by Senft, Adina
“This will be a good one,” she said, tucking it into her basket. “The whole quilt will show the sunrise of our hope in the cross, won’t it?” She caught Carrie’s eye, and she nodded in satisfaction at a good afternoon’s work. “I’ll draw copies and get them to you after the Council Meeting on Sunday. Oh, speaking of patterns, I got a circle letter from Katie Yoder up in Lebanon.”
“And how is she?” Emma wanted to know. “Does she have any news for us? She said in her last that she was making a baby quilt. If that wasn’t a hint, I don’t know what would be.”
Amelia pulled the bundle of letters from all the girls in their old buddy bunch who were avid quilters. At this time of year, the circle letters went around at twice their usual speed as the women shared what they were working on or traded patterns. “You can read it. I brought them to save a stamp. Mine’s already in there.”
Emma retrieved Katie’s letter and read it in less than a minute. Amelia didn’t see how she could do that. It took her nearly a week to read a packet of letters. When Emma got them, she probably read every one of them, wrote hers, and sent the packet on, all in the same day.
“I knew it!” Emma exclaimed. “She had a boy. I hope she went with green borders instead of yellow.” She looked up at a sound like the mew of a newborn kitten. “Carrie? Are you all right?”
“I’d be happy with any kind of border,” Carrie said quietly. Her cheeks had gone bright red, which made her blond hair look even paler. She blinked, the long lashes that Amelia had often envied becoming slightly wet and spiky with tears.
Emma looked as though she wanted to slap herself. “Oh, dear heart, I’m so sorry. I’m a thoughtless idiot. Of all things to bring up. I didn’t mean to hurt you, honest I didn’t.” She reached across and covered Carrie’s hand with her own.
Carrie turned her palm over and returned the squeeze. “I know,” she whispered. “Most of the time, I have enough to do that I don’t think about it. But when Melvin is gone and it’s so silent in the house…” She took a deep breath and let it out with only a little bit of a hitch. “That’s when it gets to me. At least if I had babies, they’d keep me busy. I’d even welcome crying and fussing, because then I couldn’t hear the silence.”
“Don’t be too quick to wish for that,” Amelia said wryly. But deep inside, Carrie’s words lodged in her heart. Hadn’t she just been thinking that very thing?
“But I do. A crying baby would give me someone to hold, you see.”
Amelia swallowed. “Babies take clothes and diapers and immunizations. Maybe it’s God’s will to keep that blessing to Himself for now, until you and Melvin can afford it.”
Carrie bent her head as though there were something fascinating in her coffee cup, and she nodded. No one said it, but Amelia knew perfectly well Carrie would give up what little she had if she could only have a baby. When a woman was twenty-eight and had been married for ten years, the fact that babies didn’t come only looked stranger with every passing month.
“My mother-in-law was here yesterday,” Carrie said in a tone so low that Amelia was glad for the silence in the house—otherwise she would not have heard her.
“All that way and back in one day?” Emma asked in amazement. “Doesn’t she live in Intercourse?”
Carrie nodded. “She didn’t go back. She’s visiting the Daniel Lapps. Mary Lapp is her sister, you know.”
“Right. And Mandy’s getting married next week. The first Tuesday in November.” Emma sounded perfectly calm. You’d never know what it cost her to say it—seeing that Mandy Lapp was barely nineteen.
“Did you have a nice visit?” Amelia didn’t know Aleta Miller very well, except to nod hello to in church when she came down. “I imagine she’s coming to help with the wedding.”
“She wasn’t here about the wedding,” Carrie said. “Or not entirely. She had time for a…very personal visit.”
“How personal, exactly?” Amelia said slowly. This didn’t sound good.
“She wanted to know if…if everything was all right between Melvin and me. If we were…having marital…relations.”
The clock in the kitchen ticked five times while Emma and Amelia tried to think of something more helpful to say than, That nosy old biddy—what business is it of hers?
“What did you say?” Amelia finally managed. She could sort of understand one’s own mother asking such a question. Hers had had plenty to say about Matthew’s leisurely arrival—as though a two-year wait to see a grandchild was more than a woman should have to endure. But to have your mother-in-law, whom you saw only a handful of times a year, come from twenty miles away to ask such a thing?
When Carrie looked up, the tears had dried, leaving tracks on her cheeks. “I’ll have to write her a letter asking forgiveness.”
“Oh, my,” Emma said. “As bad as that?”
Carrie nodded. “You know how you take it and smile and take some more?” Emma shifted in her ladder-back chair, but Carrie went on without pausing, as if she’d waited so long for this chance to talk that she couldn’t wait another moment to get it out. “You walk past your Mamm’s buddies and they put their heads together when you’re out of earshot, and you just ignore it? Well, by the time Aleta got to our door, I was about full up, and when she opened her mouth and said it straight out, not even trying to put it gently or work around to the subject over coffee, it all came pouring out of me. Like she’d lanced a big, ugly boil and neither of us had a bandage ready.”
Amelia could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d seen Carrie angry. Aleta must have hurt her deeply to put this white, strained expression on her pretty face.
“I guess she won’t be staying here while she’s helping with the wedding, then?”
“Melvin would never understand if she didn’t. Which is why I have to write this afternoon, or hitch up the buggy and go over there to invite her back. Not only that, I wouldn’t be at peace in Council Meeting on Sunday. You know they’re going to talk about forgiveness.”
At least she would have peaches to eat with her humble pie tonight. Poor Carrie.
“She wouldn’t tell Melvin what you said to each other, would she?”
“I hope not. I have to smooth it over before he comes home Friday. If she’s here and still offended at me, then I’ll have to tell him what I said to cause it. And I just can’t bring myself to do that. He loves his mother, and it would hurt him to know I spoke to her that way.”
“She spoke to you that way,” Emma pointed out.
“I know, but I shouldn’t have given it back. Most of the time we get on fairly well, but children are a sore spot with both of us.”
“Doesn’t Melvin have brothers and sisters with lots of babies for her?”
Melvin and Carrie had met at a band hop when they were both on Rumspringe, when kids came from as far as fifty miles away to dance and drink and watch each other do what was forbidden at home. It wasn’t as though he’d grown up in Whinburg and they’d known his family all their lives. He’d moved here and bought this farm so Carrie would be close to her family. Melvin probably thought he was making a sacrifice for the woman he loved, but in Amelia’s mind God knew what He was doing separating Carrie from her mother-in-law.
Except there were separations of distance and separations of emotion. If Carrie didn’t close the gap in the latter, it would widen until she’d need more than a trip of twenty miles to heal it. And then how would she be able to take part in Communion next month with a good conscience?
“He does—four brothers and two sisters, and all but the youngest boy are married and having families.” Carrie reached over to collect Amelia’s empty dessert plate. “That’s why I don’t understand why she cares so much.”
“Maybe he’s her favorite,” Emma suggested. “My sister Karen is Pap’s favorite, and all of us know it.”
“I wish Karen would come visit your folks more often.” Carrie changed the subject so smoothly and sympathetically that Amelia almost missed it
. “She’s only on the other side of the lane. It would give you a break.”
“I do, too,” Emma admitted, making the conversational sacrifice for Carrie. It was clear the latter didn’t want to talk anymore about her differences with Aleta, and if that meant that Emma now had to bear the burden of talking about what hurt her, she would do it. “But you know…she’s busy with her own family and running our place.”
“What about Katherine? She could come for a week and let you get away,” Carrie said. “She only has the three girls, and the oldest must be ten. Old enough to help with her grandmother.”
Amelia buttoned her lip. Only a childless woman would think that three kids under ten would be any help at all in the sickroom after the first hour’s novelty had worn off. Not that Emma’s father was in a sickroom. But if he got much farther than the barn, he would forget where he was and Emma and her mother would have to go out looking along the roads to fetch him back.
“Mamm would love to see them,” Emma went on calmly, “but it’s not so easy to get away, I guess.”
Carrie was a born organizer, especially when she was organizing other people. “But if each family came for a week out of a month, or took your parents into their homes for a month at a time, you’d have only a few months when you were left to do it completely alone.”
Emma shook her head and put a kettle of water on to boil for the dishes. “It wouldn’t be fair to Mamm and Pap to be ferried all around the country. Pap has a hard enough time remembering where he is on a place he’s lived all his life. How would he manage over in Strasburg with Katherine, or way out in New Hope with Jonas? He’d be upset every minute, and he’d set off down the road to come home not even knowing what direction he was going. It would just be too hard.”
“Hmm.” Carrie took the dishcloth from Emma’s hand and gave her a towel instead. “I’ll wash, you dry. It just doesn’t seem fair, that’s all, you stuck in the Daadi Haus caring for your folks with no relief.”
“I like how you said that. Caring.” Emma’s voice held the gentlest of reproaches. “I love them. It’s not a burden, not really. Karen comes on Tuesdays so the three of us can have our frolic, and she and John help on Sundays at church, so someone’s sitting with Pap on the men’s side. And everyone helps clean when church is at our place, so that’s no burden either.”
She made it sound so reasonable. So straightforward. And maybe she needed it to sound that way, so she could go home again and stay for love, not because God, for reasons of His own, had put rocks in any other path that might be open to her.
Amelia suspected that it wasn’t only God who expected Emma to stay home and care for her parents. Everyone did. She was the last remaining unmarried daughter, and had been for enough years that people took it for granted there would be no more courting buggies pulling up in the Stolzfus lane. To everything there was a season, and in the minds of most people in the district Emma’s season was past.
There had to be more to a woman’s life than that. As she and Emma walked home the way they had come, Amelia pulled up a long stalk of dried grass, its head heavy with seed, and used it as a switch.
There just had to be.
Chapter 2
On Wednesday morning the pallet shop opened at nine o’clock. This meant that Amelia got up at six to cook breakfast for the boys. After they ate together, she made their lunches—sausage rolls, fruit, a small jar of homemade apple juice, and a whoopie pie apiece—and packed them in the roomy outer pocket of their backpacks.
“Mamm, I can’t find my geography book, and we have to know the capitals of all the states today,” eight-year-old Matthew wailed.
“Don’t you know them without the book?” Amelia sounded as exasperated as she felt.
“I wanted to look at the map again.” Matthew’s lower lip trembled. “Miss Hannah said if we got them all right, we could have double recess.”
A mad search through the house found the book on the back porch, acting as the roof of a barn for six-year-old Elam’s carved animals. Thank goodness it had not rained in the night.
She walked the boys, pushing and shoving each other, to the end of their lane and saw them off on their walk to the schoolhouse half a mile away in the company of the other children from neighboring places. Matthew quit fussing with his brother about the book when they got onto the road, the mantle of responsibility falling on his shoulders like Elijah’s cloak. He would see little Elam safely into the school yard no matter what, even if he pushed him into a group of pinafore-clad little girls the second he was inside the gate. And then, after school, they would walk to Daadi and Mammi’s and stay there until Amelia came to collect them after work.
How proud she was of Matthew, she thought, turning back down the lane. He was like Enoch that way—serious one minute and pulling a prank on someone the next. Fortunately for both of them, the pranks were never serious or harmful. Short-sheeting some poor newlyweds’ new bed had been more along Enoch’s line. Nothing like the things she heard went on up north, where a couple had come out of their house the day after their wedding to find their brand-new gas-powered washing machine up on the roof of the barn. It had taken a team of six men and an arrangement of ropes and pulleys to get it down again.
Amelia packed her own lunch pail just the way she’d once packed Enoch’s. In fact, it was Enoch’s. Years ago she’d read articles in Family Life deploring the necessity for the lunch pail—which to everyone was the symbol of men leaving the farm to go to work. Their family farms had been split among sons until they couldn’t be split any further and still yield enough to live on. Enoch had been one of those. The third son, he’d known that the farm wouldn’t come to him. So he’d started up the pallet shop in part of his father’s barn. When it had become successful, he’d moved it to a shed on the edge of town, and when he’d earned enough to buy this place, he’d asked her to marry him. They’d been talking about building a shed right here, close to the road, and moving the shop into it when the accident had taken away their future.
Now she walked the two miles into town. Sometimes, if she timed it just right, she could get on the bus when it stopped near the phone shanty on Edgeware Road. And sometimes someone would give her a lift, especially in the winter. But mostly she walked.
She closed the lunch pail and reached for the latches. Her fingers fumbled, going numb and wobbly.
“Not again.” For a few seconds, she rubbed her arms briskly, up and down. It had worked yesterday. This time her forefinger decided to behave, and she flipped the latch into place, locking it down with her thumb. Again the third and fourth fingers refused to do anything but prickle. “Well, goodness me.” She didn’t have time to worry about such nonsense. After shaking her hand as though to dry it, she draped her shawl over her coat and headed off down the lane, walking briskly to ward off the autumn chill.
At the shop she found Aaron King already there, lounging against the door in his Englisch clothes.
“Morning, Amelia.”
“Guder Mariye, Aaron.” Hoping to make a point, she didn’t return his greeting in English. He slouched into the front office after she unlocked the door, and instead of picking up the small landslide of mail the door had pushed along the linoleum or going straight into the back to start work, he hung around the desk, tapping a stack of business cards until all their edges lined up.
Amelia slid her lunch pail into the cubbyhole under the desk and picked up the mail herself. “Is there something you wanted?” She sat at the desk to fan through it. Bill, bill, order, bill.
“My dad needs me to go up to Bird-in-Hand with him. So I thought I should tell you before we left.”
She looked up from the mail in slow motion. “When are you going?”
“Today. Soon as I can get home, probably.”
“Today? Did you finish the order of a hundred for that seed company yesterday?”
“No, there’s still some left to go.”
She would not let him leave her in the lurch again. “Then
I suggest you get back there and finish them.”
“But—”
“In the time you’ve stood here working up the nerve to tell me about it, you could have had one made.”
“But my dad said—”
“Your dad doesn’t sign your paycheck. So if you want one of those, you’ll finish the order.” She’d never seen him look so flummoxed, his eyes wide under his dishwater-blond brush of hair. “Now, Aaron.”
With a mumble that she was just as glad not to have heard clearly, he fled into the back. Soon she heard the sound of the air nailer going at about three times the rate it usually did.
That would take care of the seed company’s order, but it didn’t do a thing for the rest of today’s work. Building pallets didn’t exactly tax the mind, but it was hard labor—and it looked like today she’d be using that nailer herself if she wanted to put a dent in the orders hanging in their metal pockets on the other side of the wall.
Be thankful you have them. Imagine how much worse it would be if there were no orders at all. How would she put food on the table for the boys? Or pay the mortgage? She’d have to move back to the farm with Mamm and Daed. …No, no. Better to build pallets with her own hands and have a home of her own, even if it did echo when she was alone in it.
Absorbed in sorting receivables and payables, and wishing she’d paid more attention in mathematics back in her days as a scholar, it took a while for her to realize that the pneumatic whacks of the air nailer had stopped. She stepped into the back and looked around. Lumber, stacks of finished pallets, the hoist, the pallet jack. Tools, neatly replaced on the wall. The air nailer, lying abandoned on the concrete floor next to a trio of studs, its hose snaking over to the gas-powered compressor.
“Aaron?”
Hands on hips, she blew out a long breath, then turned to count the pallets in the stack. Eighty-one. The order had been for an even hundred, so she could assume that number eighty-two consisted of those studs. And the truck was supposed to come today.
“Oh, you are in so much trouble, young man.”
