Jacob’s Return

Chapter 1

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, June 1885

 

Jacob Sauder drove his buggy toward the home he left four years before, never intending to return. Same old dirt lanes bisected greening patchwork fields and plain Amish farms, untarnished by time. But despite the landscape, time had passed. Life had changed. And unlike the panorama that quickened his heart, Jacob Sauder had been tarnished.

Uncertainty had dogged him since his decision to return, but this sense of anticipation — this was a surprise.

Jacob stopped the buggy at the top of Hickory Hill and scanned the valley. Lancaster looked the same, yet different, trees taller maybe, grass greener surely.

Home. He had come home after all.

But would they let him stay?

He flicked the reins setting Caliope to a trot. Right before he left this place — at his mother’s funeral, no less — he told everyone, God and the Bishop included, to go to hell. Then he’d turned from Mom’s open casket, and the dirt hole waiting to swallow her, climbed into his buggy, and never looked back.

He’d tried to become English, which his people called anyone not Amish, and broke every rule he’d been taught, some as slight as wearing buttons on his coats … others, much, much worse. And he might have gone on that way, if fate had not taken a hand.

Anticipation skittered his heart.

Dread weighed him down.

How would his father feel about his unexpected return? How would Rachel feel? She who’d filled his empty soul when his twin sister, Anna, had died. Rachel who became, somehow, his missing half. Rachel Zook. Mudpie – he called her. His brother’s wife.

How were Datt and Rachel? Had they changed?

Jacob slowed when he spotted thirty or so Amish buggies outside the Yoder barn. His heart skipped as he turned into the drive. A good sight, these buggies. “You are home, they said, and welcome.”

If only he believed it.

“You are not welcome here!” came a familiar voice.

Well, his brother, Simon, had not changed, not in looks, certainly not in disposition. Jacob shook his head. “Missed you, too.”

“Go back to where you belong,” Simon said, approaching with an angry stride.

Jacob climbed from his buggy. “This is where I belong.” It tickled him to skin Simon’s knuckles, especially with faulty sentiment.

Simon’s thin lips firmed, his eyes narrowed. “You would come on Church Sunday, especially this one.” He straightened his frock coat and raised his chin. “I am to be ordained Deacon this morning.”

Jacob was taken aback by the news, but it explained Simon’s solitude; he was waiting to make an entrance. His brother would be a stern, humorless deacon, but some people needed that, Jacob supposed. “You must be pleased.”

“I am pleased to do God’s will. Unlike you.” Simon walked away. “Just go,” he said, and disappeared into the barn.

Very unlike me, Jacob thought, as he made his way around his buggy, raised the back flap … and grinned. After all these weeks, he still could not get over the sight of them, his two-year-old twins, now snuggled in sleep like newborn pups. “Come, Pumpkins,” he said. “Up we go.” What a surprise they’d been. What a joy, despite the fact that he deserved no joy. He held them, one in each arm. He was getting good at this, he thought, considering he’d only had them a short time. Two sleepyheads, one kapped, the other hatless, nuzzled his neck.

Good. They felt good there.

When Jacob walked into the Yoder house after four silent years and carrying two small children, whispers grew, then, “Shh, Shh, Shh.”

Suddenly, not a sound could be heard save the chafing of his new black broadfall pants rubbing one leg against the other. Rough they were and itchy, not smooth and comfortable like the buckskins he’d worn when he pretended to be English.

He stopped and stood in the middle of the group, the sight familiar yet foreign. Row upon row of men sat ramrod straight on simple backless benches. In the opposite room, facing the men, sat rows of women, on matching benches, the folding doors between the two rooms open for this purpose. The women were white-kapped, the men bearded, marking them Amish.

Jacob’s own beard had been shaved daily during his sojourn into the English world, with only three weeks growth now to show for his decision to return. This marked him a rebel. And a liar. Only married men let their beards grow.

He saw old friends, nodded at a few. Some smiled back, but not many. This should not anger or surprise him, but it did. Emma sighed in her sleep, reminding him of his plan to raise his babies here. Knowing that a bad attitude could make for a bad beginning, Jacob swallowed his urge to declare that he was not sorry he left.

His father was not to be seen, but Ruben Miller, fellow rebel, grinned a true welcome. Jacob grinned back.

 Where should he sit? He belonged in the men’s section. The babies belonged in the women’s. Unheard of, this, a man raising his babies alone. He would be expected to court a mother for his children soon. But how could he, when the woman he loved....

He saw her watching him and was jolted.

Rachel was more beautiful than he remembered, but she looked....

She buried her anger — he saw the effort it took — and came to him. “They’re yours?” she asked.

Drinking in the sight of her, he could only nod.

“Their mother?” she asked.

Gave them life with her last breath, he thought, but he shook his head, his remorse too great for words.

“What are their names?”

Jacob swallowed his yearning, and his regret, and found his voice. “Emma and Aaron.”

Rachel opened her arms. “I’ll take them.”

“I can’t ask you—”

“Oh, please,” she said, her maple-syrup eyes wide and pleading – revealing a different kind of anguish.

And Jacob knew within the deepest part of himself that Rachel longed to hold his babies with an ache as acute as his own had been these many years to hold her.

He’d almost forgotten this ability they shared — to feel each other’s emotions, as if each lived inside the other. It had happened often to them as children, less as they grew older.

But this, just now, had been powerful. Except that she should be holding her own babies. “Thank you,” he said. “Sit first. It’s tricky when you’re standing.”

They held everyone’s attention, he knew … the prodigal and the woman who’d tossed him away, passing babies back and forth, her marriage to his brother like a cloud between them.

Jacob sat in the back of the men’s section. Everyone opened the Ausband and turned to the hymn named. As always, the Vorsinger began the chant. The High German song soothed him, their blended voices the only music. The words and chant had been passed from one generation to the next. The same song sounded different in other settlements. Better here.

With an ordination, service would be longer than the usual three hours, but he’d already missed the vote for Deaconate candidates. Simon, by the grace of God — according to Amish belief, not Jacob’s — had obviously been the candidate to choose the Bible with the slip of paper naming him Deacon. And from what Simon said, the ordination and laying-on of hands was yet to come.

When it began, Simon was in his element, eyes downcast, brought high in his humility for all to see.

During the ceremony, Jacob could not keep from watching Rachel, his babies asleep in her arms, her slim fingers gentling them. He closed his eyes and imagined the lips that touched Emma’s tiny forehead, touching his.

He remembered how Rachel’s hair, now hidden by her white heart-shaped kapp, would look and feel set free as it grazed his cheek. She had hair the color of blackberry wine, with unruly curls all over her head. And if he were to wrap sections of the silky softness along one of his fingers, he could make the ringlets into long curls that hung down her back like a veil of evening mist after a new moon. And it smelled like honey straight from the hive. Honey with that extra scent of musk it had on a summer afternoon, the sun high in the sky, and you had to fight the swarm to win your prize.

He had removed her kapp on just such a day, let down that beautiful hair, and kissed her for the first time.

Back then, he thought she would always be his.

But she belonged to Simon now. Still, Jacob could not keep from imagining that musky scent … until the words of the new Deacon’s sermon stung him.

“A cankerous apple left in the barrel will rot those around it! It must be plucked, discarded so as not to spoil the rest.” Simon looked straight at him, the bad apple, and all but pointed an accusing finger as he urged all to thrust him from their midst.

Jacob almost laughed. It would take more than a vengeful sermon to scare him away. He’d lived English; nothing could frighten him now.

When he’d looked for Miriam, three years after leaving her, and found his motherless babies instead, he’d considered the best place to raise them and thought this might be it. Now, with Rachel holding them, he was certain of it. But already he knew it would be much harder to watch her and Simon together than he had imagined.

Nevertheless, he was staying … unless he got tossed out.

Simon must have read his resolve, for the Deacon rocked on his heels, clasped his hands behind his back and turned from such a rotten-apple brother as he to gaze at the men about him.

“Who do you think has the most important role in the Amish Church?” Simon asked with great interest. “Is it the Preacher? The Deacon? Is it the Bishop?” He paused to build expectation, searched the men’s faces.

Simon raised an arm to signal the power in his words. “I will tell you who,” he shouted. “It is the women with babies on their laps who have the most important role in our church.”

Jacob sat straighter. Swift and bright, understanding came. Rachel was barren. And Simon was up to his old tricks. His sanctimonious judgment, dispensed now through sermon, would emerge as God’s words. Coated in pretty sentiment, the new Deacon had just shamed his wife before the entire church district.

‘Lift not the sword,’ they’d been taught from birth. Not that the English lived it, and neither had he. But he was Amish again, for good or ill … and he wanted more than ever to plant his fist in his brother’s face.

Good beginning.

Jacob sighed. This was not going to be easy.

Then he saw the tic in Simon’s cheek, the color reddening his neck, signs of discomposure, most likely anger. And Jacob’s heart lightened, for Simon was gaping at Rachel, two tiny two-year-olds to her heart, looking for all the world like an angel, her attention not on him but on the babies in her lap.

Jacob suppressed his chuckle and grinned. She probably hadn’t heard a word her husband said.

With a struggle, likely only visible to this rotten-apple brother, Simon composed himself and turned his sermon toward repentance and the like … until a child’s wail split the air, and the Deacon’s voice was silenced once more.

Everyone craned their necks to see whose child dared interrupt. But Jacob knew. Emma was awake.

Simon glared at Rachel.

Jacob stood to go to her, knowing how difficult it could be to maneuver two heavy babies.

She implored him with her eyes as he came from the back.

I’m coming, Mudpie, he said with his look.

Hurry, she begged with hers.

Aaron, awakened by his sister’s screams, scrambled to the floor, allowing Rachel to carry Emma to the kitchen, shushing her and kissing her tears.

The crowd tittered and a few men chuckled as Aaron stood in the middle of the room looking up at Simon, the uncle he did not know, and pulled on his trouser leg. “Pee pee,” his boy said.

“Ach,” Jacob said as he scooped his son into his arms. “First time he asks to go. I have waited for this day.”

A round of hearty laughter followed them outside. “Good boy, Aaron,” Jacob said, rolling his eyes. And then he began to laugh.