“But go tonight and get it done,” Jacob Koop shouted. His words were met with a murmur of agreement.
“I have already spoken to her. She has agreed that—”
“She has agreed?” Jacob bellowed. “She has turned your head, Aaron Miller.”
“Brethren, could we not lose sight of the matter at hand?” Aaron replied, casting about for one person to speak in favor of allowing the teacher to try things her way this once. “Perhaps we should pray on the matter.” He bowed his head, and the others followed—Jacob Koop reluctantly.
After several moments during which the atmosphere in the room calmed noticeably, Walter Janzen raised his head. “I propose that tomorrow Aaron Miller and I go together to speak with Abigail Yoder. The hour is late, and I propose we speak with our teacher tomorrow.”
The room was silent except for nods from the elders. After a few seconds to allow for further objections, Aaron held up his hands, calling once again for prayer. As noisy as the hall had been when he arrived, that was how silent it was when Aaron left. Outside, the sky was heavy with the promise of more snow and the night was dark. He saw a light in Oscar Yoder’s house and started down the lane toward it. As he looked back at the school—now dark—he imagined the offending candles lit and flickering in the windows. He had failed to notice that detail in the list of plans for the pageant. Surely she would understand why no one would stand for that. Anything that smacked of frivolity, having no utilitarian purpose, would not be tolerated. He thought about her excitement the Sunday she had asked him about animals she might use in the pageant, and he knew that talking her out of that might be far more difficult. She might agree to a compromise—animals but no candles—but she could have neither, and he was quite sure she would not like that.
He knew he should wait for Walter to call on her, but he felt it only right to prepare her for what was to come. He opened the gate leading to the Yoders’ front walk.
♦ ♦ ♦
Abigail was working on the script for the pageant when she heard the knock at the door. Her aunt and uncle had already retired, and her uncle’s snores resonated through the small house. She hesitated but then reminded herself this was not the larger community she’d lived in all her life back in New York. This was Hope, Wisconsin. If someone had come at this hour, that person must have a very good reason for calling so late. She wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and opened the door.
Her nemesis stood silhouetted against the dark night, snow swirling around him. He started to speak, stopped, and finally said, “Is your uncle at home?”
Abigail was put off by his gruff tone. “He is sleeping, as is my aunt. Is there a problem, Aaron Miller?” She stepped out onto the small stoop, pulling the door closed behind her and tightening the shawl she wore.
“It can wait,” he mumbled and turned to go.
“Was there some business at the meeting that…” Why keep him there? Why not let him go on his way so she could get back to her work?
He hesitated as if trying to come to some decision. Finally he turned to face her. “You cannot place candles in the windows.”
“They are important to the pageant.”
“Will there not be enough light from the lanterns and the setting sun for the children to perform?”
“Of course. The candles are—”
“The candles are purely decorative and as such go against our beliefs in plain living. I will do what I can to honor the agreement you and I made regarding the pageant, but that agreement did not include the addition of candles and greenery.”
She allowed him to get two steps away from the house before answering. “And if I refuse?”
She saw his large frame stiffen and knew it wasn’t caused by the blast of cold wind that swept over them both. Slowly he turned to face her. “Are you determined to have us reject you, Abigail?” She was struck by his use of her Christian name without the surname attached. He was making a gesture of friendship—one she was tempted to accept since she had made few friends in the weeks she’d been in Hope. “Are you so anxious to return East,” he continued, “that you would do so at the expense of embarrassing your uncle?”
“I have given my uncle my reasons for placing the candles and greenery in the windows. He has agreed to consider my purpose and pray for guidance. Perhaps you and the others who object might wish to be as charitable in hearing me out.”
“We are not finished with this discussion. Tomorrow Walter Janzen and I will come to the school before classes begin to speak with you about the pageant. The elders have—”
She did not wait for him to complete his statement. Her fingers were numb and stiff as she clutched her shawl, opened the door, and slipped back inside the house. Once inside, she hurried to the stove to warm her hands, but she could not seem to stop shivering. It was more than the cold. It was also her fear that she had made a terrible mistake. Aaron Miller had offered her something she had failed to consider. Her aunt and uncle were dear to her, and she would not cause them grief. Perhaps he was right in demanding she not include the candles and greenery. On the other hand, if only he and the others would allow her to explain that each candle carried the name of one of the students and would be lighted only at the close of the pageant as a symbol of their light shining out to guide the Christ child.
♦ ♦ ♦
Impossible woman!
Aaron crossed the snow-covered fields on his way back to his dark farmhouse. After he’d left Abigail—or rather after she had dismissed him by going inside and closing the door—he had started for home. But Jacob Koop and three other men had been waiting for him. Among them was Samuel Lemke.
“Did you set her straight?” Samuel demanded.
“She has discussed the matter with the bishop, and he is praying on it and will give her his answer tomorrow.”
“The bishop is her uncle,” Koop reminded the group. “How much praying will it take to turn that around?”
Samuel appeared to be wavering. “Maybe it is only right that—”
“You speak from your heart, Samuel,” the third man said. “Your feelings for this woman are no secret.”
“My feelings have changed. I do not like her ways,” Samuel replied.
Jacob Koop cleared his throat loudly. “You may court her or not, Samuel. That is hardly the issue. She is leading our children down wrongful paths and must be stopped. And if the bishop has not the will to do so, then we must. She returns the pageant to its original form, or there will be no pageant and she will be barred from the school.”
He stalked off.
Aaron knew that in spite of Jacob’s bad temper, many in the community would agree with him. After all, the community had been founded by people leaving a larger Mennonite settlement just over the border in Illinois, and the leaving had been for a similar cause. The citizens that had established the community of Hope had been alarmed at the increasingly liberal ways of their Illinois brethren.
“Will you refuse her the livestock, then?” Samuel asked.
Aaron had forgotten all about the idea of having live animals as part of the pageant. He should have told her that live animals were out of the question. He turned back toward the Yoder house but saw that the light he’d seen in the sitting room was no longer there. “We’ll wait for the bishop’s decision on the matter,” he told the two men still waiting with him.
“And the livestock?”
Aaron ignored the question. “Godspeed, my friends.”
As he reached his farm and stepped inside the barn to check on the stock, Aaron decided he had no need to either deny or agree to Abigail’s request for a cow, a sheep, and a donkey. Surely her uncle would see the folly in all of this and put a stop to it. In the meantime, a storm was brewing and there would be several more inches of snow come morning. Perhaps God was the one squelching Abigail’s newfangled ideas. For the first time all evening, Aaron felt a smile tugging at his lips. If the storm were the blizzard it promised to be, there would be no pageant, for
everyone would be confined to their homes for the next several days.
Chapter 3
The following day dawned under a sky leaden with gray clouds. The snow everyone had expected had not materialized, but the threat was present. Abigail did not know whether to be pleased or apprehensive. She fingered the wax of the candles she had gathered for the pageant’s ending—two for each window of the school. One for each child. As she waited for Aaron and Walter Janzen to come, she printed a card with each child’s name and set the finished cards with the candles. The two elders who had been charged with meeting with her were reasonable men. Surely once they heard why the candles were important…
The meeting lasted less than fifteen minutes. Clearly the two men had reached their decision before entering the schoolhouse. There were to be no animals and definitely no candles and greenery. Beyond that, having studied the script, they saw no harm in delivering the good news of Christ’s birth in the way Abigail had proposed. When she started to protest, Walter stopped her with one raised hand.
“We are offering a fair compromise, Abigail Yoder—one that has elements to satisfy all concerned. Consider that if you insist on your way, you will be labeled—and rightly so—as prideful, and it is my opinion that parents will not allow their children to attend, much less participate in this program.”
“Very well,” Abigail said softly. “Thank you.” She could hear the children arriving for their final day of class before the pageant. “If you will excuse me, I need a few moments to pray for guidance in telling the children this news—for they will be disappointed.”
“They would not be disappointed, Abigail Yoder, had you not filled their heads with ideas you must have known would be challenged.” Walter pressed his point. “We have agreed to the idea of a manger and single narrator. We have agreed that the children may take the parts of shepherds and kings and Mary and Joseph. These are gifts, Abigail Yoder, that you would be wise to accept with grace and gratitude.”
She nodded and felt tears welling. The elder was right. She had once again simply assumed that others would be as enthusiastic about her ideas as she was. Her parents had warned her that one day her willfulness would get her into trouble. “I understand,” she whispered and turned away so the men would not see her tears.
As if the day were not bad enough already, Louisa Koop did not come to school that morning, nor was she present for the class’s last rehearsal of the pageant the following day, and it seemed to Abigail that the wooden box holding the candles loomed larger than life on the bookshelf at the back of the classroom. That afternoon as she rehearsed the children and took the reader’s part herself, her gaze kept wandering to that box. She could accept that, in the view of others, placing the candles in the windows would serve no useful purpose and the greenery was indeed purely decorative. But what if the children carried the candles as they came to visit the manger? It would be dusk by the time the pageant reached its end. Of course there would be lanterns in the school, but what if the light increased as the story unfolded so that by the end of it, the entire church was alive with light almost as if the star itself had entered the space?
Abigail watched as her students halfheartedly went through the motions of their parts. As she had predicted, they had been terribly disappointed when she’d reported there would be no livestock or candles. But they knew better than to protest openly. Instead, their protest took the form of apathy. She wanted to tell them her new idea, but she would not risk disappointing them again, and certainly if any one of them reported her idea to their parents, the news would spread and the pageant would be canceled.
No, Abigail would pray on the matter between now and the hour for the pageant and seek God’s guidance to do the right thing. After all, was her fixation with the candles the work of the devil or the work of God? Sometimes it was so very difficult to decide.
♦ ♦ ♦
The day of the pageant, there was still no sign of Louisa as the clock ticked on toward four—the hour for the pageant to be presented. The citizens of Hope took their places on benches moved from the church for the occasion. The children were nervous and excited, aware of the objections of their parents and others even if they did not understand the reasons behind those concerns. The stage was set with Rebecca in place as Mary and one of the two older boys standing next to her as Joseph. A wooden manger stuffed to overflowing with hay to hide the absence of an actual baby sat center stage. Abigail briefly considered asking the other older boy to replace Louisa as narrator, but he was a slow reader and his voice skipped comically from low to high registers without warning. She decided she would take the role herself.
Just as she was settling the younger children into their places as shepherds, kings, and angels, she heard a rustle of surprise among those gathered in the audience. She looked up to see Aaron herding a calf and lamb up the aisle. Outside the open door, she saw a donkey.
“Best make this quick,” he muttered when he reached her. He handed off the staff for herding the animals to the older boy playing the role of shepherd and took his seat in the front row.
Abigail’s heart was beating so fast she thought it might be heard by others. “Thank you,” she whispered, following Mary and Joseph up the aisle and outside so they could make their entrance, arriving at the inn. Several people were whispering, and she realized the tone had changed from one of disapproval to one of excitement. It was all going to work out after all. Oh, how she wished Louisa could be part of this!
♦ ♦ ♦
Aaron had had no intention of bringing the animals. He’d had little intention of attending the pageant, but when he had awakened that morning and realized the storm had still not come, he was mystified. He had been so sure that by dawn several more inches of new snow would lie on top of the foot or so already covering the ground. He’d further expected that a strong north wind would be whipping the fresh snow into dangerous drifts that would make travel by foot or animal impossible. Aaron was rarely wrong about weather—a man simply had to read the signs that God laid out for him.
As he went about his chores, he found himself wondering if the unexpected break in the weather were indeed a sign. He also thought a good deal about Abigail Yoder. To his consternation, it wasn’t her penchant for changing the ways of the community that was uppermost in his mind. No, when he thought of Abigail, it was the way her eyes twinkled when she smiled, or the way he was tempted to smooth out the tiny lines that marred her forehead when she disagreed with something. Most recently he had found himself imagining what she might look like with her hair undone and spilling down her back like a waterfall lit by the sun.
Enough.
He sat alone at the small kitchen table, eating his noonday meal, the clock on the mantel ticking off the minutes, all the while picturing her with the children—surely every bit as excited as they were about the pageant. It was ridiculous of her to consider using livestock in the performance. Animals were as unpredictable as small children—perhaps even more so. And yet although she had agreed to the elders’ terms to cut them from the pageant, he saw her point. Making the animals part of the story would not only enhance the children’s understanding of the miracle, but it might also bring some much-needed hope for better times to come for the adults.
That was when he decided to bring the calf and lamb. He was on his way down the path when he heard the donkey bray and turned back. Just as he reached the church, it started to snow—soft gentle flakes that to him felt like approval.
Now he sat with the other adults and watched as the children played out their roles and Abigail read straight from the scripture. If anyone had thought she intended to rewrite the holy words, they were proved wrong. She read of the journey to Bethlehem and no room at the inn, of shepherds in the fields, and of kings following a star. With each change of scene, the children took their parts—each carrying a lighted candle—until the tableau at the front of the classroom was almost like a painting that Aaron had once seen of the Nativity. Mary seated, Jos
eph standing by, the shepherds to one side, the kings bowing before the manger, and everything cast in the soft glow of a dozen candles. The room was as still as the dying day outside the small building, and as he looked around, he saw some of the adults wipe tears from their eyes.
Abigail had just stepped to the front of the room when the door to the schoolroom banged open and Jacob Koop strode in—his beard and shoulders covered in snow. “Where is she?” he demanded as he advanced on Abigail. “What have you done with my girl?”
Oscar Yoder rose immediately and started toward Jacob, his hands raised in a gesture of conciliation. Abigail stood her ground, neither backing away nor showing any sign of fear at Koop’s menacing posture. “Louisa is not here, Jacob Koop,” she said in the same calm voice she had used for reading the scripture.
Koop snorted. “A likely story. You put all these worldly ideas in her head, and now you try to hide her as well?”
“No one is hiding anyone, Jacob,” the bishop said, stepping between his niece and the outraged man. He turned to the audience. “Has anyone here seen Louisa today?”
There was a murmur of dissent followed by a buzz of growing concern. Aaron stood and placed his hand gently on Jacob’s shoulder. “When did you last see her and where?”
He felt all the fight go out of his friend as Jacob collapsed onto a bench and buried his face in his hands. “This morning. She did her chores as usual then said she was coming to the school. I forbid it, and she went inside the house. She’s a good girl. I thought…I never thought…”
“And when did you realize she was not at the farm?” Aaron asked. It was imperative that they gather as much information as possible. Through the open door at the back of the room, he could see that the snow had started to accumulate as the wind whistled and moaned through any opening it could find.
A Plain and Sweet Christmas Romance Collection Page 54
