A Lancaster County Christmas

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  Danny was never one to sit still for long. He succeeded in pulling off one sock, then dropped it and crawled off toward the grassy world beyond the blanket. Even then, he was intent on exploring the world.

  Sol watched him pick up a rock and put it in his mouth, a look of surprise flashing across his small face at the strange texture and taste.

  “Awful, isn’t it?” he said softly, wiping dirt and drool from Danny’s chin.

  Mattie moved beside him, quietly, efficiently, taking out things from the basket.

  “Should he have that in his mouth?” Mattie asked, settling down beside him, so close he was aware of her sweet scent, filling the air.

  “Probably not,” he said, unclenching the rock from Danny’s fist and replacing it with a torn off piece of bread instead.

  They ate lazily, then picked ripe blackberries for dessert, sun-washed and tender. Danny ate them by fistfuls, juice running down his cheeks onto his bib. He lifted a chubby arm to point to two golden eagles, circling in the deep blue sky. Later, when he fell asleep, Mattie moved him on a blanket in the shade.

  “This is nice,” Mattie observed, settling against Sol, who leaned with his back against a tree. “We should do this more often.”

  Sol looked at Danny, sleeping so deeply with his head turned to the side, his long hair curling against his damp neck. He kissed the top of his wife’s head, warmed by the sun. It was nice. It was more than nice. It was a hint of heaven. Mattie looked up at him, expecting him to say something, but he kept his face turned away; he didn’t want her to see him so stirred by emotion.

  No sooner did the memory of that perfect day seep into his head than it began to snow. Great wet clots of flakes as big as fists. He looked back over his shoulder, blinking hard to get the ice crystals off his lashes. He snapped his head around and peered through the lace curtain of falling snow ahead of him. It was a silent cold, like having your ears stuffed with cotton. The snow and the still, heavy air muffled all sound, except occasionally the sound of a raven calling out as it flew overhead, although he couldn’t see it.

  He pulled out his pocket watch. Nearly two o’clock. He planned to give this clock to Danny on his sixteenth birthday, the age when his father had given it to him. Sol had never begged anything of God before, but he was begging now. He was, in his heart at least, on his knees with his hands clasped in an agony of pleading. Please God, he prayed over and over, like a litany, with every step up the hill. Please help me find my son. Please keep Danny safe. Please, please, please.

  The grandfather clock in the living room ding-donged out the three strokes of the hour. Certainly, Jaime thought, C.J. or Sol had found Danny by now. She glanced down at Buster, sleeping quietly on his perch. Lucky Buster. He didn’t know that his surrogate father was missing, and he wouldn’t care until it was time for the next mouse. He’d be fine as long as a mouse was delivered, on schedule. It wasn’t so easy for people.

  She tried to think of ways to get Mattie’s mind off the search for Danny and on to other things. She asked Mattie if she wanted to quilt. No. Would she teach her how to bake bread? Seemed as if Amish housewives were always baking bread. But Mattie said no and went into the living room to look out the windows. Jaime decided to try to get Mattie to eat or drink something. She opened the cupboard and found a half-used jar of instant coffee. It was the kind her mother used to make every morning. Jaime unscrewed the cap and inhaled deeply. She suddenly felt overcome with a wave of grief. It really was the little things, like instant coffee, that made Jaime miss her mother the most.

  Jaime took out two mugs and reached for the hot water kettle that sat on top of the woodstove so the steam would humidify the room. In the silence that was not quite silence—the sink faucet dripping, the grandfather clock ticking softly, the wind whistling through the trees—her thoughts traveled to memories of her mother.

  She stirred in two heaping teaspoons into the mugs, watching the brown crystals dissolve. The smell of the coffee faded, much the way her mother’s vivid, everyday presence in her mind was fading. She couldn’t remember the whole of her anymore, only bits and pieces: the way she would slip off her shoes as soon as she walked into anyone’s home, even if she had a hole in her sock. Or the way her face would light up when Jaime and C.J. stopped by for a visit. Her mother adored C.J. “He’s a keeper, that one,” she liked to say. Jaime felt so concerned about Danny that her worry over her marriage receded into the background, but it did not disappear.

  What kind of card would her mother send her now, if she knew how thin was the string that was holding her and C.J. together? Jaime could imagine it: a big dog like Tucker on the front of the card, and inside it would read “DOG! Depend On God!”

  Jaime’s hair fell over her cheek as she bent to put a cup of coffee next to Mattie. She settled onto the couch, tucking her legs beneath her. Mattie had her Bible open on her lap and her head was bent over it. Jaime could see the white part of Mattie’s scalp where her hair was parted.

  Jaime picked up her spoon and stirred the milk into the coffee. Ching!

  Mattie flinched, as if she hadn’t realized Jaime was there.

  “Does it help? Reading from the Bible?” she asked Mattie.

  Gently, as if it were something very precious, Mattie closed the Bible. “It helps tremendously.” She noticed the coffee and reached over to pick it up. “Don’t you find that Scripture helps you in times of need?”

  Jaime shrugged. “I don’t read the Bible. C.J. does, now and then. Over the last six months or so, he’s been going to church.” Eve’s church. Eve had the gall to invite him to join her one Sunday and he went. Happily. “I guess you could say he’s got more of a religious bent than I do. Since my mother died, God and I parted ways.”

  Mattie looked at her, confused. “What does that mean, exactly?”

  “C.J. is just more open than I am to the idea of believing in things you can’t see. I tend to accept only things I can see.” Or hear? Like, The Voice?

  She thought about bringing up The Voice—especially because Mattie seemed to be a little less distracted with worry about Danny. Jaime still wasn’t sure how or why The Voice had suddenly bounced into her head. Could it have been that God put it there? And if so, did that mean she was . . . praying? Had Jaime turned into a praying person? Did that mean she would have to start going to church? She wouldn’t! She was still mad at God.

  The last time she set foot in a church was on the afternoon of her mother’s funeral. As she followed the casket out of the church, she left the church behind. The church where her mother had died.

  Last June, on a typical Sunday morning, Connie MacComber walked out of church and crossed the street to reach her parked car. She was coming over to Jaime and C.J.’s for brunch. It was their weekly get-together and C.J. always came up with a complicated new recipe to try that required every dish in the kitchen. That morning he was whipping up Belgian waffles with blueberries and pecans. Jaime vividly remembered every detail of that morning. The phone rang, and C.J. reached for it, still whisking egg whites for the waffle batter, the receiver tucked under his chin. As he listened, he stopped stirring the eggs and got a strange look on his face. It was so quiet she heard a wasp buzzing against the window screen. C.J. hung up and came over to sit with her at the table.

  “That was the police,” he said, in a voice that didn’t sound like his. Tight, clogged with tears. “Your mother was hit by a car.” He took a deep breath as if he was struggling for air. “The officer said . . . he said . . . she was killed instantly.”

  Ever since, Jaime felt as if her life was divided into two halves. Before that phone call. And after.

  Connie MacComber, a woman who had survived all kinds of hard things—who was deserted by her husband, who had raised a child all on her own—her life was over in a matter of seconds. Killed. Boom, just like that.

  The drunk driver who hit Connie MacComber was eventually sent to jail, but that didn’t matter to Jaime. It didn’t change the fact that her
mother was dead. Better to watch your parent die of cancer, Jaime felt, than to have it happen without any warning. So sudden, so premature. Her mother was only forty-nine years old. No time for goodbyes. No time for one last “I love you.” So unfair!

  How could there possibly be a loving God who would allow a good person like her mother to die in such a needless, senseless way? Jaime concluded there were only two options: either there was no God—and that option didn’t work because she knew there were too many mysteries in the universe to think it was all by chance—or, God didn’t care.

  Now that made sense to her. So that’s what she settled on. The clockmaker theory. God set things into motion and let things go. Off to meddle in another galaxy!

  She knew her mother would object to her theology. She often cobbled together imaginary conversations with her mother: “Listen here, Jaime. Don’t go blaming that accident on God. He wasn’t behind the wheel of that other car. All things happen for a reason.”

  But Jaime was never satisfied with pat answers. Her mother used to say that she was forever picking at the Bible and questioning it.

  “I’m just trying to understand,” Jaime would tell her.

  “What’s there to understand?” her mother replied confidently. “God said it. I believe it. End of story.”

  And then Jaime would roll her eyes and call her mother a happy, sappy Christian. She used to make fun of her for believing God spoke to her.

  Until thirty minutes ago, when something—Someone?—spoke to Jaime. Today of all days!

  A blast of wind hit the house and made the windows rattle, jolting Jaime out of her theological muse. She looked over at Mattie, surprised to see her leaning forward on the couch, peering intently at her. Clearly, Mattie wanted to continue this conversation.

  “So, then, for example, you don’t believe in the wind?” Mattie asked.

  “I believe in the wind. You can feel it and sense it and observe its effects.”

  “But you can’t touch it or see it.” She picked up a book on the coffee table and dropped it on the floor with a thunk. “Gravity is all around us, from the heavens to the ground under us.” She plucked a feather from a couch pillow and raised her arm as high as she could, then released the feather. She watched it flutter to the ground. “Isn’t that believing in something you can’t see?”

  One thing that always nagged at Jaime about such declarations of belief: wasn’t there such a thing as just having faith in faith? “Believing in a law of nature like gravity isn’t really the same as believing in a God who is involved in our everyday life.” She might have sounded a little more defensive than she intended.

  Mattie looked out the window and released a sigh. “To me, it is. Powerful, invisible, majestic, mysterious. And faithful. Gravity is a force utterly consistent in its steadiness on all items—great and small. God is faithful even when we are not.”

  For a moment, Jaime forgot that she was in an Amish farmhouse on Christmas Eve, that the hosts’ child had disappeared, that her plans for Christmas had fallen apart. For a moment, she was having a debate about the existence of God, just like she used to with her mother. She felt like a teenager again, trying to figure things out for the first time.

  “Oh Mattie, do you honestly believe that God who created the universe and put laws of gravity into place—do you honestly believe he cares about our little, tiny planet in this small Milky Way galaxy, among billions of galaxies! Do you really think we’re of any significance to him? And you really, truly believe that God actually cares about your thoughts and your choices and your concerns?”

  Mattie locked on to her eyes. “I do.” She leaned forward on the couch. “I believe God reveals his loving nature in all kinds of wondrous ways. Every single day. From sunrises and sunsets, to the families he’s given to us to share this life, to—” Buster gave a loud squawk from his box in the kitchen and Mattie smiled—“to birds and animals. To the greatest miracle of all—the birth of the Christ child, a holy God entering into his creation to redeem it. God’s perfect love is all around us, Jaime. But if you shut your eyes to all the light he has given to you, you can’t see the evidence of his love.”

  God’s perfect love? There it was again! What did that mean?! Okay. Fine! If Mattie wanted to push her on this topic, Jaime was going to push right back. “Mattie, if you believe that God is really out there, truly watching over everyone, that he’s a good and loving God like the Bible says . . . then why are you so anxious about everything? Why do you seem to live as if you’re expecting a catastrophe at every turn? So if you pray, why worry? And if you worry, why pray?”

  Mattie looked at her for a long while with an inscrutable expression on her face. Quietly, she stood and left the room.

  Jaime heard Mattie’s bedroom door shut gently but firmly.

  Bad, bad idea.

  In the silence that remained, all Jaime could hear was the ticking of the old clock and Buster in his box, hissing and spitting like he was angry.

  Why does my mouth seem to run ahead of my brain? She had said all the wrong things. She had only made things worse for Mattie. She was trying to distract her from worry, only to bring it right up again. She rubbed her face and leaned her head back against the couch.

  She let out a loud sigh. She had blown her chance to ask Mattie about The Voice.

  Not long after C.J. set out, there came the first shrieking, biting gust of wind. It sent the falling flakes spinning and whirling crazily and whipped at the loose snow on the ground. The knife slash of the wind cut through his clothes and felt as if it were shredding his lungs. He glanced at his wristwatch: twenty minutes after three. He pulled his collar up around his neck and pushed on.

  C.J. had encouraged Sol to head up to the ridge that lined the farm’s property, hoping he would be able to catch sight of Danny and Tucker from a high vantage point. He wanted to stay on the low ground—to follow the stream that fed the pond. All kinds of streams crisscrossed these Amish farms, carving crevices through pastures, and he knew those banks were extremely unstable. He carefully followed the stream, calling for Tucker and Danny, listening for a response, scanning the area for signs of a boy and a dog. The stream was smothered under a blanket of fresh snow, the willows that lined the banks were all fringed with it. He tried to look as far as he could see for any sign of movement, but the whole world looked frozen dead.

  He was trying not to panic. As an experienced SAR volunteer, he knew of countless stories just like this—a family was enjoying themselves, got busy and distracted, a child wandered off—and the day ended in tragedy.

  But not today. Not this Christmas Eve. He wouldn’t let a tragedy happen again, not like it did last summer. He had to be able to find Danny. Even without Tucker and his nose, C.J. had enough experience now to find Danny. Didn’t he?

  Enough. Funny how that word seemed to keep hitting him in the face lately.

  His mind drifted to Jaime’s comment last night, that sometimes love just wasn’t enough. A few weeks ago they’d had a terrible argument. It was a Sunday morning and he had planned to meet Eve for church. He asked her if she wanted to come along—like he always did—and Jaime acted as if he had insulted her. “Why should I come?” she said. “I would just get in the way.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he had said.

  “What do you think it means?” she asked.

  “Jaime, what’s going on? Why are you overreacting?”

  “You don’t love me,” she said. “You’ve never loved me.”

  “I do love you.” He tried to keep his voice steady. He could see she was steaming like a tea kettle and he wasn’t sure why.

  “Not enough! You don’t love me enough.”

  “I do love you enough,” he said. But it worried him that it would never be enough.

  Before he could say anything more, she darted into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her and locking it.

  C.J. knocked on the door. “Jaime? Please open up. Jaime, I don’t know what’s
made you so upset.”

  He heard nothing from the other side of the door but her muffled crying. Even with his best intentions, the best he could give, he’d somehow failed. He had listened for a minute, and then he picked up his car keys and left to meet Eve.

  How could he love Jaime enough when she always wanted more?

  A blast of cold wind slapped him in the face. The wind shifted from southwest to due west and the sky was low and gunmetal gray. Something caught his eye in the open field he was walking through—an area of discoloration against the snow. He picked up his pace until he reached it. It was discolored, all right—a stain of fresh blood on the snow. C.J. sank down on his knees in the snow and searched around to see if he could find any clues—any fur or tracks or indication of what this was. Fresh kill? He leaned forward to examine the blood and caught sight of something slightly buried—a stick? A rope? Carefully he dug it out. His heart started thumping wildly. It was a dog collar. A small tuft of yellow fur was still attached from where the collar had been torn off. Bitten off.

  C.J. had found Tucker’s collar.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth and called out, “Danny! Tucker!” Then he listened for a response. Nothing. He called again and again. Nothing.

  He glanced at his wristwatch: ten minutes to four. He had to keep going.

  When Jaime’s cell phone started to vibrate, she dove for it and moved into the farthest reaches of the living room before she answered. Mattie was still upstairs and she wasn’t sure if she was mad at her or not. The last thing she needed was to add to Mattie’s aggravation by having a cell phone in the house.