Free The Devil Dances by K.H. Koehler

informal in this setting, so I added, “Nicholas, if you prefer.”
    Mrs. Knapp nodded and started heating up some apple cider on the stove. Without prompting, she said, “Caleb was my grandson. He was shunned two years ago, and not long after that, he left the colony. Not many English understand the concept of shunning. They think it an act done in anger that the Swartzcopf throw their members over the fence to be consumed by the world, but it ain’t like that. We merely cease to acknowledge them. They become dead to us in spirit. We don’t throw them to the world, though many choose to leave after some time.” She looked up at me. “I understand you’re asking about him. He’s dead now, truly, yah?”
    I hovered undecidedly. Even as a cop in New York, delivering the news of a loved one’s demise had never been my strong suit. I usually left that to my beat partner, Peter. “Caleb did die, yes. I was there with him.”
    She looked at me, her eyes pale, washed, unreadable. “You saw him breathe his last. You comforted him?”
    “I did what I could for him,” I answered. “Though I doubt he found any comfort in me, frankly. Most people don’t.”
    She looked me over, from head to foot. “You’ve no high opinion of yourself, Nicholas.”
    I shrugged. “I’m realistic.”
    We sat with our mugs of hot cider and a half-eaten molasses pie that Mrs. Knapp had retrieved from the old-fashioned, non-electric icebox, and I asked her the inevitable question—the elephant in the room, so to speak. “Why was Caleb shunned?”
    Mrs. Knapp gave me hooded eyes but spared nothing as she carefully sliced a piece of pie for me and plated it. “He had unnatural carnal relations during his Rumspringa… the running around time, when the young ones are allowed to leave the community for apiece and experience the outsider’s world. They’re encouraged during that time to explore themselves and their own desires so they may willfully be baptized into the Church. The young ones smoke and drink and fornicate. That is understood, even accepted. I, myself, had a romance with a young English boy during my Rumspringa. But there are some sins that are unforgiveable.” She didn’t go into more details than that, but I had a pretty good idea what she was talking about.
    “And after his shunning… that’s when he left the community for good?”
    “He joined the English world then,” she answered as her left hand fiddled nervously with the strings on her cap. “I did not see him in the flesh again, my Caleb.”
    “I take it you loved your grandson.”
    “Shunned or not, one does not stop loving a child,” she explained simply. “Caleb was my eldest son’s son. His name was Matthew. Matthew and his wife were killed in a buggy accident when Caleb was four. After that, I raised him and his seven brothers and sisters. It gave me great pain to see the colony turn its back on him, but what was done was done. If you never lose a child in your whole life, you will be a blessed man, Nicholas.”
    I tried to imagine her great pain. I had never had a child to lose, but I
had
lost my mother when I was four years old—so young that I had difficulty remembering her face at times. My father had come for her then, had taken her to be with him in his kingdom, and I had never seen her again. I didn’t even know if she was dead, in the normal sense of the word. My mother lived in Hell; I had no idea if she was happy or not, if she missed me, if she even remembered me. I thought about touching Mrs. Knapp’s hand, trying to comfort her in some small way, but I’d long ago learned that my touch generally brought nothing but fear, misery and distrust to others, so I kept my hands to myself.
    As if sensing my mood, she looked up and said, “You, too, are alone, yah?”
    I had to take a moment to think about that. “I have friends.” Then I laughed. “Friends in low places, mostly.”
    “But no family.”
    “My father is still alive, but we