What Will Be Made Plain by Latayne C. Scott

Author:Latayne C. Scott [Scott, Latayne C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781945750113
Publisher: TSU Press
Published: 2019-05-15T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

It’s kind of a point of pride among the Amish and some other people that we don’t wear wedding rings, that the vows we take are written on our hearts, sealed until death, and we don’t need any outward symbol to warn away other men from an Amish wife.

A woman’s virtue is her protection, Papa always says. A woman’s virtue is her beauty.

Mama received that square-cut brilliant emerald ring from her own mother and she told me sometimes that it was her only vice.

“Keeping such a worldly thing isn’t very plain,” she said to me one evening as the cancer began to swell her abdomen and wither her arms and legs. “But I like to see the lights inside it, as if it has a thousand tiny green candles made by a hundred candlemakers.” That was the way she thought, always seeing even a simple seam embroidered in her mind. I remember leaning over her shoulder as she lay, resting my chin there, smelling the lavender in her hair, seeing green flames everywhere.

I heard the sadness in her voice. “It keeps me company while you are in school,” she said, and I wondered why Papa did not stay with her. I wondered, even then, where he spent his days. I wondered about the sound of a shutting door sometimes in the night.

The ring was the last thing of value Mama’s own mother owned because her house burned to the ground just before Papa and Mama married. Mama’s cedar chest full of linens and even the quilts, the family quilts, all were gone. The ring, my grandmother GrossMem’s own only dowry from her Philadelphia mother who gave it to her and then disowned her when she married Papa, this was her only dowry for Mama.

Papa always said that the ring carried a bad spirit with it like the idolatrous ephod Gideon made and that Mama should sell it so that it wouldn’t bring estrangement and disaster to me when I got married.

“We’ll stop that right here,” he once said, “just get rid of the ring. Buy some land for the community.” But Mama never did, one of her few little rebellions against Papa.

I saw the ring on her hand as it lay on her wedding dress (pulled together and held with clothespins in the back, she had lost so much weight) after Papa insisted on being the one to wash her body and prepare it for burial.

There was a stir about that, I remember. But he was her husband, and no one could deny this sobbing man that last service.

No one seemed surprised that Papa said he would bury her ring with her, though. As a child I often opened Mama’s wooden box where she kept hairpins and safety pins and old ribbons and put the ring on my skinny fingers, holding it up to the light and marveling at the way it split the light into other colors and made them dance like fireflies on the walls and ceiling. But I never gave it another thought after the day of her funeral.

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