CHAPTER ONE

 

Bloomington, Indiana

Summer, 1917

Charlotte Miller sat across from the doctor and screamed, “Where are my brothers and my sisters?” Tell me now, Doctor!”  Her peach complexion heated up to a deep red, her face grimacing with anger. What on earth was she doing in the doctor’s office shivering under the hand-knitted baby blue shawl without anyone else from her family there at such a tragic time? 

Seven siblings- seven to be exact and she had just claimed her mother and sister’s bodies, and she had to decide the future of the family farms and finances. Hadn’t they been told about the accident?  Did they even care? 

Charlotte pouted, her face still reddened and her heart still heavy.  She felt taken advantage of, neglected, and to be honest, she felt deserted by her siblings.

Nervously, she laced her hands and then popped her knuckles. Her stomach swiftly jiggled; the nausea was so strong that she wanted to die to get out of misery, and if the doctor had offered, she had taken a bed in the back of the office after viewing the bodies.  Now, four hours later, she was still in town crisscrossing from shop to shop to try to figure out how to plan and execute a proper funeral before ending back up where the bodies lay. 

She gritted her teeth, quickly folded her arms, and flopped back into the couch.  She was mad, and she had the right to throw a temper tantrum, and she knew it, so she carried on, lashing out at the doctor.  “I will not have the funeral without them being here to make some of the decisions.  It’s pouring rain outside, and I feel like I’m coming down with a cold.  I’m delicate, and they know that, and they need to get here and run those farms now.  I’m not a farmer.  I want to be a schoolteacher!”

Her siblings knew she had been boxed up in the house for sixteen years with a mysterious illness.  Why, she’d never touched a hoe or gathered water from the spring until the past few weeks, and that was because she could finally be outside. Besides, it had taken her forever to dig around the orchard grass and sheet tin to dig up the next to last hole of last year’s preserved potatoes. How on earth could she bury a whole field of potatoes at the speed and accuracy that her mother Pearl had done?  She couldn’t, and she knew it.

  She firmly bit her bottom lip and felt the stinging sensation caused by her sharp, white teeth. Pouting, she stewed for a couple of minutes before forcing her yellow curl-covered head up to study the handsome doctor’s face.  His eyes seemed sympathetic and compassionate. Her stomach continued to sway as she rubbed her left hand over it and hoped that she wouldn’t vomit on the hardwood floor.

The Doctor broke her preoccupied pity, “They want no part in the farm.  It’s where you’ve lived all of your life, and to be bluntly, they don’t think that you can survive out in the real world.” The Town Doctor forced a smile and waited for her response. His sun-stroked face glowed under the hanging gold chandelier.  He sat in a folding chair across from the couch, in which she was sitting, with a concerned look and an attentive ear. Old-framed awards and certificates of practice dotted the walls, and the room smelled of medicine and thick cherry cigar smoke from his pipe.

She lifted her light blue gloved right hand up to her face and wiped away the cold tears that freely flowed down her ruby red cheeks. “I suppose there is some truth to that since I spent my school years being taught by mother.” She slid down into the couch and eyed her lap with sheer disappointment.  Sixteen long years boarded up in one five-room house.  How could she be a real lady, one with her own experiences, those that would mold her into an adult? 

A sigh of restlessness blew through her perfectly-formed cherry-colored lips before they flattened and expanded into a smile.  “I can understand, but it doesn’t make it fair.” She sighed and leaned up toward the doctor.  “I’m just overwhelmed.  I’m sorry that I gave such an immature outburst.”  She hung her head, her beautiful spirals of gold flowing over the bright blue hues that bordered the entire fancy garment’s ocean of ruffles.

He nodded and leaned back into the chair to admire her beauty.  Her peach-toned face wasn’t sun-kissed, and her height wasn’t even the height that he liked his ladies to be, but there was something about her whole body that made her remarkably beautiful, and he could feel that she didn’t know it.  What a pity, he thought, for he knew that most ladies with that kind of attractiveness used it well to their advantage.  She would not; she’d have to fight and fend for herself out in the real world.

Would he be doing her a favor by telling her that she was the most beautiful lady that he’d ever seen, so much that her beauty stunned him, took him by surprise? He smiled and concluded that it would do her a world of good to dance with the wolves: to have to run two busy farms, support herself without the financial help of any of the men folk, and to find a man that she loved for his heart and not for his money. 

He hadn’t seen a good, strong woman in a long time: the Proverbs 31 Woman.  She would blend in well in Walnut Creek, and he knew it.  Walnut Creek was full of hard-working Proverbs 31 women, and most of them were Amish. Charlotte was Amish, but as she sat there in front of him, she looked like a Broadway actress.  Why had she changed the look that the women in her family had worn for years?  Had the bishop seen her yet? He doubted it as he ran his eyes down her sparkling evening dress. 

He anxiously bit his bottom lip and thought more deeply. He was in Bloomington with very little Amish.  Why had her family wanted to settle here? No other families had followed after the first missionary flow there leaving very few Amish. Before practicing in Bloomington, he had practiced in Walnut Creek, and he thought it was the best place in the world to raise a family with the strong Christian values, hospitality, and compassion that the Old Order Amish showed everyone.

The baby blue umbrella tapped against the wooden floor as she thought about fighting.  She’d been a quitter all of her life, and she knew it having been babied by family because of her mysterious illness.  She had to be honest; this was only the eleventh time that she’d been outside their rural five-room farmhouse since she was an infant. Could she really make it on her own?

Her girdle brushed across her frozen chest as a couple of rib-hugging breaths forced their way into her lungs.  Her eyes rolled.  An emotional tug of war, which was painful, just as painful as her isolated life, stabbed her in the middle of her tightly-fitted lace-covered chest.

She searched the handsome doctor’s face for empathy, “Isn’t it ironic that I finally get healed from the strange disease six weeks before my Mother, Pearl, and my Sister, Lola were killed in the accident?  God just yanks them up and snatches them away without asking me.  Her left hand swept up in a snapping motion before she cleared her throat and continued, “He just plucked them from the earth as if he thought that I could survive down here without them.”

“You can, Charlotte.  I know it, God knows it, and so do you,” The Doctor got up and extended his arm over her shoulder.  “Just take care of yourself and remember to stay out of the sun.  We don’t know much about this disease, except that the sun triggers relapses.  If you get a relapse, you may die.”

“Yes, Sir,” she softly nodded as a deep breath exited her chest.  Closing the crucial meeting, her slender legs rose and her sweaty hand united with his for a brief but brisk handshake.  She arched her back and squared her shoulders to try to gain confidence. Her long blonde hair’s usual glow overpowered her now ivory face. Her stomach swayed, but she inhaled and exhaled some deep breaths to try not to lose her morning coffee on the Town Doctor’s hardwood floor. “I can do it; goodbye.”

The office door closed shut. The night wind and rain hurled coldness under her umbrella causing her knees to stiffen, and her back to ache.  Where was the buggy? Her head shook with disappointment and her body shivered; how had she forgotten that she had tied the horses at Hickman’s Café instead of the doctor’s place? She trekked the short block walk and thanked God that she had a good, heavy hair of head to protect her eyes properly from the cold snap. I don’t want to get an earache; I am already coming down with a cold.

She untied the horses and got into the buggy.  She thought about what to do as the horses trotted down the empty street. Laughter and loud music echoed out of the saloon as a man was thrown out.   He stumbled in front of her buggy with a busted mouth and bleeding lips.

Alcohol strained through the air as the rain got harder.  The reddened-faced man stumbled half way up and grabbed his stomach.  His rough curly hair and fast talking made her nauseous, for he was her uncle, and he was the precise reason that she had gotten the mysterious disease that had tucked her in her home for sixteen long, hard years.  Why on earth had he lathered a “secret hair tonic” all over an infant knowing that infants touch every part of their body that they can reach and then aim for their mouths? She probably would have been okay if she hadn’t ingested some of the chemicals that were in the hair tonic.

“Sorry Ma’am.  I’m going back in there!”  He finally stood all the way up and ran back into the saloon, and she shook her head wondering why he hadn’t recognized her, for he lived in her old upstairs bedroom while he was in town.

“Don’t sell anymore cans of that hair tonic!” Charlotte screamed, but he was already back into the bar.  She sat and waited for him to be thrown out of the bar a second time, prepared to take him home, but the swinging wooden doors just swayed a little with the outside wind. 

Should she go in and approach him?  It wouldn’t prove anything, but deep down, tucked away within her chest, was a flame of unforgiveness, one that any liquid couldn’t quench, and she felt terrible about having this grudge.  In her Old Order Amish faith, forgiveness was a must. It wasn’t that she didn’t forgive him for the accident but that she didn’t forgive him for continuing to drink alcohol after the accident had occurred.

Her gut feelings told her that he hadn’t learned anything from being drunk the night that he’d lathered the hair tonic on her and to her that meant that her life and the pain that he had inflicted on her didn’t matter because she wasn’t important.

She remembered  nothing about the day that he’d come into town, for she was only a happy infant, at least that was how her mamm, or mother had told the story of the day that she’d gotten sick.  The same man that had just rolled with blood and spinning dirt, in front of her buggy had been the one that had a drinking problem with strong liquor from the time he’d left her close-knit Old Order Amish community at the age of sixteen. 

It looked like nothing had changed for this uncle, and in a way, she felt sorry for him.  How could she forgive a man that saturated her whole head with a “miracle hair grower” while she lay in her baby bed?  What he had done was wrong, and her daed was wrong too, but she never told him, and now that he’d been dead for a year, she’d never get to tell him.  He’d wanted Uncle Graham to get saved and re-join their Christian community, so he put up with his wild recklessness during the visits that he’d make several times a year. 

The Miller family had fought like tooth and nail to flee religious persecution in Europe, only to find that something far worse existed in The States: the power of gold.  Americans seemed to treasure it, even dream of it, and even worship it.  Would they have been killed if they had stayed in Europe?  If they had gotten raided and tried to flee, would her mother be trapped on the other side of the barbed wire fence like Erma Yoder’s grandmother? 

She suddenly felt guilty about wearing the flowing evening gown, for the straight pins in her cape dress symbolized the loss of life and the price that was paid for freedom to America.  She smiled and led the horses around the sharp right turn out of town.  Wasn’t Uncle Graham living the American dream?  He’d built a home ailment and spice business from the dirt ground up, and he had worked hard at it; however, he’d drank hard, too, and it had shown in the letters that he’d written her father Earl. 

Even after Earl’s death, her mother Pearl had invited Graham in when he’d come to town twice a year and she had done that up to the day that she’d died.  Charlotte knew that her mother didn’t feel comfortable with him around with his loud tone and rough-housing with her siblings.  He never rough-housed with Charlotte because he’d felt guilty about bringing about the strange disease, and the little bags of glowing red-striped and deep lavender-coated stick candy that he’d always spread out on the wooden kitchen table before them had offered a counter for his guilt. 

The horses were rushed as they fled out of town.  The storm intensified bending tree branches like strands of yarn.  The smaller ones looked like they could snap at any time, and that scared her, for she’d stayed inside their tiny house for sixteen years because of her illness, and she’d never been in the storm. Truth be told, her whole life was a storm, and she knew it.

She jumped a little each time a strong rain current zipped across the buggy, for it felt odd against her face.  She lifted her eyes to heaven, and although she couldn’t see His Face, she talked to him, exactly like she’d talked to Him from the upstairs bedroom window, where she stayed all the time, except for mealtime and schooling, which were done at the wooden kitchen table that her father had made.  “God, I want to leave right now and be with mamm and daed. I know that I don’t know much about you because I never went to the other  church members houses for Sunday services, but I do know that you loved and cared for my family.”

She hadn’t heard him answer, so she assumed that she’d have to find another way to get to heaven.  She let go of the blue umbrella and watched it swirl into the storm’s strong fury.  The answer was in the sun, and she knew it.  She would soon be in the comfort of heaven, but she didn’t know how long it would take the sun to cause a relapse that would end her lonely life.