19

Annie stopped by every day to see the baby. She fed him, rocked him, cuddled him, offered him her finger to grasp. She lifted her hand with his fist clamped about her index finger to her mouth and kissed his plump little hand. When she got ready to leave, Annie pressed one last kiss on the baby’s cheek. Sadie shifted Joe-Jo to her shoulder and patted him as she watched Annie walk down the hill. Annie was such a lonely little figure, and she was heading home to be with her nutty grandfather. The sight of her tugged at Sadie’s heart.

Amos came out of the barn and crossed over to where Sadie stood with the baby. “Annie and I have had a lot of talks these last few weeks—about why she left and why she came back,” Sadie said. “Good talks. She seems much stronger now, much better prepared to face her responsibilities.”

Amos put his hand on the fence post.

“Dad, I think the time is coming when we need to think about letting Annie have Joe-Jo.”

“Fern has mentioned the same thing,” Amos said. “But we felt it would be best for you to make that decision.”

“Maybe we could start slowly. A day here and there, then maybe an overnight. To help her adjust.”

Amos took Joe-Jo out of Sadie’s arms. “You know that could very well mean she will move to Ohio to join the colony in the fall.”

Sadie gave a slight nod. “I keep trying to think of what Menno might have wanted, if he could understand the situation.”

Amos kissed the baby’s smooth forehead. “I think he would understand that Annie is the baby’s mother. She’s trying to do the best she can. And he would be pleased that we are trying to help her.”

Sadie couldn’t stop thinking about Gid’s words: When God forgives, he does it once and for all. He doesn’t keep dragging out reminders the way people do. The way she did.

She gave her father a sad smile. “Soon, then.”

Will hardly slept. He kept going over every precaution he could think of for banding the chicks.

Miner’s hard hat with LED lamp. 

Red helium balloons to tie on his backpack. 

Air horn to scare off Adam and Eve if they flew too close to him. 

Protective goggles. 

Fingerless leather gloves so he could handle the bands. 

Cell phone to call for help if Adam attacked him and left him for dead. 

A little before 4:00 a.m., he threw back the covers and got out of bed. Bird-watchers were a little on the obsessive side. A group of them had figured out he would be banding today and told him they would set up their scopes at dawn. They knew that banding was done when the nestlings were about three weeks old because, at this stage, they didn’t run out of the scape or attempt to fly off. What Will doubted that these birders would know was that at three weeks of age, the young birds could be sexed by measuring the width of the legs. He had promised Mr. Petosky a male and a female. Last night, Mr. Petosky said he decided he wanted three, not two, and Will put his foot down. Two was his limit. Two left in the wild, two brought in for captivity. It seemed fair.

His plan was to get out there, get up the ridge, wait for Adam and Eve to leave the scape, band the birds, remove the two bigger ones for Mr. Petosky, and be done with it. He would lie and tell Mahlon that only two were found in the scape. Mahlon would wonder what had happened to them from dusk the night before—the time of Will’s last call to him. But Will wasn’t too concerned—there were all kinds of reasonable explanations as to the disappearance of fledglings. They could have fallen from the scape and ended up as dinner for another animal. Even Mahlon said he didn’t expect that fourth chick to survive. They competed with each other in the scape, and the older chicks had the advantage: bigger, bolder, quicker. Once the deed would be done, Will was sure he wouldn’t feel needles of guilt anymore. It was that time of indecision, of anticipation, that made this whole business seem sketchy.

Dressed and prepared, Will climbed the steep, uneven ridge to reach the scape, just like he had practiced. He stopped at a level place, behind the scape, where he would band the chicks. He planned to band them one at a time. He would pluck one from the scape and band it down below. He would also check it for overall health and condition. If he could get the birds banded quickly and back into the scape without Eve getting too aggressive, he would try to collect eggshell fragments and prey remains for examination. That would make Mahlon happy and hopefully deflect his attention from the two missing chicks. The eggshells could be analyzed for contaminants and the prey remains could provide additional insight into peregrine falcon feeding habits. The use of DDT in the 1950s and 1960s had practically wiped out the peregrine falcons by causing thinning of the eggshells. Even though they were recovering, it was still important to analyze the eggshells for contaminants. With a little bit of luck, he would be done in ten minutes and his pulse could return to normal.

He did have luck—more than a little. Adam was already out hunting. He heard the quacking, duck-like sound he made as he soared over the fields. Hopefully, Will could coax Eve out of the scape with some quail left on a lower rock. Then he could get in, do the deed, get out.

Everything was going according to plan. It was eerie, how easy it was. The bird-watchers wouldn’t arrive for another hour, which made Will feel considerably less anxious. He opened his backpack and pulled out a flashlight, turning it on so he could light the area where he would band the chicks. He set out the tools he would need: bands and pliers. A strange thought burst into his mind . . . this must be what it was like as his father prepared for surgery.

Now was not the time to think about his father. He quickly dismissed the thought and got back to work.

Will tossed a quail—Eve’s favorite morsel—on a rock way out in front of the scape. He held his breath, watching her carefully to see if she noticed it. The scape was so much smaller than he would have expected—only about nine inches in diameter. The depression was only about two inches deep. After a long moment, Eve hopped to the edge of the scape and took a short flight to reach the quail. Will held his breath, watching her for a moment. He thought she might bring it right back to the scape, but she stayed put. Probably hungry.

Okay. Go!

Will scaled the rock where the scape sat, grabbed a chick, and jumped back down. He whipped off a glove and picked up the bands Mr. Petosky had given to him. The downy white chick looked at him with those eyes—dark, penetrating eyes, ringed with gray fuzz. It just stared at Will, unblinking. This—this was why falcons have played a prominent role in human history, he suddenly realized. As he gazed back at the chick, he felt the strangest connection. As if the bird knew what he was up to and was disappointed in him. He could almost hear Sadie’s voice, poking his faulty conscience: “Is this the kind of man you’ve become? After all you’ve learned about yourself this spring, about the God who cares for you . . . this is who you want to be? This is the moment of decision, Will. Yours and yours alone.”

Panic crashed through his mind like waves at high tide, his emotions a brackish mixture of embarrassment, confusion, self-reproach, guilt, fear. A cord of guilt wrapped around him and squeezed hard. He’d created this moment, built it one conversation at a time, and now he was terrified of it. His hands were trembling.

Will heard Adam’s quacking sounds grow closer. He heard Eve answer back in alarm. They had spotted him. He had to finish this task. He had to.

Will stared at the cell phone in his hand. He had been hemming and hawing for the last hour. He was about to make the hardest phone call of his life. His heart was pounding, his hands were clammy. Finally, he pressed the button. One ring, two rings, three rings, then a fourth.

“Will?” His father exhaled, impatient. “I’ve only got a minute. What is it?”

“Dad . . . I’m in some trouble. I need your help.”

A woven-wire fence enclosed the cemetery. Amos, Fern, Sadie, M.K., and Uncle Hank met with their neighbors to help clean up the graveyard after the recent storm. They went in by the gate to join the others. They knew a good many residents of the graveyard, though the oldest part went back to the early 1900s. Uncle Hank stopped to examine a small tombstone. “WHY, LOOKY HERE! If that isn’t Lovina Shrock! She was my first customer for my coffin-building business. Howdy, Lovina!” He stopped to pull a few weeds around the stone.

“What ever happened to that particular line of work?” Edith Fisher said, coming up to him with a shovel.

Uncle Hank’s face lit up. “My clients never laughed at my jokes!” He took the shovel from her. “But at least I never got any complaints.” He roared with laughter and Edith rolled her eyes, until a rusty laugh burst out of her.

So Edith must have finally forgiven Hank for pulling a practical joke over her on a fishing trip. Now that twosome, Amos thought, watching the two of them wander off to weed a row of graves, was one of life’s great mysteries. M.K. ran off to join her friends as Sadie set the baby in the shade. Fern started to work with a cluster of women.

Amos wandered down a path to Maggie’s grave, under a willow tree, near the fence. Menno’s was next to her. A branch had cracked and he pulled out his handsaw to trim it. Then he dropped down on his knees to clear away the brush. He traced his finger over the lettering on the headstone:

Margaret Zook Lapp
Beloved wife and mother

He glanced around, making sure he was alone. Satisfied, he started to talk to Maggie as he knelt down to clear weeds and debris from her stone. He did that, sometimes, when he had important things on his mind. He never told anyone. He knew she wasn’t in that grave. He believed she was in Heaven, in the presence of the Almighty. But it made him feel closer to her.

“Maggie, you know how I loved you. No one could ever take your place. Not ever. But I remember a time when you were expecting our second baby, and we wondered how we could ever love a child more than we loved our Julia. Then Menno came, and Sadie, and M.K. And one night you told me that now you understood—love isn’t finite. It expands, like the yeast in bread dough, you said. I remember you were punching down bread dough when you told me that very thing.” He reached over and pulled the rest of the weeds from the side of the gravestone.

“Maggie, there’s room in my heart to love another woman, and I think I’ve found someone I want to start over with. I want your blessing, dearest.” He brushed away the weeds and rose to his feet, standing quietly before the grave for a few minutes. As he turned away, he found Fern, not three feet from him. He looked her straight in her eyes, his heart beat like a drum. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Fern asked.

Amos took a step closer to her. “Don’t marry Ira Smucker.”

She lifted her chin. “I told him no.”

Amos felt a smile start deep down in his heart and rise to his face. He took a step forward, putting only inches between them. He reached for her hands. “Fern Graber, do you think you can stand being part of the Lapp family for the rest of your life?” He felt so raw, so exposed. His inner adolescent had kicked in, because he feared her response but at the same time hungered to know the truth.

Fern pursed her lips for a moment, appearing to be considering this.

Amos held his breath until she lifted her face to his. Her eyes softened as she gazed at him. When she finally spoke, her low, husky voice wavered with emotion. “Well, to tell the truth,” she said, “I don’t know how I couldn’t.”

Two hours later, Dr. Charles William Stoltz drove up the driveway to Windmill Farm in his champagne-colored convertible BMW. Will was surprised to see his mother hadn’t come too. Then he remembered that his mother had sent him a text message that she was off to New York City this week to see a new Egyptian exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was relieved. This was hard enough.

Will’s stomach knotted. He tried to pretend it was from hunger, not regret.

Will waited until his father was out of the car to walk over to him. His mother always said that she was drawn to her father because he reminded her of Gregory Peck—raven hair, now with white wings at the temples, even with that little divot in his chin. He was wearing his customary off-duty uniform: tassled cordovan loafers, light gray slacks, and a powder-blue dress shirt with a pair of Ray-Bans hooked in the breast pocket. He didn’t wrinkle. Ever. He looked like he was going to his country club for drinks with his weirdly cerebral doctor friends who made jokes about aneurisms and neuron tangles. It had always amazed Will that his father had friends at all; he thought he had the personality of a prison warden. And he seemed completely out of place on an Amish farm.

Will took a deep breath to galvanize himself as his father took a long look at him. “How in the world does a person stay on an Amish farm and end up with a shiner?”

Unlike Will, Charles Stoltz never got ruffled or confused. He never lost his sense of purpose, which was why he found it so difficult to understand that Will wasn’t sure he wanted to go into medicine. Will touched his eye. “Long story.”

“Have you packed?”

“Not yet. It won’t take long to finish.”

“So.” Will’s father got right down to business, as usual—no How have you been? We’ve missed you. “What have you done now?” he said in his quiet, detached voice.

Will took a deep breath. He might as well tell. Everything.

If anyone were looking at them from a distance, they would have seen a father and son, side by side, leaning their backs against the car, arms folded against their chests, long legs stretched out, one ankle crossing the other. They would have thought the two were very laid-back. Ha! His father was as laid-back as a mountain lion. And they wouldn’t have known that Will’s heart was beating fast, confessing to his father the many ways he had messed up in the last few months. This confession made getting suspended from school and losing his spot in medical school to be a mere blip on the radar. This was big—it involved the law. The DUI. The shady lawyer. Illegally selling a noncaptive endangered species to a breeder. And now, trying to backpedal and get out of it all.

When he called Mr. Petosky to tell him he couldn’t do the switch, that he had banded all four chicks with the game warden’s bands, there was dead silence, followed by a stream of cussing like he’d never heard before, even in a fraternity house. Mr. Petosky told him to expect to find out that his DUI blood alcohol limit from the night of his arrest was now at the highest level, thanks to a friend at the police station who didn’t mind altering official records. Expect jail time, Mr. Petosky told him. Expect a huge fine. Expect to have your license revoked. Expect to say goodbye to ever getting a decent job. And then he flung a few more swear words at him and hung up.

His father listened carefully, asking a few questions here and there. He was completely unreadable. No fury, or worse, disgust, as Will thought there would be. Nor did he offer any answers or solutions. He simply listened. He could have been taking history on a patient, he was that impassive, that detached. If anything, his father grew more outwardly calm, never a good sign. As Will finished his long tale, he saw the Lapps’ buggy pull up the drive. He was grateful they had been away up to this point.

His father noticed the buggy too, and made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “We can . . . finish this later.” He glanced at Will with eyes narrowed. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so disappointed in you.”

Just like that, Will was eight years old again, and those same cold eyes were judging him for getting a B+ in P.E. on his report card. If only his father could have been like Amos, who only cared about his children’s happiness and well-being. Will tried to play it cool, but his guts were in a knot.

M.K. was the first to spill out of the buggy. She hurried over to meet Will’s father. Sadie went straight to the house with the baby, which didn’t surprise Will. He knew how shy she was around strangers. Amos and Fern walked over to say hello. “You must be Will’s father,” Amos said, offering his hand to Charles. “You raised a fine young man. We think the world of your boy.”

Will winced. How could he face Amos once the truth about him was out? He had been so good to him.

“Oh, I think a lot of my son too,” Will’s father said dryly, shaking Amos’s hand. Zing! Aimed at Will, but one that was lost on the Lapps.

Fern tilted her head in that way she had, sizing up Will’s father. Will wondered what she was thinking—did they resemble each other? Did Will fall short? Of course he did.

Then her eyes went wide. “Why, Little Chuckie Stoltzfus. I haven’t seen you since you tied an oily rag to my cat’s tail and set it on fire.”

As Amos heard Fern talk to the fancy doctor like he was a small neighbor boy, he thought that just possibly she had completely lost her mind. Had that intimate moment in the graveyard unhinged her? Fern kept circling back to the cat—how it was her favorite cat in all the world and she still mourned for it. Amos knew, for a fact, that Fern didn’t particularly like cats.

The fancy doctor glanced at his watch, tapped his foot, seemed as coiled as a cobra. His face was stone, his eyebrows knitted together. And still, Fern chattered on about that cat. Amos was baffled; Fern wasn’t a lengthy talker. Short, pithy remarks that brought a person up short—those were her trademarks. The doctor’s cheeks were turning fire red. So rot as en Kasch! As red as a cherry.

Amos worried the doctor might explode and how could he blame him? Fern was describing, in infinite detail, how the burnt smell of cat fur lingered on and on. He was just about to step in and muzzle her when the fancy doctor met her gaze, head-on. “Fern Graber, I did not set your cat on fire,” he said. His voice was smooth, no friction between the words. “My cousin Marvin did.”

You could have heard a pin drop, a heart beat. Will’s eyes went wide, his mouth dropped open, noiseless.

So, Fern had been after something! Amos’s heart swelled in admiration for her. Somehow, she seemed to know just how to pressure this man into cracking, admitting something he apparently had kept hidden for—well, at least for Will’s twenty-one years. It boggled Amos’s mind—to think Fern grew up in the same church as Will’s father in Millersburg, Ohio! Even more astonishing was the shock registered on Will’s face. To think that Charles Stoltz, a.k.a. Little Chuckie Stoltzfus, had never told his son that he had been raised Amish.

Fern insisted he stay for dinner, overruling Charles Stoltz’s many objections. Amos suspected there were only a few people who ever told this man what to do—and his Fern was one of them.

Dinner was torture. As they settled in to eat, Will sat there, stunned, wordless. Amos felt sorry for him. Will had shared a few stories about his father with Amos—never in his wildest dreams would he have thought that fancy doctor, with all his degrees, had been raised Plain.

Nothing about Dr. Stoltz seemed Plain now. Certainly not the outside trappings—the clothes, the car. Not a trace of a Deitsch accent. Not a mannerism. Not a single hint of his humble beginnings. Even his surname had been modified. All evidence of his upbringing had been washed away, swept clean.

No one said much at dinner. Except for Fern. She just kept on talking, reminiscing about stories she remembered about Little Chuckie—which seemed to mortify him—updating him about the people in his church as if he had asked. Amos thought she might be trying to squeeze information out of him for Will’s sake. “So if I remember right, you were dead set on going to college.”

“That’s right.” It was pretty clear that Charles Stoltz didn’t want his past sifted through.

“And your father was dead set against you getting a college education.” Fern swallowed a bite of chicken. “He was determined to have you farm alongside of him.”

Charles remained unresponsive and helped himself to a spoonful of mashed potatoes. He cut two precise squares of his chicken.

“Broke your parents’ hearts when you ran off,” Fern said. “I sure do remember that.”

Charles cut his meat with such intensity that Amos feared he might go right through the plate.

“That’s sort of flip-flopped,” M.K. said as she poured a pool of gravy over the potatoes on her plate until Fern stopped her. “Your dad wanted you to be a farmer and you ran off to be a doctor. You want Will to be a doctor and he ran off to be a farmer.”

At the exact same moment, as if it had been orchestrated, Charles’s and Will’s forks clattered against their plates.

No one said much else for the rest of the dinner. Except for Fern.