3

Mary Kate woke early, after a restless night. Today was the first day of school, and she was the schoolteacher. She had absolutely no idea how to teach school. She slipped out of bed and dressed, then went downstairs. Last night, she had made up a batch of wheat bread dough and put it in the refrigerator. It was a special recipe that required a long kneading time.

She took the bowl out of the refrigerator and turned the dough onto a lightly floured surface. She deflated the dough—gently pressing down to let the air out. By gently squeezing out the excess carbon dioxide, the yeast would be more fully distributed throughout the dough. Then she started the kneading process: turn and fold, turn and fold, turn and fold. She knew she would need the task this morning—kneading bread could dispel a good deal of anxiety from even the most nervous heart.

And it did help. By the time her father woke to head outside and feed the livestock, she was almost calm. Almost. “There’s coffee started,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and wavery.

Amos poured himself a cup and peered at the bread she was kneading. “Wheat. Hmmm. You must be feeling pretty fidgety.”

Panic rose up again inside of M.K. “I can’t do it, Dad.”

Amos put the coffee cup on the counter. “Of course you can. You’ve never failed yet at anything you tried to do, have you?”

“Well, no, but I have never tried to teach school.”

“You’ve tackled every job that ever came your way. You never shirked, and you always stuck to it till you did what you set out to do. Success gets to be a habit, like anything else a person keeps on doing.”

M.K. felt a little better. It was true; she had always kept on trying, she had always had to. Well, now she had to teach school.

“Remember when Sadie ended up with the job of tending chickens? And she just couldn’t bring herself to butcher one. You just picked up that ax and—” he made a cutting motion with his hand—“the lights went out on that poor chicken. You must have only been eight or so.”

“Seven.”

“And remember when Jimmy Fisher took his pigeons to school and accidentally released them inside the schoolhouse?”

M.K.’s head snapped up. “That was no accident! He let them go on purpose.”

“And you helped capture them.”

M.K. grinned. “Alice Smucker hid under her desk.”

“Now that is not something you would ever do as a teacher. You’re too brave.”

She put the bread dough into an oiled bowl to rise. Fern would bake it later this morning. She turned to her father. “Do you really think I’m brave?”

He patted her shoulder. “The bravest girl I know.”

At ten minutes to seven, M.K. couldn’t put it off any longer. She picked up her Igloo lunch box and left for school.

Jenny couldn’t believe her ears. “You mean you want me to lie to everyone and say that my last name is Yoder?”

“It’s for the best, Jenny,” Chris said. The two of them were eating together at the kitchen table. “This is kind of . . . interesting. I don’t believe I’ve ever had Cream of Wheat that looked like soup before.” He lifted his spoon and the Cream of Wheat slipped off like a waterfall.

Jenny may have used a little too much liquid.

She had learned a lot from Old Deborah, but mostly about gardens and herbs and remedies. Old Deborah’s healing work took up so much of her time that she didn’t cook or bake like most Amish women did. As a result, Jenny had never been much of a cook, but now, she realized, things were going to have to change. She had better figure out how to cook if they were going to eat anything that wasn’t from a can or a box. “Old Deborah would never agree to a lie. Using her name as ours is wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Chris added raw Cream of Wheat into the bowl until it resembled gray wallpaper paste. He took a taste and gagged. Then he put his spoon down, frowning. “Old Deborah raised us like we were her own. She would understand.”

Jenny sighed. She knew her brother well enough to know it was useless to try to reason with him. Stubborn. He was just so stubborn about some things. She picked up her brown lunch bag and walked to the door, dreading what lay ahead.

Three hours later, M.K. rang the bell to start her first day of school. Calling the cattle to the trough of knowledge was how she had always thought of it. Doozy took up residence on the front steps—as far as M.K. would let him come—and wouldn’t budge.

Before M.K. was a sea of polished wood desks. The children tripped over Doozy as they hurried inside the classroom and stared at M.K. She stood, ramrod straight, and faced all of those scholars.

There were so many! So many beady little eyes.

She racked her brain for what came next. Nothing came to mind.

For the first time in her life, her mind was a complete blank. Empty. She thought she might get sick. She might get sick and die, right on the spot. That, she thought, would serve the school board right.

From the back of the room, Jenny sized up the new teacher. She could see this young teacher nervously knot and unknot her hands. You could tell she didn’t know where to begin or which way was up. Her voice wobbled as she said “Good morning” to the students. Wobbled.

“Morning, M.K.,” said a few students.

A boy with big glasses raised his hand as high as it could go. “We should probably call you Teacher M.K.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you, Danny. Please call me Teacher M.K.,” she corrected, but her voice sounded uncertain.

What kind of a name was Emkay?

A big boy leaned over his desk and winked at Jenny. She snapped her head away from him. How rude! Boys were never rude in her old school. But then, there was an abundance of girls in the upper grades. There was only one boy who was her age at her old school, Teddy Beiler, and he was frightened of the girls. Teddy had a permanently startled look on his face.

Then the new teacher tried to take roll and dropped the roll book. Twice. When she dropped it the second time, the big boys in the back of the room quickly changed their seats just to confuse her. And it did. When she straightened up, she looked thoroughly flustered.

“I’ll start with the first grade,” the teacher said. “Barbara Jean Shrock?”

A little hand shot up. “Here,” Barbara Jean said in a thin, piping voice. “But I’m not staying.” There was a whistle in Barbara Jean’s whisper because she was missing her two front teeth, so staying came out as th-taying. She sat primly, her purple dress pulled snugly over her small bony knees. The sneakers she wore dangled several inches above the ground. Her tiny hands were neatly folded in her lap.

“Well, let’s get through the roll, at least,” the teacher said. “Eva Zook?”

Another little girl raised her hand. “Here.”

“Now the second grade.” This went on for a few more minutes until something happened that interested Jenny. When the teacher reached the sixth grade, she called out, “Danny Riehl?”

“Here,” a boy said. It was the same boy who had spoken up earlier. He had a round face and wore big glasses with adhesive tape in the middle. His hair was the color of straw. He was earnest, Jenny thought. An earnest boy.

A tall girl in the back row stood up. “I’m Anna Mae Glick and I need to sit next to Danny Riehl.”

The teacher’s face shifted to a frown of puzzlement. “Why is that?”

“Because we’re going to be married someday,” Anna Mae Glick said smugly. “He’s already asked me. We’re going to get married when I’m twenty and he’s eighteen. It’s all settled.”

Danny, who was sitting a couple of desks in front of Anna Mae, froze. He looked at the teacher in panic. “No, Anna Mae, I didn’t say I would marry you,” he protested. “I never did.”

Anna Mae glared at him. “You did!” she said. “You promised! Don’t think you can break your promises like that.” She snapped her fingers to demonstrate Danny’s broken promises.

“No, I never did,” Danny repeated quietly. He looked troubled.

The big boys started snickering. One of them—the one who had winked so rudely at Jenny, said, “Anna Mae, you mean that nobody would ever marry you, not in a hundred years.”

“You mean that nobody would ever marry you,” Anna Mae retorted. “Any girl would take one look at you, Eugene Miller, and be sick.”

Yes and no. Eugene Miller did carry with him a strong odor. Pig farmers, Jenny guessed. You didn’t want to get downwind of him. And Eugene could be rude, but he wasn’t bad looking. He was man-sized and there was a rim of fuzz on his upper lip.

Anna Mae crossed her arms. “M.K., just so you know, Eugene Miller is a nuisance.”

Eugene Miller let out a room-shaking guffaw.

“Eugene and I are permanently mad at each other,” Anna Mae added. “Just so you know.”

“Anna Mae, you are in the eighth grade,” the teacher said, consulting her roll book. “You need to sit with your class.”

Anna Mae scowled but sat down in her seat, a few rows behind Danny.

Jenny began to wonder if this teacher was going to ever get the class to an actual subject before the end of this first teaching day.

Peering once more into the roll book, the teacher looked relieved at the prospect of getting roll call back on track. She read Jenny’s name but seemed puzzled when Jenny was the one who answered. “Shouldn’t you be sitting up front with your own grade?”

“I am sitting with my own grade,” Jenny said firmly.

Flustered, the teacher glanced at the roll book again. “How old are you?”

“Thirteen.”

“I would have thought ten,” Anna Mae said loudly.

Jenny glared at Anna Mae. She crossed that girl off her potential friend list. That was unfortunate because there weren’t many girls in the upper grades.

“Are you new to Stoney Ridge?” the teacher said.

Chris had warned Jenny to think twice before she said anything. Anything at all. “Yes,” Jenny said, slowly and carefully.

The teacher tilted her head at Jenny, as if she was about to ask something else, but one of the big boys sent a paper airplane sailing across the room. It hit the window and fell to the ground. The teacher went to pick it up. Breathing a little hard, she asked, “Whose is this?”

Of course, no one would admit to it. They all kept their eyes facing forward, even the little ones. Teacher M.K. looked up and down the rows at the children, then threw the airplane into the garbage can. A big boy snickered. Eugene Miller. Jenny thought that boy had a saucy way about him. His face held a big grin as he looked right at the blackboard. And the silly teacher didn’t do anything. Not a thing.

At that exact moment, Jenny knew that this young woman would never make it as a teacher. She didn’t want to be the boss.

M.K.’s armpits were wet and she felt like throwing up. She stared at the children, who were staring back at her.

Six-year-old Barbara Jean Shrock stood by her desk and tugged on M.K.’s dress. “I’m going home.”

“Barbara Jean, you can’t go home,” M.K. said, feeling a rise of panic. “It’s only nine in the morning.”

Barbara Jean planted her little feet. “You thaid I jutht needed to get through roll call.”

M.K. was ready to go home too. This whole experience, the full hour of it, was turning out just like she had thought it would. Disastrous. Each time she thought she had the classroom under control, something would happen that was entirely out of her control. The last something was a mouse. She strongly suspected that Eugene Miller had something to do with that mouse in the classroom, but she couldn’t prove it. When she told him to catch it, he said, “You’re not the boss of me, M.K. Lapp. I remember when you were in eighth grade and you put a black racer snake in Teacher Alice’s bottom desk drawer. She practically had a fatal heart attack, right then and there.”

And what could M.K. say to that? It was the truth. In fact, it was the essence of the problem. M.K. had been the worst offender of any pupil—by a long shot. Hadn’t she just been reprimanded in church for reading a book? How could she possibly try to act like she was in charge when she was known for being the ringleader of mischief? She knew these pupils, and they knew her. It was hopeless. And the thing was—she didn’t blame them one bit. She should not be standing here as their teacher.

Eugene Miller was in the third grade when M.K. was in eighth. He was a little too smart-mouthed for his own good, even back then. And he was at that troublesome age now, a renowned prankster. He had dark, shaggy hair that hung in his eyes, and he wore a smirk of superiority on his wide mouth as if laughing at the whole world and everyone in it. Clearly, he was the leader of the big boys, and she knew he could easily influence them to make trouble for her.

And then there was that overly petite new girl—Jenny. She looked at M.K. with unconcealed suspicion. As if she knew M.K. had no business teaching.

It dawned on M.K. that she had probably stared at poor Alice Smucker in the same insolent way as Jenny was staring at her. It was the first time she could recall having a sympathetic feeling for Alice Smucker. Ever. The thought amazed her.

Barbara Jean pulled on M.K.’s sleeve again. “Thee you thometime at church.”

M.K. had to think fast. If she allowed Barbara Jean to leave, the entire classroom would think up excuses to leave. Had she been in their position, she would be inventing excuses for each of the students and selling them for a nickel during recess. “Barbara Jean, tell me why you want to go home.”

Tears filled Barbara Jean’s eyes. “I love my mom tho much. You don’t know how hard it ith to be away from thomeone you love that much.”

M.K. felt tears prick at her eyes. That she understood! She pulled Barbara Jean into a hug and whispered, “I miss my mom like that too.” She wiped away Barbara Jean’s tears with her handkerchief. Then she wiped away her own tears.

Ridiculous. This was getting ridiculous. Somehow, she had to pick up the pieces of this class and carry on. “How would you like to be the teacher’s helper and sit at my desk?”

Barbara Jean gave that some thought.

“If you still want to go home at lunch, then I’ll let you go.”

Barbara Jean whispered a yeth, so M.K. led her right up to her desk.

M.K. felt rather proud of herself. She had actually solved a problem. The feeling quickly dissipated as she heard a high-pitched scream from the back of the classroom. Someone had lit a match and tossed it into the trash can at the back of the room. As M.K. rushed outside with the flaming trash can, she thought she caught a smirk on Eugene Miller’s smug face. Why, that boy was another Jimmy Fisher. Worse.

Somehow, she stumbled ahead through the day, one eye on the clock, willing this hour to be over, and then the next and the next.

Chris tried to hold back a smile when he heard Jenny’s complaints about the new teacher. He burst out laughing when she described the teacher’s looks: bony, wispy haired, wild-eyed, false teeth that wobbled when she talked. His sister had a vivid imagination. “What’s her name?” he asked.

“Teacher M.K. That’s all I know about her. That and the fact that she has had no teaching experience whatsoever. I’m not even sure she can read. Probably not.”

Chris rolled his eyes. “I highly doubt the school board would give the teaching job to a teacher who couldn’t read.”

“Well, I heard that the real teacher was run over by a crazed lunatic. Just last week. And she’s dying as a result. That’s a fact. I heard that too.”

Chris knew Jenny had impossibly high expectations for teachers and they always fell short. Jenny had yet to find a teacher who challenged her. She was always “bored.” But the more he heard about the school day—starting with the fire in the trash can and ending with the disappearance of a little first grade girl, the more he had to agree with Jenny’s assessment. This new teacher sounded like she had no ability to control a classroom filled with big boys. No backbone at all. If this was day one, it was going to be a long school year.

He knew what it was like to have good teachers and not-so-good teachers. That was the thing about a one-room schoolhouse. You didn’t have much of a choice with your teacher. At least Jenny had a place to be each day, and this hapless teacher was too preoccupied with putting out fires to ask his sister too many questions about her background.

But he did make Jenny promise not to stir up any trouble. The last thing she needed to do was to add to this poor pitiful teacher’s problems with the big boys.

Chris had problems of his own on his mind tonight. He stared at the ceiling. The sight of water stains and peeling plaster did little to dispel the cloud of gloom hovering over him.

He was working at Windmill Farm this morning and got caught in an untimely conversation with Hank Lapp, Amos’s uncle. Chris had been cutting hay in the north field and noticed the bit for the large Belgian wasn’t fitting properly. The big horse kept tossing her head. When Chris examined the bit, he saw that a piece of it had come undone and was causing discomfort for the horse. That wouldn’t do. He headed back to the barn to see if he could either fix the bit or find another one.

As he passed by a buggy, a loud voice called out: “DADGUM!”

Chris stopped to locate the source of the voice.

“BLAST! WHERE DID THAT DADGUM THING GO?”

All around the buggy were tools. Chris looked into the shop and thought he had never seen such a mess. Buggy parts and tools littered the floor. Every horizontal surface was filled. A headful of wild white hair popped out from under the buggy and peered up at Chris in surprise. If Chris wasn’t mistaken, one of the man’s eyes wandered.

“Uh, hello,” Chris said to the head. “I’m helping Amos cut hay.”

The wild-haired man pulled himself out from under the buggy. “So I heard!” He rose to his feet and thrust an oil-smudged hand at Chris. He pumped Chris’s hand up and down. “Hank Lapp. Known far and wide for my buggy repairs.”

“Not hardly,” came another voice.

Chris whirled around to face another older man with a long white beard.

“When will this buggy be ready, Hank?” the man said. “It’s been months now.”

“Now, Elmo, what we’ve got here is a tricky problem,” Hank said. “Very hard to fix. Needs just the right part and I can’t seem to . . . uh . . . locate the source.”

As the two men discussed the buggy, the conversation became more animated, especially on the part of Hank Lapp. Chris decided it would be wise to slip quietly away. On the ground, he noticed a clevis—a little metal pin that held the singletree to the buggy shafts. He bent down and picked it up, then walked to the buggy. He looked up to see if he could interrupt the men, but Hank was waving his arms, talking fast, trying to explain why there was such a delay in fixing this particular buggy. Chris slipped the clevis into place and rose to his feet. Hank abruptly stopped talking. The two men stared at Chris.

“I think I found that part you were looking for.” Chris knocked on the singletree that kept the traces from working their way off on their own. “See? It works.”

Hank came over to check it out. “LOOK AT THAT! Well, wonders never cease.”

Elmo sized up Chris as if he had just noticed he was there. The way he looked at Chris made him nervous. It was like the man was peering into his soul. “And who are you?”

“That’s Amos’s hired help. New to town.” Hank looked over at Chris. “Son, I didn’t catch your name.”

“Chris Yoder.”

“Chris Yoder, this is Bishop Elmo.” Hank pulled on the trace holders to make sure they were taut.

The bishop. The bishop? Oh, this was not good. Not good at all.

Bishop Elmo, cheerful and bespectacled, took a step closer to Chris. “New to Stoney Ridge?”

“Really new. Just arrived.”

“Any relation to Isaac Yoder?”

Chris shook his head.

“Melvin Yoder?”

Chris shook his head more vehemently. He did not want to start down that long road of dissecting family trees. Two thoughts ricocheted through his mind at that moment. One, that Bishop Elmo would ask why he hadn’t seen him in church more often once he discovered how long Chris had been here. That could be answered easily—they really just arrived a few weeks ago. A second and far more dangerous question was that the bishop might inquire—no, definitely would inquire, by the way he looked at that moment—as to where Chris had come from. Actually, it was surprising that he’d been able to evade the question so far with Amos Lapp and a few other people he had done odd jobs for, thanks to Bud at the hardware store. Chris quickly searched his brain for something to comment on, hoping it might redirect the conversation.

He held up the bit in his hand. “I left the horses in the field while I fixed this bit. It sure is a hot day. I’d better get back to work.” He rushed off to the barn before Bishop Elmo could squeeze in another question.

And still, Elmo managed to call out, “I’ll expect to see you in church in two Sundays, Chris Yoder.”

Church. A feeling of dread washed over Chris. He would be found out.

Stop it! he told himself fiercely. They’d come this far, hadn’t they?