“What did she mean by that?” Sitting in an easy chair, Hannah held a glass of iced tea.
“When she left Samuel—your father—she claimed he was abusive, that Amishmen all were. Behind closed doors, Amishwomen were the next best thing to slaves, that she wouldn’t leave you alone with Samuel.”
Disturbed, Hannah said, “You didn’t believe her? Domestic abuse is pretty common.” She’d hidden her head under a pillow some nights when her mother and the man du jour screamed at each other, when she heard slapping sounds and crashes. Although . . . if Samuel Mast had been abusive, wouldn’t you think Mom would be more careful where men were concerned?
Helen frowned. “It was so . . . out of the blue, you see. There’d never been any hint before. Samuel and Jodi had us out to their house often. Jodi was all smiles, and from the minute you could toddle, you’d run right to your daddy, completely trusting him to swing you into the air, or push you on a rope swing, or put you on one of the horses’ backs.” She hesitated. “Also, Jodi has been a worry to us since she reached adolescence. Either she could never stick to anything, or she was never satisfied. I guess that’s why I doubted a sudden story like that. A job or class in school was always fine one minute, and the next she’d claim an instructor was sexually harassing her, or that the employer’s practices were unethical and she refused to go along with it. She’d also refuse to report them, though. I don’t think she ever lasted on a job for more than a few months.”
“She still doesn’t,” Hannah said quietly, feeling as if she was betraying her mother, but also grateful that for the first time in her life, here was someone she could be honest with about Mom.
Her grandmother’s smile was sad. “I’m sorry to say, I’m not surprised. She started college twice and dropped out both times without even completing a semester. When she first told us she was converting to be Amish, we were alarmed. But, well”—she glanced at Robert, who reached over and clasped her hand—“Samuel was kind and several years older than her. He seemed so steady. We hoped their deep faith and the routines and boundaries of the Amish were just what Jodi needed, so in the end we supported her decision. And, at first, it seemed we’d been right to do so.”
“At first?”
“She got pregnant, oh, six or eight months into the marriage. She was so excited! And I’d swear she adored you, but you weren’t very old when I saw signs of restlessness. I’d spot her in town with friends who must have picked her up with their cars. If I asked her about it, she’d lie and say I was mistaken, or insist she was entitled to have friends who actually wanted to have fun. At first, she seemed to be earnestly trying to fit in, but it wasn’t long before I realized that Samuel’s female relatives seemed to be doing most of the cooking and plenty of housework besides. Jodi would reheat dishes, or Samuel would, even though he looked exhausted after a hard day of work. He’s a farrier,” she added.
Hannah nodded. Helen had told her that in an earlier phone conversation.
“When we were there, Jodi would dart around as if entertaining us was her only obligation. We worried about you, but your other grandmother or one of Samuel’s sisters or nieces always seemed to be there, warm and loving.”
Robert wordlessly handed Helen a big, white handkerchief, which she used to wipe her cheeks and blow her nose.
“I started to wonder why she hadn’t gotten pregnant again. The Amish mostly have big families. Was she secretly using birth control?” Her mouth compressed. “Whatever we expected, it wasn’t what happened. Samuel came to see us, distraught. She’d taken all of the cash they had on hand—and, I gather it was several thousand dollars, at least. He hadn’t seen any necessity to bank more than every few weeks. He thought she might have been taking some over the past months, too, a hundred dollars here and there. She left a note on the kitchen table, and was gone. Their second horse and buggy was there. A friend had to have picked her up. She called us two days later to tell us how horrible her marriage had been and how afraid she was for you, pleading for some money and our support. When I told her running away was wrong, well, that was the last we heard from her. Until this week.”
Twenty-two—almost twenty-three—years later.
“I’m so sorry,” Hannah whispered. “I wish . . .”
Robert said, “Not . . . your . . . fault. Scared . . . for you.”
“I’m ashamed that I don’t even remember you. Except . . . since you called, I keep feeling as if more memories are lurking than I knew.” She bit her lip. “This one time I asked Mom if I could ride a horse, and she told me it wouldn’t be safe at all, since I’d never been on one before. And . . . I was maybe seven or eight, and we passed several Amish buggies on a road. I got excited, but she rolled her eyes and said, oh, of course I’d seen them around, because Amish did have communities in . . . I don’t remember. Indiana or Iowa or wherever we were. If she did that enough times—”
“You’d doubt your own memories. And . . . start suppressing them yourself.”
“Yes.” Hannah sat quiet for a minute. “I’m going to my father’s house for dinner tomorrow night.”
Her grandmother nodded. “He let us know.”
“Did he divorce Mom? Or . . . ?”
“No. If she’d sent divorce papers, he might have signed them for her sake, but with his faith, he would have still considered himself married. He didn’t remarry until, oh, ten years ago, long after we were told you and Jodi had died.”
“You stayed in touch?”
“Oh, yes.” Helen’s smile warmed. “Samuel invited us to occasional gatherings, and now that Robert can’t easily attend, Samuel still drops by every so often with a basket of fresh produce, a delicious pie or cobbler, or honey from one of his neighbors. He told me that when we need help, to let him know, that we were still family.” More huskily, she added, “Always family.”
“You believe he’s a good man?”
“I truly do. And saying that, I’m ashamed of my own daughter.”
Hannah saw that Helen and Robert’s handclasp had tightened. Comfort offered and received. They had to have been married fifty years, and yet, unless she was imagining things, the love they felt for each other was still palpable.
Hannah wanted that, with all her heart, but didn’t know whether she’d be able to stand so much closeness, or was capable of sustaining love and trust. The only relationship of any meaning she’d had was with her mother, who was affectionate, lighthearted, and imaginative, but also inconstant and useless where the practicalities of life were concerned. As it turned out, those were trivial flaws compared to what she’d done to her parents, her husband . . . and her daughter. Thanks to her mother, Hannah had never known a sense of security. What foundation did that give her?
Unless, a voice seemed to whisper in her ear, her first five years of life, her grandparents, her father, and her extended Amish family had provided the bedrock she could trust. Just because she’d blocked it out didn’t mean it wasn’t still there.
A loner now, she was almost afraid to find out.
Chapter Three
Annoyed because a delivery of fertilizer hadn’t arrived when promised, Gideon decided to check for a telephone message. He considered leaving the kinder playing, since they seemed happily occupied kicking a ball back and forth on the lawn, but decided he didn’t dare. Most of the time they were responsible, but Zeb was at an age to be reckless, and Rebekah never slowed down long enough to think before she tore off to her next discovery.
When he said, “We must walk to the phone shanty,” they both brightened. The ball rolled away.
“Do I have to hold hands, Daadi?” his daughter asked. “If we do, I want to hold yours, not his.”
Zeb curled his lip. “Who’d want to hold your hand?”
Best friends one second, squabbling the next.
“You and I will hold hands once we reach the road,” he said.
�
��Race you!” Zeb cried, and tore down the driveway. His sister ran after him.
“Stop before you get to the road!” Gideon called, increasing the length of his stride, but not worried. The most important rules, they knew to obey. He trusted them not to run out onto the road.
It was a quiet, rural road, not like the highway, and most of his neighbors on this stretch were Amish, but Englischers used it, too, and they often drove too fast. Especially the tourists, out hunting for any glimpse of the Amish. Tourism was good for Tompkin’s Mill, keeping the restaurants busy, including the Amish-owned Country Days Café, and plenty of other businesses in town, too, many of which were also Amish-owned. Bowman & Son’s Handcrafted Furniture sold almost entirely to the Englisch, for example.
Well, let the tourists go into the stores and stare all they liked, he thought, but stay away from his farm. He hated to look up when he was plowing a field to see a car parked by the side of the road so a row of strangers could snap pictures of him at work as if he were part of an exhibit. It wasn’t as bad here as it had been back home, in upstate New York, but Missouri had plenty of those people curious about the Amish for no reason Gideon could fathom.
A faint smile twisted his lips when he remembered Miriam Bowman, now Miriam Miller, a member of his church district, telling him that the tourists were excited because the Amish drove and farmed with horses. “If we used tractors and cars, they wouldn’t care what we wore,” she’d told him.
That might be so.
And he knew that growing up as one of eight kinder crammed into a three-bedroom house had left him with a craving for solitude that partly explained his choice of work. None of the Leit—the people—liked the curiosity of auslanders, but he more than most felt their intrusion.
His own kinder had skidded to a stop short of the pavement and now ran back toward him.
“Are you going to call someone?” Zeb asked him.
“Probably not, just listen to messages.” He explained about the fertilizer, and his son nodded solemnly.
Rebekah, not at all to Gideon’s surprise, looked messy—her formerly crisp white kapp was hanging by a pin or two, and her hair, also dripping pins, had fallen down around her shoulders. Part of that, he would concede, was his fault; even after a couple of years, his fingers still felt thick and clumsy when he tried to fix her hair.
How could Leah have done this to her family? he asked, as he still did too often. He didn’t want to think he was begging for an answer from God. He tried to have faith his Lord had His reasons for taking her, but even his family and members of his church district back home had questioned his decisions and Leah’s behavior to the point where he had to believe that he bore some responsibility for her death, that it was not all God’s decision. Left confused and hurting, he had made the decision to move away, where people didn’t know what had happened.
It was better here in Missouri than it had been in New York, where the endless whispers sometimes felt like a horde of whining mosquitoes intent on sucking all the blood out of him and the kinder. But living without his wife, the kinder without their mamm, had become no easier. Nor had his own questions about the accident.
A kind on each side of him, he was walking the short distance on the shoulder of the road to the phone shanty he shared with three other households—Esther Schwartz, a widow; Isaac and Judith Miller as well as their son and his family; and Bart and Ada Kauffman—when he heard a car approaching. It was crawling along, by the standards of the Englisch. He turned to see why, not liking how exposed he and the kinder were to cameras and rude questions.
The driver was a lone woman, however, no one he’d seen before, but at least she didn’t appear to have a camera. She did brake beside them and roll down her window. “Do you speak English?” she asked.
Beside him, his kinder gaped at her. Both had probably learned enough English now to understand her, Zeb more than Rebekah.
“Ja—yes,” Gideon said. “Are you lost?”
He had the surprised thought that she was pretty, but not in a showy way. Which meant she wasn’t wearing the makeup most Englisch women did, he realized. Her dark blond hair was confined in a knot at her nape, and her eyes were green and gold with maybe a hint of brown. He guessed she might be tall, for a woman, and thin. And why he was bothering to wonder, Gideon didn’t know.
“Not lost, I don’t think,” she answered. “Just . . . I’m a little confused by the house numbers.”
He nodded his understanding. “That’s because when the road took that sharp bend half a mile back, the numbering changed.”
“But I’m still on the same road. Aren’t I?”
“No. This is Two Hundred Seventy-Fourth now.”
“Shoot. I must have passed the house I’m looking for.” She smiled. “Thank you. Denke.”
“Who are you looking for?” he asked, not sure why he didn’t just nod and keep on his way, which was what he would normally do.
“Samuel Mast.”
Was this the long-lost daughter everyone was talking about? He had no excuse for asking.
“Then go back to the bend, and his farm is the second driveway on the left.”
She offered another smile, aimed at Zeb and Rebekah as well as him, thanked him again, and drove the short distance forward to the Millers’ driveway to turn around.
With another smile and a wave, she passed them again and went on her way. As Zeb, incurably curious, asked who she was and why she, an Englisch woman, would go to Samuel’s house, Gideon thought she probably was Samuel’s daughter—because her long, slender fingers had been gripping the steering wheel too tightly, and her eyes and even those smiles showed tension.
Scared to meet her daad, who was probably just as nervous. Someone had said she’d been snatched away when she was just past her fifth birthday, and had only now discovered who her father was.
Gideon looked down at his own six-year-old daughter, feeling as if the hollow left inside him where Leah had been had suddenly expanded. Even with his trust in God, if he lost Rebekah or Zeb, that would be hard to survive.
He imagined Samuel pacing the floor or perhaps out front in the yard, waiting for a first glimpse of that little girl, now grown up.
“Here we are,” he said, stepping into the three-sided wooden structure where a telephone and answering machine sat side by side. A red light blinked on the answering machine. A lower shelf held a couple of tattered spiral-bound notebooks and a cup with pens and pencils. Anyone who checked the answering machine would make note of messages for the neighbors.
Picking up a pen, he smiled at Rebekah. “Would you push the button to start the messages?”
She beamed and reached out.
Zeb complained, “Why can’t I . . . ?”
A man started talking. The message was for Gideon, saying just what he’d expected. The fertilizer was to be delivered tomorrow. “Without fail,” the man concluded.
Gideon snorted and erased the message.
For no good reason, even as he listened to his kinder chattering and answered endless questions on the return walk, his thoughts strayed to the Englisch woman and to Samuel Mast. Would anything come of this meeting? It seemed unlikely, after she’d been out in the world so long. But just knowing she was alive and doing well, that would be a blessing for Samuel they would all celebrate.
* * *
* * *
Halfway up the driveway, Hannah’s foot jerked to the brake when she saw children chasing each other around the lawn in front of the large white farmhouse. Her sisters and brothers? As she made herself start forward again, they all stopped where they were and turned to stare at her car. The oldest girl suddenly lifted her skirt and raced for the front porch.
By the time Hannah parked in what seemed a reasonable spot where the hard-packed lane turned toward a barn, a man had come out on the porch.
Even more nervous tha
n when she’d met her grandparents, she grabbed her handbag, climbed out of the car, and walked toward him as he descended the steps and came to meet her.
He wore the same kind of suspenders over the same color shirt as the man with the two children down the road had. Heavy work boots, too, and a straw hat. He was blond, with a beard that was a shade darker, almost a match to her hair, she couldn’t help thinking. The beard with a shaved upper lip looked odd to her.
“Hannah?” he said. “My Hannah?”
“Yes.” Oh, heavens, she was going to cry again. “Yes. If . . . You must be Samuel Mast.”
Astonishingly, he had to swipe at his cheeks, too. “Ja. Yes. I thank God for bringing you home.”
She bit her lip and nodded.
He lifted his arms, then let them fall. Hannah took an equally hesitant step forward and then thought, This is my father. Feeling her lips tremble as she tried to smile, she took that last step, and felt his strong arms come around her.
His beard was wiry against her cheek. He wasn’t a tall man, no more than a couple of inches taller than her, but solidly built. She had the bewildering thought that he smelled familiar.
“Daadi,” she whispered.
He lifted his head and let his arms fall. “You remember?”
“No.” She sniffled. “But . . . sometimes I think I do.”
“You were very young.” Bright blue eyes met hers. “I never forgot you. When your grandmother let me know you and your mamm had died—” He took a couple of deep breaths. “My heart broke.”
“I’m so sorry—”
“No.” He stopped her with a hand on her arm. “You knew nothing about that. You were only eleven when your mother asked that man to make it look like you were both dead. Still a girl.”
She barely remembered the sheriff’s deputy Mom had stayed with for something like a year. Mom must have done it just because she finally had someone she could coerce who might—as it turned out, did—know how to fake a death certificate.
Finding Hope Page 3
