AS SPRING TURNED INTO SUMMER, ANNIE’S workload doubled, at least. The sun’s rays increased, drawing the many seeds into sprouts, the sprouts into beanstalks, potato plants, pea vines, and more. She stood to survey the sheer size of her garden.
It was a dewy morning, after a few days of intermittent rain and drizzle, so the weeds had gathered in force, taking over the well-tilled and hoed soil until it looked like a sea of green. And it was wet. So wet. How would they ever restore the garden to its original manicured state? She would be ashamed to have the neighbors see this. But then she smiled to herself, remembering that everyone’s garden had been rained on, not just hers.
And it was a lovely morning. The dew was like jewels scattered across the yard, the lush green plants beaded with them, dripping off the perfect green leaves. The sun was a fiery ball of orange, already pulsating with the heat that left men leaning against a fence post, their hats tilted back as they swiped at rivulets of perspiration.
This was the time of homemade root beer, mint tea, and ginger water taken to the hayfields where the men forked loads of loose hay onto a wooden wagon drawn by faithful mules or Belgians. This was when every single vegetable from the garden was eaten or canned to put down cellar for the coming winter. For the hundredth time, Annie was grateful to have a kind and gentle husband, and the anxiety of providing for her family alone taken from her shoulders. She loved his strength, his way with the children, his patience and gentleness. How could it be that God had blessed her when she most certainly did not deserve all this?
She turned and went back into the house, only to find Joel and John, five and four, who were Dan’s youngest children, in a heated argument with five-year-old Lydia, who was her own.
Oh, she hated that she still thought of them as her children and his children, but how else was she to make sense of the constant bickering and rivalry? These children had gone through so much, losing their mother and father, struggling with grief and childish sorrow, before being thrown together to live in one house. Remembering this gave her the compassion she needed to deal with the daily struggle of peacekeeping and discipline.
Joel was nearly six now, dark haired and dark eyed, with a brilliant mind and the vocal cords of a little preacher. He ruled John, who was a gentle, passive child, happy to go along with whatever his older brother wanted. Five-year-old Lydia, on the other hand, had inherited all the spit and vigor of Annie’s own mother, including the loud voice and quick temper.
Joel and Lydia had both woken up in a foul mood, the heat upstairs causing them to sleep fitfully. Thirsty, unable to find their mother, they sat on the old davenport like uncomfortable little birds, eyeing each other, with sweet-natured John between them.
“Where’s Mam?” John asked, his strident voice like a razor to Lydia’s ill temper.
“She’s not your mother.”
“Yes, she is. She’s as much our mam as she is your mam,” Joel answered.
“How do you figure that?” Lydia sat forward, slid her feet to the floor, and twisted her head toward him, suspicion and challenge in her eyes.
“Well, you know. Since the wedding. We’re all your mam’s kids, and my dat is your father, too.”
“Don’t say ‘kids.’ Only English people say ‘kids.’”
“Kids, kids, kids!” Joel said loudly.
“Stop it. Stop it this minute.”
“Kids.”
With her hand on her hips, Lydia faced her opponent squarely. “You say that one more time, and I’m going to the barn and telling Dat.”
“No! No!”
Now that Lydia had the upper hand, she wasted no time in using her power to its full advantage, taunting him with every misdeed of the day before, of which there were plenty.
They both began to yell, which was how Annie found them when she entered the kitchen.
Again, it was easiest to tackle her own Lydia, before turning to the irate Joel, and by now, the deeply troubled John.
“What happened? Stop this now, both of you.”
Lydia was indignant, her face flushed with anger. “He said we were ‘kids.’ Only goats have kids, and we are not supposed to say that.”
“No, we don’t say that, Joel. You are ‘kinna.’” Annie answered calmly.
“He just kept saying it,” Lydia pouted, crossing her arms around her waist.
“I did not!”
“Yes, you did. Mam, he’s telling a schnitza. He always lies!”
“Lydia, you go sit on that chair.” Annie pointed to a cane-bottomed chair in the corner. “Even if you’re right, you’re being prideful and unkind.” She turned to Joel. “What started this?”
Sullen, he refused to meet her eyes. She waited.
Finally, he spoke. “She said you were not my mother, and I said you were. At the wedding, the preacher said we all became one.”
Annie’s stern face softened. She could see the hurt and confusion beneath his petulant scowl.
“Yes, Joel, we are. We are all one family. We all live together in this big stone house and we all have to try and get along. I am everyone’s mother, and Dat is everyone’s father.” She turned to Lydia. “So, Lydia, it wasn’t right to say what you said. And Joel, never refer to any of your brothers or sisters as ‘kids,’ alright?”
He stared at his toes, would not give her the satisfaction of a decent answer. Annie sat beside him, slid an arm around the stone-faced boy, and pulled him close. “Promise me?”
She was shocked when he flung himself into her lap and cried as if his heart would break, which set John into little sputters and then full-fledged howling, too.
Annie’s heart seemed to melt within her. She reached out to include John in the hug, squeezing them tight to her as tears sprang to her own eyes.
“It’s alright,” she murmured, over and over.
She beckoned to Lydia to join their huddle, but she shook her head stubbornly, folding her arms across her chest and watching the display with bitterness glistening in her eyes.
Was ever anything all right, she wondered. She had pronounced these words over and over since the day she married her beloved Dan, but most days there was much more wrong than right. No one could prepare another person for this. It was like walking blindly down a sunlit path, never imagining the obstacles you would meet. Most stepmothers had only a few children, and she’d heard it could be hard, but this?
She thought of her mother’s warning against marrying a man who didn’t feel for her children. But Dan was fine with the children—he always seemed to know just what to say or how to act around them. Annie, on the other hand, constantly doubted that she was saying or doing the right thing. And there was simply not enough of her to go around. Some days she thought the sting of grief and poverty was easier to handle than the feeling of constant failure and inadequacy.
Suddenly, she could hear her grandmother’s voice in her mind. “Annie, can you get nothing right? Must you ruin everything you touch? Ach, your poor husband someday. What a mess, Annie. What a mess you are . . .”
Annie felt her stomach clench up, the way it always did when she remembered her grandmother. She took a deep breath and brought herself back to the present, back to the two needy children beside her. She held the two boys, told them they were very special to her, and that she would always be their real mother.
When Joel sat up and dug out his small, wrinkled handkerchief and wiped his eyes and nose, a shudder passed through him.
He looked up at Annie.
“Do you really mean that? You will always be right here?”
“Oh, I will. I love it here. I love your father and I love you.”
The two pairs of eyes turned to her were guileless, the innocent eyes of children who were hungry for love, hungry for assurance of a mother who would never leave them.
From the corner came Lydia’s disgusted voice.
“Well, it’s nice you like some of us, at least.”
“Come, Lydia. You know I have always loved you.” Then she smiled and said teasingly, “And I like you, even when you’re kind of a bossy little tattle tale.”
At that, Lydia couldn’t help but giggle a little, which got the rest of them laughing until their sides hurt.
Breakfast was two loaves of bread sliced and spread with peanut butter, laid in a wide soup plate with sugared coffee that was thick with cream poured over it. They all ate heartily of the good coffee soup, a staple in warm weather when the kitchen range would have to be fired too high to fry all that cornmeal mush. Sometimes Annie made oatmeal and they ate it with apple butter and biscuits, or a huge cast iron pan of fried potatoes, but only on mornings that were cool.
The happy chatter and clatter of spoons on granite plates reminded Annie how easily children forgave each other and moved on with their lives as if nothing had occurred. Dan praised the coffee soup, said the peanut butter really got a fellow going on these hot days. She smiled into his eyes and was rewarded with the tenderest look from his gentle countenance. For the hundredth time, she thought nothing could be impossible with Dan by her side.
Ida and Hannah, both eleven years old, were chosen to do dishes, while Ephraim, Lavina, and Emma were told to help their mother in the garden. Amos and Enos were expected to drive the horses, one to cultivate the cornfield, one to drive the wagon while Dan forked hay.
Suvilla was expected to start the washing. The water was already steaming in the iron kettle. Ida said she didn’t know why she couldn’t drive the horses. Hannah agreed, saying girls should be allowed to drive. In fact, she’d seen Emery Glick’s girls, Fronie and Sadie, drive the hay wagon just the day before. Amos narrowed his eyes and said girls washed dishes and boys drove wagons around. Ida’s eyes flashed fire as she sized up her stepbrother, but she kept quiet. Annie breathed easier when Hannah did the same.
Dan listened, smiled, then said probably girls were every bit as good at driving horses as boys, so if they washed the dishes real good for breakfast and dinner, he’d let them try this afternoon, seeing how he needed Amos and Enos to help him fork hay.
The girls looked on their father with an expression close to worship. Annie thanked him with her sweet smile.
Everyone was expected to work hard, right down to the two little Emmas and Hannah. They worked together as a team as the sun rose high over the gardens. The children were all suntanned, their muscles well developed, toughened by physical labor as well as vigorous play. They all knew the work came first, which could last most of the day. The smallest ones carried wooden bushel baskets by the wire handles and gathered the piles of weeds as the older children dug them out with hoes. Sometimes they sang or whistled, calling back and forth across the rows.
It was Hannah who found the first potato bugs. She alerted Ida, who knew exactly what to do, but she figured she’d better talk to her mother first. Annie and Suvilla were in the cellar, sweeping cobwebs and washing shelves that looked quite empty now. They would scour every inch before mixing powdered lime with water, then brushing it over the stone walls of the house’s foundation, creating a sparkling white disinfected area to store the summer’s bounty.
“Mam!”
“Potato bugs! Millions of potato bugs!”
“Ach my. Wait, I’ll help you get kerosene.”
She found an old tin can, put on the shelf in the woodshed for this purpose, and poured some of the smelly fuel into it, then selected a short stick and handed it to her.
“There you go, Ida. Be careful to check the undersides of the leaves.”
Ida loved this chore, as did the other children.
“Potato bugs!”
“Let me! Let me!”
Everyone swarmed around Ida, eager for a turn at knocking the shiny purplish brown beetles into the kerosene can until they died, which was not long at all. But Ida pushed her way through to the potato plants and began to whack them quite efficiently into their oily demise, with many pairs of keen eyes observing every move she made.
“They’re dying,” Joel announced solemnly.
“They are supposed to do that,” Lydia told him, her nose in the air, taut with her own superiority.
“I know,” Joel said.
Lydia, never able to let something go without having the last word, announced triumphantly, “You didn’t know till I told you.”
“I did. Kerosene kills anything.”
“Not everything.”
“Almost.”
John sat between two rows of beans, snapping a yellow wax bean before putting it in his mouth, his head turning first to Lydia, then to Joel as the exchange continued.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said loudly.
“What?”
“About kerosene.”
“What about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either.”
Solemnly, the children continued picking up weeds, dragging the heavy wooden bushel basket between them. They did their job well, never complaining, only occasionally stopping for a drink of water. Now and then a conversation broke out, but the work always progressed steadily throughout
the forenoon.
At twelve o’clock, Annie washed her hands at the pump, laid out bread and butter and glasses of mint tea for a quick lunch. Dan had gone to help a neighbor with the birthing of a first-time heifer, so there was only a snack. The biggest meal of the day would be after the evening milking.
The afternoon wore on, with the children losing energy as the heat of the sun became almost unbearable. Ida had long ago found the last potato bug, so it was back to hoeing, which did not seem fair at all, the way the weeds were so thick it didn’t matter how hard she brought the hoe down, there were more weeds. The hotter it became, the more her temper flared.
“Dat said we could fork hay or drive horses. Instead we’re still stuck in this garden,” she fumed.
Suvilla was thinning corn, her hair blowing out and away from the kerchief around her head, her face almost the same color as the early cherry tomatoes. She slanted the irritable Ida a look. “What did you expect? Fathers never keep their promises.” She pushed her hair back, leaving streaks of sweat and dirt on her forehead. “I, for one, am never getting married.”
Ida stopped hoeing and drew down her eyebrows as she mulled over her sister’s words. Puzzled, she asked what she meant by that.
“Dat always promised me he’d take care of us, but he didn’t,” Suvilla said sullenly, just loud enough for Ida to hear.
“But he couldn’t help it that he died. He was in an accident.”
“He still died.”
“So?”
“So I’ll never get married.”
Ida considered this. “It’s not like most husbands die so early,” she ventured softly.
“Some do.”
“But we have a new Dat, Suvilla. This one is much nicer. We have more to eat, and a bigger, better house. This Dat doesn’t raise his voice, or become angry or anything.”
“Not yet. He might, though.”
Ida leaned on her hoe, looking for all the world like a wise old woman with her head cocked to one side, nodding to herself.
“You know, it’s probably a good idea for you to stay single. If you did get married, your husband would have to live with you constantly worrying about him dying or getting mad. You’d both be miserable.”
“What do you know about marriage, Ida?” Suvilla barked.
“Enough to know you better stop feeling sorry for yourself unless you really do want to be a lonely old maid.”
There was a loud call from the barn.
“Suvilla, Ida, Hannah! Kommet!”
Ida took off in long-legged strides toward the barn, Hannah and the two Emmas toddling behind.
Suvilla’s brows lowered, her mouth set in a grim line, and she turned away. Slowly she gathered up the hoes and the bushel baskets, stacked everything in the woodshed, threw the weeds across the fence to the horses, and went to find her mother, who was just finishing up the whitewashing.
Annie took one look at Suvilla’s glowering face before setting down the galvanized bucket, placing one hand on a hip, and saying, “What?”
Suvilla brushed past and went into the house, slamming the screen door behind her.