by Linda Byler
Furious, she spat out, “Now you’re making fun of me!”
“Yes, I am. You’re the shining example of someone who blames their parents for the not-so-nice person you are today. That was in the past. It’s over. Get over it. Forgive and forget and move on. Live a life free from all that garbage. God allowed all that in your life, so evidently there is a purpose.
“You know, Hannah, did you ever think that all the cruel weather, hunger, drought, all that stuff you told me, could have been avoided if you would have obeyed your mother and come back home to Lancaster where she wanted you to be? Did you ever think about the children of Israel’s wandering in the desert when they were led by Moses, a man of God? Same thing. God could have led them all in a straight shot to the Promised Land, but He led them through trials and awful crazy stuff to teach them lessons. If they refused to learn, they perished!
“If you never learn to move on and stop blaming that godly mother of yours, or your imperfect father, you’ll never get any further than being in your own tight cocoon, spun by a web of your own making, a dark prison where you sit and glower at other people with hate-filled eyes like you did to John Esh.”
She said nothing, running her forefinger around the rim of her teacup.
“It may be cruel to speak to you like this, but I have a strong hunch no one ever had the backbone to do it before. Am I right?”
“Jerry did, some.”
“Bless Jerry’s heart. He must have been a great guy.”
“He was.” What kept her from pouring her heart out, confessing her mistreatment of Jerry and her ongoing remorse? She knew Dave deserved to hear it from her. How did he know …?
She blurted out, “How do you know my mother was godly? Still a saint?”
“I had a long talk with her at your husband’s funeral. I wanted to marry her, except for her age.”
Hannah’s mouth dropped open. “My mother? But …”
“I would have, except for you.”
She stared at him, uncomprehendingly. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m teasing.” He reached across the table and draped his enormous hand over hers. “I wasn’t interested in your mother the same way I am in you. But she did remind me of what Lena would have been like had she lived to your mother’s age. Your mother’s a good woman, Hannah. It wouldn’t kill you to admit it.”
Hannah pulled her hand away, returning it safely to her lap. He had no idea what her family was like, no idea what she’d been through. He barely knew her, and it was probably better to keep it that way.
The weekend was spent alone, the last cloying heat of August making Hannah even more miserable than she already was. All Dave had told her banged around in her head, giving her a tremendous, pounding headache until she put her fingers on either side of her head and groaned with the pain. She shed her clothes and went to lie down on her bed. But there wasn’t even the whisper of a breeze, the curtains hanging stiff and straight, the air sultry with humidity.
She should have gone to church at Levi Stoltzfus’s. Her mother would be disappointed by her absence. Manny would be searching the rows of women, eager to spot her face among them. But she hadn’t felt up to dressing in her heavy black garments, with all the turmoil going on in her head, not to mention the steady weeping of her heart.
What if Dave’s words were true? All that suffering, and all her fault? No, he hadn’t said it that way. He’d merely stated the obvious. Could she have avoided it all? Of course, but she wanted the homestead. She had been determined to keep it. The truth was her life had also been enriched. The wind, the wide-open spaces, her communion with earth and sky. She’d come to know the weather patterns intimately, all as diverse as human faces.
She’d found reserves of strength and courage she could never have imagined. She’d loved and lost and yes, she had also learned. And here, her face burned with shame.
She had risen to her former level of dictator-like cruelty with her grosfeelich treatment of John Esh. Right in front of Dave.
Well, Dave didn’t understand. It was all that manure on John Esh’s shoes. That wad of tobacco in his cheek. Let Dave go and marry her mother. Hannah was certainly never going to be like Lena, the “perfect wife,” his little angel. If that’s what he wanted, he better keep looking. The man had no social graces himself. Every word out of his mouth served to put her in her place. It was like herding a good milk cow into a stanchion.
She tried to picture herself running the store, acting like she enjoyed people. She imagined John Esh coming into her store as she smiled sweetly and asked him to please wipe his feet. She could put a spittoon in her fabric shop. She could do it. Couldn’t she?
She got up, shrugged into her dress, squinted into the mirror, and decided she looked old and mad and ugly. She pulled her mouth back into the caricature of a smile but felt she looked a lot like the witch in Grimms’ Fairy Tales.
Why did he have to say that about her mother? He had said he was teasing, but she wasn’t sure. Why wouldn’t a man want a sweet, submissive, pushover wife instead of a mean-spirited, stubborn woman like Hannah? When she imagined her mother and Dave together she was taken captive by a fierce jealousy, one that made her want to slap them both.
Finally, when the heat became too oppressive, her thoughts as heavy as rocks, she dressed in her black Sunday garments, hitched up the brown gelding, and drove. She drove out to the Old Philadelphia Pike and turned right toward Bird-in-Hand, the small village where she believed her friend Priscilla had moved after marrying Abner Beiler.
She waved at oncoming teams, practicing the friendly gestures she had never much cared for. It felt fake, like she were pretending to be another person entirely. She allowed her eyes to glass over, giving her a sense of anonymity, as if she were a wax figure or a see-through spirit.
The sun beat down on the black bonnet that covered her head. Her black clothes grabbed at the fierce sun and held its heat to her skin. The horse (she still had to name him), a gallant, willing animal, kept up an even trot, the white foam that sprang from his sweating hide a testimony to her lack of a good washing before she had thrown the harness on his back.
Everywhere she looked there were farms or houses, sheds, automobiles, people in buggies. A black car roared past with a young boy hanging out of the window, his nose pinched between a thumb and forefinger, gesticulating, mimicking the smell of her, the horse and buggy, or both.
Hannah longed for a handful of ripe horse manure to stuff in his face, until she remembered she was pretending to be nice.
Well, what of it? She was only who she was—no more and no less—and thoughts couldn’t hurt someone anyway, right? Could she help it if little boys like that made her want to retaliate? She wasn’t a saint. She wasn’t her mother, either. And she certainly wasn’t Lena. If she was smart, she’d never give that arrogant Dave King the opportunity to compare the two of them.
She rode through the village of Bird-in-Hand, eyeing houses, going under the train tracks that ran over the arch of cement and stone bolstered by sturdy iron and tons of concrete, she hoped. She pulled on the right rein, on a whim, thinking she’d take a side road and find some shade to allow her horse a rest. Perhaps there’d be a passerby from time to time and she could inquire about Priscilla Beiler’s whereabouts.
The horse slowed to a walk, then stood obediently beneath a canopy of maple branches with leaves like a heavy, green cloak, stirring faintly as if afraid to disturb the heat. Hannah loosened the neck rein on the horse, then fanned her face with her apron, finally wiping it across her neck and cheeks to dry her streaming perspiration. She scanned the hot, metallic sky for signs of a cooling thundershower, but there was none, not the slightest indication of relief.
There were no passersby, no one walking, not a buggy or a car in sight. She didn’t want to knock on doors to make inquiries, so she drove home in the stifling heat, a strange melancholy settling over her shoulders.
It was odd, this being alone among so many people. She had always
relished isolation, but that was different, in North Dakota. To be alone on a great and glorious prairie was to be one with nature and the earth and God—all the same thing.
Here, she was alone, while others walked or rode together, sat down together at mealtime, drinking and eating and sharing their lives.
She sighed and decided to name her horse Flapper for the way his loose haunches flapped when he ran. Flap for short. “I guess it’s just you and me, Flap,” she said, thinking she was glad for a companion who couldn’t berate her, question her, tell her she was a bad Christian or how poorly she compared to other people.
CHAPTER 22
HANNAH’S STORE WAS OPEN FOR BUSINESS ON THE TWENTIETH OF September. She stood behind the counter, the green metal cash box below her on a shelf, a small, speckled composition book to tally the day’s sales beside her.
The room was almost square with white painted shelves along every wall, and a wide counter down the center of the room. The windows along three sides allowed plenty of natural light to enter, illuminating the area where women would inspect the various bolds of plain and patterned duchsach with calculating eyes.
Buttons, thread, bias tape, rickrack, elastic, needles, straight pins, hooks, and eyes. The list was endless. Manny had made small wooden bins to hold the notions. He’d painted them blue and brought them one Friday evening, as a surprise.
Sarah donated her best pair of Wiss fabric-cutting scissors. Hannah refused, at first, saying, “No, no, Mam. Not your Wiss scissors.” But she knew they would make her task easier.
She would sell scissors in the future, but stocking her shelves had taken almost the whole of her bank account. Harold Rocher had given her access to some of the best textile mills in the Northeastern United States, so she was set to make a profit.
Dave King had been paid in full, the check handed over to him without fanfare, her face a cold mask. She had spoken only what was absolutely necessary until his part of the deal was over. And that was how things stayed.
He went home shrugging his shoulders and telling himself she could take him the way he was or stay alone. She told herself she had had enough of being told off. He could wash his own dishes and live by himself. She’d never be sweet and submissive, and if she didn’t like people, well, he wasn’t going to dig up some deep psychological reason for it that would only make her feel worse.
She welcomed her first customer, Sadie Lapp, a thin-as-a-rail spinster with a nose like a parrot’s beak and a squawk to match. She roamed the store with a condescending air, asked dozens of questions that Hannah answered politely, although with an air of stretched martyrdom. Sadie bought one yard of white covering organdy, holding on to every dollar as long as she possibly could, counting out her own change twice, then folding the coins in a tiny leather packet. She lifted her apron and rummaged in her pocket to make sure the purse was beneath the large men’s handkerchief nestling there, which had been used and reused, if her horrendous, honking, nose-blowing was any indication.
The effort to stay amiable drained Hannah. She stood behind the counter, her arms feeling like dishrags as she took slow, easy breaths.
All forenoon, then, women arrived. Some were brought by their husbands. Others drove teams themselves. Babies were slung on hips, carried around by strong arms attached to muscular shoulders. Big women, some of them. Big and rangy and uglier than a mud fence. But friendly, openly excited about Hannah Riehl’s store.
At first, the smile she plastered on her face felt awkward and every bit as fake as it was. But as customers commented on her nice selection and her cash box began to fill, a natural excitement lit up her countenance. Her cheeks turned pink, a rosy glow surrounding her as she dropped coins into the metal box and folded dollar bills carefully, laying them down neatly as she did so.
“Do you have quilting thread?”
“No snap buttons? The kind you sew on?”
“Where’s the chambray?”
Each time, Hannah was able to help, showing them the item. If there was something she didn’t have, she wrote it on a tablet, to be ordered immediately.
At the end of the day, she had a little over sixty dollars in her cash box. Sixty dollars was wealth far beyond her imagination. She needed to keep it stowed away. Most of the money would go back into buying inventory.
She was sweeping the floor when the door was pushed open barely wide enough to allow two small girls to enter the store. Wide-eyed, their cherubic faces were both frightened and adventurous. They slipped in like a soft breeze, then stood uncertainly, staring at her.
“Hello,” Hannah said, setting her broom against a shelf.
“Good evening.” They spoke in low, well-modulated voices, sounding much older than their size. Hannah was held in the grip of two pairs of very blue eyes.
“May I help you find something?” she asked.
“Our brother is sick with chicken pox.” The oldest girl cleared her throat. “Our mam sent us to see if you have baking soda and Epsom salts.” The words were spoken clearly, without the usual lisp of a child.
Hannah shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have those things in my store. Only fabric and other things that are used for sewing clothes.”
Hannah was pinned behind the counter with a clear blue gaze. “You should. Mothers need those things sometimes.”
Hannah agreed quickly. What was it with these small children holding her directly responsible for her lack of wisdom? “I have both of those things in the house if your mother would like to borrow them.”
“Yes, she would like to.”
Hannah hurried to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and came back with both items. The girls were rooted to the same spot, just inside the door, their feet as still as if someone had nailed them there.
“You can just take these containers. I have more. Then you can return them sometime later,” she told them.
“I think that would not suit my mam. Please pour some in a small poke and we will pay for it with the money she gave us.”
Feeling as if she was under some strict requirement from a judge to obey them, Hannah did as she was told, without argument. She charged them twenty-five cents, which the girl handed over without hesitation, staring up at Hannah with unwavering blue eyes.
“Thank you.”
With that, the girls turned and left, leaving her with the distinct feeling that she had fallen short. What odd little girls.
Well, she had met all sorts of women today, starting with that first old maid, Sadie Lapp, and ending with the two little girls. She was bone-weary. Her shoulders ached with a deep dull throb and her neck was stiff. She leaned her head from side to side and worked her shoulders to loosen them, smiling at the ceiling.
Cash. She had all that cash. She would label her first day a success. What a turn her life had taken now.
She swept the floor, surveying her small store with a sense of satisfaction. She knew her job at the hardware store in Pine had been for a reason. She had never imagined that those days spent arranging shelves and cleaning for Doris were anything other than a necessity, a means of survival.
Like Harold, she, too, lived now in an area she had been fiercely opposed to, but she was learning that it was possible to become accustomed to another environment, another way of life entirely. Going to church, interacting with strangers—women of her own faith but strangers nevertheless—seeing her mother and siblings, living among a close-knit community held together by a patchwork of fields and crops, clusters of woods, ribbons of creeks, all crisscrossed with roads and dotted with towns. This area was a beehive of energy, swarming with all sorts of human beings, the exact opposite of the vast open land with only waving grasses and the wind for company, the air as clear and pure as she imagined Heaven’s to be.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts, then let herself out the door to feed Flap. He nickered, welcoming her presence, shook his head up and down as if to remind her that it was high time for a feeding. She scratched his forehead and
told him he was a faithful steed. Common looking as all get out, but faithful.
He needed a pasture, a small plot of grass to eat. A place to kick up his heels and get some exercise in between his jaunts on the road. She could do it. She would have to put in some posts, but she’d seen it done plenty of times. She’d watched the Jenkins boys dig holes and set posts. All she’d need were locust posts and a few rolls of barbed wire. That meant she needed to make a trip to the neighbors to use their telephone to call the sawmill and she’d need to go to Zimmerman’s Hardware for the barbed wire. She wished she could talk to someone about the cost.
Would a hundred dollars be enough? She couldn’t use the sixty she already had. That needed to be set aside for new inventory. For a moment, she wished for a partner to help with all these things, but then she stopped herself. All that bowing to someone else’s will, negotiating every problem that presented itself … it simply wasn’t worth it.
The cold winds of autumn were already rustling the brilliant fall foliage by the time Hannah began digging post holes. Her work at the store kept her from ordering the posts immediately and then the delivery took an abominably long time. She knew she could wait until spring, but in her own driven way, she began digging until her fingers were covered in painful blisters that popped, exposing the tender layer of skin beneath. Still, she kept digging, her fingers covered with white adhesive tape, setting posts with aching shoulders, tamping down the dirt around them with a heavy digging iron. Blood seeped from beneath the adhesive tape, mixing with dirt and perspiration, but she kept on working feverishly every evening as the daylight hours became less and less.
She fell into bed, exhausted. Her back and shoulders burned with fatigue, her fingers and the palms of her hands throbbed with pain. Far into the night she lay awake, turning miserably, trying her best to lay her hands in a comfortable position. She thought about the cash she had from her store and wished she had a dog. It would be extremely comforting to know that a good watchdog would alert her to any prowlers.