Butterfly Garden

by Annette Blair

  “Let me wash Ab. The girls will need you.”

  “No! By God they won’t!” His fury was back with a vengeance, but it was nothing to his aversion. If he disliked his children so much, they would be better off with her. Was it because they were girls? Boys, he had wanted, to help with the farm.

  “Go to them.” This was an order, and Mad Adam Zuckerman issued orders to be obeyed.

  “I cannot take them.” Sara wondered why she refused to accept what she’d wanted forever, children, a family — however temporary — a treasure she had almost given up hoping for.

  One of the two suitors in her life had said there would be no children for her. She was as bossy as a man, he said, too bossy to bed. The other had not been as kind.

  Four little girls. Oh, Lord, she wanted them as dreadfully much as she wanted to be a midwife, but she could not take them. She could not.

  They were his. Not hers.

  “It’s because you’ll have to give up midwifing if you take them, isn’t it?” Abby’s angry husband asked. “Giving up would be hard for a stubborn one like you.” He looked her up and down in that icy way of his and Sara wondered how a look so cold could make her so hotly aware of her own shortcomings. “Well, what is it to be, Spinster Sara?” he asked. “Children of your own? Or a life of watching others bear fruit while you wither on the vine?”

  Another hit, more direct, more painful. Sara squared her shoulders to hide the hurt. “Even if I could take them — which I cannot — I would not give up delivering babies.” Sometimes she felt as if she could do anything. Most times she knew better. But taking Abby’s girls away from their father was wrong. She could not help noticing that a barely-discernible discord existed between Mad Adam Zuckerman’s words and his actions, between what could be seen and heard, and what could not. Ab would have told her she wanted her to take the girls in the event something happened. Besides, Sara sensed that deep down Adam Zuckerman did not want to give away his children. So why was he?

  Perhaps this was why they called him mad.

  Adam sighed, in defeat or weariness, Sara could not tell. “Take them till after the funeral then. Please.”

  Adam Zuckerman, pleading? “Why me?”

  He considered for too long, she thought, as if he were choosing and discarding a series of possible answers. “You have no one,” he simply said. “No one.”

  Unable to bear the pain in that truth, Sara silently took the newest Zuckerman to her fast-beating heart and into the kitchen to wash, and when the babe opened her big Zuckerman eyes, Sara was lost.

  Before long, the mite was clean and soft in Sara’s arms, her tiny heart-shaped mouth pursed in sleep, her full head of chestnut hair a fluff of wayward curls.

  Sara shut out the pain and absorbed the pure and simple pleasure of human contact. She rocked, hummed, and savored, until four-year-old Lizzie, ranked-and-professed big-sister, barefoot, hair in her eyes, dress on backward, entered the kitchen from the enclosed stairway and came right to her. “Hi Sara, what you got?”

  Before Sara could answer, from the enclosed stairway came a bit of whining and some childish Penn Dutch chatter. Then three-year-old Katie, all smiles, curly hair and big eyes, dragged Pris over. Two-year-old Priscilla, eyes downcast, pouting as usual, companion-blanket in hand, stepped behind Katie.

  Sara reached over and tugged on the blanket, drawing forth the shy, sullen Zuckerman who had just been displaced as baby of the family. Pris looked, not at Sara but at the floor. Sara lowered her head to see Pris’s face, and with a whine, the child lowered hers even more.

  This continued until Pris was on all fours, whining for all she was worth, brow touching the floor. What had always seemed a game to Sara disturbed her more than she would like, though she’d never followed it through to this sad conclusion before.

  “Pretty Pris,” she said, not daring to touch those dark curls. And she would be pretty, Sara thought, if she were not so sulky.

  With nut-brown hair and storm-gray eyes, they were, all three, the image of Adam Zuckerman. Lord, and weren’t they the most beautiful little girls in the world. Sara wanted to gather them up, hug them tight, and protect them forever.

  “Where’s Mommie?” Lizzie asked.

  The pain in Sara’s heart might have come from a blade, it cut so sharp. They had no Mommie anymore. They had no one. She shook her head in denial and determination. Even if she didn’t take them home with her, they had her now. Sara held the baby forward so they could see her. “Look what you’ve got. A new sister.”

  “What’s her name?” Katie asked.

  “I waited for you to wake up so we could name her together. Let’s each say a name, then pick the one we like best.”

  “Noodle!” Katie shouted on a giggle.

  But Lizzie was, as usual, serious and wise. “Can we call our baby Hannah? Mommie said Hannah, if we got another sister.” She ran across the kitchen. “I’ll go ask her.” But Lizzie stopped in her tracks and stood stiff-backed and unmoving, because her father suddenly filled the entrance to the enclosed stairway.

  For each of Adam’s steps into the kitchen, his oldest took one backward, never removing her gaze from his.

  Sara feared he’d tell them their mother was dead in his cold, harsh way. But she needn’t have worried, he didn’t tell them anything; he just passed them by.

  Katie ran after him, “Datt, Datt. My got a baby. My want Mommie, Datt. My’s hungry.”

  He ignored his high-spirited daughter, the only one who did not seem afraid of him. “Sara will feed you,” he growled.

  “We named the baby, Hannah!” Sara yelled at his back as the door slammed behind him. She was right. He didn’t care.

  With Lizzie’s help, Sara got Katie and Pris dressed and fed, her need to weep having less to do with not knowing how to care for the girls and more to do with the joy Abby would never know.

  Stooping down, Sara bundled Lizzie in her cape and bonnet to send her to the barn. “Go ask your Datt for a lambing bottle so I can feed Hannah some milk. I’ll watch you from the window.”

  Shaking her wise little head, Lizzie placed her hands on each side of Sara’s face, as if she must pay strict attention. “No, Sara. Mommie will feed Hannah with her Mommie’s milk.”

  Sara swallowed hard and blinked to clear her vision. She covered Lizzie’s small hands against her face with her own. “We’re going to try the bottle for Hannah. Cow’s milk will make her strong.”

  That must have made sense to Lizzie, because she nodded and skipped off on her errand.

  As Sara watched the child approach the barn through the window, she touched her cheek to baby Hannah’s and let her tears fall. Behind her, Katie giggled and Pris whined.

  * * * * *

  In the lower level of his huge bank barn, Adam paced. Cows lowed. A mule kicked its stall. Ginger ran to and fro barking needlessly. Even the sheep in their pens bleated; the stupidest animals God created, and even they knew something was terribly wrong.

  Why had he let Abby talk him into trying again for a boy? Yes, he wanted sons. A man did need sons on a farm. Everyone knew that. But not at such a cost.

  Dear God, Ab, what have I done?

  She might have been content with the girls, but she thought giving him a son would make him love her. He never did succeed in making her understand that he couldn’t love anyone, for their own good.

  “I do this because I love you.” He could hear the words in his father’s voice, words he could not, would not, say to his children, not to another soul, for the cruelty doled out in their wake was not to be borne. Love. He could never dare feel it.

  Abby had known and said she accepted it. She had known enough to protect the children. Now she was gone and it was his fault. He hadn’t let himself love her, and still he destroyed her.

  Adam punched a hay bale, over and over, until his knuckles bled. He wanted to hit something bigger, harder, throw his whole body into the fight, but he couldn’t. Not yet. His punishment for killing Abby c
ould wait until after her girls were settled.

  He couldn’t keep them. Not alone. Not without somebody who cared enough to keep them safe. Without Abby, no one was left who knew why but him, and he wanted to keep it that way. Neither he nor Abby had family. Ab had said that together, with their children, they were a family, but what was a family with no heart?

  Broken.

  Only one person in the district whose heart he knew, because she was the only one ever came close enough ... Spinster Sara.

  Sara visited Abby — not often — but when she did, usually when he was away, Abby chattered on for days after about Sara.

  She’d damned near leveled him with a barn-board at Zook’s barn-raising, and that was the first time he set eyes on her. At fellowship meals after service, Sara often served him first. Looked him right in the eye, she did. Wasn’t afraid of anybody, that one. Spoke her mind.

  Lord, she drove people crazy with speaking her mind. She was fractious all right. He’d often thought she served him just to prove she could handle anyone. Look at her trying to become a midwife. She was in for a fight with that. The whole district was set against her.

  Spinster Sara. Midwife Sara.

  Scrapper Sara, more like.

  Bad enough she’d been earning her own living for years with her salves and remedies. Now she was trying to learn doctoring, something no woman should. Worse, she was going about it all wrong. Spending weeks in the company of the English doctor ... it was scandalous, immoral, a man and a woman tending to the intimate needs of a woman in labor, sometimes overnight. Adam clenched his fists and gritted his teeth.

  And, Sara, unmarried on top of it.

  He’d once lost his temper over her foolishness, and Ab had laughed at him and— Adam stopped pacing, struck in an almost physical way with shock and remorse. Here he stood, consumed with fury at another woman, when his own wife had just died.

  Ah, and here, in loud and rattling reproach, came the cabinet-maker with his spring wagon bearing Abby’s casket. His father was right. He was worthless. He’d failed as a son, and now as a husband and father. He was defective, body and soul. His children didn’t need him. They needed Sara. Already he’d seen her give them a mother’s smiles.

  Sara would take good care of Abby’s girls.

  When she’d drawn them to her, without extending so much as a finger, and let them name their sister, he knew he’d been right to send for her.

  And Sara was right too. He’d killed Abby as surely as that empty casket sat waiting for her body. God he could still hear Ab weeping for a son. He’d hated himself for his weakness, had vowed if she weren’t pregnant after that one time, she would never be again. But she was.

  And now she was gone.

  “Datt?”

  Adam looked down, toward the barest whisper of sound, and wondered when his oldest daughter had arrived to stand before him. Lizziebelle.

  He fisted his hands at his side to keep from reaching for her.

  “Why can’t Mommie feed Hannah with her Mommie’s milk?”

  Adam leaned against the lambing pen, seeking balance in a careening world. Guilt. Hard. Raw. He swallowed and forced himself to take a breath, and needed two more before he could speak. “What did Sara say?” he asked in a voice that did not sound like his own.

  “That you would give me a lambing bottle and we would feed Hannah cow’s milk to make her strong.”

  Adam nodded and turned his back on his motherless child, because for the life of him, if he did not, he would gather her up and ... condemn her to the punishment love enforced.

  * * * * *

  The girls played quietly in Abby’s sewing room while Sara rocked baby Hannah and fed her milk from the boiled bottle and nipple.

  Abby’s body would soon be carried in an open box from her bedroom into her best room.

  At the very thought, the sharp claws of anxiety clenched Sara’s every muscle, holding her captive in the same way it had fifteen years before.

  Her mother’s labor had gone on for more than a day. Her father had set off in an ice storm for the doctor ... and died in a ditch with a broken neck.

  Sara had been fifteen when she’d taken that lifeless baby boy and placed him in her mother’s weak arms. Fifteen, when she’d pushed wadded towels between Mama’s legs to stop the blood ... but watched her life drain away, instead.

  The next morning, in a house gone silent, Sara had stepped into the best room to see three caskets — two large, and one too tiny to bear. Crude boxes with covers to smother.

  She’d had trouble breathing then.

  She had trouble breathing now.

  Once again, panic rushed her. Abby’s girls were too young to see such a sight. But Sara couldn’t take them, not from their father. It would be the greatest cruelty to lose both parents at once; no one knew that better than her.

  And yet, with such a parent?

  Her mind scrambled for an answer, examining and discarding every possibility, until….

  If she took the girls ... for a time ... and taught their father, somehow, to know and love them…. It seemed an impossible task, and yet Abby said there was something worthy hiding deep inside Adam Zuckerman, something he wanted to keep buried. Sara thought she had glimpsed a shadow of that something today. She was almost certain of it. Besides, what choice did she have?

  She wasn’t sure which would be more difficult, reforming Mad Adam Zuckerman or letting his children go once she loved them. Except that wasn’t even a consideration, because she loved them already.

  Sara rose and went to the window. The clouds were dark and angry still. She sought guidance from beyond the firmament, but neither faith nor entreaty would come, only anger, and in her heart, she gave it voice. I won’t let them lose both parents, she informed He who seemed to have abandoned them, almost expecting thunder and lightening in reply. Then she admitted that she could not do it alone and whispered, “Help. Please.” But neither comfort nor response was forthcoming.

  “Fine then,” she snapped. “I’ll do it myself. And this time I won’t fail.”

  Sara hurried to the bottom of the stairway. “Adam,” she shouted, angry with God for not listening, and with Adam for ... everything. “Adam, come down here, now!”

  Like a mule team spooked by a jackrabbit, he came, but he stopped when he saw her, his face pale and taut, his breath short.

  “I’ll take them,” she said. “Until after the funeral,” she added in a rush. “And if I’m called to deliver a babe while I have them, I’ll go if I have to take them with me.”

  Adam hesitated then nodded once, his relief so apparent, Sara thought she might have imagined the wretchedness that preceded it. “Shut Abby’s door,” she said. “I’m taking them upstairs to get their things. I’ll tell them about Abby later. It’s best they think of their mother smiling and happy in heaven, not cold and silent in a box.”

  Another single nod, a hard swallow. “I won’t show her till you’re gone.”

  Chapter 2

  Through her yard, Sara chased Abby’s daughters, the two oldest shrieking almost as much as her. And though Pris wasn’t excited, or even smiling, it seemed as if her eyes almost danced ... until the girls rounded a corner and came upon their father by his buggy in the drive. Then everything stopped — sound, movement, joy. Sara came up behind them and touched each small shoulder in turn, telling them without words that she was there.

  Adam absently looked them over, then he stiffened, anger, fear, transforming him. “Where’s the baby?” he shouted.

  No hello. No mention of his reason for coming. And Sara panicked. Not because of his bellow, which was normal, but because she expected he’d come to tear her heart from her flesh.

  Two days and already she couldn’t bear the thought of giving his children back. But for some reason, she sensed she could not let him know how much she wanted to keep them, so she masked her dread and pointed to her porch. “Hannah is there, in her cradle.”

  “Mein Gott, she’ll f
reeze to death!” Adam marched right over, as if he expected to find proof of his foolish accusation, and found a swaddled infant, instead, her chubby apple-cheeked face peering up at him with huge gray eyes exactly like his. Hannah gurgled and cooed when she saw him, swinging her arms in her excitement, for all the world as if she knew him.

  Sara tapped the tiny pink nose and got a bubble for her effort. “She likes it out here. We all do. We don’t stay long. Just a few minutes, to use up energy and get fresh air. It’s cold for autumn, yes, but….”

  Adam looked away, and Sara guessed he was no more displeased than usual. “Can we go inside?” he asked, with as near to manners as Sara had ever seen.

  She offered the girls cookies and cocoa, and they got in line for plates and cups to bring to their small table by the hearth. She was pleased they were doing as she’d taught them and looked to see if Adam noticed how well they behaved, but he wasn’t even looking at them.

  Adam took in every aspect of the tiny cottage, finding it difficult to ignore Sara’s bed, with that bright flower-garden quilt covering it, as if the sun shone down on her even in sleep. He shifted, uncomfortable about invading what amounted to a spinster’s bedroom.

  He hadn’t realized she had only the one room. He’d have to get her a bigger place ... if he convinced her to keep the girls longer, until after the funeral ... and after that to keep them till harvest, then until Christmas, then spring planting, and longer still, until she loved them too much to let them go.

  Adam didn’t let his gaze linger on the girls. They were fine. No more or less happy, it seemed, than before, which was as good as could be expected, he supposed, after the loss of a mother. Though it had taken Pris a minute to remember to pout, which raised his spirits for some odd reason.

  Sara placed a cup of chocolate and a plate of cookies in front of him, then she sat across from him. He’d never seen such a small kitchen table as this one, with barely room for the two of them. He had to turn sideways to keep his knees from touching hers.

  The girls were nibbling cookies at a child-size table, Katie chattering, Lizzie listening and Pris staring into the fire.