Keys of Heaven

by Adina Senft

  Fed from the spring that bubbled up out of the ground and ran down a dip in the property that led to the larger body of Willow Creek, the dock leaves were luxuriant and bursting with the curative agent that God had put in them.

  When she said this to Amanda, the girl smiled, a poor replica of her usual twinkle and humor. “Are you going to tell that to Simon’s foreman, who wants to know what’s in the leaves that heals so well?”

  “I just might. It’s the truth—and while I might look up what the curative compound is in my herb book, it doesn’t hurt to give a word in season.”

  She slid her sister-in-law a glance. “What’s wrong, Liewi? You’re pale and thinner, and you’re not taking care of your skin like you have been.” She wouldn’t even mention the dark circles under her eyes. That would just heap more on a soul that was probably already far too aware of her own imperfections.

  Amanda snipped at a clump of leaves, the sound sharp and artificial under the soft rustle of the breeze in the trees behind them, and the melody of a pair of wrens circling the bark looking for insects. Off in the field, a bobwhite asked his eternal question, calling for a mate.

  “I can’t talk about it with you.” Her voice was nearly as soft as the rustling leaves.

  Sarah knelt next to her, struggling against the ambush of pain. There was nothing they couldn’t tell each other, except maybe details of marriage and childbirth that weren’t fitting for an unmarried woman to hear. But when God changed that, Sarah had no doubt that she could share those things freely, too.

  And then the last few words sank in. “With me? Why not with me?”

  But Amanda just shook her head, and tears beaded on her lashes.

  “Is it Silas? Has something happened?”

  Amanda straightened and turned away, the scissors dangling from her hand. Finally she tossed them to the ground and wrapped her arms around herself—a protective gesture that Sarah didn’t miss.

  “Have you been seeing something of each other?” Sarah asked softly.

  “Ja. I’ve been over to Miriam and Joshua’s a number of times to see the progress on the bathroom. It’s done now. As you probably noticed, Miriam is as happy as if fifty Christmases were all rolled into one.”

  “I did notice when we were talking around the quilting frame. But if the renovation is done, does that mean Silas will be going home?”

  “That…is the problem.”

  “If you care for him, I can certainly see that it would be.”

  “Du versteht nichts, Sarah.”

  “Help me understand, then, Schwechsder.” Sarah slid an arm around her hunched shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “Whatever it is, I want to help you. This pale face and these unhappy eyes hurt my heart, and I don’t think that any of my teas and tinctures will cure it.”

  Amanda nodded. “I should know better than to keep anything from you.” Still hugging herself, she raised her face to the sun, its late-afternoon light turning the curves of her face a buttery gold. “You remember when Zeke and Fannie were here and I told you that Silas spent most of our ride home asking questions about you?”

  Sarah did, all too clearly. “Ja.”

  “Well, over the last several days we’ve had other things to talk about—the renovation and how it was going, the latest edition of the Budget, what we heard in church, and lately, that funny Englisch boy who is staying at your place. Silas was quite concerned about that.”

  “Why? He’s just a boy.”

  “I don’t know. But he seemed quite exercised about it. Anyway, the renovation was done and I walked over to see it, and after supper, he hitched up the buggy and gave me a ride home.”

  “That was kind.”

  “And he said that he was ready to go to his home, but if he had a reason to stay, Miriam and Joshua had made it clear that he could use the guest room at their place as long as he wanted to.”

  “Doesn’t he have his own farm?” Sarah tried to remember the details. “All I can think of is that cellular phone tower in his field and how Zeke disagrees with him for allowing it to be there.”

  “I gather the farm is mostly in hay because of it. His bishop might have something to say if too much money comes in and he risks becoming proud or complacent, so he didn’t plant his fields with a cash crop.”

  “Silas doesn’t strike me as a proud man.” Hay took care of itself; it didn’t have to be weeded or even watered much. A month’s absence by the husbandman wouldn’t bother it a bit. “So during your ride, then, did he ask you to give him a reason to stay?” She hoped so. Oh, how she hoped that he would finally have seen Amanda’s wonderful qualities and realized he mustn’t miss his chance.

  “He did. And I asked him a question in return.”

  “That must have taken courage. What was it?”

  “Whether he was staying for me, or because he still had some hopes of you.”

  Sarah’s heart gave a great thump and she pulled in a couple of deep breaths to steady it. “Me?” she managed.

  “He told me that he had asked to court you first. And that you said you were not ready for courtship because you were setting yourself apart for the work of a Dokterfraa.”

  “That’s all true.”

  Amanda whirled on her. “Then why didn’t you tell me, Sarah? All this time, we’ve been having family dinners and sisters’ days and going to church together, and you didn’t say a word—you just let me like him and have my silly dreams and all the time he wanted you—had spoken to you so you knew he did!”

  “I didn’t—I—”

  But Amanda plowed on, the lid blown off the pressure cooker at last. “The last thing I want you to think is that I’m proud, or offended. But Sarah, it would take a much better woman than me to be happy about being a man’s second choice.” She choked. “Is it so much to ask to be a gut man’s first choice? Will I ever get that chance? And if I don’t say yes to Silas, will I ever get a chance of any kind?”

  The corners of her mouth pulled down as the rain followed the storm on her face, and she yanked up her apron to scrub the tears from her cheeks.

  “Amanda. Oh, Liewi, I never meant to hurt you so.” Sarah pulled her unwilling body into her arms and let her cry, shaking with sobs and gripping Sarah’s dress as though it would hold her up. Sarah eased her down to the grass and simply held her, letting her get it all out before she tried to speak.

  Amanda gasped for breath and hunted blindly in the pockets of her dress, but Sarah beat her to it with a hanky. When she’d blown her nose and quieted a little, Sarah sat back on the grass and let the warm breeze flow between them for a few moments.

  “The whole time he was talking to you about me,” Sarah said gently, “I was talking to him about you. Every chance I got, I put the two of you together. I found out that Fannie and Zeke and even your Mamm were planning to try their hands at some matchmaking between him and me, and I put a stop to it before it could even get started.”

  “And yet…he hoped.”

  “It’s what we frail humans do, don’t we? Even in the face of sure disappointment, we think that if only we try hard enough, or argue long enough, or come again faithfully enough, the person will see it our way. I have to give him credit. After our second discussion on the matter, he finally accepted that what I said was what I meant, and after that it seems he focused his attention on you, where it should have been in the first place.”

  “He thinks he’s too old for me.” She blew her nose again.

  “Do you think so? Have you heard his story?”

  Amanda nodded. “Miriam told me he’d been deserted by his fiancée on their wedding day—just as the ministers were upstairs with them before the service started. And that it has taken him years to get over it. He’s a little bit like Englisch Henry in that way. And maybe even you.”

  Sarah resisted being linked with Henry in anyone’s mind, even though it seemed to happen no matter what she did. “When you love, you don’t stop with the person’s death—or marriage to someone else,
” she said. “Some days, it seems as though I’ve just lost your brother. Other days, our wedding day seems so far in the past that it might have happened to someone else. But on both kinds of days, the love is still there. Still strong.” She paused. “If Silas has come to the place where God is prompting him to find another to share his life, then it’s gut he’s obeying that prompting.”

  “By asking you if he could court you,” Amanda said glumly.

  “Ja. It was a step. Whether it was in the right direction is up for debate.”

  Amanda tried to smile, and failed. “But what should I do? The feelings that had been in my heart have just…died. As though a frost has settled on them and killed them.”

  “Is there any hope that they might come up again in a different season?”

  “I don’t know,” the girl whispered. “I may not have a season to find out. He may just go home and court someone else.”

  “Will it bother you if he does, is the question.”

  But Amanda just shook her head. “Poor girl. She would be third best.”

  “It’s not profitable to look at it that way, Liewi. Instead, think of it like this—his feelings for me must not have been that deep if he could turn to you so soon and see all your good qualities. Which is what I wanted him to do with all possible speed.”

  This time the smile perched on her lips, swaying, before it fell away. “What should I do, Sarah? Tell him to stay? Or let him go?”

  “I don’t think you should tell him anything. I think you should be your usual self, and he won’t want to go away. Let your smile come when it wants to, and sing if you feel like it. Use my skin cream and eat blackberry pie when you want some. Get some sleep and think on what God says in His Word…and like a bee coming again and again to a flower, he won’t be able to leave. And then you’ll know he’s staying for the real you—and that you are first among women.”

  Amanda patted the last of the salty tears from her cheeks. “You make it sound so easy.”

  “These things are not up to us, you know. If Silas is the man God has chosen for you, you’ll know it—and so will he.”

  “I—I hope he is,” Amanda whispered. “Maybe there is a green shoot or two still surviving under the frost.”

  “Then wait for the sun to come and thaw it out,” Sarah advised her with a smile. “Now, come and gather up these dock leaves with me, so it doesn’t get back to Silas that I was neglecting the health of the Gmee while we sunbathed in the grass—after I told him I was dedicating myself to that purpose.”

  Amanda retrieved the scissors and they finished harvesting the leaves. As they carried the green armfuls back to the house where Sarah had left her basket, she wondered again at just how much Amanda saw in people that they didn’t realize themselves. It was a little like diagnosing an illness—and in some cases, there was no cure.

  Like loving those who were lost.

  Not for the first time, she gazed over the cornfield that climbed the hill behind her five acres. The hill that stood between her home, filled with life and good food and noisy boys, and Henry Byler’s solitary, shabby house, filled with silence.

  Chapter 29

  Henry snapped open the latches on the heavy lid of the kiln and glanced down at Eric, who shifted with a mix of impatience and anxiety next to him. “Ready?”

  “What if it broke? Then what?”

  “Let’s take one thing at a time. You did everything right. The likelihood of breakage is no greater on your lantern than it is on any of my batter bowls. Come on. Let’s have a look.”

  The lid swung up and Eric gripped the top edge, gazing into the cooled kiln as though it were a wishing well. The pieces they had stacked in here for the firing made a riot of color against the drab brick walls. Henry removed the cones, which melted when the kiln reached the correct temperature, and discarded them. Then he began to lift out the pieces.

  On the top level were four batter bowls, two with the peony-leaf handles and glazed in a tawny green and gold, and two with handles that ended in a flourish like a wave curling against a shore, painted in his new sky and water glaze.

  “Look at that,” Eric breathed. “Did it come out the way you wanted it to?”

  Henry held up the bowl, which gleamed with iridescence along the rim and handle, the gentle lines his thumbs had made suggesting water and the movement of air. He nodded, slowly, hardly daring to believe that so many weeks of work had come to fruition in a piece so beautiful.

  “It’s almost exactly how I saw it in my head,” he said on a long breath that mixed relief with quiet satisfaction. “I might add the iridescence to the interior on the next batch.” He handed the bowl to Eric. “What do you think?”

  But Eric shook his head. “I think it would be too much. You don’t see the light in the deep pools in the creek where people swim, do you? Just along the edges, where the water is moving faster.”

  Henry gazed at him with the respect of one artist for the opinion of another. “I didn’t think of it that way. But you’re right—if I’m going to work with natural forms, they should behave the way they do in nature, shouldn’t they? Otherwise, I’m serving myself and my own tastes, not what the piece is meant to be.”

  Eric grinned back at him, his narrow shoulders relaxing under his clay-stained Star Wars T-shirt. “I thought you’d be mad at me for criticizing.”

  “Honest critique with positive value is a different animal from criticizing. Now, let’s move these over to the bench, and we’ll unload the next layer and get to your lantern.”

  Henry removed the spacers and revealed the next layer, then bent in and took out the top and bottom pieces of Eric’s lantern.

  “Here you go. Put them together and we’ll have a look.”

  The finished dome gleamed with a coppery glaze on the bottom that continued into the flat tray of the base. But above, like the sky seen through autumn leaves, the copper color gave way to a speckled blue and finally, at the knob handle, to a blue so pale it almost looked white. On the sides, the cut-out geese shapes flew from right to left, their edges smooth and uncracked.

  “It’s beautiful, Eric,” Henry told him. “Good work. I like the color choice, even though I wasn’t sure how it would turn out. Good for you for sticking by your decision when I was all hung up on the yellow instead of the blue.”

  The boy cupped a hand around the top and rocked it in its groove. “The bottom’s still uneven. See how it doesn’t sit quite right?”

  “Your first major piece and you’re worried about that? It’ll come in time. Give yourself a chance.”

  “But the admissions people will see it.”

  “They’ll be so taken up with the goose shapes and the way you graduated the color that a little unevenness in the body won’t even register. This is a good piece of work, Eric. Be proud of it.”

  “Caleb says pride is bad.”

  Of course he did. “All right, then, be glad you created something that’s not only useful, but it can also give pleasure to others. How’s that?”

  Eric touched the lantern, tracing the cutouts as if checking for any roughness he’d missed. “Do you think Mom would like it? Her birthday’s in September.”

  “If you’re going to submit it to the school, she’ll see it. It won’t be a surprise.”

  “That’s okay. I want her to know it’s hers, especially if it gets me admitted. Then it’ll mean something, you know?”

  Henry couldn’t help himself. He ruffled the boy’s hair, then slipped a companionable arm around his shoulders. “It already means something, kiddo. It means talent and hard work and guts. And if it comes to mean acceptance, too, then good on it, but it doesn’t need the approval of other people to be a very cool piece of art.”

  “Is that how you feel about your batter bowls?”

  And with a strange feeling of recognition, he realized he did. “Yes. Yes, I do. I mean, it’s great that D.W. Frith wants them, and I’ll be able to pay the taxes and fill the fridge for the rest of the
year. But mostly, I’m pretty happy with what we’ve got here, and if I never show a single thing or get written up in another paper for the rest of my life, I still know the work is good. And for us artists, maybe that’s all we need to know.”

  That sense of satisfaction stayed with him as he showed Eric how to pack the pieces in the crates he’d ordered from the Amish pallet shop in Whinburg. Eric’s lantern got its own small crate, but before they packed it, Eric took a picture with his phone.

  “To show Mom and Dad,” he said, his thumbs busy typing out an e-mail.

  In less than a minute, the phone pinged and Eric dug it out of his pocket again. “It’s Dad.” Then he handed the phone to Henry.

  To: ericnotpeter@email.com

  From: Trent_Parker@SeaboardOil.com

  Very nice. I hope it’s been worth two weeks in Amish land. Pack up—I’ll be there tomorrow night to get you. Mom & Justin coming in Sunday so we can pick them up at the airport on our way home.

  Dad

  “Tomorrow?” Henry repeated, handing back the phone. “That soon? It feels like you just got here.”

  “It feels like I’ve been here for, like, a century,” Eric said. “In a good way. At first I hated it, especially getting up so early. But Sarah’s nice and Caleb is cool, too—you know, for an Amish kid.”

  “You’re pretty cool for an Englisch kid,” Henry informed him, reaching out to ruffle his skater-boy hair again.

  Eric grinned, dodged under his hand, and scooped up a last handful of packing popcorn. “I don’t want this getting busted on the way home. Can you drive me over to Sarah’s? It’s too heavy to carry over the hill.”

  “All right. And then do you know what? I think we should have a farewell party for you. If your dad is coming tomorrow, you won’t have a chance to get around and say good-bye to everyone you know here.”

  “Oh…no, do I have to?”

  “Eric, it’s not a matter of have to. It’s different here. You get involved with people—like Priscilla and Benny, for instance, who helped you in the first place. And Sarah, and Caleb, and Jacob and Corinne. Even Ginny. She asks about you every time I see her.”