by Kelly Long
The doctor replaced her chair in its proper position and helped her to sit down. Then he broke the seal on a jar of spiced apples and syrup and held the glass to her lips.
“Drink this, Miss King. It’s sweet and will revive you.”
She obeyed, letting the thin syrup slide down her dry throat. He next offered a white handkerchief that she clutched, pressing it to her lips.
“Now, no harm done—just a dreadful scare, right?”
Her hazel eyes filled with tears, and she tried to focus on answering.
The doctor straightened her head covering, waiting for her to speak.
“If you hadn’t come along . . .”
“You would have planted him a facer and he’d have slunk off like the dog he obviously is.”
She shook her head and swiped at the tears that fell now. “No, I probably wouldn’t have . . . I couldn’t think. It was Matthew Fisher . . . the Fishers, you know, from your farm.”
She met his eyes and saw that his face appeared drawn and white, though his blue-gold eyes blazed with intensity.
“I see. Obviously there are some mixed feelings there,” Dr. Williams said with a look of concern.
“I don’t know what that boy with Matthew might have done . . .”
Dr. Williams replaced the lid on the apples. “It won’t happen again, Miss King. They’re cowards and won’t be back around.”
“When Father hears of this, he won’t let me work at the stand.”
“Is that wishful thinking?” The doctor laughed. “I say your father has greater faith than that.”
Sarah had to smile at his “wishful thinking” comment. Somehow this Englischer seemed to know her thoughts so well. She lifted her chin and drew a single sniff.
“May I offer you some peanut brittle, Doctor?”
“Only if you agree to join me.”
And because he seemed so calm, she did.
A bag and a half of peanut brittle later, Dr. Williams jumped to his feet. “Hey, I nearly forgot in all that ruckus—I brought you something.”
Sarah concealed her surprise. She had never had a “something” from a man before, and certainly not from an Englisch man. She wondered what Mamm would say, then bit her lip as she realized the doctor was repeating himself.
“I’m beginning to recognize that look. Are you permitted to receive something from an Englisch friend, Miss King?”
“Ye–es,” she said, trying not to appear too excited by the wooden box he’d produced from beside the steps of the stand.
“Well, good then. I was cleaning out my office this morning and taking some things up to the attic. We’ve got a colony of bats hanging up there, incidentally.” He went on while she wrinkled her small nose. “Anyway, I found this box up there and when I opened it, well, I just thought of you . . . Here.”
He proffered the box and she took it onto her lap, letting it fill her arms. She hesitated in sliding the wooden lid open when she considered the visitors in his attic.
“No bats, I promise.”
She smiled and opened the box, then gasped in surprise and faint dismay. “They’re beautiful!” Her slender fingers pulled handfuls of colorful fabric squares into the light of day. There were cottons and silks, worsteds and flannels, layer after layer of unusual and pretty material of varying weights and colors.
She fingered an iridescent green piece of cloth and considered his words. He thought about her when he saw the fabrics? She just didn’t feel like she matched up, especially because he probably assumed that she could quilt.
“Did you know,” he queried, bending his long legs to hunch down beside her, “that the hummingbird is the tiniest bird in the world?”
“Yes.” She nodded, confused as to where he was going with the conversation.
He reached a long finger to stroke the iridescent fabric square she held. “And did you know that hummingbirds can flash their bright colors, as well as hide them when necessary?”
“Yes, I knew that. I like birds, and hummingbirds often come to the garden,” she admitted.
“Well . . .” His finger briefly whispered a touch against hers before he withdrew. “You’re like a hummingbird to me, Miss King . . . like this material here. Tiny, curious, always darting busily around and hiding your bright colors . . . except when you smile with your eyes.”
She blushed and shook her head, thrusting the shiny material beneath a stack of others.
Grant laughed. “Too worldly, right? Just think about it.”
“I can’t. It’s vain . . . almost.”
“No, it’s a compliment, given truly and without device. You can choose to accept it or not.”
She swallowed, not wanting to hurt his feelings, but not wanting to believe words of the world, words that rung with intimacy as well as friendship. She decided to put aside her indecision and awkwardly said the first thing that came to mind.
“I know that hummingbirds like to perch . . . they have weak feet.”
He looked into her eyes.
“Knowing that you are probably not being ironic, thank you, Miss King. I think you just made my day.”
She thought for a moment, then slid the lid closed on the box. “I can’t take these from you.”
“But you said that you could accept . . .”
“No,” she interrupted. “It’s not that.” She sighed. “You asked me to tell you the truth. Well, the truth is that I’m not a quilter, not like other Amish women.” She reached past his knees to pull a handful of squares out of her basket. “I’m struggling just to make a baby quilt for my sister.” She glanced at him and offered the box back.
He smiled at her. “I suppose quilting was somewhere in the back of my mind when I saw the material, but the truth is what I told you. The squares are beautiful just as they are.”
Sarah let the box rest on her lap and realized that he didn’t care whether she quilted or not. It was a liberating thought. “Thank you, then. I’ll keep them.”
“Great.” He got to his feet and started to pack the remaining peanut brittle in a basket.
“Come on. I’ll walk back with you to your father’s farm for lunch and tell him of your visitors. I don’t want him to be alarmed.”
Sarah stood, holding the wooden box of fabrics. For a few minutes, he’d made her forget all about Matthew Fisher and his friend, but now she shivered.
If the doctor noticed, he didn’t say anything; he merely slung up the basket of peanut brittle and waited until she’d gotten the money box and gone down the steps.
“By the way . . .” His deep voice made her peer up at him in the bright sunlight. “I’m buying this lot of peanut brittle. Mrs. Bustle, and don’t repeat this, can create a meal out of two sticks, but she is not a candy maker.”
“You’ll make yourself sick,” Sarah cautioned, eyeing the bags in the basket.
“I’ll take my chances.”
Sarah dreaded going into the house, knowing that her grandmother was there, but there was no help for it. She sensed the tension immediately when she walked in with Dr. Williams at her heels. Mamm smiled politely, but the corners of her mouth were tight, and Father rose from the table with a furrowed brow, while her brothers paused in eating their lunches. Aunt Ruth and Grossmudder King were in bentwood chairs by the woodstove, drinking tea, and suddenly stopped their rocking. It was one thing to have the doctor over for supper, but it was quite another to bring him unannounced into the intimacy of the family kitchen, when Father and her brothers were taking a break from the fields to eat lunch.
“Sarah, why are you home from the stand so early?” Mamm questioned.
“I had a little problem,” Sarah said lamely, sliding the wooden box of fabric squares out of sight behind the counter.
“I suggested that we walk back together,” the doctor interceded, putting down the basket of peanut brittle. “Miss King had a bit of trouble at the stand with some teenagers, and I happened to come along.”
Mamm came to Sarah’s side. “Are y
ou all right?”
“Jah, Mamm, thanks to the doctor.”
“What happened exactly?” Father asked.
“It was Matthew Fisher, Father, and an Englisch friend of his. Matthew was angry at me, at us, for his family’s leaving. He . . . they . . .” She faltered, and the doctor took up the story.
“One of the boys forcibly tried to kiss your daughter. I gave them a good shaking and a warning not to come back around.”
Father came around the end of the table and extended his hand to the doctor. “Then we must thank you, Doctor, for helping our Sarah. We must be vigilant of the Fisher boy.”
“I’m glad I could help.” Dr. Williams returned the handshake.
“Who are you anyway?” Grossmudder King inquired loudly from her chair.
“Ach,” Father said with a harried look. “You must meet my mother and my sister.”
The doctor went to shake hands while Sarah watched, wondering what her grandmother might say. She didn’t have long to wonder.
The old woman gave the doctor an unceremonious poke in the knee with her cane. “Well, you’re tall, but Sarah should have been able to use her wits to manage the boys herself. I don’t believe that a woman needs rescuing.”
“Unless it means marrying her,” Luke joked from the table and his brothers laughed.
“In that case, Luke King,” Grossmudder said with her normal tartness, “it seems that you’ll never be in the position to rescue anyone.”
Sarah threw a pleading glance at Mamm, who interceded. “Doctor, won’t you sit down to lunch with us? And Sarah, how about a cup of tea?”
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, his voice laced with humor. “I need to be going, but thank you just the same.” He nodded to the room at large and then to Sarah and made his way to the back door.
“Ach, don’t forget your peanut brittle,” Sarah called and hurried to him with the basket.
He took it from her with a smile. “Thank you, Miss King.”
She saw him out the door, then turned back to the kitchen.
Father cleared his throat. “A good man. A good neighbor to us.”
“Jah,” Samuel replied. “But we should have words with Matthew Fisher just the same.”
Father stroked his beard. “We will see, but for now we must thank Der Herr that Sarah is well and ready to go back to the stand after lunch, jah, Sarah?”
“Of course, Father.” So much for getting out of the work at the stand, Sarah thought ruefully.
“I wanted some peanut brittle,” Grossmudder King complained. “Forgot to get it this morning. Now I suppose that Englischer walked off with the lot.”
“It’s bad for your teeth, Mamm,” Aunt Ruth objected.
“When you’re eighty some years old and you want peanut brittle, Ruthie, don’t tell me that you won’t be having it! Why, the time was that I . . .”
Sarah let the diatribe flow over her head and hastily swallowed a cup of tea, then she escaped back into the sunshine and the roadside stand.
Later that night, in the cool comfort of her little bed, she thought about the peanut brittle she’d made and smiled. God used it to help a neighbor, feed an enemy, and share with a friend. She pushed aside the doctor’s complimentary words from the afternoon about the fabrics, even though the wooden box was now tucked beneath her bed. As the stray pines whispered through her open window, she drifted off to sleep beneath the patchwork quilt Mamm had pieced for her as a child and thought of the doctor’s eyes and the colorful flick of a hummingbird as it darted across a golden blue sky.
CHAPTER 5
Grant, poised with a flashlight, and Mr. Bustle stood ready on the top attic step. Seeing the bat colony hanging upside down in eerie repose was enough to give anyone the shivers, but Grant especially had problems with bats. Although he loved all animals, he’d been bitten by a bat as a young boy and had never quite gotten over his fear of them. He’d been helping to carry the groceries in at night from the back of the family’s station wagon and had gone back out alone to retrieve a candy bar he thought had fallen from the bag. He saw a shadowy lump on the backseat and grabbed for what he thought was his chocolate, instead coming up with a handful of misguided baby bat. He’d screamed louder than Mrs. Bustle, shaken the thing off, and then run, still screaming, in to his mother. It was one of the last times before her death that he could recall going to her for comfort.
All this flashed through his mind as the last rays of sunlight sank beneath the level of the small attic window, which had a distinct hole in it, large enough for an adult bat to fit through. Almost as one, the colony began to awake, and Grant doused his light, feeling his skin crawl, but once they’d stretched their wings and called in high-pitched shrieks to one another, they began a mass exodus through the hole. It took a full three minutes, and Grant estimated the colony to be in the high hundreds. When they’d gone, he looked over his shoulder at Bustle in the flash of his light and saw that his friend was pale.
“Come on, Bustle, we’ve got to get that glass replaced before they get back.”
“Yes, sir.”
Grant marched across the attic floor, ignoring the piles of bat droppings he was stepping in, and made for the window. He had the old piece of glass out and was fitting a new one when Bustle spoke.
“Sir? Did . . . the almanac mention anything about the babies?”
“The babies?” Grant edged the glass in with satisfaction. “What babies?”
“The bat babies, sir. It appears that they like your shirt.”
Grant turned in growing horror to look over his shoulder and let out a faint groan. At least twenty bat pups clung to the back of the flannel shirt he’d thrown on and seemed to be as happy as could be next to the warmth of his body.
“Give me the other glass pane back, Bustle.”
“But, sir . . .”
“We’ll get a professional, and a veterinarian is definitely not it.”
He switched the glass back so that the hole was once again present and began to ease out of the shirt. The baby bats squeaked in protest.
“Bustle?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Don’t let the cat up here . . . they’d eat him alive.” Grant joked. “And let’s not mention this whole escapade to Mrs. Bustle.”
“Quite, sir.”
Grant dropped the shirt on the floor and ran, Bustle at his heels, until he’d slammed the attic door. He took off again until he got to the shower he’d had installed the week before. He stayed there for a nice ten minutes, and that night he wore boots to bed with a long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and a hat, just for good measure.
Sarah had heated water at the stove and used the hip bath in the secluded comfort of the blanketed-off kitchen the night before, so this morning all she had to do was dress and wind her waist-length hair into its intricate coil to stay beneath her kapp. Church meetings were held every other Sunday at the home of a different family in the community, and there were enough families so that the Kings need only host several times a year. This morning the Loders were hosting, and Mamm wanted to bring fresh root beer for the after meeting meal, so Sarah hurried down to the kitchen to help. She wanted to finish in time to gather her seeds, for Father had said that Luke might take the lighter buggy to drive her to the doctor’s home after luncheon to help him with his garden.
Mamm wished her a good morning as she plunged down the narrow stone steps to the cellar where the crocks of root beer had been placed days before. Sarah had helped to funnel the cane sugar, baker’s yeast, and root beer extract along with the fresh spring water into the narrow necks of the crocks, and now she hooked a finger into each corked crock and lugged them back up to the kitchen. She’d learned that displacing the cork, even a bit, could result in an explosive outpouring of carbonation, and she had no desire to change her apron. She left Mamm to settle the jugs in a tin bath full of ice and asked if she might gather her seeds from the attic for her visit to the doctor’s.
“Jah, Sarah, but bass uff,
as du net fallscht on those attic stairs.”
“I will not fall, Mamm, danki.”
“Here.” Mamm handed her a fresh biscuit filled with spicy brown sausage. “Eat this, or you’ll feel like fainting in service.”
Sarah took the food, though her stomach was jumping with nerves. She was usually excited on church meeting days, but she was especially happy today at the thought of sharing her knowledge of gardening with the doctor.
She climbed through the familiar rabbit’s wren of staircases to the topmost attics of the old farm. A wasp droned at a small windowpane, and she pushed opened the glass to set it free as she chewed the last of her biscuit. Far below her she could see the plowed and growing fields like the furrows on Grossmudder King’s aged brow. She closed the window, though; she had no time for idle thoughts today. She turned and navigated the orderly rows of trunks, some of which held the time of the journey to America from Europe. Others, she knew, contained Mamm’s simple blue bridal dress and various knitted baby items from all of the family. And still others were filled with Amish quilts, patterns, and color squares, layered with cedar shavings to keep pests away until it was airing time.
She passed through the large main attic room and bent to slip through another narrower passage into one of the wings. Here, the light was brighter because Father had enlarged the window, but the air was very cool, being insulated by the heavy stone that formed the walls. Sarah straightened and went to the giant pigeonhole desk that looked as though it belonged in a bank and not on a farm. Sarah knew it had been her great-great-grandfather’s, who had built it up there, finding solace to do his ledgers away from his brood of thirteen children.
Father had used its many drawers to house feathers and to tie flies for fishing for a long while, but when Sarah’s accumulation of seeds had outgrown the spice cabinet downstairs, he’d officially given the desk over for her sole use to store and label seeds.
“It’s our heritage she’s preserving,” he’d admonished when one of the boys had complained. “The seeds are part of our relationship with the land, with Der Herr, and Sarah is a faithful steward. She shall have the desk as her own.”
