughts were dispelled when I saw Zollicoffer’s farm buildings ahead, for they were a solid representation of what the Pennsylvania Dutch stood for. What a curious term! It would be impossible for me to say ‘the Pennsylvania Germans’; mind and soul would have revolted. But we were Germans; so far as I know, there was never a single Dutchman from Holland to come our way, so our name was a gross misnomer. It happened like this.
In the speech I learned in my Mennonite family as a boy we were the Pennzylwanische Deitsch, with the two vowels in the last word pronounced as they would be in height, and that’s what we should have been called in English. But Deitsch was difficult to spell and pronounce, so it was quickly simplified to Dutch, which would obviously lead to endless error and confusion. However, it was so easy to say that that’s what we became, and today I rarely hear the correct pronunciation. Herman Zollicoffer and I are archetypical ‘dumb Pennsylvania Dutchmen,’ except that we aren’t really so dumb as others sometimes think.
My heart always beat a little faster when I approached the Zollicoffer farm, for it was the perfect example of what the Pennsylvania Dutch wanted. The barns—the heart of the farm—lay on one side of the rural road, while the house and its attendant buildings were on the other side. The two barns were painted red, of course, and were much larger than the house, which was a simple rectangular structure, three stories high, and painted white. It stood close to the road and was fronted by a generous porch supported by four white columns. Three rather small buildings clustered near the house: an old-style cooking shed, a deep cellar for storing foodstuffs, and a corncrib, each painted in some color neither white nor red. On the barn side of the road stood a substantial silo, and behind the house stretched the garden in which Mrs. Zollicoffer grew the vegetables she canned each summer and autumn for winter use.