Morning Star

by Charlotte Hubbard

  Regina immediately forgot her own troubles. “Oh my. I haven’t seen Dorcas at church for a while, but I had no idea she was at death’s door.”

  Jo shook her head. “Apparently the vitamins weren’t improving her anemia, and she had other ailments she didn’t look after, either. You’d think a mother with young children would’ve taken better care of herself.”

  “Poor Glenn,” Regina murmured, glancing toward his store. “Should we open his shop?”

  “Seems a pretty small favor,” Marietta put in. “We maidels would do that for one another, ain’t so?”

  “I’ll do it,” Regina said. “And if I see any of you girls swamped with customers, I can help you, too. That’s the nice part of having partitions we can see through, ain’t so?”

  Regina felt better having a purpose for her day. Spending her time in Glenn’s wood shop also made it easier to accept that Koenig’s Krafts now occupied the space where NatureScapes had been—and it moved her farther away from the Flaud shop. She wasn’t eager to face Gabe yet.

  What if we just left, Red? I could make furniture and you could sell your paintings! We’d get by just fine living English.

  The atmosphere at the Flaud house must’ve gotten more stifling than she’d realized if Gabe was so ready to leave his family forever. A part of her was thrilled that he’d hinted at marriage, yet his abrupt exit had shown her a side of him she wasn’t comfortable with.

  It’s best you saw his true colors—his lack of commitment to the faith—before you fell in love with him.

  Regina sighed as she walked along Glenn’s shelves of small wooden toys, familiarizing herself with their prices. Truth be told, she’d fallen for Gabe long ago. Since her shunning she’d hoped, deep down, that he’d rescue her from her aunt and uncle’s spare room, but that bubble had burst once he’d expected her to jump the fence. She didn’t want to live with Clarence and Cora Miller—but she didn’t want to live without them and the girls in her life, either. If Regina left the Old Order, the preacher would make no allowances because she was their niece: if she broke her vow to the church, she would be dead to him and his family.

  Regina eased into one of Glenn’s rustic rocking chairs. Fashioned from flat slats of varnished birch embellished on either side with birch branches that still had the bark attached, the chair made a comforting noise as she rocked on the plank floor. When four customers entered, Regina rose and invited them to browse—

  “Did my son sleep at your place, Regina?” a familiar voice demanded. “Delores is worried sick. And if you’re letting Gabe hide at your house—”

  Regina turned toward the doorway, her cheeks burning as Gabe’s irate father entered the shop. “My stars, Martin,” she protested softly. “Why would I have anything to do with Gabe not coming home?”

  “And why would you ask such a question in front of Glenn’s customers?” Bishop Jeremiah asked as he entered behind Martin. He placed his hand on the older man’s shoulder. “Gabe stayed at my place last night. Let’s get some coffee, Martin. Seems we need to continue our chat from last night.”

  Martin shrugged out from under the bishop’s grasp, his scowl deepening. “Why are you chatting with me, Bishop?” he challenged. “None of this would’ve happened if my son had made his confession in private.”

  “Let’s go,” Jeremiah insisted, gesturing for Martin to precede him. “Delores is worried. And when I stopped by your place a while ago, it wasn’t Gabe who’d upset her.”

  As Bishop Jeremiah escorted Martin to a table in the commons, Regina relaxed. If anyone could set the Flauds’ situation straight, it was their district’s compassionate bishop—but that didn’t stop the customers in Glenn’s shop from stealing secretive glances at her. No doubt they questioned her morals, after Martin’s outburst about Gabe staying at her place—

  And what must Gabe think of my morals, if he’s invited me to leave the Old Order? Why would he believe I’d forsake everyone I’ve ever loved?

  It was a baffling dilemma. For years, Regina had dreamed of marrying Gabe—and perhaps because he hadn’t noticed her, she’d continued painting to console herself. She prayed that Bishop Jeremiah could unruffle Martin’s feathers—and that he would give Gabe the encouragement he needed before he got desperate enough to leave the church.

  As the rain began to beat down on the building’s roof, Nelson and Michael Wengerd carried their hanging baskets, flats of flowers, and vegetables into the building and set them in the commons area in front of their interior shop. After about an hour of thunder and lightning, a lull in the customer traffic gave Regina a chance to walk around inside The Marketplace. A glance toward Flaud Furniture told her that Gabe hadn’t come to work. Despite Bishop Jeremiah’s continued company and the presence of customers in his store, Martin looked no more cheerful than he had earlier in the day. In fact, her boss’s florid face and scowl accentuated a demeanor that seemed uncharacteristically crabby and erratic.

  When she spotted Rose Wagler in the Quilts and More shop, focused on an embroidery project, she couldn’t resist walking in that direction. Outside the store, Martha Maude and Anne Hartzler sat at a quilting frame stitching on a star-pattern quilt, greeting the customers who’d braved the rain. When they saw Regina, however, both women focused intently on their work, as though she weren’t standing a few feet away from them.

  It was the hardest part of being shunned, that strict, silent separation church members insisted upon.

  Regina lingered for a moment anyway, inhaling the rich scents of the vanilla and cinnamon candles that burned in displays near the doorway. Next to Rose, six-year-old Gracie sat in a small chair, intently poking her needle into a large cross-stitch design on a flour sack towel. When the little girl spotted Regina, her face lit up.

  “Hey there, Regina! Look at this!” she exclaimed as she hurried toward the doorway. “My towel has a bunny sittin’ in a tulip patch! Mamma says we can use it at home when I finish it, coz it’ll make dryin’ the dishes really fun!”

  Fond memories made Regina’s breath catch in her throat. “Oh, it’s been years since I embroidered—and just like you, Gracie, I used to sit stitching with my mamm,” she whispered wistfully. “It was our favorite way to spend Sunday afternoons and long winter evenings.”

  The little blonde nodded, happily waving a clear plastic bag stuffed with skeins of embroidery floss. “I like pickin’ out the colors, coz colors make me happy! Mamma let me get a big ole bag of floss at the craft store—fifty skeins!—so we can share!”

  “Jah, you won’t need to buy any more for a gut long while,” Regina said with a chuckle.

  As Rose approached the doorway to corral her little girl, who was too young to understand the harsh rules of shunning, Regina took her cue to leave—but her heart was racing.

  I like pickin’ out the colors, coz colors make me happy!

  Gracie’s bagful of floss—brilliant blues, deep greens, sunny yellows, vibrant reds and purples and pinks—had made Regina immediately happy. She yearned to reclaim her paints from the thrift store—

  If you stitched your wildlife pictures on towels, you’d be creating something practical! No one could fault you for artwork that women could use every day.

  She blinked. Her mother’s dear voice had come out of nowhere. A solution to her soul’s deepest hunger had just dropped from heaven like the manna that had fed the Israelites in the wilderness.

  Regina returned to Glenn’s shop to help a couple of ladies who’d gone inside, but her mind was racing ahead to formulate a plan for her sanity’s salvation. Embroidery! How could she have forgotten the hours of pleasure she and her mother had shared while stitching colorful designs on tea towels?

  Oh, Mamm, this might be the idea that makes living with Uncle Clarence and Aunt Cora bearable. Well—almost bearable.

  During the next lull in business, Regina made a beeline to Koenig’s Krafts. She felt so full of hope and anticipation, she could forget that her watercolors had once sold for such pr
incely sums in the shop she was entering. Spotting the needlework section near the back, she was barely aware that Martin was ranting about something in the adjacent furniture shop. His voice was growing louder and more insistent until—

  “Martin?” Bishop Jeremiah interrupted. “Martin, you’d better sit down before—”

  Regina reached eagerly for a package that contained thirty skeins of bold, bright floss colors—and instinct compelled her to choose the bag of variegated colors hanging beside it as well. She could already imagine using the deep green for a mallard’s head and then stitching its feathers with the blended shades of browns and tans in one of the variegated skeins. When she spotted flour sack towels in packages of three, she picked one up, figuring she should try her new pastime before committing to any further expense. Then impulsively she added a second package to the growing stack of items in the crook of her arm.

  “Could I interest you in a shopping basket?”

  Regina turned with a start, laughing when a bespectacled young Mennonite clerk offered her a blue milk crate. “Gut idea!” she said, dropping her selections into the crate. “When the crafting bug bites, you can’t get out of a store with just one or two things.”

  “Jah, those crafting bugs keep us in business,” the clerk said with a laugh. “If your eyesight’s better than mine, maybe you won’t need a high-intensity lamp or a needle threader or—”

  “Somebody got a phone? Call nine-one-one for an ambulance!” Bishop Jeremiah called out from the Flauds’ shop. “Martin’s passed out and I can’t rouse him.”

  Alarmed, Regina peered between the slats of the shop divider. Martin had apparently collapsed onto the dining room table where he’d been sitting.

  “I’m on it!” the clerk said as she grabbed her cell phone from her apron pocket.

  From the central commons where she’d been refilling the coffee maker, Jo rushed toward the furniture shop, followed by the Helfing twins, Lydianne, and the Hartzler women. Everyone was talking in low, urgent voices, speculating about why Martin’s behavior had become increasingly troublesome of late and what had made him pass out.

  “Do you have any idea where Gabe is today?” Regina asked as the bishop massaged Martin’s shoulders. “I’ll go get him. Or I can fetch Delores—”

  “Gabe’s delivering furniture over past Cedar Creek,” Bishop Jeremiah replied. “All things considered, it might be best if I accompany Martin in the ambulance and get him settled before we drive Delores to the hospital.”

  “I’ll go to the house and stay with her,” Martha Maude said. “She and the girls need to know about Martin.”

  The wail of an approaching siren told them of the ambulance’s arrival. Shoppers and the other folks in The Marketplace had gone quiet, remaining a respectful distance from the emergency workers who hurried through the front doors.

  At the sight of their gurney, Regina turned, stabbed by the painful memory of her parents’ covered bodies being wheeled from the crushed remains of the bus they’d been riding in on the way home from a wedding out east. Dozens of times over the past ten years she’d wondered why God had allowed the bus to stall just before its rear tires cleared the railroad tracks. The racket of the train speeding toward them—the wail of its horn as it warned them of its approach—would be forever etched in her memory.

  Why had she been seated in the front, where she and her cousin had clambered out after the collision, when her parents in the back hadn’t even known what hit them? Counselors had assured her there’d been nothing she could’ve done to save them, yet questions and guilt still plagued her at times. At twenty-two, she hadn’t been ready to deal with her parents’ deaths—or the possibility that it had been God’s will for them to die while she’d survived.

  “Martin, thank God you’ve opened your eyes!” Bishop Jeremiah said. “No fussing, now. We’re taking you to the hospital to get you checked out.”

  Regina waited until she heard the men’s footsteps leaving the furniture store before she drew a deep breath and let go of her memories. The clerk relaxed as well. They made light conversation as she scanned the items Regina had chosen.

  As she left Koenig’s, Regina didn’t even care that she only had a couple of dollars left in her wallet. She’d found an acceptable way to play with color and to use her sketching skills again.

  More importantly, she’d provided herself with a survival tactic for when her maidel life was confined to a spare bedroom.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The tiny hospital room closed in on Gabe as he stood a few feet from his father’s bedside. He’d never been in a hospital before—and Dat never got sick. The sight of so many clicking mechanical monitors and the tubes snaking away from his father’s arm and chest spooked him so badly that he almost bolted. Dat was supposedly resting comfortably after they’d stabilized him, following what had apparently been a heart attack, but the man in the bed appeared too old and frail to be his father. He could’ve been a stranger’s corpse laid out for burial.

  Gabe had never been so frightened in his life.

  “Hospitals aren’t my favorite place either, Gabe,” Bishop Jeremiah remarked softly as he entered the room. “It’s normal to feel like you’re suspended in a state of unreality—especially because we’re so used to seeing your dat hale and hearty—”

  “Taking charge of everything, and telling us what to do,” Gabe put in hesitantly. “Are we sure he’s going to—to wake up?”

  The bishop gently grasped Gabe’s shoulder. “They’ve sedated him, but believe it or not, he’s much better than he was earlier today. When he collapsed at The Marketplace—”

  “I should’ve been there helping him,” Gabe blurted out. “If I hadn’t been so set on staying away from him, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  The bishop focused on the slender figure in the bed. “We don’t know that, Gabe. You were doing your best to lessen the confrontational atmosphere at home—and it was your dat keeping things stirred up.”

  Gabe looked away. He appreciated Jeremiah’s support—especially because, despite Gabe’s being under the bann, the bishop was kind enough to speak to him, to explain what had happened to his dat. Deep down, however, he still believed his father would be fine today if he hadn’t made such a scene during his confession at church a couple of weeks ago.

  “The doctors have told me that Martin’s erratic behavior and moodiness of late could’ve been caused by limited blood circulation and the blockage they’ve located in the passageways around his heart,” the bishop continued. “After his surgery on Monday—and after his pacemaker settles in—he should feel a lot better. His condition has been a long time in the making, Gabe, so he didn’t even notice that he was getting slower and crankier, or that he wasn’t feeling very gut.”

  “Or he was just too stubborn to admit to it,” Gabe said with a sad laugh.

  “Jah, that too.” At the sound of voices in the hallway, the bishop turned toward the door. “Ah—gut afternoon, Saul. And Matthias, it’s nice of you to visit, as well. Martin’s under heavy sedation, but I bet his soul knows we’re all here with him so he’s not facing this ordeal alone.”

  Gabe nodded at the deacon, and he found a tentative smile for Matthias, who lowered his eyes because of the shunning situation. He feared the men would leave—or would expect him to leave—but Bishop Jeremiah’s presence apparently convinced the deacon to keep his lectures to himself. Bishops and other church leaders were allowed to counsel folks who’d been shunned, so Saul wouldn’t likely call Jeremiah out for being here.

  Removing his black straw hat, Saul approached the bedside, gazing steadily at the man connected to the monitors and tubes. “I hear you were with him when he collapsed, Jeremiah. Probably a gut thing the ambulance got to The Marketplace in a hurry, ain’t so?”

  “It’s all gut, and God has it all under control,” the bishop replied solemnly.

  “I was glad to see Martha Maude and Anne out in the waiting area with Delores and the girls,�
�� Matthias said. “I suspect she’ll want to come in again soon. We shouldn’t overstay our welcome.”

  “All things considered, I think we have time for a verse or two of a song,” the bishop suggested. “It can be our prayer for Martin while he’s not able to join the singing.”

  Gabe’s throat suddenly got so tight that any sort of vocalizing felt impossible. Once again he wanted to leave the room, but Jeremiah’s hand remained on his shoulder. After a moment, the bishop began “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” his mellow baritone easing away the harshness of the clinical, claustrophobic room. Saul and Matthias hummed in two-part harmony until they reached the refrain. Then they, too, sang the lyrics that were as familiar to Gabe as the feel of his guitar’s frets beneath his fingertips.

  But he couldn’t join them. The part about singing because he was happy—and free—made his eyes widen with irony. This was a familiar song about how God watched over every one of His children, yet since two weeks ago when he’d been shunned, Gabe had felt anything but happy or free. As the words and his friends’ voices continued, however, he became very aware of the music’s power over him—its rhythmic way of seeping into his soul to soothe him.

  Gabe also heard the silent spaces where Dat’s voice should’ve been, resonating on the bass line. The song was still an ode to quiet faith, but it lacked the rock-solid foundational quality his father’s harmony provided.

  After the men had sung two verses and eased into a soft closing, Gabe mumbled his thanks for their music—but he felt compelled to leave. In the waiting area he smiled nervously at his worried sisters. After he spoke with his mamm and the Hartzler women, who focused on their laps, he went home to do the livestock chores.

  Gabe felt as unsettled as a box of loose rocks mixed with shards of glass. As he pulled his buggy into the stable, the building felt empty and haunted. His dat’s buggy horses nickered as he fed and watered them. He went to Mamm’s chicken house and filled the feeders. Even as eager birds surrounded him to peck their grain, he couldn’t shake the lonely, terrifying sensation that his father was gone.