by Linda Byler
They had a fit about Sarah and her senseless yearning. Although they usually kept their thoughts to themselves, occasionally a snippet of their indignant views would slip out, allowing Mam to glimpse the discordant note between her married and single daughters.
Well, Anna Mae and Ruthie had better watch out, she would think, setting her jaw firmly as she drove Fred home from sisters day. Those two had had pretty uncomplicated courtships.
“Malinda!”
“Levi, what is wrong now?”
“Ich hopp ken hussa (I have no trousers)!”
“Yoh (Yes).”
“Nay (No).”
Priscilla got up from her misery to help Levi find a pair of trousers, which were not in the usual drawer but folded neatly and stacked on top of his dresser, where she had put them the day before.
“You have to look, Levi.”
“That is not where I look for my trousers, and you know it. You just didn’t want to open the drawer and put them in. I know how you are. Always in a hurry.”
Priscilla managed to laugh and tweaked his ear. He lifted a large hand to slap it away, but he was smiling, the crinkles beside his deep brown eyes spreading outward.
Breakfast was subdued but not without encouragement, as they heaped their plates with the crispy, golden slabs of cornmeal mush, fried eggs, stewed crackers, and chipped beef gravy. The plastic tumblers were filled with the orange juice made from frozen concentrate that Mam bought by the case from Aldi.
Levi’s weight was a constant challenge. Some meals could turn into a battle of wills, but the first meal of the day was normally not restricted, so he was a cheerful person at breakfast, happily dabbing homemade ketchup over his stewed crackers and spreading great quantities of strawberry jelly on thick slices of toast.
Priscilla ate very little, and Sarah noted with concern the look of suffering in her eyes as she watched the snow swirling against the kitchen window.
Mam poured mugs of fragrant coffee and brought a fresh shoofly pie from its rack in the pantry. Sarah cut a fairly large wedge for herself and one for Levi, smiling at him as he thanked her over and over.
Dat said he’d have to ask Ben Zook to use his skid loader to bury Dutch. Then they had to explain to Levi what had occurred that morning, and he listened with great interest.
Wisely, he shook his great head. “Well, I didn’t make it up then. A car drove in here. I was up during the night and walked to the bathroom. I saw it. I bet there was someone in the barn.”
Dat slowly set down his mug of coffee, the color leaving his face. Mam turned, her mouth open in disbelief, her eyes wide, alarm clearly visible.
But it was Priscilla who began to shake uncontrollably.
Dat questioned Levi extensively, and he answered with calculated precision.
No, it wasn’t snowing then.
Yes, it was a white car.
White shines in the dark. It’s a lot lighter than the darkness. The lights were round, down low, just like the time the barn burned.
Clearly, there was only one choice. The police had to be notified. The story made it into the Intelligencer Journal the next day. It was just a short strip with no picture, which was Dat’s wish.
The police had urged the Amish people to invest in dogs. Big dogs trained to attack, but Dat was slow to be convinced, saying if they did get an attack dog, was it really worth the injury to another person? What if an intruder was accidentally killed?
As they discussed the article and the issue of the dogs, Sarah suggested allowing Suzie to get her Lassie dog, and Mam’s face softened as she looked at her youngest daughter with so much affection that Sarah could hardly watch. Then Sarah caught Priscilla’s eye and smiled, encouraging her to smile back.
Priscilla had been brave the day before, Sarah thought. Very brave. In fact, so courageous, it had broken her heart to watch her sister standing in the snow, a black figure, her head bent, her shoulders slumped, her eyes downcast.
Priscilla had been braver than she had been herself. For one thing, why did they have to send that Lee Glick with the skid loader? Dat could have driven Fred over to Ben Zook’s and left him in the barn while he came home with the piece of equipment to bury Dutch himself.
Furthermore, wasn’t it about time that Lee finished up his stay at Ben Zook’s? Sarah thought he would have returned home months ago, but now he had a job and everything. Had he decided his home was now here in this community?
The thing was, Lee always unsettled Sarah—not really unsettled, but he left her feeling as if she wasn’t quite getting it or didn’t understand something he understood.
Or was she just remembering the night of Reuby Kauffman’s barn fire, when she…. Sarah lifted cold hands to cheeks that turned warm at the thought. Oh, he was just being kind, she told herself. He would help anyone. But would he help anyone in such a…thoughtful way?
At any rate, who showed up driving that skid loader but Lee Glick with his blond hair covered by a gray beanie? His gloved hands quickly dug a hole, drug out the sad black and white carcass with the skid loader, and rolled the great horse into the yawning, cavernous hole before covering it neatly and packing it down by running over it repeatedly.
Sarah could have stayed inside, she supposed, but Priscilla needed her support, so she stood beside her, watching the snow drift across the landscape creating a vast whiteness interrupted only by jutting buildings and trees and telephone poles, drooping wires hanging between them.
When the skid loader stopped and Lee hopped off, Dat reached into his pocket for his wallet, but Lee waved it away and stood talking to Dat for the longest time.
Lee was taller than Dat, something Sarah hadn’t realized. As they turned, Priscilla waited, her eyes never leaving Lee’s face. She was mesmerized, Sarah could tell, and was surprised to find herself suddenly irritable, cold, her feet wet inside the soft lining of her snow boots.
When the men reached the girls, Lee looked only at Priscilla, and she lifted her eyes to thank him.
“Hey, no problem. Glad I could help. Must have been hard, losing another horse.”
“It was.”
“I feel really sorry for you. I sure hope the police can help.”
“We talked to them this morning already.”
“Really?”
Priscilla nodded.
Dat gave Lee more details, and he whistled low, then shook his head. And he continued to ignore Sarah as if she had all the charms of one of the apple trees behind them as he asked Priscilla questions and listened closely to her replies.
Just when she was ready to walk away, Lee turned to Sarah and asked how she was. His eyes met hers with so much blue it was like a streak of lightning blinding her for a second before she could see clearly.
“I’m fine,” she said curtly.
“You get home okay Saturday night?”
“Yeah.”
Defiantly, she met his blue eyes, eyes that seemed to mock her now. She felt as if he knew everything that happened that night between her and Matthew Stoltzfus.
She felt the warmth rising uncomfortably in her face, and she lowered her eyes and kicked at the loose snow, her composure sliding away in a free fall along with the whirling snow.
Dat stood comfortably, his hands in his wide trouser pockets, his black coat bunched up above them, his wide black hat protecting his face and shading his eyes as he observed this exchange with seasoned perspective.
It wasn’t Dat’s way to say anything serious about matters of the heart. That was Mam’s domain, but a small smile played around his lips as he noticed Sarah struggling to regain her air of aloofness.
So that was how it was with Sarah. Well.
The remainder of the day she thought of Matthew, his warm brown eyes, the way he had asked if she’d consider being his girl. She thought how it would feel to have finally attained the long awaited goal of being exactly that—Matthew’s girl. Oh, the thought of buying and wrapping a gift for him! She’d dreamt about it for years but knew
couldn’t happen this year, but the next one, likely.
As she mixed the butter and sugar for a batch of peanut butter cookies, she planned what she would buy. When she burned the first sheet of cookies, Mam was not happy, her cheeks a brilliant shade of red, her hair almost crackling with frustration, clucking and fussing, saying she’d never been so on behind with her Christmas baking, and goodness knows she still had nothing for Anna Mae’s baby.
“Sarah, stop being so dreamy. It upsets me.”
Sarah watched her mother running around, accomplishing nothing. She told her to calm down—she was acting worse than Mommy Beiler ever had.
“Humpf.”
It was a huge insult. Mam esteemed her work ethic far above that of her late mother-in-law’s, but she was used to navigating the surprising waters of mother-daughter relationships, and so she drew her lips to an uncompromising line and remained silent.
After about a hundred Hershey’s kisses had been pressed into as many peanut butter cookies, Sarah felt uncomfortably warm and nauseous, not to mention completely irritated by Mam’s silence, so she said loudly, “I don’t know what you’re so mad about.”
Mam burst out laughing, sat down, and slid low in her chair, her feet wearily stretched in front of her. She pushed up her white covering, extracted a steel hairpin from her bun, and scratched her head before replacing it.
“Huh,” she sighed. “One of these years, believe me, I’m going to skip Christmas altogether. I’ll just sit in a corner somewhere and read a Bible story about the Baby Jesus and let it go at that.”
She stretched her arms over her head.
“Levi, get away from there!”
Mam sat up and leaned over, her eyebrows lowering as Levi tried to make off with yet another cookie.
This was when Sarah loved Mam best. When she was completely herself—just Malinda, humorous and comfortable and not taking things quite as seriously as usual.
“These peanut butter cookies make me sick after the chocolate on top gets cold,” Levi said, as wily and slick as any thief trying to convince a judge of his innocence.
“They do not!” Priscilla retorted.
The door burst open, and Suzie exploded into the house with her bonnet tied haphazardly over her head scarf, her boots covered with snow, and her coat buttoned crookedly.
“Hey! The English people’s school bus is stuck on the hill past Elam’s!”
“Oh my goodness. Is it still snowing? Ach (oh), it is. Well Suzie, I hope you were careful coming home. My goodness.”
Suzie reached for a cookie. She watched Levi’s hand snake out and grab one, too, before shuffling back to his card table and the display of cards spread on out it.
“Levi, put that cookie back,” Mam said without turning around.
Levi stopped in his tracks, facing away from Mam, and said, “What cookie?”
“The one in your hand.”
Quickly, Levi inserted the cookie in the gap between the buttons on his shirtfront and answered glibly, “I don’t have one.”
“You don’t?”
“No.”
“Okay then.”
That was the most entertaining part of the entire day, aside from the hole being dug for Dutch, or rather, that chap driving the skid loader, Sarah decided.
Why did he do that to her? It seemed as if he kept planting his blond head into her thoughts when she did not want to think about him at all.
It was Matthew she loved, and it was Matthew she planned on marrying. It was just that….
She wished that she’d never gone to Reuby Kauffman’s barn fire. All it had done was bring back the terror, the memory of the screaming animals, and all the helplessness their own fire had brought into her life.
And then Lee had held her securely in his arms as she struggled to recover from her fainting spell. Of course, he would have helped anyone. That was how Lee was.
He was the one who buried Dutch. And he was helping his brother-in-law, Ben Zook, finish the details in his barn, working every evening after work for months. He was always one of the first ones on the scene at barn raisings, one of the last to leave. It seemed as if that was all he did—work for other people and help them out.
Was that how someone was measured? Sarah didn’t know. She just wished she’d never met him, the way he made his way into her thoughts like an uninvited intruder.
Sighing, she thought about making supper and doing chores. The usual routine suddenly felt like an insurmountable burden. All she wanted to do was roll into her bed and cover her head with the quilt to block out the snow and Christmas and Dutch and Priscilla and, yes, Lee.
That evening, Sarah walked to the barn and halfheartedly helped Dat with the milking. Her thoughts were a million miles beyond the cow stable, Lancaster County, or anyone around her. She missed Mervin and wished she could see him again, touch him, tousle his blond hair, just one more time.
When a cow lifted a heavy, soiled foot and kicked her shin hard, she yelped in surprise, then pain. She began howling in earnest, bringing Dat to her side as a dark bruise started forming beneath her woolen sock.
“Boy, she socked you one, didn’t she?”
Grimacing, Sarah laughed ruefully, nodding her head. “She has a secret hatred for me.”
Dat laughed heartily and agreed with Sarah that she was an ill-tempered cow. He had seriously considered turning her into steak and hamburger. Now he said he just might have to.
“Nothing broken, is there?”
“No, it was just enough to make me good and angry.”
“You weren’t too happy to begin with.”
Sarah nodded. “Yeah, well. Sometimes you just aren’t yourself,” she said, making an enormous effort at cheeriness.
Dat watched Sarah and then took the golden opportunity to ask her if she had prayed for God’s guidance in seeking a life companion.
He was shocked to hear the rebelliousness in his daughter’s voice.
“You make it sound like one of those better-than-thou books. Of course I pray. The Lord showed me a long time ago that His will is for Matthew and me to be together.”
The words were explosive, forceful.
Dat’s eyebrows raised of their own accord.
“Alright, Sarah, alright. You know I’m not the one you talk to about matters of the heart. I get embarrassed talking to you about….”
“Say it,” Sarah said harshly, unkindly.
“Sarah.”
The tone in his voice stopped her downward spiral into a stream of hurtful and useless words.
“You don’t want to be this way.”
“How do I want to be?”
Dat didn’t answer. He just turned to the cow being milked and bent to retrieve the milker. He poured out the warm, creamy milk and placed the machine on the next cow.
Straightening, he watched Sarah’s face and said, “All I want is for you to be honest with yourself.”
“I am.”
“Alright. If you are, there is no need to defend yourself.”
That sent Sarah into a miserable state of confusion. Dat had never mentioned Matthew’s name, so what was all that supposed to mean? Now thoroughly confused, she walked out of the barn into the cold evening that was just headed toward dusk. The sun was spreading a pink and apricot glow beneath the remnants of the snowstorm, infusing the stone house with an other worldly brilliance as the snow piled in glistening heaps on the shrubs and bushes reflected the same beautiful radiance.
Well God, she breathed, her prayer a whispered need, a small cry of confusion from a bowed spirit. You’re going to have to come through if….
She couldn’t finish, somehow unable to lay her sacrifice on the altar, afraid to think or pray about what was hidden in the recesses of her heart, that delicate balance of her own will, God’s will, and Matthew.
As if in immediate answer to her troubled spirit, a dark figure cut into the Beiler driveway, the black horse easily pulling a two-seater sleigh—a cutter—painted a glossy blac
k. Her cousin, Melvin, waved wildly. He was wrapped in a ridiculous pile of outerwear, his prominent nose rising above his gaudy, plaid scarf.
“Sarah! Good! You’re home! Come on. Let’s go for a ride before every back road is cindered.”
“Give me a minute!”
And that was all she needed. She washed her hands, donned clean socks, boots, a sweater, coat, head scarf, and warm gloves before limping and slipping out to the sleigh and the impatient horse.
“Here we go! It’s unreal how quiet this is. There is not one sound except for the horse’s hooves, and even they’re muffled.”
He talked as if he had invented the sleigh and the horse and created the snow, the sun, and the clouds himself, Sarah thought, knowing Melvin as well as she knew herself.
They sped through the waning light, the cold invigorating her, dashing all the confusing thoughts from her head. Like cobwebs, they were swept away with an unseen broom.
Melvin chattered away, and Sarah listened, nodding her head or saying, “Mm,” or “Okay,” or some other fitting word to assure him that she was listening.
When she did have the opportunity to tell him about Priscilla’s horse, asking if he had seen the paper, Melvin’s mouth opened, his eyes widened, and he shook his head in disbelief.
That was all it took to start another of his verbal explosions, his head nodding and hands gesturing as he spoke of the very real danger of someone losing yet another barn or more livestock.
“It’s just a matter of time. I bet you anything that horse reared back out of fright, seeing someone sneaking into the barn. But the nerve! Can you imagine someone doing this again? Still driving the same car? He can’t be too smart, or he’d drive a different vehicle. For Pete’s sake, Sarah. What a loser!”
Sarah reminded her agitated cousin that Levi may not have been completely awake or was imagining things, trying to create drama, enabling him to have the top spot at meetings.
Melvin disagreed vehemently, turning the sleigh at the end of Irishtown Road, skillfully handling the reins with one gloved hand as the other one waved in the air for emphasis.
That was the end of the conversation as the wind picked up and whirled their words away in its fury.
