22
At the Bent N’ Dent, Hank Lapp heard someone say that Freeman was going to cut down the Hanging Tree, so he stopped by Jesse’s buggy shop to persuade him to go watch. “Come on with me,” Hank said. “It’s a ‘Big Hat, No Cattle’ kind of day.”
That was Hank’s description of the day’s bleak weather—leaden gray skies but no snow. Jesse looked around the buggy shop. Why not? Seeing the Hanging Tree get cut down might be a pretty exciting thing to watch, far more of a thrill than sitting in a buggy shop. He whistled for C.P. and started toward Amos Lapp’s cornfield to make a shortcut to the Glick property. “SLOW DOWN, slow down,” Hank yelled from behind him. “En Baam fallt net uff der erscht Hack.” A tree falls not at the first stroke.
Jesse stopped, clapped for C.P. to return to him, and waited for Hank to catch up. When they came to the base of the hill of the big old oak tree, Jesse saw that a small crowd had gathered. Under the oak tree were Freeman and Levi, with winches and ropes and a chainsaw. Their sons stood around them, running and playing tag.
“I don’t think I want the children so close,” Freeman’s wife said as she gathered her children around her like a hen pulls in her chicks.
Dane made his way around them to reach Jesse. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.” He stood watching for a long moment. Jesse could see something swell up in Dane, until it overflowed.
Dane stomped up the hill a few paces and yelled, “Freeman, what do you think you’re doing?”
Freeman turned to locate the voice. “What does it look like? I’m cutting down a dead tree.”
“Why now? Why today? It’s been dead for years.”
“Then it’s high time.”
“It’s your way of getting back at everybody. It’s your silent revenge.”
Freeman ignored him and reached down to pick up the chainsaw.
Jesse turned to Hank. “What did Dane mean by that? What’s silent revenge?”
“That tree.” Hank’s one good eye was fixed on it. “It’s the very tree their illustrious ancestor was hung on.”
“Pardon?”
“The infamous horse thief. That’s the Hanging Tree.”
Oh.
“Freeman!” Dane yelled. “I asked you a question and I want an answer. What are you doing? When are you going to stop trying to make everybody in this town pay for your hurt pride? Nothing is going to change when you take this tree down. It’s not going to erase the parts of the story you don’t like. Cutting this tree down is your version of lot switching. You can’t keep trying to cover things up. You can’t pick and choose your history. And guess what? Nobody cares! Nobody cares whether our great-grandfather was illegitimate. Nobody cares that we have a horse thief in our family tree. Nobody cares whether we’re 100 percent Amish or 84 percent Amish.”
Freeman’s jaw clenched and unclenched rhythmically. “Stand back, boy.”
But Dane wouldn’t stand back. He didn’t budge. “All anybody cares about is who you are now. That’s what David Stoltzfus has been trying to get through your thick skull. You’re not who you should be. I’m ashamed to be related to you and it has nothing to do with a horse thief. It’s because of you. Your stubborn pride, your selfishness, your hard-heartedness. You’re always preaching about humility, but you’ve got more pride than anyone else on God’s green earth.”
Freeman faced him squarely, his beard bristling. “I told you to stand back.” He spoke the words in staccato, angry and pointed.
Dane threw his hands into the air. “What’s it going to take, Freeman? What’s ever going to get through to you?!”
Freeman braced himself, then pulled the chain to start the engine. Crows scattered out of the nearby trees. He set the blade against the tree trunk to start a hinge. He worked for a while, then stopped to take a break and turned off the chainsaw. Levi swept away the sawdust from the hinge.
Dane walked back to join Jesse and Hank, an angry, disgusted look on his face. “He’s not even cutting the tree down the right way,” Dane said. “He should be taking down more limbs before he starts the hinge. He’s doing it wrong.”
“RIGHT YOU ARE,” Hank boomed. “There’s a reason loose branches are called widow-makers.”
Dane folded his arms against his chest and glanced at Jesse. “Haven’t you noticed? You don’t tell Freeman anything.”
“But if it’s not safe . . .”
Hank took off his hat and scratched his wild white hair. “I guess he figures there’s nothing to hurt out here when the tree drops.”
True. But Jesse took a few steps back.
Freeman had his hand on the pull cord when a shout came from down the hill.
“No, Freeman, no! There’s a great blue heron nest in that tree!” Everyone turned to see Birdy running up the hill. “You can’t chop it down.” She ran right up to him and put her hands on the chainsaw.
Freeman jerked it from her. “The tree is dead. The branches are brittle. Keeping it is a danger.”
“To whom? No one ever comes out here.”
“If I leave it, it will only get rotten and then I can’t sell the wood. And I need the wood.”
“But not that tree!” She nearly choked over the words. “There are other trees!”
He glared at her. “This tree will provide an abundance of high-quality firewood.”
“You have a shed full of stacked firewood.” She pointed toward the house. “You could at least wait until the heron moves on.”
“Next year? Or the year after?” He shook his beard like a billy goat. “No reason to wait. Levi knows of a man in town who wants white oak lumber to build a sailboat.”
“I do,” Levi said. “Fellow wants to build a sailboat.”
Freeman pulled the cord to start the engine. “Stand back, Birdy,” he shouted over the sound of the engine. “I can’t be responsible for you.”
Birdy turned to Dane for help.
“Don’t bother, Birdy,” Dane said, his lips twisting in revulsion. “He won’t listen to you. He won’t listen to anybody.” He walked over to Birdy and pulled her by the arm to stand farther away from where Freeman was working.
Freeman continued to cut through the tree when, over the sound of the engine, a splitting sound filled the air. The vibration of the cutting caused a large branch to snap off, and as it came down, it brought several more with it. The tree started to sway, but in the opposite direction of the hinge made by Freeman. He looked up at the treetop in horror, then turned off the chainsaw and threw it to the ground as he yelled, “Run! Everyone run!”
He took off down the hill behind Levi. Jesse and Dane and Hank bolted a few dozen feet away, then stopped to turn and watch the tree fall. Jesse gasped as he saw Birdy near the tree. Instead of running, Birdy couldn’t seem to move. She froze.
Jesse could do nothing except hold his breath, paralyzed by his own helplessness. He could see the whole thing unfold like a bad dream.
As the tree came crashing down on Birdy, the quiet that followed was immediate and complete.
Birdy was knocked out cold, with a large gash on her head and an arm broken in two places. The doctor set her arm and stitched her cut, but made her stay overnight in the hospital because of her concussion. She slept for fourteen hours, her temperature raised and pulse erratic. David didn’t leave her side. This was where he belonged, here with this unadorned woman, whose wholesomeness and kindness made anyone pale in comparison to her. He sat in a chair in a darkened room, just being here. Near her. Praying and thinking.
He heard the door open and saw a doctor walk in. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust and realize that he recognized this doctor, wearing blue scrubs. This doctor was his sister Ruth.
“Hi, David,” she whispered. She stood at the end of Birdy’s bed. “I just heard about the accident when I started my shift. Sounds like she was lucky. It could have been much, much worse.”
“Yes,” he said. “She was hit by a branch, but the trunk of the tree missed her by mere inches.”
“She’s important to you, isn’t she? I mean, more than just a church member. Or maybe you do this for all the church members.”
“Yes, I would do this for anyone in my church.” That was true. “And yes, she is important to me.” David looked at Birdy, sleeping peacefully, with a white bandage wrapped around her head.
“The nurses say that whenever you walk into hospital rooms, patients’ heart rates go down.”
A light smile touched his lips. “Hopefully not too far down.”
She grinned. “Is there anything I can do for you, David? You should eat something. I could get you something from the cafeteria. Even a piece of toast would be good for your ulcer. For your stomach. Don’t let it get empty.”
“I’m fine.” It still seemed incredulous to David that his sister would be working at this hospital, of all places in the world. When he had sensed God’s call to come to Stoney Ridge, this encounter with Ruth must have been one of the reasons why. How could he have ever doubted the wisdom of God in sending him here, as difficult as it had been? “Yes, you can do something for me. Come to the house for Christmas. Meet your nieces and nephew.”
Ruth hesitated. “Mom will be there.”
“Yes.”
She picked up Birdy’s chart and glanced through it.
In his mind’s eye, David saw the girl she used to be, the wonderfully feisty sister who was never satisfied with the way things were, who was always challenging, always exasperating their mother.
Ruth turned back to David. “Soon, perhaps. I’m not quite ready. I’ve just started work here. My house needs unpacking. I’m still living out of boxes.”
“Ruth, why did you come here? What made you leave Ohio?”
She kept her eyes on Birdy. “Same reason as you, most likely. Opportunity called.”
“The reason I came here was because I felt God’s call to come.”
“As did I. There are many ways to serve God, David. The Amish don’t have the corner on that. They just they think they do.” She went to the door. “You can have me paged if you need anything.” She put her hand on the door handle, then hesitated and turned back when he spoke her name.
“You’ll come for Christmas? There’s one person, in particular, who’s eager to meet you. My fourteen-year-old daughter, Ruthie.”
A few seconds of silence, then, “Is she as stubborn as me?”
“Yes. Very possibly, even more so.”
She grinned and it lit her face. How he loved her smile! He’d forgotten how much he’d missed his sister. “I’ll give some thought to Christmas. No promises.”
“Okay,” he said, returning her smile. “Consider yourself invited. And wanted.”
She looked over at Birdy. “Your friend was lucky. She’ll be fine before too long. The sleep is good for her. It’s how the brain heals.”
Not lucky, David thought. There was no such thing as luck. Birdy’s life had been spared because she was blessed. He was blessed just knowing her. The thought of life without her was impossible.
A few hours later, Birdy started to stir. She slowly opened her eyes, blinked down at the cast on her arm, looked around the room in a daze, and asked what had happened. David explained that a branch from the Hanging Tree had fallen on her, the trunk narrowly missing her.
She nodded weakly and closed her eyes. “Poor Freeman,” she said, her eyelids shut and quivering. “He must be beside himself.”
Was he? David hadn’t seen Freeman or Levi at the hospital when he arrived last night. He put his hand to her cheek and then let it fall. “Birdy,” he began, slowly and firmly. “Can you forgive me?”
She opened her eyes. “You’ve had so much to deal with lately.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “Yes,” he went on almost sheepishly, “it’s true that the last few weeks have been . . . distracting. But . . .”
Her voice softened. “David, you musn’t worry so. I understand.”
Their gazes met momentarily. That was the thing. She did understand. She didn’t judge him for his weakness. Or meekness. Or cowardliness. She accepted him the way he was, flaws and all. He searched for a way to express the fullness in his heart, but couldn’t seem to find the right words. There was no simple way to express what she meant to him.
“Everybody needs you, David.”
“Yes, sometimes it seems like everybody does need me. But Birdy—” his voice broke—“I need you.”
Birdy reached out for his hand. “I like hearing that.”
He clasped her hand and lifted it to his lips. “Are you sure you’re ready, Birdy?” Ready to be a minister’s wife? Ready to become a stepmother to six children of assorted ages? And soon, a step-grandmother to Katrina’s baby? Ready to be a daughter-in-law to Tillie Yoder Stoltzfus? All these thoughts ran through his mind. Could anyone ever be ready for this role? Was it even fair to ask? Perhaps not.
Birdy squeezed his hand and locked eyes with him. “Oh David, don’t you know? I’ve been ready from the moment I first saw you.”
They smiled at each other, and a moment of mutual appreciation fluttered between them.
“Come closer,” she whispered.
He sat gingerly on the edge of the mattress, and she had to reach out and pull him toward her. He stretched forward to embrace her, awkwardly and carefully, so that he wouldn’t bump her broken arm or jostle her sore head, though she didn’t seem to mind at all.
He turned his face against her ear. “Birdy Glick, I love you.”
Nothing much was happening in the buggy shop today and Jesse lay in bed, pondering the marketability of metal foot warmers for buggies. He had read an article in Buggy News about the use of bottles filled with hot water and thought he might be able to sell them at the Bent N’ Dent. His musings were interrupted by a persistent rapping from below on the buggy shop door. He knew that kind of rapping did not bode well. He jumped out of bed, threw on his pants, and tucked his shirttails in his pants as he hurried down the stairs to open the door.
Eli Smucker glared down at him. “My wife was right. She said you have a tendency to be unreliable.”
This was an unfortunate way to greet the day. “Good morning, Eli. Is something wrong?”
“You’d better believe something is wrong. It broke down! On my first trip in the snow, the ski sled attachment came right off my buggy!”
Jesse was afraid of something like that. Old bolts were old bolts. And Eli’s ski sled attachments were handmade and primitive. Sooner or later, one had to face reality with an old buggy and accept that it had come to the end of its life. He understood the attachment that people developed to a buggy, but sentiment had to be kept in its place. Buggies couldn’t last forever. Why not throw away old buggies once they had had their day?
He stretched to his tiptoes to peer behind Eli into the driveway. “Where is the buggy now?”
“On the road to town. Not far from your father’s house.”
“Abandoned? You left the horse and buggy there?”
“I took my horse home.”
“Give me a minute to get dressed and we can go get your buggy.”
Eli shook his head. “I have work to do. You figure out a way to get that buggy back to the shop and fixed. For good, this time!”
As Jesse made his way down the hill to see what needed to be done to retrieve Eli’s buggy, he wondered what work it was that Eli had to do. Mostly, Eli sat at the Bent N’ Dent and played checkers and drank coffee. He hopped over a fence and walked around a small herd of dairy cows who watched him with accusing eyes, as if they knew, they knew, he had tried to repair Eli’s buggy with brittle old bolts.
Why did he listen to Hank Lapp? It always ended up getting him into trouble.
He came to the edge of the field, hopped the fence, and trudged through the snow to where he thought Eli had said he had abandoned the broken-down buggy. He looked up and down the road, but there was no buggy. He was sure that Eli said it happened very close to the turnoff to his father’s house.
He walked up the road, thinking it must have happened farther than Eli had thought, but there was still no sign of the buggy. He walked back again to the turnoff. “Very strange.” He doubled back and then a shocking thought dawned on him.
It had been stolen. Eli’s old broken-down but dearly beloved buggy had been stolen.