Amish Homecoming

by Jo Ann Brown

  For Leah, her homecoming was wunderbaar. Mamm had embraced her as if she never intended to let Leah go again. They had stayed up late to talk, pray and cry together. Her sole regret was her daed was away and wouldn’t be back until next week. She hoped she could mend the hurt she and Johnny had caused him and that Daed would be as welcoming as her mamm had been.

  It was never easy to tell with Daed. He kept many of his thoughts to himself, and he had never been as demonstrative as Mamm. Only Johnny, when he and Daed quarreled, had been able to break through that reserve.

  No, she did not want to think of those loud arguments that had been the reason Johnny left and refused to return to Paradise Springs. She had done everything she could to try to persuade them both to listen to the other, but she had failed, and now it was too late.

  Leah bent to pick up Shep and put him back in the buggy, but the little dog jumped out again, clearly thinking it was a game. Shep ran forward to the horse, who snorted a warning at him. The black dog was fascinated with the other animals on the farm, even the barn cats that had rewarded his curiosity with a scratch on the tip of his black nose.

  “Stay, Shep,” she said.

  The little dog obeyed with an expression she was familiar with from Mandy. An expression that said, All right, even though I don’t want to.

  Sort of how she felt trying to make conversation with Ezra Stoltzfus. The last time she’d talked to him, words had flowed nonstop from both of them. Now it felt like they were strangers. With a start, she realized that was exactly what they were. She’d changed in many ways over the past ten years; surely he had, too.

  If she needed proof, she got it when Ezra said in the same cool tone he used to greet her, “To be honest, Leah, I didn’t expect to see you in Paradise Springs ever again.”

  “I wasn’t sure I would ever get back here.” She needed a safer subject, one where she didn’t have to choose each word with care. “How are your sisters?”

  “Ruth is married.”

  “She married before I left.”

  “True. She has seven kinder now.”

  “Did she choose names for them from Old Testament books as your parents did?”

  His grin appeared and vanished so quickly she wondered if she’d truly seen it. “She decided to start with New Testament names.”

  “And how is Esther?”

  “She is at home. Mamm moved into the dawdi haus after Daed died, and our baby sister is now giving orders to the Stoltzfus brothers to pick up after themselves and help with clearing the table after meals.”

  She hesitated. Asking about his siblings was not uncomfortable, but asking him how he was and what he was doing seemed too personal. That was silly. It wasn’t as if she was going to quiz him about whether he was courting anyone. She’d never ask that. It wasn’t their way to discuss possible matches before the young couple had their plans to marry announced during a church Sunday service. Even if such matters were discussed freely, she wouldn’t ask Ezra such a private question. Not now when every nerve seemed on edge.

  “What about you, Ezra?” she asked, keeping her voice light. “I don’t see another shop here. What keeps you busy?”

  “I took over the farm.”

  “As you planned to. Have you started your cheese-making business yet?”

  His gaze darted away. Had she said too much? Or was he simply unsettled by each reminder of how differently her life had turned out from what she’d talked about while his had followed exactly the path he wanted?

  He bent to pat the head of the little dog, who had inched over to smell his boots, but Shep shied away.

  “Shep is skittish around people he doesn’t know,” she said. “He usually stayed inside except for his walks when we were in Philadelphia.”

  “Is that where you’ve been? Philadelphia? So close?”

  She nodded, picking up the dog and holding him between her and Ezra like a furry shield. She was astonished by that thought. When they were growing up, she had never felt she needed to protect herself from Ezra. They’d been open about everything they felt and thought.

  “Philadelphia is only fifty or sixty miles from here, and buses run from there to here regularly. Why haven’t you come back to Paradise Springs?” he asked, and she noticed how much deeper his voice was than when they’d last spoken. Or maybe she’d forgotten its rich baritone. “Why didn’t you come back for a visit?”

  She gave him the answer she had perfected through the years, the answer that was partly the truth but left out much of what she felt in her heart. “I wanted to wait for my brother to come back with me.”

  “Did he?” Ezra glanced around the parking lot. “Is he here?”

  Tears welled in her eyes, even though she’d been sure she had cried herself dry in recent days. “No. Johnny died two weeks ago.” She regretted blurting out the news about her brother. How could Ezra have guessed when she wasn’t wearing black? She was unsure how to explain that she had only a single plain dress until she and Mamm finished sewing a black one for her.

  Ezra’s face turned gray beneath his tan, and she recalled how Johnny and Ezra had been inseparable as small boys. That changed when they were around twelve or thirteen years old. Neither of them ever explained why, though she had pestered both of them to tell her.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  She crooked a finger for him to come away from the buggy. Even though the accident had happened shortly after Mandy was born, she didn’t want to upset the kind by having her listen to the story again. Mandy was already distressed and desperate to return to Philadelphia and the life and friends she had there, but Leah hadn’t considered—even for a second—leaving her niece behind with Mandy’s best friend’s family, who offered to take her in and rear her along with their kinder.

  Mandy and she needed each other, because they had both lost the person at the center of their lives. Now they needed to go on alone. Not completely alone because they had each other and her parents and her two older sisters and their spouses and their extended family of cousins, aunts and uncles in Paradise Springs. And God, who had listened to Leah’s prayers for the strength to live a plain life in the Englisch world.

  Leah paused out of earshot of the sleeping girl and faced Ezra. The sunlight turned his brown hair to the shade of spun caramel that made his brown eyes look even darker. How many times she had teased him about his long lashes she had secretly envied! Then his eyes had crinkled with laughter, but now when she looked into those once-familiar eyes, she saw nothing but questions.

  “Johnny was hurt in a really bad construction accident, and he never fully recovered.” She looked down at Shep, who was whining at the mention of his master’s name. The poor dog had been in mourning since her twin brother’s death, and she had no idea how to comfort him. “In fact, Shep was his service dog.” She stroked the dog’s silken head.

  “Why didn’t you come home after Johnny was hurt?”

  “He said he didn’t want to be a burden on the community.” She thought of the horrendous medical bills that had piled up and how she had struggled to pay what the insurance didn’t cover. Johnny’s friends told her that they should sue the construction company, but she had no idea how to hire an attorney. Instead, she had focused on her quilts, taking them to shops to sell them on consignment or to nearby craft fairs.

  “No one is a burden in a time of need.” Ezra frowned. “Both of you know that because you lived here when Ben Lee Chupp got his arm caught in the baler, and the doctors had to sew it back on. Everyone in our district and in his wife’s district helped raise money to pay for his expenses. We would have gladly done the same for Johnny.”

  “I know, but Johnny didn’t feel the same.” She bit her lip to keep from adding she was sure the financial obligations were not the main reason behind her brother’s refusal. He had told her once, when h
e was in a deep melancholy, that he had vowed never to return home until their daed apologized to him for what Daed had said the night Johnny decided to leave.

  That had never happened, and she had known it wouldn’t. Johnny had inherited his stubbornness from Daed.

  Ezra looked past her, and she turned to see Mandy standing behind her. Her niece was the image of Johnny, right down to the sprinkling of freckles across her apple-round cheeks. There might be something of Mandy’s mamm in her looks, but Leah didn’t remember much about the young Englisch woman who had never exchanged marriage vows with Johnny.

  Leah knew her mamm had been pleased to see her granddaughter dressed in plain clothes at breakfast, and the dark green dress and white kapp did suit Mandy. However, Leah sensed Mandy viewed the clothing as dressing up, in the same way she had enjoyed wearing costumes and pretending to be a princess when she went to her best friend Isabella’s house. Mandy seemed outwardly accepting of the abrupt changes in her life, but Leah couldn’t forget the trails of tears on her niece’s cheeks that morning.

  Motioning for Mandy to come forward, she said with a smile, “This is Amanda, Johnny’s daughter. We call her Mandy, and she is my favorite nine-year-old niece.”

  “I am your only nine-year-old niece, Aunt Leah.” Mandy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of a preteen.

  “Ja, you are, but you’re my favorite one.” She put her arm around Mandy’s shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “This is Ezra Stoltzfus. He lives on the farm on the other side of our fields.”

  “I spoke with your daed the day before yesterday,” Ezra said as he looked from Mandy to Leah, “and he didn’t say anything about you coming to visit.”

  “Coming home,” Leah corrected in little more than a whisper.

  “I see. Then I guess I should say welcome home, Leah.” He didn’t add anything else as he strode away.

  She stood where she was and watched him go into his brother’s buggy shop. When he did not look back, she sighed. She might have come home, but her journey back to the life she once had taken for granted had only begun.

  Chapter Two

  Ezra walked between the two rows of cows on the lower level of the white barn. He checked the ones being milked. The sound of the diesel generator from the small lean-to beyond the main barn rumbled through the concrete floor beneath his feet. It ran the refrigeration unit on the bulk tank where the milk was kept until it could be picked up by a trucker from the local processing plant.

  He drew in a deep breath of the comforting scents of hay and grain and the cows. For most of his life, the place he’d felt most at ease was the bank barn. The upper floor was on the same level as the house and served as a haymow and a place to store the field equipment. On the lower level that opened out into the fields were the milking parlor and more storage.

  He enjoyed working with the animals and watching calves grow to heifers before having calves of their own. He kept the best milkers and sold the rest so he could buy more Brown Swiss cows to replace the black-and-white Holsteins his daed had preferred. The gray-brown Swiss breed was particularly docile and well-known for producing milk with the perfect amount of cream for making cheese.

  He hoped, by late summer, to be able to set aside enough milk to begin making cheese to sell. That was when the milk was at its sweetest and creamiest. He might have some soft cheese ready to be served during the wedding season in November or December if one of his bachelor brothers decided to get married.

  He squatted and removed the suction milking can from a cow. He patted her back before carrying the heavy can to the bulk tank. She never paused in eating from the serving of grain he’d measured out for her. Opening the can, he emptied the milk into the tank. He closed both up and hooked the milking can to the next cow after cleaning her udder, a process he repeated thirty-one times twice a day.

  Usually he used the time to pray and to map out what tasks he needed to do either that day or the next. Tonight, his thoughts were in a commotion, flitting about like a flock of frightened birds flying up from a meadow. He had not been able to rein them in since his remarkable conversation with Leah.

  Johnny was dead. He found that unbelievable. Leah had come back and brought Johnny’s kind with her. Even more unbelievable, though he had hoped for many years she would return to Paradise Springs.

  Her mamm must be thrilled to have her and her niece home and devastated by Johnny’s death. How would Abram react? The old man had not spoken his twins’ names after they left. But Abram kept a lot to himself, and Ezra always wondered if Abram missed Leah and Johnny as much as the rest of his family did.

  If his neighbor did not welcome his daughter and granddaughter home, would Leah leave again and, this time, never come back?

  “Think of something else,” he muttered to himself as he continued the familiarly comforting process of milking.

  “If you’re talking to the cows, you’re not going to get an answer,” came his brother Isaiah’s voice.

  Ezra stood. Isaiah was less than a year younger than he was, and they were the closest among the seven Stoltzfus brothers. Isaiah had married Rose Mast the last week of December. He had been trying to grow his pale blond beard since then, but it remained patchy and uneven.

  “If I got an answer,” he said, leaning his arms on the cow’s broad back, “I would need my head examined.”

  “That might not be a bad idea under the circumstances.”

  “Circumstances?”

  Isaiah chuckled tersely. “Don’t play dumb with me. I know Leah Beiler’s reappearance in Paradise Springs must be throwing you for a loop. You two were really cozy before she left.”

  “We were friends. We’d been friends for years.” Friends who shared one perfect kiss one perfect night. He wasn’t about to mention that to his brother.

  Isaiah was already worried about him. Ezra could tell from the dullness in his brother’s eyes. Most of the time, they had a brightness that flickered in them like the freshly stirred coals in his smithy.

  “Watch yourself,” Isaiah said, as always the most cautious one in their family. “She jumped the fence once with her brother. Who knows? She may decide to do so again.”

  “I realize that.”

  “Gut.”

  “Gut,” Ezra agreed, even though it was the last word he would have used to describe the situation.

  His brother was right. When a young person left—jumped the fence, as it was called—they might return...for a while. Few were baptized into their faith, and most of them eventually drifted away again after realizing they no longer felt as if they belonged with their family and onetime friends.

  While he finished the milking with Isaiah’s help, they talked about when the crops should go in, early enough to get a second harvest but not so early the plants would be killed in a late frost. They talked about a new commission Isaiah had gotten at his smithy from an Englisch designer for a circular staircase. They talked about who might be chosen to become their next minister.

  They talked about everything except the Beiler twins.

  Ezra thanked his brother for his help as they turned the herd into the field as they always did after milking once spring arrived. Letting the cows graze in the pasture until nights got cold again instead of feeding them in the barn saved time and hay. When he followed Isaiah out of the barn and bade his brother a gut night, low clouds warned it would rain soon. The rest of his brothers were getting cleaned up at the outdoor pump before heading in for supper. Again, as they chatted about their day, everyone was careful not to talk about the Beilers, though he saw their curious looks in his direction.

  As he washed his hands in the cold water, he couldn’t keep himself from glancing across the fields to where the Beilers’ house glowed with soft light in the thickening twilight. He jerked his gaze away. He should duck his head under the icy water and try t
o wash thoughts of Leah out of his brain.

  Hadn’t he learned anything in the past ten years? Did he want to endure that grief and uncertainty again? No! Well, there was his answer. He needed to stop thinking about her.

  The kitchen was busy as it was every night, but even more so tonight because Joshua and his three kinder were joining them for supper. Most nights they did. Sometimes, Joshua cooked at his house down the road, or his young daughter attempted to prepare a meal.

  With the ease of a lifetime of habit, the family gathered at the table. Joshua, as the oldest son, sat where Daed once did while Mamm sat at the foot of the table, close to the stove. The rest of them chose the seats they’d used their whole lives, and Joshua’s younger son, Levi, claimed the chair across from Ezra, the chair where Isaiah had sat before he got married. Esther put two more baskets of rolls on the table, then took her seat next to Mamm. When Joshua bowed his head for silent prayer, the rest of them did as well.

  Ezra knew he should be thanking God for the food in front of him, but all he could think of was his conversation with Leah and how he was going to have to get used to having her living across the fields again. He added a few hasty words of gratitude to his wandering prayer when Joshua cleared his throat to let them know grace was completed.

  Bowls of potatoes and vegetables were passed around along with the platters of chicken and the baskets of rolls. Lost in his thoughts, Ezra didn’t pay much attention to anything until he heard Joshua say, “Johnny Beiler is dead.”

  “Oh,” Mamm said with a sigh, “I prayed that poor boy would come to his senses and return to Paradise Springs. What about Leah?”

  Amos lowered his fork to his plate. “She came into the market today and asked if I would be willing to display some of her quilts for sale.”