by Linda Byler
Emma’s mouth opened, but no sound came from it. She cleared her throat and tried again to speak.
Lizzie pushed open the screen door and stepped out. She did not know if these people were dangerous; she just knew she could not trust them. First of all, they must never know their parents were not at home. The man’s eyes were on her. The woman stepped up on the sidewalk beside the man and glanced at the twins that Emma and Lizzie were holding. For a moment, Lizzie thought she would smile, but she didn’t. She only lowered her eyelids farther.
“How y’ doing?” the man asked.
“I’m fine,” Lizzie said, louder than she had wanted to.
“Y’ Mom and Dad home?” he asked.
“Y-yes,” Lizzie lied.
“Can I talk to ’em?” he asked, eyeing Lizzie suspiciously.
“No. My mom is too sick and my dad is with her. He can’t come to the door right now,” Lizzie said.
The dark-haired man glared at her, and Lizzie glared back.
“Y’ think your dad would let us look for arrowheads along your bottom field, here close to the creek?” he asked, jerking his thumb in the direction of the line of trees bordering the creek.
“What do you mean?” Lizzie asked bluntly.
“These.” He came forward, reaching into the pocket of his jeans for a few arrowheads. He held out his hand, showing her pieces of grayish brown stones in the shape of an honest-to-goodness arrowhead.
Lizzie bit down on her lip as she surveyed the stones from her spot on the porch.
She looked at the arrowheads, and then looked up at the man’s face. His eyes were chocolate brown and not unfriendly now. She looked at the arrowheads again, and then up at him. What should she do? She glanced at Emma.
“Could … could you come back later this evening?” Emma asked.
The man smiled widely and Lizzie took a step forward.
“Your dad ain’t home, huh? Your mom ain’t, either,” he stated.
Lizzie stepped back. She felt extremely foolish.
“That’s okay. We’re not going to hurt you. We live a couple miles from here. I own a machine shop in the nearest little town. Everybody knows me, Evan Harper, my wife, and brother-in-law.
“So you bought this farm from ol’ Edwin. Don’t look the same with his junk gone. We’ll be back later when your dad’s home. See ya.”
He headed down the sidewalk toward his truck with the woman close behind him. The truck starting with an awful-sounding roar.
Lizzie sank onto the porch swing, letting out her breath in a long, slow whoosh. Emma looked over at Lizzie and said, “Oh, I mean it, I was never so scared in all my life!”
“It was awful,” Lizzie agreed.
“You lied, Lizzie,” Emma said.
“Not really a bad lie, Emma. I was only trying to protect both of us, Jason, and the twins. They looked so … so, well … just like you would imagine kidnappers or thieves might look.”
“It was still a lie.”
“Emma, now don’t scold me. What if they were dangerous, and I would have let them know our parents weren’t at home? I couldn’t do that.”
“He knew you lied.”
“So? If he knows, he could wash his hair and cut it and stop acting so big and tough. Then I wouldn’t have to lie, because I would trust him in the first place. It’s his own fault, not mine.”
“You better ask God to forgive you.”
“I will.”
Dat came home toward evening, leaving Mam at the hospital. As the girls crowded around him, he told them how sick Mam was, how they took X-rays of her chest and admitted her as soon as they could.
Dat said she was resting well, and they had already started medication and it would help her fight the pneumonia.
“The doctors said that Mam is very, very sick and it will take a few days to tell which medication works best,” he said with tears in his eyes.
“Is … is she in pain?” Emma asked.
“No, not really. Only when she coughs. She seems relaxed, and all she wants to do is sleep. She told me to come home to you children. You know how she says, ‘I’ll be fine.’” Dat shook his head ruefully.
Then the girls told him about the old green pickup and its occupants, their fear, Lizzie’s lie, and the arrowheads.
“Never let rough-looking men like that know you are alone,” he said.
“But Lizzie lied.”
“I know it isn’t right to lie, but what else could she have done? In a way, it was the right thing to have done, and yet …” Dat just didn’t know.
Later that evening Dat sat all alone on the porch for a very long time. Lizzie wondered what he was thinking. The tree frogs’ chorus from the creek was deafening as a half-moon appeared in the sky. Lizzie hoped Dat was a strong enough person to make it through the next few weeks without Mam. She hoped she was, too.
Chapter 10
LIZZIE WAS VERY NERVOUS, sick to her stomach with apprehension. Today was the first day of school in Cameron County. She didn’t know what to expect. She wished Mam was here, but she was still recovering in the hospital.
Lizzie had completed eighth grade before they left Jefferson County, and so now she would attend vocational school just one morning a week until May. She needed to hand in her diary where she kept account of the homemaking jobs and farming chores she had done that week. And along with the other vocational “scholars,” as the Amish called them, she would study arithmetic, spelling, and German, a few hours each week.
Earlier in the week, Dat had made arrangements for them to travel with an English van driver who also hauled two other Amish families’ children to school. Because there weren’t enough families in Cameron County to build an Amish school, the few Amish children that lived in the area attended an Old Order Mennonite school. Lizzie didn’t know one thing about these Mennonites. Dat said they drove horses and buggies, but they had some practices that were different from the Amish.
Lizzie tried to remain calm and serene as she wet down her hair and worked at combing it in the new Cameron-County way. After four or five attempts, she decided it was good enough, especially since there wasn’t much time to try again. She smoothed her new dark purple dress, pinning her black apron and her covering into place. After one last glance in the mirror, she was ready to go.
“How do I look?” she asked as she stepped into the kitchen.
Emma was at the counter, kneading bread.
“You look fine,” she said. “You’re hair doesn’t even look too bad.”
Lizzie tried to smile, but she felt as nervous as Mandy looked. It was also Mandy and Jason’s first day at school, and both of them were near tears over breakfast. Outside, Jason made up songs as he ran little circles in the driveway.
“I wish you were coming with us, Emma,” Lizzie said.
Emma added some more flour to the bread and began to shape the dough into a loaf. She had finished her vocational class before they left Jefferson County and now worked at home full-time, like other Amish girls her age.
“You’ll do fine,” she said.
Lizzie nodded. She took a deep breath as a black pickup truck with a flat camper on the back popped over the hill and rolled to a stop at the end of their drive.
A white-haired, balding gentleman jumped out and helped them into the truck. Inside were two boys and two girls. The boys looked so much alike with their very blond hair and blue eyes that Lizzie thought she must be seeing double. They didn’t say anything as they watched Lizzie climb into the back of the pickup as gracefully as she could.
“Hi,” said the girl with the same blond hair and blue eyes as the twins. “My name is Sara Ruth. These are my brothers, Joe and John.”
“I’m Lizzie,” she said. “This is my sister, Mandy, and my brother, Jason.”
Jason squirmed in his seat, while Mandy smiled.
“And this is my cousin, Sharon,” Sara Ruth said.
“Hi,” Sharon said quietly.
Sharon wore a navy dress that had little li
nes in it and lovely sleeves with pleats in the shoulders. Lizzie could hardly wait to ask Mam to make a similar dress for her. Sharon’s hair was dark brown and very straight, rolled up neatly along the side of her face. Did her hair look that nice? Lizzie wondered.
The truck rolled to a stop outside of the brick schoolhouse and they all clambered out. Lizzie slipped her hand in Mandy’s.
“I hope the Mennonites are half as nice as the Amish are,” she whispered.
“Me, too,” Mandy said quietly as they followed Sara Ruth into the cloakroom. Pretty floral sunbonnets hung from hooks around the room, next to narrow-brimmed boys’ hats made of black straw.
A large group of girls followed them into the classroom.
“Lizzie, this is Viola, her sister Irma, and Marlene,” Sara Ruth said, pulling or pushing each girl forward. Some of the girls giggled and others shrugged as they tried to free themselves from Sara Ruth’s grasp, but they all managed to say, “Hello.”
Lizzie knew she met Lucy, Etta, and Jean, but she could not keep their names or their faces straight. She thought there were three sisters in the Zimmerman family and two in the Hoover family. One—no, two—with the last name of Martin had eyes as brown as she had ever seen. They had straight brown hair and skin tanned almost the same shade from their long days in the summer sun.
“So! These are the new girls!” the Mennonite teacher said, welcoming them in a rush of color and warmth as she came into the room.
“We heard for a while already that you were moving in,” she said. “You’re not from Lamont, where the rest of the Amish are from, right?”
“N-no, we’re from Jefferson County,” Lizzie said.
“Same kind of Amish? I mean, is there a difference?” the teacher inquired.
“Yes, there is,” Lizzie said, uncertain about how to explain the distinctions between the two Amish groups.
“Really? That’s interesting. Did you like it in …did you say Jefferson County?”
“Oh, yes. We loved it. Well, I did. I … I … we had lots of cousins and friends there.”
“Well, hopefully, you’ll find lots more friends here. We’re happy to have you in our school!”
Lizzie didn’t know what to say. Mandy smiled and said, “We’re glad to be here.”
Lizzie wasn’t sure that was quite true. She didn’t know how she’d feel until she had spent the morning in vocational class.
“Time for the bell!” and the new teacher was off in a whirl of tiny little flowers. “Oh, I didn’t even tell you my name! Esther!” she called over her shoulder as she disappeared behind the tall white doors.
Esther reappeared promptly, clanging and banging an old hand-held bell. At the sound, boys of all shapes and sizes charged past her into the school, dust flying and gravel spitting as they ran. They milled around the entry, hanging up straw hats, clomping their feet, and talking loudly. But as soon as they stepped into the classroom, they quieted down until every noise faded away and there was complete silence.
As Teacher Esther read the Bible, Lizzie chewed her fingernails in her seat at the back of the room. The Mennonites did dress differently. The boys wore jeans and plaid shirts, or striped ones, and their hair was cut short like English boys’. The only thing that made them look like Mennonites was their suspenders.
The Mennonite girls were so pretty. They combed their thick, wavy hair back and secured it with clasps, and then wove it into a heavy braid on each side of their heads. What really caught Lizzie’s eye was that they were allowed to wear rubber hair bands with brightly colored baubles on the ends, and that they had barrettes in their hair. She would love to look so fancy.
Joe and John sat one row in front of her. The twins were decidedly good-looking. They were a bit small for their age, but they’d probably grow taller soon. Lizzie thought she would probably marry one of them and Mandy would marry the other. Of course, that left Emma out, but these boys were too young for her anyway.
Lizzie was relieved to know there were boys here in Cameron County whom she could marry. Of course, Mam said it was not up to them. They needed to pray every evening and ask God for his will, not their own. That was all very good and right, Lizzie was sure, but it was hard to know exactly what that meant. You couldn’t help it if you thought some boys were nice-looking and others weren’t.
The way Mam sometimes made it sound, all the handsome boys weren’t good husbands—just the homely ones. It caused Lizzie to fall into a great state of sadness most times when Mam gave them that lecture.
“You don’t go by looks,” she would say, shaking her forefinger at them. “God has a special person for each one of you, so it’s very important you don’t go by his looks.”
Well, Lizzie was too young to take this husband matter very seriously, but she certainly hoped one of these twins would be God’s will, as Mam put it. She couldn’t wait to talk to Mandy after school to ask her which twin she wanted.
Lizzie leaned back in her chair. Were lovely girls bad wives, too? she wondered as she studied the girl next to her. Viola was strikingly beautiful. She was beautifully tanned and had deep-brown, wavy hair with gold overtones, almost as if sunlight had reached in and dyed some of her hair, just not all of it. Her eyes were slanted and very dark, and she had white teeth that flashed when she laughed.
Marlene sat on the other side of Lizzie. She looked a lot like Viola, suntanned with such dark eyes, except her hair was straight and soft and pulled back into heavy braids that fell below her waist. Lizzie had never seen such pretty girls before. She shifted in her seat, suddenly aware of her skin and how much she weighed and how her dress was made. Why couldn’t she be prettier? Each miserable thought settled on her like a huge, wet blanket until she could barely breathe.
Then Lizzie remembered what Aunt Vera had told her when she visited just after they moved to Cameron County. Aunt Vera walked like a duck. She was short and round, with solid little legs on solid little feet that rocked her from side to side when she moved. Her face was round, with big blue eyes and a small nose, and Lizzie had discovered, much to her joy, that Aunt Vera’s nostrils looked exactly like her own.
“Aunt Vera!” she said gleefully.
“Now what?”
“Your nostrils look like mine!”
Vera had thrown back her head and laughed her raucous laugh. “Now, mind you, Mousie! You think my nostrils are ugly and you think I’m short and fat and I walk like a duck. You wait! When you’re as old as me, you’ll be shaped like me. Yessir, you will. Now mind, won’t be long!”
How did she know what Lizzie had been thinking?
“No, no, Vera. I think you’re just right. You wouldn’t be Vera if you didn’t walk like you do,” Lizzie assured her.
Lizzie sat up straighter. She wouldn’t be Lizzie if she didn’t look like she did. She would have to “brace up” as Mam said. She tried to think of all her attributes. Brown hair rolled flat in this Cameron-County, slicked-down fashion that she would never get used to. Ordinary eyes, slanted nostrils, flat nose, and teeth that looked like a rabbit’s. Her covering didn’t fit right; her dress that had seemed so pretty this morning was just downright drab-looking now. She could not think of one good thing about herself.
Fortunately, the bell rang. The classroom quickly emptied outside into the school yard. Lizzie followed the others slowly, blinking as she stepped into the sun.
“Over here, Lizzie,” Sara Ruth called. “We’re picking teams for baseball.”
Lizzie hurried over to the group. Joe and John were leaders of the two teams. They took turns choosing from the group of pupils, picking the big boys first. The first girl picked was Viola, who giggled and batted her eyelashes while John grinned at Joe, or Joe grinned at John. Lizzie had absolutely no idea which boy was which.
So … Viola must be a top ballplayer. Lizzie’s heart beat faster as she thought about when she’d be chosen. She knew she could play ball every bit as well as some boys and better than most girls. That was one of the reasons w
hy she got into so much trouble in Jefferson County. She was hot-headed and fiercely aggressive when it came to winning in baseball.
The twins were looking at her and Mandy, trying to decide if they should choose them before some of the smaller children, Lizzie realized. She felt her face heat up and quickly scuffed the toe of her shoe in the dust.
“Lizzie!” one of the twins said.
“Mandy!” the other one echoed.
Viola walked over to John or Joe and asked for his glove, holding her pretty head to one side. A tug of raw jealousy pulled at Lizzie. Oh, so Viola even shared gloves with them.
Her eyes narrowed as she set her chin resolutely. I may not be as pretty as she is, but I’ll show her a thing or two about playing baseball, Lizzie thought.
When Lizzie’s turn came to bat, she was so nervous, she felt like fainting. She hoped no one could see her heart beating through the fabric of her dress. The blood pounded in her ears and her mouth was dry as sand. She licked her lips nervously, biting down hard on the lower one to steady herself.
The first pitch was too high, but she swung anyway, misguided by nervous energy, sending a foul ball just shy of third base. No one said anything. There were no groans or calls. A strange silence hovered over the ball field. Lizzie was one of the new girls, so everyone had to be nice.
Lizzie had never wanted anything quite as badly as a good solid hit to show all of them what a good ballplayer she was. But she was far too nervous. She knew she had to calm down and relax.
The second pitch she let pass on purpose, taking a few deep breaths to get her bearings. The third pitch came in fast and low. She swung with every bit of strength she could muster.
A solid THUMP! and Lizzie was off. The girls screamed and the boys yelled as loud as they could as she ran for first base. Somewhere out beside the road the boys scrambled in the tall grass, still looking for the ball as she rounded first base and streaked for second.
“Go! Go! Go to third!” Everyone sounded hoarse from yelling. Just as she reached third base, one of the twins caught the ball at the pitcher’s mound, and she knew she had to stay. She was panting and her heart was swelling as the third baseman said, “Good hit for a girl!”