by Linda Byler
She would bake the lightest bread and the sweetest pies. Her garden would yield vast quantities of vegetables, enough to share with the neighbors. Like Kate’s, the wooden cradle would always hold an infant.
Hester glanced sideways at William, noticing the neat angle of his nose, the perfect jaw, the set of his mouth.
“Here, Hester, is what I will inherit.” William waved a hand in the general direction of his parents’ farm. Hester’s large eyes were round with awe.
“Of course, my father and mother will live in the doddyhaus on the same yard, but I believe, in time, my mother will come to accept you. She can teach you how to work.”
“I know how to work. I was taught first by Kate, then by Annie. I doubt very much whether your mother knows more than I do.”
“Oh, ho! The voice of inexperience, Hester! My mother is held in high esteem all through the valley. She is unequalled in just about every housekeeping skill. She makes her own ponhaus at butchering time, saying no one else’s is fit.” William laughed, a superior sound of exulting that eclipsed Hester’s happiness and her plans for the future, turning her awe of the beautiful farm to a gray hue of uncertainty. Hester fell silent after that laugh.
William told her he would not introduce her to his parents just yet, adding that it would be nice if he had a magic potion that would turn her skin white like his.
Hester smiled, but it was a mere lifting of the corners of her mouth, a small, trembling mock of gaiety.
He stopped the horse by a tumbling brook, then turned to her in the glow of the evening light beneath a canopy of green leaves that made a soft rustling sound, as if they were settling themselves for the night. Somewhere a robin set up a short, raucous bedtime call, gathering her fledglings in. He let the reins dangle at his feet after loosening the horse’s neck rein, allowing him to lower his head and pull at the thick green grass.
“Hester, I have loved you since I first saw you, so shy, so set apart among a group of girls at that wedding. I have never forgotten you. You have remained in my heart and in my mind. It is only by God’s grace that he allowed you back into my life. I know this is very soon, but I hope to marry you by November.”
“But.” Hester was completely taken aback.
William held up a hand. “No, don’t protest. I know I’m moving too fast. I love you, Hester. My love for you is a beacon of hope I carry in my heart. I want you for my wife. My mother needs to have me marry now.”
Suddenly she was caught in his arms, held against him in a viselike grip. Clumsily, his lips sought hers, then found them. Hester had never been kissed. It was so sudden, so powerful. She had no time to resist, to attempt to loosen herself from his grip.
When she thought perhaps she would suffocate after all, he released her just as suddenly. His eyes shone with a new and triumphant light as he reached for the reins.
Hester wrapped her arms around her waist as if to steady the quivering in her stomach. So this is how it was. No one had ever told her. It was bearable. There were worse things. To belong, she could endure being kissed, held in that painful grip. It was good to feel as if she belonged.
Again William turned to her. “I love you, Hester. Will you marry me?”
Hester nodded. “I will.”
Later, she remembered that she had not said she loved him. Or that he had not thanked her for accepting his offer of marriage. She did love him, she reasoned. Enough to marry him.
She spent her days without telling anyone of William’s proposal. Emma clucked and worried when she left her soft-boiled egg beside the toasted bread at breakfast, then ate every morsel after Hester went to do the washing.
Billy started back to school that week, an unhappy red face spouting many bitter words of resistance beneath his new, scratchy straw hat with a decorative red band that matched the stiff collar on his starched new shirt. His riotous red curls were cut and plastered into subjection with hard strokes of wet palms against his head. Emma’s threats to bring in a nice slab of wood from the woodpile were mere whistles above his furious little face.
Billy told Hester he was going to run away. He’d stay in the woods with the crickets and katydids like she had. Then he walked stiff-legged with fury the whole way out the lane—a grassy dent called a lane—turning right toward the schoolhouse two miles away, swinging his lunch pail angrily at a passing sparrow.
Emma chuckled and chuckled at her Billy. What a display! Like a bantam rooster, he was. Ach, du yay, she thought, shaking her head. Yes, and what good did school do for a bright boy like him? Why he made as much money down at that livery stable as some grown men. He was smart, her Billy. His brain was as quick as a whip. Oh, he’d grow into a fine man, but he needed schooling. It was the order, the discipline, that did him good.
All that week, every morning, she wet down his short red hair, packed his lunch pail with bread and butter, ham and cheese, stewed apples, and crumbly sugar-sprinkled cookies made with molasses. And every morning he stomped around like some dangerous little man, vowing to run away, making Emma chuckle and laugh, her round stomach jiggling with her efforts to restrain it.
When Emma served platters of beans with chunks of pork, roasted cabbage, and fresh mint tea, and Hester only picked at a few beans, Emma finished her third helping of roasted cabbage, wiped her mouth with the back of the tablecloth, sipped her mint tea, and turned to Hester. “Now, Hester dear, you’re going to have to tell me what’s wrong. You can’t hide it. Tell me.”
Silence hung between them, a curtain of irritation for Emma, a necessity for Hester, as she desperately searched for the courage to explain what was going on.
“I’m being married to William. In the winter. In November.” Her voice was weak and whispery, but they were words, and Emma heard each one correctly.
“But, you can’t!” she burst out immediately.
“He loves … me. He said so. He wants me for his wife.”
“Mein Gott. Oh, mein Gott. Oh, du yay, du yay.” Up went the apron over her face as she rocked from side to side. “Gook do runna, Mein Herr und Vater.” Praying aloud in German, she beseeched her heavenly father to look down on Hester.
“Why? Oh, why?” Lamenting and exclaiming, perspiration forming rivulets of moisture down the side of her wide forehead, she rocked back and forth, as if Hester’s announcement were too much for her rounded shoulders to bear.
“I told you, Emma. He loves me. He is taking me to live on his farm with his parents.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes.” Firmly the word sealed her future. Surely now she would return to the fold and be welcomed with open arms, her life full and running over with purpose and belonging.
She would be exactly like Kate. Laughing, telling stories, her children about her like jewels, each one more precious than the last. William would love her as Hans had loved Kate. She would win Frances’s love. She thought of Hans’s mother, the abrasive Rebecca, who, like a stiff brush, had hurt Kate. But, that, too, would be the price she would pay. In exchange she would experience a great and wonderful sense of belonging.
Emma remained unconvinced that Hester could ever be accepted into William’s family—and she said so. Not willing to hear Emma’s tirade of words, Hester thought back to William’s kiss. Was that how it was? She almost asked Emma, but she didn’t want to listen to more agonized wails of wrongdoing.
Perhaps the tenderness would come later, like the way Hans would slip an arm around Kate’s soft waist or whisper a word in her ear, making her face light up with happiness. No one had ever given her the slightest sense of romantic notions. Hans’s tortured eyes and touch had been swept beneath the rug of denial now, where they belonged. It was nothing. It never had been. Whatever little bit that occurred had been all her own fault.
William would be like Hans was with Kate, filling the stone house to capacity with love. You couldn’t separate love and belonging.
“Hester, you don’t have to look for a place to belong. You belong here. With
me and Billy.” Emma began to cry, real sorrow running from her eyes so nearly lost in the folds of her round face.
Billy put up an awful fuss. He said William King was all right, he guessed, but not as her husband. She didn’t need a husband as long as him and Ma were around, and besides, once he grew up, he was going to marry her. Which started Emma on another round of sorrow mixed with laughter, until her voice rose to a squeaky pitch and she became a bit hysterical, which served to turn her face into a purple color that stayed all evening.
Hester remained unmoved, stoic, steadfast. William talked to his parents and to Joel Stoltzfus, the bishop of the Lancaster County Amish congregation, who called a secret meeting with his mit dienner, and then met with John Lantz and his group of ministers, who said yes to the marriage. Hester grew up in Berks County, John confirmed, but why she suddenly ran away from her Christian home and joined the worldly people in the town of Lancaster they would never know. Hans and Annie Zug were prominent members of their district. They must be told that Hester had been found.
The leaders set about doing this, arriving late one evening at the Zug home to share this news. On the way home, Rufus Troyer told Amos Fisher that according to their beliefs, shunning Hester was right when she lived in the world—but why was Hans refusing to have anything to do with her now, when he should be wanting her to return to the fold?
Amos Fisher said likely Annie had something to do with it. What he didn’t say is how he noticed blood draining from Hans’s face. Something was a little mysterious there. Something you did not talk about.
Rufus said, yes, no wonder Noah went off to the war.
CHAPTER 12
AND SO HESTER WAS MARRIED TO WILLIAM KING ON the last Thursday in November, on Thanksgiving Day. It had snowed during the night. The ground was covered with a soft layer of pure white fluff, like manna from heaven, William said, smiling at his bride-to-be. Hester was dressed in traditional garb. Her black hair was almost completely covered with a new cap, which threw her beauty into stark relief. With her eyes downcast, her mouth so soft and vulnerable, her whole demeanor one of subjection, she fit the bill perfectly for Frances King and her plans for her son.
The stone house was filled to capacity, the benches set in long lines in rooms cleared of furniture. This was a wedding, so everything that couldn’t be sat on had to go. The preparation had been a work of many hands.
Emma Ferree threw her hands in the air and said she was having no part of this. She asked Walter Trout for a group of helpers so she could move back to her house on Mulberry Street in short order before winter came on. She did not approve of William King and let everyone within earshot hear her opinion.
She went right back to Mulberry Street and began to minister to the poor. Billy went back to the livery stable and began collecting coins in his tin box. He found a straggly little terrier he named Hester, who lived beside the fireplace on a cushion, shivering with fright for weeks after they took her in. But they never quite got over the disappointment of losing Hester the young woman to William King.
The Kings’ Amish neighbors gathered their cabbage and beans, beheaded their fat chickens, baked wedding cakes and pies and cookies, cleaned the house at Amos Speichers’, and had a wedding.
Susie Fisher, a single woman, did the sewing for Hester. She had always hoped William King would ask for her hand, but had given up on that, seeing as she had already turned thirty. She liked sell Indian maedle and wished them the best. She measured and pinned, talking all the while in rapid Pennsylvania Dutch, exclaiming about Hester’s dark hair and her skin.
Hester sat at her wedding table in the traditional corner with William’s brothers and cousins as part of the bridal party. William ate great quantities of the festive wedding food from the fine china plates he had given Hester to be used on their wedding day.
He could not take his eyes off his lovely bride, a fact that was duly noticed by his mother, a keenly observant woman, tall and spare, with the same loping ease of movement as her son. Good. That bode well for the future.
William’s five sisters had all married before him and were quite happy to finally have him married off, even if it was to an Indian. They had been afraid he’d run off with an Englisher yet.
Hester’s eyes shone with happiness—the excitement of the day, the headiness of being the center of attention. In a few months’ time she had gone from being a refugee and living in the country away from prying eyes, to becoming a young wife of a handsome, older Amish rumshpringa, a youth who was overdue for a wife.
Far into the night, the wedding guests sang old German hymns, passed food and drink, and ate with great relish. Over and over again Hester and William shook hands with friends and family, accepted their blessings, and acknowledged their kind words and good wishes. Their wedding gifts were substantial, but then, everyone knew this poor Indian girl had no wooden hope chest piled with bedding and linens, towels, and other necessary items stored away for this day, the way other Amish girls did.
Hester was taken to the stone farmhouse and made her home there. William’s parents were housed securely ins ana end, literally, “the other end,” the phrase meaning, the apartment built on for the older folks on the homestead.
So many things reminded her of her home in Berks County. The hearth for cooking, the way the washing and cleaning were done—everything she had been taught came tumbling back.
With sturdy arms, she washed the whites to a shining clean that was almost blue. Her mother-in-law’s approval rang in her ears like bells of much-needed esteem. She reveled in William’s praise of her meals as well, as she turned out succulent roast beef, fluffy mashed potatoes, crisp corn mush, and creamy porridge.
She sewed carefully and scrubbed floors with speedy precision. She was accepted by William’s family, which gave her the prestige she needed to be received well by the remainder of the congregation.
Two years went by. The wooden cradle stayed upstairs beneath the eaves, a beautifully carved work done by William’s own hand. Often Hester would climb the stairs when William was in the fields. Today the weather was dreary, the rainwater running in rivulets down the mossy oak shingles. It dripped off the edge and splattered at the base of the house, creating thin indentations in the grass, soaking the scattered brown leaves and the acorns.
Hester shivered from the chilly dampness of the upstairs. She wrapped the thin shawl around her shoulders before reaching for the cradle. She dusted it with the tips of her fingers, then rocked it gently with her right hand. She prayed in broken whispers. She pleaded for the blessing of a child. She thought of Hannah in the Old Testament at the temple, lamenting for a child until onlookers thought she was drunk. Ah, poor woman.
As Hester threw herself on the unforgiving oak boards, sobs wracked her shoulders. No one could see or hear her. No one. “Let the rain pound the shingles. Let the water slide down the side of the roof. My tears will be like the rain,” she said aloud to herself. For William and his mother and father were running out of patience. Their gaduld was wearing thin.
She often thought of Kate. If only she could have one conversation with her to ask her what had happened so that she was able to have children. Her table was filled, her heart and hands busy with the hundreds of duties of love that had brought so much enrichment to Kate’s life.
Perhaps, Hester thought, it was her fault. William loved her well, but he never understood her shrinking away, her inability to welcome his ardor. She had finally admitted to herself that his kisses were an onslaught. It was a long time before she acknowledged the warnings of Emma Ferree.
But she was William’s wife, and she loved him as best she could. She endured bravely, nodding her head in agreeable perplexity to William’s question about her inability to conceive and answering Frances King’s impertinent questions honestly.
Lying on the wooden floor, she cried until her spirit felt battered and brittle, as if it could easily break into thousands of pieces. Then she was finished. She got to her knees
, folded her hands in supplication, and asked God to bless her one last time, before pushing the wooden cradle back under the eaves and making her way slowly down to the kitchen, where she dried her eyes, washed her face, and put on a bright smile for William’s evening meal.
How she longed for him to fold her into his arms tenderly, carefully, whispering words of love and assurance. But that was not William’s way.
Hester knew he had too much to do. He needed to hire a Knecht, a youth to help with the milking and the harvest, but he felt it was money unwisely spent. He often wolfed down his supper, barely noticing what he ate.
Tonight, though, it was raining, which allowed him some free time in the barn, repairing a harness and cleaning stables, jobs that had been pushed back during the harvest. Hester had prepared a special dish, the one he favored above all the hearty meals she set on the snowy white tablecloth. Lima beans and potatoes cooked together with milk and butter and a generous douse of black pepper, thickened to a creamy consistency, served with fried chicken and applesauce.
Before every meal he washed, combed his thick black hair, and then sat down at the sturdy plank table full of Hester’s cooking. They bowed their heads. His lips moved in silent prayer. He raised his head, filled a plate, handed the dish to Hester, then served himself, usually without speaking, his thoughts on the cattle, the crops, or some other important matter. He would lower his head and shovel the food into his mouth, clearly hungry and sometimes ravenous. Hester learned to eat in silence, knowing he would talk later.
“The cake all gone?”
Hester nodded, her dark eyes lifted to his.
“You haven’t had time to make another one?”
She spooned applesauce into her mouth. Swallowed. “Yes, I had time but thought perhaps I should spin wool upstairs.”
“Upstairs? You go up there to moon about that cradle, working yourself into a frenzy about being childless. That’s what Mother says.”
Hester’s eyes were black with rebellion when she raised them to his blue, mocking, appraising eyes. Her performance fell short. Unable to fill that cradle, she left William’s quiver empty for the whole of Lancaster County to see.
