Back in the house, Rachel offered Leah a brief tour around the inside before joining her mother and sisters in the kitchen.
Edith mixed something in a large bowl. “If you’re going down to the cellar, fetch some flaisch brieh while you’re there.”
“Ja,” agreed Rachel.
Flaisch brieh. The term was unfamiliar to Leah.
“Green beans,” clarified Edith, noticing her confusion.
Rachel opened a door in the wall of the kitchen to reveal steps leading down to a basement. It was not pitch-dark since a little light came from small high windows in the house’s foundation. When Leah descended to the concrete floor, cool on her bare feet, she saw wide double doors with windows leading to a ramped driveway.
“In case we need to back the wagon up after a harvest,” Rachel explained, pointing to the doors. “We can unload through those doors. Plus it gives us a bit of natural light.”
As her eyes adjusted, Leah made out stacked wooden bins, stacked plastic buckets, and what seemed like miles of shelves. “What’s all this?”
“Food, mostly.” Rachel pointed. “Buckets of wheat and rice, beans, corn. We use plastic buckets because it keeps the mice out. We get the buckets secondhand from grocery store bakery departments. These are the shelves of our home-canned food.” In the gloom, hundreds of glass jars twinkled.
“You won’t starve, that’s for sure.”
“We’ve had a couple of winters when the snow was very deep,” Rachel recalled. “Everyone preserves their harvest and keeps it in their cellars.” A lilt of suppressed mirth entered her voice. “It’s not like we can dash to the grocery store in our car.” She chuckled, and Leah joined in. The very thought seemed strange.
Rachel walked to one shelf and withdrew two quart jars of green beans, one of which she handed to Leah.
“You canned these yourself?”
“Ja, sure, from last summer’s garden.”
The journalist in her asked, “How many quarts of beans do you can each summer?”
“About a hundred or so, give or take. We try to put up enough to have a vegetable with each meal rotating every week for a year. If we eat green beans just once a week and have two quarts at the meal, then we only need about a hundred quarts to last us through the year. That’s our minimum amount, but of course we’ll preserve whatever bounty Gott gives us.”
Drawing the logical conclusion, Leah observed, “I’ll bet harvest time is very busy.”
“Ja, sure. But it’s also a lot of fun, everyone working together. The garden also keeps us busy throughout the summer. I hope you’ll join us in some of the work.”
“Of course. I want to help however I can, but you’ll have to teach me the difference between a weed and a carrot.”
Rachel paused, the quart of beans cradled in one arm. “What’s it like, living in the city?”
How to answer such a question? In just the few hours she’d been here, it was clear the Bylers could never understand the complexities of urban life, from navigating the best commuting route to selecting the perfect outfit from the closet, or the constant pressure of checking her smartphone.
“Complicated,” she answered at last. “Everything is more complicated. Prices are higher, roads are crowded, there’s noise everywhere. The day before this happened—” she gestured toward her face “—I would have said nothing could pry me away from the city or my job. I thrived on the chaos and competition, the television ratings and chasing a news lead. Then...” Her voice cracked. “Then it all came crashing down in one moment.”
“What happened?” In the gloom of the basement, Rachel’s expression was compassionate.
Leah sighed. “I was filming a story on gang violence in LA. It was the night of January first, New Year’s Day, a cold night out on the streets. I saw two gang members kill a woman and her child. They just knifed them down in cold blood.”
Rachel gasped.
“They didn’t see me or my cameraman, and we filmed the whole thing.” Leah’s voice trembled. “I’ll never forget it. It was pure accident they were killed on camera, and it happened so fast neither of us could have stopped it. But they saw us. Suddenly we were running for our lives down a dark alley. They caught up with us when I tripped and fell.”
Rachel gulped. “What then?”
“One...one of them started slashing my face. I thought he was going to slit my throat, but my cameraman, Ted, kicked him in the head so he was knocked out. Ted saved my life that night. He decked the other guy, dragged me to my feet, and we made it back to the news van and got out of there. He took me straight to the hospital, where they had to do some reconstruction work on me, but it was clear from that moment my career in front of the camera was over.”
“How long were you in the hospital?”
“A week. My station aired the footage of the murders, and from then on I’ve been hunted. They had to post a guard at my hospital room door after some people tried to get in. I wasn’t safe at my apartment. It took no time for my address to become known. They want me dead. Finally the authorities put me in witness protection, which is how I ended up here, through the kindness of your parents. Since I speak a little bit of German, that was a factor in choosing the Amish. That, and the sheer distance from Los Angeles.”
Rachel collapsed against one of the shelving units, and her breath whooshed out. “So that’s what it’s like, living in a city.”
“No. Thankfully it’s not, or no one would live in a city. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But it’s not safe for me to go back. Not now, not with how well I’m known in the area.”
“But what will you do after this? After your stay with us is over?”
“I don’t know.” Leah looked at the jar in her hands. “Learn how to can green beans, I guess.”
Back upstairs, Sarah had joined her mother and younger sister in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. Edith took the jars of beans and put them on the counter, and without a word Rachel took up a knife and began working too.
“What can I do?” Leah lingered by the basement door. “And what are you making?”
“A casserole you can take to the hot dog roast tonight.” Edith picked up a glass baking dish. “I’m making two, actually, one for ourselves and one for you to take. We’ll just have Ivan and the younger kinner home for supper, so one casserole dish will be plenty for us for a meal. Would you like to peel some potatoes?” She gestured toward the sink, where a small basket of potatoes rested. “Here’s a peeler.”
Leah stood at the sink and peeled. The youngest sister, Eliza, noticed her technique. “Um, would you like to know a little trick to make it go faster?”
“Sure.”
“Like this.” The girl took the spud and the peeler and whipped the skin off the vegetable with speedy outward movements. “Try it.”
Embarrassed to be schooled by such a young child, Leah took the peeler and imitated the girl’s confident, rapid technique. Sure enough, she finished the potato within a few seconds. “Thank you!”
Behind her, Edith chuckled. “I hope she didn’t offend. Many things are learned while very young, and it’s hard not to share.”
“I’m not offended.” Leah reached for another potato. “If you don’t mind the fact that I’m a novice in the kitchen.”
For the next half hour, Leah worked with the other women until the casseroles were constructed to Edith’s satisfaction. “There, that’s ready.” She glanced at a clock over the sink. “There’s time to work in the garden before you go. I’ll take care of the kitchen.”
The daughters washed their hands and headed for the back door. Leah trailed after them, wondering in the back of her mind how much downtime anyone ever got. Already she’d done more domestic chores in the space of a few hours than she normally did in a week.
The girls grabbed small tools from a box near the garden gate. Rachel pointed. “Look, Isaac is still here. I thought he’d gone home by now.”
Leah saw Isaac in conversation with Ivan outside the shop. “He said he had a little more work to do.”
“Ja, maybe.” Rachel turned and plopped down amid the rows of vegetables.
Leah squatted next to her. “Which are weeds and which are vegetables?”
“See these?” Rachel pointed to rows of wispy, delicate vegetation. “These are carrots. Anything that doesn’t look like this should come out. Here, use my weeder. I’ll go get another.” She handed Leah a tool that looked like a screwdriver with a notched end.
Leah dug the tool into the ground to lever out the weed roots, then pulled the plant. She got the hang of it within one minute and kept up as the Byler girls worked their way down the rows of carrots.
“This is fun!” she exclaimed, eliciting chuckles from the others.
“I like weeding,” Rachel said. “It makes everything look so neat and tidy. Like haus cleaning, only in the garden. And don’t worry, you’ll learn as you go. It’s not like there’s a test or anything.”
Leah warmed to the short woman. Rachel twinkled with irrepressible humor and good cheer. “Thanks. I don’t want to be a drag.”
“Need help?” Isaac asked from behind.
Sarah turned. “Since when do you work in the garden?”
“Since I don’t have much else to do this afternoon.”
Leah saw Sarah exchange a lightning glance with her sister. “The tools are by the garden gate. Help yourself.”
To Leah’s surprise, he did. Like those of the Byler girls, his movements were swift and efficient.
With so many hands, the weeds didn’t stand a chance. The sun wasn’t too hot, the earth smelled fresh and moist, the birds sang around them, and Leah was enjoying herself more than she thought possible.
“If I were in Los Angeles right now,” she mused, “I’d be working on a computer. Or maybe driving with a news crew to cover a story. The last thing I’d be doing is weeding carrots in the bright sunshine on a lovely afternoon.”
“Why aren’t you married?” asked young Eliza, with the candor of youth.
“Shh, schtupid, that’s not polite!” hissed Rachel, glaring at her sister.
Leah didn’t take offense. “I’ve dated, but I’ve always been more focused on my career than my personal life.”
“But no kinner,” mourned Sarah.
Leah’s good humor started to dissipate. How to explain that children weren’t even on her radar? “Maybe not, but there’s still time.” She poked her tool into the ground.
“Maybe you’ll find a hutband here,” observed Eliza.
“Impossible,” replied Rachel. “She’s not Amish.”
She noticed that Isaac stayed silent in the face of this conversation, levering weeds out of the soil.
Leah became curious over Rachel’s comment. “How often do outsiders become Amish?”
“Not very often.” Sarah rubbed her cheek and left a smear of dirt. “Most don’t like living without cars or telephones.”
“But you do?”
“Well, on my rumspringa I had some excitement but decided it wasn’t for me. I wanted to come back and be baptized right away.” Sarah’s lovely face glowed with health and beauty as she glanced over the garden. “I decided cars weren’t any better than walking on foot, and grocery stores don’t have any good food in them.”
Leah refrained from informing Sarah about other attractions of the modern world. It was not her place to make the Bylers’ oldest daughter question her faith or her community.
“That’s how you felt, too, right, Isaac?” asked Sarah.
“Ja, sure. It’s why I came back.”
“Besides.” Rachel pulled a weed. “On my rumspringa, I missed having friends around all the time. It seems a lot of Englisch people are lonely. I know I would be, if I didn’t have the church community around me all the time.”
The words were simply spoken, but they made Leah blink hard for a few moments. Short or not, Rachel knew where she belonged. She had a place in this community. She knew what her role was in life.
Where do I belong? Leah had a moment of profound loneliness. She belonged nowhere. She no longer knew what her role was in life. She was rootless, without the community or even faith that sustained these three daughters of the Byler family.
What would it be like to be so unquestionably accepted? Leah had clawed her way to the top for so long that the thought of sinking quietly into a society that accepted its members with love and loyalty was intriguing.
All those years of work—high school, college, internships, career, ratings, recognition—had been snatched away in a few minutes by two evil men, which was how she found herself wearing an apron and kapp and weeding carrots. Life was so unfair at times.
“Regrets?” murmured Isaac from nearby.
The man had an uncanny ability to read thoughts. “Some. It’s hard not to sink down in self-pity.”
“It’ll get better. Trust in Gott.”
A flash of anger made her snap, “Easy for you to say. You have no idea what I had to give up.”
“Whatever it was, you’re here now. Why fight it?”
“Because I’m a fighter. That’s the only way to get ahead in life.”
He raised his brows. “Who taught you that?”
“My mother.” She clapped a hand over her mouth. She didn’t mean to say that.
“Your mother?”
“Look, just drop it, will you?”
“I will, for now. But it sounds like there’s a story behind that. I want to hear it.”
You won’t, she promised to herself. The man was entirely too intuitive as it was.
Sarah rose to her feet and dusted off her dress. “It’s probably time to get ready. Isaac, vielen dank for your help.”
“I’ll see you at the hot dog roast, then.” He rose, touched his hat and walked out of the garden.
Rachel stared after him. “How strange. He’s never worked in our garden before.”
“Nee.” Sarah glanced at Leah. “I wonder why he did that?”
“Because he’s nosy.” Leah didn’t want anything to do with Isaac Sommer. “I think I’ll skip the hot dog roast. It’s been a long day.”
The sisters exchanged looks. “Are you sure?” asked Sarah. “Everyone is curious to meet you.”
“But if Isaac is planning on being there...”
“So now you’re a coward?” Rachel’s tone was mild but her blue eyes held a challenge.
Leah clenched her fists. The taunt stung. “Okay, I’ll go.”