by Jan Drexler
She shook her head. “I’m not beautiful.”
He rubbed her hand with his thumb again. “Why would you say that?”
“You know I’m plain, and I’ll always be plain.” She lifted her free hand to her cast eye, then let it drop. “I’m more than plain.”
Cap rested his chin on her head. “You’ll always be beautiful to me. I’ve never known someone like you. Your eyes are lovely.” He shrugged. “I know your cast eye is there, but I only see you. Naomi. A beautiful woman and a wonderful mother.”
His words washed over her hurting heart like a soothing balm. She leaned into his strength, drawing warmth and comfort from him. A man like Cap thought she was beautiful? It was a notion that tempted her to accept it without question.
The balm turned cold as the memory of Davey’s disappearance jolted her. She had forgotten. For a brief moment, she had forgotten Davey. A sob rose in her throat before she could stop it. Naomi pulled her hands away from his and rose from her seat. She clung to the railing at the edge of the porch and stared into the twilight woods all around them.
Cap stood behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder, but she shook him off.
“You don’t understand. No one does. How can I be a mother when I let my boy wander off on his own?” Naomi let Cap turn her toward him, but she couldn’t look up into his eyes. “I’ve failed him. God trusted Davey to me, and I’ve failed.”
Gentle hands squeezed her shoulders. “It isn’t your fault. Davey is a boy, and boys don’t think about their actions sometimes.”
“That doesn’t make a difference. I’m responsible for him. Me.”
Cap drew her toward him until she leaned into his chest. He was solid, strong, and confident. Without his presence, she would sink into the ground.
“Memmi!”
Davey?
Naomi looked toward the road where it sloped down toward the river. Two figures were walking, and one was a boy. She pushed past Cap and ran. Through the rough grass of the yard, onto the road. Davey ran to meet her and barreled into her arms. She held him against her until he struggled free, but she still couldn’t keep from stroking his hair, straightening his shirt, caressing his cheek. Her son was home.
Cap was behind her, and the rest of the family gathered around, everyone talking at once, until Daed’s voice broke through.
“Thank you.”
Daed spoke in English to the man who had brought Davey home. Davey wiggled out of Naomi’s caresses and went to the man, taking his hand. The Indian was old, his face dark and lined with wrinkles. He was dressed in ragged cloths wrapped around his waist and legs, but his chest was bare. His hair was gray and long, framing his face. Even though his age was apparent, he held himself straight and tall as he laid a hand on Davey’s shoulder and looked at Daed.
“Smart boy. Good boy. He found the way home.”
“We have stew for supper. Won’t you join us?”
The old Indian shook his head. “A long trail waits for me. I must go.”
Without another word, he turned and walked away.
Mamm hugged Naomi. “It’s a miracle. Davey is safe.”
“Ja, a miracle.” She watched Davey as Daed hugged him, then Henry. The boy’s face glowed. He was muddy, and his shirt was torn in a few places, but he was home.
Cap joined the Schrock family as they crowded into the house for a late supper.
“We’ll let Davey eat his stew, and then he can tell us what happened,” Eli had said.
Cap stood against the wall behind Henry’s chair and watched Davey shovel spoonful after spoonful of the savory chunks of venison and vegetables into his mouth as if he hadn’t eaten in a week.
“Are you so hungry, Davey?” Naomi asked. She sat next to him on the bench on the opposite side of the table, her arm around him.
“It’s been a long time since dinner, and we only had some roots that Crow Flies dug out of the ground.”
“Roots!” Lydia said, shaking her head. “Roots and berries, that’s all they eat.”
Eli grinned at Davey. “Ja, Lydia. Roots, just like we eat. Carrots and potatoes!”
Cap joined in the laughter as Davey finally put his spoon down and leaned against Naomi.
Henry leaned forward. “Tell us what happened. We’ve been looking all over for you. Where were you?”
“The boy needs his sleep,” Naomi said. “He’ll tell us in the morning.”
Davey sat up. “I’m not so tired.” He turned to Naomi. “Can I stay up? I want to tell you about Crow Flies.”
Naomi relented as Eli said, “Go ahead.”
“I wanted to go fishing—”
“You should never have done that,” Naomi said. “What if you had fallen in?”
“Let him talk,” Cap said, and Naomi looked at him. Her face was flushed. Her fear was turning to anger now that Davey was home and safe. “You can discuss the details with him later.”
Naomi nodded, and Davey went on.
“I did fall in.”
Naomi covered her mouth with her hand, but Davey kept talking.
“I almost drowned. The water was . . . was like a horse that keeps going one way when you want it to go another. It bumped me on the rocks.” He pulled his shirt up and stood to show them a sickening purple-and-green bruise on his ribs. He sat again and continued his story. “I didn’t know how far the river went, but I just kept going and going until there was a tree across the river. I got caught in the branches.”
Naomi smoothed his hair away from the scratches on his face.
“I was almost asleep, so I don’t remember much, but Crow Flies found me and took me to his camp.” He turned to Naomi. “I threw up, Mamm. My chest hurt bad. But Crow Flies made me feel better.”
“How did he do that?”
“He gave me some tea. It tasted bad, but I drank it. Then I slept for a long time. When I woke up, Crow Flies fed me and showed me how to hunt and do things in the woods. Then we went to sleep again, and then this morning Crow Flies said men were looking for me and I had to go home. And so we walked and walked and walked. It was getting dark, but then we came to the road and the place where we went fishing, and I knew how to get home from there.”
Davey looked at Cap. “Were you really looking for me? Was Crow Flies right?”
“We looked for two days, Davey. All of us did.” Cap swallowed. He couldn’t say any more.
Eli leaned forward in his chair. “You know what you did was wrong, don’t you, Davey?”
Davey caught his lower lip between his teeth, then looked at Eli. “But no one told me not to go fishing alone.”
No one spoke as Eli held Davey’s gaze for a long minute. “But you knew it was wrong.”
Davey nodded.
Cap looked from the boy’s scratched and bruised face to a torn fingernail covered in dried blood. Would he learn from this episode, or would he still be as careless as ever?
Eli sighed. “We are thankful to our Father in heaven that you were returned to us safely, and I think your experience is punishment enough.” He and Naomi exchanged glances and she nodded her agreement.
Davey yawned and Naomi stood. “This boy needs to get to bed.”
Lydia kissed Davey’s head as Naomi led him to the ladder, and Eli patted his shoulder as he walked by. Cap watched every step, every movement until Davey was up the ladder and in the loft. His eyes filled and he wiped the tears away. Davey’s safe return was a miracle.
He slipped out the door as the Schrock family finished their meal. He paused on the porch. The trail home was dark, quiet, and lonely. In no hurry to leave the comfortable sound of the voices that carried out to him, he leaned against the porch rail.
The stars blazed above, just as they had the night before, but tonight they were glorious. Almost as if they were celebrating Davey’s homecoming too. As if God was celebrating along with the Schrocks. Cap smiled. Henry had gone out to take the news to their neighbors as soon as Davey had gone up to his bed, so by now the whole neighbo
rhood was celebrating and thanking God.
He chewed at his lip. Had God had a hand in this? In Davey’s surviving the rushing river waters? The near drowning? He closed his eyes. He had prayed that God would lead him to Davey, to let him find the boy. But instead an old Indian had found him, cared for him, and brought him home.
Many times over the last couple days Martha’s face had appeared in his thoughts. The hours he had spent praying for God to let her live, to give him the power to hold on to her life, had been wasted. Martha had died. His son had died. Nothing he had tried would save them.
Saving Davey, finding him alive, would have atoned for his failure so many years ago, but he hadn’t been able to do that either. No matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t good enough. He never accomplished what he set out to do. God—if there was a God—seemed to be working against him at every turn.
Soft footsteps behind him alerted him to Naomi’s presence.
“Davey was asleep before he even laid down, I think.”
“He was a tired boy.”
Cap could see Naomi’s face in the starlight. She should have been smiling, but instead a frown held sway over her features. She barely glanced at the stars above before she fixed her eyes on the dark forest that surrounded them.
“He came home.” Cap picked a sliver of wood from the porch rail and twirled it between his fingers.
Naomi didn’t answer, but sniffled a little.
“You should be celebrating. What is wrong?”
“I am glad he’s home, and so thankful that God brought him back to me. But it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. If I wasn’t so wrapped up in learning how to set up Annalise’s loom . . . if I had been watching him more closely . . . I could have kept him from—”
Cap threw the sliver into the yard and grabbed Naomi’s hand. “Come with me.”
He pulled her hand into the crook of his elbow and led her to the road. Turning toward the river, he guided her around the stumps and other rough spots in the road. The starlight was so bright that he could pick out his route between the shadows and the stumps glowing silver and gray.
“Where are we going?”
“I want you to see where Davey disappeared.” He pulled closer. “I have to admit I had given up hope of finding him alive. I thought—” Cap’s voice broke. Was that why he hadn’t found Davey? He had been searching for a pale corpse instead of a living, vibrant boy. “Forgive me.”
Naomi stopped and turned toward him. “Forgive you for giving up hope? How could any of us have held on to hope that we would find him alive?” She wrapped her free hand around his arm and hugged it. “You never gave up looking for him.” She turned and started walking again. “I was afraid we would never find him. That he had disappeared without a sign of what had happened, no trail to follow.” She shivered. “I don’t know if I could have lived, not knowing.”
Cap continued down the slope to the ford through the river. The waxing moon, a silver sliver in the western sky, gave no light, but the spot where he and Henry had taken Davey fishing on Monday was as clear as the road had been in the starlight. The log where he and Davey had sat, the dark eddy where Henry had said the big fish lurked, and the spot where he had found Davey’s footprints leading into the water yesterday afternoon.
“This is it. This is where Davey went into the river. If his disappearance is anyone’s fault, it’s mine. I’m the one who convinced you to let him go fishing. I’m the one who refused to take him again on Tuesday.” Cap took a deep breath. “If I had gone fishing with him, he wouldn’t have tried to go on his own. He wouldn’t have been down here by himself.”
Naomi stood in silence, watching the rushing water. The river splashed over the ford and rushed past them on its spring journey north to swell other rivers with its flood.
When she spoke, it was a whisper. “So either both of us are to blame, or neither of us.”
Cap squeezed her hand as they stood by the spring-swelled flood.
Naomi shuddered. “He was in that?”
Cap nodded, his hand holding hers, still tucked in his elbow. He watched the churning water, dark and oily in the starlight, looking nearly as solid as the soil it carried with it. He could imagine the strength of the current pulling at Davey, rushing him from one rock to another.
“I don’t know how he survived, but he did.” Cap stroked the back of Naomi’s hand.
“Thanks to Crow Flies.”
Cap squeezed her hand. “Thanks to Crow Flies. We were lucky that old Indian happened to be close by.”
“Some would say that God was watching over him.”
“Maybe.” Cap took a step back from the river, guiding Naomi to a drier spot to stand. “But if God had been watching out for the boy, he would never have come to the river alone.”
God was so distant that there wasn’t any way that he cared about a lost boy any more than he cared about a dying mother and her child.
8
Naomi let Davey sleep as long as he wanted the next day while she and Mamm caught up on the chores they had neglected while Davey was missing.
As she worked in the garden, planting lettuce in the row she had just hoed in the soft soil, her eyes strayed to the road, to the way Davey had gone down to the river. And the direction he had come from when he had been miraculously returned to her.
She wiped her eyes with the hem of her apron and went back to dropping the tiny seeds in the furrow, one by one.
It had been a miracle. How else could she explain how the old Indian had found Davey and cared for him? An old Indian man that she had never seen before and then had disappeared into the dark night?
Someone was looking after her boy. That was the only explanation.
Davey wandered out to the garden just as Naomi dropped the last seed in the furrow and covered it.
“Good morning. You slept for a long time.” Naomi gathered him close to her for a hug, then brushed his hair out of his eyes. He would need a haircut soon. “Did you have your breakfast?”
“Grossmutti made hoecakes for me, with maple syrup.”
His favorite. Mamm was spoiling the boy, but Naomi would have done the same thing.
“Can I go to Cap’s?”
Her stomach swirled. “Alone?”
“I won’t be alone. Cap will be there.”
Naomi glanced toward the trail leading to Cap’s clearing. Davey had walked that trail many times, running through the woods along the shaded path, and had never gotten lost. But today, the thought of him slipping out of her sight made her fingers clutch at his shirt.
She took a deep breath. “I will go with you.”
“Why? Do you want to see Cap too?”
Davey’s question startled her. She had only intended to make sure Davey reached his destination safely, but to see Cap . . .Why did the thought of seeing him settle her turning stomach?
“Ja, I want to see Cap. Run and tell Grossmutti where we’re going while I put the hoe away.”
Naomi had grown warm as she worked in the sunny garden, but the air was still cool in the shade of the trees in the woods. Davey ran ahead of her down the trail until she called to him.
“Not so far ahead. Stay where I can see you.”
Davey stopped to wait for her. “Why? I want to get to Cap’s before you and surprise him.”
“I just don’t want to let you out of my sight.” She tousled his hair as she caught up to him and they continued down the path together. “I missed you . . .” Tears filled her eyes with a sudden flood that she dashed away before they could trickle down her cheeks. She swallowed. “While you were gone, I longed to see you so much. Now I don’t want you to get too far away.”
“All right.” He walked next to her. “Did you really miss me?”
“Of course I did.”
He grinned up at her. “I didn’t have to do my chores.”
“If you think you’re going to get out of doing your chores by running off into the woods, you had better think again.”
Naomi forced herself to frown.
“Crow Flies gave me chores to do. He said everyone does chores, even Indians.”
“What kind of chores did he have you do?”
“Gather wood, mostly.” Davey hopped over a fallen log. “He let me watch him skin a squirrel, but he wouldn’t let me do it. He said I had to learn how to use a knife first.” He looked up at her. “When can I use a knife, Memmi? Mose has a knife, and William does. I’m old enough, aren’t I?”
A knife in the hands of her active seven-year-old? What would he ask for next? “I think we’ll wait a while before you start carrying a knife.”
“What if I need one? Crow Flies said every man needs a knife.”
“That’s Crow Flies. He’s a grown man, living in the woods.” Naomi didn’t let herself think about what his camp might look like, or how Davey lived when he was with him. He was home now, and safe. That was all that mattered.
“There’s Cap. I can see him.” His eyes pleaded as he looked at her. “Can I go ahead now? Can I?”
“Go ahead.”
Davey ran toward the clearing. Cap was on his roof, setting stones into the top of his chimney. As Davey ran toward him, he climbed down the ladder to meet the boy on the ground. When they met, Davey threw his arms around his friend and Cap picked him up, swinging him in a circle.
Naomi paused, watching the two of them together. If she didn’t know better, she would think they were father and son, the way Cap knelt down as he talked with Davey. And the way Davey clung to his hand as he told Cap whatever story he had to share with his friend. This was what Davey missed. He had men in his life, but not a father. That was something she could never give him.
Cap looked up as she walked toward the pair and his smile grew larger. He looked as if he was happy to see her. As he started toward her, Davey’s hand firmly in his, a warmth spread through her and the raw nerves from the last few days melted away. Cap had a way of putting her at ease, as if he lifted a burden from her shoulders whenever he came near.
“It’s good to see you smiling this morning,” he said. “Davey tells me that you’ve been working in the garden already.”