The Amish Nanny

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “See?” he told me. “You’re as light as a feather.”

  Leaning forward, I wrapped my arms around the front of his shoulders, palms flat against the rock hardness of his chest.

  With his first step, my hood draped back, and the snow fell against my kapp and face. The flakes were coming faster and faster now. Will had to be getting tired, but he was still sure and solid. I bounced as he landed on each rock. He would pause a moment and then leap again. I kept my eyes on Giselle and Daniel on the far bank, not daring to look down. As we got closer, I could see that her face seemed to be softening with each step. By the end her eyes met mine with a wistful smile. Will’s last leap landed us on the bank, and I slid to the ground quickly, still shaking.

  “You’re freezing,” he said.

  “We’re almost there,” I answered, my teeth chattering. “I-I can make it.”

  The men made a chair again for Giselle, and we hurried as fast as we could, cutting down toward the cottage. When we reached it, I stepped ahead and opened the door quickly, my hand shaking on the knob.

  “Morgan!” Will called out. “We need your help.” He turned toward me then. “Get out of your wet clothes and into your nightgown. Then crawl into bed beside Christy. Morgan can climb in too.”

  I stumbled into the entryway after the others.

  “Let’s get Giselle in her room and straight under her blankets,” Will said to Daniel. “She’s not soaked like Ada.”

  I stepped into the office, and by the light of the hall grabbed my long underwear, fuzzy socks, and warmest nightgown. Then I closed the door and quickly changed, shaking nearly uncontrollably as I did.

  Sliding in next to Christy I grabbed the extra blanket off the end of the bed, and pulled it on top of myself. Then I urged her in her sleep toward the wall, gently, so I could share the spot already warm from her body. I stayed as close to her as I could without waking her up, hoping Morgan would get here soon.

  “Ada?” Morgan whispered. I turned to see her standing hesitantly in the doorway. “Will told me what happened. He said to come climb in next to you and help you get warm.” She pulled the door shut behind her and moved toward the bed. “I put on some water for hot tea,” she added. “That might help. But shouldn’t we get you in a hot bath or something?”

  Blinking, I could barely make out her features in the faint morning light.

  “N-no,” I said, my teeth clicking together. “This is the b-best thing to do r-right now. Though the t-tea is a good idea also.”

  Sliding into the narrow space behind me, Morgan positioned herself as I directed, pressing against my back and using her arm to warm my shoulders.

  “I get it,” she giggled, “Christy and I are making an Ada sandwich.”

  “Ya. The b-best way to recover b-body heat is to add s-some more b-bodies.”

  We were quiet then for a few minutes as I slowly felt myself thaw out. Soon the chattering of my teeth had stopped, and I almost felt human again. Glancing over my shoulder at Morgan, I noticed a strange expression on her face and I asked her what she was thinking.

  “That I guess I should have realized that the Amish would know how to get warm. Without electricity or a gas line or anything, your houses must get plenty cold.”

  I was about to explain how we heated our homes without using public utilities when a soft knock was heard at the door, and then Will stepped inside.

  “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “Much better.”

  He nodded, pleased with my answer, and then he told Morgan that the water had boiled before he disappeared again.

  She slipped from the bed to go make tea, and a few minutes later she returned with a mug in her hand. I scooted up just a little, pulling the covers up to my chin, and took it from her.

  “Oh, Ada.” I couldn’t make out her eyes in the dim light, but her voice sounded as if she was fighting back tears. “What if something had happened to you?”

  “It didn’t,” I said. I sipped the hot tea and sighed as warmth spread inside of me too. “Though I guess it was pretty stupid of me to go out there alone.”

  “You can say that again.”

  I heard Will’s voice in the hall, and then Morgan slipped out to join him. Putting my mug on the end table, I wiggled back down under the covers. After a while the door opened all the way, and Will stood there again.

  “How’s Giselle?” I asked.

  “She’s is in a lot of pain but warming up. We’re going to take her into the hospital in just a minute. Do you think you need to come along and be seen by someone too?”

  “No, I’m fine,” I told him. And I was.

  “Let’s check your extremities, just to be sure.”

  Humoring him, I climbed out of the warm bed and came to the doorway, holding out both hands and then each foot in turn to show that they were all bright pink but nothing more. “See?”

  His eyes went from my hands to my face and lingered there. I was still freezing, but the shiver I felt in that moment had nothing to do with the cold.

  I wasn’t sure where Daniel had gone, but guilt surged through my veins as I broke my gaze with Will. “I…uh…I’d like to see Giselle before she goes,” I said. Then I stepped back to the bed, grabbed the extra blanket, and wrapped it around my shoulders as I headed to her room, moving past Will without looking at him.

  “Ada,” Giselle said as I came through the door. Her ankle was propped up with a pillow, and she was covered with blankets and quilts. Her stocking cap was off, and her hair stuck up around her head like a halo.

  I stopped beside her bed, and we talked about her ordeal for a moment. Then I asked why she had been in the cave at all.

  “I used to go there when I first started weaving. I would take a sketchbook and work out my designs by flashlight. Sometimes I would explore. It was the one place I’d let myself remember.” She took a deep breath. “I used to go to the Mennonite church too. The cave and the church.” She shook her head. “But then I made a vow that I didn’t want anything to do with the past anymore. It was too hard. I couldn’t get my mind to leave it once it landed there. So I stopped going to both places for years and years—until yesterday. I thought I’d sit and sketch by my flashlight for a while and then go down to the church.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I finally remembered what I did with the letters. I took them there, years ago.”

  “To the church?”

  She nodded. “In the back room. I think.” She shrugged. “I was in such a fog back then, but I feel as if I remember carrying in the wooden box when no one was around and sliding it into someplace dark and tight.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  She shrugged, eyebrows lifting. “I wish I could tell you, Ada. I hadn’t thought about those letters in all these years. It took me a while to recall that I used to go down to the church at all.”

  A rustling sound was heard in the hall, and then Daniel and Will were at the door, excusing themselves for interrupting.

  “We should get going, Giselle,” Will said. “Daniel and I are going to carry you to the car, and then Morgan and I will take you to the hospital.” He directed his attention to me. “And you need to get back in bed.”

  In a quiet voice, I asked Giselle if she would tell Daniel what she told me. She nodded that she would. I brushed past the two men, holding the blanket tightly.

  Christy stirred again when I crawled back in beside her, but she didn’t awake even though the morning light was now streaming through the window.

  I was no longer cold, but for some reason I began to shiver again. I wrapped myself more tightly in the covers and closed my eyes. As I drifted off, I couldn’t be sure what was making me tremble. The thought of what would have become of Giselle if I hadn’t checked the cave?

  Or the memory of my body wrapped around Will’s, leaping fearlessly into the night?

  THIRTY-SIX

  The sound of knocking woke me. I wrapped the blanket around me again and went to ans
wer it. Daniel stood on the stoop, his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

  “It’s melting,” he said. Sure enough, the eaves were dripping and the pathway was slushy. Still, the landscape looked like a winter wonderland. I breathed in the crisp mountain air.

  He nodded up the hill. “George said he’d give us a ride to the church so we can look for the letters, and then he’ll take Christy on to the hospital.” He went on to say that George had talked to Will and Giselle’s ankle was broken, but at least she wouldn’t need surgery. The doctor would cast it sometime this morning.

  Smiling in relief that Giselle’s injury wasn’t as bad as it could have been, I said that Christy and I would come up to Amielbach as soon as we were ready.

  As I started to close the door, Daniel blurted out, “Alice is being discharged, so George is making arrangements for you to get home.” His words came out in a tumble, and then he turned and headed back up the path before I could even respond.

  A half hour later, as George drove us toward Langnau, he told us he’d finished making our flight arrangements. “You leave tomorrow afternoon.”

  Christy began to chatter excitedly about going by plane, but I could only stare out the window in silence. Not only did I have to make a decision in the Daniel matter, but we also had to find the property agreement and get the judge to clear the title by four o’clock today. Time was running out, in more ways than one.

  George dropped us off at the church and we hurried into the office, where Daniel explained our predicament to the secretary. She led us back to the library room we’d seen on our tour and told us to feel free to snoop around.

  Once she was gone, Daniel reminded me that he’d spent quite a bit of time in the library last summer, looking through the church registries and other records, and he hadn’t seen a carved box or come across a stack of letters. He would have remembered. Which meant Giselle must have hidden the box well. He pulled a step stool over to the shelves at the far end of the room and started looking on the top row.

  “Try to think like Giselle,” I said. I looked in all of the cupboards under the windows. They were full of cardboard boxes of manuscripts.

  “I went through all of those,” Daniel said, moving the ladder to the next set of bookcases.

  “Maybe it’s in one of the other rooms,” I said.

  Daniel groaned. “It could be anywhere.” There was a gap between the floor and the bottom of the bookcase Daniel was in front of. It was definitely big enough for the box to fit under. I grabbed a ruler from the main desk, went to the first one, and knelt down on the floor, scraping it under the edge. I didn’t feel anything and scooted forward a little. When I was almost at the end, I brushed up against something. Getting down on my stomach, I wiggled the ruler further under the shelf, thinking maybe it was a book. It was wedged in pretty tight. I reached in with my hands and felt carvings on each side.

  “Ada.” Daniel was looking down at me. “What are you doing?”

  “There’s a box under here,” I said. “A carved box.”

  As he got down on the floor beside me, I inched it back and forth until I pulled it free. The carving on the top was of the bakery in Frutigen with the Alps towering above it. Another of my ancestral homes.

  “Open it,” Daniel pleaded.

  I lifted the lid. The box was full of letters. Tears stung my eyes.

  “I’ll skim through it for the agreement.”

  It only took him a minute to declare it wasn’t there. “But this is still better than nothing,” he added. “The letters might make some references to the agreement or maybe have information about where it was hidden.”

  He slipped into a chair with the whole stack and dove right in. I wasn’t sure how much time we had, so I excused myself and went down to the office to use the phone.

  I called Alice’s room and got Will, who said that, between Giselle’s cast and Alice’s paperwork, they wouldn’t be finished for at least an hour or two, maybe more. He asked if we wanted George to come to pick us up, but I said no, that we’d stay here a while longer and then just walk to the hospital. It wasn’t until we hung up that I realized I’d forgotten to tell him about the box.

  Back in the library, I found Daniel exactly where I’d left him, at the table, intently poring over the letters.

  After I sat down across from him, he said the first letter was dated May 8, 1877, and the return address was Crossing the Atlantic. In the first letter Elsbeth wrote about her stepchildren and how at first they were hesitant around their father after having been separated from him for the two years he’d been in prison, but they were warming up to him. There wasn’t any adjustment for them toward her being their mother because, as their governess, that was what they had come to think of her as anyway. She wrote that she was looking forward to their new life in Indiana, and she hoped her father would change his mind and soon sell Amielbach and join them in America. She also asked that he please accept the fact that she loved Gerard Gingrich and was married to him and would be for the rest of her life.

  “Nothing about the agreement?” I asked.

  He shook his head and went on to the next one.

  It detailed their arrival in New York City and their journey west. When they arrived in Adams County, Indiana, they were welcomed by the other Swiss Mennonites there who had arrived two decades earlier. The people already had vast farms and were making good livings. An older, wealthy couple took Gerard, Elsbeth, and the children into their home and offered the young family a loan to purchase land. She was optimistic about their future.

  By the end of the first year, the family had a farm with a house and a big barn—and another child. Elsbeth wrote that her stepchildren, who were now ten and twelve, were attending school but she was still helping them with their studies as both were very bright and needed to be encouraged to make the most of the gifts God had given them. She wrote that she was doing all she would have been doing as a governess for the family, and much, much more. She was far happier than she could have ever imagined being—except for being so far away from her beloved father and missing the mountains, hills, and valleys of her homeland.

  While I found my great-great-grandmother’s epistles fascinating, I realized none of them was probably going to have any information about an agreement between Abraham Sommers and Ulrich Kessler.

  Daniel zipped through several more, saying every couple of years another baby was born, and it was obvious that Abraham had written in his letters that he was worried about his daughter. Elsbeth assured him her health was fine. The older two children grew up and left home. The younger ones began school. More kept coming. Gerard was a hard worker and was growing wheat and raising dairy cows, and with the help of his sons, he kept acquiring more and more land. None of the sons wanted to return to Switzerland to live with their grandfather as he had requested.

  Daniel looked up at me. “She wrote that for all his talk of family being most important, she would think that her father would have come to join them.”

  Without waiting for a response from me, his head dropped back down, and then he explained that in 1889 she wrote that she was still waiting for her father to visit, as was the rest of his large, extended family. In 1890 her ninth child was born and she named her Sarah. I was pretty sure that was Mammi’s mother.

  Daniel kept translating the letters one by one. He announced when he was on the next to the last one, and translated that Elsbeth referred to Abraham’s letter “explaining everything.” This must have been the letter he referred to in his diary when he mentioned his transgression. She said it was upsetting, but of course she and Gerard forgave him. She also said they had a much better life in America and all of their children had opportunities in Indiana they never would have had in the Emmental. It was God’s will for them to leave, and it was obvious He used her father’s ill motives to help speed His will. She would write to Marie and tell her about the agreement, in case her friend’s father had only told his older sons, not his youngest, his only d
aughter. But she couldn’t imagine her friend traveling back to Switzerland now to claim her land.

  Then she said she didn’t want her children to know what their grandfather had done, so she hid his last letter in the bottom of her carved box.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What was that last bit?”

  Daniel looked down at the letter as he said, “She says she doesn’t want her kids to know what he’s done, so she’s hidden his last letter in the bottom of her carved box.”

  “Which box would that have been?” I asked. “We have three of them now. The one Mammi gave to Lexie, the one Mammi kept, and the one Herr Lauten had given Giselle when she first moved here.”

  “It seems as though she’s talking about the one from your grandmother with the farm scene.”

  I started to stand.

  “Wait. Let me read the last letter,” he said. “It’s not to Abraham. It’s from Elsbeth to Caspar Lauten.”

  He returned his gaze to the stack of letters and began to translate. “She writes that she is grieved her father didn’t receive her last letter before he passed and wasn’t assured of her forgiveness.” Daniel continued reading and translating, saying Elsbeth agreed to the arrangement her father made with the Lautens to stay at Amielbach, pay the taxes, and maintain the property. In time, she said she would choose one of her descendants to inherit the property. “She also said she hadn’t heard back from Marie, but at least her friend knew about the contract and could choose to do what she wanted.”

  Daniel folded the letter. “That’s it.”

  “Let’s go,” I said, jumping to my feet.

  We stopped by the office and he spoke with the secretary in Swiss German. She responded, he thanked her, and off we went.

  “She said they’ll never miss what they didn’t know they had,” he explained.

  As we hurried along the slushy side of the road on the outskirts of town, I brought up Giselle, asking if he was surprised to find out she was my birth mother.”

  He nodded. “It’s quite a story you have, Ada.”

  Determined that he know everything, I told him about Lexie and how both of us had the same father, an older married man, and how Giselle relinquished us when Lexie was two and I was a newborn.