Thomas lowered his window and gazed out at the rolling Pennsylvania farmland. The growing season was several weeks behind Seven Poplars, but it was full spring here all the same. The trees were bursting with new green leaves of every hue, and tractors and teams of workhorses plowed the wide fields. “A little rocky,” Thomas pronounced, “but this looks like rich soil.”
“Some of the best in the country, Daniel said,” Leah replied. “The topsoil is deeper than a man’s arm is long and the Pennsylvania Dutch are good stewards of the land.”
“I think that some of my grandmother’s people came from north of here. Some valley.” He shifted in his seat to find more room for his legs. Leah’s compact car was a tight fit for him. His head nearly brushed the roof, and even with the seat pushed back as far as it would go, he was cramped. Not that he cared about a little discomfort. He was enjoying the day, the new sights, and a break from the routine of everyday work. And they hadn’t even reached Richard Hunziger’s organic farm yet.
Leah signaled, slowed and turned off the wide road onto a narrower, hilly one. The houses on either side of the blacktop were a mixture of older stone residences and newer clapboard or brick. Young Amish children played in the yards, and women hung clothes on lines, swept porch steps and planted seedlings in large gardens. In one yard, a boy, no more than four years old, tugged at the halter of a fat brown-and-white pony. Pulling out of a driveway was an Amish man in an odd type of gray buggy, enclosed in the front as a normal buggy would be, but open in the back for carrying larger items.
“Amish pickup,” Thomas said. “Pretty handy to have. I could use one of those for transporting lumber and building material.”
Leah chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“Not what you said. I’m sure a buggy like that would be useful. I was thinking about how far away this is from the Amazon. When the St. Joes didn’t walk, they traveled by river in dugout canoes that barely rose above the waterline. Sometimes they’d load them down with entire families—fathers, the mothers, infants, kids and elders. I wondered why they didn’t sink, but they never did.”
“Mothers?”
Leah shrugged and grimaced. “Customs change slowly in the Amazonian jungle. It used to be common for the best hunters and the leaders of the St. Joes to have more than one wife at a time. Daniel and I did our best to discourage the practice, but...”
Thomas shook his head, amazed at what this young woman had seen and half wishing that it had been him traveling to faraway places and witnessing unfamiliar and outlandish customs. “Aren’t there crocodiles in those rivers?”
“Some, but what we saw were a kind of alligator called a black caiman. Vicious beasts that grow to over sixteen feet long. The river also was home to poisonous snakes and flesh-eating piranha. Delicious, but very dangerous.”
“You ate piranha?”
She laughed. “I’m sure we did. It wasn’t considered polite to ask what your hostess put in her cook pot. Food, especially meat, is difficult to come by in the jungle. When the locals offer you food, you accept with thanks, ask a silent blessing that you won’t die from it, and you eat it.”
“So I wouldn’t think you did much swimming in the river?”
She laughed again. “Hardly. The St. Joes swim naked.”
Thomas felt his throat and face flush. Nudity was hardly a proper topic of conversation between a man and a woman, especially those who were dating. Not that this was a date. He’d come with her to learn more about organic-farming practices. As much as he enjoyed being with Leah—and she was always fun—she had a way of making him uneasy. She was so outspoken...so experienced. Not like other Amish girls he knew. He wondered if she’d ever be able to return to the quiet life in Seven Poplars or any other Old Order community after her life in the English world. Pity the man who did marry her. It wasn’t natural, a woman knowing more than her husband.
“I don’t think it’s far now to Richard’s farm,” Leah said.
They passed an open courting buggy with a couple in it and several more gray family buggies before turning into a lane marked with a cheerful green-and-white sign that read Eden Hill Organic Fruits and Vegetables. A stone wall enclosed a pasture on one side with a flock of black-faced sheep. On the far side of the driveway were tidy rows of young apple trees.
A dog barked as the car pulled into the farmyard. The back door of a tidy white cottage opened and a middle-aged African American woman wearing a calf-length denim dress, a flowered apron and a head-scarf cap much like Leah’s came out onto the steps. “You made it!” she called. “Richard! They’re here!”
A husky redheaded man with a neatly trimmed beard followed her out onto the stoop. He came out to the car, followed by his wife, and shook hands with Thomas. “Did you have any trouble finding us?” Richard asked.
Leah shook her head. “Ne. Your directions were excellent.”
“This is my wife Grace,” Richard introduced. “The boys are in school, but you’ll get to meet them later. They have a short day today for some reason.”
“Teachers’ conferences,” Grace supplied.
Leah greeted Grace with a warm embrace.
“It’s so good to see you. We’ve been worried about you,” Grace told Leah. “We were so shocked by your loss. But you’ve been in our prayers every day.”
Leah nodded. “I appreciate that. It means a lot.”
“And I appreciate you taking the time to show me around your farm,” Thomas told Richard.
Richard rolled up his shirtsleeves. “Glad to do it.”
Grace chuckled. “Believe it. There is nothing Richard likes better than someone new to share his ideas with,” she said.
“This is just a small place,” Richard explained, leading the way across the yard. “Seventeen acres. And a lot of it is too steep to till for regular crops. But we’re blessed with two springs that never go dry and some really fertile fields. By concentrating on growing only the best vegetables, I’ve been able to build up a steady demand for our crops, at top prices.”
“And you think the market is there to make the extra expense of growing organic profitable?” Thomas asked. Leah and Grace fell in behind them.
“I do. It’s hard work—I won’t tell you otherwise—but I find it extremely rewarding, not just in financial reward but in knowing that I’m growing the healthiest food possible, food I want to feed my family. And I know I’m not polluting the ground or the water.”
“That’s one of the things that drew me to the idea of growing organic produce,” Thomas said. “In many ways, it’s the traditional way of farming, as our great-grandparents did.”
Richard nodded enthusiastically. “You can start small, but land is the most expensive outlay. And you need something that hasn’t been worked commercially. Otherwise, it will take a lot longer to meet the qualifications for organic crops.”
“The acreage I have in mind has been in pasture for decades,” Thomas explained. “It has good drainage and the soil’s not too sandy.”
“That sounds perfect. But finding your buyers is crucial. That’s Grace’s department around here. She carried free strawberries to a dozen of the best restaurants in Philadelphia and convinced the head chefs of two of them to give us a try. Since then, our farm has been in the black, and we’ve doubled and tripled our fancy-fruit sales. Farming has always been a hard way to make a living, but this has the greatest potential that I’ve seen, especially if you can find help to do the picking and packing.”
“Which I think I can,” Thomas said, thinking of the young Amish men and women in Seven Poplars who’d recently left school.
Richard led the way to the first of three greenhouses and pushed open the nearest door. “This is where I grow our salad greens and start seedlings,” he explained. “With a combination of solar power and propane, I can keep the temperature high enough to grow tomatoes, lettuces and peppers, even in bitter weather.”
Thomas stood back to let Richard’s wife and Leah enter first. He noticed that Leah was carrying a clipboard and pen.
“To take notes,” she said when she saw him looking at her. “You might like to know what varieties of cucumbers and squash grow best in a greenhouse, and what varieties Richard may have had problems with.”
“I should have thought of that,” he answered. Thomas was pleased that Leah showed so much interest in Richard’s farming practices. For more than an hour they followed Richard up one aisle and down another, listening to him as they inspected the greenhouses and then went to see the field greens and strawberry patches.
“Blackberries and raspberries provide an excellent return,” Richard said. “But they’re labor intensive. They have to be picked, packed and delivered at the peak of ripeness. My customers love them, but the season is relatively short.”
Duplicating what Richard Hunziger had done here would take years of work, Thomas mused, but the possibilities seemed endless. Finding markets for his products near Kent County, if he managed to grow them successfully, would be a problem. There were restaurants in Dover, but it was a much smaller city than Philadelphia, and Philadelphia was too far from Kent County to easily deliver fresh produce. But those were problems that could be worked out. What was important was that Richard was doing exactly what he’d dreamed of, and was doing it in a manner that supported his family.
Thomas and Leah had planned to be home early, but there was so much to learn from Richard and Grace and they were having such a good time that it had been impossible to refuse Grace’s invitation to share a late lunch. And, after that, seeing that Richard had transplanting to do, it seemed only fair that he and Leah pitch in to help. They didn’t leave the farm until almost supper time.
On the ride home, Thomas and Leah couldn’t stop talking about all they’d seen. And he hadn’t realized that he was hungry again until Leah pulled the little black car into a fast-food place. They purchased hamburgers, fries and lemonade from the drive-through window and ate it parked in the back row of the lot behind the restaurant. His double cheeseburger was so juicy that grease ran down his chin, and Leah had to mop it up with a napkin. They laughed over that and a dozen other silly incidents that had happened that day as they finished the last of the salty French fries and drained the last drops of lemonade.
“Not as good as Sara’s,” Leah pronounced.
“No, but it’s cold and wet,” Thomas replied. And then, chuckling and exchanging guilty looks like naughty children, they drove around to the drive-in window again and bought ice cream with chocolate and whipped cream on the top.
“Is it as good as you thought it would be when you were in the jungle?” he asked, indicating the ice cream.
She licked her spoon and grinned. “Absolutely.”
All the way home they discussed all the possibilities of his starting his own organic-farm project that spring. Leah had good suggestions, and he was surprised by how much she had absorbed of what Richard had told them. “It’s finding the markets that worries me most,” he confided. “It won’t be any good to grow organic vegetables if I can’t find a place to sell them profitably.”
“What if you tried the beach?” she asked as they drove back onto the highway and turned south toward home. “Rehoboth and Lewes? I think there are lots of high-quality restaurants there, and I know they must have the customers who would want organic produce.”
“But how do I deliver the fruits and vegetables?”
She thought on it for a moment. “Horse and buggy wouldn’t work, would it?” she said.
“Hardly. It must be forty, fifty miles from my place to Rehoboth Beach.”
She braked at a traffic light. “So maybe you need to go to Rehoboth and talk to some people at some restaurants. See if anyone’s interested.”
“I don’t know who I would talk to. I can’t just walk in the door. I’d probably have to have an appointment.”
She glanced at him. “Actually, just walking in probably would be better. If you asked for an appointment, they could say they were busy. But if you walk in the door, a manager or a chef or maybe even an owner would probably talk to you just because you’re Amish.”
He frowned. “What do you mean because I’m Amish?”
“All day long they serve Englishers. Tourists in tiny bathing suits and short shorts and fancy clothes. How many Amish men come in? They’ll be curious. You can take advantage of that curiosity. It’s how Daniel and I met the more isolated tribes. We were a curiosity to them.” She chuckled. “All we need is a few minutes of the restaurant manager’s time. And if you could bring fresh organic vegetables to their back door, it would be a big help to their business, wouldn’t it?”
He ran a hand through his hair. “What we haven’t figured out is how I’d get those vegetables to them.”
“One problem at a time,” Leah said. “First we find you customers, then we’ll worry about how to get the vegetables delivered.”
Traffic began to back up. They came to a stop again, this time a long way from the light. Sirens wailed and an ambulance and several police cars passed. “I think there must be an accident ahead,” Leah said. “I hope no one is hurt.”
Thomas rolled down the window and strained his neck to see, but whatever had caused the trouble was too far ahead to make out.
On the left, a big sign flashed, advertising a bowling alley. “Oh,” Leah said. “Bowling. I haven’t been bowling in years. When I was little my dat used to take us. Do you bowl?”
“I’ve never been,” he admitted. “Well, not since I was a teenager. And then, I was terrible.”
“Me, too,” she admitted.
They waited. More police cars passed. Not a vehicle in the lanes moved. There were cars in front of and behind them and a bumper-to-bumper line on the left. People began to get out of their automobiles.
“I think we may be here for a while,” Leah said.
“It looks like it.” He glanced at the flashing bowling ball and then back to Leah. “Maybe we should go bowling. It would be better than sitting here.”
“Are you serious?” she asked.
He shrugged.
“Why not?” Leah exclaimed.
* * *
“And did you go bowling?” Leah’s sister Rebecca asked as she reached for another of her mother’s raisin sticky buns. They were seated at Sara’s kitchen table with Ellie, enjoying a leisurely Saturday-morning visit. Rebecca’s toddler, Jesse, was sprawled on the floor playing with a bag of wood alphabet blocks that Ellie had found in Sara’s toy chest.
“Did they ever!” Ellie laughed. “Leah beat him at bowling. Slaughtered him.”
Rebecca chuckled. “I don’t know if Sara would approve. It doesn’t sound like very good behavior for a first date.”
“It wasn’t a date,” Leah protested. She glanced from one to the other. “It wasn’t! We went up to visit Richard and Grace so that Thomas could see Richard’s farm and hear about his organic-vegetable business. It’s something that Thomas is interested in. He doesn’t want to be a blacksmith.”
“Wait. Wait, let me get this straight,” Rebecca teased. She was red-haired like Leah, like most of her sisters, and prone to sunburn. Since she’d been busy in her garden that week, she was sporting a crop of new golden freckles, sprinkled like cookie crumbs across her sweet face. “It wasn’t a date. Yet the two of you, you and Thomas—the same Thomas who Sara wants to match you with—traveled out of state together, shared dinner with the Hunzigers, went to a restaurant, went bowling and didn’t get home until after midnight? And you want us to believe that it wasn’t a date?”
“It sounds like a date to me,” Ellie agreed. “And a pretty racy date at that. Even for a Mennonite.”
“It wasn’t like that!” Leah declared. She knew that their kidding was good-natured, but it didn’t stop her from flushing with embarrassment. “We went to get information about organic farming. We had to eat something on the way home.”
Jesse’s block tower tumbled and he began to fuss. Ellie got down on her knees to help soothe his distress. “Like this, Jesse,” she said, and then handed another block to the chubby, ginger-haired boy. He was still young enough to wear a baby gown, the garment that all Amish children in the community wore until they were out of diapers. He had a full head of hair that Rebecca kept cut straight across his forehead that fell around his ears in auburn ringlets, and he had the cutest button of a nose.
Leah looked at her nephew with a lump in her throat. Strangely, it was becoming more and more difficult for her to remember her lost baby’s features. She closed her eyes for just a few seconds and gathered her resolve. Her baby wasn’t gone forever. They were just separated for a little while. She was here and, Lord willing, she would have other children to love. And they would all be together in heaven someday.
Rebecca nibbled on a piece of sticky bun. “If you want my advice, sister, I think you should give Thomas a chance. I think that’s only fair to him. You did tell Sara you’d agree to get to know him.”
Leah wiped the crumbs off her mouth with a worn linen napkin. “She didn’t really give me—give either of us—a choice. This isn’t all on me. Thomas wasn’t thrilled with the idea, either.”
Rebecca and Ellie exchanged looks.
“He wasn’t,” Leah protested. “Thomas only agreed because his family is putting pressure on him to find a wife.”
“Because I turned him down,” Ellie put in.
“It’s more complicated than that,” Leah told Ellie. Then she turned to her sister. “You weren’t there in Sara’s office, Rebecca. You know how it all came about. Sara asked me to get to know Thomas and if it didn’t work out, after six weeks, she agreed she’d find the kind of match I’m looking for. An older widower, someone settled in his life who needs a wife for his family.”
Rebecca raised her Yoder blue eyes to meet Leah’s gaze. “What you’re talking about is a marriage of convenience,” she said.
Leah got up and went to the stove on the pretense of warming her coffee with more from the pot. Of all her sisters, Rebecca had always understood her the best. Rebecca gave the impression of being easygoing, but she could go directly to the heart of a matter with unerring accuracy. “Is that so wrong?”
“Not wrong. We all know good marriages that have been arranged by family or friends, or even...a matchmaker,” Rebecca said. “But your marriage to Daniel was very different. You fell in love. You went against your family and your church to marry him because you knew he was the one for you. You let your heart decide, not logic.”
“I’m just...at another point in my life.” Leah took care to choose the right words. She wasn’t comfortable talking about this. About her feelings. Not with her sister. Not with anyone. She was still too raw from Daniel’s and her baby’s deaths. Too raw deep inside. “I don’t want the same things that I did when I left Seven Poplars with Daniel.” She threw her sister a pleading glance. “I wouldn’t change my decision for the world, but I’m not certain that I would make the same one again.” She inhaled, then sighed. “Let’s say that I’ve come to value the quiet joys of life. I don’t need excitement or romance. What I’m looking for in a husband is settled companionship, a partnership where each of us knows our place. No more jumping the traces for me. All I want is the peace of our community and our faith.”
“I think it’s early days yet,” Ellie advised. “Don’t be so sure that God wants you to be the wife of a man old enough to be your father. There’s much to be said for a young man with spring in his step. What if that young man God means for you is Thomas? There’s more than a few men and women in Seven Poplars who say Sara plays a part in God’s intentions when it comes to marriage. That she’s His instrument.”
Leah placed her cup on the edge of the counter, not sure how to respond. She had heard enough from her mother to know Sara’s matchmaking skills were the best. That was why she’d come to Sara in the first place. But she saw nothing wrong with telling Sara what she wanted. Didn’t everyone, man and woman, who came to her do that?
There was a sound of the back door opening and Leah let out a sigh of relief. “Need any help, Sara?” she called.
“Not a bit. Clothes are on the line.” Sara entered the kitchen from the utility room, her cheeks rosy. “We have a visitor. Someone who’s come to see you this morning, Leah.”
“Who is it?” Leah asked.
“Your brother-in-law. Anna’s Samuel. I asked him to come in, but he said maybe you’d rather just come out to the buggy.”
“Ach,” Rebecca said. “I wonder what Samuel wants with you? I should be going, anyway. I’ve got a dozen things waiting for me at home, and Caleb and I want to ride over to look at a new driving horse this afternoon. It’s a bit of a drive, so we told Amelia we’d pack a lunch and make a picnic of it.”
“You sure you have to go so soon?” Leah frowned. It felt so good to be with her sisters again. She hadn’t realized just how much she’d missed them until she returned to Seven Poplars. “I feel like you just got here. But you’re not far away now.”
“And we’ll see plenty of each other,” Rebecca assured her, retrieving her son.
Leah went to her sister and hugged her, then bent to give small Jesse a squeeze. He giggled and claimed whatever bit of her heart he hadn’t earlier. “Come again soon,” she urged Rebecca.
“And you come over to see me. The road runs both ways, you know.” She kissed Leah’s cheek. “And stop and talk with Caleb sometime. He’s wiser than his years, sister. He may be able to give you spiritual comfort. You remember, he suffered a terrible loss, too.”
“Maybe I will,” Leah replied, thinking she would do no such thing. Her grief for Daniel was private. She couldn’t imagine what her sister’s husband could tell her that she hadn’t already heard from a dozen other well-meaning people.
Curious as to what Samuel wanted, Leah left Rebecca to say goodbye to Ellie and Sara and went out into the yard. He was standing by his horse’s head feeding the animal bits of carrot and stroking the bay’s neck and nose. The horse saw her coming and raised its head, nickering softly.
Samuel turned to her, his expression solemn. He was a kindly man, one that Leah knew made her sister happy. Samuel was a good father and a pillar of the church community, but being almost a generation older, she’d never known him well and had always held him in a kind of awe.
“Samuel. Good to see you,” she called.
“I’m afraid I’m here as a deacon of the church rather than your brother-in-law,” Samuel said. He was a big man, tall and wide of shoulder, with a full beard, streaked with gray.
Nervously, Leah thrust her hands into her apron pockets and waited.
Samuel took a deep breath. “I don’t like doing this, and I hope you won’t allow it to...” He broke off and started again. “You know as deacon, it is my duty to point out errors in the behavior of—”
“Behavior?” she asked. Now she was really curious. She’d barely been in Seven Poplars three weeks. “What have I done wrong?”
He grimaced. “Not wrong. Just unseemly. Bishop Atlee called on me early this morning and said that he’d had a disturbing report from someone in our community. You were seen returning at a late hour last night, in the company of a man.”
Leah’s eyes narrowed. “Aunt Martha reported Thomas and me to the bishop, didn’t she?” She should have known that her interfering aunt would make a fuss. “There was no misbehavior, Samuel,” she said. “Thomas and I went to Lancaster to visit cousins of my late husband and discuss organic gardening. Then we had something to eat, went bowling and drove home from Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, my car had a flat tire in front of Uncle Reuben and Aunt Martha’s place. Uncle Reuben was in the barn delivering a calf, saw our flashlight and came down to the road to see what happened. He watched Thomas change the tire, and then I drove Thomas home and came back to Sara’s.”
“But you and Thomas are dating. And you were out all day and part of the night without a chaperone.” He tugged on the brim of his straw hat. “I know you, Leah. I’ve known you since you were a child. You’re a good girl. You wouldn’t behave in a way that would shame your family. But Thomas has the reputation of being a bachelor who cuts a wide swath. It doesn’t look good, Leah. Your aunt doesn’t approve, Bishop Atlee doesn’t approve and Anna and I are concerned for your reputation.”
A knot twisted in the pit of Leah’s stomach and she tamped down her rising ire. “I’m not baptized in the faith. I’m a grown woman, a widow. Surely, I can stay out after dark without my mother’s approval.”
Samuel shook his head. “That’s part of the issue. You’ve been in the outside world for years. Now you’ve asked our bishop to return to the fold. It’s important that you demonstrate that you can live by our rules. And you can’t be accused of setting a bad example for younger women who look up to you.”
She drew in a deep breath, resting her hands on her hips. She wasn’t annoyed with Samuel; she understood that this was his responsibility. She just didn’t like people telling her what to do. Not anyone. “So what does Bishop Atlee want me to do? I’m supposed to be getting to know Thomas. That’s what everyone wants. How am I supposed to get to know him if we don’t spend time together?”
“It’s not about you spending time with Thomas,” Samuel responded patiently. “It’s about the circumstances. You were unchaperoned.”
“The bishop wants me to take my mother and stepfather with me next time Thomas and I go to Byler’s for ice cream?”
Samuel frowned. “Anna said you wouldn’t take this well. We mean only the best for you, Leah. We love you, and we want you to be accepted fully into the community. Bishop Atlee understands how difficult your position is. He asks that if you are out after dark, or if you and Thomas leave Seven Poplars in each other’s company, you have a chaperone with you to prevent any uncharitable gossip. And it doesn’t have to be your mother. Anyone will do.” His expression hardened. “There is more at stake than your own situation. English people are quick to notice what we do. I know that you wouldn’t want to cause our community to be a topic of criticism.”
“Ne,” she agreed reluctantly, crossing her arms over her chest. She was still annoyed, but she knew he had a point. “I wouldn’t.”
“Goot.” Samuel’s features softened. “Then I’ll tell the bishop that you understand and you’ve agreed to use a chaperone when necessary. Ya?”
Leah cut her eyes at him. Then she sighed and dropped her arms to her sides. “Ya, fine, I’ll agree to it. I just won’t agree to like it.”