Chapter Eleven
Miriam’s lips parted, and she stared up at him in astonishment and something else he couldn’t read. Maybe a desire to whack him over the head with a cast-iron skillet. Or maybe just disbelief because she guessed he wanted to kiss her.
“You’re thinking of Levi, aren’t you?” she asked with unexpected softness.
Stunned, he released her and nearly staggered back. “Levi?”
“David, I’ve said this before, but you need to trust in God. ‘And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose,’” she quoted.
David didn’t want to think about Levi’s death right now, far less discuss it.
“God doesn’t ask us to be foolish,” he snapped.
Her eyes narrowed. “I was careful!”
This time, David pressed his lips together and didn’t fire back.
Miriam glared at him. “I’m going home.”
He still wanted to insist on driving her, but their argument had obviously reinvigorated her. When she marched around him to the driver’s side of her small buggy, he stayed where he was. He didn’t even look at her. She had such a short distance to travel, he had no reason to worry.
Maybe this was what he’d run away from, he thought. Ja, guilt was part of it, but also a bone-deep terror of losing someone else he cared about.
Loved.
With her too-generous heart, Miriam would do foolish things whether he lived next door or not. Yet if he were here, so close, and couldn’t protect her, he didn’t know if he could bear it.
She had stopped, looking over her mare’s rump at David. “Are you all right?”
He forced himself to nod. “Ja, of course. You saved my horse. If he were a mare, I’d name him for you.”
Her mischievous smile calmed his raging emotions. “You’re saying that because you think we’re both dumb.”
“There’s a difference between foolish and dumb.”
She lifted her chin. “I don’t like the sound of either.”
Now he almost felt a tinge of humor. “Ach, well, there’s a fine line . . .”
“You called him Copper,” she said suddenly.
“I never liked orange flowers.”
When she beamed at him, his knees went weak.
“Denke. Now, I must go. Mamm will wonder where I am.”
She jumped into the buggy, lifted the reins, and clucked to her mare, who responded with alacrity, eager to go home.
David stood for a minute watching the buggy recede down the driveway before turning out of sight on the road. Then he sighed, knowing he had to mend the fence before he did anything else but unharness Dexter and reward him for his patience with a full feedbag.
Uneasiness stirred in him a minute later as he buckled on a tool belt and chose several boards he had already sawed to length for fencing. Tomorrow would be a full day, and then came Sunday. Amos had decided he was ready to make his confession during the members’ meeting after the service.
Was he ready? The turmoil he felt instead of the peace he’d expected was a nagging reminder that he hadn’t been entirely honest with Amos and the ministers.
Would the Lord understand and forgive him his trespasses, when the time came? He prayed so.
David had planned his very early arrival at the Schwartz farm to give him a chance to warn Esther of the day’s events. He hadn’t wanted to earlier, in case she refused flat out, but he didn’t consider it kind to allow her to be shocked. Caught wearing a housekeeping dress she wouldn’t want anyone else to see, maybe, or not wearing her kapp when people arrived.
Expecting to have to hammer on her door until she got mad enough to open it, he spotted her outside hanging laundry when he was halfway up the drive. To have already done her washing, she must be an even earlier riser than he was.
David tethered Dexter and crossed the lawn toward her. Esther ducked beneath the first clothesline and faced him. “Why are you here again?”
This morning, he was struck again by how drastically she’d aged, more than the years explained. Her hair had gone completely gray, although he didn’t think she was older than her midfifties. Deep lines on Esther’s face revealed discontent and bitterness. She’d lost weight since Levi’s death, appearing shrunken inside a dress that was too large for her.
Guilt seized him, as always, but he felt pity, too. Her life must be lonely, but there were many widowers in the settlement. She might have remarried if she weren’t known for her sharp tongue. Of course, he felt guilty having that thought, too, and wondered how lonely he would become, how open to bitterness, if he refused to marry and start a family.
“I’m ready to paint your house.” He paused. “Others are coming today to help. We hope to finish scraping and paint the barn as well.” At her expression of horror, he almost faltered, but instead forged on. “Your neighbors want to do this for you. The women will be bringing food. It’ll be a fun day, and your place will be neat again, the way I know you’d like it.”
“It wasn’t your right to plan this without talking to me,” she snapped.
“Levi would expect me to do this.” A lump filled his throat. “I felt as if you were my mamm, too. I abandoned you when I ran away, but I won’t do that again.”
A faint breeze lifted a sheet, temporarily blocking his sight of Esther. He took a step sideways, to see that she was wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.
“Accept the help in the spirit we give it,” he said quietly. “With joy and friendship.”
Her voice croaked. “I don’t have any choice, do I?”
“No.”
“I don’t feel joy anymore.” Expression arid, she reached for a clothespin. “I need to take my laundry down. I’ll hang it in the basement.”
Confused, he glanced toward the one full line and saw why she was uncomfortable leaving her wash out to dry. A pair of sturdy panties was clipped between an apron and a towel. At home, laundry hung outside every few days, no one thinking twice about it, but he supposed even his mother wouldn’t let the entire congregation see the family’s undergarments lined up when she was hosting a worship or frolic.
“If I can help . . . ,” he said awkwardly.
Esther reached the basket a few feet away and flapped her hands at him. “Go. Haven’t you done enough?”
Retreating, he feared she hadn’t meant that in a positive way. Still, she’d been aware of him here working on her house every two or three days for a few hours over the past three weeks. She could have come out and ordered him off her property. That meant she didn’t object too much. He hoped.
While she retrieved her laundry, David led Dexter to a clear place beside the driveway, slipped the bridle over his head, and replaced it with a halter and line that he tied to the fence. He shook his head, exasperated at himself for not having thought of arranging for some boys to be here to take care of the horses and buggies, as always seemed to happen on worship Sundays. Too late. Ach, well, he’d never planned anything like this before.
Accompanied by a gangly boy, David’s father was the next to arrive, the two walking up from the road. Daad carried a large plastic bucket that probably held brushes and other tools he thought he might need today. David waited where he was.
“I thought we might need help with the horses,” his daad said. “I borrowed Abram Yoder. You remember his father, Micah, ain’t so?”
David grinned at the boy. He’d seen Micah at both worship services he’d attended but, because he hadn’t stayed for the fellowship meals afterward, hadn’t talked to him or met his wife and children. “Micah and Levi and I used to get into a lot of trouble together. Daad’s probably told you.”
The boy grinned back. “My daad says none of it is true.”
David laughed and slapped him on the back. “I remember you as a little boy.” Of his contemporaries, Micah was one of the first to marry. “How old are you now?”
“I’m eleven. I think I remember you, too. You and Levi had a great team of Percheron horses, ain’t so?”
David felt a pang. Fleeing like a rabbit for its burrow, he’d never given a thought to the horses that had been the symbol of the business he and Levi were building. “We did.” Glancing at his father, he said, “I didn’t think of the help we’d need today besides painters.”
“So I thought. One of Abram’s friends is coming, too, and maybe others.”
Soon enough Gideon Lantz, the next-door neighbor, showed up in his buggy, loaded with cans of paint for the barn. They’d talked it over the last time David was here to finish scraping the siding. David had brought the amount he calculated was needed for the house.
Gideon greeted the others and said, “Lloyd Wagler offered to bring a generator and a couple of paint sprayers. He has a business painting houses, mostly for the Englisch, and our bishop allows him to use a gasoline-operated generator.” The last wasn’t quite a question, but David heard the hesitation.
“Bishop Amos will approve that, I think. Several members of our district use generators in their businesses. The sprayers will be especially good for the barn.”
“That’s what I thought.”
David and Gideon set to unloading with help, Abram carrying the tarps toward the house. Within minutes the numbers multiplied. He was relieved to see how many men from his church district had been able to take time from their own work to come. Even Luke Bowman appeared, saying his daad said only one of them was needed to keep the store open, and Luke would be of more use here.
“His back has been bothering him some. He doesn’t like to admit it, but he’d be embarrassed to fall off a ladder if his back spasms.”
David shook his head solemnly. “Hochmut.”
Luke laughed. “He’d never admit to pride. Still, one minute he insists he doesn’t feel a day older than he did when I was a boy, and the next he groans and grumbles about how I can’t understand what it’s like to get old.”
As the two men walked toward the front porch with full cans of paint, David chuckled, too. “Eli looks as tough as ever.”
“He is. He uses a stool more often when he’s working on furniture, but that’s the only change I see. Mamm still gets mad at him because he sneaks out to his barn workshop whenever he can.”
“He and you both are lucky to love your work.”
“You haven’t found that yet?”
It was impossible not to give fleeting thought to the logging and the pleasure he’d taken being in the woods, but that dream was gone.
“I do love working with horses. I don’t know yet if I can make a living breeding and training them, but thanks to Onkel Hiram, I’ll have the chance to find out.”
As they distributed paint cans around the house, Luke commented that Miriam had mentioned finding his runaway horse on the road.
“I fixed the span he broke through, but Monday I intend to walk the entire fence line of that pasture and make sure it can’t happen again.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have waited, but there’s been so much to do.”
“I hear you’re to confess before us tomorrow.”
David hunched his shoulders, no doubt betraying his renewed discomfiture. “Amos thinks I’m ready.”
“You’d have been smarter to take off before you were baptized, like I did,” Luke said, his smile both sly and sympathetic.
“Ja, now you tell me.”
This laughter was healing. He could take comfort tomorrow in knowing the Bowmans would be present when the time came, friends who had already accepted him. Unlike his own brother, David couldn’t help thinking. What if Jake chose to vote against David’s acceptance back into the congregation?
No, David didn’t believe he’d do that. Jake seemed wary, not hostile. Because I broke too many promises to him.
He shook off the old regret and the questions about the personal bann his brother had chosen to place him under. There would be time for him to prove to Jake that he was trustworthy. Today was the beginning of his attempt to do what he could to make up for even a small part of what Esther had lost with Levi’s death.
Miriam had said she’d be here today. David refrained from asking for confirmation from Luke. Asking would have opened him to speculation he didn’t dare awaken.
Miriam and her mother drove to Esther’s together. She was happy to spot Copper grazing on the far side of the fence where he belonged, sticking close for once to the old mare. Was it possible he’d learned a lesson yesterday?
She almost laughed. That was like asking if a wild seventeen-year-old in his rumspringa learned common-sense lessons from every foolish mistake.
Miriam hadn’t made many of the usual mistakes because of her determination to captivate Levi. Why would alcohol, partying, or riding in an Englisch boy’s fast car appeal to her? She’d been foolish enough to wish that Levi would ask her to join him when he raced buggies with other young men, but otherwise she’d wanted most to grow up, for him to see her as a woman and not the little girl who had trailed him around. The racing, so dangerous, might have been his one form of rebellion. After the shock of losing his daad when he was so young, leaving only a stunned boy and his grieving mamm, he’d had no choice but to take his father’s place and make a living to support his mother.
Her mind turned to picturing David as a boy, but not the solemn, obedient kind she would once have assumed him to be, if she’d thought that much about him. Of course she’d always known his family, since they were in the same church district, but even David’s younger brother, Jake, was older than she was. Levi’s age, if she remembered right from school. She liked Judith and Isaac, who seemed to be kind, Isaac especially having a dry sense of humor. David’s difficult childhood was a reminder that what she saw of a family from the outside wasn’t always accurate. Now she knew that, in running from his faith, he had been fleeing far more than his guilt and anguish about Levi’s death.
With her mamm seemingly content to ride in silence, Miriam brooded about the strange scene yesterday, when David got so angry at her for doing nothing more terrible than capturing his loose horse and returning it to the barn. It was almost as if he were thrown back to the moment when he’d seen a tree falling wrong and known Levi was in its path. As if he didn’t understand that she’d brought Copper home, and, ja, the horse had gotten excited, but David had arrived to help and it was all over. Neither she nor the horse was hurt.
In David’s mind, he must have been mired at the beginning, imagining how many things might have gone wrong. Maybe that was natural, after the one time things did go so terribly wrong. Daad tended to yell when Luke or Elam especially had scared him. Maybe all men did that, raging against the helplessness they’d felt.
What Miriam couldn’t forget was that one strange moment when David’s fingers had bitten into her upper arms and he looked down at her with eyes glittering with some intense emotion. For an instant, she’d almost thought— But that was absurd. David had never been interested in her that way. And even Levi, who had liked smooching with her, had never looked at her quite like that.
David had been mad, that’s all. She would just hope he’d gotten over it today.
Mamm didn’t speak until Polly turned off the road and trotted up the hard-packed lane toward the line of parked buggies. “I hope Esther isn’t upset with us. Surprises are fun when you’re a kind, but not as much so at our age.”
Miriam glanced at her. “Did you know her as a girl? She looks older than you, but I guess she can’t be.”
“She married late, didn’t have Levi until she was almost thirty, I think. She’s younger than I am, but I started my family so much sooner.” Forehead wrinkled, Mamm seemed lost for a minute in the past. “Her parents were much older than mine, and she was their only child. A miracle, that late arrival, everyone thought. But they were stern, not understanding that the young need to have fun sometimes. Esther was never a happy girl, and not popular with the boys.” Mamm flushed. “I shouldn’t have said that. She’s a good woman, just inclined to think the worst of people. I worried—”
“Worried?” Miriam reined Polly into a spot next to Charlie and her brother’s buggy.
“About you sharing a home with her. There’s no grossdawdi haus here, you know, and I doubted she’d have been ready to move into one anyway, give way to a girl as young as you were.” Mamm seemed to shake herself. “Ach, water under the bridge. I’m glad David decided to do this. I feel guilty I haven’t been pushier with Esther. We never should have let her keep apart so much of the time.”
“I’ve tried, but not as hard as I should have,” Miriam agreed.
“You tried harder than anyone else,” Mamm retorted with unusual sharpness. “It wonders me why she refused to accept help so gladly offered.” Calling a greeting to the first boy to arrive, she climbed out. “We’ll need help to carry these tables to the lawn.”
A second boy showed up, and even though the two were too slight to be included in the big jobs, they willingly carried the folding tables while Miriam and Deborah brought the food.
Miriam didn’t immediately see David, or Luke, either, for that matter. Her eyes settled on a dark-haired and dark-eyed man who didn’t look familiar. Married, she assumed, because of his beard, although he could be a widower. An Amishman didn’t shave his beard even if he lost his wife. Maybe close to Luke’s age, he’d dressed in old clothes, fortunately, because he was spattered with white paint that would not wash out. He called around the corner of the house to someone else, then turned and saw them.
He crossed the lawn in long strides. “Do you need a hand? We’re glad to see you. I’m Gideon Lantz. I live right next door to Esther.” He nodded to the south.
“Judith Miller has mentioned you,” Mamm said, after introducing herself and Miriam.
“I bought land here last year at the urging of cousins who live across the river. Because of them, I’m in Bishop Ropp’s district.”
“Ach, well, it’s good to meet you,” Mamm said. “We expect some other women with food. My sister Barbara and Judith Miller, for certain sure.”
Gideon promised to produce help to carry any additional tables, chairs, and food, disappearing after a moment around the house.
Miriam looked around. “I don’t see Esther.”
“I hope she isn’t being stubborn.”
Clearly uninterested in their hostess, Mamm said, “Judith talks about Gideon. I’d forgotten he lived so close. She told me he’s a widower. That’s why I didn’t ask after his wife. He has two kinder, a five-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy.”
Miriam recognized that elaborately casual voice. It seemed she’d been wrong. Mamm hadn’t entirely given up on her youngest daughter marrying. She couldn’t resist hinting when a new man presented himself. Although why Gideon and not David? Because David’s status within their church was still unsettled?
A kick in her chest told her it was more likely her mother recognized that David’s close friendship with Levi complicated any relationship they might have. Or did she only think that, because Miriam had never expressed any interest in David in the past, her feelings were unlikely to change now?
Miriam made herself start breathing again. What a very odd moment to realize that, in fact, her feelings had changed.