Seasons in Paradise

by Cameron, Barbara;

  “Gut. Danki.” That would solve the problem of climbing the stairs. And hopefully he wouldn’t have that nightmare in a different room than the one he’d had all his life.

  Who was he kidding? As if location had anything to do with it.

  Mercifully, his dat left the room and David helped him undress and slide under the quilt. He’d no sooner gotten settled than his mudder came in with lunch and a pain pill.

  “Welcome home,” she said, beaming as she put the tray on his lap. “I made you your favorite. Eat and get some meat back on those bones. Then take a nap and before you know it it’ll be suppertime and Mary Elizabeth will be back.”

  “Sounds like the perfect prescription to get well,” David told him.

  Sam hadn’t had much appetite in the hospital, but the hot meatloaf and gravy sandwich smelled incredible. He devoured it to his mudder’s delight.

  “Where’s Lavina?”

  “Taking a nap.”

  Sam yawned.

  “Stop fighting it,” David said with a chuckle. “C’mon, your little boy’s all settled in.”

  “Very funny,” Sam said, and then he was sound asleep.

  * * *

  The uneasy truce between Sam and his dat lasted a week.

  Mary Elizabeth walked into the kitchen one afternoon and found the two men seated at the kitchen table. Tension was so thick she felt she could cut it with a knife.

  Waneta looked at Mary Elizabeth. “I’m glad you’re here. I need your help.” She took Mary Elizabeth’s arm and led her from the room.

  “But—”

  “Help me strip the bed,” Waneta said when they walked into the front bedroom.

  She did as she was asked. It was a job that didn’t need two women, but Waneta had taken on extra work with Sam back home.

  They made the bed with clean sheets and covered it with a quilt. Still, Waneta lingered in the room.

  Finally, Mary Elizabeth could stand it no longer. “Don’t you think we should get back to the kitchen? They looked like they were about to have an argument.”

  Waneta sat on the edge of the bed. “I spent years trying to keep the men in the family from arguing. Sometimes I should have said more. But now? This is the last chance for Amos and Sam to heal what’s between them. I—” she broke off as they heard shouting.

  Mary Elizabeth turned and ran. Were they killing each other?

  When she got to the kitchen, she saw Sam lying on the floor. His dat stood over him.

  “He wouldn’t listen to me,” Amos said, sounding disgusted. “Insisted he could walk without his crutches. Help me get him up.”

  “No, call David,” Sam told Mary Elizabeth. “I don’t want you hurting yourself.”

  Amos stalked to the back door and rang the bell that was used to summon someone in the fields.

  “What’s all the racket?” Waneta asked as she came into the room.

  “Sam fell,” Amos said. He slammed the back door. “Trying too hard to take care of himself. Wouldn’t let me get him a glass of water.”

  “I can take care of myself.” Sam rolled to his side and tried to lever himself up but couldn’t.

  David rushed in, looking frantic. “What is it? Is Lavina having the boppli?”

  “Nee, it’s Sam. He didn’t want me to help him up off the floor.”

  “Let Daed and I do it.”

  Sam looked like he was going to object, but he let his dat help David get him up and to a chair.

  “If you don’t need me, I’m going to check on Lavina.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “Always so stubborn,” Amos muttered as he looked at Sam. “Acting like everything’s my fault. Well, it takes two to have an argument.”

  “Not if one man wants to keep trying to pick one.” Sam took the glass of water Mary Elizabeth handed him. He pulled a prescription bottle from his pocket, shook a tablet out, and swallowed it with some water.

  “I’m not trying to pick one.” Amos sat down in a chair at the opposite end of the table and glared at him. “I did the best I could raising you three kinner. Didn’t do any different than my dat did and seems to me I turned out allrecht.”

  Mary Elizabeth held her breath as Sam raised a brow.

  “Seems to me my sohns did, too.”

  “All of us? Not just David?”

  “Not just David,” Amos said a little grudgingly. “Don’t go telling John I said that, though. We don’t want him thinking it’s allrecht to live with the Englisch.”

  “Amos, there’s something I need your help with,” Waneta said.

  “What?”

  “Something in the dawdi haus.”

  He hesitated and then he must have gotten the message from her. He hauled himself to his feet and followed her there. The door shut behind them.

  “Well,” Sam said. “That’s as close to an apology as I’ll probably get for the way he treated us.”

  “Ya, it is,” she agreed.

  “I’ll take it.”

  She smiled.

  * * *

  Mary Elizabeth stood with Sam at the back of the living room.

  She’d sat on the porch of his old house one day when he came home from the hospital and told him time would pass quickly and soon they’d be married.

  Time had flown by. Now they stood together about to walk to the minister and say their vows.

  Their day had finally come.

  She looked at him, thinking he’d never looked more handsome in a new suit and white shirt. And he’d never looked happier.

  “Are you sure you don’t want your cane?”

  “Don’t need it.”

  “If you need to you can lean on me.”

  He smiled. “I know. I have these past weeks, haven’t I, lieb?”

  “Ya, you have. That’s what people who love each other should do. Right?”

  The minister looked back at them and nodded. They walked toward him, past the rows of friends and family gathered here in her home to watch them marry.

  Once again, time seemed to fly by. Amish weddings were long, filled with so many traditions: the verses from the Bible, the songs the congregation sang a cappella, the testimony of another lay minister who spoke of his own long, happy marriage blessed by God. Three hours passed in a happy, happy blur.

  The men of the church turned the pews around to tables for guests to sit at the reception. Mary Elizabeth and Sam accepted congratulations as they moved to sit at the eck, the corner of the wedding table.

  “Feels gut to sit down,” he murmured. He inhaled the aromas of the food the women began laying on the table: the baked chicken, roasht, mashed potatoes with browned butter on top, so many vegetables you could almost hear the table groan. And, of course, the celery that was a feature of Lancaster County Amish weddings.

  After the midday meal there’d be games and visiting and, before the guests left, another meal. Marriages lasted a long time in the Amish community and started with lengthy celebrations. Mary Elizabeth couldn’t stop smiling as the hours passed.

  “Have I told you how beautiful you look?” Sam asked her, squeezing her hand under the table.

  She smoothed the skirt of the wedding dress her mudder and schweschders had helped her sew of the material she’d stored so wistfully in her closet while he lived in town. “A dozen times,” she said, smiling. “But I’ll be happy to accept the compliment one more time.”

  Finally, the last guest departed and Mary Elizabeth and Sam turned to each other. They smiled and walked without speaking to climb the stairs to her room. Sam opened the door to the room for the first time.

  A new quilt covered a new bed—a double bed had been quietly moved into her room one day by her parents while Mary Elizabeth and Rose Anna were at quilting class. Now a wedding ring quilt in colors of blues and golds that her mudder and schweschders had sewn as a wedding gift covered it. She and Sam would spend their wedding night and their honeymoon and the months before they moved into their own home in this room where she�
��d grown up.

  And they were both grateful for the welcome her parents had given them to stay as long as they needed.

  She couldn’t ask for more, she thought as she closed the door and looked at her new mann.

  Except to ask for Christmas to come quickly. She’d dreamed so long of spending Christmas with Sam as his fraa.

  21

  Mary Elizabeth never understood why the calendar year didn’t start with December—December 25 to be exact.

  What was a more important date to remember than the birth of the Christ child?

  But the rest of the world followed a calendar that started with January 1 and ended with December 31. She sighed. Well, it was finally December 1. She was a new fraa—how she loved that term—and she was sitting here in a nice warm home stitching on one of the last Christmas themed quilts of the season. There’d be a break to do others and then, perhaps only a month later, they’d begin on new ones for the next Christmas.

  It was a comforting thing to have work you loved and that kept you thinking about Christmas through the year. Oh, not the one of trees and Santas and the like but the heart of Christmas—the giving of love and good will for your fellow man. At no other time of the year did people think about giving of heart and hand as they did at this time of year.

  Amish Christmases were simple but deeply felt. Gifts were seldom luxury items or even store-bought. A gift made by hand with thought and care was the best, to her mind. So when she had an hour here and there, she sewed or knitted the gifts for her family.

  And locked the bedroom door to keep out her new mann so he wouldn’t walk in and catch her sewing the first shirt she’d make for him. Hopefully, there would be many shirts she’d sew in the many years she hoped God would give her with him.

  Lavina shifted in her chair and Mary Elizabeth glanced over at her. “Just can’t get comfortable,” her schweschder said ruefully.

  “Maybe you should get up and walk about a bit,” Mary Elizabeth suggested. “That usually helps.”

  “Then I’ll have to climb the stairs again.” But she got up, and they went downstairs.

  “It won’t be much longer,” she reminded her as they walked into the kitchen.

  “I know.”

  “Tea?”

  “Love some.”

  Sam limped in. “I thought I heard voices.” He settled into a chair at the table.

  Mary Elizabeth pulled a chair over and put his injured leg on it. “Doctor wants you to keep it elevated,” she chided him gently.

  “Danki.”

  “Coffee?”

  “That would be nice.”

  She checked the percolator on the back burner of the stove and found it still warm. She poured him a mug of coffee and turned the gas flame up under the tea kettle.

  Lavina brought the cookie jar over and set it before him. “Daed always has to have a cookie about this time of day.”

  Sure enough, he came in a few minutes later, bringing cold air with him. He took off his jacket and hung it on a peg by the back door. “We’re getting some snow flurries.”

  Mary Elizabeth set a plate before Lavina so she could pile the cookies on it. All the women had baked up a storm the past week. Fruitcake cookies sparkled like jewels with their cubes of candied pineapple, maraschino cherries, and ginger. Candy cane cookies and German lebkuchen had taken extra time, but they were expected year after year.

  Sam chose a sugar cookie cut in the shape of a reindeer. Mary Elizabeth picked a gingerbread man and smiled. Amish maedels often ate gingerbread men and thought about the man they wanted to marry. Now she had hers. God was gut.

  She poured mugs of hot water and, before she sat, knocked on the door of the dawdi haus to see if Grossdaadi wanted to join them.

  Soon the table was full of family. The Stoltzfuses did love snack time. It was too bad John was in town working and David was at the farm or the family would have been complete.

  When cookies and hot drinks were consumed, everyone but Sam got to their feet. Daed went back to the barn. David swung by to pick up Lavina. Sam reached for Mary Elizabeth’s hand. “Do you have to go now?”

  “In a few minutes,” she said. “After I clean up the kitchen.”

  Rose Anna winked at Mary Elizabeth as she left the room.

  “I wish I had something to do,” Sam said as he watched her clear the table.

  “You could take up quilting,” she suggested tongue in cheek. “We could use some help with the orders this time of year.”

  “Men don’t quilt.”

  “Schur they do. Why, I have a quilting magazine upstairs with an article about men who quilt.”

  “I’m not going to learn to quilt. Maybe I could walk out to the barn and help your dat with his seed order or repair some bridles or something.”

  “It’s too slippery out there for you to walk that far. If you fall you could set yourself back even more.” She stared at him. He’d always had trouble sitting still. Recuperating had proven hard on him. “Tell you what. I’ll walk out and ask Daed if he has something he needs help with. Maybe the two of you could look over the seed catalogs in here. It’s getting cold for him to be out there anyway.”

  “Danki. Be careful.”

  She smiled as she pulled on her jacket. “I will. Be right back.”

  Her dat jumped in surprise when she slid the barn door open. When he quickly put his hands behind his back, she raised her eyebrows. “What’s going on?”

  “None of your business,” he said, but he grinned.

  Christmas secrets, she decided, and she walked toward him and tried to see what he was hiding. He dodged her each time she moved toward him and finally he laughed. “If I show you, you’ll have to promise you won’t tell your mudder.”

  “I’m not the one who can’t keep secrets,” she reminded him. “That’s Rose Anna.” Not only did her younger schweschder do her best to find out what she was getting for Christmas—she’d always blabbed what others were getting when she found out about gifts in progress.

  He brought out what he’d been holding—a pretty spice rack for her mudder. “Think she’ll like it?”

  “She’ll love it. Daed, Sam’s bored. I told him maybe he could help you with the seed order or something.”

  “It’s done. I’m concentrating on finishing my gifts this afternoon.”

  “Maybe I can drop him off at David’s when I go to town.”

  Jacob hid the spice rack. “Gut idea. I’ll hitch up the buggy for you.”

  Sam nearly jumped out of his chair when she told him she’d take him to his bruder’s haus.

  But when they got there, Lavina answered the door and told them that David had just left to help a neighbor with something.

  “I should have called,” Mary Elizabeth said.

  “Kumm, have some tea with me,” Lavina invited.

  “I can’t. I have errands to run for Mamm. But Sam can.”

  Lavina smiled at him. “That would be nice. We can be cooped up together. Doctor said it could be any day now.”

  Sam stiffened and turned to Mary Elizabeth. “I could go with you. Maybe Lavina would like to rest.”

  Mary Elizabeth hesitated, but when she saw her schweschder rub at her lower back she felt a little uneasy. “David should be home soon. And Lavina shouldn’t be left alone.”

  “I’m not a kind,” Lavina told her, frowning.

  “Nee, you’re about to have one, and you shouldn’t be alone.”

  “I could run the errands,” Sam offered.

  “You don’t need to be sliding around in the snow,” Mary Elizabeth said.

  The oven timer dinged. “Cookies are done.” Lavina headed for the kitchen.

  “Cookies?” Sam followed her. “What kind?”

  “Gee, see you later, Mary Elizabeth,” she said, her lips quirking in a grin.

  Sam turned and gave her a quick kiss. “Oh, sorry, lieb. Have fun and I’ll see you soon.”

  “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” s
he murmured and left.

  * * *

  Sam thoroughly enjoyed helping Lavina. He set his cane aside, pulled the trays of cookies from the oven, and was invited to have several. They smelled so gut he couldn’t resist blowing on one and popping it into his mouth.

  “Ow.”

  “You’re as bad as a kind. You need to wait ’til they’re cool.”

  He grabbed a glass of water to cool his mouth. It was worth it. “That was wunderbaar. I might be able to wait until another one cools.”

  Lavina smiled as she used a spatula to move the cookies to a big plate. “We have enough to make about two dozen more cookies. You can take some home with you.”

  He watched her rub at the small of her back again. “Let me put the next batch in the oven. Your back is hurting.”

  “It’s been aching all day.”

  “Then sit.”

  “Neither of us should be on our feet,” she said. But she sank gratefully into a chair.

  “I’ll sit, too.” They worked dropping spoonfuls of dough and when they were finished, Sam slid them into the oven and set the timer as she instructed.

  A few minutes later, she suddenly uttered a cry, and he heard something splashing. She slapped a hand on her mouth and stared at him with horror in her eyes.

  “What is it?” he asked, his heart leaping up into his throat.

  “My water just broke.”

  He jumped to his feet and felt a twinge in his injured leg at the sudden movement. Then he was grabbing at the back of her chair as his feet slid in the water on the floor. Not water, he told himself. The water that surrounded a boppli in the womb. Amniotic fluid.

  The boppli was coming.

  “Stay there,” he croaked when she started to rise. “I don’t want you slipping.”

  He grabbed a couple of dishtowels from the kitchen counter and threw them down to absorb the liquid.

  “We need to call David.”

  Sam reached into his pocket for the cell phone Peter had insisted he get after the accident. He hit speed dial and handed her the phone.

  “David? You need to come home. The boppli’s coming. Really coming this time.”

  She pulled the phone from her ear and stared at it.

  “What’s the matter?”