by Linda Byler
Her mother came on the train, arriving on a sweltering August day. She smiled and cooed as she examined her namesake with glad, quiet eyes. She held her, unwrapped her, and said she was a beautiful child. That was high praise from Hannah’s stoic mother.
Hannah refused to stay down. When Sarah was five days old, she swept the kitchen, dusted the furniture, and walked out to the turkey barns. She came back white-faced and limp, sat in the rocking chair, and didn’t say much that whole afternoon.
Her mother brought news from home. Grandfather Stoltzfus was ailing. He was no longer able to do his everyday chores. Elam and Ben should both be looking for wives. She feared there was something wrong with them, the way they made no attempt to date or even appear interested. Hannah snorted and told her mother to get over it. They were bachelors!
After Sarah left, Hannah was relieved. Now she could do as she pleased, which was exactly what she proceeded to do. She could not stand the way her mother folded clothes, so she went to the baby’s changing table and refolded every tiny article of clothing and all of the diapers.
Sarah was not an easy baby. Her stomach cramped. She bent double with spasms of pain, screaming and crying, her face as red as a beet, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth like a foghorn emitting the most awful yells Hannah had ever heard. Surely there was some remedy, Dave asked, his face white with the sounds of his daughter screaming in pain.
Hadn’t he had enough, going through the fear for Hannah and the unborn baby, remembering the agony of losing Lena and the twins? There was Hannah, waltzing through the months before Sarah was born, without a trace of concern. And now, this.
It was more than he could take. He stomped out of the house and stayed out. Hannah was furious! Well, if this was how he was going to be, there would be no more children.
Sarah screamed and yelled her way through the first three months of her life. Well-meaning visitors all recommended a different remedy.
Catnip tea. Chamomile. Comfrey. Massaging the baby’s feet. Wrapping her around a table leg. Touch her elbows to her knees. Loosen those muscles. A bit of baking soda to sweeten her stomach. Hannah told Dave if she tried everything they recommended, the baby wouldn’t survive.
Suddenly, Sarah stopped crying, looked around with her dark brown eyes, and noticed a ray of sunshine reflected from the colored leaves outside. She rolled over and played with her hands and that was it.
She sat by herself at five months, crawled at six months, and walked by herself at eight. If she was not allowed to have what she wanted, she threw herself on the floor and kicked with all her little might, yelling.
Hannah said she was a mess! Dave watched his wife’s face, a small grin playing around his mouth, as he asked, “I wonder why?” Hannah smacked his arm as he reached out for her and pulled her onto his lap, kissing her. He loved her as never before.
Samuel was born the following year, a gentle child with Dave’s curly hair already sprouting all over his head like a good stand of alfalfa. He was born at almost ten pounds, his wails normal, his naps long and undisturbed by any gastric churning of his tender digestive system.
A sturdy newborn, he was a quiet baby, content to lay on a blanket, his eyes watching the play of sunbeams through the window panes, waving his large hands in the air and kicking his chunky feet with toes like marbles.
For months, the parents could not decipher Samuel’s eye color. Mud, Hannah said. The color of mud. Dave disagreed and said his eyes were the color of dark peppermint tea.
Sarah, who was pronouncing whole sentences by the time she was eighteen months old, kept peering over the side of the crib saying, “Sayna mol. Sayna mol. I want to see!”
Hannah kept house with strict discipline for herself. Wash on Monday and Thursday. Iron on Tuesday. Bake bread on Wednesday. Pies and cakes and more bread on Saturday. Clean all day Friday. Every day, morning and evening, she was in the turkey houses, checking the growing turkeys, cleaning waterers, making sure their feed was fresh and clean.
She didn’t particularly like the fowl themselves. She often thought of them as stupid and dumb, without much sense, even for a bird. But to be among them, caring for them, was so much better than being among people. At least turkeys didn’t judge her or expect her to be someone she wasn’t.
She often wondered why she had even tried to be the owner of a dry goods store. She hoped Sadie Lapp was happy after her father purchased the house, the store—everything. So happy to be out of Lancaster County, she walked among the gentle hills of Illinois, a good ten miles to the closest Amish neighbor, adapting to the isolation so quickly that Dave told her he’d never met a person like her.
Hannah felt fulfilled in a way she had never thought possible. The anger still flared, the embers of that fire never quite extinguished. But her bitterness was gone. Its miserable grip on her past that had chafed like an open wound was healed, scabbed over until only a small, unsightly white scar remained.
She still struggled with feeling inadequate, that she was not good enough to pass the inspection of others. The first time they attended church services in the home of Abram and Edna Troyer was nothing short of a punishment.
She began the morning by snapping at Dave who was taking an inordinate amount of time in the bathroom. She slapped little Sarah’s fingers when she reached into her oatmeal bowl with her hands, which only served to fill the house with her awful howls of self-pity, which set Samuel to crying.
Until they were seated in the buggy, Hannah was on edge, having rolled and re-rolled her hair so many times her scalp smarted. Her covering looked lopsided and smashed, the strings unable to be tied in a decent bow.
Sarah’s dark hair had to be put into “bobbies,” those fashionable little rolls of hair twisted around bendable pieces of lead that Dave had flattened with a hammer.
First, Hannah wetted Sarah’s black hair, smoothing it down with both hands and plastering it against her scalp, which set up a round of indignant howls of protest. Hannah, already stressed beyond endurance by her inability to comb her own hair just right, reacted to her daughter’s howls by a smart cuff on her shoulder. “Stop it, Sarah!” This only brought on more howls, which was the last straw.
“Dave!” He appeared from the bedroom door in his white shirt, buttoning it with his large fingers, an accomplishment Hannah never could figure out given the size of those thick appendages.
“Help me with this.”
At her side, he asked what he should do. “Hold her chin so she can’t move her head.” Grimly, Dave did as he was instructed, gently holding Sarah’s face in his giant palms, his daughter’s howls increasing when she saw she was outnumbered. Hannah rolled her hair around the lead and doubled back. When he thought everything was finished and he was free to go, Hannah tilted the unhappy child’s chin to bring her face close to her own as she focused on the two rolls of hair, unhooking one to start over.
“What in the world?” Dave erupted.
“Don’t start, Dave,” Hannah said in a low, threatening voice.
And so the morning continued, the ride to church strained with impatience and ill feelings. It was one thing to comb a child’s hair in such nonsensical forms, quite another to think everything had to be perfect. At one point he’d asked her if she needed a carpenter’s level!
At the Troyer’s house, the women standing in a large circle in the kitchen where church services would be held were openly curious, kind-faced and offering to help with the baby. Little Sarah stood at her mother’s side, eyeing the women with dark eyes.
Hannah managed to smile, shake hands, greet the women with respect, but mostly kept to herself, offering her friendship to no one.
A young mother named Sally Miller, short, rotund, and happy, spoke more to Hannah than any of the others. She invited Hannah to a quilting the following week, telling her to bring the children. Barbara, her oldest daughter, would love to watch them. Hannah smiled, said all the right things, and had absolutely no intention of going to any quilting. She’d
rather swallow a tablespoon of vinegar!
A quilting was a stretched piece of fabric surrounded by a bunch of cackling biddies that all talked at once and no one listened. Hannah couldn’t quilt, for one thing, pricking her fingers incessantly and knotting the thread until she had to cut the needle loose.
Sally felt as if she’d made a friend as she chattered happily to her husband about Hannah the whole way home. What a beautiful girl she was! Her little girl looked exactly like her. She remarked how nice Hannah was and how she looked forward to their friendship.
Hannah, on the other hand, slouched against the side of the buggy and told Dave that if Sally Miller thought she was going to a quilting, she had another think coming.
Dave raised his eyebrows and asked her why not? It would do her good to be among other women.
“If I want to hear a bunch of chatter, I can go out to the turkey barns. Same thing.”
Samuel had fallen asleep on her lap. Sarah stood at Hannah’s knees taking in the sights, the warm breeze laced with loose horse hair stirring her little bonnet strings.
They drove for miles, the steel wheels crunching on gravel roads, the ditches filled with rain water, dandelion, new grass, bluebells, and columbine. The landscape could only be described as beautiful, Hannah often thought. Mostly level, the land was covered with verdant grass, but enough woods and thickets to create an illusion of patchwork, shades of green so deep and brilliant they hurt Hannah’s senses. Windy days, calm days, rain in the form of scattered showers, or hard, week-long clouds that dripped rain as if God had changed His mind about allowing another flood. Sunshine and beauty after the rain filled the land with millions of dew drops like costly diamonds.
Hannah loved Illinois. Here was the isolation she craved, with a compromising land that loved them back in the form of corn and hay, which Dave harvested and stored in the barn. He built a corn crib and filled it to the brim. He bought a herd of ten sheep.
He built fences, fertilized the grass, bought a few Herefords, and the farm was up and running. He marveled at the changes in his life, the contentment. He’d never imagined he wouldn’t miss the pace of his carpentry, the dealing with people and the challenge of pleasing each customer.
Dave knew, though, that his wife was his biggest challenge. For sure. Her garden was immense, enough potatoes to last for three years, row after row of green beans and corn. Tomatoes enough for a shipment to a cannery.
Samuel was raised in the garden, sitting among plants like a little rabbit, playing with the cucumbers and beans. Sarah ran among the rows, covered with dirt, pulling out beanstalks with both hands wrapped tightly around the stalks, her heels digging into the soil, her eyes squeezed shut as she bit down her tongue and heaved and tugged, until Hannah spied her and yelled.
Her mother’s voice was no threat to Sarah once she was on a mission. She kept tugging mightily, until she felt her mother’s presence beside her, the whoosh of her hand and a firm whack on her skinny little bottom. “Stop it, Sarah!” Hannah exclaimed. “Those are not weeds. They’re beans!”
“Weeds.”
“No, they’re not.”
“No beans on here.”
“There will be later. Leave them alone.” And Hannah went back to her weeding. Sarah went back to pulling out the beanstalks, determined to prove her mother wrong.
What to do with an ungehorsam, disobedient, child? They could administer all the discipline they wanted but Sarah went her own way, her eyes popping and snapping.
Dave smiled and said there wasn’t much Hannah could do; she was her mother’s daughter. He imagined Hannah had been the same, a real handful.
The harvest from the garden was a steady flow of vegetables, the blue agate canner on the top of the gas range in constant use, preserving beans, peas and corn, tomatoes, peppers and onions and squash, sliced and shredded into relishes and compotes so that Dave had to build more shelves in the cellar.
Hannah whitewashed the stone walls with a mixture of lime and water, swept the packed earth floor, lined the new shelves with folded paper, carried everything down cellar, and stood back to survey her horn of plenty.
Without being aware of it, the hunger from her past drove her like a slave master. Hannah worked with a ferocious intensity, cutting only the smallest amount from the red beet tops, shaking off the clinging soil from the smallest onions and braiding them together with the larger ones.
Every ear of corn was saved, down to the smallest nubbin, the tip of her paring knife gouging deep holes to extricate the fat worm that feasted on her corn.
The smallest potatoes were sorted, put in Mason jars, and cold-packed for fried potatoes. Late in the fall, she covered the celery and the carrots with mounds of garden soil, a layer of straw heaped around the cabbages that had not been shredded and packed in crocks for sauerkraut.
She hummed and whistled, talked to her children, moved around her kitchen with the speed of a small whirlwind. She grabbed her husband by his heavy shoulders and kissed him after eating an onion, breathing the tainted odor into his face. She laughed and ran for dear life when he growled and came after her, until Sarah shrieked, frightened by the thumping noise of her father’s boots.
This was on a good day, when Dave counted his wife among the best women he had ever encountered. He loved her with a fierce passion and thanked God for directing their paths together, in spite of having endured pain and grief.
Sometimes the cloud would descend and cover Hannah like a gray shroud. All conversation would cease, her eyes turn dark, her face morose. He always tried to conjure up the past few days and what he had said or done to bring this on. But, more often than not, he came up empty-handed.
Then he’d go his way, avoiding her as much as possible, enduring the silent meals, the slamming of serving dishes containing half-cooked potatoes and lumpy gravy. She had to crawl out of her foul moods by herself, he soon learned.
And he did what he could to help. He’d take the children out to the barn to play while he did the chores. He made sure the wringer on the washing machine was oiled. He weeded the potatoes. From time to time, he lost his temper and told her she was acting worse than a sullen child and needed a good spanking. That only served to prolong the frigid silence, but he said it anyway.
He came to accept these times, but learned not to tiptoe around her, which was what she wanted. She wanted to control him. He knew that, somehow, he had failed her and this was her way of making his suffer for his shortcomings.
Mostly, however, the sun shone. There was laughter and love and plenty of hard work, a church and community surrounding them like a protective fence.
There was plenty of food. The skies turned gray and showered them with rain. The wind blew and dried the land. Bees hummed from plant to plant and butterflies winged their erratic way from one milkweed pod to the next. There were fat woodchucks in the fence rows, shy deer in the woods behind the barn.
Hannah often thought of the wolves and the coyotes, those lurking, shaggy enemies that had inhabited so many of her thoughts in those long winter months when the snow flew past the kitchen window, hurled by the endless, powerful prairie winds of winter. Sometimes she cringed, patted her full stomach, went down to the cellar and stood, breathing heavily to calm her remembered feelings of panic. The food was there and would stay there. She could always come here to this dank, moist, earthy place and find potatoes and turnips, carrots, and onions. Tears would push to the surface and spill over. Her hand would reach out to touch the smooth, glass jars, feeling the tops of the lids, checking to make sure they were sealed.
Then she would pick up a potato, run her fingers across the dry, dusty surface of its skin, and replace it carefully before turning to make her way back to the kitchen, feeling reassured.
“Have you ever been hungry?” she asked Dave one evening, adjusting her head on his shoulder as they lay together in bed, the children both tucked in for the night.
“Of course.”
“No, I mean, hungry
hungry. When you knew there might not be enough to go around. When you went to bed with an empty stomach?”
Dave considered her question. “No, never,” he responded. “I have always had enough to eat. Maybe not what I wanted, but something to fill my stomach.”
“It’s not funny.”
“I’m sure it’s not.”
There was a soft, comfortable silence. Dave stroked his wife’s hair, that sleek, heavy mane he loved so much.
“I still shiver when I think of those winters on the prairie. I’ll never forget them if I live to be a hundred years old.”
“I would be happy to turn a hundred years old with you.”
Silence. Then, “I’m not always nice.”
“Doesn’t matter. I love you.” And he was asleep.
Hannah sighed, turning on her side. But sleep would not come. She knew what love was now. She’d figured it out, in her own way. Love was wanting to be with Dave. It was looking forward to mealtimes with him, craving the closeness of him, loving everything about him. The way he walked, the way he brushed his teeth and drank a glass of water. The way he ate a slice of bread in two gigantic gulps.
She felt his magnetic power, the physical pull of his strength. She felt less than him, conquered by him. She also had an emotional need that only he could fill. But this was her own knowledge, hidden away, never to be revealed.
Dave was no-nonsense, abrupt and businesslike, often leaving her scrambling for security, a sense of trust and belonging. When she felt her handhold on this safety crumble, the dark cloud would descend and she was far too proud to ask for the reassurance of his love.
Wasn’t she Hannah? The proud, the powerful woman who didn’t need a man to make her happy? And underneath that thin veneer, a week and needy person resided, longing for his time, his attention, his caring. He was her light, her cornerstone.
Well … God and Jesus Christ first, of course. That relationship was on better ground than it had ever been. But Hannah figured that Dave came a close second.
