by Sarah Price
She also thought about David from the feed store. She remembered the tense look in his face when he had tried to shoo away those tourists who stole photographs of Drusilla. If she married Caleb and didn’t agree to accepting options, he might have no choice except to work at his cousin’s hardware store or a similar place. Certainly he’d be exposed to the very same type of people as that awful woman!
No, she realized that Caleb wasn’t forcing her, but she also knew as his eyes held hers, that she had no choice for, just as he called her his waterfall, she knew that he would always be her rock.
With a deep breath, Drusilla gave a slight nod of her head. “Ja, Caleb, I’d move to Ohio with you,” she said softly. “If we can’t find a farm here in Lancaster, that is.”
His mouth twitched as though he suppressed a smile. Instead, he nodded his head twice, his blue eyes still staring intently at her. She could tell that he was pleased with her response and it dawned on her that he hadn’t been entirely certain that, after her hesitation, she would respond in such a manner. Now however, with the matter settled, he seemed to relax and return to his old self.
“All right then,” he said. For a second, he seemed to hesitate as if uncertain what to say. He gave her a mischievous smile and let his hand rest on her shoulder. “Now that that’s settled, I found a nice patch of raspberry bushes just down there on the other side of the stream. Let’s cross over and pick some for the rest of the group. Nothing better than fresh raspberries on a beautiful morning, don’t you think?”
He let his hand slide down her arm and take ahold of her hand as he led her toward the narrowest part of the stream. Carefully, he jumped onto a rock and turned, reaching out for Drusilla to follow his example. When she did, her foot slipping just enough to splash some water on her sneakers, he steadied her. With one more leap, they made it safely, together, to the other side of the stream.
An Amish Autumn
They do not say in their heart, "Let us now fear the LORD our
God, Who gives rain in its season, Both the autumn rain and
the spring rain, Who keeps for us The appointed weeks of the
harvest."
Jeremiah 5:24 KJV
Chapter One
“Did you see the size of the pumpkins, Daed?” Drusilla asked, a concerned tone in her voice. She didn’t want anyone to overhear her, especially Daniel who worked in the other room, sanitizing the milking equipment. It would do no good to have anyone worried about the failing crop. With her arms crossed over her chest, she avoided her father’s eyes as she gazed out the dirty window in the backroom where she found her father. She could see the large field of what should have been ripening pumpkin gourds.“They haven’t even come close to their proper size for September! I’m worried.”
Her father, Amos, nodded his head. “Ja, I noticed the same thing,” he said.
To Drusilla, he looked tired, the dark circles under his eyes accentuated the exhaustion that she knew he felt. The past few months had not been kind to the Riehl family. When Esther gave birth to baby Anna, she hadn’t recovered as quickly as she had from her previous childbirths. Added to this, Anna immediately became colicky, something no one in the family previously experienced. It was only just recently that Anna started sleeping for longer periods of time during the night. While everyone breathed a long sigh of relief to Anna’s cessation of constant crying from the colic, Drusilla noticed that her mother had not quite sprung back to her happy, organized self.
Now that summer was over and the younger children were back at school, Drusilla had hoped that her mother would recover from what everyone was calling the baby blues. Drusilla had seen her mother in such a depressed and irritable state only twice before: after she lost two pregnancies. But this time was different. Esther seemed distant and emotional, not bonding properly with the new baby. She also seemed to complain more about the work on the farm and needing more help. Even the fact that Hannah was home now, her years at school completed, did not seem to help. In fact, Drusilla often wondered if Hannah’s presence, so adversarial at times, did not make things worse.
But for the moment, Drusilla was more concerned about the pressure on her father in regard to his crop of pumpkins.
“Do you know why, Daed?”
“It was a cooler summer than usual,” her father said, although he didn’t sound very convinced by his own words. “And it didn’t rain too much. Must have impacted the crop.” His explanation seemed logical, but Drusilla was still worried. “What can we do, Daed?”
He reached out and touched her shoulder, his hand a gentle attempt at reassuring her. “Not much, Dochder. It’s in the hands of God. We can no sooner control His will as we can the weather.”
Drusilla watched as her father walked away from her, his shoulders hunched over and his head hanging low. She had never seen him look so defeated. The crops had not grown as well as usual and there were only five hay cuttings during the season. While Drusilla suspected that her father was correct, the weather had not played into their favor. She also knew that the pumpkin crop was important to the well-being of the family. Besides, her father had a contract to sell a certain tonnage of pumpkins to a company in Delaware in early October. Since her father had never failed to produce a crop in the past, Drusilla did not know what would happen if her father failed to deliver as promised.
With a discouraged sigh, Drusilla walked out of the barn and headed down the lane toward the mailbox. Along the way, she paused to observe the pumpkins one more time. What should have been a field full of green vines and almost ripe orange gourds. Instead, most of them were still green and there were even a few flower buds still on the vine.
Her brief interruption in her daily trek to fetch the mail made her hope even more than usual that there was a letter from Ohio waiting for her.
For three weeks, Caleb had been away from Pennsylvania. Shortly after the camping trip, he drove his horse and buggy to a Sunday youth gathering and, when no one was looking, motioned for her to slip out the side door. Rather than socialize with the others, they spent the evening talking in the privacy of his buggy—a closed top buggy for once!—as he guided the horse down the backroads.
That was when he had informed her that he was leaving that week and wouldn’t return for almost a month. He had wasted no time in arranging his trip to learn more about farming opportunities in Ohio.
Ever since that day, Drusilla found that she couldn’t sleep at night. Nor could she concentrate during the day. Sometimes she worried that he wouldn’t find a property, and then, at other times, she worried that he actually might! After all, deep in her heart, Drusilla couldn’t imagine moving away from her family. While she knew that she loved Caleb, she also knew that saying good-bye to her parents and siblings would break her heart. Yet, Caleb needed to earn a living and Drusilla knew that farming was the only way she wanted to raise her future children.
“Where you goin’, Drusilla?”
Startled, Drusilla stopped walking and looked in the direction of the mule paddock where she saw her sister Elsie, sitting on the ground in the shade of a large, round hay bale. The mules stood nearby, eating the hay and relaxing on a rare day off from field work.
“What are you doing in there, Elsie? You know that one mule bites.” Drusilla hurried to the wooden fence and leaned over the top. “Come on now,” she coaxed, holding out her hand.
Reluctantly, the eight-year-old stood up and, taking a wide birth around the mule, walked over to the fence. She reached out a dirty hand to hold onto Drusilla’s and, with her bare feet, stood on the bottom rail of the fence. Her dark brown dress flipped up, exposing her knees, as Elsie scrambled over the top and jumped to the ground.
Drusilla brushed the stray pieces of hay from her sister’s back. “What on earth were you thinking? Daed would have taken you behind the woodshed, for sure and certain. You don’t want to be walking down that path, now do you?”
Elsie shrugged. There were streaks of dirt on her face and, under her eyes, the clear
sign of tears that had undoubtedly rolled down her cheeks.
“What’s wrong, Elsie?”
“Hannah says you’re getting married and moving far away,” Elsie said as she lifted her eyes to look up at her sister. “I don’t want you to move far away.” She paused. “Or get married either.”
Hannah! Drusilla thought angrily. Swallowing her outrage, Drusilla tried to smile at Elsie.
With her big, bright eyes and sorrowful expression, Elsie’s concern over the future of her oldest sister touched Drusilla.
Squatting down, Drusilla placed her hands on her sister’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. “Now, where would Hannah get a notion to say such a thing?” But Drusilla knew where.
Her fourteen-year-old sister must have found too much time on her hands, especially since this was the first autumn that she wasn’t attending school. Without doubt, Drusilla suspected that Hannah had done the unthinkable: gone through Drusilla’s hope chest and read the letters written to her from Caleb. “Besides,” she added, “we all grow up and get married someday, ain’t so?
And that doesn’t mean I’d be leaving you; it means you just have one more home to stay at!”
“So you aren’t getting married and moving away?”
Before she could answer, Drusilla caught the sight of activity on the front porch from the corner of her eye. She looked over Elsie’s shoulder and squinted in the late afternoon sunlight. Her mother raced across the front yard toward the barn. It wasn’t the fact that her mother was moving so fast that caused Drusilla to instantly worry; it was the expression on her face.
Standing up, Drusilla kept her eyes focused on the barn. “Why don’t you get the mail for me, Elsie, and then go see if there are any late-ripe tomatoes in the garden? We can talk about this marriage and moving business later, ja?”
She didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, her feet began to move toward the barn and her mind quickly rattled through the list of what could possibly be wrong.
In June, her mother had given birth to her seventh child. While Drusilla had never given thought to how much her mother could handle, she had quickly learned that everyone had a breaking point. With the baby’s colic and a bad case of postpartum depression, Esther Riehl had not recovered as quickly as expected. And Hannah sure didn’t seem to help, her sassy remarks and petulant behavior often pushing Esther to the edge of patience.
Drusilla suspected that, once again, Hannah had upset their mother.
As she approached the barn, however, Drusilla was surprised to see her mother crying and clinging to Amos.
“Maem? What’s happened?”
Amos looked as perplexed as Drusilla at the reaction from his wife. “Now calm down,
Esther,” he said in a soothing voice. “You take a deep breath and then tell us what’s happened.”
She tried to stifle her sobs, but she couldn’t. The tears continued to fall down her cheeks leaving little trails of glistening sorrow on her skin.
“What’s going on, Daed?”
Drusilla looked up and saw her brother, Daniel, standing behind their father. She shook her head, silently indicating that he shouldn’t say anything further.
Finally, Esther managed to calm down long enough to say two words, two words that sent
Amos racing toward the house: “Mammi Ana.”
Drusilla could only imagine the worst. Her grandmother had not been herself recently, her memory being touched by old age. Most of the time, Mammi Ana mixed up everyone’s name and it was a rare occasion that she did much more than sit there in her wheelchair. But she had a passion for baby Anna, her last grandchild and her namesake. Even during Anna’s bout with the colic, a period of time that Drusilla would rather forget, it was Mammi Ana who didn’t seem bothered by the screaming wails of the newborn baby. In fact, Mammi Ana often held the crying baby when no one else wanted to.
Inside the house, it took a moment for Drusilla’s eyes to adjust. Without a lamp already lit and the sun beginning its descent in the sky, the kitchen and gathering room were increasingly dark, a sunset version of blue mixed with gray that only deepened as the sun continued setting in the west.
Her grandfather, Jacob, hovered over Ana who sat in the wheelchair, her left arm dangling over the side of the chair and her body slumped, just enough to the side that she appeared immobile. Jacob repeatedly said her name, “Ana? Ana?” but she remained silent.
“Dru, go to the neighbors’ haus and call 911!” Amos knelt before his mother and took her hand. “Maem? Can you hear me, Maem?”
Drusilla turned and ran out of the door. She raced across the yard and toward the stable. Her foot scooter leaned against the wall and, despite not wearing her shoes, she grabbed it and began riding it down the lane. The neighbor’s had the communal phone that was shared by the surrounding farms, although at least one or two of them had their own phone lines in the barn.
Drusilla had often wondered at her father’s insistence to not have a phone installed on their property, just in case of emergency. Now, she suspected that her father might change his mind.
As she hurried toward the neighbor’s farm, she reminded herself to pray that God would take care of Mammi Ana. Despite her old age and the onset of dementia, Ana still had a lot of life and love left to offer the family and the community. Jacob would be lost without his wife; they had been married over fifty years. To spend almost all of his life with one person and then lose her? Drusilla prayed that God gave him the strength to deal with whatever might happen.
Twenty minutes later, an ambulance pulled into the driveway of the Riehls’ farm. Drusilla stood on the porch, waiting for their arrival. Inside the house, Jacob and Amos had moved Ana to the sofa so that she could lie down and Hannah kept the young kinner occupied outside. A somber tone fell over of the house, Esther fretting in the background and Amos trying to help his father. Until the emergency workers entered the house, however, there was nothing that could be done.
“Drusilla,” Hannah asked as she peeked around the corner of the house, her eyes wide and frightened. “Is Mammi Ana going to die?”
“Hush, Hannah!”
Hannah made a face, expressing her unhappiness with being scolded. “The little ones are scared and I don’t know what to tell them,” she snapped.
“Go take them for a walk. Better yet, head to Miriam and Naomi’s. You best be alerting them anyway.”
With a loud sigh, Hannah waved her arm to the other children and they ran around the side of the house. Elsie’s puffy, red eyes and the boys pale faces told Drusilla that they were more aware that something happened. She walked over to them and touched Elsie’s shoulder. “Mammi
Ana needs our prayers, but she is in the best hands possible.”
“God’s hands?” Elsie asked in a quiet voice.
“Ja, God’s hands. And while we don’t know whether or not God is calling Mammi Ana home, we do know that she is protected by His love.” She looked at the four children, hoping that her smile masked her true feelings. Truth was that she felt just as scared and worried as her brothers and sisters. Unlike them, Drusilla had been inside and seen her grandmother in such a state of frozen time. Now that the emergency responders were working with Ana, there was nothing everyone else could do but wait.
“We can pray for Mammi Ana while we walk,” Hannah said in a take-charge type of voice that surprised Drusilla. “Come along, then. The sooner we start over, the sooner we can return and find out how she’s doing!”
As they marched away from the house and barn, Hannah kept her wards close to her. She even held Elsie’s hand as they neared the road. Just as they were about to turn toward their cousins’ house, Elsie broke free from Hannah and ran part of the way back toward the house.
Hannah was quick to race after her and grab her hand.
“But I have…”
Hannah didn’t let her finish, quickly dragging her little sister back toward the road. Drusilla almost started to smile, a real smile, at the sight of Elsi
e fighting Hannah, her weight on her feet as she leaned back and fought being dragged away from the farm. Whatever Elsie needed,
Hannah apparently thought it could wait.
The door to the house swung open and the medical people rolled a gurney through it,
Mammi Ana resting beneath a white blanket and strapped to the top of it. Drusilla forgot about the children and watched as the two men carefully put the gurney into the back of their ambulance.
“Who’s going with her?” one of the men asked.
For a long second, everyone looked at the others as if trying to gauge who was the better person to be there with Ana. Drusilla glanced at Daniel and held her breath. Her heart beat rapidly and she knew what the decision would be. Jacob was too upset to be of much use at the hospital, at least right now. Amos needed to situate the household before arranging transportation for himself and his father to the hospital. Daniel needed to stay behind so that he could manage chores in the morning. And that left two people: Drusilla or her mother.
Esther stood to the side of the kitchen, her arms crossed around her chest as if she were cold.
The color had yet to return to her cheeks and her puffy, red eyes made her look sickly. Drusilla knew that her mother was in no shape to go to the hospital. After all, despite the four months since baby Anna’s birth, her mother still seemed to be hanging onto those baby blues.
“I’ll go,” Drusilla offered, her voice sounding stronger than she felt.
For a moment, her mother appeared relieved. Just as suddenly, a look of guilt seemed to wash over her. “It should be me,” she said without any conviction in her voice. “I should be the one going.”
Amos reached out his hand and touched Esther’s arm. “You need to be here with the kinner, especially the boppli. They need an adult here to reassure them that everything will be as God wants it.” He glanced at Drusilla and quickly added, “An adult as in a parent, I mean, Drusilla.”
She nodded her head, knowing what he meant. “I best get going then.” She hurried to the door, pausing only to grab her handbag. She didn’t want to keep the emergency responders waiting, although she could see that they were still taking care of Mammi Ana, strapping her gurney into the back of the ambulance. Drusilla did not look back at the anxious faces staring at her from the porch.
