Sarah's Sin

by Tami Hoag

  Isaac looked away from him, pinning Sarah with his gaze instead. “He speaks of your love, daughter,” he said, reverting to German once again. “Are your sins even more terrible than I thought? More terrible than anyone knows?”

  Once again Sarah refused to answer. She wouldn't soil what she had shared with Matt in love by calling it a sin. It wasn't a sin in her heart. Her soul was twined with Matt's more closely than it had been with her own husbands. She was married to him in her own eyes and, she prayed, in the eyes of God. She lifted her chin, winning her another black mark in her father's eyes.

  “You have lain with this English?” he said, his voice shaking with anger. His fierce grip tightened on her arm, and she had to grit her teeth to keep from wincing. “You are a forni-cator? A whore?”

  She bit her lip to keep from saying anything at all. She knew she should have bowed her head. Expressing shame and humility might have won her some mercy, but she wasn't ashamed and she wouldn't pretend it. She looked at her father squarely and let him see her defiance, let him see the rebellion she had held inside for so long. She raised her chin another notch in pride, which was itself a sin.

  Isaac cursed her, an expression of pure rage twisting his features. His right hand lashed out like a bolt of lightning and caught Sarah across the mouth, splitting her Up. The force of the blow turned her head and burned her cheek, but still she refused to cry

  Matt jerked her back out of Isaacs grasp, swearing viciously under his breath. He turned her to survey the damage her father had done, cradling her face gently in his trembling hands. He wiped a bead of blood from her lip with his thumb, fighting the urge to kiss it away.

  “I'll be all right,” she whispered, her eyes huge with pleading. “Please, Matt, don't make it worse.”

  “How the hell could I make it any worse than this?” he asked, his voice shaking. He looked up at Isaac with loathing. “You pack quite a punch for a pacifist. Get out of here. Nobody abuses women in front of me, no matter how righteous and pious they think they are. Leave. Now.”

  “Come, Sarah,” Isaac commanded as if she were a dog to be ordered about. He showed no open remorse for what he'd done, but his expression had been wiped clean of anger and rage and was now blank.

  Sarah started toward him, and again Matt held her back.

  “Matt,” she said softly, glancing up at him. “It's all right.”

  His eyes widened incredulously. “It s not all right! You're a grown woman. He can't come here and knock you around and drag you off by the hair! He doesn't have any say in your life.”

  “He is my father.”

  “That doesn't give him the right—”

  “Matt.” Ingrid's voice drew his attention to the porch, where his sister had come to stand in the open doorway with her basset hound on her feet, and her arms crossed against the chill of the early evening. Her expression was both strained and guarded as she looked at him. “Let it go. Sarah knows what she's doing.”

  He worked his jaw, fighting the urge to argue with her. Deep inside he couldn't escape the feeling that he was Sarah's protector, her knight in shining armor ready to slay any dragon for her. Some protector, he thought derisively. It was because of him her father had been driven to strike her. It was because of him she may be in serious trouble with her people. Once again he had managed to hurt her when his greatest desire was to love her and keep her from harm. Maybe she was right in saying he should go back to his world. It was becoming painfully clear that their separate worlds couldn't mix.

  “Please, Matt,” she whispered tremulously, tears spilling past her lashes and down her cheeks. “Please.”

  She was asking him to let her go. She'd told him she'd known all along their time together would be brief. He had fought the idea just as he had wanted to fight any threat to Sarah herself. He wanted to fight it still, but she was asking him to let go. If he followed his heart and fought for her, he would only end up destroying her. The selfish man inside him argued that they would still have each other and the love that had blossomed so quickly and so brilliantly between them. But he knew deep down that the cost would be too great. He couldn't force her to change, couldn't ask her to give up her family and her faith and her way of life. She wasn't willing to make that sacrifice for him and if he forced her to, how could their love possibly survive?

  It took a terrible effort, but he pulledhis hand away from Sarah's arm and stepped back, conceding the battle to Isaac Maust. Sarah looked up at him with an expression that tore his heart in two.

  “I'm sorry,” she said, the words barely audible. I'm so sony I hurt you.”

  Matt felt the pressure of tears behind his own eyes as he looked at hen committing to memory her every feature. He reached out and brushed a drop of moisture from the crest of her cheek, “just don't be sorry you loved me,” he said, then turned and walked away, limping heavily and feeling old and beaten.

  She was gone in a matter of minutes. Matt sat on a decorative iron bench beneath a maple tree on the far side of the yard and watched the black buggy pull out, white reflective tape glowing eerily in the dark as it made its way down the road. The last rays of the sunset had faded to black, a color appropriate for mourning, Matt thought. He looked out at the millions of stars that dotted the sky like fairy dust, his gaze fastening on the brightest.

  Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight …

  He shook his head in amazement at the nursery rhyme that had popped into his head. He hadn't experienced a sense of wonder in a long, long time. For months now he'd felt as aged and cynical as the world itself—until Sarah had come into his life. In her quiet way she had awakened in him an appreciation for the simple beauty of the world around him. Now she was gone and all the joy of that beauty had gone with her.

  Blossom came trotting across the yard, nose to the ground. She made a beeline to him, sniffed his shoes, and plopped down in front of him. Her somber, woebegone expression was clear to him thanks to the faint silver glow of the yard light that stood between the house and the barn.

  “I feel worse than you look,” he murmured.

  The hound whined and lay her head on her paws in apparent sympathy.

  Ingrid emerged from the shadows of the house and came to sit beside him on the bench with his leather jacket draped across her lap.

  “You shouldn't let yourself get a chill, Dr. Thome,” she said with absolutely no censure in her voice.

  Matt didn't take the jacket, nor did he say anything for a long while. He just sat there absorbing his sister's silent comfort, staring out at the night and marveling at the quiet of it.

  “Do you think she'll make them understand?” he asked.

  “I don't know. They'll forgive her if she asks for it. They're very forgiving people.”

  “What about that thing you told me, that mide thing.”

  “The Meidung. Shunning is serious business for the unrepentant. It might not come to that. Like I said, they're gentle, forgiving people.”

  Matt gave a harsh laugh. “Her father doesn't seem very forgiving.”

  “Isaac is a hard man, almost bitter for some reason. He's very strong in the Unserem weg, the old ways. Very strict.”

  “I could have killed him for hitting her.”

  “I know”

  They sat in silence for another few minutes. Ingrid leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder. She took one of his hands in hers and squeezed it tight. “I'm sorry, Matt.”

  So am I, he thought, hurting in a way no drug could ease.

  “Is there anything I can do to help her?” he asked.

  “Stay out of it. They won't tolerate interference, especially not from you. Make a clean break. Get on with your life.”

  What life? a lonely voice asked inside him.

  Realistically, he knew he would take In-grid's advice. Realistically, he knew he would go back to work, and in a few months his brief stay here and his brief affair with a young Amish woman would be a memory, the awful pain dulled by the
anesthetic effects of time. Realistically, he knew all of these things, but in his heart he couldn't accept any of it at the moment. In his heart he knew only that he'd found something bright and pure that had lighted his life when everything had seemed bleak and dingy, and now that special something had been snatched away from him, wrenched from his grasp even sooner than he had feared. In his heart he knew only that he felt more alone than he had ever felt before.

  He wondered if Sarah was feeling the same way.

  He looked out at the starlit sky and listened to the breeze rattle the skeletal cornstalks and the dried leaves in the trees. He felt the autumn chill bite into his bones, and he thought about Sarah in the house down the road.

  Dorit be sorry you loved me.…

  “Deacon Lapp suggested a visit to the Ohio relatives,” Isaac said. “A period for you to pray and reflect, to heal the soul.”

  As if her love for Matt were an illness she could recuperate from given some time in a sterile environment, Sarah thought bitterly. They sat at her mothers round oak kitchen table, Isaac and Anna Maust and herself. The rest of the family had been sent to bed with no explanation of what was going on or why Sarah was home. It seemed quite clear to one and all it was not a joyous occasion. The talk going on in the kitchen by the light of the kerosene lamps was serious stuff.

  “No confession?” Sarah asked. She felt numb and it had nothing to do with the buggy ride home into the chill of the October wind.

  “He knows only of what Micah Hochstetler told him, and he tends to be lenient toward you for some reason I cannot fathom. Time away to clear your head of foolishness, he thinks, and I say we send you before things get worse. I won't have you disgrace my family.”

  My family, as if she were not a part of it, as if he had already shunned her himself. The remark cut, but Sarah didn't let it show. She gave him a long look of contempt for his hypocrisy. He could call her a harlot and a sinner, but God forbid anyone else should find out. Were her supposed sins any less because he was the only one who knew of them? As righteous as Isaac pretended to be, Sarah thought he should have gone ahead and reported her to the bishop. Isaac would no doubt have taken great delight in her excommunication if not for the fact that it would reflect badly on him.

  She looked at her mother, knowing Anna Maust would not argue with her husband on this point or any other. Plump and still blond, more than ten years her husbands junior, Anna Maust had ever been the quiet, dutiful wife. She was a woman with a kind heart and a soft touch, who had always looked on her eldest daughter's restless spirit with a kind of puzzled awe. She looked at Sarah now with sad blue eyes and said, “It is for the best, Sarah. Es waar Goiters Witte.”

  It is Gods will. Her mother had said that same thing to her when her baby had died of pneumonia and when Samuel had been killed. Every terrible thing that happened, Anna heaped the blame on God s doorstep.

  “No,” Sarah said quietly, rising from her chair. “It is Isaac Maust's will.”

  She expected an explosion from Isaac, but none came.

  “Tomorrow I will see to the getting of the bus ticket,” he said.

  Sarah gave no indication she had heard him. She turned and left the kitchen, making her way upstairs toward the tiny bedroom she used when she was home. On her way down the hall she stopped at Jacob s door and looked in on him. He was asleep but terribly restless, tossing and turning, groaning a little in his sleep.

  “He snuck too many pieces of apple strudel last night,” Anna whispered, coming up close beside her daughter. “He suffered for it today, but I gave him a good big dose of castor oil. He will be better by morning.”

  Sarah watched her baby brother for another long moment, feeling apprehension stir in the pit of her stomach. She hated seeing Jacob ill. It frightened her. And the thought of leaving him in a few days tightened her apprehension into a knot.

  “To bed now with you, Sarah,” her mother said, pulling Jacobs door shut. “This day has been too long. I am wanting another sunrise to brighten things.”

  Sarah turned toward her mother and said, “In my heart there will be no sunrise.”

  Anna was quiet for a moment, lost in thought. “Did you love him so much, this Englishman?” she asked at last, her voice soft and wistful.

  “Yes.”

  Anna closed her eyes and bowed her head, as if in fervent prayer, then squeezed her daughter's hands and bid her a whispered good night.

  By morning Jacob was no better. Anna bundled him up and rode with Isaac into Jesse, where she took the boy to see Dr. Coswell while Isaac made his pilgrimage to the bus depot. The doctor casually pronounced Jacob's malady as a case of the flu that was currently going around and sent him home.

  Sarah spent the morning packing her things for her trip, carefully folding her dresses and aprons and underthings. As a gesture of pure rebellion, she packed her Glamour magazine and her bottle of Evening in Paris perfume. Throughout the process she kept thinking that she didn't want to go. She wanted to go back down the road to Thornewood and to Matt, but she knew better. Matt had never suggested they had a future together. She had given herself to him in love, knowing in the end they would part. And she had to think of her family, of her mother and her sister Ruth and her brothers and Jacob. She had remained in the faith because of them, because she loved them. It was for their sakes she would go to Ohio to stay with relatives she barely knew.

  In the afternoon she helped shuck corn until her thumbs were blistered, then helped prepare the evening meal for the family. No one had much to say to her. Even her brother Lucas, who at seventeen had honed teasing to a fine art, was unusually quiet. Isaac said nothing at all once he had announced she would be on the eight o'clock bus day after tomorrow. Her mother was full of worried and sympathetic looks, but short on words of comfort beyond her usual Es waar Cotters Wille.

  Sarah kept her chin up and her mouth shut. She thought of Matt every single moment. She had never in her worst nightmares imagined it would hurt this much to leave him. After all, she had known the end would come eventually; she had been prepared for it from the first. But the ache gnawed at her incessantly, and she wondered vaguely if it were possible to die of such a pain.

  When the dishes had been done and everyone else had settled into the living room to read or sew, she sought the one person in her life who had a chance of easing her suffering just by smiling at her—Jacob. He had had a miserable day of sickness and fitful sleep. As Sarah let herself into his room he moaned and kicked the quilt that covered him.

  Sarah lit a lamp on the simple bedside table and settled herself on the narrow bed, bending over her little brother and brushing back damp strands of blond hair-from his forehead. He was burning up with fever. That alone was enough to put her heart in her throat, but when Jacob clutched his stomach and moaned, her worry soared to near the panic margin.

  “Shhh … rest, bobbli” she whispered, trying to soothe both him and herself.

  “Sarah?” Jacob called out weakly. “Sarah, it hurts me too much.”

  “What hurts?”

  He didn't answer her but clutched his stomach and started to cry. Sarah bit her lip until she tasted blood, desperate to help Jacob, but uncertain of what she could do. He seemed much more ill than Dr. Coswell had diagnosed. Dr. Coswell, the man Matt had said wasn't fit to practice medicine on monkeys. What if the man had been wrong about Jacob? What if the boy had something that could threaten his life? She couldn't bear to lose Jacob!

  In a panic she flew down the stairs and through the living room, saying nothing to anyone, registering their shocked looks only in the nether reaches of her mind. At the back door she paused only long enough to grab her cloak off its peg, then she was gone.

  “She's being sent to Ohio to stay with relatives for a while,” Ingrid said, slipping into the armchair catty-corner from Matt. They were in the library. The stereo hummed in the background. Matt had wedged himself into a corner of the sofa he had once shared with Sarah, sitting stiffly, riffling through the
Minneapolis paper. He scowled and turned a page, cracking it like a whip, glanced over the columns without reading, turned a page, snapped it open with a flick of his wrists.

  “No word of excommunication”

  “Good news travels fast,” he said sarcastically.

  Ingrid ran a hand through her short dark hair and sighed. “I just heard via the grapevine. Isaac purchased a bus ticket this morning.”

  Matt nodded curtly, not looking up, though he wasn't taking in a single word of print. His first thought was to ask when Sarah was leaving, but he stifled it ruthlessly with common sense. It was over. There was no point in trying to see her again. She didn't love him enough to leave her folk and he loved her too much to ask. Time for any smart bachelor to cut bait and run. Actually, it was past time for that. He never should have let himself get so involved in the first place. But he'd been so in need of something, anything that would help life make sense again, and there had been Sarah, the embodiment of everything he thought had gone out of life—goodness, innocence, faith.

  Maybe Julia had been right. Maybe he had been trying to compensate. Maybe he had been trying to withdraw from the world, wrapping himself in the cocoon of Sarah Troyers homemade skirts.

  “I'll be going back to the Cities at the end of the week,' he announced.

  Ingrid said nothing. She probably knew he was not well enough to return to work, but she also knew better than to protest.

  Outside the wind howled and hurled rain against the panes of the bay window. In the snug warmth of the library, the Righteous Brothers sang the mournful opening bars of “Unchained Melody.” Matt folded his Star-Tribune with quick jerky movements and hurled it across the room in a burst of temper. In the front hall, Blossom sent up a howl as someone began pounding on the door.

  Ingrid had just pushed herself up out of her seat when Sarah came rushing into the library, looking like the headless horseman had chased her all the way to Thornewood. Her kapp was gone. Her hair hung loose in wet strings, and rainwater dripped off the end of her reddened nose. The heavy black cloak she wore smeUed of wet wool and horses.