by Senft, Adina
Amelia dropped her gaze to her seams and pumped the treadle. In comparison to Lena Stolzfus, right now she didn’t have much to complain about. She could get into town and work. She could still cook, though they weren’t eating so many vegetables that had to be cut up fine, like cabbage, and she was teaching the boys to help with meals. They liked helping with that part, egging each other on to see who could cut his carrot the fastest. If their root vegetables looked lopsided, she didn’t care—they all went down the same way.
“Amelia,” Carrie said slowly, “getting back to Melvin leaving…Would you ever consider—I know this is an imposition, but do you think…What if you found a place for him in the shop over the winter?”
The needle stopped halfway through a stitch. “Melvin?” In her shop? Could the man even handle a hammer, much less an air nailer?
“It would be such a gift to me if he didn’t have to go so far away at Christmas.” Carrie’s words picked up speed, as if she were hurrying to convince Amelia before she could say no. “And I know he could do the work—he repaired the porch here, and that’s pretty straightforward, like pallets.”
This probably wasn’t a good time to point out that the porch boards curled up on the ends because he’d nailed the green wood camber up instead of down. She had to watch her step every time she came over or she’d stub a toe.
She couldn’t hire Melvin. But neither did she have the heart to quench the hope that shone in Carrie’s eyes. “I already have the two boys on the payroll,” she said as gently as she could. “I’m not sure I could afford to take on another man.”
“But haven’t you told us fifty times that Aaron King doesn’t pull his weight? If you let him go and hired Melvin, he could do the work of two men. And you’d have someone trustworthy there on the days I took you to the doctor.”
Behind the sewing machine, Amelia winced. When had Carrie developed the ability to use guilt like that? Because how could she ask Carrie to help her when she stood by and did nothing to keep Carrie’s husband at home?
She didn’t know what to say, and Emma was sorting fabric with such attention it was obvious she wanted to stay out of the conversation. “I don’t know,” she said at last, sounding lame even to herself. “I’ll have to pray about it, ja ?”
“I’m doing enough praying for the two of us,” Carrie said quietly.
Oh, dear. If she refused, would it damage their friendship? Do so much harm that she would lose the woman she looked on as a sister—as much or more than her own sisters? Because you couldn’t choose your family, but she, Emma, and Carrie had chosen one another as friends way back in the schoolroom.
“Let me talk to Aaron, all right?” It would only delay the inevitable, but at least it would give her some time to find the right words. Words that wouldn’t hurt. Or divide.
Carrie let out a breath, as if she’d been holding it. “Of course. Maybe Aaron wants a reason to quit anyway. One of my brothers used to do that—be so slow or so sloppy that my dad would finally elbow him out of the way and do it himself.”
“Maybe.” Amelia didn’t think that was the case. Aaron’s parents might have bought him his new buggy, but all those fancy additions still had to be paid for, and Aaron took money very seriously.
If Melvin came to work for her, how would that be? Teenage boys were one thing—they hadn’t quite gotten out of the habit of obeying their parents and saw her as a mother whose bidding they still had to do. But a full-grown man? How would he like taking instructions and orders from a woman—particularly one he was used to seeing chattering and laughing in the kitchen with his wife? How would he react when she showed him how to work the air compressor? Would he want to change how Enoch had done things?
Oh, dear, oh, dear. This was why God made the worlds of men and women separate. Each had their own work, and each grew up learning what to do. How these Englisch women in big companies maintained their authority over the men who worked for them was an utter mystery.
Emma glanced at the sky and began to pack up her fabric. “We’d better start for home, Amelia, or we’re going to get wet. And just between the three of us, I’d rather not be here when Aleta gets back from the Lapps’. I hardly know what to say to her.”
For the first time that Amelia could remember, she was glad to get out of Carrie’s house. As soon as they left the lane and were in the quiet of Moses Yoder’s field, Amelia spoke.
“Do you think I should do it, Emma?”
“What, hire Melvin?” She glanced at Amelia. “I saw how uncomfortable you were. Do you think you could stand to have him around?”
“I’d have to watch him every second, and I don't have time for that.”
“David would be with him, though. He can show him the ropes.”
“Sure he can—at first. But Melvin’s a grown man. Will he take kindly to being managed by a boy? Or a woman?”
“If he has the spirit of a lamb, he will.”
“A lamb who’s all thumbs.”
Emma laughed. “Look at it this way—he can’t be worse than Aaron, can he? At least you’d know he was dependable and not running off to band hops on Fridays without telling you.”
That was true. “So you think I should do it?”
“I think Carrie needs one good thing to happen.” She glanced over toward the road, as if making sure Aleta’s buggy was nowhere in sight. “If it’s in your power to give her that, you might think about it.”
Hadn’t she just been thinking of all the things she had no power over? Now here was one thing that God had dropped into her lap, and she was pushing it away with both hands.
“I’ll talk it over with Daed. And Aaron. To be fair, I have to speak with him first.”
“Of course. And if he—”
“Emma!” On the other side of the field, they saw Karen, her skirts hiked up in both hands, running toward them.
“Oh, no,” Emma breathed. She broke into a run.
“Emma, it’s Pap!” Karen called when she was close enough. Her chest heaved, and her Kapp had slipped sideways. And were those leaves caught in her hair? “He’s wandered off again and none of us can find him!”
Chapter 7
Where was the last place you saw him?”
They were gathered at the Daadi Haus where Emma lived with her parents, separated by the lane with its double row of poplars from the big farm now run by Karen and her husband, John.
“Right here on the back porch,” Lena Stolzfus said from the rocking chair, bundled up against the weather, her voice trembling with age and fear. “He was right here, looking out over the yard, and then he wasn’t.” Four of her grandchildren, all under twelve, clung to her chair anxiously.
“Looking out where?” Emma asked. “Which direction?”
Lena gazed past her, as if to recall her husband’s figure silhouetted against the gray skies, and met her daughter’s gaze once more. “I don’t know. Just out. And he was in his shirtsleeves. He didn’t even have a coat.”
“All right.” Karen’s John shrugged on a heavy coat and took charge. “I’ll take the buggy and young Phil and go a mile in either direction on the road. Emma, you and Karen take the younger kids and walk our fields. And, Amelia, if you wouldn’t mind, could you walk Moses Yoder’s fields between our place and yours?”
That would cover all four directions. Amelia nodded and squeezed Emma’s hand. The latter looked as though she were about to cry. No matter how bitter she got, underneath it all she loved her dad and couldn’t bear to think of him coming to himself out there all alone, not knowing where home lay.
“We’ll find him. How will we let each other know?”
“Bring him back here to Mamm, then run over to the farmhouse and hit the dinner gong hard,” Karen said.
“Everybody take an umbrella,” Lena said. “It’s raining already.”
They scattered, umbrellas bobbing away over the lane and into the fields. Amelia wished she could have gone with Emma, but time was in short supply if they were
to find Victor Stolzfus before he slipped in the mud and hurt himself or got a chill from being out in the wet with no coat.
Once she left the well-worn path over the fields between her place and Emma’s, the going was difficult. Amelia’s shoes sank into the soft ground, which had been roiled into ridges by the harvester’s wheels a month earlier. She struggled up the slope to the highest point and, breathing hard, tipped her umbrella back to see through the driving rain and the bluish mist that seemed to rise off the ground as the day cooled into late afternoon.
Nothing moved except a flock of crows in a stand of hawthorn bushes. She turned in the other direction and, away at the bottom of the field where it butted against the highway, caught a flash not of movement but of light. Blue, then red, over and over, dancing behind the trees that lined the road.
A police car.
Amelia’s heart kicked into a gallop. A police car plus a missing man added up to nothing good. They were half a mile away, but she didn’t hesitate. She dashed into Moses Yoder’s barn and found him hitching up his buggy.
“Why, Amelia Beiler!” he exclaimed. “Was tut Sie hier?”
“Victor Stolzfus is missing,” she gasped out. “And there’s a police car out on the highway with its lights flashing. Can you take me down there?”
“Amelia…don’t jump to conclusions.”
“Please, Moses. Just to make sure it’s not— And with the rain—”
He nodded, his movements crisp and efficient as he finished with the straps. “Get in.”
Five minutes later—far less time than it would have taken her to run across half a mile of mud—Moses wrapped the reins around his hands and pulled up the horse behind the police car. By this time another had joined it, and there was a third car, too—sitting catawampus across the shoulder with a broken windshield. A man with slumped shoulders was talking in jerky sentences to one of the policemen, off to the side. Something lay still on the ground, with an orange tarpaulin over it. The only sounds were the squawk of the radio in the police car, the voices of the men, and the patter-patter-patter of rain on the tarp.
“Moses—” Amelia grasped his left arm with damp fingers and her throat closed. “Can you ask them…ask if…”
Even as she spoke, an ambulance flew over the top of the hill and skidded to a stop between the police cars. The flashing lights were giving her a headache, and she squinted, turning the deep brim of her black “away” bonnet to block out the jittery lights. Two men in paramedics’ uniforms jumped out, and one ran to the tarp while the other stopped to talk to two more policemen. One of them finally turned toward the buggy, rain dripping off the visor of his cap.
“Folks, turn around and take the next road east, please. This is an accident scene. We’re not letting any traffic through.”
“What happened here?” Moses asked, leaning out of the buggy.
“It’s under investigation, sir. Please turn around.”
“One of our people is missing.” Moses sounded as calm as a pond on a summer day. “We have a concern that he might have come to some harm.”
“What do you mean, ‘missing’?” The cop’s eyes narrowed.
“He is old and has the…the…” Moses looked at Amelia.
“Alzheimer’s,” she whispered.
“He has the old timer’s disease. He forgets where he is, and he wanders off.”
“Can you describe the man?”
“Sure. He is Victor Stolzfus. He had his seventy-sixth birthday in August, and he lives on his son-in-law John’s place about half a mile up that way.” Moses pointed.
The cop looked to his partner as if seeking advice, and in the silence Amelia heard the Englisch man on the side of the road say, “I’m telling you, he just walked out in front of me, didn’t look or anything. This is a county road, I was doing fifty at least, and in the rain…I tried to swerve, and next thing I knew, he was flying over the hood and there’s glass everywhere.”
“May I look at this man?” Moses Yoder asked quietly. “If it is our friend, someone will have to tell his family.”
The policeman hesitated. “It’s for the family to identify him, down at the morgue. I don’t think—”
His partner lifted a hand and nodded toward the buggy. “It’s the Amish,” he said in a low voice. “You gotta be flexible with them.” Moses took that as permission and got out. Biting her lips together to keep them from trembling, Amelia looked down at her hands, studying them instead of what lay under the tarp. Less than a minute later, the buggy tilted under Moses’s wiry weight.
He sighed. Picked up the reins. Turned the horse around. Only then did he answer the question in her gaze. “Victor and I have been friends for sixty years. Better Lena should hear it from me than the Englisch policeman.”
Amelia nodded, her heart weighing like a stone in her chest. It was so like Moses to put Lena before himself—he probably wouldn’t even allow himself to grieve until the day was over and he’d gone out to be alone in his barn. Emma would be just the same, seeing to everyone and everything before herself. But where would she go to grieve?
Oh, Emma.
Amelia gazed straight ahead over the horse’s back, seeing nothing through the rain that ran untrammeled down the glass storm front of the buggy.
The Stolzfus clan scheduled the funeral for Saturday, and Thanksgiving became a quiet celebration of Victor’s life. Lena even shooed her daughter Katherine and her husband off to the wedding they’d been invited to. “Death, marriage, and birth are part of life,” Lena told them. “They go on with or without us, all part of God’s will.”
Amelia marveled at Lena’s spirit of acceptance—deep in her own heart, where no one except God could see it, she still hadn’t accepted Enoch’s death, and it would be a year on Sunday. But Lena just shook her head. “I’ve had a good many years to prepare myself. And he’s in a better place—with his right mind and with his Savior. I couldn’t ask for better gifts for the man I love.”
Such a full, sweet spirit in a body that was so frail you could practically see through it.
Amelia wished that Emma could share some of her mother’s spirit, because she looked positively haggard in her funeral black. As the long line of buggies rolled slowly down the highway out to the cemetery, the horses’ hooves a slow clop and the wheels shushing them on the wet pavement, Emma let Matthew take the reins. She had offered to drive Emma and Lena, but the enormous Stolzfus connection had swept all the arrangements before it and had hardly left mere friends a corner to serve in.
Which, she supposed, was the way it should be. Family came first—though in her most private thoughts she reckoned that Emma would have been more grateful for the family’s help in the ordinary day-to-day care of her father than she was now, where every moment was dictated by tradition and everyone knew what to do.
When you were on your own and the mental disintegration of the parent you loved produced a different kind of crisis every week, even one of those casseroles lined up on the tables and stacked on the kitchen counter in the big house would have been a gift from God.
But it was done now, and all that was left was the grieving—and, after that, the missing.
The turn into the cemetery was coming up, and the buggies had all slowed to a creep. “I’ll take the lines now,” she said to Matthew.
“I can do it, Mamm.” He sat straight on the bench, every muscle in his little body behind the reins, sensitive to every movement of the horse. “I see the turn up there. Daed taught me. I’ll show you.”
Her instincts, long trained to hold back, to keep close, to prevent, urged her to take the reins from his hands. But in her memory she heard Enoch laughing as he walked beside Daadi’s pony cart. “That’s the way, Matthew. Hold him back. Show him who’s boss. You don’t want him running away with you—and I don’t want to go chasing you down the lane and plotz in a puddle.”
She nodded and sat back. “Gut, then. You show me.”
She needn’t have worried. The procession
was moving so slowly that the turn between the stone walls of the cemetery might as well have been a straightaway on an open road, so easy to manage it was. She didn’t have to take over until they approached the hitching rail, and even then he jumped out to loop the reins over it.
“Well done, Schatzi,” she said, resisting the urge to give him a big hug. He was turning into a young man so quickly—and besides, a group of his friends had gathered to watch him drive, their eyes huge under their black hats. It would never do for her to treat him like little Elam in front of an audience.
She kept both boys next to her at the gravesite. There would be no running around as there would at a wedding. And anyway, between the rain and the solemnity in the crowd, the boys seemed to be content to stay close, sheltering under the big umbrella. How could it not bring back memories of Enoch’s funeral? They had stood one row over, under that big pine, and listened to the bishop pray, just as he was doing now. They had held hands then, though, Amelia clinging to her boys as though they were life rafts and she a drowning swimmer. Elam was content to hold on to her skirt and press close now, but Matthew stood beside her, not touching, his back straight and his face solemn.
Ach, they grew up so fast. Before she could turn around, they would be going on Rumspringe and badgering her for buggies of their own.
When the last hymn had been sung, the crowd moved and scattered. Since she was standing near the back, it was no trouble to walk the few steps to Enoch’s grave. Simple and unadorned, it carried only his name and the dates of birth and death.
“Thirty-two years, a month, and seventeen days,” Matthew said. “That’s what you get if you subtract the first date from the second.”
There were trees not ten feet away that had lived longer than her husband. “So short a span to be born, grow up, get married, and have you two, isn’t it?”
