ANNA FELT THE HARD GLARES of the other mourners as the coffin was lowered into the grave. She knew what they were thinking: She hadn’t shed a tear since her father passed away three days ago. It was against God’s ways not to weep, they believed. The truth was, she considered him blessed to be finished with this cruel world.
Maybe her heart had become hardened. The last time she could remember crying was that night the Cromwell twins jumped to their watery deaths. Even when she had sat in her father’s meeting house twelve years ago trying to explain to Micah why she no longer loved him, she had been incapable of dredging up any feeling of loss or grief. She had spent the time since the war in a fog of benumbed despair, having come home from tending gassed soldiers to nurse a father who had lingered on for years with a disease that slowly ate his nerves until he shook like the wind.
Yes, she could hear the thoughts of Micah and these men around her, just as she had heard the silent prayers of those soldiers dying in the field wards:
This farm lies fallow. There will be no harvest again this year. The woman is thirty-seven years old. In a time of want and hunger, it is indulging the wanton sin of pride against the Almighty not to take a husband and be productive.
Her father’s dying request had been for Micah to take his place behind the pulpit. But Micah had already indicated his intent to remain at Bethel College, where he was now a professor of theology. Each Christmas for three years after her return home, he had made the long journey down to beg her hand in marriage, but she had always put him off.
When he finished the eulogy, the dirt was thrown into the hole and the mourners returned to the buggies without offering her condolences. Left alone in the small cemetery, she looked down at mound of fresh black loam and struggled to find comfort. It is just a grave, like all the others. At least he lies here at home, unlike those who—
“Anna.”
Startled, she flinched.
Micah caught her before she stumbled and fell. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
Recovering her balance, she brushed off his hand and set her face in stone. “It takes more than that now.”
He frowned, not taking her meaning. “May I have a word with you?”
She couldn’t look at him. “Don’t do this. My feelings have not changed.”
“No, I understand. Now is not the best time for this, I know, but I have to leave tonight. I have classes tomorrow.”
“Time for what?”
Taking her gently by the elbow, he led her from the cemetery fence and toward the hill where they had once played as children. He was heavier now and wreathed in a thick beard, but he still had that unintended grin, even in sad moments like this. She took several deep breaths to chase the recurrent dizziness that had haunted her since returning from France. It was Indian summer, and a few stubborn horseflies still buzzed in the brown grass, but the turn of the leaves in the holler groves promised that winter was creeping in, finger by pale finger. She sensed the shift of his censorious attention to the fields that had not been planted that year for lack of help.
As they walked, he seemed to be struggling for the words to start. Finally, he said, “You remember that barn-raising feast we had up here?”
“That feels like a lifetime ago.”
“You used to shoo those flies into my pie, Shoofly Raber.”
“Don’t do this, Micah. I know your tricks.”
He stopped walking and forced her to meet his eyes. “Out of respect for your father’s feelings, I waited to bring this up until he passed.”
“I can take care of the farm myself.”
“That’s not what I want to talk about.” He fidgeted with his pockets, just as he had years ago when he searched for the courage to invite her to bundle with him. “The elders of the congregation asked me to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“They say you haven’t been attending services.”
“Hearts filled with such tolerance and unconditional love,” she muttered with bitter sarcasm. “I cannot imagine why anyone would not want to bask in their presence.”
“Anna, these people are your family.”
She turned on him in hot anger. “They are not my family! I left my family in …” She stopped herself, knowing he would not understand.
He took her hands and pressed them together. “Will you pray with me?”
She escaped his importuning grasp. “I cannot.”
“What has happened to you? You refuse to pray on the day your father goes to his heavenly reward?”
She turned away. “Does Scripture not say that God is like a loving father to us?”
“Matthew Six-Twenty-Five. ‘Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?’”
“What loving father would cause his children to endure so much pain and suffering? Not a Father I will worship.”
“Anna, you are not the only one who has suffered. Look around you. In the English towns, people have no work. Children are going without meals.”
Her fists were clenched so tight that she felt her nails digging into her palms. “I never said I was the only one!”
After a long silence, she looked up to find him bathed in tears of pain, gazing across the waving fields of golden rye on the farm down the road. His broad, expressive face had always been a flip-deck of emotions, and now his air of spiritual calm gave way to a haunted visage.
“When I was being held at that military camp in Kentucky, the officers stood us up against a wall one morning and told us we were going to be shot for refusing to fight. I prayed for the courage to endure the bullets. Yet God saved me. He saved me for His work in the fields of faith. He saved me for this very day, when I could bring you back from your loss of faith.”
She stared at him with a slacked mouth. He thinks God saved him? She had never told him of the blackmailed bargain she had struck with the commandant of that camp to get him released. She felt the rage rising again in her throat. She was determined to puncture his delusion, but before she could utter the revelation, he reached into his coat pocket and brought out his copy of the Martyrs’ Mirror, the venerated account of the Anabaptist heroes that they had studied together growing up.
“Do you remember Dirk Willems?” he asked.
She shook her head, though the name made her feel apprehensive.
He turned to a dog-eared page in the book. “Brother Willems was one of the first of the faithful who lived in the sixteenth century. The Spanish Catholics threw him into prison in the Netherlands. One night he escaped by climbing down a high window with a rope of knotted rags. The moat around the prison had turned to ice, and he was so light from having been starved that he managed to cross it. But the guard chasing him fell into the moat and cried for help. Brother Willems ran back to save his pursuer from drowning. Rather than thank him, the guard forced Brother Willems to return to the prison. A few days later, he was burned to death. He forgave the guard, for he knew that the Almighty would also forgive him.”
She stepped away, feeling the need to be alone.
He reached for her and tried to bring her closer. “Anna, you must release this anger and pain in your heart. Forgive God for what you witnessed during the war, and He will forgive you.”
Incensed that he could so easily dismiss the horrors as divine will, she shoved the book back into his hands, drawing a grunt from the force. “Now let me tell you a story. Have you ever heard of Lieutenant Tomas?”
“No, but—”
“He was a German soldier. Several hours after the armistice was signed, his commanding officer told him to go over to the Americans in a gesture of good will and give them the news that his German regiment would be vacating the house it defended. He was also ordered to tell the Americans that they were welcome to sleep in the house that night. As he walked to our lines, he was shot dead. God in His infinite wisdom chose not to convey the news of the surrender to that particular American regiment. Apparently, God wanted Brother Tomas to be the last man killed in the war, for no apparent reason other than the world needed one less kind man.”
“Please—”
She came face to face with him, finishing with battened fury, “Why don’t you go to Germany and find Lieutenant Tomas’s mother! Tell her about the martyrs and bring her back to the faith!” She walked off before Micah, stunned by her outburst, could manage a response.