15

Luke Schrock, David decided as he drove past him on the road one afternoon and noticed a fishing rod in his hand, was a dabbler. That young man needed something to light the fire inside him, a reason to get him up in the morning.

David thought back to all the jobs Luke had had over the last few years, and realized he’d been fired from every single one. Finally, Galen King, prompted by Luke’s mother, tried to take him on in the horse training business but that backfired when Luke kept forgetting to lock the paddock gates. After chasing down horses on a daily basis, Galen concluded Luke wasn’t cut out for the job. David wondered if leaving paddock gates open might have been Luke’s method to avoid work. Most of his previous employers thought Luke Schrock wasn’t very bright, but frankly, David wondered if Luke wasn’t the clever one—he sabotaged every employment opportunity and ended up with a lot of free time on his hands, which was, David suspected, exactly the way he liked it.

It was a conundrum. Luke had potential. But how to tap it? It felt a little like the oil traps on Moss Hill. The oil sat there for centuries, just waiting for the right equipment to tap into it. What equipment, what means, could possibly tap into Luke Schrock’s potential?

And then David had an idea.

As soon as he reached home, he hunted down Birdy. She was in the garden, down on her hands and knees, weeding the carrot patch. “Birdy, what kind of a student was Luke Schrock?”

She sat back on her heels and wiped her muddy hands on her apron. “What kind of student?”

“Yes. How did you enjoy teaching him?”

She bit her lip. “‘Enjoy’ might not be the word I would use for being Luke’s teacher.”

“What word would you use?”

“Challenge. Dare. Trial. Test.”

“Ah.”

She smiled. “Toward the end of eighth grade, I asked each scholar to choose a life verse to memorize. On the last day, they recited it in front of the entire class. With a perfectly straight face, Luke recited Deuteronomy 32:15. ‘Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked.’ The class looked puzzled, trying to understand the deeper spiritual meaning of that verse.”

“So he was just being a smart aleck.”

“Yes, but he is frightfully smart.” She went back to a tug-of-war with an unyielding carrot. “Any reason you’re asking about Luke?”

“The school board is looking for a replacement for Danny Riehl. I was thinking . . .”

“Luke?” She gasped, eyes wide. “You are considering Luke Schrock? To shape and mold young minds? To care for little children? To nurture varying intellects?”

To put it mildly, Birdy was flabbergasted. “I thought it might fill his mind. You know, challenge him. Help him find a way to contribute to the community. But from the way you positioned it, I can see that it’s a bad idea. Never mind.”

“That verse of Luke’s . . . I’m not sure he meant it this way, and I have no idea who Jeshurun is, but he sounded a little like Luke. Growing fat and kicking?”

“Jeshurun is another name for Israel,” David said, taking off his straw hat and waving it at a bee that hovered too close to Birdy. “And yes, the same thought occurred to me.”

Back to the drawing board.

Jesse noticed Jenny Yoder coming down from the orchard at Windmill Farm before she noticed him. He liked looking at her from a distance. There was a sense of purpose, an aliveness in Jenny’s stride. She knew what she was about. So different from Mim Schrock’s wishy-washiness.

The comparison startled him. When had he ever found fault with Mim? Never! Look what Jenny Yoder was doing to him. Scrambling his head. Tangling his mental wires. It was a dangerous and destructive effect she had on him. The Jenny Yoder Effect.

But, truth be told, Mim was wishy-washy. She could never quite decide if Danny Riehl was the one for her and, in her indecision, kept Jesse dangling on a thin thread of hope.

Or could his father have been right? Was Jesse the one who preferred the fragile thread of hope to the ups and downs of a real relationship?

That, too, was an alarming thought. He didn’t like to think of himself as one of those guys who avoided commitment. Not like Jimmy Fisher, who managed to dabble with matrimony and avoid it the way a clever fox toyed with a trap.

A trap? A trap. Did that description of matrimony just flip through his mind? The fact that what he had thought felt peculiar made him realize, indeed, he had become a cliché—he was one of those guys.

Leroy Glick, the older apprentice, exchanged a knowing glance with Sammy Schrock, the younger apprentice. “I think our boss is sweet on Fern’s helper.”

“Ooo-la-la!” Sammy whistled. “Jesse has a girlfriend!”

Jesse sighed. It would be easy to lose his temper with these boys, but he knew he should hold his tongue and exercise patience with them. It helped to remind himself that these two boys had very little brain power.

“I never want just one girlfriend,” Leroy said. “As soon as I turn sixteen and my dad gets me my own buggy, I am going out with a different girl every night. Lots and lots of girlfriends.”

Sammy looked blank. “But that would be a lot of girls to keep track of. Sundays too?”

“Every single night. Different girl.”

“That would be thirty or thirty-one girls every month, except for February.”

Leroy smiled. “Maybe I would have three dates on February twenty-eighth,” he said smugly, “just to keep the numbers even.”

This information stretched Sammy’s mind beyond capacity. “But then . . . what would you do about leap year?”

Exasperated, Jesse looked at the boys. Where does one start? He considered himself to be an expert repairman, but how could he try to patch the holes in their faulty thinking? Especially when they thought they already knew everything.

Jesse left the two of them as they tried to work out their meager mathematics. They were appalling, those two. He had to have faith in the young girls of Stoney Ridge and hope they were all smart enough to avoid his apprentices.

He looked toward the farmhouse and saw Jenny Yoder climb the porch stairs. Without any warning, right by his side, C.P. let out an ear-busting woof. Jenny turned her face toward the buggy shop and lifted her hand in a casual wave.

Why, if his eyes weren’t deceiving him, Jenny Yoder was smiling at him. Jesse’s whole being soared upward.

C.P. looked up at him with his big saucer eyes, and he reached down to pat him fondly. Maybe this dog wasn’t quite as useless as he thought.

David forgot all about Luke Schrock’s smart-alecky life Bible verse for a few days. He sat at his desk and opened the Bible to the thirty-second chapter in the book of Deuteronomy. “But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.”

Luke had missed the point by not memorizing the full verse, which came as no surprise. And didn’t that just seem to summarize Luke Schrock? He lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation. In doing so, he missed the very heart and soul of the Amish life: glorifying God.

Context, context, context. David knew it was dangerous to pluck a verse out of Scripture and put weight on it that it wasn’t meant to bear. He turned the pages of his Bible to set the stage for this verse. Who was speaking? And why?

Moses.

It was Moses’s last day as leader to the Israelites. God had informed Moses that he was going to die—which David thought was such a gift. It gave him peace to know that God had prepared Moses for his death. A good death. Buried by the very hand of God.

Moses had time to prepare for his death. These last few chapters of Deuteronomy consisted of his farewell address. Pastor Moses preaching the Word of God to his congregation in the desert. The Israelites were poised on the brink of the Promised Land. David’s imagination wandered as he pictured old Moses high on a ledge, speaking truth to the two million Israelites in the barren valley below him, his aged voice amplified by the rocks around him in the desert. God had told Moses to teach the people this song, known as the Song of Moses, as a reminder of God’s faithfulness and a warning to not abandon their faith once they inhabited the Promised Land.

“But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.”

The thought that followed literally took his breath away. This time the verse struck him, as palpably as if he’d received a blow to his gut. It seemed eerily prophetic of the condition of the church of Stoney Ridge. They were growing fat and lightly esteeming God.

David covered his face with his hands. Without God, the Promised Land was nothing.

A summer storm blew through Stoney Ridge, hitting Eli Zook’s old dilapidated barn with such strong winds and rain that it collapsed, killing two cows. David sent word around the community that a barn raising was scheduled for Saturday. Ruthie could see the look on Patrick’s face when he heard about the barn raising. He’d asked her all about them, which she found to be amusing. How many barn raisings had she seen in her life? Dozens and dozens. To her, they were just a long day of hard work.

To Patrick, the work frolics were a romantic slice of Amish life. Of community, a concept he felt the Amish excelled in. She tried to correct his assumption. “You’ll see when you come. It’s not so much a community as it is a few men bossing everyone around. Everyone has very clear roles.”

“They’re probably the ones who know what needs to be done. Any construction project needs supervisors.”

She hadn’t thought of it in that way. “The women stay out of the men’s way to get a huge meal ready for them, then spend the afternoon cleaning it all up.” She had tried, when she was eight years old, to join the boys as they hammered nails and was shooed away by one of the fathers, told to go back to the kitchen. It was one of her many pet peeves about being Amish. You had to fit in the box.

“The way I see it,” Patrick said, “the women’s role is the most important one. You’re providing nourishment to all of those people, to help them do their jobs. Take away the food and everything else would disappear too. Providing sustenance is the foundation.”

She had never, ever thought of providing food like that. Not once. To her, it was just hard work. The long preparation, the endless cleanup. And people gobbled the food down so fast! Hours and hours of work consumed in fifteen minutes. Here and then gone, just like that.

Patrick smiled. “What strikes me most about a barn raising is that it’s a metaphor for the Amish. I’m looking forward to a glimpse into a world where people give without expecting anything in return. They just . . . give. Their time, their food, their energy, their supplies. Even their Saturday. All given in love.”

But when Saturday came, Patrick thought he was getting a cold and told Ruthie he was going to have to pass on the barn raising. She had to admit that he looked terrible, like he hadn’t slept at all. Dark circles under his eyes, and he moved slowly and cautiously, as if he didn’t quite trust his body to do what he wanted it to do.

“Should I be worried about you?” she asked. “There won’t be anyone around if you need help. We’ll all be at Eli Zook’s for most of the day.”

He smiled at her. “Thank you, but I’ll be fine. I just need a quiet day to knock this out.” Patrick shoulder-bumped her, a friendly, familiar gesture that felt strangely comforting.

“Is there anything I can get for you before I go?”

“If I think of something, I’ll tell you,” he said, opening the door and stepping aside for her to go through it.

“Will you?”

“Yeah.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah.” There was a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead that made Ruthie nervous. She wanted to do something for him—bring him soup, aspirin, something like that. But he seemed to just want to be left alone.

Walking over to the main house at Eagle Hill, she saw Luke sitting sprawled on the porch steps. His head was tipped back to stare at an eagle soaring overhead and he didn’t see her approach. Handsome hardly began to describe him. So handsome that it made her a little queasy. She liked his dark hair—nearly jet black—that curled around his collar, she liked his sapphire blue eyes—distant and a little mysterious. She liked the whisker-scruff on his face, his Adam’s apple, the tense form of his athletic body.

The wind caught at her skirt, slapping it so that he turned his head at the sound. When he saw her, he looked at her in that intense way that made her stomach swoosh up and down, and she felt warmth spread along the ridge of her ears. He slowly rose to his feet.

“Patrick isn’t feeling up to joining us.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Ruthie lifted one eyebrow. “You’re not sorry at all. You are extremely pleased.”

“Pleased that Saint Patrick has to stay home and polish his halo?”

“Stop calling him Saint Patrick. He’s not like that, Luke.”

“Like what?”

“He’s not a hypocrite.” Hypocrisy was something Luke railed and ranted against, yet sometimes Ruthie thought he was the real hypocrite. He disdained everything Amish, yet he didn’t leave. Wasn’t that a false way to live? Patrick had come to the Amish because he sincerely believed in their way of life. He told her he admired that they worked so hard to safeguard the things that were beautiful and true in the world. She wondered how Luke would respond to that comment. “You haven’t even tried to get to know Patrick.”

“Not true! He declined my magnanimous invitation to go out with my friends last night.” His tone was jokey, but Ruthie sensed he was a little miffed.

“To do what? Look for trouble?”

“I don’t go looking for it. Trouble is just so difficult to avoid.” The stone-faced stare the comment earned only spurred him on. “Ruthie, if it didn’t seem downright laughable, I’d say Saint Patrick is trying to steal you away from me.”

Why did that seem so downright laughable? But to Luke, she only said, “He can’t steal me from you because I don’t belong to you.”

“Not yet.” He gave her that smile of his, the one that was hard to resist, and she felt herself ease up. His fingers toyed with the ends of her capstrings as he smiled down at her, his eyes twinkling with mischief. “Maybe after the work frolic, we can go to Blue Lake Pond. A couple of guys are meeting up to play kayak chicken.”

Kayak chicken. Such a stupid game! She shook her head. “Not after a long day of barn raising.” Cooking, serving, and cleaning up hundreds of dishes.

Luke put a finger to her lips. “Don’t say no. Let’s just see how the day goes.”

At Eli Zook’s, the strangest thing occurred. Only a handful of families showed up, more children than adults. There was a man in their church, Henry Smucker, who was the architectural brains of barn building—he knew how much lumber to order, knew how to number the boards so there would be an economy of effort in putting the barn together, like a jigsaw puzzle. But on this morning, no one knew where Henry Smucker was. No lumber had arrived from the sawmill, and when Ruthie’s father called, he learned that no lumber had been ordered.

Everyone looked to Luke, perhaps unfairly. He lifted his hands in surrender. “It wasn’t me! I’ve been here the whole time!”

They ended up clearing the debris of the old barn off to one side. Ruthie was glad Patrick hadn’t come today. There wasn’t the usual lightheartedness, the joking between people, the buzz of energy and excitement. People worked quietly, ate quickly, and left soon after lunch had been cleaned up. There was no reason to stay. The barn raising would be postponed, Ruthie’s father explained. But he seemed bothered by the day’s outcome. Everyone did.

Except Luke. He thought the abbreviated workday was awesome.