Sara smiled. “The first time I saw him, he was big and angry and ... big.”
“And handsome, my Adam.”
Sara smiled. “Very handsome. But he never smiled. Sometimes I felt as if he were watching me, especially after I had been laughing—”
“It is the bright butterflies, Adam likes best.”
“Your family likes butterflies a lot,” Sara said, intrigued by the subject. Adam had called her his perfect butterfly.
“We do. Go on.”
“But why butterflies?”
“They are bright and beautiful, one of God’s most perfect creations, I think. They are a symbol for me, of God, of his healing power, even of light and sunshine. I passed my love for them to Adam when he was small. He held on to it, I guess, if you have heard him mention butterflies.”
“His horses are named for them. Titania and Tawny.”
“I did not realize. Such knowledge warms a mother’s heart. Now tell me about the first time you saw him.”
It was right after the districts had been re-divided and I became part of this one. I knew no one, but already, the Bishop was annoyed with me, because I had made known to him my plan to become a midwife. We were at a barn raising, discussing the subject ‘heatedly.’ Bishop Weaver shouted that I should stick to women’s work, so of course, I needed to prove to him that I could do anything a man could.”
“Oh liebchen, what did you do?”
“I went to the stack of planks and followed the example of those who were bringing them to the men nailing them to the lower outside wall of the barn.”
“And you handed one to Adam?”
“I didn’t know who he was yet, but I saw him waiting for one, so I made for him, carrying the plank over my shoulder, as I’d seen the others do. But when I had just about reached him, I saw Bishop Weaver coming toward me with an angry stride, and it made me nervous. My grip on the plank faltered, and it tilted, down in the front, up in the back, and slipped toward Adam so fast, it hit him ... hard ... in a bad spot ... between his legs.”
Lena screeched and slapped her hand to her mouth
Sara feared for a minute that her mother-in-law would chastise her again, but instead her eyes twinkled and she began to laugh. Sara was so relieved and so enchanted by Lena’s merriment, that Sara saw, for the first time, the humor in that long-ago encounter, and she began to laugh as well.
Lena wiped away her tears. “What did my Adam do?”
“He set his jaw hard and made a face like this,” Sara’s tense face made Lena laugh again. “Then he bent over, very carefully, picked up the board and nailed it to the studs.”
“And the Bishop—”
“Told me I was needed to watch the children.”
“And after that?”
“Adam made me mad with his constant watching, not as if he thought I would hurt him again, but as if he were annoyed with me for being happy, so I did what I thought would bewilder him, you know, keep him guessing. I walked right up and served him first, that day, and most every time after, at fellowship meals, barn-raisings, whatever frolics we had in the district. I did it to show him I was not afraid of him, even if he wished me to be.”
“My Adam would need a wife to give as good as she got. Do you think he wanted you not to be afraid?”
“I just know that he made me so uncomfortable, being rude that way, that I had this need to be nice to show him up.”
“And annoy him a bit,” Lena said on a laugh. “But he still married Abby instead?”
“Oh, he was already married to Ab when the district was re-divided. We became instant friends, his first wife and me. Abby was my only friend until Mercy, but Mercy lives in Indiana.”
“Liebchen? I would think friends of yours would be plenty, with your easy laugh and happy disposition. Why none?”
“I was a woman who belonged nowhere and to no one. An Amishwoman who wanted to deliver babies, which was ferbudden.” Sara made to lower her voice like a man. “A woman should not take on so, an unmarried one, especially.” She laughed. “This I heard often. But I am a rebel, a scrapper, I know it and everybody else in Walnut Creek does too. Sometimes, even now, Adam calls me Scrapper Sara, but it’s better than Spinster Sara, which is what he used to call me.”
“You might not have been happy to be a spinster, but you are pleased to be a scrapper, I think. Glad to break rules, like with your dresses of the rainbow colors for my grandbabies. Pride and stubbornness are both a weakness and a strength for you, my daughter. For Adam too. That’s why you belong together.”
That Lena thought she and Adam belonged together, warmed Sara. She closed her eyes, her new mother’s hand stroking her wrist, soothing her as no mother had done for some time. “Adam’s first wife laughed at how I used to make the Elders mad,” Sara said opening her eyes again. “She told me she used to tell Adam whenever I had done so and he would get as mad as the Elders did. Madder. Ab seemed to think it was funny, the way I could make Adam mad, and the way I tried to annoy him by being nice, serving him and all, and joking with him. She did not believe me when I said he scared me.”
“Tell me how it happened that you went from being my son’s first wife’s friend to his second wife. When did his first wife die?”
“Sara’s heart plummeted. Last fall.” She related the circumstances of Abby’s death. “Adam always disliked his children. Everybody knew it. Not that he liked the adults. But with children, especially his own, his dislike seemed to go deeper. He stayed apart from them, frowned when they came near. The girls seemed nearly as afraid of him, back when Abby was alive, as Emma is now.”
Distraught, Lena stood and went to the window, looking as if she might weep. After a minute, she turned back to Sara, disbelief in her look. “Adam hurt his girls? He closed their little fingers in doors and such?”
“Of course not! Why would you say such a thing? Oh no.” Stricken, Sara sat up. “Please, do not say that his fath—”
Lena’s hand sliced through the air, cutting off Sara’s words, as if doing so could change the fact of them, and that’s when Sara knew it was so, and she too wanted to weep.
They stared at each other as the color returned to her mother-in-law’s face, but Lena shook her head, refusing further discussion. On the previous subject, however, she felt no such compunction. “Tell me more about you and Adam and his children,” Lena said.
Sara decided she owed her mother-in-law the truth. “Adam gave them to me after Abby died. He said I should take them home to raise them. Just like that.”
“So you said you would marry him instead?”
“I would never have suggested such a thing. The Elders decreed we must marry or be shunned.”
Lena shook her head again, but seemed willing to let her confusion pass for the moment. “You think Adam does not like his children, even though he never hurt them?”
“He wants no more.” Tears of shame coursed down Sara’s cheeks as she told Adam’s mother how she had been so selfish and unfeeling as to accuse him of killing his wife when Abby was already dead. “And now he won’t touch me, because he doesn’t want to kill me—God help us both—by getting me with child. Oh, Lena, this will destroy him. What have I done?”
Lena let go of Sara’s hand as if it burned her suddenly. “So this is not my son’s babe you carry?”
Sara laughed at the accusation and the look on her mother-in-law’s face, but her laughter became a wellspring of tears that could not be held back. Rolling away from the woman whose love was for Adam first, as should be, Sara let herself cry. She could use a mother of her own, right now, though. Then she felt Lena’s hand rubbing her back, soothing her, a mother’s soft voice trying to calm her, calling her liebchen.
Sara turned to face her. “Thank you.” She rubbed the tiny mound of her child. “This babe beneath my heart is your grandchild. Adam was delirious in that shack we sheltered in and doesn’t know he broke his vow. I only learned of the vow recently, or else ... No,” Sara shook her head i
n firm denial. “No. I would not have tried to stop him, had I known. Oh, Lena, I love him so much, it hurts.”
“Love usually does, liebchen, but it is worth the price, though I have never known such a love as you and Adam share. Be grateful for the gift.”
If only there were love on her husband’s part, Sara thought.
Lena’s eyes twinkled again and Sara saw where Emma got her spirit. “So you became my son’s bride in truth on that snowy night, and the dummkopf doesn’t even know it.”
Sara actually giggled. She felt so much better, she hugged her mother-in law. “I needed to laugh just then. Thank you.”
* * * * *
Weeks into Adam’s absence, Katie came running into the room where Lena was showing Sara how to make a baby quilt. “The butterflies, they come.” She grabbed her grandmother’s hand. “Come Grossmommie; my take you. Sara too.”
“Butterflies?” Lena looked as if her heart took to beating double as Katie dragged them into the yard.
Lena took Sara’s hand in a grasp that hurt when she saw the children around the large stone-lined ring of plants. “Is that ... is it—”
“A butterfly garden,” Lizzie said. “Datt planted it special the day I was born, Mommie said.” Lizzie looked at Sara with suddenly wide and regretful eyes. “Our first Mommie, I mean.”
Sara kissed Lizzie’s kapped head. “I know, Sweetheart.”
“Did your Mommie tell you why your Datt planted such a garden?” Lena asked, almost begging for an answer, but Lizzie shook her head.
“I will tell you then.” Eyes bright, Lena knelt in the grass and took the three girls into the circle of her arms. “When your Datt was a very little boy—small as you, Pris—I planted a butterfly garden for him, because your Datt was a sad little boy, and I ... I was not strong enough to make him smile. I wasn’t even strong enough to tell him I loved him, so I planted a butterfly garden to show him that I did. Butterflies are a sign of God’s healing, and he needed lots of healing back then, your Datt.” She looked up at Sara. “I think he still does, but I believe that he has found the one who can heal him, except that he does not know it yet.”
Sara’s heart filled with hope at her mother-in-law’s words, and she knelt beside them in the grass. “Tell me about this butterfly garden your Datt planted,” she asked Lizzie. “Did he ever tell you anything about it.”
Katie knelt at the edge of the well-tended ring, her curls breaking free of her kapp, her beautiful little face lit from within. “Datt says this one will bring the pretty blue butterfly over there.”
“The Azure butterfly,” Lizzie said, kneeling beside her younger sister. “And this is a Juneberry for the Banded Purple butterflies. And that heart-shaped plant is a bleeding heart, my favorite because of all the little hearts hanging from it.
The bleeding heart ... a beautiful and sad flower, Sara thought, its name alone a reminder of the girls and their father, with hearts in need of healing.
“The butterflies go away in the winter,” Katie said sadly. “But they come back to our garden every year.”
“Butterfly bush,” Pris said, shaking a fragrant bush with spiked lavender flowers and making Sara and Lena laugh.
“She’s right,” Lizzie said. “That’s what it’s called. Painted ladies come for that flower.”
“Yes,” Sara said. “But will butterflies come?”
Lena thought her grandchildren’s giggles somehow charmed even the butterflies flitting about them.
“We’ll have to bring Hannah out here and teach her about the butterfly garden too,” Sara said. “I need to learn too.”
“You can learn later,” Lena said, taking her arm again. We need to talk.” She turned to her oldest granddaughter. “Teach Pris for a while, then come inside for lunch. Your Mommie and I have something to discuss.”
Inside the house, to Sara’s surprise, Lena’s joy disappeared. Rather than begin the discussion she spoke about, she became pensive and quiet.
Sara sensed the need to be quiet, also, so she brewed some peppermint tea and poured it before she spoke. “I have been meaning to ask you, Lena, why Adam thought you were dead. I’ve asked him, but he doesn’t answer.”
Lena sighed and took her hand. “Let me tell you first that Adam does not dislike his children. He loves them. He just doesn’t know it.”
“I would like to believe that, Lena, but—”
“There is proof. We just saw it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I planted him a butterfly garden to show him my love, knowing that the garden and the butterflies would say it for me every spring.”
“Lena, why didn’t you just tell Adam you loved him?”
“Because I could not, not without causing him harm.”
“That makes no sense—”
“Shh. Listen. I believe Adam planted his butterfly garden for the same reason I planted mine, to tell his children he loved them. His father, the man I foolishly married, was not a good man, liebchen, not like our Adam is. Amos demanded perfection, even from a child. And for a child who stammered and had a frail body, like Adam, he had no patience. Worse than that, he was cruel. He told Adam he was unfit for farming, that he was worthless. Amos would get so mad with Adam’s stuttering, he hurt the child in his determination to force him to stop the bad habit.
“Adam got whipped, Sara. He got his fingers crushed in doors, his toes crushed under the very rocker his father sat in.”
Sara was too shaken by such cruelty to speak.
“He got locked in the smokehouse, the outhouse, overnight, summer or winter. He has scars, on his body, and sometimes, I fear, deeper.”
Sara rose to hide her shock and disgust, not only at Adam’s father, but at his mother as well. But she could not hold her feelings back. “How could you allow such cruelty? How could you let your husband hurt your own son?”
“Adam was always strong, strong enough to endure—”
“You just said he was frail.”
“Of body, he was, back then, but not of mind. He was stronger than Emma, at least.”
Sara caught her breath. “Her father is why she fears men? Because of beatings?” As if that were nothing, Sara thought, and yet, anything worse was impossible to imagine, let alone voice.
“Because of beatings, only. Amos was cruel, but he was not … sick—”
“Oh, but he was, Lena. He was.”
Lena paled to the color of flour paste and a forlorn sob escaped her. “He beat her, only, and never badly, not like he beat Adam. Adam saw to that. But Adam looks now like Amos did then and I think that’s why Emma is afraid of him. When Adam is angry, it is his father’s temper for certain that he struggles with, yet it is not so bad as my husband’s was.”
“Couldn’t you have gone to the Elders and told them what your husband did?”
“They would never have believed that the pious Amos Zuckerman could harm his children. I feared being shunned for lying or disrespect to my husband. I could not take the chance. If I was right and I had been shunned, Amos would have had control over the children and my protection would have been removed from Emma. Adam was strong enough to bear his father’s anger. But even you can see that Amos would have broken Emma.” Lena sobbed again. “Maybe even killed her.”
As much sorrow for Lena as for her son and daughter rose up in Sara and she embraced her mother-in-law. “You have lived in hell, I think, but you are safe now with us. Emma too.”
Lena stepped back and raised her chin. “You would have been proud to see how little Adam turned his father’s fury away from his smaller sister and pulled it toward himself. He proved he was strong in the way he drew his father’s anger and allowed himself to be beaten so Emma was not.”
If it were possible, Sara fell more deeply in love with her big, bad, mad husband, though he was no longer any of those things to her. He was a good man who had suffered in his life and was suffering still. Now, only his heart she saw as big, and the ‘mad’ she had taken into
her own heart for what he had suffered. “Tell me about the butterfly garden,” Sara said, sitting, patting the chair beside her at the table.
“I was afraid if I interfered between Adam and his father, Adam would have clung to me, making Amos see him as weaker still, and more in need of a strong hand. I told Adam the butterflies brought sunshine and healing because I didn’t know how else to tell him that all things ugly pass and God’s beauty reigns in the end.”
“Adam was only five when you left him with your husband. What made you do such a thing, leave him, I mean?”
Lena sighed. Her hands shook. “My sister was ill, dying alone. I went to care for her, despite Amos warning me not to. Adam tells me his father said I took Emma and left for good. It made my son hate me, and with cause. Within the week, Amos told him we died in a carriage accident and he brought Adam here to Ohio.”
Lena’s face looked suddenly ravaged, old, her look begging forgiveness, understanding. “All these years I looked for my son, and now I have found him, only to find, as well, the horror I wrought with my own weakness.”
Sara took Lena’s hand and squeezed it. “I understand, in a way, why you could not tell Adam you loved him, why you planted a butterfly garden for him. But why can’t Adam just tell his girls he loves them, if, as you say, he does? Why does he need a butterfly garden?”
Sara went to gaze out the window. Three beautiful little girls were chasing the butterflies their father had all but provided. Then she envisioned that same man giving them away. “Why, for heaven’s sakes was he willing to give those beautiful babies to me, if he loved them?”
“I don’t know,” Lena said, the words a cry of torment. “I wish to God I did.”
* * * * *
While Adam was gone, Sara and Lena spent time every day with the girls in the butterfly garden. One morning the ‘rat-a-tat’ of a woodpecker caught their attention. Lena took the girls to the tree and they saw the bird fly up to a nest in its upper branches. Lena told them the mother woodpecker likely expected little ones soon and maybe they would be able to show her babies to their Datt when he returned.
Sara learned all she could about the plants that brought butterflies. Some were feeder plants for the caterpillars to eat. Some were bright and showy to attract particular species.
Butterfly Garden Page 20
