A Plain and Sweet Christmas Romance Collection

by Lauralee Bliss

  Chapter 10

  The next morning Martin mucked out the stables, looking startled when Viktor entered the barn. “I told Dad you’d be back chorin’ this morning.” The lad stopped in his tracks. His mouth gaped. “What happened to you?”

  “Nothing much. Met up with something bigger than me.”

  “Huh?”

  Martin tried to dismiss his injuries, though he was aware that his jaw was swollen and one eye was turning shades of blue. “Guess the animals couldn’t wait? I’m sorry our business in the village took longer than we’d hoped.”

  Viktor’s jaw clenched. “I could handle it alone if Dad would give me a chance.”

  “But school will soon be starting.”

  “You sound just like him.”

  “So you did all the chores yourself last night?” Martin fished.

  “Nope.” The boy seemed frustrated. “Hanna helped me.”

  Martin cringed.

  “Then she had to stay up late, preparing special things for today.” Viktor’s gaze softened. “She’s already busy helping Mom cook up a real Christmas meal. We’re having roasted duck and Cherry Moos.” Martin’s mouth watered, especially over the dessert dumplings. Viktor’s burst of enthusiasm waned, and he lowered his head and toed the ground. “She said it would be your last meal with us, the train leaving tomorrow an’ all.”

  “You’re right about the train.” Martin wished he could confide in Viktor with his real plans, but it was too early. Yet while he had the lad’s ear, it wouldn’t hurt to ask a few questions. “The blacksmith showed up yesterday morning, didn’t he?”

  “Oh jah. Dad was real excited about that. He asked him if he could court Hanna, and of course, Dad gave his permission. Dad and him are real thick. When I helped Kir chore, he was grinning and singing. He’s got a terrible voice. He’s got it bad for Hanna. He even made her some kind of ice sculpture flower bouquet. Then there was some kind of—” But Viktor didn’t get to finish because he heard his mother calling his name. “Gotta go. Oh! When you get done, come to the house early. Dad’s gonna read the Christmas story, and Yury says you owe them a marble game.”

  As soon as the lad disappeared, Martin pitched his pitchfork in the straw and hurried over to Filipp, who was brushing one of the horses in a nearby stall. “Did you hear that?”

  “Jah, marbles. Sounds fun.”

  Clenching his fist and wanting to hit the nearest stall post, he snapped, “You know what I mean.”

  “Calm down.”

  “No wonder Kir was so riled last night. Do you think he came to some kind of understanding with Hanna?” He started to pace the floor. “She really encouraged him when we went to the smithy together. I thought she was doing it to get even with me because she thought I was making plans to leave. But maybe I was just a distraction and she’s been inclined toward him all along.” He let out a long sigh and hung his head. “I’m too late. It’s good we didn’t put our money down on the property yet.”

  “Martin.” Feeling his brother’s grip on his shoulder, he looked up. “All’s not lost yet. You’ll get your opportunity to present your case today. Then it’s up to Hanna to decide.”

  “And her dad.”

  “He doesn’t know your intentions. He only knows Kir’s. Let’s get the chores done so you can spruce up before the meal. Use the time to think about what you’ll say to Hanna and her dad.”

  Martin nodded, but he was feeling jittery inside. “Better pray for me.”

  Filipp laughed. “I have been, brother.”

  “It isn’t funny.”

  Shrugging, Filipp replied, “It is from my view. Glad I’m participating from the spectator’s seat. I just never thought you’d beat me to the altar. It’s humbling.”

  Martin shook his head. “Just keep prayin’.”

  “I will, but you gotta do your part, too.”

  Martin took off his hat and slapped it against a stall wall then raked his hands through his hair. “And what’s that?”

  “Gotta have faith. You know what Mom always says. Faith is being sure of what we hope for and what we don’t see. That without faith we can’t please God, but we must believe He exists and rewards those who earnestly seek Him. That He wants to give us good gifts. I think Hanna is one of those good gifts.”

  Martin nodded, remembering how their mom often referred to the book of Hebrews in the New Testament as it was one of her favorites. “I’ll try.” Thinking of his mom helped. She’d like Hanna, and if she knew what was transpiring, she’d be supporting him.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Early afternoon, Martin and Filipp headed to the main house. Martin hoped he’d get a chance to talk to Dmitri first, but everyone was already congregated in the main room sitting around the hearth. When he and Filipp stepped inside, they were accosted with delicious smells. Yury ran up to them. “Come play with us?”

  “Sure,” Filipp replied. “Just let us hang up our hats and coats.”

  “Boys, give them room to breathe,” Sonya laughed.

  But Stefan looked up at Martin. “What happened to your face? The cow kick you?”

  He wished. He felt everyone’s gaze and saw Hanna’s eyes widen. “That story can wait a bit. When the timing’s right.”

  Stefan shrugged. “All right. Must be a good one.”

  Hanna hopped up and served them eggnog.

  As the boys led them to the center of the room, Filipp made their apologies. “I’m sorry we missed last night’s chores. We got held up in the village.”

  “Must’ve been a misunderstanding,” Dmitri remarked. “Usually Kir keeps good to his word. I expected him to take care of it. But he must’ve had work at the smithy.”

  “I sent him home,” Hanna said, blushing slightly.

  “You did?” Martin blurted. Hanna nodded, and it gave him hope that all was not lost. He stole a quick glance at Filipp and saw his subtle nod. “About that, I’d like to tell you about our trip to the village.”

  “Is it about your face?” Yury asked.

  “Partly.”

  “Can it wait till after marbles?”

  “Yury!” Sonya said. “Let go of Martin’s clothes and let him finish his story.” Reluctantly, Yury sank to the floor beside his brother. “Please have a seat Martin.” She motioned to a chair beside Filipp.

  “Thanks, but I need to stand for this.” He set his eggnog on the table and took a few strides toward Dmitri. “Since we’ve been in Mountain Lake, everyone’s been accommodating.” He touched his jaw and gave a sheepish smile. “Well, most everyone, and we see the way the community comes together in a crisis. Your village is exactly what our father sent us out to find. What I’m trying to say is we don’t think we need to go all the way to Canada. Yesterday Filipp and I spent the day with the land agent and found a couple parcels that suit our needs.”

  He glanced at Hanna, who was seated, eyes wide and wondrous, hands wringing in her lap. At his sudden declaration, her cheeks had reddened significantly. “You’re staying?”

  “Under one condition.” He turned back to Dmitri. “If you’ll let me court Hanna.”

  “Bah!” Dmitri’s face turned red as his daughter’s. “You’re too late. The blacksmith aims to court her.”

  Hanna jumped to her feet. “No he doesn’t. I sent him away. I turned him down.”

  Sweat trickled down the back of Martin’s neck. Now he really understood why the blacksmith had tackled and threatened him. “Mr. Friesen, my family and I are coming here as immigrants without much to our name except the land we will buy. But I intend to get some land right away, too. I’m not sure how soon I’ll be able to work it, but I want you to know I love your daughter and will do my best to take care of her. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’m just asking if I can court her.”

  Dmitri’s face twisted in a scowl. “How can you say you love her when you’ve only just arrived? We hardly know anything about you or your family.”

  “Dmitri, he’s only asking to court her,” Sonya reas
oned.

  “Humph.” Dmitri tilted his head, scrutinizing Martin. “So what happened to your face? Was it Kir?”

  “Jah. That’s the short of it.”

  The older man’s expression remained stoic. “You know we don’t believe in violence or fighting. It’s not our way.”

  “Tell that to Kir.”

  Slowly Dmitri’s scowl softened until his face creased in a smile. “Don’t know why I’m so slow to know what’s goin’ on right under my nose. What have you to say about the matter, Hanna?”

  She crossed the room and gave her dad a hug. “Jah. I love Martin, too.”

  “Yuck.” Yury made a face. “Now can we play marbles?”

  Martin raised a brow, waiting for Dmitri’s answer.

  “I give my consent. We can talk about your plans later. One game, and then we’re doing the Christmas story.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Everything changed so rapidly, Hanna felt as though she’d been swept up into a wonderful dream. As delightful as it was, she longed for time alone with Martin. To hear words of the affirmation of his love again. When after the Christmas meal he rose from the table with intentions of looking after the animals, she grabbed her shawl and hurried after him, ignoring the family’s grins.

  They stood together on the porch, and he encased her gloved hands between his own as if he cherished her. His eyes, so filled with untold promises, pleaded for her understanding. “I wanted to tell you the day we took the peppernuts to the village, but Filipp asked me to wait. He wanted to look at land prices before I raised your hopes. Then this morning, I thought I’d lost you to Kir.”

  “Never.”

  He raised her hands to his lips then lowered them with a grin. “What I really need to know…Does Mountain Lake have more than one smithy?”

  She laughed. “No, but he’ll come around. He’s just a bit of a hothead.”

  “You were right from the beginning, when you said God was showing us His favor by stranding us in a Russian Mennonite village. And I must add, sending us to your particular soddy. It just took me awhile to realize that the best-laid plans can be changed.”

  “Have you told your dad?”

  “Not yet. But Filipp thinks it was the right thing to do, too. God’s will.” He glanced toward the soddy. “The family won’t come until spring. Guess we should move to the Immigration House.”

  “Stay at the soddy as long as you like. It would be pointless to live at the Immigration House and come here to chore every day. Dad’ll come around as long as you mind your manners.”

  “I will. We’ll take it slow and get to know each other, though it will be hard to do.” He glanced up at a row of icicles that edged the roof. “I can’t make ice sculptures or do many things right. I’ll probably bumble my way along for a while. But I promise, I’m yours and I want to make you happy.”

  She touched his cheek. “You’re God’s gift. The answer to my Christmas prayer.”

  “Jah, I guess I am.”

  She tugged his sleeve. “Don’t look so smug about it.”

  He pulled her close. “You’d better get used to this look. This is the look of a man in love.”

  Peppernut Cookies (Pfeffernüsse)

  Recipe by Elizabeth Warkentin, Mountain Lake, Minnesota. From Mennonite Community Cookbook, by Mary Emma Showalter (Herald Press, 1978).

  ⅓ cup shortening

  1 cup sugar

  1 cup sweet cream

  1 teaspoon peppermint extract

  6 cups flour (approximately)

  3 teaspoons baking powder

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 cup milk

  Cream shortening and sugar together. Add flavoring and sweet cream; beat until fluffy. Sift flour, add baking powder and salt, and sift again. To creamed mixture, add sifted dry ingredients alternately with milk. Beat until a medium-soft, smooth dough is formed. Chill dough in refrigerator for several hours.

  When thoroughly chilled, divide dough into 5 or 6 parts. Remove one portion from fridge at a time and turn out on lightly floured board. Cut off small portions and form into fingerlike sticks, rolling with the flat part of the hand. Lay sticks in parallel rows and cut across, making pieces the size of a small marble. Place pieces close together on a greased baking sheet. Bake at 425 degrees until they begin to turn a light, golden brown.

  These are popular at Christmastime in many Mennonite homes.

  Dianne Christner lives in New River, Arizona, where life sizzles in the summer when temperatures soar above 100 degrees as she writes from her air-conditioned home office. She enjoys the desert life, where her home is nestled in the mountains and she can watch quail and the occasional deer, bobcat, or roadrunner.

  Dianne was raised Mennonite and works hard to bring authenticity to Mennonite fiction. She now worships at a community church. She’s written over a dozen novels, most of which are historical fiction. She gets caught up in research having to set her alarm to remember to switch the laundry or start dinner. But her husband of forty-plus years is a good sport. They have two married children, Mike and Rachel, and five grandchildren, Makaila, Elijah, Vanson, Ethan, and Chloe.

  She welcomes you to visit her website at www.diannechristner.net.

  Treasure of the Heart

  by Melanie Dobson

  Behold the work of the old. Let your heritage not be lost, but bequeath it as a memory, treasure, and blessing.

  CHRISTIAN METZ, AMANA SOCIETY LEADER AND PIONEER, 1846

  Chapter 1

  Amana, Iowa

  December 1907

  Home.

  The simple word, laden with sweet memories, slipped into Sophie Keller’s mind as their black carriage rolled into the village of Amana. Meredith—her thirteen-year-old daughter—didn’t look up from the book in her lap, but Sophie’s tense shoulders began to relax as she scanned the row of sandstone and brick homes beside them, wood smoke curling out of their chimneys and up into the pristine blue sky.

  She’d been longing to visit the Amana Colonies for years, but Conrad had been too busy with his law practice in Des Moines to return. And she—she’d just been busy.

  At the moment, she couldn’t remember exactly what had kept her so occupied. Some days she felt like one of those cyclones that touched down on Iowa’s plains each spring. She would whirl through her daily tasks in the city, her head and hands in constant motion, but she really wasn’t doing anything to help others. Not like she had done as a young woman working in these colonies.

  The scenery here hadn’t changed much since she and Conrad left thirteen years ago, but the people had. Both her mother and Conrad’s father, an elder in the Amanas, went home to be with the Lord before the end of the century. Hilga, Conrad’s mother, followed her husband into glory two years later, and then Conrad—

  Meredith didn’t remember coming to the Amana Colonies as a child, nor did she remember her grandfather, Niklas Keller, or even Sophie’s mother. She did remember Conrad’s mother because Hilga had taken the train to Des Moines twice for a visit. With every visit, Hilga had brought a little taste of the Amanas with her in the form of pastries and wheat beer.

  Now Sophie wasn’t just coming home. She was running away from the busyness of the city to contemplate John Hoffman’s proposal in peace. By the new year, she had to sort out whether or not she would become the senator’s wife.

  A canal flowed beside the village, the water powering the woolen mill on the east side. Snow dusted the roofs of the houses and shops, clung to the white clapboard fencing around each lawn. The white garland reminded her of childhood Christmases gone by when she’d stood at the window of her family’s rooms, her nose pressed against the glass pane as she’d looked out at the lofty Glockenhaus and the dairy cows tromping through the white-laced field, grazing the remaining brown cornstalks before the deep winter snow buried them all.

  The cows were grazing today at the outskirts of town, just like they had been doing when she and Conrad left in 1894. Women bustled in and out of the k
itchen houses as they prepared their midday dinner meal for the Amana community. Men drove wagons along the cobblestone road, canvas tarpaulins covering the goods they transported to and from the woolen mill.

  “It’s just like I remembered,” Sophie whispered.

  Meredith glanced up. “I don’t remember it at all.”

  “The last time we were here you were two.”

  Meredith squinted out the window, watching the women with their heavy shawls wrapped tightly around the shoulders of their plain calico dresses. Each woman’s long hair was parted in the middle and pulled back into a neat bun. “Why are they dressed funny?”

  “They don’t think it’s funny here,” she tried to explain. “Just practical.”

  Meredith’s silky black hair was plaited in one braid with a copper-colored silk bow tied on the end. Her long braid rested on the back of her traveling dress, the wool material trimmed with black on the sleeves, collar, and ruffled hem.

  As Meredith’s gaze returned to the pictures in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Sophie leaned her head back against the leather seat. Her daughter had been looking at the same image of Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion for the past hour.

  Their carriage journey from Des Moines had taken more than two days, and Meredith spent most of their trip sitting rigidly on the opposite seat, her arms crossed as she looked at this book. She’d wanted to ride the train to the Amanas, but Sophie refused to ever get on a train again.

  Sophie reached out to take her daughter’s gloved hand. “You’re going to like it here.”

  Meredith pulled her hand away. “I want to go home.”

  Her heart twisted. What was once home to her was a strange land to her daughter. Home for her daughter was the lofty house high up on Sherman Hill in Des Moines.