by Linda Byler
She would. With marriage to Yonie erased by the first date, her father’s health improved, she would be able. So she left a message back, asking for directions, an address, and when she would be expected.
Short, brisk, and to the point.
The whole thing of leaving messages with telephones housed in outdoor buildings was maddening. She thought of organizing a protest, maybe a march, like people do.
That wasn’t the Amish way, though. It was all about submission, respecting those in authority. First God, then the ministers, bishops and deacons, husbands, parents, the list went on and on. You were raised this way, being Amish, so minor irritations like doing without telephone service in the house were like cold sores. Eventually, they went away until the next one popped up.
Rebellion came and went, like waves of the ocean. If a major rebellion came and stayed, members of the church would generally leave, buy a car, use electricity, search for a church that made more sense with their way of looking at things. The horse and buggy were too harsh, the ordnung too strict. Inevitably, there was confrontation, parents pleading tearfully to the ungehorsam, their pride seriously wounded.
The remainder of their lives, they would carry the blame, the shame of unfit parenting. How nice to have every child grow up with the same views and values as their parents, walking obediently in their footsteps.
A great blessing.
Members of the Amish church, however unfortunate as it may be, were all endowed with human nature, which meant each individual thought for themselves, and did not always adhere to the ordnung. At council meetings some would sit with a bowed head and ears red with the burning of his or her conscience.
And some saw no wrong in the pocketed cell phone, the occasional bottle of beer. They felt no conviction from God, but they’d never tell the minister their ways.
Was it possible to love your parents and cause them grief? Well, at any rate, Edna always figured you got into complicated territory once you allowed a rebellion to take over your life. To listen to messages on an outdoor phone was a small price to pay for continued peace and unity with the family, the ministers. To give in to each other was a gift, and one that brought lasting peace. God was the final judge, so Edna didn’t need to worry her head about it.
Edna believed folks in all walks of life were saved, would hear the trumpet of the Lord with gladness, the deciding of it best left alone.
But she did think it was silly to have to go outside to use the phone. And what if her parents had an emergency and needed to call for help when she wasn’t home?
“Dat, we need to get you a phone in the house,” she announced the minute she reached the kitchen.
Her father looked up from The Connection and grinned, shifted the toothpick in his mouth, asked, “Now where did that come from?”
“If you or Mam would have a heart attack or a stroke, you’d have to go out the sidewalks, through the office door, just to dial the emergency number.”
“Then I guess we’d do that.”
“You need a cell phone.”
She walked across the kitchen to the magazine rack, ruffled through it until she found a copy of Reminisce.
“Here, look at this. A cell phone with big numbers. No internet. Nothing. Just a handy gadget in case of emergency. I’d feel so much safer after I leave.”
“Now where are you off to this time?” her mother asked, leaning forward over the sink to pinch off brown geranium leaves from the cluttery display of flowers.
“I guess to that man whose wife died a while back.”
“Where’s his family?” her mother growled, pushing her glasses up with a forefinger, before peering more closely at wilted geraniums.
“I think I have mealybugs,” she muttered.
“His sister left a message. It’s spring, so they have business, I guess. Landscaping, greenhouses, I don’t know.”
“Well, my word. Don’t think it’s right, now, Edna. Family should be caring for him and his three children. See, more and more, we’re drifting to the ways of the world. This poor man should not have to hire a maud.”
Her mother’s words were delivered over the sink, with her head tilted back to see through her bifocals, muttering about her mealybugs.
Her father got up to shuffle to the kitchen table, sitting heavily and gazing with a child’s wistful expression at the refrigerator.
“Mam, I guess the cottage cheese and sliced peaches are all, right?”
“Did you look? If I have these mealybugs again. . .” she answered.
Edna went to her room. She didn’t have the energy to argue with her parents about the phone. With her father on medication for both cholesterol and high blood pressure, her mother fairly capable, they should be alright for a month. She’d make sure the girls checked on them.
She heard the click of small toenails, then watched balefully as Trixie walked into the room, making her way steadily to Edna, where she stood, lifted her head, and stared at Edna’s face with sad, accusing eyes.
“You pee on my rug, Trixie, and you’re dead,” she muttered.
Trixie put her head to the side, searching for a welcoming sign, trying yet again to be invited up on the overstuffed love seat.
Edna glared a warning.
Trixie turned, her head down, and walked slowly across the expanse of the luxurious beige rug, came to the edge, sniffed, and hunkered down to relieve her bladder mightily.
“Trixie! No! No! Bad dog!”
Trixie took off running, her feet pounding the hallway in swift bunches of her legs, her toenails like mini castanets, clicking on the linoleum.
“Mam! You get your leaking little fleabag! She peed all over my rug!” Edna yelled, hysterical with frustration.
“Komm, Trixie. Na, na. Komm.”
“Ach, Edna, we’re going to have to do something different.”
“You’re right, Mam. It’s me or the dog.”
And both parents were glad it would be Edna.
As she folded clothes in proper stacks, she found herself still smarting from the bruised dignity of that first date. Here she was, packing the same old piece of luggage with the same old work clothes, going to yet another home where she would enter without a clue, thrust through a stranger’s doors, and expected to carry on the management of a household. A great weariness settled about her shoulders, leaked into her arms, and left a stone in her chest.
Was this her own reaping, having rebelled against marriage to someone of her kind, like Yonie? Lofty ideals that flowered into unreachable fantasies, with Emery on a sky-high pillar of dreams, year after year going by without seeing herself for what she was.
She folded one white apron on top of another, her thoughts colliding, banging around in her head until she stopped, sat on her bed, and lowered her face in her hands. She had to do better than this.
Where was her usual sense of ambition? Of meeting challenges head-on, looking forward to each new home, new people? She should never have agreed to that date with Yonie, the way it had deepened her sense of failure, the development of this painful soul-searching.
This time, she walked up to another porch, her feet dragging, doubt following her like a cloud of black gnats.
This house of sorrow.
It was a white vinyl-sided house with a wide front porch, a row of three low windows, black porch rockers, and a black porch swing at one end.
The lawn would soon need mowing, chickweed strewn across the too thin mulch in the flower beds. The welcome mat was askew, with boot tracks leading to a pair of lace-up camouflage boots.
Before she could lift her hand to knock, the door was opened from the inside; a tall woman of medium build in a purple dress was greeting Edna with a smile on her face.
“Come right on in, you must be Edna Miller.”
Edna set her duffel bag on the floor, turned to shake her hand.
“Yes. I am. How are you?”
“I’m fine. Well, as good as I can be, with everything. I’m Orva’s sis
ter, LydiaAnn.” Edna was surprised to see quick tears sprout from her blue eyes.
After a month?
Uncomfortable with the unexpected emotion, Edna cleared her throat, felt helpless as she searched for proper words.
“Well, of course. You’ll want to know where to put your . . .” LydiaAnn pointed her chin in the direction of her duffel bag.
The whole morning was awkward, with LydiaAnn struggling to keep her composure, showing her to her room upstairs, a large well-lit area complete with a comfortable-looking queen-sized bed. There were also two large dressers, a writing desk, chair, and a tasteful comforter and matching curtains.
She would have to share the bathroom with the children, but Edna assured her she was quite used to that in other homes.
“Orva is at work. He has his own siding business. Construction. He’s putting in long days since Sarah died. We’re really worried about him. It’s just . . .”
Her voice trailed off. She turned to look squarely into Edna’s eyes.
“It’s a mess. The oldest boy just turned fourteen years old. Neil. He’s a handful. His mother was very special to him. I don’t know how he’ll be with a stranger in the house. Orva has not faced reality yet, we’re afraid, so he’s detached himself from responsibility as far as Neil is concerned. There is just one hurdle after another, with both of them.
“Marie is nine, and Emmylou is six. The girls are manageable, both in school, of course. It’s just Orva and Neil.”
She shook her head, a hand going to her mouth.
For a fleeting moment, the thought entered Edna’s mind that she should just leave. Go upstairs, pick up her bag, tell LydiaAnn she wasn’t about to let herself into a situation like this, call her driver, and go home.
It was so unlike anything she had ever experienced, these cloying doubts, this monumental task before her.
It had to stop.
So she mentally dusted her hands, squared her shoulders, took a steadying breath, and said she’d be fine.
They shared the remainder of the apple cake with a cup of coffee as LydiaAnn went over the basics of laundry, what the children ate in their lunchboxes, the Yeti thermoses in the men’s lunches, which day Neil went with his Dat and which days he helped his grandfather on the dairy farm two miles away.
“Emmylou is frightfully spoiled, which is understandable, having had a sick mother for so long. You just deal with the children as you see fit.
“Orva seems to be in another world, as you’ll notice.”
Immediately, Edna thought of the day at the bulk food store, the raw, unvarnished grief in his eyes. She sipped coffee to hide her thoughts, toyed with the fork, her eyes averted.
Too soon, LydiaAnn was on her way home.
Edna rinsed the coffee cups, noticed the sticky countertop, the smudged stove, the dust on the gas heater in the corner. The house was laid out sensibly, a large, bright kitchen with custom-made cabinets, an oval kitchen table with matching chairs, a wide doorway to a large living room that ran along the front of the house. The three low windows presented a view of the driveway, a grove of trees, the sweeping front lawn.
The room contained grommet drapes on each side of the windows, an overstuffed sofa and chairs, a multicolor braided rug, a low coffee table, and houseplants in ceramic pots that all appeared dry, neglected.
Well, the house was definitely cheery, open and inviting, so that was something. The laundry was already flapping on the long wheel line in the back yard, thanks to LydiaAnn, so she’d check the pantry and refrigerator for the food situation before she began cleaning.
She’d be alone till late afternoon, when the girls came home from school, then Orva and Neil between five and six.
She opened the door of the refrigerator to find it stuffed to overflowing with plastic containers, leaking bags of hot dogs, and lunch meat stuffed into torn wrappers. There was cheese in sandwich bags left open, rotting grapes, oranges covered in green mold, ketchup containers stuck to shelves, and spilled dressing, with the cooling fins in the back surrounded by thick layers of white frost.
Nothing to do but get right down to work. Edna was used to these gas refrigerators, so she turned the knob on the bottom to “Minimum,” opened both doors and began unloading the containers. She found garbage bags in a drawer and started pitching all the moldy food, the Cool Whip containers of dubious edibles, the limp celery, and sagging carrots.
As usual, work was her therapy. Adrenaline ran through her veins as she unhooked shelves, washed them in hot, soapy water, set a cake pan beneath the frost-encrusted cooling fins, then tackled the pantry.
It was a lovely pantry, with a small window set high with wide shelves along three sides, a bin for potatoes and onions, a rack along the door for mops and brooms, a hook for the dustpan and brush. Everything else was a fiasco. Too many meals had been brought in, with no one taking charge of empty containers, which seemed to take up most of the shelf space.
Opened bags of potato chips and pretzels were tossed into corners, along with torn boxes of Tastykakes, peanut butter crackers, and granola bars.
A trail of grape Jello powder was already drawing small red ants. A hunk of black bananas on the floor scared her so badly she let out a high squeak. Didn’t these children eat anything healthy, ever? Evidently not, by the looks of all these spoiled fruits and vegetables. Well, she’d change that, for sure.
She bent to the job at hand, scoured and scrubbed and organized. Every dish that belonged to someone else was placed on a table in the laundry room, filed according to initials. Thank goodness for Amish housewives and their perpetual marking of precious Tupperware, Princess House, and Pampered Chef, those versatile but pricey kitchen items they needed to keep in their possession.
Edna found the telephone in the nearby garage, felt like an intruder in Orva’s personal space, but went on to open a door and find his office. His desk was long, low, and made of metal, like a schoolteacher’s, the top littered with every imaginable contractor’s item strewn haphazardly. Calendars, deer antlers, fishing rods, old license plates, glass bottles on a high shelf, a map of Indiana.
Edna found the telephone and left a community message in a brisk voice. She chose to remain anonymous, saying only that the items left at Orva Schlabach’s should be picked up at any time.
That done, she returned to her organizing. There were too many empty black-lidded Modular Mates from Tupperware. She washed and dried them all, dumped the opened bags of snacks into them, stacked them in order, and proceeded to the next shelf. When she began to feel light-headed, she looked at the clock, amazed to find it was well past the noon hour, so she quickly folded a few slices of ham into a roll, added sliced tomato and mayonnaise, grabbed the potato chip container, and sat down, suddenly ravenous. She polished that all off, and then went in search of the chocolate chip cupcakes she’d discovered, ate two, and belched loudly.
She grinned to herself.
Nothing like good old-fashioned hard work to set your whole world right. All those crazy doubts and fears, the building pressure of clutching anxiety was gone like a balloon on a string released from a child’s hand. This was all very doable, the same as all the jobs she’d tackled before.
Three children at those ages couldn’t be all that bad.
Orva would gather himself together and step up to the plate, take on the duties he needed to again. Neil would be O.K. Everything would turn out to be fine, she knew.
She went back to work with a song whistled low under her breath, finished defrosting the refrigerator, arranging everything back on the shelves, before getting down on her hands and knees and wiping the whole kitchen floor with a new, orange cloth. The sun shone, the smell of wet earth came through the window she’d opened a few inches, filling the house with clean scent.
She went to the back patio to bring in the laundry and was surprised to find another wide expanse of lawn sloping down to a rock garden built among layers of stone, surrounded by a grove of evergreens, and one huge, old
maple tree. Daffodils had already bloomed, their shriveled heads falling off the green plants, a variety of colored tulips everywhere, with pink and lavender creeping phlox still a carpet of beauty dangling over the enormous racks.
She stood, clothes basket in hand, taking deep breaths as she surveyed this garden, as wave after wave of delight washed over her.
Who had done this? Had Orva put all the labor into this lush garden for his beloved wife, only to lose her?
CHAPTER 10
SHE HAD PLANNED TO HAVE ALL THE LAUNDRY FOLDED AND PUT away before the girls came home, but she had miscalculated, evidently, not being able to find the correct drawers. Edna heard the front door open and close, the sound of children talking, before she turned and made her way down the stairs, the clothes basket in hand.
“Hi! I’m Edna Miller, your new maud. Welcome home.”
She was greeted by two pairs of green eyes that gazed at her from a fringe of dark lashes, two grim mouths that did not smile, or open to utter a word.
The oldest, Marie, shrugged her shoulders, and the youngest one, Emmylou, simply turned away and went to the living room, sat on the couch and began to peel off her socks.
Edna put the clothes basket away, returned, and asked brightly whether they were hungry. Another shrug came from Marie, with the return of a barefoot Emmylou, clutching her black socks and glaring.
“You’re not my mom,” she said. “And I’m going barefoot. It’s warm outside.”
Edna smiled. “Alright.”
Astonished, the child’s mouth fell open in disbelief.
“We aren’t allowed to go barefoot unless we see a bumblebee,” she said. Her voice was high-pitched, with a lisp so pronounced it was like a burr.
“Who said?” Marie asked from the pantry.
“My mam.”
