The Amish Bride

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “Compassion?” I crossed my arms, my hands warm against my sides. “You’re a fine one to talk about compassion, Mom. Especially to me.”

  She stopped in the middle of the room. The strip of hair showing in front of her head covering was almost completely gray. She was shorter than me by a couple of inches. And though she’d always been stocky, it seemed that she’d grown even thicker over the past few years.

  “Ella,” she finally said. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Dairy farms? From all over?”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Ezra?” My tone was accusatory.

  “Oh, that.” She took another step toward me. “Will asked me if I knew anyone who owned a dairy, and I gave him some names.”

  “From how far away?”

  She flinched, as if I’d hit her, confirming my suspicions.

  “Why can’t Ezra work on a dairy farm in Lancaster County?”

  My mother shook her head a little. “That’s not our business, is it? That’s up to the Gundys.”

  “It might not be your business, but it’s mine. They are trying to make me disappear from Ezra’s life. That’s why they don’t want him in Lancaster County.”

  Mom closed her eyes for a moment, as if to gather strength. Finally she said, “He’s twenty years old, Ella. He needs to start making solid decisions. It’s not like the two of you have a future—”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  That condescending smile of hers started to creep back over her face. “Ella, you can’t join a church—especially not the Amish church—for a man.”

  A dead silence hung between us.

  My mother didn’t get it. She didn’t get anything, ever. Nothing about me. Nothing about love. Nothing about life.

  I was stomping up the stairs when she added, “Joining a particular church can’t be based on whom you want to marry. It has to be because of your relationship with Christ.”

  I spun around and peered down at her. “Didn’t you join the Mennonite church because of a man?”

  She blushed. “That was different. It wasn’t his church. Or mine. It was a compromise, a new one for both—”

  I bolted up the rest of the stairs and was in my room before she’d finished.

  I was pretty sure the majority of Amish youth who joined the church did so primarily because they had found a mate they wanted to marry. So what would be so wrong with me joining the Amish church to marry Ezra?

  I could hear Mom’s footsteps on the stairs. I anticipated her quiet knock on my door, which came as expected.

  “What?”

  “Klara invited us to dinner tomorrow. The Gundys have been invited too.”

  “Will Freddy be there?” I spat out his name like a poison.

  She was quiet for a moment. “Of course not.”

  “How about Ezra? Is he coming?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine so.”

  “Then are you sure you want me there? Maybe I should hop on a bus to the next state or something instead. He and I can’t be too close, you know.”

  I hated the sarcasm I could hear in my own voice, but I just couldn’t help it. When my mother replied, she ignored the question completely.

  “Ella,” she began, her voice tired, “essentially, you’re an adult now. Done with school. Nearly eighteen. I know you’re applying for jobs, but you and I need to sit down and talk about what your long-term plans are besides dreams of marrying Ezra or going to baking school.”

  In other words, you want to crush those dreams before they have a chance of happening, I thought but did not say. She was right about one thing. I was an adult now. I needed to sound rational, not petulant.

  The problem was, I knew what she wanted for me. She’d said so several times. She thought I should go to nursing school, something I was certain she wished she’d done if she’d had the choice way back when. But being a nurse would only be a little better than being a midwife. Neither appealed to me. Not even knowing my great-grandmother Sarah had worked as a nurse, for a while at least, had any sway on me at all.

  “Can we do it some other time?” I said, trying to be mature about it. “I’m very tired.”

  “Of course. It’s much too late for any more discussions tonight.”

  After a minute I heard Mom’s door open and close. I thought of the photo on her nightstand, the only one in our house, of her and my father. I rarely went in her bedroom at all and could hardly remember the photo, but I knew it was there. Nothing in her room ever changed. An Amish quilt over the double bed. A small bureau with nothing on top. Four dresses on pegs. Two pairs of shoes in a corner.

  When I heard her door open again and the sound of her steps going down the hall and into the bathroom, I hurriedly slipped from my room and dashed over to hers. Once inside, I headed for the nightstand, where the photo had always been. The light was dim so I picked it up to see it better.

  She looked so young. Her hair, what I could see under her kapp, was close to the auburn color of mine. Her gray eyes were lively, even though there was only the hint of a smile on her lips. He was tall and blond, and his brown eyes sparkled as he grinned.

  I heard a bump in the bathroom, and then the sound of the running water stopped.

  I put the frame back down and hurried from the room, wondering why she’d kept it all these years. She wasn’t adamantly opposed to photos, but she wasn’t in favor of them either. She’d never owned a camera. When someone from our Mennonite church would give her a photo of Zed or me, she would thank them for it and bring it home, but then it would disappear. I’d looked before, several times, but could never find any pictures in our house at all except for this one.

  I slipped into my room and pulled the door tight as my mother stepped into the hall.

  Not only had she kept a photo of him, but she had kept it beside her bed all these years. There were about a million and a half things I didn’t understand about my mother. Could she possibly still be in love with the man?

  My face contorted at the thought.

  I knelt down on the floor and fished under my bed, past the stack of bridal and fashion magazines, all the way to the back to the wooden box with the farmhouse from Indiana carved on the top. There was no reason for me to hide it, not really. Zed wasn’t interested in it and neither was Mom. Still, I liked the thought of it under my bed. My hand landed on it and worked it forward until I had it in both hands and pulled it out. I stayed on the floor, crossing my legs and running my fingers over the carved surface. It was a little bigger than a laptop. The farmhouse was on a little rise and was two stories high, with what looked like additions on both sides. It was big, probably close to the size of Aunt Klara and Uncle Alexander’s house. A field was in front of it, and there was a stand of trees behind it. On the sides of the box were shafts of wheat.

  I opened the lid and pulled out a copy of Sarah’s drawing. It had symbols of pies and shafts of wheat around it, in the same style as the symbols in her book, although she was much younger when she did the drawing.

  I picked up her book from my bedside table and slipped it into the box.

  I would talk to Mammi tomorrow about the relatives in Indiana. I’d see if she knew of any dairy farms in the area, ones that might be close to the Home Place.

  Already, a new plan was forming in my mind.

  FOUR

  The Gundys used to be in the same church district as Mammi, Aunt Klara, and Uncle Alexander, but that district had divided long ago. Because the population of the Amish was continually expanding but districts were limited to a certain size, splits were sometimes necessary. Ever since the one that had separated the two families, they tried to get together several times a year anyway to fellowship and catch up with each other. Just because they didn’t worship together anymore didn’t mean they were willing to give up those ties.

  And the ties did indeed run deep, much deeper than just church membership. Our two families
had been friends for generations. In fact, when Ada and several others went to Switzerland last spring, they learned how the families had first been connected way back in the 1800s. Apparently, my great-great-great-grandfather Abraham Sommers had been next-door neighbors with Ezra’s great-great-great-grandfather Ulrich Kessler. Abraham had helped finance the Kessler family’s emigration to America when the Mennonites came under persecution in Switzerland. Abraham hadn’t been Mennonite himself, but his daughter Elsbeth had joined, and she and her husband had made the trip to the States with the same group the Kesslers were in. Elsbeth was friends with Ulrich’s daughter Marie, and the two women had stayed in touch for the rest of their lives.

  Once in the United States, Ulrich settled in Lancaster County, but Elsbeth and her husband, Gerard, moved out to Indiana and built the Home Place. That separated the families for a time. But then, several generations later, Elsbeth’s granddaughter Frannie moved back to Lancaster County. A young widow with three daughters, Frannie knew of her family’s earlier connections with the Kesslers and had contacted Marie’s granddaughter Alice, whose married name was Beiler, when she got here. Frannie and Alice had become acquainted and soon were fast friends. Now that Frannie’s granddaughter Ada had married Alice’s grandson Will, five generations down from the original next-door neighbors of Abraham and Ulrich, our families had finally even been joined by marriage.

  That thought should have given me joy, but instead it gave me more than a twinge of irritation. Ezra and I should be free to marry too, without objection and without interference. My cousin Ada was Amish, so everybody had been thrilled with the news of her engagement to Ezra’s brother Will, especially considering how their union bound us all together. But thanks to my mother’s break with her Amish heritage years ago when she got married, I had been raised Mennonite, which was a huge sticking point. At least we were able to have a relationship with our Amish family and friends, thanks to the fact that my mother hadn’t yet joined the Amish church when she made the switch and thus was never shunned. But the way they saw it, maintaining friendly ties was one thing; marriage, quite another.

  Along the way from nineteenth-century Switzerland to twenty-first-century Pennsylvania, plenty of our forebears had switched back and forth between the two faiths. Despite that fact, when it came to Ezra and me, the families just wanted us apart, all because Ezra was raised Amish and I was raised Mennonite.

  Give me a break.

  We left for dinner at Aunt Klara’s at four thirty, just after Zed arrived home from school. On the way, after we had crossed the covered bridge, the rain started to come down in buckets, casting a pall over the darkening landscape. The swishing of the windshield wipers, even on high, could barely keep up with the rain coming down.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be going out tonight,” Mom said.

  “We’ll be fine,” I answered, hoping Ezra would be there. He hadn’t sent me a text all day, even though I’d sent him several.

  When we reached the highway, Mom turned right toward Aunt Klara’s. Sheets of rain bounced against the pavement. It was so dreary, I hoped Mammi hadn’t gone back to bed. Some days she did that, even though she was much better than she’d been a few years ago, before my medically trained cousin Lexie had come into our lives and discovered some dosage issues with the prescriptions Mammi had been taking.

  Lexie’s visit here had had a huge impact on our family in many ways. Before then, a lot of secrets had been kept under wraps, secrets that had to do with why she’d been given up for adoption years before to a childless couple who lived out in Oregon. Lexie had come here searching for the identity of her birth parents and ended up blowing the lid off a whole shocking web of lies and secrets. That had been a painful time for all of us, but in the end the truth really had set us free.

  Since then, we’d all seen a lot of healing take place. Aunt Klara wasn’t so bitter. Aunt Giselle was no longer so estranged from the family. Uncle Alexander stood taller and spoke stronger than he ever had before. And Mammi seemed far less burdened and remorseful.

  I turned toward the window. Here I thought that time was all about the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and yet Mom hadn’t said a word about my father being Zed’s father too. I’d thought that all of our family’s secrets had been brought into the light during that great come-to-the-truth meeting, as Lexie liked to call it, but in fact one of the biggest secrets of all had stayed in the dark—and right under my own nose, no less.

  Mom turned down the lane and the car bounced through puddle after puddle until my aunt and uncle’s white house with the balcony finally came into view. The wisteria that wound its way along the railing was as bare and ominous as a skeleton. Up ahead, I spotted a carriage headed toward the barn. Perhaps it was Will’s. Or his parents’.

  Mom parked under the pine trees, and then she and I dashed toward the house, holding our capes tight to keep our hoods on our heads. Zed came along behind us at a more leisurely pace.

  My mom’s older sister, Aunt Klara, had the door wide open before we reached the porch.

  “Come in before you drown,” she called out. She motioned to us to hurry and then stepped over the threshold, peering around us. “Come on, Zed!”

  As we stepped through the doorway and paused to take off our shoes, I was greeted by Ada and her stepdaughters, thirteen-year old Christy and three-year-old twin girls, Mel and Mat. Izzy Mueller was with them too, a young teen who had been working with Ada as a mother’s helper. She’d grown tall and willowy since the last time I’d seen her, and her hair had darkened to a deep chestnut.

  Standing near the kids were Ezra’s grandmother Alice, and his parents, Ben and Nancy. Ezra himself, however, I didn’t see anywhere. I didn’t see Will either, for that matter, and wondered which one of them had been driving the buggy around to the barn. I called out a hello to everyone as I shed my cape and gave a hug and kiss to Mammi, who was standing in the midst of the fray.

  Zed closed the door behind himself, flicking his wet bangs from his eyes. When he also hugged Mammi, I noticed he towered over her now.

  “Oh, how you’ve grown,” she gushed, reaching to pat his shoulder. “You’re going to be well over six feet, aren’t you?”

  I stepped back, taking in the two of them and wondering if Mammi knew whom Zed’s father was.

  Alice and Mammi sat down in the living room. Ben said he would go out and help Uncle Alexander finish his chores, and Mel and Mat grabbed Zed’s hands and led him over to the stack of puzzles on the bookcase by the fireplace. Izzy joined them. Mom and I followed Aunt Klara, Ada, Christy, and Nancy into the kitchen. The table, extended for tonight, was already set, and the scent of roasting chicken filled the air.

  “I just need to mash the potatoes,” Aunt Klara said. “Then we’ll be ready to eat when the men come in.” If Zed and I weren’t around, they would have all been speaking in the German dialect of Pennsylvania Dutch instead of English. We’d picked up some through the years—Zed probably more than me because he seemed to have a knack for languages—but I hesitated to speak it because I was sure I was getting it wrong.

  The thing was, Mom never spoke it at home, not even when I was little. Because my father hadn’t grown up Plain, he didn’t know the language at all, and Mom said she didn’t want to teach me something he couldn’t understand and had no reason to learn. Given that I was just three years old when he left us, it seemed a little silly for her to have persisted with that notion even after he was gone. I gasped, my mind filling with one very disturbing thought: Was it possible that she did so because she thought he’d be coming back soon? Had she wanted him to come back? Last night I wondered if she’d ever really stopped loving him. Whether she had or not, surely once he was gone, she had closed off her heart to any possibility of his return. Hadn’t she? That’s what I’d always thought, but maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe she’d been pining for ol’ Freddy since the day he took off fifteen years ago, a ceaseless yearning that had never abated. Maybe his reappe
arance now was the answer to her prayers, her dream come true.

  The thought made me so sad.

  Trying not to go there, I wandered to the back door and peered outside, even though I couldn’t see the barn from there, just a corner of the garden and the lawn.

  “How are those grandbabies of yours?” Mom asked Nancy.

  Nancy laughed. “Do you mean all of them or just the youngest three?” She had eight altogether, ranging in age from two months to thirteen years. Mom had delivered every single one of them except for twins Mel and Matt, who had been born in the hospital.

  Nancy began to talk about the newest baby in the family, and as she did, I noticed Aunt Klara glance at Ada, who smiled in return and shyly ducked her head. I knew it! Ada was pregnant. I tried to catch her eye, but she avoided my glance and focused her attention on retrieving a pitcher from the cupboard and filling it with water.

  “Here, Ella,” she said, handing me the pitcher and gesturing toward the empty glasses on the table.

  I took it from her and started pouring as I made my way around the large rectangle. Aunt Klara had put out her wedding china, the same she used at holidays. Ada handed Christy a stack of napkins, and she, too, began quickly zipping around the table.

  “How’s school?” I asked.

  “Fine. I have one more year after this one, and then I’ll be done.”

  I cocked my head as I looked at her. “Already?”

  She grinned. “What do you mean ‘already’? It’s been the longest seven years of my life.” She groaned dramatically. “I don’t know how I’ll manage to suffer through eighth grade. That’s another whole year!”

  I was surprised to hear her say that, as most Amish kids I knew lamented the end of their formal education. Then I remembered how Ada had been hired to tutor Christy on their trip to Switzerland last year, and I realized the book learning probably wasn’t her strong suit.