The Haven

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  Esther gave a brief nod.

  “Lord God, Esther chooses to forgive Emma for the things she did that hurt her. Now you continue, Esther. What do you want to forgive Emma for?”

  Esther took a deep, shuddering breath before she spoke. “I forgive Emma for making poor choices. I forgive her for thinking only of herself. I forgive her for breaking her vows to you.”

  “Is there anything else you need to forgive Emma for?”

  “I forgive Emma for . . . for . . . choosing Steelhead over her own mother.” The words whooshed out of Esther, as if she had been waiting to say them for years. That confession started Esther on another round of weeping, but Sadie didn’t mind so much. She had the most wonderful feeling that God was doing some housecleaning in Esther’s heart.

  “Esther, we all need to be forgiven. Each one of us. Would you like to ask God to forgive you for holding these feelings of resentment and bitterness against your daughter?”

  Esther was so ready that she didn’t wait for Sadie’s words but offered her own. “God, please forgive me for holding this bitterness toward Emma. And . . . Steelhead, for taking her away.” It was as though a long silence between Esther and God had been broken. A sense of relief came over the room as Esther wiped her eyes and nose.

  As Sadie got ready to leave, she thought that Esther hardly looked like the same person. Sadie had actually observed a calm wash over her, like an ocean wave. Her countenance had gone from austerity to softness.

  Two weeks later, Sadie saw Esther at church. Esther lowered her voice and whispered, “I stopped by the quilt shop and saw Emma.” She squeezed Sadie’s shoulder. “Of course, we’ll just keep that between ourselves.”

  Abraham found Sadie, after lunch, and thanked her for the herbal tea she had left for Esther. “Her headaches are so much better that she hasn’t needed any of her pain medication. Sadie Lapp, that tea of yours really worked.”

  “It’s always God who does the work,” Sadie said.

  Sadie had never seen anything have such a transforming power. Asking God’s help to forgive had turned a harsh woman like Esther into a kinder, gentler person. The result was amazing. Forgiveness, Sadie decided, was the best medicine of all.

  Amos had been filling the lawn mower with gasoline and spilled it on his shirt. He went to the house, gave a wave to Fern in the kitchen, and bolted up the stairs to get a fresh shirt before she smelled the gasoline on him and chewed him out for ruining a good piece of clothing. At the top of the stairs, he stopped suddenly. It was a miracle, one he hadn’t even been thinking of lately. He had walked up the stairs—upstairs!—without having to stop halfway, without gasping for air. Why, he had practically taken the steps two at a time, like a young colt!

  He changed his shirt and passed by Sadie’s room, where the baby was starting to stir in the basket. Joe-Jo was nearly outgrowing it, and they should be thinking about getting a crib soon. Amos listened to the even rhythm of the baby’s breathing. He picked him up and held him close, as close as he could. He put the baby’s tiny hand over his heart. “Do you feel that, little one? That’s your father’s heart, beating away.”

  When he turned, he saw Fern standing at the doorjamb with a soft look on her face.

  He felt a little sheepish. “At my last appointment, the doctor said that I should stop referring to it as Menno’s heart and call it mine. He said it would be better for me to think of it as mine as I take all the drugs to fool my body so it doesn’t reject it.” He kissed the baby’s downy head. “But I can’t seem to think of this heart as belonging to me.”

  “Doctors don’t know everything. He didn’t know that Menno had the biggest heart in the world.” Fern walked toward him and put a hand on the baby’s back. “I can’t think of anyone’s heart I’d rather have than Menno’s.”

  Amos watched her for a moment as she stroked the baby’s back and he thought it was a shame that Fern wasn’t a mother. Though, he quickly corrected himself, in a way, she was everybody’s mother. Someday, maybe soon, he would have to tell her how much he appreciated her. How much they all counted on her. What a difference she had made in their lives.

  Of course, she had no way of knowing what was running through his head. She turned to go. At the door, she stopped and quickly reverted to her starchy self. “Where did you hide that shirt with gasoline? It’s going to take all afternoon to get that stain out.”

  Caught red-handed! “Under the bed.”

  As he heard her hunting for the shirt in his room, he leaned his chin on the top of the baby’s head and nuzzled him close. What was it about Fern that made a person feel like he was out on a snowy night and had just turned the horse and buggy down the lane that led to home?

  Blessed. He was a blessed man.

  One morning in the middle of May, Sadie was in the kitchen getting a bottle of goat’s milk ready for the baby as Will knocked softly on the kitchen door and waved through the window. He had started a habit of popping in for a cup of coffee after he did a dawn check on the falcon couple.

  Fern opened the door for him and said, “No secret what you’re after.” She tried to sound gruff.

  Will gave Fern a kiss on her cheek. “Can you blame a man? There’s no better coffee on this green earth.”

  Fern huffed, pleased. She handed Will a mug of hot, steaming coffee with two spoonfuls of sugar already mixed in, just the way he liked it. Little by little, day by day, Sadie had watched Will win Fern over with his easy charm and smooth compliments.

  “No eyases to report yet,” Will said. “But it wouldn’t surprise me to find a chick or two has hatched any day now.” He walked over to where Sadie was sitting with the baby.

  The baby opened his eyes and blew a spit bubble. “Isn’t he wonderful?” Sadie’s voice held awe. “He hardly ever cries anymore, and I think he knows me more than anyone else.”

  “I’m counting on the first smile,” Will said, watching the baby over Sadie’s shoulder. He finished off the last sip of coffee and put the mug on the kitchen table. “I’d better get back to Adam and Eve. Since it’s Saturday, the bird-watchers will be out in full force.”

  “Don’t forget about the gathering tonight!” Sadie called.

  Will grinned and waved to her through the open window.

  “Sadie, don’t tell me you asked Will to the gathering.” Fern frowned.

  “Why not? You invited him to church and he’s come twice now. Same thing.” To be fair, Sadie knew it wasn’t the same thing. She knew Fern wanted Will at church to see how very different a world he was entering.

  “It’s not the same thing. Not at all.” She wagged a finger at Sadie. “I’ve warned you to not get sweet on him. A boy like that—he thinks he can talk any girl around to his side with a smile and flicker of his eyelashes.”

  Isn’t that exactly how he got you in his corner? Sadie wanted to ask but knew enough not to.

  Sadie couldn’t begin to explain how she felt about Will Stoltz. She couldn’t truthfully deny Fern’s assumption. A tiny piece of her was, as Fern had put it, sweet on him. How could she resist? Will had openly sought snatches of time with her, moseying by the garden when she was picking vegetables or appearing in the barn when she was preparing the horse for the buggy. She had recognized his ploys and managed to remain kind but cool in the face of his attentiveness, accepting his assistance without encouraging him to pamper her.

  Will was charming. He was also handsome and funny and unpredictable and . . . oh how he made her laugh! Of course, there was always that other complication . . . he was English.

  But if he weren’t—if there wasn’t a caution, an invisible boundary about the English that had been drilled into her as a child—Sadie would be falling head over heels in love with Will Stoltz.

  Then there was Gid. Many times now, he had come over late at night and flashed his beam up at her window, but she ignored it and didn’t go down to meet him. Compared to Will’s silver tongue, Gid was . . . solemn as an owl. Lacking passion. He had little to say
, and when he did say something, it seemed to come out all wrong.

  Life was so complicated. A few months ago, everyone would have assumed that she and Gid would end up together one day. But Sadie had never felt absolutely convinced of that. She wasn’t sure what held her back from wholeheartedly returning his affection until she had started spending time with Will. In just a month, she felt as if she knew so much about Will—little things, like the fact that he hated tuna fish but loved sardines, or the reason he wore a cowboy hat was because he thought his head had a funny shape. It didn’t. His head was beautifully shaped.

  And she knew big things about him too—there was pain in his eyes when he spoke about his father. He felt as if he couldn’t do enough to make his father proud of him. When Sadie held up her gentle and good father next to Will’s, she knew that her childhood was one long sunny spring picnic in the country compared to his.

  Her thoughts traveled to Gideon. What could she say about Gid? She cataloged everything she knew about him:

  He was almost twenty years old.

  He had red hair.

  He had a passel of older sisters who were married and raising families of their own. All but Alice. Oh, and Marty too.

  He had a widowed father.

  He was a schoolteacher.

  He suffered from hay fever every spring.

  He wore glasses.

  He liked to read.

  These were facts that everyone knew about him. Although they had grown up together, she was realizing that she hardly knew him, not really.

  Gideon Smucker spent most of Saturday afternoon washing and polishing his buggy, thinking up what he would say when he stopped by the Lapps’ to see if Sadie wanted a ride to the gathering. It had to be executed very carefully so that it would seem like a casual thing and not so he would appear to be desperate or cloying. No, never that. He didn’t want Sadie to feel smothered. Girls didn’t like to be smothered, he had heard one of his sisters say.

  More than a few times, he had gone over to Windmill Farm late at night to try to talk to Sadie. He flashed the beam of light against her window, but there was no response. Either she was sound asleep, not in her room, or most likely, she was ignoring his signal.

  She was mad at him. Steaming mad. By now, he would have thought she might have forgiven him for assuming—like many others had—that she had a child out of wedlock. Yet she seemed far more angry with him now than she had weeks ago. Was that typical of females? For anger to multiply, like yeast in dough?

  It was certainly true of Alice. She hadn’t lost a bit of her anger toward Mary Kate for the sledding accident. If anything, she did her best to try to convince Gid that Sadie’s indifference to him was a gift. A heaven-sent opportunity to avoid being permanently connected to the crazy Lapp family. “Take it and run!” Alice told him at least twice a week. But he would never do that.

  Mary Kate had given him an idea at school last week. She mentioned that the baby was growing out of his basket. He would make the baby a cradle! Sadie couldn’t stay mad at him if he gave the baby such a gift—something the baby could use every day. It would be a way to show Sadie how he felt. It was always easier for Gid to show love than to say it. Trying to put what he felt for Sadie into words was impossible. To even say it out loud—those three little words—diminished it somehow, the way a firefly lost its spark in a jar. Simple syllables couldn’t contain something as rare as what Gid felt for Sadie.

  He had spent the next few evenings in his dad’s workshop, cutting and sanding and staining, then placing pieces in a tight metal vise to let them dry, before coming back to stain and sand some more. He rubbed his hand along the narrow rails. They were like butter! When it was completed, he stood back, pleased with his work. Not a single nail was used. Every joint fit together like a glove on a hand. Ideally, he would have liked to wait one more day, for the glue to cure in the joints, but he really wanted to give the cradle to Sadie tonight.

  At four o’clock, he set the cradle carefully in the backseat of the buggy, covered it with a blanket, and went off to Windmill Farm, reviewing again what he would say and do when he saw Sadie.

  First, he would surprise her with the cradle. Then, he would offer to drive Sadie to the Kings’ for the singing. They would have time alone and he could finally explain and apologize for deeply offending her. She would forgive him and things could go back to the way they were, before she left for Berlin.

  That was the plan. Ironclad! Foolproof.

  As he drove up to Windmill Farm, M.K. flew out of the house, baby in her arms, to greet him before the buggy even reached the top of the drive. He barely hopped out of the buggy as she handed him the baby.

  “Isn’t he precious?” she asked.

  Gid looked down at the little face peering up at him. He had held his nieces and nephews and felt fairly comfortable with babies. This little one was cute, with round dark eyes and a headful of wispy hair. He held out a finger for the baby to grab. “They start out so sweet and innocent and trusting,” he said. “So full of awe at anything new, which is almost everything.” The baby was smiling at him now, really smiling. A big gummy grin.

  Mary Kate leaned over and softly said, “You got the first smile! Wait until Sadie hears this. She’s been hoping for that first smile.”

  Gid looked up at her. “Let’s not tell her, okay? Let’s wait for her to get the first smile.”

  Mary Kate was lost in admiration. She gazed at him in such a way that he blushed. He actually blushed. It wasn’t like he was a hero or anything, but that was the way she was staring at him. As if he saved someone from getting hurt by a felled tree, or as if he stopped a runaway buggy. It embarrassed him.

  “Is Sadie here?” he asked, handing the baby to M.K. He reached into the back of the buggy for the cradle.

  “She left over an hour ago with Will. She wanted to show him Blue Lake Pond.”

  He spun around. “The bird sitter? Blue Lake Pond?” All of his wonderful plans drifted away like smoke from a chimney.

  She was staring at the cradle. “Gid, did you make that?” She bent down to rub her finger against the satin finish. “It’s beautiful. It’s the most beautiful cradle I’ve ever seen.”

  He put it carefully on the ground. “Don’t use the cradle until tomorrow. Everything needs to set.”

  She looked at him as if he hung the moon. “This will definitely butter Sadie up. To think you made a cradle for our baby.”

  Gid was mortified. Was he that transparent? Now without a doubt Sadie would be convinced that he was desperate . . . Which he wasn’t! He definitely wasn’t. “Not a big deal. I was in the middle of making a cradle for my sister’s baby. When you said the baby was growing out of his basket—I just thought I’d give you this one. I can always whip up another one for my sister’s baby.” And now he was a liar. He hardly ever lied! Whenever he did, even a small one, he imagined the devil himself dancing with delight.

  She gazed at him with clear, blue-gray eyes, their directness telling him precisely what he did not want to hear—she was probably thinking the same thing. He was a liar of the worst sort.

  She sighed. “If this doesn’t convince Sadie to start talking to you again, well, then, I don’t know what will.”

  15

  Could it have been only a little more than a few weeks since Will had first met Sadie? It seemed that he had known her for years.

  He was sitting on the bank of Blue Lake Pond with Sadie, watching the water lap onto the sandy shore. The lake was quiet, still, the surface so glassy—so smooth the sun shined off it like a mirror. The water rolled out in a reflection of the sky, uneven at the edges where it touched the shores, weaving into cliffs and crevices, hiding pitch-black under the shadows of overhanging trees. At times like this, with a beautiful lake looking so calm, without another human in sight, it was hard to believe there could be anything wrong in the world.

  A whip-poor-will called in the distance, and from the tangle of branches, its mate trilled out a reply.<
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  Afterward Will couldn’t say how it had happened, but as they sat there in the peace of that moment, he started to tell Sadie things about his family that he had never told another living soul. Ordinarily, Will deflected any discussion about his family. He’d always made a point to keep his issues to himself. He wasn’t sure if it was Sadie’s low musical voice or easy, nonjudgmental manner, but it all worked together to loosen his tongue. Will was astonished to hear himself describe the last time he had seen his father—when he had told Will to pack his bags and leave the house.

  Sadie’s knees were bent and her elbows rested on top of them. “Do you think he really meant it?”

  “He meant it. In the next breath, he told me where I was expected to go—to report to the game warden in Lancaster County. It’s like . . . my dad is a barbed-wire fence—the same kind that I put up around the falcons’ scape. That’s what our relationship feels like. The only thing that holds us together is rusted, sharp, twisted.”

  Sadie drew a line in the sand with her finger. “And those barbs keep catching you?”

  “Yes. Exactly! That’s what he did with Mahlon and this internship—it’s like he caught me.”

  “Maybe his barbs are meant to hold you close, not to let you go. Maybe he just doesn’t know how to be close to you. Maybe he’s afraid he’ll lose you. Maybe barbs are all he knows. Fear makes people hold a little tighter than they should.”

  Will thought about that for a while. He couldn’t imagine that fear of losing Will could be his dad’s problem. But what if it was? He never knew anything about his father’s family. Charles Stoltz had a habit of brushing aside any questions about his childhood. His mother didn’t have much to add to the story, and she looked uncomfortable when Will pressed for more details. “I met your father when he was a resident at the hospital,” she said. “He was estranged from his parents and put himself through medical school.”