by Senft, Adina
Begin Reading
Reading Group Guide
Table of Contents
Copyright Page
For Karolyn Hudson, who inspired this book,
and for Marge Burke, who gave it feet
Acknowledgments
This book would not have come into being without the help of so many people. My editor, Christina Boys, embraced it before it was even born, and her enthusiasm gave it life. My agent, Jennifer Jackson, championed it when it was just an idea. Marge Burke opened doors for me into the Amish community, while her Aunt Joan helped with facts and encouragement. My best friend, Heather Graham, and my sister-in-law Cindy Bates gave me medical knowledge about their experience with MS, including the T-cell treatment using bovine myelin, and fellow writer Karolyn Hudson was the catalyst of the idea when she told me about her struggle with mercury poisoning.
Thank you to Isobel Carr for her knowledge of what it takes to get a quilt pattern into a novel, and to Cathleen Armstrong and Elaine Goldstone for beta-testing the instructions. To my mother, Carol Douglas, for reading the first draft in one sitting and liking it. And to Timons Esaias of Seton Hill University’s M.F.A. in Writing Popular Fiction program, who patiently read many more pages than a mentor should have to, with humor, gravitas, and majestic scorn for the humble colon.
I owe the Amish women of Lancaster County and Smicksburg, Pennsylvania, a huge debt for allowing me into their lives and homes, sometimes only for a moment, so that I could get the details right.
And last but never least, thanks go to my husband, Jeff, who is never without a bookmark in his pocket so he can talk to people about my books. I love you.
But do thou for me, O God the Lord, for thy name’s sake: because thy mercy is good, deliver thou me. For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded within me.
Psalm 109:21–22 (KJV)
Chapter 1
Every piece of fabric held a memory.
Amelia Beiler paused in her sorting of scraps to finger a piece of purple cotton. Sometime last spring in a moment of resolution, she’d cut it up into squares, but she knew every mark. This piece had lain under Enoch’s suspenders—the cotton was worn down to the weft threads and half the dye had rubbed away. It had been his favorite shirt—the one she’d made for him in the weeks before their wedding ten years ago. The collar had never sat properly around his neck, so he couldn’t wear it to church, and the side seams had a maddening way of twisting to his left. But every time he put it on he’d kissed her and said, “You’ve wrapped me in love, Liewi,” and worn it to work in the pallet shop.
She’d learned a thing or two about sewing since then. And about love.
Her lips wobbled and, swallowing hard, she set the scrap aside. It was really only good for the rag bag. But maybe she’d make a quilt just for herself out of such pieces. After all, the things in the rag bag tended to be what you loved the most and wore out, didn’t they? Then she could be wrapped in love, too.
It had been eleven months since the buggy accident had taken him away, but the tears still lived close to the surface where the silliest things would make them well up. The song of the wrens in the trees that woke them on summer mornings. The way his drinking glass still sat next to the kitchen sink, unused, because she always used the glass in the bathroom. His straw hat on the spindle of the rocking chair, as though he’d just hung it there. The wrens still sang and woke her up, and the boys used the glass and the hat, but the fact that Enoch was missing from all of them was enough to make the mourning begin all over again.
Genunk.
She could stand here feeling sorry for herself all day, or she could get all these scraps and squares into her basket and get over to Carrie’s. Because it was Tuesday afternoon, and she, Emma, and Carrie would have two blessed hours all to themselves to plan the next quilt. The boys were in school, the pallet shop would run itself without her—she always left David in charge on Tuesdays, never Aaron—and Emma’s sister-in-law was probably already at the Daadi Haus to spell Emma and give her a bit of a rest from caring for her parents.
Two hours. In that amount of time, you could plan a square, visit and catch up, and remind yourself that you were a woman with a soul that needed feeding.
Amelia laced up her sturdy oxfords—no sneakers on this blustery day on the bare end of October—and wrapped her knitted shawl over her chest, tucking the ends into her black belt apron. She checked that her hair was tucked neatly into her Kapp by habit and that its three straight pins—one on the top and one on each side—were in order by feel. A pan of cinnamon buns and two jars of applesauce went into her carry basket, wrapped in plastic and towels. Then she left the house and let herself out the back gate into the fallow field that separated the last of the five- and ten-acre places on the edge of town from the big farms that spread themselves along Edgeware Road.
The air smelled of wood smoke and crab apples, spiced with the tang of frost. Amelia breathed deeply and set her thoughts on Carrie and Emma and their two hours. If they saw her tear up, they got distressed and fussed with cups of coffee and worried voices. That wasn’t what she wanted for their time together. It was sacred to everything light and good, and she wouldn’t bring a rain shower in with her if she could possibly help it.
Enoch would understand. He had loved a good laugh and the small moments that God gave a person to appreciate His gifts.
Five minutes’ fast walk across the field and a hop across the creek that formed the east boundary of the Stolzfus farm brought her within sight of Emma, who waved from the front porch of the sturdy little Daadi Haus as if she were on a train leaving for Philadelphia. She disappeared inside and a moment later ran out the back as Amelia passed the big farmhouse where Emma’s sister Karen lived with her husband, John, and their young family. Like Amelia, Emma had a shawl wrapped tightly around her and a big bag suspiciously weighted at the bottom with the rounded shapes of canning jars.
“Hallo,” she said as she joined Amelia. “Do you have all your squares ready? I tell you, I’ve been looking forward to this for days. Our quilting frolics are the only good thing about this time of year.”
Amelia opened the access gate between the Stolzfus place and Moses Yoder’s pasture and closed it behind the two of them so they wouldn’t accidentally let his cows out. “The only good thing? I’d think that finishing up a winter’s worth of canned fruit, pickles, and vegetables would be a wonderful gut thing. It took me twice as long this year because of having to run the pallet shop. I had to get the boys to help me wash jars and cut beets and apples—otherwise I’d be standing in front of that stove yet.”
“All right, two good things.”
“And what’s wrong with fall? It’s my favorite season, with all the colors and things slowing down a bit. Well, except for the—” She stopped. “Oh.”
“Ja.” Emma kicked a stone out of their path. “Wedding season.”
The remains of the Yoder cornfield brushed at Amelia’s ankles, sad and brown. “You shouldn’t let it bother you, dear.”
Emma hauled the strap of her tote bag up onto her shoulder. “That’s like telling our creek it shouldn’t run downhill. I am what I am, and I get tired of hearing about it, is all.”
“You make it sound like you’re some kind of strange creature with five legs. There are worse things than staying leddich.” Like being a husbandless mother with two energetic boys and a business to run. Mothering wasn’t the problem—she loved her boys and loved making a home for them. The problem was having to do a man’s work on top of it—work for which she had little training and less talent.
“You haven’t had Bishop Daniel introduce you as ‘the senior single’ lately, then, or you wouldn’t say so.”
Amelia squelched the urge to giggle. She would never hurt Emma by so much as a smile, but—senior single? Daniel Lapp had a gift for saying exactly the wrong thing. This wasn’t the first time she’d wondered if, by letting the lot fall where it had, the Lord was testing him…or the rest of the church.
“You’re right,” she said at last. “That would be a trial. What did you do?”
“What could I do but smile and hope the woman won’t remember me?”
“You might want her to remember you if she has a brother or son in his thirties, with a nice farm.”
“Any man in his thirties with a nice farm was snapped up long ago by some schee Meedel a foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter than me.” Emma walked faster, her eyes on the ground.
“Looks don’t matter, and you know it,” Amelia reminded her. “The Lord gives everyone different gifts. Yours are a loving spirit and giving hands—and a brain that puts mine to shame.”
Emma slowed down enough to slip an arm around Amelia’s shoulders in an awkward hug as they crossed the county road and climbed the last slope. They could just see the green roof of the Miller farmhouse through bare branches.
If only there were a way to make Emma see that neither her looks nor anything else about her had to do with her being single at twenty-nine. She was warm, funny, and brave. Amelia could no more write articles for Family Life or Die Botschaft than sprout wings and fly like a barn swallow, yet Emma picked up her pen and did it. The fact that she signed them “E.S.” didn’t detract from the nerve it took to speak out on everything from the best way to keep cucumber pickles crisp to why dingle-dangles shouldn’t be allowed to hang across the storm fronts of the young men’s buggies.
Carrie must have been watching from the window, because she stepped out onto the porch as they walked into the yard, her face glowing with as much happiness as if she hadn’t just seen them at church at Moses Yoder’s place two days ago. “Willkumm!” she called. “I’ve been waiting for hours, you two.”
“So have we.” Amelia climbed the steps and hugged her. “There’s a lot of hours in a whole summer.”
“Come in, come in.” Carrie showed them into the front room, where she would set up the quilt frame when they had the top pieced. “Help me move the dining table closer to the window. The sun comes in farther now than it does in June.”
“Isn’t Melvin here?” Emma picked up one end and Amelia and Carrie took a corner each.
“No. He had to go to Harrisburg to see about winter work, now that the harvest is in.” She looked away.
Amelia and Emma exchanged a glance and said nothing. No one ever admitted out loud that Melvin’s talents did not include farming. Some men, as Amelia’s Daed said, were born with dirt under their fingernails. And some, like Melvin, just weren’t. Enoch used to casually happen upon Melvin in his fields and offer a helping hand, especially during spring, when equipment inevitably would break down because he’d forgotten to fix it during the winter, or the seed he’d laid in would be moldy, or the horses would get sick and the vet would have to be called out at huge expense.
As a result, he and Carrie were perpetually in debt, and in the slow months he had to go out among the Englisch to find work. Sometimes it would take him from home for a week. Once it had even been a month, when he’d taken the train to his cousin’s away out there in Shipshewana to work at the RV factory installing upholstery. Amelia wondered how Carrie could bear sleeping alone in the house—why she didn’t have one or two of her sisters come and stay with her when Melvin was gone. At least Amelia had the boys to give her home that lived-in feeling. Otherwise the rooms would echo with Enoch’s absence and reduce her to hiding under a quilt in his reading chair, rocking and rocking as she prayed for strength.
Carrie adjusted the hand-me-down table until it lay in a square of sunlight, then clasped her hands with sheer pleasure, like a girl. “There. Now we can get started.” One thing about Carrie—she might not have much, but at least she had the gift of joy. Their fields might be seas of mud, her washing machine on the fritz, and her cupboards bare of nearly everything for Kaffi save for what Amelia and Emma had brought, but her happiness at their mere presence was enough to fill the room.
“So,” Emma said, laying out two-and-a-half-inch squares in neat stacks, ordered by color, “have we decided on the piecing? Should we do a twenty-five-square Irish Chain again, like last year? That one was fun.”
Amelia pulled out the pile of squares she’d been cutting and hoarding all year and reached over to put them next to Emma’s. Without warning, her hand went numb and she dropped the whole thing, squares fluttering to the floor like a drift of leaves after a blast of wind.
She made a rude noise with her tongue and rubbed the circulation back into her wrist. Then she bent to gather the fabric. “Do we have enough shades of lights and darks?” she said from under the table. “We could do a Crosses and Losses, with wide borders. I’d like to try that new style of feathers, where they have them winding around a column in the middle. It’s so pretty.”
She surfaced to see Carrie looking a little doubtful. “It wouldn’t be too grossmeenich of us to do that, would it? I wouldn’t want anyone saying we were showing off.”
“It’s not like we’re entering it in the county fair to try to win a ribbon,” Amelia pointed out. “That would be showing off. This is just for us.” She lifted her eyebrows, just a fraction.
Carrie said hastily, “Of course. Or maybe we could send it in to the quilt auction in Strasburg next September when they do the big fund-raiser. I like Crosses and Losses. It reminds me of flocks of butterflies.”
Emma nodded, unaware that Amelia had nearly given the game away. What Emma didn’t know was that she and Carrie had decided on Sunday after church that this winter’s quilt would be a wedding present for Emma, should that happy day ever come. Quilting the beautiful feathered borders in the new style would be the perfect way to celebrate the beauty of their friendship as well as whatever skill God had put in the fingers of the three of them. Emma would take their friendship into her new life, covering her when times got hard and nights were cold.
Now if only the good Gott would put His infinite mind to providing her with a husband.
While Emma and Carrie nattered about whether the bigger pieces should be darker and the small triangles out of multicolored scraps, or the other way around, Amelia rubbed her hand. Had she pinched a nerve somehow with all that canning? Her middle and fourth fingers were still prickling as if they had pins and needles, but at least now they would bend.
Maybe she should check with Mamm about a remedy for circulation. She’d better do it in the evening, though, and take the boys with her. If she went over on a morning, Mamm would be so delighted that she was actually consulting her about something, she was likely to keep her there all day.
By the end of the first hour, they’d managed to come to some decisions. “I like a quilt that means something,” Emma said firmly. “The quilt should say something about the crosses with its lights and darks.”
Since it was to be her quilt, Carrie and Amelia nodded. “There are so many choices, though,” Carrie said. “What can we say with the colors we have?”
Did Englisch women think about these things when they pieced their quilts? Surely they must. The messages in the patterns were half the fun, even if the recipient never knew. The quilter kept her counsel and let her fabric speak for her. Tradition said, for instance, that the center square in a Log Cabin should be red, to signify the fire in the cabin’s hearth. With a Sunshine and Shadow, you started with light colors in the middle, to signify the light of God in the center of life. And the—
Fire. Light. Wait. “Meine Freundin, what if we . . . hmm . . . ”
Carrie grinned at Emma. “Uh-oh. Amelia’s had a brain wave.”
Amelia began to lay out squares on the table, folding most of them in half to model the triangles of the pattern. Her heart picked up its pace, like a horse sens
ing that it was close to home. “What if we shaded the colors from bottom to top? Look.” The quilt block grew, and she began another. “In each block we can shade the colors from dark to light, which would shade each row from dark to light. The whole pattern would look like a gradual sunrise, you see?”
Emma snatched up the colorful pile of squares. “You mean like this?”
Amelia could hardly contain herself as Emma’s quick eye took in the lay of her squares and triangles and began duplicating it from the other side of the table. This was the part of quilting she loved most—the creation of patterns, the realizing of order from the chaos of bits of memory, all coalescing into a single object of beauty that spoke louder than its individual parts. Something that was utterly practical and yet as unique and lovely as the women who created it.
Carrie fetched a piece of paper and a pencil and sketched the layout as it formed. One time they’d made a new design and tried to rely on memory as they pieced it. That hadn’t turned out so well—especially when Amelia brought in her squares and discovered she’d put the whole thing together backward. After that, Carrie usually made a sketch to guide them later, when the thrill of the initial creation had worn off.
“There.” Carrie ran a critical eye between sketch and table, then handed the paper to Amelia. “Why don’t I make coffee while you look this over? Then if you want to change anything, you can.”
Emma got up and rooted in her bag and Amelia’s basket, unobtrusively putting jars on the counter as if she meant to open every one and serve up a feast. Then, in the fuss of leaving, she would accidentally on purpose forget to put them back in, and Carrie would have some beautiful golden peaches to offer her husband when he came home from Harrisburg. By the time the coffee had perked and Carrie had served the cinnamon rolls, applesauce, and Emma’s chocolate whoopie pies, Amelia had made a few tiny changes to the design and added its borders.
