Home Is Where the Heart Is

by Linda Byler

  Hannah watched the truck back up, turn around, and chug off through the rain. She began to cry, soft little whimpers and a runnel of tears that sprang from her eyes and dripped off her chin. She swiped at them, furiously, trying to make sense of her sudden and overwhelming change of feelings.

  She was lonely. Too many changes in too short a time. Jerry’s death too sudden. There was nothing left to do but sag into the armless rocker, her hands dangling down on each side, her head tilted toward the ceiling, seeing nothing.

  Where had all of this come from? Something had to change before he brought back the estimate. But she knew she had never felt this way before. Not with Jerry. Not with Clay. A wave of humiliation swept through her. She felt pity for Jerry and a longing for him. He had already diminished, growing smaller and smaller, already moving away into the far reaches of her memory, if she were honest. Jerry’s face had become shadowy, no longer clear.

  Surely God had something to do with this. She had never been close to God, except when she called out to Him in desperate situations, of which there had been plenty.

  If God was allowing Dave King to come into her life, He’d need to let her know somehow. Never devout, Hannah simply sat and stared, wondering how to pray, vaguely acknowledging a Higher Power, but without proper words to turn her thoughts into an actual prayer.

  She tried, instead, to focus on her business. She hoped she’d have enough money to build the store and stock it with a decent amount of fabrics. She had no idea how to go about contacting the textile mills or a wholesale store. Surely there was one. If she could find Harold Rocher’s address or telephone number, he could give her all sorts of useful information. But she would need a Baltimore, Maryland phone book. Getting his information would be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  Hannah sat and watched the rain, heard the musical patter and the gurgling of the downspout. She imagined the limp, withered green grass in the lawn taking in the droplets, the soil becoming moist. She envisioned happy little earthworms aerating the ground, tunneling through the mud and grass roots.

  The leaves from the oak trees dripped with moisture. Green and velvety, as thick as a crocheted curtain, the leaves spoke of health and steady growth each year, the roots buried deep under the surface, taking in the nutrients and moisture that was supplied without fail.

  She thought of the West, where there was little moisture. Rain failed. The brittle drought, the endless, searing days parched throats and left the cows searching endlessly for grass and water.

  And still she had loved it.

  Now, what to do with the rest of this day? She wondered how long Dave King would take to finish his estimate. She should have offered to help him with his dishes.

  He did not return.

  Two weeks. Hannah went to church with Manny. She worked in her house, arranging, cleaning. She baked bread and a pie. She helped a farmer pick cucumbers and green beans. For a half day of backbreaking labor, she received one dollar. It was enough. She returned the following day and picked bushels of lima beans and more green beans under a sultry, sweltering sun, the air thick and wet with humidity and portent.

  Straightening her back, she scanned the thunderheads in the distance. They looked like piles of black sheep’s wool, with gray, threatening sky stretched from one horizon to another, the sun erased by scudding clouds.

  She didn’t mind the approaching storm. She bent her back and continued grabbing the stubborn lima beans, ripping them from their stalks by the handfuls with her strong fingers. If she could finish this row, she’d likely make two dollars, enough to purchase the few groceries she’d need for the week.

  As Bennie D. paid her, his eyes scanned the skies. He told her she’d better get on home.

  Hannah knew she’d picked too long. She could smell the rain, sense the wind in the churning clouds. But she’d left her windows open so she’d risk the hike home. If she got soaked, it was better than her house getting soaked.

  As soon as she was out of his sight, she ran, her arms pumping at her sides, her feet flying along the road. She could hear the oncoming wind like a freight train and feel the moisture being propelled by the wind.

  The storm hit her about halfway home, the wind taking her breath away, the rain slashing its fury into her face. She winced at the brilliant lightning followed by a drumroll of thunder. Rain streamed down her face, pelleted the top of her head. In a few seconds, she was soaked through her cotton dress.

  The trees above her bent and swayed, lashed by the strength of the wind and rain. Her breath came in gasps. She heard the crunch of gravel behind her. Headlights pierced the barrage of rain like giant cat’s eyes.

  She slowed, unable to catch her breath, the water streaming down her face. The truck pulled up alongside her. The driver yelled at her, some watery garble she couldn’t absorb, so she shook her head.

  There was a blinding flash of lightning. Electricity sizzled through the atmosphere, followed by a horrendous thunderclap. She didn’t hear the slam of the truck door as she continued marching through the torrential downpour, determined to make it home to close those windows.

  Suddenly she was hauled back by two arms as thick and powerful as hawsers. She tried to scream, but only a hoarse, wet sound gurgled from her mouth. She was stuffed unceremoniously into a slippery upholstered truck seat, floundering and spluttering like a half-dead fish.

  She wiped water from her eyes with the backs of both hands. Him!

  “What’s wrong with you?” His way of greeting.

  Angrily, she glared at him with all the power of her black eyes, her face glistening, her hair a sleek, black cap. “I would have made it home,” she stated forcefully.

  Another blinding flash and a deep, reverberating roll of thunder. The windshield wipers were almost useless. A gust of wind rocked the truck. The air in the cab was heavy with moisture, stuffy with lack of oxygen, the driver hunched over the steering wheel, gripping it with both hands, his eyes searching for her house.

  Hannah was dripping water over everything. When they turned into the driveway of her house, she nudged Dave King and told him she needed to get out. Her windows were open.

  Her house was soaked. Water streamed through both kitchen windows, spraying through the screens as if someone held their thumb across the nozzle of a hose. She ran to the bathroom after yanking the windows shut, grabbed towels and proceeded to mop up the ever-widening puddles of water.

  She yelped, remembered the upstairs, dashing up the stairs and clunking the windows shut, hard. Clattering back down for more towels, she saw him at the sink wringing out towels, twisting them with those arms like logs.

  Between them, the house was wiped clean—windowsills, walls, and the floor. The bucket was emptied and the towels were placed in the wringer washer.

  Dave King leaned against the kitchen counter, his straw hat pulled low over his eyes, his arms crossed, and told her that if she saw a storm coming out of the northwest, she should stay put. And keep her windows closed when she went away on a sultry summer day.

  “You know, if your windows were open in your store, you’d have a bunch of ruined fabric,” he finished.

  That raised her ire. “I’m not that dumb. If the windows of my store were open, I’d be here,” she said, loudly.

  “Still, you need to respect these Lancaster County storms. They can come up pretty quick.”

  She scowled, thinking he had no idea what a real storm was, what kind of weather she had survived out West.

  Outside, the rain had not let up. Sheets of wind-driven rain pummeled the window glass and pounded the roof. Rivers of water sluiced through the downspout, the gutters overflowing in a sloppy current that splashed along the front of the porch.

  Lightning lit up the dark kitchen as jagged streaks snaked through the air, followed by claps of thunder like rifle shots. The wind howled. When hail began to bounce against the window panes and leap in the yard as if it was alive, Hannah had to admit to herself that it
was a legit storm.

  She ran to the living room door to watch the icy balls hit the lawn, bounce up, and fall back down in the watery grass.

  She was aware of his presence behind her. She winced as the blue-white lightning illuminated the darkened house and endured the hard crack of thunder without showing the weakness she felt. She shivered.

  “You’re wet. Go change your clothes,” he ordered.

  Hannah went.

  “I’ll put on the tea kettle.”

  When Hannah emerged from her bedroom, she’d toweled her hair dry and was wearing a clean navy-blue dress with no apron. Her feet were encased in warm, black slippers. She was carrying her hairbrush, her hair a tousled, glossy mane spilling down her back. Tilting her head to the left, she began the slow task of removing the tangles, unselfconscious, watching the rain through the living room windows.

  Dave watched her from his stance beside the kitchen stove. When she turned to say something mundane about the weather, he couldn’t take his eyes off that tangled thicket of glossy black hair. He thought he’d been over those kinds of feelings. The loss of Lena and the babies was a heavy weight he carried around with him no matter how hard he tried to discard it. Grief and sorrow were like that. It took you to the depths of black loneliness and longing you’d never forget. After a few years, he’d honestly thought he would never feel the attraction necessary to become friends with another woman.

  But there was something different about Hannah. She had given him quite a jolt the first time he met her. Later he decided he would do well to forget his initial attraction, given that attitude of hers. She was an angry, ill-mannered, brusque young woman; he didn’t need that kind of challenge in his life.

  He was too old to be swept in by a woman’s looks alone. His mother had always said, “Choose your wife by considering whether she would make a good mother to your children.” Hannah was anything but motherly.

  Born the youngest in a family of twelve, Dave had known plenty of teasing, plenty of rough and tumble with a line of older brothers above him. He’d grown up kicking and pounding and running away from them. Now, there was not one of them who dared lift a hand to his massive strength.

  He’d simply kept on growing and building muscle after the others had reached their full growth. And he didn’t take any nonsense from anyone. Never had. It was his method of survival in a tribe of rowdy siblings.

  He had fallen hard for Lena. Petite, soft-spoken, her hair like spun wheat, she was everything his brothers were not. He’d worried and prayed and was afraid for her frail body. When he took her to the hospital, there was nothing they could do to spare her or the babies. Too much infection.

  He had entered a deep, dark place of intense suffering for a longer time than he cared to admit. He became obsessed with his work, the drawing of plans, the endless hard labor that became his saving grace.

  Angry and blaming God, he retreated into a hermit-like existence until the kindly, old bishop came to visit him, his wife bringing his favorite dish of schnitz un knepp. They explained Lena’s loss as a chastening and a polishing of a clay vessel that needed refinement.

  After they had left, he wept most of the night, waking to a new day with the anger and self-pity banished forever by the kindly, old bishop’s healing words. The death of Jesus on the cross for his sins became brighter and more real than it had ever been before.

  And now, here was Hannah, like a sultry temptress. He couldn’t be sure.

  She turned, grimacing, as the hairbrush hit an especially large snarl. “Does it often rain like this? You’d think anything unfastened would be washed away.”

  He wanted to answer, but he couldn’t. Not right away. He wanted to take the hairbrush away from her and run his hands through that luxurious mane of heavy black hair. Her large dark eyes were on his, waiting.

  So powerful was his attraction to her, he had to gulp for air and was afraid he’d have a heart attack right there in her kitchen. “Uh … no. Well, yes, sometimes. But only in summer.”

  She finished with the brushing and reached back to grasp her heavy hair, expertly wrapping some sort of elastic band around it.

  Then he had to put up with her nearness, the scent of her hair like spring rain and some tropical flower he couldn’t name. His senses swam as he took a piece of tablet paper out of his pocket, pointing a finger to some numbers.

  “Yes, yes.” She nodded her head, agreeing, and sending off a fresh wave of floral scent.

  “We can start in about ten days, weather permitting.” All business now.

  “And, what if the weather doesn’t cooperate? I mean …” She spread her hands to indicate the downpour outside.

  “Then it’ll be later.”

  “And I’ll be picking lima beans longer.”

  He laughed. “And getting caught in storms.”

  She smiled. Their gazes held. Both wondered if there could be love without pain.

  Soon after Dave King left, the sun sank in a blaze of glory, illuminating every drop that hovered on blades of grass or beaded a gentle flower. The corn produced great yellow ears, every kernel filled in by the aid of the moisture that seeped up through the sturdy green stalks.

  Hannah walked among the wet flowers and eyed the fields of healthy corn that grew like a miniature forest. She thought of her father.

  She felt a growing sympathy that edged out her irritation and blame. No doubt that he’d imagined this for the prairie. Verdant growth for acres on end, spreading to the edge of the horizon. Life-giving rains, fat cattle that ambled among lush prairie broom grass, timothy, and all the other nutritious native grasses that grew wild, feeding his cattle at no cost to him.

  He had traveled all that distance in faith believing that God would provide. Believing until it turned into human determination, eventually pushing him over the edge. The sadness of it clung to her in a new, claustrophobic way, until she no longer experienced the beauty of the glistening world around her.

  Her mother. How had she endured? Well, it was in the past. She needed to move on. But that was difficult. What if she was to begin a friendship with Dave King? Would her irritation, her dislike of people, eventually pull them apart?

  To explain his amber gaze was not possible. She could memorize, easily, the roundness of his nose, his full cheeks, his thick beard, and the indentation of the thin line of his mouth. So different from Jerry’s features. No dark hair, dark eyes, the face she had come to know as well as her own.

  All that wooly, curly hair. Hannah stepped up on the porch and sat on the wooden rocking chair her grandfather had given her, tucking her feet under her skirts to dry them. She gazed across the green lawn.

  What would have been the outcome on the plains with rain like this? The wheat. Her father’s corn crop. The cattle. Well, it wasn’t the way of it. Not in the West. That was likely the reason it was so sparsely settled, whereas here, in this blessed valley, the soil and the climate drew people from every imaginable corner of the world. Immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands. All sought a better life or religious freedom. Often both. Her own ancestors had arrived on some creaking, storm-tossed vessel, persecuted Swiss brethren who made their homes in Pennsylvania.

  No, their homesteads. Some of these farms, most of them actually, had already been handed down for generations, and would remain in families for many more. So, a homestead could be anywhere folks chose to live, to prosper, to raise their families, live their lives in harmony with the folks around them.

  Hannah smiled and tucked her feet into her skirts. This was her homestead. This adorable house with the kitchen cabinets painted white, and the hardwood flooring that shone from much polishing.

  She loved every little corner, every clever closet tucked away throughout the house. She loved the curve of the railing that followed the stairway to the second floor and the built-in medicine cabinet and green tile in the bathroom.

  Without Jerry, this would not have been possible. She laid her head o
n her propped-up knees and whispered a thank-you to her deceased husband.

  Remorse was a terrible thing. That was the main reason she would have to stop her idiotic pull toward the carpenter. She would only become testy, irritated beyond control, and then she would speak harshly and be determined to have her own way.

  She could never be a proper wife.

  But still, he’d persuaded her to build the store where he thought best. That was something, after all.

  CHAPTER 20

  HE TOLD HER THE PRICE, WHICH WAS FAR LESS THAN SHE ANTICIPATED.

  She hid her elation under lowered brows, pursed lips, and what she hoped was a professional look, the aura of a business woman. She asked, “Can’t you do any better than that?”

  “Hey, look here! I’m already scraping the bottom. Giving you discounts here and there, you being a widow and all.”

  The old irritation. “I’m not poor,” she snapped.

  “I didn’t say you were. Just wanted to give you a good price.”

  “Well, I hate the label of ‘poor widow.’”

  He couldn’t help wondering how she had any funds at all, having lived in North Dakota all that time. Her husband must have had some money, or else she certainly couldn’t have afforded all this.

  He wore a white, short-sleeved shirt, the muscles of his massive arms bulging from the too-tight sleeves, his neck rising from the open collar like the trunk of an oak. Buttons missing, a hole torn in the back, his trousers ripped, safety pins serving as buttons in more than one place.

  She avoided his amber eyes, deciding she would not allow herself to drown in their unexplainable depths.

  Hannah winced when the machine arrived and tore up her back yard like a scissors to cloth, digging the footer, leveling the ground, removing chunks of turf like slices of cake and tossing them aside. A truck wheezed in, a solid chunk of cement blocks was unloaded, and the concrete mixer put to work by the tug of a rope on the gasoline engine.

  Dave King strode among the men and machines, clearly the lord of his own domain. Two Amish boys with clean-cut jaws, their straw hats tossed aside, bent their backs and laid block like pros, with quick, precise movements. Dave worked along with them, whistling and watching everything with a practiced eye.