by Adina Senft
“By the time I get through those bushels, I might be one twentieth as good as you.” His curl broke, and sighing, he kept going.
“This is why you need a wife. If you like Schnitz pie and applesauce, she would be doing this for you.”
“I do like them, and it’s not for lack of trying that I haven’t found a girl who will have me.”
“I don’t think you’re trying very hard. Who are you taking home from Singing on Sunday night?”
“An old man like me doesn’t belong at Singing with all the Youngie.”
“That’s where you’ll find the single girls—young women like Esther Grohl, who’s close to your age and who would make a wonderful wife.” Carrie was on her third apple as he quartered his first one. “You can’t go looking for corn in a bean field.”
“Apparently I can find chicken in an apple orchard, though.”
“Not by now, you won’t. They’ll all be back on the lawn.”
“But you see my point. I’m not looking for an eighteen-year-old.”
Which was why she’d mentioned Esther. “You’re not much older than that.” She calculated for a second. He and her next youngest brother, Kenneth, had been in the same class at school. “You’re only twenty-eight, aren’t you?”
“Soon twenty-nine.” He glanced up at her. “You don’t know any girls like you, do you? Pretty, good in the kitchen, like to laugh?”
“I know at least a dozen with one or more of those qualifications.” She would not react. He had no business calling a married woman anything but her name, never mind things that would only make her too fond of her bathroom mirror. “And most of them go to Singing. It doesn’t matter how old you are, Joshua.”
“Feels out of place,” he mumbled, partially covered by his interest in choosing the perfect apple to pare next.
“Do you mean Singing feels out of place, or you do?” There was nothing wrong with her hearing.
“I do, I suppose. These kids have never been outside Lancaster County. Never done anything or seen anything.”
“How can you say that? Look at Esther. She and her sister, Marianne, and two other girls just came back from a tour of twelve different national parks, from here to Montana to California.”
“I don’t want to look at Esther.”
“She may not be as pretty as some, but you can’t say she’s never been anywhere or done anything. And goodness knows, she can cook.”
“All the Grohl girls can. They’re worth their weight in rubies. But I’ve decided I need to catch a young one and train her up proper. Like that Zook girl. What’s her name?”
“Lydia.”
“That’s right. I wonder if she sells purple? You know, like that woman in the Bible.”
“I imagine she does. I heard last church Sunday that she’s working in the fabric shop in Whinburg.”
He threw back his head and laughed. “There’s no putting one over on you, is there, Fraa Miller?”
She dropped her chin and concentrated on the perfect peel curling off her knife.
“Aw, now I’ve made you blush. Look, this is hopeless. I guess skill at peeling is one of those things you’re born with, like a good singing voice or the ability to dowse water with a forked stick.”
“I think it’s more a matter of practice,” she said dryly. “And if you’re not in the habit of being in the kitchen, you can’t be expected to do it perfectly the first time.”
“You’re kind to excuse my clumsiness. But it’s back to the trees for me.”
He dumped the remaining apples into the deep water in the sink, picked up the baskets, and took himself off, whistling.
Carrie let out a long breath and rolled her shoulders. Thank goodness. What a trying conversation.
The only good part about it was his joke about Lydia. How strange that she had come up in conversation so many times this week. The poor thing. Her mother had died of an untreated infection when Lydia was six, and she’d been keeping house the best she could ever since, with occasional help from the women of the community. Tall, gangly Abe Zook was probably not going to win any prizes for his skills as a father (“He’s got a face like barbed wire, all sharp and hooked,” Emma had whispered once, when they’d seen him out in his field whipping up his plow mule), but he was a member of the church, and once a year the whole Gmee got together to put a shine on his ramshackle place when it was his turn to host the service.
As the years passed, people realized that all the best of Abe and Rachel had been distilled into their only living daughter, with her red hair and pretty face. But as Carrie’s Mammi used to say, “Handsome is as handsome does.” It was a person’s works in God’s service and their kindness toward others that counted, not what they looked like, and Lydia had a feisty spirit that would get her into Druwwel one of these days.
Carrie picked up the next apple and began to hum.
Let me not be ashamed, let not mine enemies triumph over me.
* * *
Dear Carrie,
We’ve arrived safely and I thought you’d like this postcard of chickens. Hope you are well and that Joshua is working out. Despite what people say about him, I know you will show him Christian kindness and I’m sure he’ll like your cooking as much as I do. I miss it already, and you too.
Your husband,
Melvin
P.S. I’m thinking gossip is like a plague. You get two people together and they pass it on, and pretty soon everyone is infected.
Carrie read the postcard again and took it upstairs to their bedroom, where she tucked it in the top drawer of her dresser. There were a few letters there already from Melvin, as he’d traveled around over the last year. The two of them had written back and forth when they’d been courting, of course, since she’d met him at a band hop fifty miles away from Whinburg, in his district. But those youthful letters had been thrown away through some accident of spring cleaning. She was determined that the letters he’d written as her husband wouldn’t suffer the same fate. He wasn’t as eloquent on paper as he was in person, but every word was precious.
Downstairs, she smiled as she thought of him coming to a halt at the picture of the mother hen. Under her were a lot of tiny legs, so that she looked like a puffy tree with a dozen tiny trunks. Buried in those feathers, safe and warm, were her chicks.
Unaccountably, Carrie’s throat closed up.
Maybe Melvin was trying to tell her that he still had hope they’d have lots of chicks of their own yet. Or maybe that they should be satisfied with feathery children rather than real ones. Or maybe he just liked the humor in it and wasn’t trying to say anything at all.
“Back to work, Carrie.” Her own voice sounded loud in the kitchen, and she set to work with the apples once again.
It was Saturday, when she usually dusted and did light housework, with the evening sacred to preparing her spirit for church the next day. Today she’d abandoned those tasks and turned to the more urgent one—apples. She’d filled the two drying boxes and turned them to the sun, and now the kitchen was soft with the scent of apples and cinnamon as a big kettle of them cooked down on the stove.
Three successive thuds on the porch outside told her Joshua and the baskets were back. “Should I just leave these out here?” he called through the open door.
“Ja. They’ll keep cool overnight and I’ll get started on them early Monday.”
He came through the door dusting off his hands. “It smells good in here.”
“I’ve made dinner, if you want to stay.”
He raised his eyebrows in a comical way that told her the next words out of his mouth would probably be outrageous. “Fraa Miller, asking a single man to dinner?”
“Ja,” she said. “You’ve put in a day’s work. A meal is included, and you didn’t eat lunch.” His lips twitched at her schoolmarm tone, but what else was she to say?
“Denki, but Mamm will have dinner for me when I get back.”
“There’s enough for two or three here. I’m so use
d to cooking for two I didn’t think to cut it down.” She’d made pork hash from the roast the other day, and rice and baked squash, plus the usual accompaniments of beet pickles, bread and jam, and a taste of the fresh applesauce.
“Then maybe we can have the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.”
She nearly took a step backward in shock. “Tomorrow is Sunday.”
Lifting his hat with the back of one hand, he scratched his head. “Is it? So it is. Time flies.”
Goodness. How could he forget? Church Sunday was the lynchpin around which their days revolved. On Saturdays you got ready for it, on Mondays you washed clothes after it, and the other days you sewed and baked so you wouldn’t have to do those things on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.
Maybe men thought of time differently. This one did, at least.
“Monday, then,” he said easily.
“Monday is wash day.”
“You can’t dry apples on wash day?”
“I can take them in out of the drying boxes in the evening if I have time, but doing the wash takes a woman all day. There are sheets and towels and the clothes from Sunday, and aprons from during the week, and—”
“All right, all right.” He held up his hands, grinning, as though he were warding off a dozen tasks flying at him.
Hmph. They were her tasks, and did he see her flinching?
“I’ll come Tuesday, then, after I get my chores done at Hill’s.”
“Fine.” Tuesday was sewing day, and she had hardly any of it to do. “Apple day it is, then. See you at church, Joshua.”
“Oh, you will.” Settling his hat, he left, and a few minutes later she heard the crunch and jingle of wagon and harness in the lane.
At last.
Carrie pulled her oldest bib apron off the hook on the back of the door. Now that the sun had gone down, the chickens had mostly put themselves to bed in the coop. This was her favorite time of the day. She didn’t get the opportunity very often, because meals often interfered, but when Melvin was away, she indulged herself.
A rickety wooden chair too shabby to leave where company could see it stood inside the coop near the roosts. When she sat, Dinah jumped up in her lap and settled there. Carrie was sure she would just sleep the whole night through with the happy certainty that her human would act as her pillow all night. It never happened, of course, but the hen would cuddle down as though this time it might.
Carrie held her, and before long Lizzie-bit jumped on her shoulder. Then Rhoda jumped up to occupy the other knee. Lizzie’s feathers warmed her neck, and the relaxed feet of the two in her lap told her they were content and secure.
Such a gift.
She was often happy, but contentment—complete acceptance of God’s will for her and satisfaction in her place—often seemed as far out of her reach as a straw hat snatched away by the wind.
Inwardly, she shook her head at herself, but her heart didn’t seem to be paying attention.
Why me, Lord? Why are some women given children by the dozen, and I must make do with my birds? I love my birds, and I thank You for them, but please, might I not have even one child to bring up in Your ways and Your love?
Her prayer winged its way through the ceiling and up into the sky, but there was no answer, only the gentle breathing all around her.
Chapter 5
Church the next day was held at Carrie’s parents’ place, which meant a drive of four miles. Melvin’s weekend away with Brian and Boyd had been carefully scheduled, taking into account the fact that church could have been at the farm of any one of them. She had a feeling that, once they knew of the cabinet show’s date, a discreet word may have been dropped in Bishop Daniel’s ear so that he would not announce any of their places as being next in the rotation.
With two dozen families in the district, everyone came up at least once a year, but that didn’t mean a little jiggling of the bimonthly schedule didn’t happen now and again. Twice a year was Communion Sunday, the most important day of the church year, when the service lasted all day and included the passing of the bread and the cup, and the foot washing in the afternoon. Leading up to that were several weeks of preparation. Two weeks from now was New Birth Sunday, when baptisms were performed, and two weeks after that would be Council Meeting. This was the time to prepare for Communion Sunday two weeks later. It was important for the unity of the church that everyone made sure they were in harmony with their neighbors, to the point that if you had a problem with someone, you had better get it straightened out before you confessed in public that you were ready to take Communion.
After the sermon on the shepherd was over and everyone was filing out of the big shed where Daed kept the farming equipment during every other week of the year, Carrie made her way into the kitchen to give her mother and sisters a hand with the lunch.
Miriam King gave her a quick hug and waved at the food on the counters. “The boys will have set up the tables in the shed by now. Can you carry those loaves of bread over? One to a table, and jam and peanut-butter spread too.”
Mamm had been serving exactly this lunch for as long as Carrie had been alive. It varied some with the seasons, but the cold cuts for making sandwiches were as predictable as daylight.
She took the basket of loaves and went back to the shed. There, the boys had rearranged the benches and set up tables, and from cubbyholes in the wagon, taken out the eating utensils. All three of the Grohl girls—Esther, Marianne, and Sarah—paced the rows of tables, with knives, forks, and spoons going down first, then plates. Lydia Zook, who was in the same buddy bunch as Sarah, brought up the rear with the cups. With everyone working together, it took less than ten minutes to set the tables for sixty people.
Then Carrie was free to begin slicing bread at each table so that people could make sandwiches. Platters of cold cuts bloomed around her as her sisters brought in food, and the single girls arranged the potluck offerings around the main part of the meal.
In less than half an hour after Bishop Daniel had blessed and dismissed them from the service, he was standing at the front of the room again, looking out over the tables of the seated congregation and raising his hand for silence so that they might say grace.
Afterward, as they began to eat, Carrie’s sister Naomi leaned back over the aisle and nudged her so that she looked over her shoulder. “Mamm wants to talk to you after cleanup.”
“What about?” Her mother was a pretty easygoing person. Nothing seemed to faze her, whether it was getting the place ready for a wedding or giving an unexpected guest their supper.
“I don’t know. She just said that if I saw you, to tell you.”
Carrie nodded and let herself be drawn back into conversation with the women on either side of her, both of whom wanted to know the same thing. “Where is Melvin today? Is he sick?”
Illness and absence were the only two reasons a person might miss church—and even then, he would do everything he could to avoid the latter. If it was your week for church, it was absolutely unthinkable for you or any member of your family to be away. It simply didn’t happen. The Kingdom came first, no matter what your other plans might be—unless you were in the hospital and couldn’t help it.
“He and Brian and Boyd have gone down to Philadelphia for a cabinetmaker’s trade show,” she answered. She didn’t mind saying so to Ellie King Byler—she was one of her cousins and the pragmatic sort. She took what you said at face value and didn’t go adding to or subtracting from it like some. “They’ll be back by Wednesday, late.”
Ellie nodded, satisfied. “Melvin will enjoy talking to folks down there.”
“And maybe selling the pallet shop’s services.”
“It takes a special person to be able to do that.” Ellie shook her head. “I have enough trouble asking for the right size at the shoe store.”
“You should go to the shoe warehouse on the county highway,” Carrie advised her. “The Mennonite girls there know exactly what we’re looking for, and don’t make you feel funny fo
r wanting black lace-up oxfords instead of pink stilettos with butterflies on them.”
Ellie snickered into her glass of water. Carrie figured that would tickle her. She’d married into a real conservative family whose idea of a radical change was making a dress out of blue fabric instead of dark green.
Cleanup always seemed to take longer than the preparation and eating of the meal…much like canning and drying food, she supposed. But eventually the hubbub of clattering dishes and packing up leftovers was done, the bench wagon loaded up with its burden, and its driver rolled out of the yard to take it to the farm of one of Old Joe Yoder’s grandsons, whose turn it would be two weeks from now.
Mamm met Carrie in the kitchen doorway. “Let’s go for a walk, Liewi.”
She hesitated for half a second, then fell in step with her mother as they crossed the yard, heading for the same place they’d been walking since Carrie was a toddler—the copse of shady maples and elms tucked into a fold of the fields.
“I suppose this is where I learned to like my nature rambles,” she said, lifting her face to the autumn sun. “I always liked going on walks with you.”
“I should be back at the house being a good hostess,” Mamm said. “But Naomi knows where everything is, so if someone needs something, she can find it. Besides, that girl likes nothing more than to chatter with folks, and with all the young girls around to look after her Kinner, she doesn’t have to keep after them every minute of the afternoon.”
Carrie looked away. Five Kinner. Naomi was the perfect Amish wife and mother. If Carrie didn’t love her so dearly, she would look at her and despair.
“So what would make you come out with me and abandon the ladies in the sitting room?”
Mamm gave her a sideways look and chewed on the inside of her cheek. Carrie felt the first stirrings of alarm.
“Mamm? What’s wrong? What news have you had?”