A Plain and Sweet Christmas Romance Collection

by Lauralee Bliss

  Glory smiled at Lyddie and took the letter. Growing up in the same church district, she had known Marlin’s family all her life. But they were not her family, and her mother’s letters were a lifeline to all that made her feel certain of herself.

  Lyddie lurked.

  “Thank you,” Glory said. She did not dare open the letter, or Lyddie would be looking over her shoulder. Instead, she tucked it under her cloak, savoring a moment of warmth for her fingers as well. “Are you working in the henhouse today?”

  Lyddie glanced toward the structure, where the usual after-school chores awaited the fourteen-year-old. “I guess so.”

  Gloria waited another minute, watching Lyddie scuffle toward the henhouse, before she loosened the envelope’s flap and slipped out the single half sheet of white paper. Although her mother’s handwriting always looked as if she was in too much of a rush to let the point of the pen do more than scratch across the paper in light, angular strokes, each letter swirled the fragrance of love.

  Gloria blinked, focused on the date—today, December 21, 1910—and read the brief lines again.

  There was no encouraging phrase from the Bible, no sweet memory of her mother’s own newlywed days, no chitchat of familiar household routines.

  “We have decided we must move,” the letter said. “Your brother will look after the farm and take in the animals since we do not know when we will return. We were to see you on Old Christmas, but that seems impossible now. I am sorry not to be able to kiss your cheek before we go, but your Aenti Beth is failing quickly. I fear she is not long for this world, and someone will have to look after her little ones. Perhaps we will return by the spring planting or know by then what the call is on our future. Pray for Gottes wille. Daed is already waiting in the buggy for me to catch the first train. Curly Jake promised he would get this letter to you. Love from your mamm.”

  Her parents were gone. They were not fifteen miles away across the Lancaster district, where she would see them at church services and spend all of Old Christmas with them on January 6, when her brothers and sisters—all older and married—would gather on the family farm. They were hours away on a hurtling train.

  Gone. Her parents were gone.

  Glory spun, trying to think where Marlin had said he would be.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “It is not a competition.” Marlin winked at his three brothers. “Making putz should help us worship the Christ child.”

  Leroy and Josef, his older brothers, scoffed immediately. John, younger and the only unmarried brother, shook his head in disbelief.

  “Your mouth says the right words,” Leroy said, “but your eyes have something else in them.”

  Marlin paced across Josef’s small barn. God willing, a year from now he would be in his own barn tending the animals he and Glory would use to begin their own stock.

  “We have only three days until Christmas Eve,” Marlin said. “We all have work to do. There is no time for competitiveness.”

  “But you will work on something new,” Josef said. “You do not have a newborn keeping you up half the night.”

  “You do not have to make something new,” Marlin said, patting the rump of one cow. Leroy had already promised Marlin this cow’s spring calf. “Daed will want me to use some of his pieces in the Nativity.”

  “So you claim the Nativity?” John said. “I am the unmarried son. I should do the Nativity while you start a tradition with Glory.”

  “Now who is being competitive?” Marlin grinned. “If you want the Nativity, you shall have it. I will do the Angels.”

  “That leaves the Annunciation and the Shepherds.” Josef glanced at Leroy. “Your choice.”

  “Joannah will want me to do the Shepherds,” Josef said.

  “Sadie likes news of a woman with child,” Leroy said, “so the Annunciation will suit her. Everyone please remember that we are not trying to win a prize. It is a family tradition for all to share, not an opportunity to make ourselves stand out.”

  “That is just what I would expect the oldest brother to say,” Marlin said.

  “Do you disagree?”

  “Of course not. But the Bible tells us to do everything as unto the Lord, and does that not mean that we should offer Him our best effort?”

  John kicked up straw. “This is the first year that you do not want to work together with me.”

  “I am married now,” Marlin said. “This will be my last Christmas living with Mamm and Daed.”

  “You are only a year older than I am,” John said. “I will be gone soon as well.”

  Leroy planted his pitchfork in a bale of hay. “Are you making an announcement of your own, John?”

  The youngest brother blushed and turned to the wall of tack.

  “I suggest you enlist Marianne and Lyddie,” Marlin said. “They both like to make putz.”

  “You mean they are both as competitive as you are,” John muttered, his face still toward the wall.

  “It is not a competition,” Marlin repeated.

  Again, his brothers laughed with little effort to mitigate their response.

  The barn door opened, heralding a blast of December air. Marlin looked up.

  “Glory! What are you doing here?”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Glory flinched as she shoved the barn door closed behind her. She had not traversed three-and-a-half miles over the crunch of six inches of frozen snow in search of her husband only to be greeted with surprise that superseded welcome. The temperature inside Leroy’s barn was above the twenty degrees outside, though perhaps not by much. The brothers were supposed to be working on insulating the structure more efficiently, but it seemed to Gloria that the gathering had been more ruse for the Grabill boys to spend the afternoon together.

  She shivered under her cloak and moved closer to the cow sharing its warmth with Marlin, probing his face for signs of his attention. While he touched her elbow, his eyes panned between his brothers.

  “We were about to start work on filling in the cracks,” Leroy said.

  One corner of Glory’s mouth twitched. The Grabill brothers were notorious for procrastination when they were together, but at least they had a conscience. They would eventually rope in a sense of purpose and accomplish the necessary work.

  “Your husband is determined to make the best putz in the entire church district,” Josef said.

  “All of Lancaster County,” John said.

  “All of Pennsylvania,” Leroy said.

  Marlin waved them all off. “Ummieglich. You are an impossible bunch.”

  “Does your family make putz?” John asked.

  “We never have,” Glory said. “We sometimes rode to neighbor farms to see what families had done, but we never made our own.” Her parents were a well-matched quiet pair, sincere in their faith and loving in their sacrificial ways. But other than a few homemade gifts that came out of hiding on Christmas morning, the season changed little of the family’s routine. Certainly her brothers would not have isolated themselves in a barn where they seemed to be doing nothing.

  “You are a Grabill now,” Leroy said. “You will have to learn our ways, because your husband does not let go of tradition easily.”

  Josef laughed. “That is a well-spoken way of saying Marlin likes to be the best.”

  “Demut,” Marlin said. Humility.

  Gloria had never known Marlin to be proud or self-centered in ambition. But she had never spent a holiday with him, never seen him in his own family as she had over the last seven weeks. Moving in with the groom’s family was common for the first year of marriage, or visiting a few weeks at a time among other family and relatives while the new couple readied themselves for their own farm. Glory had always known this, yet living this tradition brought surprises every day—not all of them welcome.

  “We should get to work,” Leroy said. “If we do not make some progress, Sadie will give me a peculiar look over supper.”

  The brothers laughed. Marlin pecked Glory’s c
heek. “Thanks for coming to say hello.”

  Glory kept her voice low. “Could we talk for a moment?”

  Chapter 2

  Marlin did not often hear this tone from his bright, compassionate bride.

  “Maybe outside,” Glory said.

  Marlin glanced past his brothers to the door and nodded.

  “I will just be a minute,” he said as he led the way outside.

  Outside, frigid air bit his cheeks, and for the first time he saw the chapped redness his wife’s journey had inflicted on her face.

  “Why did you not come in a buggy?” he asked.

  “You had ours,” she said simply, the warmth of her breath hovering before dissipating as if it had never been.

  “But we have plenty of buggies on the farm,” Marlin said.

  “I did not want to presume.”

  “It is no presumption, Glory. You are part of the family. You can use a buggy if one is available.”

  “Maybe next time.” She shivered.

  “It is freezing out here.” Given the distance, Glory must have already spent close to ninety minutes in the piercing cold. “Did you tell anyone you were coming?”

  “I just said I wanted some fresh air,” Glory said.

  If she had stumbled or been injured, would anyone have known to look for her? Or would he have found her heaped on frozen ground on his way home? Marlin choked on the image in his mind.

  “I had a letter from my mamm,” she said.

  Marlin fixed his eyes on her. Letters from her mother cheered Gloria, but she looked far from pleased now. She had not ventured all this way to tell him of her mother’s latest advice.

  “What is it?” he said.

  Her features rolled in distress. “They’ve gone away.”

  “For Christmas?”

  “Probably a long time. At least until spring but perhaps much longer.”

  Marlin tilted his head to listen as Gloria read her mother’s letter aloud.

  “The English doctors said Aenti Beth has cancer,” Gloria said. “But I did not know she might go so quickly. They live all the way in Holmes County, Ohio. Her husband’s parents are gone. He will need help for a long time.”

  “Perhaps he will just need time to sort things out,” Marlin said. “Your parents will be back before you know it, and your mamm will keep sending letters.”

  “It is not the same.”

  Marlin took Gloria’s hands. “Where are your gloves?”

  “I forgot them.”

  He blew warm air on her fingers and put his own oversize gloves on her hands. “You are not alone. Your brother is just a few farms over, and I am here. My whole family is here. You are a Grabill now, and Grabills are never alone.”

  “If only God had granted us Old Christmas together before this happened.” Gloria looked down at Marlin’s fingers wrapped around hers.

  “God’s timing is best,” he said.

  The barn door opened. John stood in the opening.

  “Are you two conniving on the putz?”

  “I must take Gloria home,” Marlin said.

  She shook her head. “I will walk.”

  “At least take the buggy,” he said. “You have been out in the cold too long already.”

  “I have two cloaks on.”

  “Please take the buggy. John and I can walk, or Leroy can drive us.”

  Marlin paced off to hitch the team.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Every night at supper in the Grabill home, Glory wondered how the family generated as much sound as it did. Leroy and Josef were on their own farms with their wives and babies. But there were still six Grabills—parents David and Magdalena and their children Marlin, John, Marianne, and Lyddie. Although Glory was a seventh person in the home, she did not make up one-seventh of the noise at suppertime.

  Most of the Amish families Glory knew were efficient about preparing a simple evening meal at the end of a long day of labor, and they ate in subdued gratitude. Her own family had been this way, even when all her older siblings lived at home. For a fleeting moment, Glory wondered whether her parents had waited for her to be married before moving away. If she had not married Marlin a few weeks ago, would they still be on the family farm fifteen miles away having a quiet supper and praying for Aenti Beth’s family from a distance?

  But she had married Marlin, and her mealtimes—at least for the first year of her marriage—were wholly unfamiliar. The sisters teased each other during food preparation, their mother’s amused voice cackled above the din, and the men’s voices boomed in analysis of what had been accomplished during the day and what must be done tomorrow.

  Glory did not fit.

  “You are a Grabill now, and Grabills are never alone,” Marlin had said that afternoon. No doubt he meant it as encouragement, but to Gloria it was a descriptive statement of her new life—but not entirely accurate. Her last name was Grabill, and there were always people around. Yet she felt alone.

  She passed the bread basket to Marlin before he asked for it. At least one person at the supper table was someone she knew well enough to anticipate.

  Every other Sunday for all of her life the church district had gathered for worship and a communal meal that followed the service. It was not that she had never prepared food or eaten alongside anyone from the Grabill family before marrying into the household. But it was not the same. Everyone at church had on their “company manners,” as her English school friends used to call them. Glory could enjoy the dishes, make polite inquiries about people’s welfare, laugh at humorous stories, nod at somber prayer requests—and then go home.

  Home. Where she fit. Where she belonged. Where she was known and understood. Where life felt organized. Where she knew what to do, what to say.

  Glory passed the bread basket in the other direction now. She might not know if anyone other than Marlin wanted more bread, but it could not hurt to offer. If she could not keep up with the rapid inundation of table conversation, she could resist being sucked into its eddy by simple gestures of what families did for each other.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  In their bedroom three hours later, Marlin put a hand on his wife’s back as she let down her braids.

  “Are you feeling any better?”

  He expected her to lean her head back into his chest, a gesture of the intimacy that had grown between them in their short weeks as husband and wife. Instead, she pulled another pin from her hair and dropped it in a small white porcelain bowl on the chest of drawers without speaking.

  “Glory,” he said, “it will be all right.”

  She nodded, still without words.

  Another pin dropped into the bowl, the only sound in the room.

  Footfalls in the hall approached their closed door, and Marlin reflexively turned toward the noise, braced for a knock. Sometimes he envied the privacy that couples with their own farms enjoyed—or at least he thought that Glory envied it and he wished he could give it to her.

  The knock did not come. The steps did not pause. It was probably just one of his sisters coming in from a last trip to the outhouse on another ice-bound evening. The temperature at night had not been above freezing for at least a month. Though the hour was not yet late, the farmhouse was drafty, and even inside the temperature was dropping. Soon everyone would find warmth under layers of quilts even if bedside lamps burned for a while longer.

  “Do you need anything else tonight?” Marlin asked. Water? A book from downstairs? Another quilt? More oil for the lamp? Whatever Glory needed, he would give if only he knew what it was. He had not imagined being a husband would be so befuddling.

  She shook her head and picked up her hairbrush. When her shawl slipped off one shoulder, he was tempted to slide it off the other as well. Instead, he adjusted it to keep her warm while she pulled the brush through thick, rich brown locks that reached her waist.

  “I could read to you,” he said, reaching for the Bible that had been one of their wedding gifts. Gloria was partial to the book o
f Proverbs for its practical wisdom, and Marlin had come to appreciate familiar words afresh.

  Glory hesitated and then said, “Not tonight.”

  “You seem extra tired.”

  She nodded.

  Her mother’s letter had taken the wind out of her that afternoon. They had not sold their farm; her brother would run it and it would be there when they were ready to come home. Glory understood the circumstances of their departure and even agreed that it was right they should go. Yet their leaving had widened a bereft chasm within her. Marlin did not know how to reach across it.

  “You need some sleep,” he said. “I will go downstairs and do a bit of carving while you settle in.”

  “You do not have to do that.” Glory spoke at last.

  “Would you rather I stay?” “Two are better than one,” Ecclesiastes said.

  “I am just saying you do not have to leave. But if you want to…”

  He hated to leave her, but he was not ready to sleep, and his tossing and turning would only keep Glory from slumber. The pale exhaustion of her face made up his mind.

  “You need to rest. I will only be a few minutes, and I will be careful not to wake you.”

  Chapter 3

  Occasionally Glory wondered what it would be like to have curtains on an upstairs bedroom window sufficient to resist the light of dawn. An old English classmate made sure the entire one-room school knew that she had new bedroom curtains every two years in her house in town. Glory pressed the thought out of her mind. The girl had never been anything other than an uppity aggravation, and Glory had been grateful to leave school after the eighth grade if for no other reason than to be free of Minnie Handelman. But one of Minnie’s cast-off curtains would come in handy just now. Glory rolled away from the dawn, knowing that most of the household was already up and her mother-in-law was frying bacon and mixing biscuits to go with dippy eggs.

  Marlin’s movement in the room chastised her. He would never scold her—at least, she did not think he would—but when he sat on the side of the bed to wriggle his feet into work boots, guilt spread its tentacles. She pushed up on one elbow.