Adam glared. Sara shrugged.
“If he didn’t suspect anything before,” Roman said with a wink, “he would have to be deaf and dumb. And I am neither. But I didn’t come to snoop, just to say the rest of your family is having dinner with us, supper too. Won’t be home for hours yet.” He wiggled his brows, tipped his bedraggled straw hat, and disappeared down the ladder.
Their gossipy neighbor whistled his way out the door.
Neither Adam nor Sara spoke until his buggy had cleared the drive.
“Nosy man.”
“Nice man. We’re going to be alone for the rest of the day.”
“Good. We have things to do.” Adam climbed down the ladder.
Sara was taken aback but tried not to show her disappointment. She felt foolish for suggesting … anything. What was the matter with her?
She went down, not wanting Adam to see she was embarrassed. When she reached the bottom, he took her hand and headed for the house.
“Where are we going?”
“Chores,” he said. “Long overdue.”
Sara stopped, pulling him up short. “My chores are in the house, Adam Zuckerman; yours are back there, in the barn.”
“Inside,” he said. “It’s bath time. Let’s go.”
She stopped again and this time he stopped with her. “Remember the baths you used to give me?”
All Sara could think about was how embarrassing and … and she became warm just thinking about it. “What about them?”
“I told you. It’s bath time.” Adam wiggled his brows the way Roman had done. “And this time, we’re going to get it right.”
What started out to be a sponge bath became a tub bath, but Adam was just too big for Sara to fit in the blasted thing with him, which made him curse to high heaven, or low hell, however you looked at it.
But once she knelt by the tub and began to sponge him off the way she used to—except she didn’t stop at his belly this time—then Adam stopped fussing and began to enjoy the experience.
He did, at least, until the sound of a carriage pulling into the yard and a crying baby got his attention. And then when somebody began knocking on the door, he started cursing again.
But Sara was laughing so hard at the way he pouted, that she could tell he had a difficult time staying mad, even though the poor frustrated man looked as if he might need help getting all of him back into his broadfalls.
“I’ll just go and see who it is,” she said, trying to get serious, and then you can come out when you’re … ready. She slipped into a giggle again before she opened the bedroom door, then she squared her shoulders, went out and shut it behind her.
She heard him curse once more before she opened the kitchen door to find Mercy and Enos Bachman standing on the steps, little Saramay wailing in her father’s arms.
Before the kitchen door closed, Mercy and Sara were in each other’s arms.
Sara was delighted to see the woman who had become a friend in one heart-binding afternoon. “How wonderful you look. All blossomed out again, I see.”
Mercy stepped back and gave Sara a considering look. Had she pinned something wrong or left something showing?
“You’re blossoming too. I am so happy for you.”
“I am happy for me too, almost as happy as you are, I think.”
Sara took her namesake from her father. “You look tired from your journey, Enos,” she said, patting the fussing baby’s back. “Will you stay and have supper with us?”
Enos nodded. “Got to feed the horses.”
“My husband will be … ah, here he is. Adam, here is Enos and Mercy Bachman. I delivered this little darling for them last winter, remember, when you were laid up?”
Adam nodded at Mercy and shook her husband’s hand.
“They’re staying for supper,” Sara said. “Take Enos out to feed his horses.”
Adam gave her a bland but speaking look, and Sara couldn’t help her smile. “Mercy and I will begin cooking right now, so take your time.”
Adam led Enos out.
“He doesn’t say much, your husband,” Sara said, though hers had been silent as a post beam too. “I thought, when you delivered, that he didn’t talk because he was worried, but he’s the same now. Or is he shy around strangers?”
“Enos is tired. He’s had a hard life and I worry about him still working so hard at his age. He should have grown sons helping with the farm, but he’s still doing it by himself.”
“Since he is a good deal older than you, and you didn’t marry him to care for his motherless children, did you fall in love with him?”
“Sara Zuckerman,” Mercy said, opening her dress for her daughter to nurse. “Don’t tell me you are a romantic? Not many of those among our people.”
“No, nor many midwives either. So I guess I’m different all around. A scrapper and a rebel, Adam says.”
“Special,” Mercy corrected. “And in love with your husband, I think.”
Sara smiled and nodded. “But don’t tell him I said so. Hearing it scares him silly. When is your baby due?”
“Late November.”
“Mine is due a month later. They will play together, our children.”
Mercy regarded Sara’s middle with some surprise. “But you’re so small.”
“No, you’re so big.”
“Am I?” That troubled Mercy.
Sara knelt before her. “What’s wrong?”
“Twins, then, maybe. I’ve lost two sets, remember?”
“Ach, yes. I almost forgot about that. You’re staying till the baby is born, right? My mother-in-law told me you were coming.”
“Everything we own is in our wagon. We’re staying for good.”
That frightened Sara. “Not because of … I mean I’m only.…”
“Don’t be afraid, Sara. I would never blame you if something went wrong; you should know that.”
Sara bit her lip. “I know, but I would blame me. It does frighten me, your history and all. Promise me, the minute you get settled, that you’ll let Doctor Marks take a look at you. He’ll know if you’re carrying more than one baby. And Mercy, if you are, please think about letting Jordan deliver them.”
Her friend’s obvious disappointment bothered Sara. “I’d be there too. But the doctor has so much more knowledge of this than I do. He was my teacher.”
That made the difference with Mercy. “All right,” she said, grudgingly. “Both of you, if it’s twins. But just you, if it’s not.”
“Good. You’re staying with May and Cal Sussman like the last time, right?”
Mercy nodded. “Until we find our own place.”
“Close by, please, so we can visit every day?”
Mercy grinned and Sara laughed. “Good. Now give me back that baby girl so we can get reacquainted.”
* * * * *
As the nights grew colder and the days shorter, Sara Zuckerman grew big with child and the bigger she got, the more Adam worried.
He had never … needed … anyone before, and he hated to think that he might now. He had never been so … captivated. This overwhelming ‘necessity’ to make lo—
“No damn it!” Longing, friendship, he felt for Sara. He liked—all right, he liked her a great deal more than he’d ever liked anyone in his life. So what? Whatever such overpowering liking meant, whatever the act such liking inspired might be called—he could not bring himself to use any of the cruder words—Adam wanted it with Sara. Again and again. And damn it, his plight wasn’t even that simple. This fascination was more than lust, more than a need for sexual satisfaction.
He wanted Sara—Sara, not just any woman, but his Sara—to enjoy their … encounters … as much as he wanted to enjoy them himself. More. Probably because it was such a new and unexpected experience to bed a woman who liked the physical side of marriage as much as he did. Even bedding her sounded sordid. Damn it; if he could just identify this fascination, he knew he could deal with it.
He’d tried to tell himself that
all of this was normal. Sometimes he believed it. Other times he feared he was as mad as everybody thought.
After weeks of worrying the dilemma, Adam thought he might have discovered what ailed him and why this unexpected preoccupation with his wife. He was afraid that buried so deep he didn’t realize it existed, lived the notion that if he could get enough of Sara, it wouldn’t kill him if … he lost her in childbirth.
Adam rubbed his tight chest and coughed to dislodge the bramble in his throat. All right, so the very notion all but killed him. God help him, he almost hated the child she carried as much as he hated himself for putting it there, though he could never let Sara know how he felt.
More than once, he had come upon her, natural mother that she was, crooning to the child she called Noah. Never in anyone else’s hearing had she named it, yet he’d heard her do it twice when she was alone. Already she loved the child so much, it was a wonder she could stand the wait until she held it in her arms. If she ever held it.
It, him, her. A girl named Noah. Adam almost smiled, but, damn it, what did a name matter, if after the child was born, it had no mother?
Adam groaned and kicked a fence-post. Had a man ever been so haunted? He needed to talk to somebody. Somebody who would not make jokes, so that left Roman out. But who would see the sense in his fears. A woman would, but it had to be a man, a man who would understand, but what kind of man could?
A doctor. “Shit.” The fence-post came down with his kick.
Adam sighed. Perhaps if he did talk to the doctor, the man would tell him Sara faced no danger, that she did not have to die. God knew, he would not believe it, if anybody else told him so.
Bloody hell. He needed to talk to that bloody damned English.
He must be in real trouble if he were actually considering talking to that gold-buttoned fancy man about anything. Adam kicked the downed post one last time before stalking off.
* * * * *
Jordan was surprised the day Adam Zuckerman showed up at his surgery door. The Amishman greatly disliked him; Jordan knew that much. “Is Sara all right? It’s not the baby, is it? She’s not due for two more months.”
“Sara’s fine. Far as I know, the baby’s fine. Kicks all the time, always letting us know she’s there.”
Jordan thought he detected a bit of jealousy. Perhaps the child intruded at the wrong times. The doctor coughed. “Sit, Adam. What can I do for you?”
The big muscular farmer was clearly out of his depth and uncomfortable in his surroundings. Appearing trapped, as if he were tied to the chair, he turned his hat in his hands while regarding a white enamel pan of lancing instruments on the near shelf of a glass fronted cabinet.
“Feel free to stand, or even pace,” Jordan said. “If it will make you more comfortable.”
Adam took up his suggestion with apparent relief. He placed his hat on the surgery table and ran his hand through his hair. “You know that my first wife died in childbirth.”
Jordan nodded, concerned about where this was going.
“I don’t want to lose Sara that way,” he said, his plea so clear and heartfelt, Jordan believed a true miracle stood before him. Mad Adam Zuckerman loved his wife.
He only wondered if Mad Adam knew it. “I see.”
“I don’t care what you see. I want you to promise me—and I don’t want her to know about this—that when her time comes, you will save her.”
“Your wife was here yesterday making the same plea for Mercy Bachman. What do you all think, that I am God? Believe me, you are wrong. I am only a man, a doctor, human, flawed. Badly flawed.”
“I know that,” Adam said.
Chagrined, Jordan shook his head. “I can’t promise you anything, Adam, any more than I could promise Sara that I would save Mercy’s twins.”
Jordan put his hand on the Amishman’s arm when he paled. “I can only promise that if you call me the minute Sara goes into labor, that I will do everything I can for her and your child.”
Adam sat as if he were too weak to stand. He rubbed his face with a shaking hand. His expression, when he looked up, held panic, desperation. “But if it comes to a choice,” he said, his voice pain-graveled but determined.
Jordan stiffened. “Between her and the babe?”
Adam looked suddenly more ravaged than he had after months of drunkenness. “If it comes to a choice, no matter what Sara says, save her first.”
“I have taken an oath, Adam, to save every life I can, but sometimes that means choosing to save one more likely to survive … over one less likely.”
* * * * *
For weeks after his visit to the doctor, Adam’s obsession with Sara got worse.
His mother seemed to understand their need to be alone and cooperated whenever she could. Once, she kept the girls for two days while Adam took Sara with him to Sugarcreek. From there, they took the Wheeling and Lake Erie train to Zanesville, where they rented a room in a hotel and spent nearly an entire day in bed.
It was awful, Sara had said with a grin, how they could be … indecent … in the middle of the day, while somebody else cooked the meals, brought the food to their room, and cleaned the dishes after. She would never be able to show her face in this district again.
Adam personally thought he might go to hell for spending money in such a way, but he wasn’t certain who enjoyed the experience more, him or Sara.
In the fall, he took to seeking her out after chores, just to sit out on the hill overlooking the rolling pastures and talk. Twice, they came together in the woods. Once, she seduced him on a quilt by the stream.
Right there, in the light of day, beneath God’s blue heaven and two feet from Zeb Troyer’s dry stone wall, his wife pushed him onto his back and unbuttoned his broadfalls to release him into her hand.
Adam gasped, he moaned, he cried out. He begged for more, and more, until she mounted him, shocking him to his soul, but not so much that he would stop her from riding him. In fact, the events of that afternoon became his second best daydream ever, right after their night in the shack.
Even big with his child, Sara was beautiful. Her cinnamon hair shone when she let it down for him to run his hands through. Her cheeks glowed, her green eyes sparkled like the emeralds they’d seen in that Zanesville jewelry shop window.
Sara actually seemed to thrive on his sexual attention. How amazing to have such a wife.
As the nights grew crisp, they took to walking through the meadow after supper, while they planned next year’s crop. Often the girls came along, gamboling around them like a frisky litter of newborn pups. It was then, when they’d speak of the year to come, that worry intruded into Adam’s new world.
He began to pray again, in earnest, a practice he had all but abandoned after Abby died. Sometimes he even thought God might hear and answer. But as Sara’s time drew near and hope became more and more difficult to hold onto, he would become frightened out of mind and seek Sara out once more.
At the end of September, the Bachmans moved out of the Sussman house and bought Dead Elam Raber’s farm. The price was good. Only problem was, it had no barn. Like its owner, the structure had died a long, slow death. Now, two years after Elam had returned to the earth, his barn had become nothing more than a pile of rubble trying to do the same thing.
Jordan attended the barn-raising, not so much because he wanted to lend a hand, though he did, but he wanted to see how Sara and her fretting husband fared.
Yes, and he wanted to see Emma too.
To his delight, she ran right over when he arrived, though she stopped short of throwing herself into his arms, almost as if she’d run into an invisible wall a foot before him. Just as well, from the looks they were getting. If he were not careful, some of the women would try to protect her from him.
While that would be best for both of them, Jordan simply wasn’t ready for it, so he tipped his hat and made for the wood-framed barn.
Right behind Adam, he climbed to the tallest beam, drew his hammer from the wor
n leather pouch around his waist, and began to nail the thing together—him and about two hundred Amish and, maybe, six other non-Amish, like him.
Beside the clothesline, on the far side of the house, Jordan noticed Sara and Mercy comparing the sizes of their respective bellies. He grinned. They must do that every day; they were together so often.
Around him, hammers made a clamoring racket while most of the women below acted more like worker ants, scurrying to and fro, playing with children, setting tables, laying bright quilts in the grass on such a perfect Indian-summer day. But not a one of them looked as fresh and vibrant as Emma wearing a dress the color of blackberries—one of Sara’s Bishop-vexing creations, no doubt.
Adam must have noticed him gazing at Emma, because he cleared his throat and frowned pointedly.
Jordan warmed beneath his collar, looked down, saw the plank he’d left half-nailed, and got back to work.
At noon, six hammering hours after they began, the Bachman barn was half done. It would be complete by dusk. Jordan made for solid ground to break for lunch. Lunch, be damned; in the world he’d left behind, it would be called a banquet.
Adam followed the surprisingly hard-working English down to the ground. If the fancy man had designs on Emma, he’d best forget them.
“Sara looks good,” the man dared, setting Adam’s back up.
“I don’t need anybody to tell me that,” he snapped. “And it was not Sara you watched.”
When The English leaned close, his grin aggravated Adam the more. “Medically speaking, your wife looks good. Since I am a doctor and you’ve been, um, concerned about her condition and all, I thought you’d like to know that she came for an examination the other day and she and the child are doing well.”
Adam grunted and went to sit at one of the dozen or so tables, his stomach in knots. Sometimes he forgot to worry about it, and there went The English reminding him that his wife might die.
As ever, Sara came to serve him first. “You’re not nailing ground floor planks today,” she said near his ear.
“Hurts just to think about it,” he returned, his smile breaking, even as he tried to glower.
He had always anticipated her approach at fellowship meals with mixed emotions. He wished she wouldn’t bring attention to him by teasing him or serving him first. But, if she did not, he would wonder why, and ponder it to death.
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