Hidden Life (9781455510863)

by Senft, Adina

  You said you wanted people to listen, Emma Stolzfus, but did you ever actually open your mouth and speak? Did you ever have a conversation with a young man, or smile at a visitor, or go to a band hop when you were running around? Did you even bother to go on Rumspringe?

  No. You hid in your room and let your writing speak for you, and if no one heard, it’s your own fault.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Carrie said the next day at their quilting frolic, when Emma had summoned her courage and haltingly put some of these things into words. Carrie knelt on the Stolzfus sitting-room floor with the big silver shears as Emma and Amelia rolled out the batting. The quilt back lay under it, wrong side up, where its seams would be hidden inside. “Pull a bit your way. There. I’ll cut it even with the backing. Do you really think it’s being afraid, or was it a case of God guiding you?”

  “Would God guide her away from a home and family for all these years?” Amelia objected. “Careful, it’s traveling. Let me pull it this way.”

  “Why would He do that?” Emma asked. “Every Amish girl prays He will guide her to the man meant for her. And children are a blessing.”

  “Maybe…” Amelia hesitated, as comfortable on her knees as some people were in a chair.

  “Maybe what?”

  “I don’t want to say something hurtful.”

  “Amelia, my dear friend, you couldn’t say anything nearly so hurtful as some of the Gmee have said to me on this subject,” Emma said. “Besides, we tell each other the truth, no matter what.”

  Amelia nodded, sliding backward on the plank floor as Carrie passed her, snipping carefully. “Maybe in your desire to be heard,” she said quietly, “you forgot to listen.”

  Emma was silent. Then, “Do you know how many nights I have prayed about this? And mornings, and noons, hoping God would hear?”

  “But that’s just it. Hoping He would listen. But were you listening to Him?” Amelia’s voice was as gentle as if she were speaking to little Elam before turning down the lamp.

  Carrie made the last cut and Emma shook out the pieced quilt top. Each of them took a corner and laid it on the batting, smoothing it from center to edges, then Emma moved to the last corner and did the same. As her hands did what they had done many times before, she faced Amelia’s gentle reproof, trying not to flinch away from it.

  “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I wonder if I even know how.”

  Had she really treated the Lord of Heaven the way people treated her? Asking for everything under the sun, but not listening for a reply?

  Maybe God had been ready to show her His will, and she’d been up and away to can bean pickles, or off to her typewriter, or going somewhere else to do goodness knows what, and His counsel had blown away on the wind she kicked up as she bustled hither and yon.

  Emma took a box of safety pins and began to pin the back, batting, and top together at small, even intervals, beginning near the middle and working out. Amelia started on the other long side, while Carrie settled at one end.

  “Tonight, when you pray, just take a few extra minutes to listen to the silence. Or open up the Bible and see what it tells you,” Amelia suggested. “An answer might not come tonight, or the next night. But God is faithful. It will come.”

  “And in the meantime, Lena is right.” Carrie spoke around the row of pins between her lips, her hands moving quickly. “God has already made His choice for you. You just have to find out who it is.”

  There was the sound of feet on the porch, and Karen stepped inside, her chest heaving and her Kapp strings hanging down her back. Emma sat back on her heels in astonishment.

  “Karen, what’s wrong? Is it Mamm?” Lena had gone over to the big house for a visit, being not so obvious about leaving Emma alone with her friends to talk.

  “John just came in from the field. Amos Yoder stopped to tell him that they’ve found Lavina.”

  Emma couldn’t have spoken if it meant her life.

  “Where is she? Did she come home?” Amelia said.

  “No. That’s just it. The poor girl has been dead for nearly half a year and nobody knew it. If it wasn’t for Grant searching for her, they would never have known. The Englisch cremated her body, so Grant and Amos are going down on the train to Springfield to get her ashes.”

  “But how?” Emma’s voice came out in a squeak. “How could a woman die and nobody know?”

  “Apparently she went to a convenience store to get something for her Christmas baking, and somebody tried to rob it. The robber shot the proprietor and her, too. I don’t know why. I don’t know why that man she was living with didn’t do anything. Grant had to look at a photo, so he could tell them for sure it was her.” Karen shook her head. “It’s all over now.”

  “How awful,” Carrie breathed, “to have to tell your little Kinner that their mother will never come back.”

  “The little boy has never known her,” Karen said. “Grant sure has had a hard row to hoe. I doubt she would have come back anyway.”

  “We can’t know that,” Amelia said gently. “God could have been working in her heart and softening it again.”

  “He could have been,” Karen allowed. “I hope it’s so. What I do know is, Amos will let the Gmee know when the funeral will be. There won’t be a service, of course, since she died outside the faith. But some might want to go to the graveside.”

  When the sound of her shoes on the porch stairs faded, Carrie, Emma, and Amelia looked at one another.

  “It’s hard to settle to sewing after news like that.” Emma looked down at the quilt. “I’ve lost my heart for it.”

  “It would probably be good for us to concentrate on something useful.” Carrie moved the box of pins and began on another row. “That poor, poor girl. To go out for something as harmless as baking things and then…” Her voice trailed away.

  Emma couldn’t concentrate on work. She felt as if she had been struck by something heavy. “Remember the time she went to the drugstore for that fancy perfume and her mother made her dig a hole in the garden and pour the whole bottle out?”

  “And she’d worked as a Maud for an Englisch woman for weeks to buy it, too.”

  “How could she have imagined she would get away with it?” Amelia wanted to know. “It’s not like you can hide the smell of perfume. That’s why someone would wear it. To be noticed.”

  “She sure never had any trouble with that,” Emma said on a sigh.

  “She was baking. Somehow I never imagined that. And…” Amelia trailed off.

  And God chose that moment to take her. Probably wearing Englisch clothes, living who knows what kind of Englisch life.

  They all thought it, but no one said it.

  Only God knew the condition of her heart—and whether her soul was safe.

  That night, after she turned down the wick and extinguished the flame, Emma didn’t kneel by her bed to pray, as usual. Instead, she padded barefoot across the hardwood floor and opened the window to the soft early summer night. She curled up in the wicker chair next to it, wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, and gazed up, past the barn and the trees and the fields of her neighbors, up over the horizon to a sky spangled with stars. The breeze played in the leaves of the maple, and somewhere in the distance, she heard the clop-clop-clop of someone coming home late.

  Lord, for once I’m not going to bother you with a list of my needs. Only watch over Mamm, and bring her safely through the night. Be with my family and my friends, who are not afraid to tell me the truth if it means bringing me closer to You. Please let me know Your will for me. Help me to hear You and not the fearful yammerings of my brain.

  Oh, Lord, please be with Grant tonight as he travels, and with the children as they sleep. They will be grieving, maybe not for the loss of their mother, but for the loss of the hope that she would come back. Give him strength from Yourself, Lord, so that he can be strong and wise for them.

  She tried to empty her mind, to listen as intently as she sometimes had to
when Lena was short of breath. In the hedge, something rustled. The creek at the back of Amelia’s place, all the way across Moses Yoder’s pasture, chuckled and rushed. How amazing that she could hear it.

  This was how prayer should be. She would come again and again, and invite the quiet into her soul. And one of these times she would hear the still, small voice she loved, telling her which way she should go.

  Dear Grant,

  I was so very sorry to hear about Lavina’s passing. I can’t imagine how difficult the circumstances must be for you. Please know that while we may not say much, all of us feel for you, and are praying that God will heal the hearts of you and the children. We will do everything we can to help you.

  I remember once when Lavina made root beer floats for all of us after a singing. She forgot that you put in the ice cream after, not before you pour in the root beer. What a mess! But she just laughed herself silly and slurped up the root beer in her hands until all of us joined in. She loved life, and I’m glad for the time you had together when your hearts were full of love.

  Remember those times, Grant, and tell the Kinner about them. I have to believe that will make it easier.

  Your friend,

  Emma

  The sun shone from a brilliant, clean-washed sky as the small crowd gathered in the cemetery on Saturday to lay Lavina’s ashes to rest among the Yoder graves. Since she had left the church, there had been no funeral service attended by the entire Gmee, which Emma had to believe was a relief to Bishop Daniel. After all, he couldn’t exactly expound on the reward to the faithful soul, but neither could he hurt Grant and the Yoders by dwelling too long on the terrible price a soul risked by leaving the people of God. In the end, the prayer at the graveside was brief, as was the hymn, and only family and close friends were present.

  Emma watched from a distance but did not go into the cemetery. She was not what you could call a close friend, though she and Lavina had been in the same gang and everyone in the congregation had known one another most of their lives. But out of consideration for the family, she would not add to what amounted to a silent spectacle. She had written her letter and that was that.

  How Grant planned to go on with his life was none of her business. Not now. It was clear to anyone with a pair of eyes that he would never stop loving his wife, had done everything he could to find her and bring her home. No woman could compete with that, and Emma saw exactly how foolish her dreams had been in the face of such devotion.

  It was time to stop going down a path that led nowhere, and start hiking up a different one.

  So, at an off-Sunday get-together at Brian and Erica Steiner’s little place, when it seemed Calvin King or his girls were everywhere she looked, she decided to pay attention to the Lord’s hints on the subject. The two youngest Steiner boys owned the cabinet shop next to Amelia’s pallet shop, and had now officially bought into Amelia’s place with Carrie’s husband, Melvin, now that it seemed to be settled between Amelia and Eli Fischer. Because their father had already divided up the farm among their three older brothers, Brian and Boyd had had no choice but to buy five-acre “hobby” farms on the edge of town, just as Amelia and her first husband, Enoch Beiler, had done several years ago.

  Not that planting and raising a couple of acres of vegetables and selling or preserving them was any kind of a hobby. It was months of work, and Erica was already sunburned from weeding.

  Working off the sweets from the outdoor lunch, children ran and chased each other around the house and through the garden, including Calvin’s eleven-year-old twin girls. Mollie and Barbara, they were called. His boys were older—thirteen and fifteen—so they were probably off with their friends who were also in that awkward age between when they left school at fourteen, and sixteen, when some parents gave their children more freedom to run around and try their wings.

  As if her thoughts were a magnet, one of the twins dashed up—she had no idea which one. “Hullo, Emma,” she panted, her eyes the bright King blue, just like Calvin’s.

  “Hullo yourself,” she said. “Which one are you?”

  “I’m Mollie.”

  “Does everyone ask you that?”

  “Everyone who doesn’t know that I’m the one with freckles.”

  “Aha.” And so it was. Blond she might be, but there were freckles dusted across her nose, as pretty as you please. “Did you make ice cream last week?”

  The blue eyes widened. “How did you know?”

  “Because your daed and I had ice cream at the shop across from the bulk food store, and I wondered if he would go home and decide it was a pretty good idea to make some more.”

  “Are you and Daed courting?”

  Emma barely managed to keep her gaze on the child, and not look around to see who was listening. “Is that what it means when you eat ice cream?” She raised her brows in mock horror.

  “My brother Kenneth says you are.”

  “Your brother Kenneth ought to ask his father.”

  “Ask me what?” boomed a voice just behind her, and Mollie bounced around her to give her father a hug.

  “Noth—”

  “If you’re courting Emma,” the child interrupted, standing on the tops of his feet and looking up, her arms around his waist. “Kenneth says you are.”

  The flush burned into Calvin’s skin at about the same rate Emma could feel it burning into hers.

  “Then Kenneth has it wrong, and you should tell him so,” he said with admirable steadiness. Emma felt like running helter-skelter across the fields until she could see the silos of home. If she hadn’t been driving Mamm in the buggy, she might just have done it. But since she had to stand there, she liked that Calvin answered his Docher seriously, and didn’t try to put her off or tell her to mind her own business. “We are good friends, and good friends can have an ice cream every now and again.”

  Mollie shot Emma a look that left Emma at a loss as to its meaning, and when one of her friends called to her from behind the chicken pen, she ran off, the loose strings of her little Kapp flying behind her.

  “I wonder where your boy heard such a thing.” Emma felt awkward saying it, but it was one thing to hear it from one’s father, and quite another to hear it from the grapevine.

  “Not from me. If it had been, he would have had his facts straight. I’m afraid we need look no further than our bishop’s wife and daughter.”

  “We knew it would happen.” It felt strange and far too intimate to be using the plural pronoun with him.

  Calvin tugged on his black vest, as if he found it confining. “We could always make the rumors true.”

  “Calvin…” People were already beginning to look at them sideways, and look, there was Esther Grohl leaning over to whisper something behind her hand to Erica Steiner.

  “I know. I won’t pester you. But that offer of ice cream is still open. We made some again the other night and it would be no trouble at all to drop off a pint for you and Lena.”

  “Mamm would love it.”

  “I hoped that you might, too.”

  “It depends on the flavor.” Plural pronouns or not, he was so kind she didn’t have the heart to discourage him. And if this really was God’s will, she needed to do just the opposite. “What did you make?”

  “We took some canned peaches from last year and cut them up. It turned out pretty well, if I do say so myself.”

  “Peach is almost as good as lemon coconut.”

  “Maybe I could bring it by this evening, and we could go for a ride afterward?”

  Oh, my. Oh, my. A date. This was a date. Emma’s breath backed up in her lungs and she struggled to find words, struggled for calm…and then she saw Grant Weaver over by the hawthorn hedge, pointing out something in the branches to one of his little girls.

  Oh, the brave man, to come out in public the day after his wife’s funeral. Probably he was doing it for the sake of the girls. Striving to be normal. Which made him even braver.

  She dragged her gaze away and fou
nd Calvin looking at her, hope and trepidation in his eyes. “You are so kind,” she said a little breathlessly. “That would be—be very nice. Denki.”

  She might as well have given him a Christmas present, he looked so delighted. “I’ll come by after supper, before it gets too dark, then.”

  If you put a toe in the pond, you might as well just go swimming. “Why don’t you come for supper, and we’ll have the ice cream for dessert? I have a lemon poppyseed cake on hand, with lemon frosting.”

  “That sounds mighty gut. Around five?”

  When she nodded, he smiled again and walked off in the direction of Brian’s workshop behind the house, where the men had gathered to talk.

  “And what was that about?” Amelia sidled up to her and spoke out of the side of her mouth.

  Breathe. “Calvin asked me to go for a ride this evening. After he comes to supper bringing some ice cream for Mamm.” Breathe.

  “Did he, now? And I notice that Grant is over there, looking undecided about whether or not to join us.”

  “He’s showing his little girl something.”

  “Emma, he’s staring at you. No, don’t look.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, you sound like a teenager. The man just went to his wife’s funeral. He’s not looking at anybody.”

  Grant seemed to make up his mind and ambled in their direction. Before he reached them, Eli came up behind Amelia and put a hand on her waist.

  “I thought you went to see what Brian has going on in his shop,” she said softly. “Back already?”

  “I had something important to do.”

  “And what was that?”

  “See you.”

  They locked gazes. Three was definitely a crowd, right there on the lawn in front of two dozen people, chatting in groups under the trees. Would it be too obvious if she gracefully stepped away? But no, there was Grant coming up on the other side. If she turned and headed for the house, it would look as if she were deliberately avoiding him, and that was the last impression she wanted to give.