by Linda Byler
Oh, Hannah understood this. Indeed, she did. Halfway through the pack of Ritz crackers, the block of cheddar cheese dwindling rapidly, her stomach full and her spirits mellow, Hannah lowered her head, leaned forward, and confided in Mam. She admitted that Matthew made her so angry—just sometimes, not always—but he could come back and live among his lifelong friends and family and behave himself. Even if he was well-versed in the Bible, he better watch out or he’d be as bad as the person in the Bible who lifted his face and thanked God that he wasn’t as bad as other people, and she meant it.
With that, she nodded, clamped her mouth shut, and said there was a very real possibility of Matthew being too big in his own eyes.
When Hannah polished off the last of the grapes and headed home, Mam’s spirits were strangely uplifted, and she sang quietly to herself as she worked on her quilt, the light of the sun on the snow more than sufficient, her needle quickly rising and falling in and out of the soft fabric.
Who was she to map out God’s ways? One simply never knew what He had planned, or what He was thinking, exactly the way Davey said.
At school the next day, Sarah sat down hard, the unforgiving wooden seat of the toboggan rising up to meet her backside before she was quite ready. “Ow!” she yelled, and the third-grade girls howled with laughter.
“Ready?” Martha Ann called.
“Ready.”
Sarah gripped the narrow shoulders ahead of her and hung on, yelling with the rest of them as they careened down the icy trail that had been there for too long, the noontime sun turning the snow into a dangerous, slick path of pure, unadulterated terror.
The speed with which they shot down the hill was absolutely unsafe, but it was the thrill of each school day, the pupils arriving breathless, their entrance into the schoolhouse accompanied by their answers of, “Morning!” when Sarah greeted them. It was rarely “Good morning,” just “Morning,” but it was sufficient as long as her eyes were met, her presence acknowledged without hostility.
Constantly, Sarah reminded herself to be content with baby steps, little steps of progress, small differences in the children’s attitudes, small changes, but changes, nevertheless.
In school, the turmoil in her heart was stilled, the challenges of the day occupying her mind as she focused her attention on the children and the work, constantly striving to be the best teacher she could be.
Dealing with the students in the one-room school, with all eight grades in such close quarters, was as challenging and nerve-wracking as it had always been. But, slowly, there were differences.
Geography lessons turned into discussions, in spite of the eighth-grade boys initially refusing to co-operate and instead tapping their fingers, fiddling with their pens, and making annoying sounds, which were all duly ignored. When Alaska was chosen as a project, with its vast expanses of unspoiled acreage, pipelines, and animals of the tundra, the lure of the exploration proved to be too much, and they were slowly drawn into the discussion. Their drawings and maps were truly phenomenal.
Joe proved to be an outstanding artist, although not without constant praise, words of admiration spoken whenever an appropriate moment presented itself.
The parents who occasionally took time off from their hectic schedules to visit the school were in awe of the artwork, the projects done so precisely, the pencil drawings and intricate designs done so well. And by their own children! My, oh, they said later. I didn’t know Henry could draw like that.
Praise was hard to come by for the teacher, however. No one mentioned the artwork to Sarah, they just walked along looking at the drawings on the walls, their arms crossed around their waists. They sniffed, spoke in low tones to one another, and then changed the subject before approaching her.
That was alright. Sarah understood the need to withhold praise in order to keep someone humble, on the straight and narrow. She really did.
But a wee bit of affirmation would be nice, an unexpected ray of warmth on a chilly day.
When Lee’s sister, Anna, showed up that week, she was so effusive with her loud words of admiration, it was as if the blazing summer sun itself had entered the classroom. Sarah’s face grew flushed with heat as Anna repeatedly threw up her hands, squealing in amazement, turning to Sarah repeatedly, asking how she could get these children to draw like this.
Anna’s youngest boy was entirely engrossed in cleaning out Rosanna’s desk, books thumping on the seat, pens and pencils rolling across the floor, but it all went completely unnoticed by his awestruck mother.
Sarah winced when Rosanna spied the boy and pulled him away with an impolite jerk of his arm. This was followed by an indignant howling that brought his mother scurrying, flustered and apologetic. Her apologies were received coolly by the queenly Rosanna. Sarah felt like slapping her, but, of course, she didn’t.
Anna settled herself on a folding chair, her son perched on her short legs, her hands holding him closer than was necessary, her eyes alert, eager, radiating good humor.
Sarah conducted classes as usual, and the children sang three of their favorite songs for Anna. At recess, Anna was close to tears, praising Sarah’s teaching ability with a deluge of admiration, holding nothing back. Leaning close, she nudged her rounded shoulder into Sarah’s and whispered, “I heard! Oh, I’m excited. I can hardly believe you are actually going to date. It’s an answer to prayer!”
Sarah smiled, but her smile was followed immediately by a wave of horrible guilt, knowing that Matthew’s potential homecoming had largely occupied her thoughts, enveloping her days with anticipation.
Perceptive, smart, Anna watched, her eyes like a bird.
“What? Isn’t everything okay?”
“Yes. Oh, of course.”
“Good. Sarah, for real, you have no idea how thrilled I am, how thrilled we all are.”
A smile that felt untrue, somehow, was all she could manage, but it would have to suffice. At least she hadn’t spoken words that were not quite truthful. She hadn’t said anything at all.
Sarah completely underestimated Anna’s perceptive abilities. She was taken by surprise, to state it mildly, when Lee knocked on the door of the schoolhouse late that afternoon.
Her heartbeats multiplied, skidded, steadied, but her face still showed alarm when she opened the door.
Ever since the night that car had followed the girl with Sarah watching the fight, hearing the heated exchange of words, she did not feel completely safe at school after the children went home.
She was jumpy, lifting her head at any unusual sounds, going to the window to be positive nothing out of the ordinary was going on, telling herself it was foolish. Was it, really?
“Oh Lee.”
“I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“I’m….No, you didn’t.”
“May I come in?”
“Of course.”
Sarah stepped back.
She forgot how tall he was. She forgot how blond his hair was, how tanned his skin, how clean-cut his profile. His eyes were so blue they were ridiculous.
Before she could say anything, he found her gaze and held it with his own.
“Sarah, I came to ask if it’s true. Is Matthew returning?”
Sarah lowered her head. Her eyes noticed the dust on the high gloss paint in the intricate pattern along the side of a wooden desk. She thought she should clean it.
“Yes. He….Well, his wife, um, died. I don’t know if it’s really true that he’s coming back here. To stay. Hannah, his mother, thinks he might.”
A silence hung over the empty classroom like a suffocating blanket, cutting off Sarah’s air supply.
Finally, Lee spoke.
“And when he does return, will things change between us, Sarah?”
Sarah answered too quickly.
“No. Oh no.”
Still her head was bent, her eyes hidden from his, the top of her head the only way he could gauge her emotions, which was a lot like looking at a broken thermometer.
&n
bsp; “Sarah, look at me.”
It was impossible, and she knew it.
When he said nothing, the suffocation from the unbearable blanket of silence increased, and her desperation mounted until she knew there was no way out. The despair folded her into a child’s seat. Her arms rested the desktop, her head on them, as shameful, terrible sobs shook her body. The sounds were muffled, polite, even, but they put a dagger through Lee’s heart.
When he didn’t place a hand on her shoulder, when he didn’t crouch by her side to murmur condolences, the sobs became shorter, then weaker, then stopped entirely, before Sarah lifted her head long enough to look, search, bewildered. Had he gone?
He remained in the classroom, standing stiffly by the window, gazing through it at the late winter light, his hands clenched behind his back.
When he stayed silent, Sarah cleared her throat and said very softly and quietly, “Lee.”
He turned at the sound of his name, his expression unfathomable.
“I…I…” Completely at a loss for words, her voice faded into silence.
When he spoke, his words were restrained, his tone soft.
“I thought Matthew’s leaving was a clear, bold answer for me, straight from God. Now I’m not so sure. I guess perhaps if someone loves the way you loved him, there is never a time when that goes away completely. In other words, even if you choose to date me, I will not have you fully. A part of you will always love Matthew.”
Sarah’s denial began with a slow back and forth movement of her head, her eyes still lowered to the desktop.
Lee sighed, walked over, and stood so close to her, she could feel his presence. She could detect the odor of lumber and steel nails and strong hand soap, even the leather from his work boots.
“So Sara, I think the right thing to do in this situation would be to set you free. How does that old saying go? If you’re not sure something—someone, in this case—is yours, set it free, and if it doesn’t return, it never was yours to begin with. How does the rest of it go?”
She didn’t think before she spoke. She just lifted her head and looked into his blue eyes and said, “If it comes back to you, it always was yours. Or something like that.”
“Yeah. Something like that.”
He walked away, toward the door, and Sarah opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again when he stopped.
“You’re free to go then. Just forget about the fact that we had planned to begin dating, alright? When Matthew comes back, you’ll be completely unfettered. You alone must choose.”
Suddenly, the significance of that tremendous impasse loomed before her, a fire-breathing dragon of impossibility, hopelessness, coupled with the knowledge that she was clueless, holding a key to her future that was securely locked, and what if the key was all wrong? What if it didn’t fit?
When Lee buttoned his work coat and placed a hand on the doorknob, her eyes took in the shape of his shoulders, the tilt of his head, as if she could store away the memory, a keepsake, something to hide in the deepest recesses of her heart. She had loved him, hadn’t she?
Guilt made her cry out. “Lee?”
He froze.
“Don’t. I mean…I…”
Without another word, he let himself out, closed the door softly behind him, and did not look back.
Sarah repressed the urge to run after him. What would she say if she did catch up to him? How could she begin to tell him she did love him, but she loved Matthew more? Matthew Stoltzfus’s whole life was intertwined with her own. He was the missing piece of her, the way he filled up every loneliness, every moment of longing. She could not make Lee understand this.
Sighing, she stood and watched the road for a glimpse of Lee. When there was none, she simply didn’t know what to do, so she sat back down, staring straight ahead, seeing nothing, until her driver arrived and pressed her palm against the steering wheel, emitting two loud honks. The sound brought Sarah quickly back to reality.
When Mam looked into Sarah’s eyes and saw all the dark misery threatening to dissolve into tears, she wisely did not press the issue. She just turned away and said nothing.
Sarah mumbled something about not feeling well and went upstairs slowly. She flopped on her bed and wished there was someone she could confide in. Someone who understood.
Mam walked around with her mouth pressed in a firm line of denial, boding no good. Priscilla told Sarah unabashedly and repeatedly that she was crazy. And Dat was too involved in the meetings and goings on about the barn fires.
That was another thing. Sarah was completely fed up with all this talk of a dangerous person on the loose and people speculating about what to do. Men from the community just kept showing up in the kitchen, placing blame on Dat, on members of the community who clung to the old ways. What exactly was he supposed to do?
She felt a great pity for her father. He had aged many years in a short time. Over the winter, his cough would not go away, no matter how many different home remedies Mam spread on his chest or how many bottles of tincture or piles of herbal pills he swallowed. The cough wracked his body relentlessly.
He kept at his work, doing chores, hauling manure, oiling machinery, doing the things every farmer did during the winter, but he never quite got ahold of the rasping cough.
Even when he preached in church, he coughed, and it seemed to embarrass him. Perhaps he thought it was a sign of weakness and was ashamed.
Whatever the reason, Mam talked in hushed tones to Sarah, saying she knew why Davey coughed like that. He was under too much stress. There had never been a time like this for as long as she could remember. The way brother turned against brother, valuing his own opinion above everyone else’s—it was turning into a battle of senseless speculation, and not one of them really knew anything.
Mam said that was the whole trouble with the world, the way no one could stay silent in the face of unexplainable situations. They all tried to figure it out, when in actuality, they were all helpless. Even the world, the Englishe leid (English people), did not know what to make of the repeated disasters.
As Sarah sat on her bed, staring into space, she heard Dat’s cough in the kitchen below, then a murmur of voices, and she knew her mother would be clucking, fussing, hurrying to heat water for a bracing cup of peppermint tea.
She tried to imagine her life with Matthew as her husband, comfortably living in a house together, talking of ordinary, mundane subjects, the way they always had in school, at family get-togethers, their whole lives. They had been so close. Dating, seeing him every weekend, and often on week nights, living her dream.
He would have changed a bit, of course, which was only to be expected, living a different lifestyle. He had probably adopted different mannerisms, the way his people talked openly of their faith, freely expressing their beliefs, whereas Amish people preferred their worship in silence, their views often hidden.
But Matthew would return. He would come back to the Amish way. Sarah felt sure. If she couldn’t believe in that, she didn’t know Matthew very well, and she did. She knew him better than he knew himself, she told herself.
Sighing now, she leaned back on her pillow and let the anticipation of the future envelop her, seal her safely inside, secure, the doubts and fears kept outside. For now.
The candle on her nightstand flickered. Headlights beamed across the room as a car approached on the road, arcing across the ceiling as it turned.
Downstairs, Dat coughed again. A cow bawled from the barnyard, where the black and white Holsteins frolicked about, getting a bit of exercise in the still, cold air, their breath a whoosh of steam expelled from their warm nostrils.
Levi sat by the window, dressed in clean flannel pajamas, his hair wet, combed properly, his teeth brushed furiously. A jar of Vicks stood on the nightstand at his bedside for the long night ahead of him, when his sinuses would close, causing him grief and long hours of sniffling and honking dryly into piles of Kleenexes.
His eyes were tired, drooping at the
corners, but it was only a quarter past seven on a cold winter evening. He’d finished his jigsaw puzzle. That one had been easy, and he didn’t feel like playing a game with Suzie, so he thought perhaps he’d just go to bed.
He grasped the arms of his chair and started to get up, when he thought he saw someone, something.
He reached for his glasses, polished them on the tail of his flannel pajama shirt, and plunked them on his nose, squinting.
Slowly, he reached out and pushed a pot of geraniums aside, brushed off a brown leaf that fluttered to his lap. Aha. Some chap was walking up to the fence.
Tilting his head, he peered out the window between the leafy geraniums and watched. There. This chap sure was bold. Not ashamed of anything. What in the world? Was he just going to stand there and look at the cows?
It was too dark to see exactly what was going on, but Levi saw the animals stop and watch, their ears held forward, their wet noses held high, sniffing.
Levi’s eyes slide toward the kitchen, where Dat sat hunched over his tattered German Bible, a cup of tea at his elbow. Well, he didn’t need to be bothered. This was Levi’s sighting. All his own. And so he sat, a still form peering between the geraniums.
For several long moments, Levi sat as still as the most experienced hunter stalking his prey, completely engrossed by the spectacle before him. As he tilted his head one way, then another, he figured he’d have to get rid of some of these geraniums if he wanted to know what was going on.
He turned his head, saw Dat was alone as he read, no Mam or Priscilla. Suzie sprawled in front of the black coal stove, so he reached out with calculated precision and set two coffee cans of geraniums on the sewing machine to his left, soundlessly.
There, that was much better. He had a full view of the chap by the barnyard. With snow on the ground and the waning, half-moon’s light providing illumination, Levi could plainly outline the man’s dark form, standing stock still, looking up as if he was checking out the barn roof.
He figured the man was doing no harm. He certainly was not driving a small white car, so it couldn’t be the man that had “struck the barn on,” as the Amish often said. Likely this man was out for a walk, maybe taking pictures of the cows in the moonlight.
