The Lesson

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  It rankled their mother. She made sharply pointed comments about the Amish, but what could she really do about it? Old Deborah was raising her children for her. And doing a wonderful job with it too. She was grandmother, counselor, mentor . . . all wrapped into one warm, loving package. She fed them, washed their clothes, combed out Jenny’s tangled hair, took them to the dentist or doctor if they needed medical attention. Old Deborah and her church family were loving toward them. Chris had no doubt they wanted them there. Life was stable at Old Deborah’s. No one was on edge—waiting for his mother’s dip into addiction. Chris knew what to expect each day at Old Deborah’s. It was peaceful and safe and good.

  On some level, Chris’s mother must have known that her children were better off with Old Deborah than with CPS. Or maybe she just liked having the visits. She never registered any formal complaints about the Amish school or Amish church Chris and Jenny attended, though she gave Old Deborah plenty of informal complaints. But when Chris became baptized in the church last fall, she blew her top. It still chilled Chris to think of his mother’s outburst, filled with horrible accusations. He just stood there, taking it, not answering back, just like he always had, but he hadn’t been back to see her since.

  Jenny didn’t remember what it was like before Old Deborah’s, but Chris did. And he would do everything in his power to make sure he and Jenny never went back to that. After that scene his mother had made about his baptism, Old Deborah quietly took him aside. She told Chris that his grandfather had sent her some legal papers, right before he died. He was leaving a house in trust for Chris and Jenny, and property taxes were paid out of the trust each year. When Chris turned twenty-one, he would inherit the house and land. When Jenny turned twenty-one, half of the house would belong to her. Old Deborah gave Chris a package with all of the legal paperwork, including a key to the house. “There’s just one little hitch. Your mother is the executor of this trust.” Old Deborah took a deep breath and closed her eyes, scrunching up her wrinkled face. “I might not have shared that piece of knowledge with her.”

  “What? Mom doesn’t know? Why not?” It wasn’t in Old Deborah’s nature to deceive anyone.

  Old Deborah opened her eyes. “Your grandfather put a condition in the will—as long as your mother wasn’t using drugs, wasn’t in jail, the house could go to her first. That was the condition until you turned twenty-one. Your grandfather asked me to use my judgment about when your mother should be informed about the will. So I kept waiting for the right moment to share it with her. I wanted to make sure she was truly freed from her drug habit . . .”

  “But she never has been.”

  “No, not for long.” She offered up a smile, but it didn’t travel to her eyes. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Not ever, Chris thought. His grandfather must have thought so too. Why else would he create such a will? He knew that Grace Mitchell would spend her life skirting in and out of jail or rehab. Or both.

  “I think it’s time to go back to Stoney Ridge. This winter, you’ll be twenty-one. Your mother is . . . indisposed. The house was meant for you and Jenny.”

  Chris fingered the cold metal key. A simple little door key that unlocked so many memories. “Stoney Ridge? Go back to my grandfather’s house?”

  “Yes. This is your chance to start a life of your own.” She covered his hand with hers. Her hand was so small and fragile compared to his work-roughened one, but it was powerful in its own way. Like the rudder of a ship. “Chris, one thing I have learned over the years—your mother may not be able to be a good mother, but she does love you and your sister. Her problems get in the way of that love. Lord only knows I wish your upbringing had been different, but maybe you had an extraordinary upbringing, because it has made you an extraordinary young man.”

  He had trusted Old Deborah in every way, and though she was gone, he trusted her judgment even now. After her funeral, the very next morning, before news of Old Deborah’s passing had time to spread outside of the Amish community, he had quietly packed their few belongings, and he and Jenny set off for Stoney Ridge in Lancaster County to claim their inheritance. He felt bad that he hadn’t said goodbye to the friends who had been so kind to him and Jenny—the Troyers, especially—but the fewer people who knew where they were headed, the better. He didn’t want any news of Stoney Ridge to trickle to his mother. Not now. Not until late January, after his birthday.

  What a crazy thing he had done! Traveling the back roads of Ohio and Pennsylvania with a horse and buggy. It took weeks! Many days, they only covered twenty to thirty miles, and on Sundays, they stayed put. It didn’t matter how long it took—Chris wasn’t going to jeopardize Samson’s well-being. And time was one thing he had plenty of.

  Finally, the day came when they arrived in Stoney Ridge. The little town hadn’t changed much. The Sweet Tooth Bakery was still on the corner of Main Street, across from the post office and the brick bank. They walked down Main Street and he knew, instinctively, to turn right down Stone Leaf Drive, as if he’d never left. When he came to the lane that led to the house, he stopped and took a deep breath.

  Jenny looked up at him. “Did you forget where it is? Has it been too long?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t forget.” From Ohio—a four-week trip. From his childhood—an eternity.

  They walked up the lane and turned into a cracked and crumbling concrete driveway that led to the house. The property wasn’t large—it was surrounded by farmland.

  “Here it is, Jenny.”

  “Yuck.”

  “Hello?” he called out softly.

  All was quiet. The house was deserted and looked it. The clapboard frame of the house was just the way he remembered it—brownish gray with chipped, flaking paint, the trim painted white. The porch sagged on one side. A clothesline with bleached-out wooden clothespins was looped between the posts, just under the rafters. A memory wisped like a fast-moving cloud through Chris’s head. He remembered his mother hanging her underwear there and his grandfather raging at its impropriety. His grandfather cared about things like that. His mother didn’t.

  Chris walked up to the front door. He tried the doorknob, expecting nothing, but when it turned in his hand, he let out a surprised gasp.

  “What?” Jenny rushed to his side.

  He pushed the door open, its hinges screaming a protest.

  What he saw made him want to back right up and run. “I guess we’re home,” he whispered.

  3

  Mary Kate woke early, after a restless night. Today was the first day of school, and she was the schoolteacher. She had absolutely no idea how to teach school. She slipped out of bed and dressed, then went downstairs. Last night, she had made up a batch of wheat bread dough and put it in the refrigerator. It was a special recipe that required a long kneading time.

  She took the bowl out of the refrigerator and turned the dough onto a lightly floured surface. She deflated the dough—gently pressing down to let the air out. By gently squeezing out the excess carbon dioxide, the yeast would be more fully distributed throughout the dough. Then she started the kneading process: turn and fold, turn and fold, turn and fold. She knew she would need the task this morning—kneading bread could dispel a good deal of anxiety from even the most nervous heart.

  And it did help. By the time her father woke to head outside and feed the livestock, she was almost calm. Almost. “There’s coffee started,” she said. Her voice sounded thin and wavery.

  Amos poured himself a cup and peered at the bread she was kneading. “Wheat. Hmmm. You must be feeling pretty fidgety.”

  Panic rose up again inside of M.K. “I can’t do it, Dad.”

  Amos put the coffee cup on the counter. “Of course you can. You’ve never failed yet at anything you tried to do, have you?”

  “Well, no, but I have never tried to teach school.”

  “You’ve tackled every job that ever came your way. You never shirked, and you always stuck to it till you did what you set out to do. Success get
s to be a habit, like anything else a person keeps on doing.”

  M.K. felt a little better. It was true; she had always kept on trying, she had always had to. Well, now she had to teach school.

  “Remember when Sadie ended up with the job of tending chickens? And she just couldn’t bring herself to butcher one. You just picked up that ax and—” he made a cutting motion with his hand—“the lights went out on that poor chicken. You must have only been eight or so.”

  “Seven.”

  “And remember when Jimmy Fisher took his pigeons to school and accidentally released them inside the schoolhouse?”

  M.K.’s head snapped up. “That was no accident! He let them go on purpose.”

  “And you helped capture them.”

  M.K. grinned. “Alice Smucker hid under her desk.”

  “Now that is not something you would ever do as a teacher. You’re too brave.”

  She put the bread dough into an oiled bowl to rise. Fern would bake it later this morning. She turned to her father. “Do you really think I’m brave?”

  He patted her shoulder. “The bravest girl I know.”

  At ten minutes to seven, M.K. couldn’t put it off any longer. She picked up her Igloo lunch box and left for school.

  Jenny couldn’t believe her ears. “You mean you want me to lie to everyone and say that my last name is Yoder?”

  “It’s for the best, Jenny,” Chris said. The two of them were eating together at the kitchen table. “This is kind of . . . interesting. I don’t believe I’ve ever had Cream of Wheat that looked like soup before.” He lifted his spoon and the Cream of Wheat slipped off like a waterfall.

  Jenny may have used a little too much liquid.

  She had learned a lot from Old Deborah, but mostly about gardens and herbs and remedies. Old Deborah’s healing work took up so much of her time that she didn’t cook or bake like most Amish women did. As a result, Jenny had never been much of a cook, but now, she realized, things were going to have to change. She had better figure out how to cook if they were going to eat anything that wasn’t from a can or a box. “Old Deborah would never agree to a lie. Using her name as ours is wrong, wrong, wrong.”

  Chris added raw Cream of Wheat into the bowl until it resembled gray wallpaper paste. He took a taste and gagged. Then he put his spoon down, frowning. “Old Deborah raised us like we were her own. She would understand.”

  Jenny sighed. She knew her brother well enough to know it was useless to try to reason with him. Stubborn. He was just so stubborn about some things. She picked up her brown lunch bag and walked to the door, dreading what lay ahead.

  Three hours later, M.K. rang the bell to start her first day of school. Calling the cattle to the trough of knowledge was how she had always thought of it. Doozy took up residence on the front steps—as far as M.K. would let him come—and wouldn’t budge.

  Before M.K. was a sea of polished wood desks. The children tripped over Doozy as they hurried inside the classroom and stared at M.K. She stood, ramrod straight, and faced all of those scholars.

  There were so many! So many beady little eyes.

  She racked her brain for what came next. Nothing came to mind.

  For the first time in her life, her mind was a complete blank. Empty. She thought she might get sick. She might get sick and die, right on the spot. That, she thought, would serve the school board right.

  From the back of the room, Jenny sized up the new teacher. She could see this young teacher nervously knot and unknot her hands. You could tell she didn’t know where to begin or which way was up. Her voice wobbled as she said “Good morning” to the students. Wobbled.

  “Morning, M.K.,” said a few students.

  A boy with big glasses raised his hand as high as it could go. “We should probably call you Teacher M.K.”

  “Yes, of course. Thank you, Danny. Please call me Teacher M.K.,” she corrected, but her voice sounded uncertain.

  What kind of a name was Emkay?

  A big boy leaned over his desk and winked at Jenny. She snapped her head away from him. How rude! Boys were never rude in her old school. But then, there was an abundance of girls in the upper grades. There was only one boy who was her age at her old school, Teddy Beiler, and he was frightened of the girls. Teddy had a permanently startled look on his face.

  Then the new teacher tried to take roll and dropped the roll book. Twice. When she dropped it the second time, the big boys in the back of the room quickly changed their seats just to confuse her. And it did. When she straightened up, she looked thoroughly flustered.

  “I’ll start with the first grade,” the teacher said. “Barbara Jean Shrock?”

  A little hand shot up. “Here,” Barbara Jean said in a thin, piping voice. “But I’m not staying.” There was a whistle in Barbara Jean’s whisper because she was missing her two front teeth, so staying came out as th-taying. She sat primly, her purple dress pulled snugly over her small bony knees. The sneakers she wore dangled several inches above the ground. Her tiny hands were neatly folded in her lap.

  “Well, let’s get through the roll, at least,” the teacher said. “Eva Zook?”

  Another little girl raised her hand. “Here.”

  “Now the second grade.” This went on for a few more minutes until something happened that interested Jenny. When the teacher reached the sixth grade, she called out, “Danny Riehl?”

  “Here,” a boy said. It was the same boy who had spoken up earlier. He had a round face and wore big glasses with adhesive tape in the middle. His hair was the color of straw. He was earnest, Jenny thought. An earnest boy.

  A tall girl in the back row stood up. “I’m Anna Mae Glick and I need to sit next to Danny Riehl.”

  The teacher’s face shifted to a frown of puzzlement. “Why is that?”

  “Because we’re going to be married someday,” Anna Mae Glick said smugly. “He’s already asked me. We’re going to get married when I’m twenty and he’s eighteen. It’s all settled.”

  Danny, who was sitting a couple of desks in front of Anna Mae, froze. He looked at the teacher in panic. “No, Anna Mae, I didn’t say I would marry you,” he protested. “I never did.”

  Anna Mae glared at him. “You did!” she said. “You promised! Don’t think you can break your promises like that.” She snapped her fingers to demonstrate Danny’s broken promises.

  “No, I never did,” Danny repeated quietly. He looked troubled.

  The big boys started snickering. One of them—the one who had winked so rudely at Jenny, said, “Anna Mae, you mean that nobody would ever marry you, not in a hundred years.”

  “You mean that nobody would ever marry you,” Anna Mae retorted. “Any girl would take one look at you, Eugene Miller, and be sick.”

  Yes and no. Eugene Miller did carry with him a strong odor. Pig farmers, Jenny guessed. You didn’t want to get downwind of him. And Eugene could be rude, but he wasn’t bad looking. He was man-sized and there was a rim of fuzz on his upper lip.

  Anna Mae crossed her arms. “M.K., just so you know, Eugene Miller is a nuisance.”

  Eugene Miller let out a room-shaking guffaw.

  “Eugene and I are permanently mad at each other,” Anna Mae added. “Just so you know.”

  “Anna Mae, you are in the eighth grade,” the teacher said, consulting her roll book. “You need to sit with your class.”

  Anna Mae scowled but sat down in her seat, a few rows behind Danny.

  Jenny began to wonder if this teacher was going to ever get the class to an actual subject before the end of this first teaching day.

  Peering once more into the roll book, the teacher looked relieved at the prospect of getting roll call back on track. She read Jenny’s name but seemed puzzled when Jenny was the one who answered. “Shouldn’t you be sitting up front with your own grade?”

  “I am sitting with my own grade,” Jenny said firmly.

  Flustered, the teacher glanced at the roll book again. “How old are you?”
<
br />   “Thirteen.”

  “I would have thought ten,” Anna Mae said loudly.

  Jenny glared at Anna Mae. She crossed that girl off her potential friend list. That was unfortunate because there weren’t many girls in the upper grades.

  “Are you new to Stoney Ridge?” the teacher said.

  Chris had warned Jenny to think twice before she said anything. Anything at all. “Yes,” Jenny said, slowly and carefully.

  The teacher tilted her head at Jenny, as if she was about to ask something else, but one of the big boys sent a paper airplane sailing across the room. It hit the window and fell to the ground. The teacher went to pick it up. Breathing a little hard, she asked, “Whose is this?”

  Of course, no one would admit to it. They all kept their eyes facing forward, even the little ones. Teacher M.K. looked up and down the rows at the children, then threw the airplane into the garbage can. A big boy snickered. Eugene Miller. Jenny thought that boy had a saucy way about him. His face held a big grin as he looked right at the blackboard. And the silly teacher didn’t do anything. Not a thing.

  At that exact moment, Jenny knew that this young woman would never make it as a teacher. She didn’t want to be the boss.

  M.K.’s armpits were wet and she felt like throwing up. She stared at the children, who were staring back at her.

  Six-year-old Barbara Jean Shrock stood by her desk and tugged on M.K.’s dress. “I’m going home.”

  “Barbara Jean, you can’t go home,” M.K. said, feeling a rise of panic. “It’s only nine in the morning.”

  Barbara Jean planted her little feet. “You thaid I jutht needed to get through roll call.”

  M.K. was ready to go home too. This whole experience, the full hour of it, was turning out just like she had thought it would. Disastrous. Each time she thought she had the classroom under control, something would happen that was entirely out of her control. The last something was a mouse. She strongly suspected that Eugene Miller had something to do with that mouse in the classroom, but she couldn’t prove it. When she told him to catch it, he said, “You’re not the boss of me, M.K. Lapp. I remember when you were in eighth grade and you put a black racer snake in Teacher Alice’s bottom desk drawer. She practically had a fatal heart attack, right then and there.”