Home Is Where the Heart Is

by Linda Byler

  Every morning she turned her face into a smiling, friendly shine, washed the painful blisters, and applied fresh adhesive tape. She hid her pain and bit back the winces that came unbidden.

  That evening, she stopped digging and stood surveying her accomplishments. She still had over half of them to go. The pain in her left hand was excruciating. The dull ache had turned into a biting, heated thumping that made her sit down, unwrap a strand of tape, and hold her hand up to the golden autumn sunset.

  Her whole hand was grotesquely swollen now. Bewildered, she lowered it, clutching it with her right hand and trying to decide what she should do.

  Slowly, she got to her feet, only to find a horse and buggy turning in her driveway. It stopped at the shed, the driver remaining seated. Hannah turned her back to pick up the shovel and digging iron, rolled the offending, bloodied adhesive tape into a clump of grass, and turned to make her way to the visitor. Was it someone needing something from the store?

  When Dave King stepped out of the buggy, she thought he might turn it on its side with all his weight hanging on one side. Now what did he want?

  Irritation did its best to quench her gladness at the sight of him. So, he had come. Her heart pounded. She willed her painful, swollen hand out of her thoughts and marched ahead, gamely carrying the digging iron and shovel.

  “What are you trying to do?” Came right to the point, didn’t he?

  “What do you mean, trying? What does it look like?”

  “Tell me you’re not digging fence post holes!”

  Closer now, setting her tools against the side of the shed, she faced him. She’d forgotten the warmth of his eyes and the line of wrinkles on the side of his face. Now what was she supposed to do as she was caught under the spell of his golden eyes?

  “I am building a fence.” She spoke firmly, expertly, hiding away any trace of quivering, her heart pounding in her throat.

  “By yourself?” He flung this over his shoulder as he tied his horse to the steel ring on the side of the shed.

  “Who else?”

  “You should have asked me. I’d gladly help you.”

  “I can build a fence.”

  He walked over to the first post, grasped it with both hands, and shook it. It seemed fairly stable, or so it seemed to Hannah.

  He said nothing and she asked no questions. They both let well enough alone. If he thought the fence posts inadequate, he kept it to himself. She was not about to ask what he thought, either.

  “How have you been, Hannah?”

  The wind played with the strands of loose hair, tossed the ends of her black scarf. She wore no coat although the air felt chilly now that the day was coming to an end. “All right.”

  “Store going well?”

  “So far.”

  After that bit of mundane conversation, words eluded them. Both seemed unsure, stripped of their usual lack of inhibition. For one thing, Hannah felt weak with the pain of her hand, her head spinning as the throbbing worsened.

  “I’m going inside.”

  “May I come with you?”

  “Up to you.” She stepped inside and sagged into a chair, hoping the shadowed kitchen would mask the extreme pain she was enduring. He stood awkwardly, unsure of his welcome.

  Hannah knew it was not going to work. She was so close to tears that she blurted out, “My hand is infected, I think.”

  “Let me see.”

  She thrust out her painful hand, swollen and discolored. He moved away from the sink and took her hand in his. Turning it over he bent his head to examine it more closely. He emitted a low whistle.

  “You know this could be dangerous, don’t you?”

  She nodded.

  “Why did you keep on going with these blisters?”

  “Because I wanted to finish the fence.”

  He shook his head and thought of pliant Lena, who would never have started such a project. She would have left all the physical labor to him while she sat down in the soft, sweet grass with the gold of autumn surrounding her. She would have admired him and he would have known he was deeply loved and respected for his masculine strength.

  Here was another type of woman entirely. Should he help her with her badly infected hand, then leave and never return? All this circled around in his thoughts as he held her hand. Gruffly, he released her hand and said, “Wood ashes.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have any.”

  “Kerosene?”

  She nodded yes.

  So he soaked her hand in a dish of smelly kerosene, washed it with a mixture of homemade lye soap and boric acid, followed by a liberal dose of drawing salve, black, oily, and vile.

  Hannah wrinkled her nose. She was close to tears watching his huge fingers with their fingernails the size of a small spoon, spreading the salve, tearing strips of fabric, and then winding them round and round her painful hand with so much care and precision. The thick curly head of hair above the hulking shoulders with yet another discolored, torn shirt, the perpetual scent of new lumber and soap …

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  He drew back and looked at her with a depth in his gaze, changing his eyes from gold to a deep, murky green that churned with strong feelings of … of what? What, exactly, was this?

  Neither one understood. For one thing, they barely liked one another. He disapproved of her flagrant determination, her undermining of a man’s strength. Her uncanny ability to make him feel worthless, the opposite of his first wife’s adoration.

  She could not bend him to her will the way she manipulated everyone else most of the time. There was nothing ordinary, nothing normal, between them. Yet, there was this unexplained draw toward one another.

  Why did she occupy his thoughts most of the time? He knew it was foolhardy, this hitching up of his horse and driving to her house with no clear purpose. No speech, no prepared words to make his intent clear. You simply did not ask Hannah for a date. She’d laugh in his face and tell him no while enjoying his discomfiture.

  She drew back, both of their thoughts driving a wedge between them.

  “You know you’ll have to repeat that in the morning,” he stated, gruffly.

  “Not kerosene.”

  “I’ll bring you wood ashes.”

  “Aren’t you going to church?”

  “You will obviously not be going.”

  She nodded. The silence settled between them. Darkness crept over the kitchen. She got up, intent on lighting kerosene lamps, but could not strike a match.

  “Here, let me do it.”

  She stepped aside. The soft yellow glow of the lamplight surrounded them, creating a coziness, a space where home and togetherness joined to form remembered evenings spent with loved ones.

  Suddenly, Hannah spoke. “I’ll need a fire before long. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to bother with wood. I thought maybe I’d try coal. The only thing that keeps me from buying a coal stove is the thought of the harmful gas that can poison the air at night.”

  “Well, you can’t dump a whole bucket of coal on a low fire and turn the damper too low. That’s what causes it.”

  She pondered this. “So, you think wood is best?”

  “Not really. With wood, you have the chimney to keep clean and sometimes there’s a creosote problem. I’m thinking you wouldn’t attempt climbing onto the roof to clean the chimney.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you might fall and break a leg. Or your back. Or worse, fall on your head and die.”

  Hannah snorted. Would he care? But she didn’t ask.

  The evening was turning into a ridiculous word play that didn’t sufficiently provide a base for any meaningful conversation.

  Finally, after a few selfconscious attempts at repeating bits of daily news and gossip, Dave asked if she didn’t drink coffee or tea, or if she had lost the practice of offering some to visitors.

  “Get it yourself.”

  Without answering, he got up to put the kettle on. He sank back into
his chair and decided it was now or never. They were getting nowhere and he was afraid of confrontation or of stating his purpose—a state he had never experienced until he met Hannah.

  “All right. The reason I came over tonight was to ask what you would say to beginning a regular, every Sunday evening courtship.”

  “I hate that word,” Hannah blurted out.

  “Well, friendship then. Relationship. Dating. Getting to know each other better. I don’t care what you call it.”

  When there was no response from her, he let well enough alone and got up to get a few cups, the milk and sugar. He began opening cupboard doors as he searched for tea.

  “Left,” she directed him.

  They sat with their steaming cups on the table. Dave pressed on. “I wasn’t planning this, Hannah. But I can’t get you out of my mind. So I figure we’ll keep going with each other’s company so we can find out if we want to get married some day. Isn’t that what courtship is? What’s wrong with that word?”

  Hannah shrugged. “I don’t know.” Then, “I had an uncle who sang a silly song about froggie went a-courtin’, and every time I hear that song I imagine a long-legged, slimy bullfrog like what Manny used to catch and throw at me.”

  Dave’s laughter broke the restraint around them both.

  “You’re a prairie girl.”

  “I am. But I can’t live there. I had to let the homestead go.”

  Dave shook his head, his heart in his eyes.

  “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. To give up, let go, admit defeat, that was excruciating. I’m not sure if I’ll ever get over it. I tell myself this is home, this is where I belong. Anywhere you have a home is your own personal space and you can be happy there. The store is a challenge, and it’s fun to see if I can make a profit. But you wouldn’t believe how tired I am at the end of the day from being nice to people. Smiling, you know. Helping people. It wears me down. All of this artificial smiling when I’d love to tell that Sadie Lapp to go home, wash under her arms, and eat a piece of cake to sweeten her up. It doesn’t matter how hard I try. I just don’t enjoy people.”

  Suddenly, she looked at him with an almost beseeching expression. “Do I always have to live here? I mean, I enjoy being close to my family, but I feel so … well, caged in.”

  “I thought you liked it here.”

  She pondered his statement, swirling her tea with a teaspoon, biting her lower lip. He could tell she was trying to say what she felt, but could not come to grips with her pride.

  “Well, I do, I guess. But if I think of being here until I’m like Sadie Lapp, old and thin and tight and mean, well, I won’t do it. You say you want to start a friendship. Does that mean here? No hope of ever moving somewhere, anywhere, where there are wide-open spaces and fewer people but decent weather? I mean, out West the weather is unpredictable. You can’t win. Jerry did his best and he could have made it if anyone could have. But those grasshoppers were the final straw. It was the worst time of my life. And yet, it turned me toward Jerry, to …” Her voice drifted off.

  Dave watched her face and wondered what the truth about that marriage had been. He didn’t want that kind of marriage for himself. He was a builder, a carpenter by trade. It was all he knew. He had always planned to do that until the day he died. A few sentences out of her mouth and he was questioning his own vocation.

  “I saw in the newspaper at the post office that folks are raising turkeys in Illinois. Amish people started a colony there. What is Illinois like, I wonder?” She spoke tentatively, gauging his reaction.

  Dave watched her face. He saw the desperation of a captive suddenly grasping at a glimmer of hope, a ray of light illuminating her dark existence.

  “You’re serious.”

  “Of course. If I continue to wait on customers I’ll become physically ill from the effort. It’s just not me. It’s not who I am. Look, this is how it is. I’m a loner. I don’t need people and they don’t need me. Call it what you want, I don’t care. Perhaps I’m not a born-again Christian the way other people are. Sometimes I wonder if I need some spiritual conversion, but I can’t be who I’m not. I have no desire to put on a false front so people accept me.”

  She launched into a vivid account of the two strange little girls and how she scuttled off to supply the items they requested. It was so unlike herself. She should have told them she didn’t sell health remedies in a fabric store and to go home and stop bossing her around.

  She finished with, “So, it’s up to you. If you want me, this is what you get. Life has often handed me a bunch of sour grapes and I like to think I’m improving, year after year. But one thing I know. God knows me and He knows my heart. He gave me this nature so He’ll have to help me as I go along.”

  Dave sat quietly, watching her as she finished her impassioned speech. Then, he got to his feet, found her hands, and tugged her upright. He held her hands, then released them and reached for her with both arms. He held her against his chest in a vice-like grip that took her breath away.

  Lifting her chin, he gazed into her eyes in the soft glow of the kerosene lamp. He kissed her, sealing their commitment with the soft pressure of his lips on hers. He drew her closer still until Hannah was filled with the golden light of his love, a sensation that felt new and unexplored, promising a vast, sun-filled land of happiness.

  CHAPTER 23

  THEY WERE MARRIED IN A SMALL CEREMONY ON THE HOMESTEAD, her grandfather’s farm. The stone house rang with hochzeit velssa, the traditional wedding songs. The tables were loaded with roasht, stewed sweet and sour celery, mashed potatoes, and gravy.

  Some said Dave King wasted no time after he met that strange widow, Hannah Riehl, and her husband not long gone. Youthful spinsters pursed their lips, conceding to the loss of yet another available widower.

  The more generous in spirit rejoiced with Dave, recognizing the aura of happiness surrounding the couple. Everyone could tell that he had met his match, the brooding Hannah no one really knew. It was a mystery. Who knew what went on in that dark head behind those penetrating eyes.

  Sarah had never seen such loveliness and she cried for Hannah. Manny sat with Marybelle and counted the months until next November when she would become his bride. When the strawberries bloomed in spring, he would place his hand on hers and ask her to be his wife.

  A week after Manny’s wedding, Dave and Hannah moved to Illinois. He built low turkey barns on a vast area of almost three hundred acres of rolling grassland, and raised turkeys by the hundreds.

  The farm was located in Central Illinois, close to the town of Falling Springs, with no neighbors in sight. An established Amish settlement, each family had the pioneering spirit, but in an area that had a far more hospitable climate than Hannah had experienced out West.

  They paid less for their three hundred acres then they would have for a much smaller plot back in Lancaster County, and Hannah was able to sell her own house quickly and for a good price. They moved into the small, clapboard house. The sun shone and the winds of winter whistled around the corners like good-natured ghosts. Hannah sang and twirled, whistled and hummed her way through the days, embracing her husband and kissing him soundly at every opportunity. She fell in love deeply and thoroughly.

  Hannah missed him when he was gone and threw herself into his arms when he returned. She noticed the colors in the winter sky, the deep blue shadows of the snow drifts, and told her husband she loved him every evening and every morning.

  They held heated discussions. Dave was like a boulder, rock-solid and immovable. He made the decisions about the turkey barns, no matter how she railed against the idea. She pouted like a spoiled child, so he whistled his way through his days and ignored her, until she knew her silence wasn’t going to change anything.

  The first shipment of turkey poults arrived late that spring. Hannah stood in the middle of the sweet-smelling wood shavings and released them from their cardboard prisons, murmuring as she held them to her cheeks. Poor, frightened little b
irds, having to crouch in those awful cardboard boxes without food or water. She spent all day teaching the frightened poults how to find water and feed. The way they pecked at the wood shavings alarmed her.

  Dave stood in the doorway, one elbow propped against the frame, watching her. “Hannah, they’ll find the food when they get hungry enough,” he told her.

  “But, they’re so dumb! If they don’t stop eating these shavings, they’ll die. It doesn’t matter how many times I show them where to eat and drink, they forget immediately.”

  “Just let them go. They’ll be all right.”

  The following morning, eleven turkey chicks lay on their backs with their legs like spindly wax flowers, their eyes closed. Dead. Hannah cried, becoming so upset that she blamed Dave for saying they’d be all right, when they obviously weren’t.

  Patiently, he explained that some of them would always die. Turkeys were not smart like young chicks were, which couldn’t be helped.

  He bought a team of Belgians and grew corn and hay, enjoying his days immensely. He wondered why he had thought he didn’t like to farm, when this was so much better than moving around crowded Lancaster building things for people who were often too tightfisted to pay the amount his work was worth.

  Sarah was born in summer, when the hay lay drying beneath the blazing sun. The old doctor held her upside down and spanked her bottom, until she let out a lusty wail of resentment. “This one’s like her mother,” he chortled to himself.

  For hadn’t Hannah led him on a merry chase, the likes of which the poor doctor had never experienced? Unconcerned about any prenatal care and refusing the appointments he made for her, he often had to drive out to their farm and then leave without seeing her. Not that he really minded. He enjoyed driving out to their idyllic little farm tucked between two rolling hills, a windbreak of chestnut and oak trees, and a few white pines. The barn was hip-roofed and painted red. The house was a small, two-story, like a square box with windows, a green shingled roof and green trim around every door and window. There was a row of hedges along the porch and everything was repaired, painted, and neat. There was a flower garden the size of most folk’s truck patch!