Chapter Seven

After two full weeks of resting, as Martha Shrock insisted, in the sinner’s shack with nothing but her own voice to listen to, Grace couldn’t believe how lovely her Aenti Tess’s poor struggling gelding sounded rattling up the hill. Betty had come by once, but it was clear she didn’t like climbing that hill one bit. Or maybe it was the descent that made her all jittery. Abram had delivered her a box of fresh goods Elli insisted she needed, along with fresh gauze and ointment for her freshly removed stitches. There was also the invisible visitor. The one she was sure she had frightened off well and good two weeks ago. He had left over three dozen eggs in the passing days on her porch, but had waited under the veil of darkness to do so. It was sweet, regardless of the fact that he clearly wanted no cause to face her after the fit she’d thrown.

Dressed in her nicest robin-egg-blue dress, just recently loosened of a few threads that made it a bit more well-fitting than she felt comfortable in, she climbed into the buggy and drew in a ragged breath. Her nerves had only begun to calm after her horrible night, but facing another line of fresh faces sent them stirring again. This would be her first time attending a Sunday church that was not in her own community.

Touching the place on her arm where fresh white cotton gauze covered itchy flesh no longer holding six stitches, she suddenly felt that if she had contracted rabies, it would have been easier to have dealt with than being the new face walking into the unknown. Where was her bravery now?

“You healin’?” Tess asked in a dry voice.

Grace nodded, but neither of them broached the topic of the horrible night the stray dogs had found their way inside the shack. She rubbed at a stain of dust that had fallen onto her apron front, then licked her thumb to help remove its blemish from the white. Like everything about her, it was a mistake, and the little speck spread like spilled kaffi and took hold of the fabric. Stained, she chastised herself. Now her Sunday best was as stained as she was. She let out a heavy sigh.

The bishop’s home was over the next incline ahead, according to her aenti. The overly warm weather had ceased its tormenting of the valley and now presented itself like a proper autumn morning with cooler temps. Grace was glad for the silence that rode between them. It gave her another opportunity to chide herself for the way she had treated Cullen and Elli. They had only meant well, seeing about her as they did, even forcing her to be stitched up by a local midwife slash Amish nurse, though Martha was well-equipped and educated, surprisingly. Amish didn’t attend school after the eighth grade, but Martha had taken advantage of her rumschpringe years to take nursing classes and returned to not only be baptized, but to help all the Amish communities that made up Pleasants County.

Grace wished she had used her run around years more wisely. Though a family of her own had always been her hope, she would have preferred opening her own bakery, starting a family the traditional way, but those were no longer possibilities.

Despite feeling as big as a barn crammed with critters, Grace couldn’t help but recall how effortlessly Cullen had swept her from the floor, his muscular arms with a light-as-a-feather touch. He had to understand her rejection of his help, spawned by too many mistakes trusting people to be sincere in their feelings toward her.

But Cullen didn’t know. He could never know how just his presence made her nervous. He was just too handsome for his own good, and that wouldn’t do now that she was resigned to a life without a man in it. Still, she couldn’t help but notice how his suspenders drew taut when he had lifted her or that he’d smelled of smoke, earth, and man. It didn’t go unnoticed the way his dark kaffi eyes winced at the first sight of her kneeling behind her bed. And what man would let her talk to him as she had and simply bite his tongue and step outside? It just didn’t happen.

“Bishop Mast and our ministers know you are coming. He is aware of your situation. I should hope you conduct yourself properly if he speaks with you,” Tessie said as if in warning.

Grace wrung her hands together, nodded obediently, and tried to ignore the humming of her irregular heartbeat. The thought of facing another group of elders had her stomach in knots. Ordnung, or the traditional rules and practices of the Amish faith, was generally the same from community to community. Some had more liberal allowances, like pastel colors, cell phones for business use, and even divorce, if the circumstances were dire. Havenlee had no such liberties. Surely her condition was evidence enough that she hadn’t forgotten her lost morals.

She could still remember her first Sunday church gathering after her secret was no longer a secret. It was directly after the bishop had made her invisible to the community, invoking the banning that was spawned “out of love,” as he called it.

Entering her onkle’s home that morning, a home she had played in and run through all her childhood, she found it as foreign as her shack. Eyes darted past her, and bodies slid away when she went to take a seat on the lonely bench in the corner. Her friends and family avoided her as if she were poison ivy and her sins catching.

She would never understand shunning. After all the years she had been preached to about forgiveness, grace, and Gott’s mercies, it seemed so contradictory, despite all the assurances of its need as a gift of love to help the sinner repent and turn away from their sinful behaviors and find their way back into the fold.

At first, being invisible was the hardest thing Grace had ever endured. Now, as her girth grew and her emotions regularly became unhinged, invisibility was a gift. As Tess drove up to the massive black barn with fifty or so other buggies, a knot inside her tightened. The image of lambs being led to the slaughter came to mind.

She carefully lowered herself to the ground, without assistance from one of the three young boys handling the horses today. Staring at the ground, for she could no longer see her feet no matter how small Hannah thought her to be, she obediently followed her aenti toward the house. For such a small woman of age, Tessie’s stride soon left Grace to her own grave peril. Yep, she was a lamb all right.

“Gracie!” Grace looked up, and Hannah was the first to greet her on the front porch. She looked like sunshine after the storm, her bold green dress matching that of the shirt on the little towheaded boy straddled comfortably on her hip.

“He is adorable Hannah,” Grace said.

“He is a handful, I assure you,” Hannah jested, handing Noah over to a man standing nearby Grace could only assume was Hannah’s ehemann.

Hannah grabbed hold of Grace’s hand as if they had been dear friends since childhood and immediately escorted Grace into the huge white farmhouse. “It is gut you made it today. I hope you are feeling well. We have all worried about what happened to you.”

Grace didn’t know what to say. Why would people she didn’t know worry about her?

“The bishop’s haus has many rooms, but we shall all gather in the sitting area,” Hannah informed her, looping her arm into Grace’s as if she were fearful Grace would run. She would need to be more careful of how her face looked to others. It did no good to be so easily readable. “Small features still make big impressions,” her mutter always reminded her when her thoughts read like a book on her face.

Inside, a cool breeze wisped through hallways and rooms, and it did wonders to calm her frazzled nerves. As they drifted from one room to another, Hannah shared the history of the old house. Grace found the home to be mazelike and more than once wondered just how fast she could find her way back out to the main door if need be. The narrowing hallways were close-fitting and dense with strangers moving here and there. “I will show you around a bit, jah?” Hannah said pulling her farther still.

Grace nodded, regardless of how badly she wished to sit in some lonely corner and fade into the background instead.

The house had been an old orphanage, Hannah revealed, when that was still a thing, from the 1800s. And that explained a lot about the way rooms were scattered in an oddly chaotic fashion. Grace could envision classrooms and sleeping quarters filled with children who had been abandoned or had lost those who brought them into the world.

She thought of all the fearful and thankful faces brought here. She had not yet decided which she felt in her own abandonment. Raw, that’s what she still felt. Not just abandoned by the one who promised her a future, but by her own father who shared her same blood. Here, in a place where emotions were likely scattered as wildly as leaves on a stormy autumn day, she felt a strange calm she hadn’t expected. She, too, was like a forgotten child, perhaps. Would her boppli feel the same way some day?

Bodies flowed in and out of rooms and doorways. Grace stiffened with every brush of an arm. A narrow white door opened abruptly and brought her to a startling halt, separating her from Hannah.

“Ach. Sorry,” an older woman said in equal surprise, descending a staircase to enter the hallway, not taking into account traffic flowing on the other side of the door. “You are with child.” Grace cradled her middle and took a step back, bumping right into another body close behind her and stepping on their right shoe. She let out a timid huff, but heard nothing from behind her. Two hands instinctually steadied her shoulders so as not to let her topple and quickly let go once the threat was gone. Grace didn’t dare turn and face her victim, another set of eyes penetrating her. It was unnerving how narrow these halls were and how fast a heart could race and not burst.

“I shall be more mindful not to hurry. Forgive me, Grace Miller.” The woman smiled solemnly, but Grace only stilled at the mentioning of her name. Suddenly the warmth of the narrow hall reached a few degrees higher and she cupped a hand over her wounded arm.

“Nothing to forgive. I am gut,” Grace replied respectfully. When the woman who knew her name—though Grace did not know the woman’s—closed the door, Hannah came back into sight.

“That was Jane Mast, the bishop’s eldest,” Hannah informed. “Never married, and teaches at the school. Oh, hi, Cullen, how did I miss seeing ya behind our little Grace here?”

Hannah smiled just over her head, and Grace suddenly felt his towering presence. Cullen must have been who she had bumped into. Grace swallowed a lump that had formed and quickly stepped in line, following Hannah into the large sitting room. She refused to turn and greet him. So far nothing about this first gathering with the community was going as she had hoped.

Stepping into the sitting room, a sea of beards stopped midconversation to look at her. At their stony expressions, Grace lowered her head, playing invisible. Brushing past, Cullen uttered, “Excuse me, little Grace,” a playful grin spread across his wide lips that only teased at her, and suddenly Cullen’s presence behind her didn’t feel so unnerving. She rolled her eyes, but kept her lips tightly shut. She knew better than to speak to him here, and glancing up again at the gray beards, she knew she was right. Cullen joined the men to one side of the room, and conversation once again wheeled the community leaders back together.

Grace lowered onto the stiff bench just behind Hannah. Casually, she scanned the room before settling her sights on the only clean-shaven man, to her right. Cullen was quite a bit taller than any of the older men laughing at something he said. Yet why was she taking the time to notice that? He was clearly not the only beardless man in the room now that she pulled her gaze away and took in the gathering room. Her daed was right; she was a sinner of weak morals.

When hats started being hung on the walls by a few late arrivals, Grace knew the time had arrived and forced herself into attention. Cullen took a seat to the left and glanced her way with a half-hearted smile. Would he do that for the next three hours? Grace hoped not. She had been rude to him, and she was never rude. But she was tired of being treated like a woman who didn’t deserve forgiveness. Wasn’t forgiveness essential to their way of life? With that thought to herself, she lowered her head for the minister’s prayer.

…

Cullen sneaked another glance at Grace sitting next to Beth Zook and Walnut Ridge’s most recently baptized members. Grace looked like she was going to throw up, and hopefully a smile from a familiar face, even if it was his, might rein that nausea in before she made a spectacle of herself. She locked eyes with him, stared blankly, and then directed those big blue eyes to the center of the room. Was she not even going to at least try to be civil? He had been supplying her eggs, after all. Not that she knew it was him, or did she? Surely no one other than the women who found themselves concerned for her would be leaving her eggs. The thought ran through him surprisingly fast.

With so few maedels in Walnut Ridge, he hoped her condition at least allowed her peace from the unwed men of the community. Nothing was worse than a few desperate boys fearing they would never be family men or lonely widowers needing help to raise a family, making quick pests of themselves.

In truth, she was unwed, baptized, and having a baby. Certainly not how things were done. But at least she was safe. Grace was safe from pestering boys, and after installing hook-and-eye latches until he could build a better front door, she was safe from wild dogs.

Every time Cullen thought of her, the temperature rose a few degrees higher. He hadn’t expected that, not from someone such as her. He turned his attention back to David Zook, the minister preaching today, and put Grace and her blue eyes and dark hair out of mind.

“For it is by grace that ye be saved…” David began. Cullen’s eyes lifted and shot across the room where God’s Grace sat, head down, hands folded primly around the miracle inside her. Even the fallen deserved grace. Even they deserved second chances.

I hear ya Lord.