Rebecca's Return (The Adams County Trilogy 2)

by Jerry S. Eicher

  Past her mother she moved slowly in soft steps, up to where Miriam was standing, and then even closer until her dress touched the bed. What was she to do? Reach out? Instead Rebecca placed her hand near Miriam’s on the bed rail.

  To do more, to reveal their former intimacy, here before them all, did not seem like the right thing. It could easily be misunderstood. No, she must give no opportunity for any besmirching of John’s good name.

  He had waited until she was promised to him before he ever dared reach out for her hand. Even then she knew he had wondered whether it was the right thing to do.

  No, she told herself again, feeling a tear forming and sliding down her cheek. They had loved with a pure love, and it would stay that way. At least as much as was within her power, regardless of what lay ahead.

  “He’s so white.” Miriam’s voice sounded as if it came from a long distance away. She reached out and gripped Rebecca’s hand, which was still on the bedrail. “I haven’t seen him move—not once since we came in last night.”

  Rebecca couldn’t find words, sensing her mother moving close to the bed.

  “Has the doctor been in this morning?” Mattie asked.

  “Yes,” Miriam said, “he seemed puzzled—I thought. Said John should at least be coming around some, if it is just a skull fracture.”

  “So it’s something more serious?” Mattie asked in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “He said that they would know more after they did the scan,” Miriam said.

  “We must submit ourselves to what Da Hah has planned,” Mattie replied, in the same tone of voice.

  Looking at John’s still body, unmoving except for the slight rising and falling of his chest, Rebecca remembered how he had been. Her memory was not of last night and his anger, but of that Sunday afternoon down by the bridge. John had been so alive, so full of life, his eyes longing for her, his hand reaching out.

  Her sobs came silently, shaking her shoulders as she felt the future press down. There was something about the color of John’s skin, the closed eyes, the shallow breathing. This was no little problem that tomorrow would just blow away. Rebecca was scared. Scared for the future—both John’s and her’s.

  She finally let the emotion rise up and push out in gasps. To her side she felt more than saw Isaac moving closer to Miriam. His voice reached her, deep and solemn, the one he used for preaching on Sunday’s.

  It filled the hospital room, as he quoted by heart. “When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. O God, Father of us all, we pray now for strength and for Your holy power. Give these weak bodies of ours, frail and made from the dust of the earth, the ability to walk in Your will. Dear God, we pray, in the name of the Father, the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

  Rebecca let the sobs continue partly because she couldn’t stop them, but mostly because she knew she was being accepted by Isaac and Miriam—even here, even with John hurt. That was the best feeling of all. Isaac had prayed with her in the room. He and Miriam were offering her a high honor. They were accepting her as a part of the family.

  Somewhere, and she was not sure where, she had passed the test with Isaac and Miriam. As the girl who was promised to their son, she had shown the proper respect and response they were looking for.

  The right responses had come naturally. Remembering how she had felt during the trip to the hospital—wishing she didn’t have to come—she now was glad to be here. John was badly hurt, but already God was bringing good to pass. John had been very angry with her last night, and wrongly so, yet she loved him deeply—deeply enough to promise to marry him.

  “Excuse me.” The voice of the nurse came from behind her. “We need to take Mr. Miller for his scan.”

  “Of course,” Isaac said, quickly taking Miriam’s arm to move her away from the bed.

  Rebecca and Mattie followed. Sitting on the chairs, they watched the nurse swiftly move John out of the door, his single IV line swinging slightly as he disappeared down the hall.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Luke was driving up to Rushville to pick up the bags of oats his father wanted. Something about his mother’s actions that morning wasn’t sitting well with him. He had been trying to figure it out on the drive up but with no success.

  What is it? He pondered the question, keeping the old driving horse moving at a brisk pace even when it wanted to slow down. Is it the confusion that surrounds the letter to Emma’s lawyer? He thought on that for a bit, counting the telephone posts going past his buggy door, trying to distract himself into finding the answer.

  It all seemed so long ago now, even though he knew it had been only last night. A long night, he told himself, tormenting too. He had thought he could bring the letter home with a clear conscience because it was for a good cause. That was how he had seen it yesterday, but after last night and now this morning, things were looking different.

  How he wasn’t sure. Everything was changing. Maybe even he was changing. He felt as if temptation had come knocking yesterday and that he had answered the door. Opened it, he felt like telling himself, welcomed the intruder in with open arms.

  Tomorrow was Sunday. He would not be seeing Susie and wished he was. His mother would not approve of his enthusiasm if she knew how he was feeling. A little emotion was fine with Rachel, but with how much he had enjoyed himself last Sunday night, Rachel would most certainly not give her blessing. There is the matter of the money to think of, she would say. Can Susie fit that? Is she suitable for our family?

  If the truth be told, Luke was certain Susie fit the family perfectly. It was his mother who was trying to change the family, for the better of course, but change it nevertheless.

  How strange that was. The very thing his mother did not like—their poverty—had just calmly gone ahead and taken root, creating its own life for them. They were what they were, and his mother was now the interloper, bringing in the unknown to the known.

  That he was being unkind to his mother crossed his mind, but for the moment, he didn’t care. Perhaps it was the trip this morning that was giving him the courage to strike out on his own. His mother had acted strange with this talk of Ezra’s tractor being used in the fields. Never in his life had he ever known her to care one wit about who used the tractor where, regardless of the church rules.

  Only this fall she had urged him to use their tractor for hauling some things back to the lower field. He had refused, knowing the consequences if someone saw him and knowing he, not her, would be the one making the confessions at pre-communion church. The fact he was the deacon’s son would, in the eyes of fellow church members, only make matters worse.

  Mother should have known that, he told himself, still feeling irritated after all this time. It was even stranger that she would now want her own brother doing a church confession for the very thing she had told her son to do. A church confession it would be, Luke knew, if his dad got involved. There was hardly any other recourse one could take to settle matters with the church once your error was exposed by a deacon’s visit.

  He supposed his dad could simply drive away in his buggy, after his uncle privately confessed his error. But would his father do that? After all stretching the fence, as the Amish called it because that was what their cows did when they saw greener grass on the other side, was not that uncommon when it came to illegitimate tractor usage.

  Yet Luke doubted if his dad would take the chance on damaging his own reputation by letting Ezra, brother-in-law that he was, off the hook too easily. Word would have a way of getting around and lessoning the gravity of his future deacon visits. His father’s way out of the predicament would have been to refuse to go unless the bishop asked him to. It seemed to Luke that he was now committed.

  It was all quite confusing. Why is Father going to Ezra, and why does Mother want him to go?

  One thing Luke was certain of—this was changing him in some way, that and the talk of another baby in the house. He still blush
ed at the plain conversation around the kitchen table.

  “Susie,” he said out loud to distract himself, letting the sound of her name settle in his ear. It sounded good to him. She certainly wasn’t beautiful, he reminded himself, hearing his mother’s voice in his ear. But last Sunday night had been mighty gut. Like a warm coat in the winter, which one could wrap around one’s self without fear of it doing any harm.

  He heard her laughter again. He remembered hearing it during his visit with her in the living room of her parents’ home. He remembered the sound of her voice, the taste of the food she had obviously made herself, and felt again the warmth of her presence surrounding him in that room.

  “My,” he said, leaving it at that. It seemed to kind of sum it all up.

  With Rushville in sight, he got his mind back on watching for traffic in the rearview mirror. There was little danger of the old driving horse doing anything rash, even if a big, noisy semi should pass them from behind. The fast cars were what bothered Luke.

  Here along the main highway, the shoulder was just a little wider than the county roads. There was enough room to get halfway off the road but not enough room to drive comfortably without getting jarred by the uneven and rutted ground on the right. He could and would get off though, if an approaching car was coming up too fast.

  Luke had never driven an automobile and so knew nothing about how fast the approach to a buggy happened. It was only from his perspective that he understood the experience. An approaching automobile that was going too fast or pulling out to pass was a chilling sight in his little oval mirror. There would be little left of him or his buggy, he knew, if he got hit. So he made a habit of pulling over on a state road, bumps or no bumps, when things looked iffy.

  It had been awhile since he had been in Rushville, but he found the co-op without any problem and went inside to pay for his oats. While loading them into the back of his buggy, he noticed Henry Stuzman arrive in his surrey. Luke knew it was Henry before he even saw him because he knew the surrey. He recognized it as the one that often held Ann Stuzman on Sunday mornings.

  Many a time Luke had watched Ann climb out of this buggy at the end of the house walks, accompanied by her mother and older sister. He had watched Ann, wearing a bonnet and black shawl, walk toward the house. No one noticed him looking because the long row of boys and men always faced toward the house. Inside the church house, he had never felt right looking at her. She was kind of, he thought, above his reach, as some of the boys from the youth might say. And so he never paid her much attention.

  He knew though that she had just turned eighteen. Why she wasn’t dating seemed strange to him. Certainly, he figured, some boy had already asked her. It was simply the logic of things. Why then had she turned the boy down, which was what surely must have happened.

  Sure, he reminded himself, Susie was twenty when she went home with me last Sunday—on her first date. But Susie isn’t Ann, and neither am I the boy asking her.

  With the thought of Ann came the thought of the money, his mother’s money, and it bothered him. I’ve got to quit this. Susie’s just fine. I don’t want the money. I like her.

  But try as he might, his attraction to who might be in Henry Stuzman’s surrey wouldn’t go away. Might Ann be in the buggy? He needed to find out.

  Henry had already gone inside the co-op, leaving his horse, its head hanging low, the reins limp, resting from the ride into town. No sign or movement seemed to be coming from either the front or backseat of the buggy. Neither had anyone gone into the co-op with Henry.

  He needed to find out if Ann was in that buggy. Likely she wasn’t, but he wanted to know. He also knew, much to his embarrassment, that he would never be doing this if it weren’t for the money his mother was so certain should be coming their way. The promise of the money seemed to give him a confidence with someone like Ann Stuzman—confidence he wouldn’t ordinarily have.

  He closed the backdoor of his buggy, got inside, and drove toward the hitching rail. If Ann is not in the buggy, I will continue on. I won’t pause, and no one will be the wiser. I’ll be glad if she isn’t there, he told himself. He would be spared this burden, this unknown possibility that was haunting him.

  He almost went on by the parked surrey. Yet the compulsion to know for sure made him pull up and park beside it. He looked out his door window and saw nothing. But it was possible that he wouldn’t because a closed buggy door could well hide a person behind it.

  He told himself he would just stop and step to the ground. If the surrey door did not open once he was on the ground, he would climb back in and leave. That was his resolution and as far as he would go.

  Opening the buggy door, his right foot found the step and the other the ground. Turning around slowly, he faced the other buggy and saw its door open, revealing the smiling face of young Ann Stuzman.

  Her bright blue eyes, her soft arms, they took his breath away. This was not the Sunday Ann, all wrapped up in her shawl and her Sunday dress.

  “I thought you wouldn’t come over,” she told him with a twinkle in those blue eyes. “Dad has to check on something.”

  “I almost didn’t,” he heard himself saying, his heart pounding in his mouth. There seemed no way to stop his words. “I thought you might be here.”

  “Oh, you did?” She was smiling again now, her eyes going toward the co-op door. He thought she must be watching for her father, perhaps uncomfortable if he caught her with him. She is eighteen, he told himself, so why should her father object?

  “What did you come into town for?”

  “Dad wanted some oats. I have them in the back,” he said.

  “You come in often?” she asked.

  He felt weak from her gaze, not at all like Susie made him feel. But then Susie isn’t Ann, he told himself. Finally finding his voice, he replied, “Once in a while, when Dad needs something and can’t come in himself.” And then a wild thought streaked like lightning through his mind. Ask her home on Sunday night. I’m not seeing Susie then.

  He gulped hard, trying to straighten out his insides and make sense of this. Never had he ever thought of doing anything like this, at least not while he was still seeing Susie.

  “Dad’s checking on seed prices for the spring,” she said.

  She didn’t realize that even that short comment spoke volumes about the differences between their families, but Luke did. Reuben would never look into prices until just before he bought. Her words removed any idea of asking to take her home Sunday.

  “Well, I have to be going,” he said abruptly, forcing himself to look away from her blue eyes and reaching for his buggy door. He was sure he saw regret in her eyes.

  “Oh,” was all she said.

  He wanted to shout the words, Can I see you Sunday night? But he didn’t, his tongue dry from the tip to the base. Climbing back into his buggy, he nodded in her direction, his smile stiff on his lips, and got the old driving horse headed out of town.

  You, Luke Byler, are a total dumm kopp, he told himself, as he neared the fields at the edge of town. He had never felt so stupid.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  May we have the strength to bear Gottes villa,” Isaac said, when John had been taken from his room.

  “You shouldn’t say that. Not in front of Rebecca,” Miriam chided him gently. “We don’t really know what the doctors will find.”

  “It’ll be bad,” Isaac said with a sigh, seemingly no longer having the strength to hide his fears. “It was a bad accident.”

  “But we don’t know that,” Miriam insisted, gently brushing his arm with her fingers.

  Rebecca was surprised at their talking so freely in front of her, but they now apparently considered her part of the family.

  Rebecca wondered, What would Isaac and Miriam really say if they knew about last night and how John had spoken to me? Would they stick up for their son? Would they support him if they knew how the anger had burned in his eyes?

  “We should sit in the waiting room,�
�� Isaac announced, deciding for them all. He glanced toward Miriam and said, “You know where it is—because you were here last night.”

  “It’ll be more comfortable there,” Miriam agreed, stepping toward the door.

  As Miriam led the way down the hall, Rebecca felt the white walls narrowing again.

  Mattie sensed her daughter’s uneasiness and whispered softly, “It’ll be okay.”

  Rebecca hoped her mother was right, but at the moment it certainly didn’t feel so. “He’s not dying?” she asked, wanting to know. Her concern for John’s condition gripped her and made her whisper quietly to her mother, so no one else would hear.

  The words must have come out louder than she intended because Isaac paused at the door of the waiting room, holding it for Miriam and then for Mattie and Rebecca.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, as she passed him. The full length of his beard, even longer than her father’s, felt comforting as she glanced at his face. He had John’s eyes, the same shade of brown, and the same gentleness.

  “You don’t think so?” she asked him, to cover up her thoughts.

  “No,” he said, “I’m afraid Da Hah might have another trial in store for us. Death is a great sorrow.” He shook his head. “He would have given us grace for that and will give for whatever else we must bear.”

  “You must not speak so,” Miriam turned back to say, already seated in the waiting room chair.

  “It’s on my mind. She’s family,” Isaac said simply, still holding the door.

  “It’s your fear talking,” Miriam insisted. “The doctor will tell us soon, I’m sure.”

  Isaac let go of the door, as if he was letting go of a great weight. Rebecca felt compassion watching Isaac walk toward Miriam, wishing she could comfort him.

  “John just told us he asked you to marry him,” Miriam said softly, leaning slightly out in front of Mattie so Rebecca could hear. The statement was startling, but relieving at the same time. “He only told us last night,” Miriam added, in the same wistful tone.