“We do,” Esther said.
Deborah’s shoulders straightened and her chin lifted. “I would need to know more about what you do. A lot more. I’d love to be part of something as practical and necessary as providing pure water to people who have none.”
“What you did was a very grave wrong,” Ivan said. “You should have given our boy back to us immediately. You should never have kept him. On the other hand, had you not been there, the chances are very good that he would have drowned. A three-year-old does not have good sense. He might have tried to wade out to where he had last seen his brother. That beach was very isolated and we were gone a very long time. God used Pharoah’s daughter to save Moses’ life when he was a baby. We believe God might have used you . . . and your weakness . . . to save our son. We’ll never know, but . . . we forgive you. ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but Joy cometh in the morning.’ ”
It was then that Mary opened her arms to him, and he truly hugged his . . . other mother . . . for the first time.
“I—I have pictures,” Deborah said cautiously. “Back in New York. So many picture albums. One for each year. I will have copies made and bring them to you.”
“Thank you,” Mary said. “We would appreciate that very much.”
Logan noticed that Hope had disappeared for a few minutes. Now she came out on the porch. “I still have all those cinnamon buns you made, Mary, and I just made some fresh coffee. I also have milk for the children. Please, everyone, come in.”
“Before we do,” Ivan said, “Mother, would you lead us in a prayer of gratitude?”
Esther, who had been so faithful in her prayers for so long, lifted her nearly sightless eyes to the sky, raised her hands above her head, and prayed a prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord so pure and heartfelt that Logan could feel the power of it.
“And this,” Ivan said to the children gathered around, “is who we are, and this is what we do. Our family serves the Lord—no matter what comes—and when He answers our prayers, no matter how he answers them—we give him praise.”
Logan wiped moisture from his eyes as he watched his family file into his house. Except for Caleb, who walked off the end of the porch and went over to the large oak tree. He leaned one arm against the tree and looked off toward his father’s house.
Logan followed him.
“You were adorable,” Caleb said, without turning around. “And I loved you like only a big brother can love a baby brother. I would have given my life for you . . . and yet because of my foolishness, all these years I thought I had caused your death.”
“That’s a terrible burden to carry,” Logan said. “But I am still here.”
Caleb turned to look at him. “And I’m glad. It’s going to take me a while to forgive that woman—your ‘mother’—but I’ll work at it. I agree with my parents, it will do none of us any good to make a public thing out of this. What’s done is done. Punishing her will accomplish nothing.”
Then he hooked an arm around Logan’s neck, drew him near, and gave the top of his head a good, hard scrubbing with his knuckles.
“What was that!” Shocked by his brother’s actions, Logan put his hand on top of his stinging scalp.
“As the eldest, I figure we’ve got about thirty years of “noogies” to make up for, little brother,” Caleb said. Then he hugged him hard. “You have no idea how good it is to have you back. Maybe I can sleep without nightmares now. We all tried to pretend we were okay . . . for each other . . . but we weren’t. Now maybe we can begin to heal.”
“Did your grandmother really pray for me every day all these years?” Logan asked as they walked back to the house, their arms resting upon each other’s shoulders. “That’s kind of crazy.”
“We thought so. Now we’re figuring out that she was crazy like an old fox. I think the rest of us learned a thing or two about prayer tonight.”
• • •
His mother had a restless night. Not from pain, which had not become a big problem yet, but apparently from sheer astonishment. She couldn’t get over what had happened earlier in the evening. She kept pacing back and forth across the living room floor, occasionally glancing out at the window toward the Troyers’, although it was too dark to see anything except their porch light.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she kept saying. “What an amazing family you’ve come from, Logan. I never dreamed it would turn out like this. Never!”
He was beyond exhausted, but he wanted to stay up as long as she needed him. “You need to get your rest, Mom.”
“I’ll rest when I’m dead,” she snapped. “Until then, I need to work. I promised I’d help with their well project. They don’t yet know I only have a limited time to work. I want to accomplish as much as possible for those good people for as long as I can.”
“Can you keep your voice down, Mom?” He rubbed his eyes. “Hope and the baby are asleep. So is Simon. I wouldn’t mind getting a little sleep, myself.”
“Is she going to be staying here permanently?”
“No. She doesn’t want to. That was just a temporary fix while everyone knew I was in New York. I’ll take her to her mom and dad’s tomorrow. If you remember, she doesn’t have a house to live in anymore. A tornado destroyed it three . . .” He glanced at his watch. “Make that four days ago.”
“I have to get back to New York.” His mother wasn’t listening. “You need to take me home.”
“Now?”
“My time is short,” she said. “I have an office to close down. Research on international law to begin. You can help me polish my Spanish along the way.”
“I don’t know any Spanish.”
“Then I’ll review mine by teaching you. You can catch a nap at my place before you head back.”
He knew his mother. When she got like this, a protest was futile. “Whatever you say, Mom.”
Sick or not, the powerhouse known as Deborah Parker was back, at least for now.
chapter THIRTY
“Hold still!” Logan shouted from inside the barn. “Please!”
Hope wasn’t sure what was going on, but she thought she’d better investigate.
“Not like that, like this.” Simon’s calm voice overrode Logan’s frantic one. “You have to move this over here, and . . . uh-oh . . .”
She heard Logan let out a yelp.
“I was afraid that was going to happen,” Simon said. “You’re trying to do too much too fast.”
“I want to surprise Hope.”
“She’s going to be surprised, all right!” Simon chuckled.
Hope stepped into the barn, worried about what she was going to find.
“Vas ist letz? What’s wrong?”
The last thing she expected to see was Logan lying in a stable that needed a good cleaning, where he had apparently been kicked by her buggy horse.
“Are you all right?” She rushed in and squatted beside him.
“No, I’m not all right,” he gasped. “That horse of yours just kicked me!”
“That’s what horses do. You have to be on your guard.”
“Where did you get him, anyway?” Logan asked. “He’s always so good for you and Simon, but he’s done everything but roll over and play dead trying to keep me from hitching him to the buggy.”
“That’s Copy Cat,” she said. “Claire gave him to me a few months ago. She said she had a little trouble managing him, but I’ve never had any. You should have known better than to stand behind him. Why on earth were you trying to hitch him to the buggy anyway? Don’t you have better things to do?”
Logan had been lying prostrate, now he sat up and gingerly felt his ribs. “I don’t think anything is broken.”
“Copy Cat is smart,” Simon said. “He pulled back at the last moment. He knew he had an amateur behind him so he didn’t kick as hard as he can.”
“What I don’t understand is what you’re doing out here bothering my horse at all,” Hope said.
“You tell her, Simon,” L
ogan groaned. “I’d rather not right now.”
“I’d rather not, too,” Simon said.
“Well.” Hope put both hands on her hips. “One of you had better tell me, and fast.”
“I was trying to learn how to harness the horse to the buggy. I asked Simon to teach me.”
“I already got that part. What I want to know is why on earth you would want to harness my horse to my buggy when you have a perfectly good car sitting outside.”
“That’s the part I don’t want to tell you,” he said. “Not yet.”
She tapped her foot. “I’m waiting.”
“Well, I sure didn’t want to tell you while I’m lying here in a pile of manure.”
“Logan . . .” Hope allowed some real anger to enter her voice.
“Oh, okay!” Logan’s face turned bright red. “I wanted to see if I could hitch a horse to a buggy because if I turned Amish I’d need to know how to do things like that.”
“Turn Amish?” Hope was puzzled. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“You know . . . become Amish. Like you.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“No. Have you lost yours?” His voice was much too defensive, and she didn’t know why. It sounded like they were having an argument when all she wanted was to figure out what was causing Logan to try to hitch up her buggy. Now he was saying he wanted to become Amish. Nothing he was saying or doing was making a lick of sense to her.
“You aren’t even all that religious,” she said.
“I could be,” Logan said defensively. “You don’t know what I think about God.”
“That’s because you never mention Him.”
“That’s because you never ask.”
“So . . . let me get this straight . . . you’re trying to hitch my horse to my buggy because you believe in God now?”
Logan pulled himself out of the muck. “Of course I believe in God. I asked you to pray for me and my mom, didn’t I?”
He stood up. Simon handed him a handful of clean straw and he started wiping his pants off with it.
“So you think you’re going to become Amish? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds right now?” Hope said. “You’ve purchased every electric appliance and gizmo known to man, and now you’re going to go completely nonelectric? Amish people become Englisch sometimes, but Englisch people do not become Amish.”
“Is there a rule against that?”
“No. It’s just that it’s too hard. Only a few who try it ever make it. It’s a difficult life, even for those of us who have been raised in the faith. Usually people join the Amish church not for religious reasons, but because they’ve fallen in love with some Amish person and think they have to become Amish in order to get married . . .”
Her voice trailed off because Logan was standing there looking at her with the strangest look on his face.
“You’re not . . . you couldn’t be . . . are you . . . oh no.” She stuttered to a stop.
Simon watched avidly and safely from the front end of the horse.
“I had planned to propose after I’d mastered the horse and buggy,” Logan said. “And I certainly didn’t intend to propose covered in manure, but yes . . . that’s what I’m thinking.”
It was not exactly a romantic moment. Logan sounded decidedly grumpy, and he smelled . . . well, like horse manure.
He dropped the handful of straw and wiped his hands off on the front of his shirt, which had managed to remain somewhat clean until that moment. The man was a mess.
“I love you, Hope. I think you’ve suspected that for a long time. I want to marry you and help you raise those sweet children. But, I don’t want to be a laughingstock in front of all the other Amish men, so I was trying to learn a few things ahead of time before I started to court you. That’s what you call it, isn’t it? Court?”
Childbirth hormones were unpredictable things. It had been less than two weeks since she’d given birth and they kicked in big time now. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream in frustration, so she just stood there gritting her teeth. He would never have the knack to do a tenth of the things Amish men learned from birth up. The man was a storyteller, not a horse wrangler, or anything else that was needed on a working farm.
“It would never work.”
“I’ve already met with Bishop Schrock about this situation and he’s going to try to explain some things about the church to me . . .”
“You did what?” The idea of him meeting with her father-in-law appalled her. What must the bishop think of her when she had kept reassuring him that there was nothing between her and her employer?
“I know I can be a good husband to you, Hope. And I’ll cherish your children like they were my own. Besides, I was born Amish. That must count for something.”
“You would teach my children the Ausbund, and the Ordnung, and how to speak German?” Hot tears came to her eyes now. Angry tears. “You have sat through one worship service and met one time with my father-in-law and you suddenly think you know what it is to be Amish? You have no idea what you are talking about. You would become bored with our ways within a year!”
With that, she stomped out, leaving him to deal with his messy self alone. All she could think about was now what was she going to do? She had been a foolish, foolish woman to put all her eggs in this basket. There was a summer to get through and a harvest, Lord willing, to arrange. With the harvest, along with her savings, she might have had enough to put a down payment on a small place of her own.
Now she had to deal with an employer who had proposed to her! She couldn’t allow herself to consider his proposal—not for a minute. He was crazy. There was no way that he could do what he was suggesting. Some men, perhaps, but not him.
It broke her heart that he would even try, and it made her angry, too, because of the sheer hopelessness of the situation.
Thankfully, he did not follow her. Instead, she heard another yelp, and Logan’s voice complaining, “Good grief! The blamed thing just bit me!”
Copy Cat obviously did not enjoy being harnessed by an amateur.
She knew that Simon was probably sniggering in a corner somewhere and trying to hide it, and she wished she could laugh at the situation as well, but she just couldn’t. The whole community had watched Grace and Levi struggle with their marriage, and they were still working out what to do about church the last time she checked. Hope was not going to endanger her children’s eternal souls, or hers, by bringing this New Yorker into their family as the father and spiritual leader.
Even if he was one of the kindest most thoughtful men she had ever known. Even if those eyes of his did melt her heart every time she allowed herself to look into them.
She marched into the kitchen and began preparations for dinner. She would not eat with him and Simon tonight. She would leave the food on the stove and they could serve themselves. The less time she spent with the man, the better! She’d find another job to do after the harvest and hopefully never run into him again.
But she would miss him terribly.
She hoped he and Simon would manage to get poor Copy Cat harnessed soon. She didn’t want to go back out there after the scene she had just been through, and she had an appointment with Grace in an hour for Esther Rose’s checkup.
It would be good to ask Grace for advice.
• • •
Being in Grace and Claire’s home birthing clinic was always soothing. She loved going there. Elizabeth was frequently in attendance, making hot chocolate, handing out advice, or cooing over babies. If Claire had a few minutes between clients, she would rest her feet by putting them up on a footstool and turn out yet another knitted cap for a newborn. Grace’s baby girl either slept in a crib in a corner, or rode around on her mother’s hip while Grace consulted with the various mothers.
It always smelled good in the home birthing clinic, usually from something Claire had baking in the oven. Sometimes mothers brought extras from their own baking day. There w
as nearly always something good to eat, and a cookie for a tag-along child.
It was a comfortable and comforting woman’s place where subjects like nursing, childbirth, or postpartum blues could be discussed frankly and without embarrassment.
Hope wondered how Levi withstood the almost constant onslaught of Amish and Mennonite women who came to the clinic. She guessed that he probably pretty much lived in the barn or fields during clinic hours.
She was a little early when she pulled into the driveway of Elizabeth’s house. To her delight, Levi was in the barn with the doors wide open, working on his car with his new stepfather, Tom, her aunt Claire’s husband.
Tom had been raised Amish, joined the military, then came home to his roots twenty years later after recuperating from wounds sustained in combat. Hope figured he was probably the only Amish man in the world who could fly a helicopter. Claire and he had fallen in love and the whole Amish community had rejoiced.
Tom saw her and came to take charge of her horse.
“And how is our little mother?” His battle-scarred face was wreathed in smiles. “Isn’t it awfully soon for you and Esther Rose to be out riding around?”
“I’m feeling well enough,” Hope said.
“I hear the baby was almost born in a cellar.”
Hope shuddered. “It was too close for comfort. I don’t know what I would have done if Logan Parker hadn’t found me.”
“Got you here just in time for Grace to deliver the baby, from what I hear,” Tom said.
“He did.”
“Come see what I’m doing!” Levi called out to her. “Tom is teaching me how to replace a transmission.”
She walked over and peered into the open hood of the vehicle. What Levi was doing looked complicated. She wondered how in the world he could learn such things when he had spent most of his life using nothing but hand tools and horses.
“It’ll drive like a dream again when I get this fixed.” Levi grinned at her with a grease-stained face. She had never seen her cousin happier.
“It must be so nice to go where you want to go without having to hire Englisch drivers,” she said.
“Is that envy I hear in your voice, Cousin?”
Fearless Hope: A Novel Page 27
