These days, he wished she would just lie down and take this time before the baby as something of a holiday, to gather her strength, as Abby used to do.
Adam noticed Jordan and Roman, across the table, watching him, some joke at his expense sitting between them. He bit into a corn cake with a vengeance. In his mind he was taking a piece out of either hide with great satisfaction.
Fortunately, none of the other men had noticed his foolish preoccupation with his wife. They spoke mostly among themselves, though Zeb Troyer teased Sara about her inability to get any closer to the table. By the time she reached the end of its seven foot length, she had gone back to get more food three times. Adam could tell the way she walked that her back ached again. These days, most nights began with his rubbing wintergreen liniment into it, to her moans of pleasure.
He shifted in discomfort just thinking about Sara moaning.
Zacharius, the idiot too blind to see that she plainly suffered, asked for more corn and Sara turned to fetch it.
“Damn it, Sara,” sit down and rest. He shoved old Jake Kicher over with his hips to make room for her. Then he grabbed her hand and tugged her down beside him. “Get your own thirds, Zack. Sara needs to rest.”
Everyone stilled.
The English and Roman looked at each other, at him, then at each other again. “Alive, and kicking,” Roman said, and the doctor chuckled.
“Eat, eat,” Adam said to the rest of the staring men. “What’s the matter with everybody?”
“They never saw Mad Adam Zuckerman act nice before,” Roman confided in a mock-whisper loud enough to draw laughter.
“To his wife, even,” one man added.
Sara’s face turned nearly as bright as the ferbudden dress she’d made for Emma, her stubborn chin rising, despite the fact that she was the only woman at a table reserved strictly for the men. “I can’t stay here,” she said.
“You can if they go,” Adam all but shouted, giving the men a look calculated to shiver them in their big, clumsy shoes.
Some did leave, but not all of them.
“Why don’t you go to the quilting bee this afternoon and make sure she has a cushion for her feet,” Abe Zook called from the end of the table. “And leave the carpentry to the men.”
“Abraham Zook, you nasty man,” Sara snapped. “Adam is the one sent you a hundred dollars last month when Irenee needed to go to the hospital in Philadelphia.”
“Sara,” Adam gasped, shocked to the soles of his feet that she had revealed something he’d told her in confidence.
“Ya,” Roman said. “He’s the one always gives the most for those in need. He’s mad alright.”
Adam stood, mortified, unmoving.
“Why is Mommie sitting with the men?” Pris asked Lizzie as the girls approached, unaware of the turmoil about them.
“Because she’s fat,” Katie said.
Lizzie giggled. “Mommie’s not fat. She’s going to have a baby.”
“My don’t want her to die like my other Mommie,” Katie said, which made Pris whine and throw herself against Sara.
Adam didn’t know who made him madder, Roman and The English, the men, Sara, his girls, or his rutting self.
If anything happened to Sara, because of his selfish lust, he did not know how he would survive. No, nor the girls either.
One thing he knew for certain. He could not touch her after this baby came and he’d best get used to it. If he knew what was good for him, and for Sara, he’d best not touch her again, starting today.
Chapter 18
Sara realized over the next days and weeks that Adam had withdrawn from her, not only in the physical sense. She felt bereft and out of sorts, unloved, adrift.
Harvest chores kept him outside so late some nights, she was asleep when he came to bed. They never went walking. They never even talked anymore.
Her husband had become moody and snapped at unexpected times. She knew exactly how he felt. She had not only argued with him, she had bickered with her mother-in-law, and once, even, with Emma, though she wasn’t sure exactly how they’d managed it. She knew only that they’d parted in tears, the both of them.
There was a lot of making up for her to do, though not between her and Adam, because he kept saying nothing was wrong.
In October, the Hershberger house was struck by lightening and burned to the ground. The aging couple had never had children. Levi had been ailing for some time, though his wife, Sovilla, did well for her eighty-eight years.
Roman invited them to share his daudyhouse with his mother and father. His dead sister’s teen-age children already lived in the main house with him, so his home and his pocketbook were stretched tight.
Several days after the fire, later in the evening than was normal for callers, Sara heard a knock at the kitchen door.
“I came to collect for the digitalis Doc Marks special-orders for Levi from Boston,” Roman said as he came inside.
Without a word, Adam abandoned the farm catalogs spread across the kitchen table and unlocked the tiger-maple desk, where he dipped into the cracker tin of money he kept there.
While Adam silently counted out their contribution, Roman accepted a cup of sarsaparilla tea and a slice of warm Ob’l Dunkes Kucka. “Mm. Good Sara. I think maybe you make better applesauce cake than my mother, but don’t tell her I said so.”
“How are they all?” Sara asked.
“Mom and Pop are goot and they are happy to share their home with people of their years. Levi has aged for losing his own home, but Sovilla has a new spring in her step, just having my mother for company. Pop and Levi play checkers, when neither of them is napping.” Roman grinned. “So they play about an hour a day.”
Even Adam chuckled.
“But what about Levi, does he do any better? Does the digitalis help him?”
Roman shook his head. “I don’t know. Doc says he might need something costs more.”
Sara regarded her husband. “Adam, did you give him enough?”
“I did.”
“Are you sure?”
Sara could tell it annoyed Adam, her questioning his generosity before Roman, but—
“Leave it, Sara,” Roman said.
“Well, how much did you give him?” she asked her husband as she rose and went for the cracker tin.
“Why do you want to know?,” Adam snapped. “So you can tell all our neighbors how much?”
Sara felt as if he’d slapped her in public. She was so embarrassed, she nodded in Roman’s general direction and said goodnight.
Not much later, she heard Adam come to bed.
He tried to coax her into his arms, but she refused to be budged. What did it matter? That’s about as much as he cared to touch her these days anyway. With her big belly, she disgusted him. With her big mouth, that day at the barn raising, she had destroyed any trust or caring he might have felt for her. He hadn’t touched her in passion in weeks.
“I am sorry,” he said into the silence some minutes later.
“For never touching me anymore?” she said before she had a chance to think, then she rolled even further away. She would not beg. “It’s all right. Go to sleep.”
“Passion between us hurts you,” he said. “This is the way it must be. If you … after the baby, this is how we must be. There will be no more children, Sara. If we are still together … after … believe me, I will be grateful every moment for the life we share.”
“A life where you insult me before our neighbors?”
“A life where we raise our children together.”
“We are not together. We are as far apart as we were the day I came to deliver Hannah.”
“We are the same. That night you flayed me with words; tonight I flayed you … in front of Roman, to my distress, and yours. I repeat, I am sorry.”
“Sorry you married me.”
“If you remember,” Adam said, “I had no choice.”
“As if I did. So you are sorry?”
Adam sighed. �
�Being married to you has been both the best and the worst experience of my life. It has been, at times, better than heaven, and at others, worse even than hell.”
Sara said nothing more. She could not speak for the sorrow choking her. Her silent tears fell until she slept.
Toward dawn, she sat up and rubbed her back. Adam tried to sooth her with his big capable hand, but despite the depth of her craving for his touch, she pushed him away and rose to don her robe. “The hell is happening now, isn’t it, Adam? Too bad we were pushed into marriage so quick. If we had waited, your mother would have arrived soon enough to care for the girls and we would both have been saved.”
“If we could arrange life the way we wanted it,” Adam said, sitting on the edge of the bed, his voice tired. “We would be God.”
“The way you want your life is not with me in it, I think.”
“Sara, don’t. Come here. Where are you going?”
She had awakened because she thought she heard someone at the kitchen door. And she’d just heard it again.
Mercy’s husband stood on the porch. “She is in labor,” Enos said. “It’s too soon. You have to come. She’s calling for you.”
“Go get Jordan—Doctor Marks—and tell him to meet me there. Hurry.”
Sara went back into her bedroom to dress. “It’s Mercy,” she said when Adam questioned her.
“Give me a minute,” he said.
“Enos is waiting for me. “Go back to sleep.”
“No, I….”
“It’s an hour till dawn and, frankly, Adam, I don’t want you, at this moment, any more than you want me.”
Licking salty tears from her lips, Sara hurried to the barn to hitch up her small buggy. She had lied to her husband. Twice. Enos was not waiting for her. And she wanted Adam so badly, she could die of it. But that was not to be considered right now.
Mercy needed her.
An hour later, Sara was certain she could feel every single one of Mercy’s labor pains deep in her own womb, in the small of her back, especially.
Thank God her own babe wasn’t due for a month and a half yet.
The minute Sara arrived, before she saw Mercy even, she prepared a tea of Gossypium root bark, as she had done during Mercy’s last delivery, to induce stronger contractions.
Mercy drank it dutifully, but her labor did not proceed at all as it had done the year before. It blazed a flash-fire trail of agony through her. Within the first half hour, her pains came closer and closer, until they were already a minute apart.
“Seven times I have labored, but I have never felt such agony before,” Mercy admitted during a moment of respite. “The pains are ripping me apart, Sara. I am afraid.”
Only Sara knew that Mercy was not alone in her fear. Sweat poured down her own brow. “How long were you in labor tonight, before you sent Enos for me?” Lord, she wished Jordan would hurry.
“An hour, no more.”
“And before you told Enos you were in labor.”
Mercy nearly smiled. “Minutes only.”
Oh, Lord. Oh, God. She should have gotten that information from Mercy before giving her the tea. Suppose she’d made matters worse with the infusion. Suppose she’d caused her friend more pain.
Suppose Mercy died.
The thought was not to be borne. Sara thrust it dutifully aside, so she could give Mercy and her twins her full attention.
Twins who would be born a month too soon. “I won’t lie to you, Mercy. This is not good. The babies will be small for sharing their nourishment and growing space, and smaller still for coming early.”
“I know,” Mercy said even as she cried out with pain.
Sara bathed her friend’s face and pressed her cheek to Mercy’s cool brow. “I wish….” She sighed. “For your sake, my friend, I wish to God I knew more.”
“Jordan will be here any minute,” Mercy said.
Sara went back to check her progress. “So will one of your little ones. One with hair as pale as corn silk.” And a very weak pulse, if any.
Mercy gasped a laugh and screamed as she pushed.
The blonde mite of a boy slipped into Sara’s hands with no sign of life. Sara sobbed and worked on it for as long as she dared, but the next child that needed help entering the world might have a chance.
She turned her attention back to Mercy, who knew, without words that the first of the twins had not survived.
The second took a bit longer, which worried Sara. “When did you last feel life?” she asked Mercy.
“I … I don’t remember.”
“Yesterday? Last week?”
“I don’t remember,” she wailed.
Damn, damn, damn. “The child came. Another son. To be placed, as he was in his short months of life, beside his brother … but in death.
More labor, but not for the afterbirth, Sara realized with shock.
“A third boy,” Sara said, her voice wavering. She held up the lifeless child, no bigger than the cupped palms of her hands, regarding it through a mist of tears with an overwhelming sense of wonder and loss.
Sara washed and wrapped each babe separately and brought Mercy all three to hold. Crooning, she kissed small fingers, tiny noses, and Sara wept with her.
Mercy ran out of tears.
Sara did not.
She put the babies back in the cradle and helped deliver the afterbirth. It came fast, easy, and in one piece, thank God. Mercy was not bleeding overmuch.
“It’s not your fault, her dear friend kept saying, but Sara did not hear nor heed her words.
She had just got Mercy washed, and clean padding placed between her legs, when Enos returned. “The doc’s on his—”
He fell to his knees beside the cradle.
“Boys,” Mercy said. “I’m sorry, Enos.”
Enos turned on Sara. “This is your fault. What did you do? How could you let this happen?”
I don’t know, I don’t know, Sara kept thinking, but words would not come. She had cost the lives of three babies. She had failed her best friend.
“No, Enos,” Mercy kept saying, “It’s not Sara’s fault,” but the grieving man knew nothing but rage.
“Get out,” he ordered Sara. “Out.”
Sara kissed Mercy’s cheek. “I will be sorry until the day I die,” she whispered, then she hurried outside, as fast as her clumsy gait would allow, and climbed into her buggy.
When she topped the rise, Sara saw Jordan’s fancy carriage climbing Hickory Hill from the valley, headed in her direction. She did not want to be forced to see him. She could not bear to confess her failure. Rather than take the direct route to Walnut Creek, Sara turned her buggy onto Maple Valley Road to go around the town.
She had been a fool to think she could be a midwife. She had all but killed three babies. She could no longer allow herself to risk the lives of the women who might entrust themselves to her care. She did not, after all, possess the skill to be a midwife.
That dream was not meant to be, neither was her dream of having a husband and family of her own. If she kept going, no family would miss her, none of her own, that was.
Adam’s family would be better off without her.
Was it only a year ago that she had been so young and so filled with a sense of purpose and invulnerability?
A lot could happen in a year.
Sara tried to concentrate on her driving. She needed not to run the buggy wheels through so many holes. The jostling was killing her. Her back was killing her. She hurt so bad, she had to untie her apron because the strings binding her belly were making her discomfort worse.
Untied, her apron flapped in her face, so she pulled it off, over her head, and tried to stuff it behind her seat. It fell out almost at once and a gust of wind took it and lifted it in the air. Sara reached for it and nearly fell from the buggy.
She stopped and got down, but when she saw the wind carry the apron upward and toward the woods, her sore back reminded her she wasn’t in any condition to climb a tree, so she
gave up chasing it and got back in the buggy.
Sara started driving again, heedless of her direction, so long as she went far, far away from all she could never have.
Once she had believed she could save every mother and child she tended. She had believed that she could make Adam love his children. “As if he could love anyone.” He didn’t even love the child she carried with so much hope, until now. She had even believed he would come to love her. Sara laughed aloud, but ended on a broken sob.
“Poor baby,” she crooned, rubbing her big belly, ignoring her aching back. “I want you, even if your Datt does not. He doesn’t even want me. He only got stuck with me, because the Elders made him marry me. He needed somebody, anybody, to nurse him back to health. He needed somebody to take the responsibility for your sisters off his shoulders.
Sara stopped the buggy. She still found Adam’s giving her the girls to be something of a puzzle, the pieces of which she could not seem to fit together, no matter how many ways she tried. Another foolishness on her part, most likely. She mocked herself with a curse and regarded the fork in the road. One road lead back home—well, to the Zuckerman farm. The pike would lead her toward the far reaches of the state, where Ohio met Pennsylvania. She had heard there were several Amish communities in that vast, unknown place.
Sara pushed her hair more securely beneath her bonnet and looked around. The weather was turning. Despite the October date on the calendar, winter was almost upon them, the wind brisk, the air cool. She might have to stop for the night and she had no money for shelter, but the shack where her child had been conceived lay along the pike to Pennsylvania.
Why not take the pike? Join another community. Start again.
She had failed Mercy.
She had failed as a daughter and sister.
She had failed to teach Adam to love. He was sorry he married her. He had his mother and sister now; what did he need her for? Lena and Emma would take good care of the girls.” Sara wiped her eyes with an angry hand. Yes, she would miss them. Her arms ached to hold baby Hannah even now, but soon she would have her new little one to fill the emptiness.
Butterfly Garden Page 24
