Chapter 18

Sara realized over the next days and weeks that Adam had withdrawn from her, not only in the physical sense. She felt bereft and out of sorts, unloved, adrift.

Harvest chores kept him outside so late some nights, she was asleep when he came to bed. They never went walking. They never even talked anymore.

Her husband had become moody and snapped at unexpected times. She knew exactly how he felt. She had not only argued with him, she had bickered with her mother-in-law, and once, even, with Emma, though she wasn’t sure exactly how they’d managed it. She knew only that they’d parted in tears, the both of them.

There was a lot of making up for her to do, though not between her and Adam, because he kept saying nothing was wrong.

In October, the Hershberger house was struck by lightening and burned to the ground. The aging couple had never had children. Levi had been ailing for some time, though his wife, Sovilla, did well for her eighty-eight years.

Roman invited them to share his daudyhouse with his mother and father. His dead sister’s teen-age children already lived in the main house with him, so his home and his pocketbook were stretched tight.

Several days after the fire, later in the evening than was normal for callers, Sara heard a knock at the kitchen door.

“I came to collect for the digitalis Doc Marks special-orders for Levi from Boston,” Roman said as he came inside.

Without a word, Adam abandoned the farm catalogs spread across the kitchen table and unlocked the tiger-maple desk, where he dipped into the cracker tin of money he kept there.

While Adam silently counted out their contribution, Roman accepted a cup of sarsaparilla tea and a slice of warm Ob’l Dunkes Kucka. “Mm. Good Sara. I think maybe you make better applesauce cake than my mother, but don’t tell her I said so.”

“How are they all?” Sara asked.

“Mom and Pop are goot and they are happy to share their home with people of their years. Levi has aged for losing his own home, but Sovilla has a new spring in her step, just having my mother for company. Pop and Levi play checkers, when neither of them is napping.” Roman grinned. “So they play about an hour a day.”

Even Adam chuckled.

“But what about Levi, does he do any better?  Does the digitalis help him?”

Roman shook his head. “I don’t know. Doc says he might need something costs more.”

Sara regarded her husband. “Adam, did you give him enough?”

“I did.”

“Are you sure?”

Sara could tell it annoyed Adam, her questioning his generosity before Roman, but—

“Leave it, Sara,” Roman said.

“Well, how much did you give him?” she asked her husband as she rose and went for the cracker tin.

“Why do you want to know?,” Adam snapped. “So you can tell all our neighbors how much?”

Sara felt as if he’d slapped her in public. She was so embarrassed, she nodded in Roman’s general direction and said goodnight.

Not much later, she heard Adam come to bed.

He tried to coax her into his arms, but she refused to be budged. What did it matter?  That’s about as much as he cared to touch her these days anyway. With her big belly, she disgusted him. With her big mouth, that day at the barn raising, she had destroyed any trust or caring he might have felt for her. He hadn’t touched her in passion in weeks.

“I am sorry,” he said into the silence some minutes later.

“For never touching me anymore?” she said before she had a chance to think, then she rolled even further away. She would not beg. “It’s all right. Go to sleep.”

“Passion between us hurts you,” he said. “This is the way it must be. If you … after the baby, this is how we must be. There will be no more children, Sara. If we are still together … after … believe me, I will be grateful every moment for the life we share.”

“A life where you insult me before our neighbors?”

“A life where we raise our children together.”

“We are not together. We are as far apart as we were the day I came to deliver Hannah.”

“We are the same. That night you flayed me with words; tonight I flayed you … in front of Roman, to my distress, and yours. I repeat, I am sorry.”

“Sorry you married me.”

“If you remember,” Adam said, “I had no choice.”

“As if I did. So you are sorry?”

Adam sighed. “Being married to you has been both the best and the worst experience of my life. It has been, at times, better than heaven, and at others, worse even than hell.”

Sara said nothing more. She could not speak for the sorrow choking her. Her silent tears fell until she slept.

Toward dawn, she sat up and rubbed her back. Adam tried to sooth her with his big capable hand, but despite the depth of her craving for his touch, she pushed him away and rose to don her robe. “The hell is happening now, isn’t it, Adam?  Too bad we were pushed into marriage so quick. If we had waited, your mother would have arrived soon enough to care for the girls and we would both have been saved.”

“If we could arrange life the way we wanted it,” Adam said, sitting on the edge of the bed, his voice tired. “We would be God.”

“The way you want your life is not with me in it, I think.”

“Sara, don’t. Come here. Where are you going?”

She had awakened because she thought she heard someone at the kitchen door. And she’d just heard it again.

Mercy’s husband stood on the porch. “She is in labor,” Enos said. “It’s too soon. You have to come. She’s calling for you.”

“Go get Jordan—Doctor Marks—and tell him to meet me there. Hurry.”

Sara went back into her bedroom to dress. “It’s Mercy,” she said when Adam questioned her.

“Give me a minute,” he said.

“Enos is waiting for me. “Go back to sleep.”

“No, I….”

“It’s an hour till dawn and, frankly, Adam, I don’t want you, at this moment, any more than you want me.”

Licking salty tears from her lips, Sara hurried to the barn to hitch up her small buggy. She had lied to her husband. Twice. Enos was not waiting for her. And she wanted Adam so badly, she could die of it. But that was not to be considered right now.

Mercy needed her.

An hour later, Sara was certain she could feel every single one of Mercy’s labor pains deep in her own womb, in the small of her back, especially.

Thank God her own babe wasn’t due for a month and a half yet.

The minute Sara arrived, before she saw Mercy even, she prepared a tea of Gossypium root bark, as she had done during Mercy’s last delivery, to induce stronger contractions.

Mercy drank it dutifully, but her labor did not proceed at all as it had done the year before. It blazed a flash-fire trail of agony through her. Within the first half hour, her pains came closer and closer, until they were already a minute apart.

“Seven times I have labored, but I have never felt such agony before,” Mercy admitted during a moment of respite. “The pains are ripping me apart, Sara. I am afraid.”

Only Sara knew that Mercy was not alone in her fear. Sweat poured down her own brow. “How long were you in labor tonight, before you sent Enos for me?” Lord, she wished Jordan would hurry.

“An hour, no more.”

“And before you told Enos you were in labor.”

Mercy nearly smiled. “Minutes only.”

Oh, Lord. Oh, God. She should have gotten that information from Mercy before giving her the tea. Suppose she’d made matters worse with the infusion. Suppose she’d caused her friend more pain.

Suppose Mercy died.

The thought was not to be borne. Sara thrust it dutifully aside, so she could give Mercy and her twins her full attention.

Twins who would be born a month too soon. “I won’t lie to you, Mercy. This is not good. The babies will be small for sharing their nourishment and growing space, and smaller still for coming early.”

“I know,” Mercy said even as she cried out with pain.

Sara bathed her friend’s face and pressed her cheek to Mercy’s cool brow. “I wish….” She sighed. “For your sake, my friend, I wish to God I knew more.”

“Jordan will be here any minute,” Mercy said.

Sara went back to check her progress. “So will one of your little ones. One with hair as pale as corn silk.” And a very weak pulse, if any.

Mercy gasped a laugh and screamed as she pushed.

The blonde mite of a boy slipped into Sara’s hands with no sign of life. Sara sobbed and worked on it for as long as she dared, but the next child that needed help entering the world might have a chance.

She turned her attention back to Mercy, who knew, without words that the first of the twins had not survived.

The second took a bit longer, which worried Sara. “When did you last feel life?” she asked Mercy.

“I … I don’t remember.”

“Yesterday?  Last week?”

“I don’t remember,” she wailed.

Damn, damn, damn. “The child came. Another son. To be placed, as he was in his short months of life, beside his brother … but in death.

More labor, but not for the afterbirth, Sara realized with shock.

“A third boy,” Sara said, her voice wavering. She held up the lifeless child, no bigger than the cupped palms of her hands, regarding it through a mist of tears with an overwhelming sense of wonder and loss.

Sara washed and wrapped each babe separately and brought Mercy all three to hold. Crooning, she kissed small fingers, tiny noses, and Sara wept with her.

Mercy ran out of tears.

Sara did not.

She put the babies back in the cradle and helped deliver the afterbirth. It came fast, easy, and in one piece, thank God. Mercy was not bleeding overmuch.

“It’s not your fault, her dear friend kept saying, but Sara did not hear nor heed her words.

She had just got Mercy washed, and clean padding placed between her legs, when Enos returned. “The doc’s on his—”

He fell to his knees beside the cradle.

“Boys,” Mercy said. “I’m sorry, Enos.”

Enos turned on Sara. “This is your fault. What did you do?  How could you let this happen?”

I don’t know, I don’t know, Sara kept thinking, but words would not come. She had cost the lives of three babies. She had failed her best friend.

“No, Enos,” Mercy kept saying, “It’s not Sara’s fault,” but the grieving man knew nothing but rage.

“Get out,” he ordered Sara. “Out.”

Sara kissed Mercy’s cheek. “I will be sorry until the day I die,” she whispered, then she hurried outside, as fast as her clumsy gait would allow, and climbed into her buggy.

When she topped the rise, Sara saw Jordan’s fancy carriage climbing Hickory Hill from the valley, headed in her direction. She did not want to be forced to see him. She could not bear to confess her failure. Rather than take the direct route to Walnut Creek, Sara turned her buggy onto Maple Valley Road to go around the town.

She had been a fool to think she could be a midwife. She had all but killed three babies. She could no longer allow herself to risk the lives of the women who might entrust themselves to her care. She did not, after all, possess the skill to be a midwife.

That dream was not meant to be, neither was her dream of having a husband and family of her own. If she kept going, no family would miss her, none of her own, that was.

Adam’s family would be better off without her.

Was it only a year ago that she had been so young and so filled with a sense of purpose and invulnerability?

A lot could happen in a year.

Sara tried to concentrate on her driving. She needed not to run the buggy wheels through so many holes. The jostling was killing her. Her back was killing her. She hurt so bad, she had to untie her apron because the strings binding her belly were making her discomfort worse.

Untied, her apron flapped in her face, so she pulled it off, over her head, and tried to stuff it behind her seat. It fell out almost at once and a gust of wind took it and lifted it in the air. Sara reached for it and nearly fell from the buggy.

She stopped and got down, but when she saw the wind carry the apron upward and toward the woods, her sore back reminded her she wasn’t in any condition to climb a tree, so she gave up chasing it and got back in the buggy.

Sara started driving again, heedless of her direction, so long as she went far, far away from all she could never have.

Once she had believed she could save every mother and child she tended. She had believed that she could make Adam love his children. “As if he could love anyone.” He didn’t even love the child she carried with so much hope, until now. She had even believed he would come to love her. Sara laughed aloud, but ended on a broken sob.

“Poor baby,” she crooned, rubbing her big belly, ignoring her aching back. “I want you, even if your Datt does not. He doesn’t even want me. He only got stuck with me, because the Elders made him marry me. He needed somebody, anybody, to nurse him back to health. He needed somebody to take the responsibility for your sisters off his shoulders.

Sara stopped the buggy. She still found Adam’s giving her the girls to be something of a puzzle, the pieces of which she could not seem to fit together, no matter how many ways she tried. Another foolishness on her part, most likely. She mocked herself with a curse and regarded the fork in the road. One road lead back home—well, to the Zuckerman farm. The pike would lead her toward the far reaches of the state, where Ohio met Pennsylvania. She had heard there were several Amish communities in that vast, unknown place.

Sara pushed her hair more securely beneath her bonnet and looked around. The weather was turning. Despite the October date on the calendar, winter was almost upon them, the wind brisk, the air cool. She might have to stop for the night and she had no money for shelter, but the shack where her child had been conceived lay along the pike to Pennsylvania.

Why not take the pike?  Join another community. Start again.

She had failed Mercy.

She had failed as a daughter and sister.

She had failed to teach Adam to love. He was sorry he married her. He had his mother and sister now; what did he need her for?  Lena and Emma would take good care of the girls.” Sara wiped her eyes with an angry hand. Yes, she would miss them. Her arms ached to hold baby Hannah even now, but soon she would have her new little one to fill the emptiness.

“You,” she told her restless child, “will know only a complete and willing love, not a half-grudging one. You might have only one parent, but she will love you enough for two, though she will miss your father until the day she last closes her eyes.”

Sitting there, looking down that lonely road, Sara knew she had no choice. She could not go back. One parent who loved was better than two, if one of them made a child yearn for what could not be. Better to be content in life than feel as if something was missing.

For the child pressing and turning in her womb, she must go. To relieve her husband of the burden of her presence, she must. As she must to relieve the community of a midwife who could kill.

And she must do it now, before anyone could change her mind, before good-byes could weaken her determination or tears sever her resignation. She would make this sacrifice for the child she carried, for the family she loved, but did not belong to, and for the people and community she’d failed so miserably.

Mourning the babes who’d died at her hands and would never know the joy of life, Sara turned her buggy toward the road to Pennsylvania.

Her community needed better than a fumbling Amishwoman for a midwife. They needed a book-taught doctor. If they were too foolish to call Jordan … well, that was not her problem anymore, was it?

Though her people had not embraced or welcomed her rebelliousness easily, leaving even them was more difficult than she expected. With every mile she placed between them, she mourned. The thought of not seeing those faces, of never seeing her new mother and sister again, made her cry out with the unfairness of it.

She hoped that someday Lena and Emma would forgive her for her part in their arguments. They would be good to the girls, to children of their own blood. Blood made the difference. Lizzie, Katie, Pris, baby Hannah; they were not Sara’s blood and never would be, no matter how badly leaving them lanced her heart.

Lizzie would learn to cook fine without her. Katie would still giggle, maybe not for a few days, but giggling was inside that girl, no matter what. Sara worried about leaving Pris, though, and Hannah.

She swiped at her eyes so she could see the road better.

The greatest break in her heart, the one that pained her more than her back right now was the ache of leaving that big, little boy of a man. That stone-for-a-heart male with his beard of wire and nibbling lips of silk that could turn her to water.

That same headstrong man had made a space for himself in her wary heart and would reside there forever. If she were to be honest with herself, Sara had to admit that the place Adam Zuckerman occupied was very, very big. So big that maybe her love for him had overflowed into her very soul when she wasn’t looking.

Silly her, for letting it happen.

For a minute, Sara stopped and held the reins, unmoving, not certain she could go on.

She wanted to go home.

Home to Adam.

To her children. Except, they were not hers.

She could do this. She was strong, and a scrapper, everybody knew it, stubborn, passionate, determined.

If that were so, then why did she feel so much the opposite right now?

Even as she sat there, the air turned to a snap and the temperature plummeted, much like a certain leaf-crackling night about a year ago. The temperature had chilled fast the night she went to deliver Abby’s baby.

Her words to Adam still haunted her. She had stood in judgment, foolish, stupid. That girl; that was the one she most resembled now, she thought. Foolish, stupid, weak, afraid. Still stubborn, though, because she flicked the reins and continued in the direction she’d set, away from everyone and everything she loved, for their own good.

Before long, snow swirled around her in tiny flakes. Barely there, but enough to remind her of getting lost in the snow before. She stopped the buggy again. She was not terribly far from home, yet something in her rebelled at turning back. Not just because she was stubborn, but because she simply could not bear to go back, then have to make the same, painful decision another day.

She could not. This was best.

The snow, she saw soon enough, was no more than a flurry, a hint of the future, nothing like the other time. She could bear the chill that was left after it stopped, but what about her child?  Could he bear it?

Where had Adam said the shack stood, precisely?  At the least, she needed an outhouse. At the most….

Sara pressed her hand to the small of her back. Oh she did not like this backache at all.

* * * * *

Adam bedded down Titania and Tawny after his trip to the buggy factory where he’d replaced the reins to his mother’s buggy. She’d had them repaired and re-braided so many times, it was a wonder she and Emma had made it all the way to Ohio from Indiana without an accident.

It was a wonder they’d not snapped that night in the snow as he’d searched for Sara. Adam shivered. He never wanted to spend a similar agony of hours again. Even now, bad as the day had begun, he could hardly wait to set eyes on Sara.

He hadn’t wanted to leave this morning, but he’d not been able to bear waiting for her to return, and he knew she wouldn’t want him at Mercy’s, their argument distracting her. He’d needed to keep busy, but the trip to Millersburg had been dull, lonely.

Funny how one journey with Sara and the girls, and one with Sara alone, could change the way a man thought. He didn’t like traveling alone any more. He supposed he had to admit that he liked having company on long rides. And not just any company, but Sara with her smiles and laughter, and the girls with their trips to the trees every twenty feet, and the kinds of questions could drive a man mad.

Adam nearly smiled. Imagine Mad Adam thinking such a thing. If Sara were here, he’d take her hand and share the joke.

Damned if he hadn’t found himself smiling over some of the girls annoying questions on the ride home today. Damned if he didn’t anticipate a house filled with noise, even Emma’s screech when he walked in.

Sara should be back and exhilarated after delivering twins. Lord, he wanted to take her to bed. And she wanted him as much as he wanted her. Was he crazy to worry so about the birth?  Was he crazy to deny himself, and her, during this safe time?

Probably.

He raised his head. Perhaps he’d tell her so tonight.

Ah, but how would he bear not having her after their child’s birth, if he did not begin the way he must go on?

When he got home, the house was quiet. Too quiet. But for a lop-eared rabbit on a bed of quilts, no one raised their head in greeting. No dinner scents lingered, no supper pans of hot food simmered on the stove to answer the growl in his stomach.

All the times he’d wished for quiet returned to haunt him, and he imagined any number of frightening reasons for the silence.

He cursed. Foolish. His mother and Emma had probably taken the children and—

Was Sara still here, alone?  His body quickened at the notion. Adam rolled his eyes over his eagerness for his wife. Then again, what was different about that?  He supposed, with the child due in less than six weeks, he’d best be thinking about something else. Still, six weeks was a long time….

He entered their room, hoping Sara was napping and hadn’t heard him come in, but his fantasy of waking her with kisses took wing when he saw the empty bed.

He headed for the stairs.

Every single bedroom was empty. The house was empty.

Had she spent all day tending Mercy?

It wasn’t till he came back to the kitchen that Adam found the note tucked into the jelly cupboard latch. ‘Sara is still with Mercy. Took girls to Verna’s quilting. Knew you would be hungry. Bread, cheese and cold beef inside. Mutter.’

Sara must have found the note and gone to join them. He went back out for his buggy. Nobody would expect Mad Adam Zuckerman to show up at a quilting supper. For a minute Adam was uncomfortable with the notion of sitting down with all those women, but then the look on Sara’s face when he did—on all the women’s faces—was enough to make him anticipate the scene.

Old Verna about swallowed her smacking gums when he walked into her best room. Her look alone would have been worth everything, if Sara had been there.

Emma screeched when she saw him and quit the room, but his mother rose and came to him. “Is Sara all right?  I didn’t like her backache yesterday. I hope she’s not still at Mercy’s. She needs to rest. I told her to rest.”

A buzz started in Adam’s head. His heart, for some reason, took on a tripping beat. The faces of the women around the quilting frame held different expressions, expectant, curious, worried.

Adam took his mother’s arm and led her to the kitchen. “She isn’t resting. She isn’t home.” He scrubbed his face with a hand. “I thought she’d joined you, here.”

“She must still be with Mercy, then.”

“I’ll go get her. She shouldn’t be trying to drive that buggy with—  Why are you worried about a backache?”

Adam could have sworn his mother said, dummkopf, below her breath. She shook her head. “Go find Sara.”

An hour later, Adam left the sad house of Mercy and Enos Bachman. Mercy had been feeding little Saramay when he arrived. “It wasn’t her fault,” she said when she saw him. “How is she?  I was afraid she was in labor too.”

Too?  As if she’d slapped him upside his head with a barn-beam, Adam reeled.

Mercy’s boys had not survived their birth. Three of them, lost. Sara would blame herself and bear triple the guilt. Adam knew that as well as he knew his own name, and the knowledge chilled him.

He would not allow her such guilt. Self flagellation, especially over death, could be crippling. Worse. It could make you crave death, yourself.

Adam swore but tried to stay calm.

Mercy’s boys had been born before ten this morning and dusk drew purple streaks on the horizon even now. Sara should have been home hours before.

But nothing would be simple with Sara, especially with guilt as a dark companion. Where had she gone?  Even if she believed she deserved punishment, she would not hurt the child she carried, which calmed Adam a great deal.

At the end of the Bachman drive, he stopped his buggy to think. Sara did not run from her problems. She faced them. But she was not herself these days. The Scrapper who’d faced down Mad Adam Zuckerman was carrying a child. She had turned into the woman who’d wept when she tripped over a rabbit and sent a platter of pigs knuckles and sauerkraut across the kitchen to splatter the walls and dirty the floor.

Adam urged the horses onward. He could almost laugh again, as he had that night—at the sight, at her fury at him for laughing—if he were not so out-of-reason worried about her.

She had believed, if she were a midwife, that there would be no more dead mothers or babies, which worried him the most. He’d tried to tell her that she shouldn’t take such burdens upon herself.

He only wished she’d listened.

Deep down, Adam hoped Sara understood that she could not blame herself for those babies’ deaths. She had told him the day Abby died that she was not a doctor, just a midwife. After today, did she still understand the sense of her words?

Just a midwife, not a doctor. Jordan. Much as Adam disliked the man, much as he hoped Sara would seek her husband out first, she might have gone to the medical man, in these circumstances. His opinion on the deaths of Mercy’s babies would matter to her.

Adam swore and stopped at the side of the road to light and hang his buggy lanterns. While he did so, he thought he heard something flapping in the trees, but it was too dark to see much of anything. He climbed back into his buggy and turned his horses back toward the doctor’s house on the far side of town.