Keys of Heaven

by Adina Senft

  “They’re still in school, aren’t they?” Sarah said.

  “The two younger are, if you can pin them down long enough to go,” Amanda said. “One of the elder two just got back from a month with Arlon’s relatives in Lebanon County and the other is putting the i in Rumspringe.”

  “But why don’t they help?” she wanted to know. “It’s their place to honor God and their father by helping him now that they’re old enough. With four boys, that farm should be fixed up and producing enough to keep them by now.”

  “I don’t know what the problem is,” Corinne said. “They’re a cheerful lot, and all smiles in their dirty faces, but a firm hand should have been applied years ago, if you ask me. I don’t know what Arlon and Ella are thinking.”

  Arlon and Ella were not Sarah’s business. But Amanda seemed to think that Linda was. “If you see Linda, let her know I’m happy to talk with her,” she said at last. “I don’t know how I can help, but at least I can give her a nice big slice of pie and some fresh milk. Everything else is up to the Lord.”

  Amanda’s smile broke out, making her quiet face with its broad forehead and small chin beautiful. “I’ll tell her.”

  “Speaking of things being up to the Lord, I hope you’re coming Friday,” Corinne said. “Did you have anything else planned?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Only writing letters. My sister is expecting again, so we’re all excited as can be. She had a miscarriage this past winter, you know.”

  Corinne nodded. “I’ve been praying for her—I’m so glad! Well, that’s gut, then. Our company will be here in time for dinner—you remember my cousins Zeke and Fannie King? One of Fannie’s relatives who is farming east of there is coming, too. We hardly ever get to see Zeke and Fannie except in the winter. This is a treat.”

  “I’d love to. What can I bring?”

  “One of those funny salads with the flowers in it,” Amanda said promptly. “I love those.”

  Sarah laughed and said, “A salad it will be. Maybe I’ll put nasturtiums in it, just for you.”

  She reached up to put the dry drinking glasses in the cupboard, and missed the conspiratorial look and raised eyebrows that Amanda exchanged with her mother. When she turned back again, they had wiped it from their faces and the conversational river flowed on as if that silent exchange of secrets had never been.

  Chapter 2

  Henry Byler hadn’t been around kids much after he’d left home. When he’d climbed down from that bus in Missouri after leaving his parents’ Holmes County farm in the middle of the night, he’d felt as aged as his own Daadi, and at the same time, as young and inexperienced in the ways of the Englisch world as any toddler on his mother’s lap in church.

  He’d lucked into a job in the back of a garden store that sold clay urns and decorative pottery, and met the potters who supplied them. From there, he did rather like Caleb was doing now—hanging out and absorbing as much knowledge as he could before someone noticed and chased him away.

  Busy with survival and then later, making a living, then getting his GED and going to college…there hadn’t been a lot of time for getting to know any kids.

  He was paying his dues now.

  “Slam it down harder, Caleb,” he instructed the gangly fourteen-year-old who had somehow morphed into his unofficial apprentice. “You’re not going to hurt the clay, and the bubbles have to be flattened out of it completely.”

  “Oomph!” The boy hefted a big lump of clay like a bag of chicken feed and slammed it on the wedging table.

  “Try cutting it in half,” Henry suggested, then returned his attention to the batter bowl he had on the wheel.

  “I can manage,” Caleb panted. “Do you think I’ll have muscles like yours by the end of the summer?”

  “I think you’ll have a slipped disc and carpal tunnel syndrome. Don’t try to save time by wedging a big piece and then cutting it. Cut one or two pounds at a time, enough for a single mug or bowl. I tacked up a chart for you, see? You’ll be better able to pound the bubbles out of a smaller lump.”

  “This is an important commission and we can’t mess it up. Ja, I know.” He took the words out of Henry’s mouth, which made him realize just how often he must have said them in the last couple of weeks.

  “Point taken,” Henry told him. “Now you take mine. And yes, you’ll have some definition by the end of this job, if that’s what you’re after. Working clay is hard physical labor.”

  “Daadi doesn’t believe me. He thinks I ought to be helping him and Uncle Josh in the fields.” Caleb took the cutting wire and sliced the lump into three as easily as Henry himself might have. The boy was a quick study in some things, he’d give him that.

  “Maybe you ought to obey your grandfather.”

  “But I want to do this.” Slam! Slam! “Anybody can follow a horse up and down. But not everybody knows how to work clay. Can I make the handles?”

  “I need someone to wedge more than I need someone to make handles. Those only take a minute. That’s probably enough on that lump, Caleb. If you overdo it, then it won’t do what I ask it to on the wheel.”

  “How do you ask it?” The boy wrapped the damp clay in plastic and set it with the row of others that would be today’s batch.

  “With my hands.”

  Was that what had happened to him when his fiancée, Allison, had died in that car accident? Too many slaps—too much slamming against the brick walls of life, rendering him unable to do what God asked him to do?

  Maybe.

  But things were better now. He didn’t know why. Coming to the home his aunt had left him, to the community of Amish relatives he’d visited in his youth, should have made things worse. He’d been running from his upbringing for most of his life, so it was strange that running back to it had brought him a measure of peace and allowed him to get his hands back into clay again.

  Not that he was coming all the way back to it, mind you. That was never going to happen. But he was getting used to living in the quiet, nonelectrified farmhouse that had once rung with the voices and shouts of someone else’s family. Of living on a farm that other men tilled and cared for. Of making friends with other people’s children.

  Like Caleb, and a few of the teenagers like Priscilla Mast, whose dad’s farm abutted his and Sarah Yoder’s on one corner. After a hoedown party had ended in a grass fire a couple of months ago, the local teens had evidently decided he was on their side when he didn’t press charges or hand anyone over to the local sheriff. He overlooked the fact that nonretaliation was the Amish way, and told himself it was because they hadn’t really done much harm to that old fallow field. The Youngie would greet him on the road when they were driving by in their courting buggies, and now and again he’d find a plate of cookies or a pie on his doorstep when he came in from the studio he’d created in the barn.

  Sarah Yoder sent the odd plate over, too, but not with this kind of frequency.

  It felt a little strange to be accepted by a bunch of local kids. A nice kind of strange. As Caleb had pointed out in a rare moment of sense in all his chatter, Henry and the local teenagers were on the same side of the baptismal fence. They hadn’t joined church yet, and neither had he.

  Except in his case, there was no yet.

  Through the open doors, he heard the crunch of tires on gravel, rolling slowly past the house and coming to a stop on the wide piece of ground he’d paid Caleb to clear for a parking lot between house and barn. Not buggy wheels, but tires, which meant an Englisch car. It was either a curious tourist, drawn in by the small placard bearing a pot and the word ARTISAN that he’d ordered off the Internet, or it was—

  “Hello in there!”

  Ginny.

  Caleb grinned over his shoulder as Henry brought the wheel to a stop. “Hello,” he called as her curvy form appeared silhouetted against the light between the open barn doors. “Give me a second—I’m just pulling this bowl off and I can’t leave it.”

  “Take your time,” she s
aid cheerfully. “Hey, Caleb. ’Sup?”

  Caleb, whose mouth ran a mile a minute, got inexplicably tongue-tied in Ginny’s presence. Henry could never decide if it was because she was an Englisch woman, or an African-American one, or simply because she was Ginny, and she tended to silence people while they adjusted to her brilliance, the way eyes had to adjust when they came out of a dark room into the sunlight.

  He lifted the bowl, still on the bat—the flat surface in the middle of the wheel—and took it over to the workbench, where he used his thumb and two fingers on its soft rim to pull a spout into shape that was wide enough to accommodate the thicker flow of cake batter. Then he cut it from the bat with his cutting wire and set it on the drying shelf.

  “There. Done.” The water in the deep sink was cold, fresh out of the ground, with a tendency to be hard, but it felt good as he washed his hands.

  When he was dry and presentable, he turned to Ginny with a smile, and she, as irrepressible in her way as Caleb normally was, gave him a hug instead of a handshake. “I hope that old thing isn’t interfering with my mugs.”

  Today she was wearing yellow jeans and a lime-green T-shirt with a quilt square and the words SISTERS’ DAY EVERY DAY written on it in curly script. Her earrings were tiny yellow birds.

  On any other woman, the effect would have made him flinch. But on Ginny, they made you feel like all the sunflowers in the field had turned their beaming faces toward you and all was right with the world.

  “Not a bit. I did five this morning, before I got started on the D.W. Frith order.” He smiled into her amber eyes. “I haven’t forgotten who my number one customer is.”

  “You’d best not.” She gave him a poke in the ribs and said, “But I’m not here on business. I actually have an afternoon off and I’m here to tempt you into two hours of dissipation and frivolity.” He took a breath, and before he could say a word, she went on, “I know those are foreign concepts to you, but for once in your life, just go with it and come with me, okay?”

  He hadn’t had a day off in two weeks—since starting the Frith order, in fact. Temptation flooded in, warring with the thought of the bowls and jugs that needed to be completed, glazed, fired, and shipped to arrive by the fifteenth of August.

  Ginny appealed to Caleb. “Help me convince him. A man can’t work twelve hours a day, seven days a week without losing it.”

  “Go on, Henry,” said Caleb, the traitor. “I’ll finish wedging this block of clay and clean up. It’ll all be ready for you tomorrow.”

  Henry wavered, but it was the pleading in Ginny’s eyes that did him in. The novelty of someone actually asking for his company was still too fresh, too unusual. He was powerless against it.

  Which was how he found himself on a sunlit hillside an hour later, looking out over the valley from under a big chestnut that had probably been there since the original Amish settlers had come to the township in the seventeen hundreds.

  “There, now,” Ginny said happily, setting out sandwiches, a basket of berries, and bottles of cold limeade she’d probably made herself to match her T-shirt. “Isn’t this nice?”

  “You have a gift for making an event out of the simplest things.” He bit into a fresh, flaky roll to discover it contained a fat slice of Brie cheese, a layer of cranberry sauce, and some leafy greens he couldn’t identify. He finished it in about two seconds and reached for another.

  “Not a gift,” she said, making herself comfortable on the quilt she’d fished out of the trunk of her car. “I just pay attention to details. And one detail I noticed was that you hadn’t been out in a long time. So I came to rescue you from the tyranny of the pots, marching around your studio like the brooms in that Disney cartoon.”

  He laughed at the image—and at the unconscious assumption that he would get the reference. “You forget I didn’t have a childhood that contained cartoons. But I did go to Disneyland once, and I know what you mean. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, right?”

  She nodded. “That scared me silly when I was a little kid. Inanimate objects behaving with minds of their own—don’t like ’em. I don’t like dolls that talk and move their eyes, either, or clowns. Creepy.”

  “Not a fan of the circus, then?”

  She shook her head so that her spiral curls, tied back in a yellow scarf wrapped around her head like a headband, danced. “You couldn’t get me to go on a bet. The one and only time my parents took me and my sisters, a clown came leaping into the stands to give out candy or something, and I had a total meltdown. They had to carry me out before I burst a blood vessel from screaming. Or so Mama said. After that first sight of the darn clown coming at me up the stairs, I don’t remember very much.”

  “The most traumatic thing that ever happened to me was falling through the hay hole when I was seven. That doesn’t really compare.”

  “It would if there was nothing underneath. Did you get hurt?”

  “No, luckily my dad had just filled the stall, so it was a soft landing. Still, I treated the loft with a lot more respect after that.”

  “Do you miss it, Henry?”

  “What? The hayloft?” The words came out defensively, instinctively.

  “No, silly. Being Amish.”

  Deflect—deflect. “Did your husband?”

  She took his question at face value. “I don’t think so. He was happy in the Mennonite church, and so was I, for a time. But after our divorce, I didn’t find the satisfaction in it that I used to, so I left.”

  “I can say the same.”

  “Our situations are different, though. I still have my family, all happy Gospelpalians, in Philadelphia.”

  “Gospelpalians?” That was a new one.

  “Episcopal Gospel Church of Douglastown, but that’s a mouthful. Mama couldn’t get her tongue around it when she was small, so her family started using her word for it. Gospelpalians. It’s a family tradition now, even when she got married and Daddy took over the pulpit.”

  “I still have my family.”

  “But you told me yourself, you can’t go home again.”

  “I can, technically. I’m not under die Meinding. But I don’t want to. I’m happy living here, and my relatives are civil and don’t have their fingers in my life, and it all works out.” He finished up the last roll as if that were the end of it.

  Ginny gazed at him, then out at the pretty view, and back to him again.

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to decide if you really mean it.”

  He met that gaze, as sober now as it had been twinkling and full of laughter before. “What brought on this serious conversation anyway? I’m supposed to be having an afternoon off.”

  “You can still use your mind, even if your hands aren’t busy,” she pointed out. “Where do you see our friendship going, Henry?”

  “I see it blooming like the daylilies down there by the road.”

  “Aren’t you the poet. I’m serious.”

  “So am I. I don’t ask more of a flower than that it simply exists, and in return, it makes me happy.”

  “But people aren’t flowers. We do more than just exist.”

  “Sure. But isn’t it enough that our friendship exists, and that it makes us happy?”

  She sighed, a short, choppy sound of frustration. “Never mind.”

  He knew he should answer her question in the spirit in which she’d asked it. But he couldn’t. Not yet.

  Not until he knew the answer himself.

  Chapter 3

  Except for cleaning toilets, which she didn’t like doing at home, either, Priscilla enjoyed her job at the Rose Arbor Inn. Ginny was not only nice to work for, but also fair about extra wages for extra work, and flexible about things like time off. Pris could see now that, had she gone to work on the retail floor at the Hex Barn in order to be close to Simon, she would have gone crazy in the first week. The disappointment of incurring her father’s wrath in order to be near him, only to have him leave within a few days, would have been bad enough, b
ut to add the tourists and the strangeness of having to tell people that the made-in-China things they bought were Amish-made would have made it worse.

  There were plenty of tourists at the Inn, but at least she could say with perfect truth that ja, the quilt on their bed had been made by a local Amish or Mennonite woman. In fact, the Kentucky Storm in the Peace Room had been made by Evie Troyer, and Priscilla herself had helped with the quilting before it went to the auction last September.

  She’d spent the morning stripping beds and scrubbing bathrooms. The other Maud, Kate Schrock, a Mennonite girl from the church Ginny used to go to, worked Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays while Priscilla worked Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Kate wore a lace doily on her coiled-up hair, held on by a couple of bobby pins, which were discouraged by the Ordnung for any Amish woman. Kate was older than Priscilla, and getting married the following year.

  “Anytime you want to take a few days off, you just let me know,” she’d told Priscilla not long ago. “I want to get in as many hours as I can and save as much as possible so we can put a down payment on a house.”

  Ginny wanted all the guest rooms made up, the dishes done, and the public rooms tidied and dusted by two o’clock each day so that when guests checked in at three, there were no buckets lurking in the upstairs hall or glasses left over from the night before sitting on the coffee table.

  Kate usually vanished the moment her chores were completed, to go and do bride-to-be things, but Priscilla liked to linger a little. When she brought in a bouquet of flowers for the entry hall where the registration book lay open, Ginny had been delighted and the job of doing a few things “just for pretty” had become hers.

  Ginny wasn’t back yet from wherever she’d gone all dolled up in yellow pants with birds in her ears, and when the doorbell rang at two forty-five, Priscilla jumped and put down the bowl of snowball flowers on the dining room table so abruptly it was a good thing the water didn’t slosh out onto the gleaming wood.