The Haven

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  Fern had fixed sandwiches before she left for the frolic. It was good timing to have Will stop in so he could carry everything out, because she didn’t know how she would manage juggling the baby and the sandwich tray and the iced tea. She tried to hurry as she rinsed shampoo out of her hair so she could join Will downstairs, but the next thing she knew, he called to say he was leaving, and something about how sweet it was to have things ready on the table.

  Wasn’t he wonderful to notice?

  Five minutes later, Sadie’s hair was towel-dried, a fresh cap pinned on, and she was in a clean dress. She took one more look in the mirror that hung on the bathroom wall. She wished so much to be tall and slim that she almost hoped to see a tall, slim girl. But in the glass she saw a small, round girl in a blue dress. Even the face in the mirror was round. Her chin had a soft curve, and her nose was almost right, but her eyes were too far apart, and they didn’t sparkle. They didn’t sparkle at all. At least her hair wasn’t such a bad color. Once, after church, Gideon had told her that the sunlight beamed on her hair and it looked golden. She tipped her head to see if the sun from the window bounced off it. Was it golden-y? Suddenly Sadie realized that if anyone saw her preening in the mirror right now, they would think she was vain! She picked up the baby and went downstairs, stopping abruptly when she saw a pink bakery box. On top it said “To Sadie from Gideon.” Inside the box were four little cockeyed tiny cakes. U-L-I-E. Huh? What did Ulie mean? What was Gid trying to say? Then she gasped. You lie.

  Tears filled Sadie’s eyes. How cruel! How insensitive. How downright mean. What was wrong with Gideon Smucker? How dare he accuse her of lying! Then anger swooped in and displaced her hurt feelings. She picked up the box to throw it in the garbage, but thought twice. She might as well eat the little cakes. They did look delicious, even if the message was unspeakably rude. Then she would throw the box away.

  And she would never, ever speak to Gideon Smucker again.

  Will had lied to Mr. Petosky. On Sunday, Eve had laid one egg. He had observed her standing in or near the nest, guarding the egg. Will knew she would lay another egg or two before incubation would begin. On Monday morning, when Mr. Petosky called, there were two more eggs. And this morning, there were four eggs in the dug-out scape.

  He had climbed a tree to see the eggs. The eggs were slightly smaller than a chicken egg, mottled with a dark, reddish-brown pigment. Eve would begin incubation now for the next thirty-three days. Once it began, Eve would sit on the nest and rarely leave the eggs unattended. Adam would give her brief reprieves so she could fly off and hunt for food.

  And then the eyases would only stay in the nest another four to six weeks before they tried to fledge.

  He was going to have to tell Mr. Petosky the news soon. There looked to be four viable eggs in the scape. He just wasn’t quite ready to have Mr. Petosky breathing down his neck. He needed time to think. He was pretty sure Mr. Petosky would find a way to confirm Will’s findings.

  All kinds of things could happen to these eggs. Often, there could be “egg failure.” The female would push an egg that has failed to the side of the scape. If an entire clutch was lost, the female may attempt to re-nest several weeks later, often in a different location.

  “Nice view up there?”

  Will looked down the tree to find Sadie peering up at him. He shimmied down the trunk and hopped off as he neared the end.

  She tilted her head when he smiled at her. “Are you all right?”

  “Most of the redness is gone.” Will wriggled his fingers at Sadie. “The skin isn’t as taut as it was before, and the blisters don’t appear to be anything that will last more than a day or two.”

  “I didn’t mean your hands, but I’m glad they’re doing better.” She crossed her arms behind her and leaned her back against the tree. “You had a strange look on your face.”

  “Me?” Will said, looking straight at Sadie. “Strange? Stranger than normal?”

  Sadie smiled, then shook her head slowly. “Don’t mind me. Every now and then, I just get this odd feeling that you’re carrying around something heavy. But then, the feeling passes and you seem right as rain. Better than rain.” She paused. “I might be wrong. Maybe you’re not sad or confused about something at all. Maybe I’m imagining things. I’ve been known to do that.”

  She wasn’t wrong. In fact, she couldn’t be any more right. He was sure she had all manners of herbs and remedies for everything else, but what could you do about what was bothering him? He doubted she had herbs for a guilty conscience. Or a concoction for soul sickness.

  What was wrong with him—what made him do the things he knew he shouldn’t do and what kept him from doing the things he should? Maybe his father was right. Maybe he did have a demon inside him. “My father would say I am suffering from acute laziness.”

  “What does your father do for a living?”

  “He’s a neurosurgeon.”

  She looked puzzled. “What’s that?”

  “He operates on people’s brains.”

  “So he drills holes in people’s skulls?”

  “Well, not really. He specializes in endovascular work—the vessels that bring blood to the brain. A lot of problems in the brain occur in those arteries and veins, but there’s all kinds of technology that allows him to treat them without drilling open the skull. Much less invasive. No cutting bones or opening someone’s head. But endovascular neurosurgery is the most dangerous of all the specialties of neurosurgery. Most of the people he sees have run out of options. They’re either going to die, or my dad will operate and save them.”

  “He must be a smart man. It’s hard to imagine having the courage to operate on a brain.”

  “Dad says the brain is like a melon, with a thick, leathery covering inside the skull—the dura mater—that gets pulled back and the glistening surface of the brain is exposed. He says it’s like putting on a diving mask and looking beneath the surface of the water at a coral reef: a whole new world opens up.”

  Sadie shuddered. “He has such a responsibility. What if he made a mistake?”

  “I don’t think my father makes mistakes.” Will scratched his head. “Ever. He’s pretty confident that he’s the best neurosurgeon in the country.”

  “What makes him so sure of that?”

  “Everybody tells him so. Other doctors send their toughest cases to him. From all over the country.”

  She gave him a shy smile. “I can’t imagine having that kind of confidence.”

  “Sadie,” Will said, “if you had the kind of self-confidence my father has, you wouldn’t be you.” He shifted his gaze to a flock of ducks coming in for a landing near the creek. “You wouldn’t even be someone you’d like.”

  Sadie rose and walked down the bank to the creek. He watched her from afar. He noticed a curious stillness about her. She was, at her center, as tranquil as Blue Lake Pond on a windless night. Just being near her had a calming effect. He discovered he was in no hurry to be elsewhere, that his normally impatient, easily bored nature somehow found the patience to stand back and just be.

  You’re good for me, Sadie Lapp.

  For the briefest of moments, Will entertained a fantasy—that he and Sadie were together like this, really together. Caring for a small farm, raising a family.

  He chased the fantasy away, swatting it as if it were a mosquito about to bite. He and Sadie Lapp belonged in different worlds. She wasn’t his type, much as he wanted her to be.

  As he noticed how absorbed she was by the nature around her, it seemed as if she were no mere observer of the world but right in the middle of it. He’d wondered if she knew there was something special about her. Probably not.

  Will walked down to join her. There were six ducks, honking and rustling about in the creek. Sounding remarkably similar to last Sunday’s long-winded Amish preacher, she called out, “Troubles are often the tools by which God fashions us for better things!”

  Blank stares from every last one of those ducks. She
sighed. “I’m practicing my newly acquired boldness on them. It doesn’t seem to be working.”

  “Don’t take it to heart,” Will said with a grin. “My guess is they just haven’t been to church lately.”

  13

  For the first time in her life, M.K. could not imagine life without school and books. She had only one more year of formal schooling ahead of her. After that, it would just be one endless day of chores after another. She was already worried that crotchety Alice Smucker would come back next year and Gid would return to full-time farming with his father. She thought he preferred teaching to farming, though he would never say so. Gid was private about his feelings. He was a first-rate teacher, the best. The very best.

  M.K. had always annoyed Alice when she finished her work early and grew bored. Alice would tell her to redo her work for the practice. By contrast, Gid stayed late in the day so that he could give her new assignments the next morning. He always had something new for her to puzzle out and she loved the challenges. Shakespeare for studying the beauty of language, Galileo to read the mystery in the night sky. She had learned the names of all the stars and constellations. She was struggling a little with geometry—she preferred algebra. But today, Gid corrected her paper and handed it back to her with a smile. “You’re getting there.”

  When Gid smiled, his dimples deepened and his eyes shimmered with satisfaction. M.K. had trouble concentrating after getting one of his smiles.

  Sometimes, she would stay after class and help him clean up, chattering away about a piece of poetry she had read or an essay, and he would listen carefully. He commented now and then on her thoughts, offered her some suggestions of different poets, and even brought in a book of beginning Latin for her—to help understand the roots of words, he said. He never patronized her, not once.

  She watched him work with the second-grade class. He was so handsome! It was a tragedy that Sadie refused to fall madly in love with him. It would be sheer heaven to have Gid as a brother-in-law. She would get to see him every day for the rest of her life. Maybe she could live with them! She planned to never marry because she thought all boys—except for Gid and her father and Uncle Hank—were short on brains and long on foolishness. She had no patience for them.

  Gid was playing a game with the second graders—at least, they thought it was a game. It was a clever way to encourage reading comprehension. The three second graders had all read a short story and Gid was quizzing them on details in the story. Each time they answered correctly, they took a giant step closer to the blackboard.

  That was what made Gid so remarkable—he was always thinking up ways to make learning interesting. Not too long ago, he had a “100 Days of School” celebration. Everyone brought a collection of one hundred items. Most of the kids brought in pennies or marbles—pretty dull stuff. M.K. brought in one hundred two-week-old chicks. It was great fun until the chicks pecked through the boxes and escaped, scattering around the room. Then Ruthie sat on one and that got her all bug-eyed and tearful. After Davy Mast called her a chicken killer, she couldn’t stop crying. She sniffed and sobbed all afternoon until finally Gid sent her home, along with M.K. and her boxes of ninety-nine chicks. M.K. sighed, thinking back on that day. Like many of her plans, this one went awry.

  She noticed that Gid dismissed the second graders and brought up the third graders. Now, why couldn’t Alice Smucker have ever thought of ways to make school fun? Except for the occasional mischief of Jimmy Fisher and his cohorts, every day with Alice Smucker was identical to the day before. Last fall, as the new school year started, it was almost—though not quite—a letdown that Jimmy had finally graduated eighth grade and was no longer in school.

  Almost. But not quite.

  Stoney Ridge was as different from Will’s life in Philadelphia as anything could be. He thought of how, at the end of a day, he would get back to his fraternity house after his last class, watch TV or play a video game, or head over to Chelsea Van Dyke’s apartment and have a beer, maybe neck with Chelsea on the sofa if she was in the mood for necking. She usually was.

  Here, on this Amish farm, he was working himself to the bone. Each night, he trudged back to the cottage and flopped on the bed, exhausted. The next thing he knew, birdsong was welcoming the new dawn. When he heard the sweet music of the birds, a smile creased his face.

  Will considered himself to be a closet birder. He never let anyone in his college fraternity, or any girlfriend for that matter, know how he loved birds and spent vacations on bird-watching expeditions. If he were to hunt birds, his friends would admire him. But observe them? Study them? It would be laughingstock, fodder for ridicule.

  Bird-watching was the one activity he and his father enjoyed together. Dr. Charles William Stoltz could identify each and every type of the enormous variety of fowl that migrated through southeast Pennsylvania. He was a truly dedicated birder. The birds were proof in some way that Will’s father did have a tender side. Most of their good moments together were spent taking long walks through the woods with binoculars hanging around their necks, thumbing through field manuals. Beyond that, Will’s study of them gave them something to talk about. His father preferred taking him along on birding expeditions rather than any of his brainy bird-watching doctor friends. Will was quieter, he said.

  It was the only compliment his father had ever given him. And Will wasn’t really sure it was a compliment. He was quiet around his father because he was thoroughly intimidated by him.

  Briefly, he thought about wanting to tell his father what Amos had said to him this morning. Amos had pointed out the field he wanted Will to plow under but instructed him to leave the far corner alone because the bobolinks were nesting. “They earn their rent by giving us pleasure,” Amos had told him. His father would enjoy that kind of thinking.

  Even though the spring morning was raw and bleak, awash in gray, Will was hot. He wiped the sweat from his brow and sat back on the plow, admiring the morning’s work. He thought his plowing skills were improving. The furrows in this field weren’t quite as wobbly looking as yesterday’s, and much better than the day before. He was faster too, which suited him, because he was pretty sure he had felt some rain sprinkles. From the looks of those clouds, he wouldn’t be surprised if a drizzle turned into a steady rain.

  For now, he needed food. He thought about what he could scrounge up in the cottage when he saw Sadie wave to him from the fence, near the water trough. He led the horses over to the water trough and let them drink their fill. Doozy was chasing imaginary birds on the other side of the fence. He worried about that dog.

  Sadie gave him a shy smile and lifted a basket. “I brought lunch.”

  “Ah! You’re an angel.”

  “Better eat it first, then decide. Dad and Fern took the baby with them to go visit Annie’s grandfather—to let him know to expect some help on Saturday. So I made lunch.”

  Will splashed his hands in the horse trough and hopped over the fence. Sadie was already setting up a picnic under a shade tree. He sprawled on the ground and let out a deep sigh.

  She handed him a sandwich. “When will your falcons become parents?”

  Will unwrapped the sandwich and took a lusty bite. How was it possible that food tasted better here? This sandwich he was eating, for example. The bread was homemade, the smoked turkey was real turkey, the lettuce was crisp, the tomato ripe. Delicious! “In about a month. Hopefully, they will be good parents too.” He glanced at her. “That’s not always the case.” Not with animals, not with people. Certainly Sadie couldn’t understand that, for she’d come from a family where warmth and belonging and love were like flour and sugar, staples in the pantry.

  She threw a crust of bread over to Doozy, who pounced on it like a cat. “God seems to give most animals a basic instinct of how to care for their young. I’ve always thought it’s another way he shows us how he loves us.”

  “Parents—” He stopped, and felt his stomach twist. “I hope God loves us more than parents do. If he does
n’t, I’m doomed.”

  “Your parents weren’t loving?” she asked tentatively.

  He emitted a bark, humorless mirth. “Not exactly.” Love, in Will’s family, had always come with strings. It was a reward for perfect behavior. It wasn’t handed out for free.

  “Some people have a hard time showing love to the ones they care the most about.”

  He gave her an odd stare. “Do you always see the world this way?”

  Sadie reached in the basket and handed him a bright green apple. “What way is that?”

  “Always looking for the good in a situation.” He took a bite of the apple and chewed. “I can’t think of too many girls who would be happy to have a baby dropped in their laps.”

  “This wasn’t just any baby. But this baby—this one is a gift to us. It connects us to Menno.” She looked up at the sky. “I think God knew my family needed this baby.”

  “Life isn’t always that way, you know. Some things just don’t work out for the best.” He took a few more bites of his apple and tossed the core away. Then he tilted the thermos to his mouth and drained it. He felt better now, much better. “The way I see it, I think it’s better not to expect too much out of life. That way, you don’t get beaten down or disappointed by people. It’s better to meet life head-on, eyes wide open, so you’re not blindsided in the end. Cut off. Left to drift in a canoe without paddles.” The last sentence tumbled with a ridiculous amount of emotion. He pressed his fingertips to his forehead and closed his eyes, embarrassed. They had drifted way too far into personal issues, and he thought he might be making an idiot of himself.

  “The Bible says that for those who love God, things will work out for the best. Like the way the baby worked out to be the best.” She glanced at him. “Don’t you believe in God’s goodness?”