by Jan Drexler
Annie had told them the news.
Without a word, Mattie slid onto the bench next to Mamm and handed her a clean handkerchief from the waistband of her apron. Levi looked from Mamm to Annie and back again.
Mattie took a cookie from the jar on the table and handed it to her nephew. “Here, Levi. Have a cookie.”
She set him on her own lap as Mamm sniffed back her tears.
Annie reached across the table toward her mother. “I’m sorry. If there was any way for us to go with you, you know I would. But this is our home.”
Mamm nodded, controlling her tears. “I know. But we will miss you.” She looked at her oldest daughter then. “Perhaps sometime you might follow us?”
Annie watched their hands, entwined in the table’s center. “Who knows what the future holds? Perhaps God will call us to go west someday.”
The front door opened. Christopher took one step into the room, his normally pleasant face grim. “Annie, we must go home.”
Mamm hiccupped. “You were going to stay . . . it’s dinnertime.”
Christopher shook his head. “We won’t eat here today.” He held out one hand. “Levi, come home with Daed.”
Mattie lowered the little boy to the floor and he ran to Christopher. Annie slowly let go of Mamm’s hand and rose. She didn’t look back as Christopher closed the door behind them.
Naomi rose from the table, motioning for Mattie to follow her out the back door.
When they reached the porch, Mattie whispered, “We can’t leave Mamm alone, can we?”
Her sister took her hand. “Right now Mamm needs to cry. When she’s done, she’ll be back to her usual self, but she won’t let herself cry while we’re in there.”
Naomi was right. “How do you know things like that? You always know what someone needs and I never do. I wouldn’t have thought that she wants to be alone.”
“I saw it on her face. She didn’t want to cry in front of us.”
She sat on the top step and Mattie sat beside her, leaning her elbows on her knees and resting her chin in her hands. “How long should we wait?”
“For a while. Dinner is in the oven and will be done soon. Mamm should feel better by then.”
“I never really thought Annie wouldn’t go west with us.”
“She needs to stay with her husband.”
“Is that what it’s like when you get married? Whatever your husband decides, you have to do?”
Naomi brushed some flour off her apron. “Annie said she agreed with Christopher.”
“But you saw how miserable she is. And Mamm doesn’t want to go west. She agreed because Daed wants to. If she had her way, she would never leave Brothers Valley.”
Naomi scooted down to the next step and leaned back with her elbows propped behind her. “The Good Book says that when two people marry, they become one flesh. I suppose married people have to agree on things, or else they’d be torn apart.”
“But would you agree with some man if he wanted to do something awful like take you away from your family?”
“First of all, I wouldn’t marry ‘some man.’ If I ever get married, it will be to the man who loves me.” Naomi crossed her legs at the knee and bounced one foot in the air. “And second, he would be my family, not you.” She bounced her foot again.
Mattie felt a little sick. “You would choose him over me?”
Naomi looked up at her, smiling. “Of course, even though I would hope I will never have to make that choice. But you will do the same thing when you marry Ephraim or Andrew, or whoever wins your heart.”
“Never.” Mattie shook her head. “If he doesn’t do what I want, then I’ll head west to Oregon or somewhere without him.”
Naomi grinned. “You just wait until you fall in love, like Annie did. Nothing will be as important as being with your husband.”
Mattie didn’t answer, but watched a male robin chase another away from the oak tree. Andrew Bontrager would never win her heart. Only one boy had ever come close to doing that, but when he arrived from the Conestoga, he probably wouldn’t even remember her.
2
The good weather held through the end of the week and into the next, the spring sunshine causing flowers to burst from their buds and garden soil to become warm, soft beds for the carefully preserved seeds from last year’s bounty. Mattie closed her eyes and lifted her face to catch the sun’s rays. Fresh odors assailed her senses, carried on the warm southwest breeze. She sifted through the spring’s scents. Apple blossoms and lilacs from Annie’s front yard, freshly turned garden soil between her toes, and beneath it all the constant reek of manure piles. Every farmer along the Glades Pike had opened his barn and cleaned out the winter bedding from stalls and cow pens this week, and the ammonia-laced pungence was a balm to her winter-sick soul.
But Mamm had sent her to plant peas in Annie’s garden, not daydream in the sunshine. Mattie poked a hole in the dirt with her stick and tossed a pea in. She pushed dirt over the seed with her toe, and moved half a step to her right. Another hole. Another pea. She felt the bag tied to her waist. Much more than a handful. She sighed and turned her face to the late-morning sun again.
They would come down from the mountains that filled the eastern horizon. Three families, Daed had said. One older couple from the Ephrata settlement and two from the Conestoga.
She wasn’t the little girl of ten who had left the Conestoga, but surely they would remember her. Hannah and Liesbet, Johanna, Annie, Naomi and Mattie . . . as girls they had played together for hours while their mothers quilted or spun.
Mattie stared at the distant mountains, rolling a dry pea between her fingers, her chore forgotten.
On butchering day, the autumn before her family had moved to Brothers Valley, the girls had all put their fingers in their ears and stared at each other with solemn faces until the pigs stopped squealing, and then burst out laughing at each other’s expressions. Hannah and Liesbet’s brother, Jacob, had roasted the pig’s tail that day. He had skewered it with a stick and held it in the fire until it was crackling hot and dripping grease, and then shared it with her. They had taken turns biting off the crunchy bits until he laughed at the grease dripping from her chin.
The eastern mountains were the past, and she knew them. She had traveled down from those ridges when she had been a little girl. But the western mountains . . .
Mattie turned around. From Annie’s garden she could see the distant ridges rising in blue-green piles. Soon, very soon, she would follow the Glades Pike west and cross those mountains. Soon she would see what wonderful things were on the other side, and Jacob Yoder would be with her.
Mattie sighed, the garden forgotten. The dream had come again last night. She had often had the dream of the tall cliff standing between her and something wonderful, but last night had been different. This time she had searched all along the base of the cliff, looking for the passage that would take her to the other side. But when she awakened, she still hadn’t found it. Maybe, just maybe, the answer was on the other side of those mountains.
The pea dropped from between her fingers, bringing her back to her task. She bent to retrieve it, then planted it along the willow trellis Annie had built last week, after Christopher broke the news that they wouldn’t be coming west with the rest of the family. The peas would grow to cover the trellis, but by then Mattie would be over the mountains, leaving Annie behind with her husband and the little ones.
As she reached the end of the first row, a horse’s whinny sounded through the air from the direction of the road. Mattie shaded her eyes against the spring sun. A bright blue wagon appeared over the rise, pulled by a team of four Conestoga horses. Behind them came another, smaller wagon. A young woman walking next to the second wagon waved to her. Mattie almost jumped in the air with a squeal. They were here! The waiting was finally over.
She stuck her hand into the bag of seeds, impatient to be done with her chore. If she hadn’t been daydreaming, she might have been done already and
could go to greet the Conestoga folks. She jabbed at the soil with her stick and tossed peas into the holes.
“Baa-aa-aa.”
Mattie turned to see a sheep standing behind her. It fixed its unblinking eye on her, and then reached out to grab a willow twig from the trellis.
Mattie dropped the stick and flapped her apron. “Shoo, sheep. Shoo!”
The sheep skittered sideways, but only moved a couple of steps before it grabbed at the willow twigs again. This time it tugged with a toss of its head and the woven branches pulled away from the ground, falling over in a heap.
“Rosie!” A girl’s voice sounded from the other side of the blueberry hedge. “Rosie, where are you?”
Mattie grabbed the sheep with one hand around her neck and the other around her middle. “I have her here,” she called.
A young girl appeared around the end of the bushes. “That sheep. She’s always running off somewhere.”
Rosie saw the girl and started bucking, but Mattie held on. “Why don’t you tie a rope to her?” Mattie’s words came out in grunts as the sheep struggled.
“Jacob says she needs to browse as we walk, but she never stays with the rest of the flock.”
As a man walked around the blueberry bushes, Mattie’s stomach churned and she gripped the sheep tighter. Jacob Yoder. Older, taller, and with broad shoulders, but it had to be Jacob. He stopped when he saw Mattie. He looked from her to the demolished pea trellis and back to the sheep. He thumbed his hat brim up on his forehead and grinned at her. “What did you do to the trellis?”
“I didn’t do anything to it. This sheep started eating it.” Mattie pulled the sheep toward her, but it bucked again at the same time and pushed her over. She landed on her bottom in the damp garden soil with the sheep lying on her lap. Off its feet and helpless, the sheep lay still. Mattie narrowed her eyes as she looked back at Jacob, daring him to laugh.
He rubbed his chin, and then beckoned to the little girl. “Margli, take Rosie off with the others. Daed will know where we can pen them for the night.”
Mattie pushed the sheep off her lap, and Margli left, pulling the sheep by the wool around her neck until they were out of the garden and then sending her toward the road with a poke from her rod. Jacob planted one end of his shepherd’s crook in the ground and reached a hand down to help Mattie stand. His brown eyes still held a twinkle as he pulled her toward him.
“You’re one of Eli Schrock’s daughters, aren’t you?”
Mattie reached behind her to brush the dirt off her skirt. “I’m Mattie.” She looked at him again. His eyes hadn’t changed at all. He was still the finest-looking boy she had ever seen. “You’re Jacob. Jacob Yoder.”
His grin widened and the dimple appeared on his left cheek. The dimple that had appealed to her even as a little girl. “You remember me?”
How could she not remember him? Not a day went by that she didn’t think of him. He had been the kindest boy on the Conestoga and had kept the other big boys from teasing the girls with snakes and frogs. She stood straighter. She could feel the blush rising in her cheeks. Now, seven years later, he wasn’t a boy anymore. “Of course I remember you. You and your sisters always played with us. I remember . . .” Her voice lost its strength. He would think she was a silly little girl for remembering him the way she did.
“I remember how you used to hate fishing.” His voice was deeper, without the straining squeaks of the fourteen-year-old he had been when she last saw him. “You hated baiting the hook.”
“No matter what you said, I know it hurt those poor worms.”
“They were going to be eaten when we caught the fish.” Jacob shrugged his shoulders and grinned again. “And you hated taking the fish off the hook too.”
Mattie shuddered, in spite of herself. “And you always laughed at me.”
His brown eyes looked deep into hers. “Because you were always so much fun to tease. And now we’re moving west together.”
A warm feeling spread through Mattie that had nothing to do with the spring sunshine. He continued to watch her, the grin on his face.
“Ja, we are.” She smoothed her wrinkled apron and her hand bumped the sack of seeds. “Ach, Annie’s trellis.”
She turned to the tangled mess and Jacob joined her, sticking the ends of the willow branches into the soft earth and reweaving the tips together.
“Your daed told us your whole family is moving to Indiana.”
“Everyone except my sister Annie and her family.” Mattie felt the ache rising again. If only Annie’s Christopher would agree to go west with them. The decision had created a gulf between Daed and his son-in-law that may never be healed.
Jacob gave the trellis a last firm push into the ground and stood back. “That should hold up as long as our sheep leave it be.”
“Denki.” Mattie took her stick and a handful of peas. She poked another hole, starting again where she had left off before she had been interrupted, and dropped a seed into it. Jacob would need to see to his sheep, and she mustn’t delay him, but he still lingered.
“Hannah is looking forward to getting to know you again.”
“I always had so much fun playing with Hannah and Liesbet.” Mattie dropped another pea. “And Fanny too.” She glanced at Jacob. His face had grown hard.
“Liesbet died in February.”
Mattie clutched the next pea before it could drop. “Ach, ne.” The Yoders had lost another child? First Fanny, Hansli, and baby Catherine that awful winter when she was seven, and now Liesbet. She remembered Liesbet after the diphtheria had struck. She was always pale, never playing with the other children. She had been too weak to walk far, and her daed had always carried her to the Sunday meeting.
“I will miss her.” Mattie had always wished her own brown hair had curled the way Liesbet’s did. That’s what she remembered most, Liesbet’s golden curls flying in the breeze as they played tag around the apple trees at the Yoders’ farm.
Jacob shifted his feet. “I thought you should know.”
Mattie dropped the pea she had been holding into the hole and covered it.
Jacob shifted his crook, but didn’t leave. He watched her drop another pea. She glanced at him again. His face was stony, his eyes focused on the hole she poked for the next seed.
“Margli has grown up since the last time I saw her,” she said. “She was only a baby when we came west to Brothers Valley.”
He looked at her, and then shook himself a little. His mood shifted. “Has it been that long? We have two more brothers, also. Peter and William.”
“It’s a fine thing for you to have brothers.”
He shrugged. “They’re all right. Too little to do anything with, though.”
It must be because he was a man. If she had little brothers, she would dote on them. Henry was fourteen already, and had grown from a little boy into a friend. “Maybe when they’re older and can be a help to you, you’ll like them better.”
“Maybe.” He tapped the ground with his shepherd’s staff. “I have to go help Margli and Peter with the sheep.”
He moved off toward the road, walking with an easy stride, as if he hadn’t just gotten to the end of a long journey.
Mattie dropped another pea into a hole and turned toward the western mountains. Jacob Yoder. She would see those far-off lands with Jacob Yoder. She hugged herself and grinned. All of her dreams were coming true.
The sheep, after moving slow as molasses over the mountains from the time they left home a month ago, now charged down the narrow road between farms as if they knew a few days of rest were ahead of them. Jacob jogged past Peter and Margli, one on each side of the road with their staffs, and caught up with Bitte, the lead sheep. She slowed her pace as he came alongside, her bell’s clanking finally silent as she fell in behind him. The dozen ewes and one ram followed, baaing questions back and forth as they bunched together behind Bitte.
“Here, Jacob.” Daed waved to him from the gate of a fenced pasture ahead. Eli Sch
rock stood with him next to the road, alongside the new wagon that had brought their family from the Conestoga Valley and across the mountains.
Jacob led the sheep into the pasture, green with spring grass. Bitte fell to grazing and the rest of the flock followed. Daed walked among them, patting a woolly side here, lifting a leg there.
“You’ve done a good job, son. Even after that last dash for the pasture, they show no signs of stress.”
Nodding his thanks, Jacob fastened the gate and sent Margli and Peter off with a wave to help set up the camp. They had been good help on the trip, even as young as they were. He dipped a cup of water from the barrel hanging on the side of the wagon and listened to the men’s conversation as he drank.
“Two days’ rest, I think.” Daed stood with his hands clasped behind his back, watching the sheep.
“Will that be enough?” Eli stood at an angle to Daed, his stance identical.
“The animals are all doing well, and I don’t see any reason to wait longer than that, do you, Jacob?”
Jacob straightened his shoulders. He still hadn’t gotten accustomed to Daed asking for his opinion on matters. “Ja, two days.”
“We’ll be ready to go by then.” Eli stroked his beard and looked toward the farmhouse beyond the sheep. “My wife isn’t too happy about leaving, since our daughter Annie and her family are staying here in Brothers Valley. But she’ll need to say farewell, and better sooner than later, in my thinking. Long goodbyes just make it harder to break away at the end.”
“Where should we set up our camp?”
Eli waved his hand beyond the sheep, to a field near the house. “There in the hay meadow. There is good grass for your animals, and plenty of room. Lydia says not to bother with cooking fires. She’ll fix meals for us all in the house.”
Daed nodded. “My Annalise will be happy to see her again. She has missed the friendship since you came to Somerset.”
