With Winter's First Frost

by Kelly Irvin

  “We need water!” Zechariah shouted. “Get buckets of water. The flue is on fire.”

  No time for anything. No time to think. Gott, save this house. The kinner. The boplin. Gott? The kitchen seemed a million miles away. Water, too far away. Laura grabbed a blanket from the sofa. Everything slowed to a nightmarish pace. Her legs and arms didn’t want to cooperate. Faster, faster. The young, agile woman inside her screamed in frustration. Move, move. You have to move. She stumbled forward.

  Ben’s big body cut her off.

  “Get back, get back!” He grabbed something that looked like a paper-covered log and shoved Zechariah aside. Zechariah fell back and caught himself with one arm. Ben removed a cap, scratched a black button with the cap, and dropped it inside the fireplace alongside the fire. In seconds that lasted a hundred years, the fire subsided, its snarls gone.

  Life snapped back into place. Laura would make supper. The kinner would bicker. The babies would cry and Rosalie would shush them.

  Miraculous? Or simply quick thinking? No matter. Zechariah was safe. They were all safe.

  Danki, Gott. Laura brushed away thoughts of what might have happened and dashed forward. Her traitorous body cooperated now without a hint of mutiny.

  She knelt next to Zechariah. Black ashes smudged his hands and face. Red patches of burned skin marred one cheek, his forehead, a spot on his bald head, and both hands. He smelled of singed hair and burned cotton. “Ach. You’re burned. You’re hurt.”

  “I’m fine. I don’t know what happened.” The smoke roughened Zechariah’s voice, making him sound as if he had a cold. He coughed so hard he retched. “The fire was down to a bed of coals. I didn’t want the boplin to be cold. I added a few logs and boom, it took off.”

  “We had the start of a chimney fire.” Ben whirled and stood over them. The muscle jumping above his jaw said he gritted his teeth. He was trying not to explode like the fire had. “I told you not to mess with the fire. Several times. I take care of the fire. Not you.”

  His face as red as the burned patches on his hands and face, Zechariah hacked and coughed for a few seconds. “I only added a couple of logs. They’re seasoned wood. They should’ve been fine. When was the last time you cleaned the chimney?”

  “I checked the flue yesterday. It was fine.” Fear disguised as anger boiled over in Ben’s words. He glowered at them both, as if Laura had some role to play in this near disaster. “You have to be careful adding logs to coals. They have tremendous heat.”

  “I’ve been taking care of fires for sixty-plus years. Before you were a gleam in your mudder’s eyes, young man.”

  “Accidents happen.” Laura grabbed Zechariah’s hand and examined the burns. Painful, fiery blisters sprang up across the back and on his palm. “Gabbing about it doesn’t help. Let me get some salve on these burns. I think I have some B&W. We can jaw about it later.”

  “He wanted to put water on a chimney fire. You don’t put water on it. We learned that at the Volunteer Fire and Rescue Community Day last year. Don’t you remember?” Ben took a long breath. No doubt counting to ten in his head. “That’s when I bought the chimney fire extinguishers they recommended. You were with me. Do you remember that?”

  A befuddled look on his soot-covered face, Zechariah shook his head. He snatched his hand from Laura’s grip. He rolled over and dragged himself to the nearest chair. Propping his forearms on it, he pushed up until he could stand. “It was a chimney fire. That’s caused by a buildup of soot that turns into creosote, which is highly flammable.”

  “You do remember.” Ben turned his back. He grabbed the fireplace brush and began to sweep up the ashes and remnants of wood. His shoulders hunched. Finally, he turned to face his grandfather. He seemed to measure his words. “You also remember—I know you do—that I told you to let me handle the fireplace duties.”

  “Chimney fires happen all the time.” Scrambling to her feet, Laura fought to broker peace. Both sides of the discussion presented themselves to her. “Mary Katherine’s dochder and mann had one last week. Remember, they had to call Fire and Rescue. It spread upstairs and into the attic area. They had all that smoke and water damage.”

  “Which is why I keep the chimney fire extinguisher handy, should the fire spread beyond the fireplace, and I sweep the fireplace regularly.” Ben’s grim expression didn’t ease. “I know how to keep the flue clean.”

  “I only added wood.” Zechariah held his arm to his chest. A look of pain mixed with misery shot across his face. “If you kept the fireplace and chimney clean it wouldn’t have happened.”

  “I know you were trying to help. But you did something I specifically asked you not to do. Your actions put the kinner in danger. The boplin in danger. Do you know what damage smoke could do to their little lungs?” Ben stopped and inhaled. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “They were born early with underdeveloped lungs. This is very dangerous.”

  “I know that. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt them.”

  “You endangered them, Groossdaadi.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know you had gut intentions.” Biting at his lower lip, Ben stared at his boots. He raised his gaze level with Zechariah’s. They both seemed to have forgotten Laura’s presence. “Ivan approached me after the meeting today about moving you to Michael’s. I told him there was no need.”

  He glanced back at the blackened fireplace. “Now, I realize he’s right. It’s time.”

  No. Zechariah only wanted to be useful. A young man like Ben couldn’t see far enough into the future to know he, too, one day would be old and frail of body, but not mind—God willing. “Don’t do something now you’ll regret later—”

  “Hush, woman. Leave it be. It’s his haus.” Zechariah tottered to the wall next to the fireplace and grabbed his cane. With an obvious effort he held himself upright and moved past his grandson. His gaze met Laura’s. “He has a right to decide who lives in it.”

  With great dignity he marched from the room.

  “That is unfair.” Laura clamped her mouth shut. It wasn’t for her to interfere in this family matter. As much as every fiber of her being clamored to meddle. “Can’t you see that?”

  “I do see it, but I have to do what is best for the kinner, for the boplin.” Ben brushed past her and grabbed his coat from the hook. “I need to get up on an icy roof to see if damage was done to the chimney. Life isn’t fair. He likes you. Go look after him. Please. Tend to his burns.”

  He let the door close softly behind him.

  Zechariah liked her. That Ben had noticed didn’t escape Laura’s note. Now was not the time to pick that observation apart. She had to patch things up between Zechariah and his grandson. No easy task. He couldn’t move to Michael’s. Not under these circumstances. A cloud of smoke and ashes cloaking him. Zechariah would want to lick his wounds in private. Be that as it may, burns could become infected and with nine children, Laura had years of experience tending to them.

  Old men too. Eli could be as prickly as a rosebush. But like roses, he was worth the effort.

  Zechariah had those same thorns and he was past blooming, but something about him seemed worth the effort.

  Which burned more? Zechariah swallowed the acrid taste of smoke, anger, and fear lodged in the back of his throat. He stared at the ugly, inflamed patches on his hands and breathed through the pain. It didn’t bother him nearly as much as the way Ben had talked to him. The way he’d treated him. Like a disobedient child. Leaning on the knotty familiarity of his birch cane, Zechariah shuffled to the window covered with icy condensation. He pushed the back of his hand against the pane, letting the cold cool the burn. The ice melted, giving him a distorted view of snow-covered trees that glowed in the starlight. Every instinct urged him to leave this place where he was seen as a liability to his own flesh and blood.

  Flee. Walk out into the dark and the snow. Trudge through the night until he reached the other side and Marian. Sweet Marian. A hug and a kiss and a good talking-to a
nd he’d be right as rain. That’s what Marian would say.

  Foolishness. Marian was gone, gone, gone. Long gone. That’s what she would say. Get over it. God knows what He’s doing. Stand aside and let Him do it.

  “Remain in my love.” John 15:9

  “I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go.” Genesis 28:15

  “My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.” Exodus 33:14

  In Zechariah’s old age, he could only remember short verses now. The longer ones had become wispy shadows flitting around in the corners of his mind, like the lyrics to hymns he’d sung for an entire lifetime.

  I’m tired, Gott. Where’s that rest You talked about?

  “Zechariah?”

  Laura couldn’t be here. Not in this room. He shifted his weight and turned. “What are you doing here?”

  Her gaze danced around the room. Chair. Small table. Lamp. Bed. She flushed and her gaze dropped to the piece rug on the floor next to his narrow, single bunk bed. “I came to fix you up.” She held out a woven basket filled with gauze, scissors, a jar of ointment, and a washcloth. “You should put something on those burns right away. You don’t want them to get infected.”

  “I don’t really care.” Now he sounded like a child. Not surprising that he’d been treated like one. “You can’t be here.”

  Heat ripped across his face. His hands shook. He studied the pants and shirts hanging from hooks next to the table on her left, far from the bed covered with a Log Cabin quilt made by his dead wife on her right. “Don’t you see that?”

  Laura’s eyebrows rose and the ruddy hue of her cheeks darkened. She lifted her chin. “If you don’t come out, then I’ll have to come in.”

  “Don’t you have someone else’s business to mind?”

  Laura took one step forward. She now stood in his bedroom. Would lightning strike them both dead? Would their bishop—whom Zechariah had known since he slipped from the womb wailing like he couldn’t wait to eat—make them confess their sins before the Gmay?

  She nodded toward the chair. “Sit.”

  “Nee.”

  She glowered. He summoned his best scowl.

  “Ben has gone outside to check the roof.” She took another short step forward. Her cheeks turned the color of pickled beets. “Delia’s asleep. Rosalie is feeding the boplin in the bedroom. Tamara hasn’t come home.”

  “Not here.” Careful to keep his gaze on the unvarnished red-oak planks under his feet, Zechariah brushed past her. “It isn’t right.”

  Her scent floated around him. Spice tea and lemon, maybe. The baby smell of puke. Like a mother and wife. The knot in his throat grew. He stuffed a groan there with it. Gritting his teeth, he stomped down the hallway into the kitchen and plopped into a chair with his back to the wood-burning stove.

  The smell hurled memories at him. The fire roared. The wood popped. Smoke roiled like a living, breathing animal intent on consuming him and everyone and everything in its path.

  He coughed. His throat burned and itched. He couldn’t stop. Fearing he would throw up, he stumbled to the sink.

  “Here.” Laura’s soft voice soothed. She held out a glass of water. Her other hand rubbed his back in a soothing, circular motion. She needed to stop doing that. Please don’t stop doing that. “Come on, take it. The smoke irritated your throat. I’ll make you some tea with honey. But first drink this and let’s see to those burns.”

  To his eternal mortification, tears filled his eyes. He grabbed the glass and slurped the water down in enormous, noisy, embarrassing gulps. “Danki.” The word came out in a sputter. “No need to make tea.”

  “My kitchen, my rules.”

  “It’s not your kitchen.”

  “You’re already feeling better if you want to argue.” She scooted a plastic bucket of water toward him. “It’s cool, clean water. Stick your hands in it. It’ll help take the sting out of the burn.”

  He did as he was told. Afterward, she patted them dry with the lightest of touches. She pointed a gnarled finger at the chair. “Sit.”

  Afraid to speak, he sat.

  She pulled up a second chair so close their knees almost knocked. Afraid to look at her face, he stared at her white apron’s folds. Snowy white but warm, like her hands.

  She started with the burns on his bald spot and then his forehead. Her head bent so close to his, he could smell her breath. Sweet peppermint. He inhaled. He probably smelled like coffee. He swallowed and held his breath. She leaned back and tilted her head. “Better?”

  “Better.” Two syllables that sounded breathless in his ears. “Fine.”

  She took his hand in hers. Her bony fingers were warm and surprisingly soft. She peered at the patches through glasses that needed to be cleaned. How did she see out of those things? She applied the burn ointment used by Plain families all over the country for all sorts of ailments. Most doctors didn’t like the idea, but then Plain folks did a lot of their own doctoring. Cheaper, common-sense doctoring.

  The familiar smell of honey, aloe, lanolin, and comfrey root reminded him of his childhood and his mother’s soft touch when he burned himself stoking the fire. She never spoke a cross word to him, never. His dad, that was another story, but it seemed so long ago he couldn’t remember why his dad bellowed at him.

  Laura hummed a hymn as she covered his wounds with gauze and a nonstick tape. The words escaped him at first and then bumped around in his head the way Bible verses he’d known since childhood did now. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.”

  That was him. The wretch who had caused a fire and put babies in danger.

  “Does that feel better?”

  He jumped at the sound of her voice. “Jah, it does.”

  “Ben was upset and worried.” Her fingers smoothed his sleeve, blue against the startling white of the gauze patch. “He didn’t mean what he said.”

  Zechariah concentrated on the feel of her fingers on his skin. The pain receded. Darkness receded. The bitter anger in the back of his throat disappeared. A light danced at the far end of a path of packed dirt cool under his bare feet. Trees shaded the path and the wind blew leaves from their branches. They floated in the air like feathers, twirling and somersaulting until they touched the ground like kisses at dusk. Her touch smelled like lilacs and shoofly pie and fresh-cut grass, each more tantalizing than the last.

  “Zechariah?”

  He looked into her eyes for the first time. Sweet, sweet caring looked back at him. The enormity of her caring astounded him. It knit the wounds on his heart in tiny, neat, perfect stitches. He cleared his throat. “It feels much better. Much better.”

  She laid his hand back on his knee. He caught hers before she could settle it back on her side of the great divide. “Not yet.”

  Her lips curled in a small, bemused smile. “Okay.”

  Silently they sat, hands clasped between them. With each second their bodies became more and more entangled. Hands, arms, bodies, legs, feet, a heap of humanity. It was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Her warmth, her womanliness, her humanness hummed as they flowed into him. Heat seeped into crevices that had been icy cold for years. The dust blew away. Shiny reappeared.

  Zechariah peeked at her face. It glowed young and sweet and unlined just as he remembered it from the schoolyard. Cheeks pink from exertion as she spiked the ball over the net for a point or ran the bases after a solid hit into right field.

  Fiercely young and fiercely alive.

  No less so now, sixty-some years later.

  His hand tightened around hers. She responded. Her lips parted. She smiled and ducked her head, no different from a young girl on her first buggy ride after a singing.

  She had a lovely singing voice. He began to hum that hymn. “Amazing Grace.”

  After a second or two, she joined in, but with the words.

  Her voice bathed him in a healing pool of anticipation. Something he hadn’t felt in years. Sweet anticipa
tion.

  He need only lean forward ever so slightly and his lips would touch hers.

  What would they feel like? Tender and soft.

  Wonderful.

  Like love.

  Somewhere in the house, Delia’s voice cried out. “Mudder, Mudder.”

  Life whirled between them like a tornado touching down and spiraling away.

  Laura withdrew her hand, but the smile remained. “I’ll get the tea.”

  Zechariah turned his hand back and forth, peering at the palm, then the other side. Her touch didn’t have miraculous, physical healing power, but something inside him had changed. “Ben meant what he said.”

  “It’s not over until it’s over.” Her knees popped and her hips cracked as she stood. “It doesn’t matter where you live. It’s a small community. A short ride. A small effort.”

  Was she talking about them? It seemed so. Gott, I hope so.

  Humming, she went to the stove and settled the teapot on a burner. “I don’t know much, but I do know every minute on this earth counts. I trust in the Lord and His will for me.”

  She turned and smiled. The delicate scent of chamomile and honey floated in the air. “And for you.”

  TWENTY

  LAURA SLIPPED DOWN THE HALLWAY IN SOLOMON’S HOUSE to the back bedroom. Ben had agreed to give her five minutes with Hannah before the meeting, called specifically to hear her greatgranddaughter’s confession. It hadn’t taken much begging, such was the compassion in Ben’s eyes. This was his first official act only one week into his service as bishop. She knocked on the half-open door and peeked inside. Hannah stood at the window, staring out at the frozen landscape in Solomon’s backyard.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Is it time?” Hannah’s hands went to her neck as she turned, her face red and blotchy from tears. “Already? I can’t decide if I want time to pass quickly so I can get it over with or slowly so I don’t have to walk out there yet.”

  “A few more minutes.” Laura hugged her. The girl’s thin body trembled. “I just wanted to tell you I’m praying for you. My lieb for you will never change.”