The Lesson

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  What story could M.K. be telling? What could have possibly made Chris Yoder laugh? Whatever it was, why hadn’t M.K. told Jimmy that story? Jimmy felt strangely unsettled.

  M.K. snapped open a fresh sheet and watched it settle gently over her bed. She smoothed the wrinkles and tucked in the corners. She had always loved the feel of cool clean linen beneath her hands, had always loved to crawl between crisp sheets at night.

  Why couldn’t these simple pleasures be enough for her? They were more than enough for Ruthie and Sadie and Julia. What was wrong with her? Yesterday, she was helping Fern tackle the basket filled with clothes needing ironing. The sweet smell of steaming cotton filled the room. Treading carefully, M.K. asked Fern if she ever wanted to see parts of the world.

  “No.” Fern kept ironing. “We should want nothing more than the life God has given us. The problem with you, M.K., is you lack contentment.”

  Contentment. She didn’t have it. Not much of it, anyway. In truth, it sounded boring. Cats and dogs were content, and they slept all day.

  Fern acted as if gaining contentment was as easy as taking a vitamin pill and M.K. knew it wasn’t.

  So M.K. took her scooter out to pay a visit to Erma and ask what she thought about contentment. “Personally, I think everyone should be able to seek their own contentment,” M.K. said, as she helped Erma gather ripe grapes from her vineyard.

  “The only problem with that thinking,” Erma said in her calm way, “is that if one can’t find contentment at home, one is unlikely to find it anywhere else.”

  Oh. Oh. Could that be true? Did the fact that M.K. had been discontented living in Stoney Ridge mean she was doomed to a life of discontent?

  Then, typical of Erma, she turned the whole thing around. “Mary Kate, I have discovered that I am happiest of all when I have learned to be content at home.”

  Jenny hated arithmetic. She always just wrote any old numbers down before, so she wouldn’t have to think about it. Even if writing stories became fun when Teacher M.K. gave them their handmade books, there was no way she could make arithmetic fun. The teacher had an oven timer on her desk and Jenny kept one eye fixed on it. As soon as it went off, math would be over for the day and they could be excused for recess.

  Jenny ran behind the far maple tree and sat on the ground, leaning against the tree. This was where she spent every recess and every lunch. She definitely did not want to spend her precious free time with Anna Mae and her group of giggling girls. Besides, they had never asked her to join them.

  Jenny pulled out a paper and pencil from her pocket.

  Dear Mom, I miss you a LOT.

  She chewed on her lip, thinking. What else could she say to her mother? Chris would be upset with her for tipping their mother off to where they were living. He thought their mother would never be able to stay out of jail for long. The counselor at the rehab center explained that using drugs short-circuited your brain so you weren’t the same person anymore. Jenny refused to believe that her mother couldn’t change. She believed in her, even if no one else did. When she had asked Old Deborah what she thought about that, a sad look covered her sweet wrinkled face. “I believe God can work miracles, Jenny. But our faith is in God, not in people.”

  I know you probably don’t feel very good, but remember: you can do it! You got clean before and felt really good, remember? Keep getting better and better.

  Chris is working really hard to fix up Grandfather’s house. He has done so much! It is still awful because no one was in it for a long time, except for a creepy bat. The house looks a lot better than it used to. Chris has big plans for the house because he wants to be a horse breeder. He really likes it in Stoney Ridge. Maybe when you are better, you can come live with us. The Colonel left the house to Chris and to me. Old Deborah said so.

  Love, Jenny

  P.S. I am trying to save as much money as I can to send to you. Please quit smoking! It’s not good for you.

  A softball bounced on the ground next to her. As Jenny leaned over to pick it up, Eugene Miller ran up to her. She braced herself. You never knew what was going to pop out of Eugene’s mouth, and it usually wasn’t very nice, though he hadn’t actually been unkind to her. Not yet, anyway. She tossed the ball to him, expecting him to catch it and return to the game.

  “Nice throwing arm,” he said. “Why don’t you come play? We need a good shortstop.”

  She looked up sharply at him, thinking he was making a crack about her height. She had heard all kinds of smart-aleck comments about her small stature: Thumbelina, Oompa Loompa, Shortcake, Peewee, Itsby Bitsy. If Eugene thought “shortstop” was a new nickname to Jenny, he was sorely mistaken.

  But he actually seemed sincere. When she hesitated, puzzled that he was being nice, he put his hand out to help her up. “Come on.”

  Under Eugene’s shaggy bangs were bright blue, smiling eyes. Even though his complexion was marred by acne, he had an attractive smile that made dimples in his cheeks. She was surprised to realize how cute he was, up close like this. She shook her head to erase the absurd idea.

  She looked at his hand, waiting for her. She folded the letter to her mother and put it in her pocket. The letter could wait. She took Eugene’s hand and jumped to her feet.

  It had taken Jimmy Fisher more time than he had expected to figure out where Chris Yoder was living. It was strange that no one seemed to know. He was sure someone at Windmill Farm would know, but Amos was away at a farm equipment auction and Hank didn’t have any idea where Chris lived. Even Fern didn’t know—and she knew just about everything. He finally tracked down M.K. and she knew. He should have known. M.K. knew all sorts of facts about people in Stoney Ridge that no one else knew.

  That afternoon, Jimmy rolled into the long narrow driveway of Colonel Mitchell’s old house and found Chris replacing rotted boards in the covered wraparound porch floor. Jimmy couldn’t find a hitching post to tie the reins of his horse and buggy and finally decided on a tree branch. He waved to Chris, who had stopped sawing a board when he saw Jimmy drive in. “Looks like you could use a hand.”

  Chris looked surprised. He hesitated, then said, “I wouldn’t refuse it.” He handed the saw to Jimmy across the sawhorse.

  Jimmy waved away the saw. Instead, he picked up a hammer. “You keep cutting boards and I’ll nail them in place. There’s an excellent chance I would lose a finger or two by cutting. I’m not known for paying too much attention to details. Too risky.” He held up his hands and bent a few fingers down, as if he was already missing a few. “It’s killing my career as a classical pianist.”

  He got a laugh out of Chris at that. That meant a lot to Jimmy, to get a laugh out of a serious guy like Chris Yoder. He had the impression that Chris didn’t laugh much. Jimmy would change that, if they were going to be friends.

  The two worked side by side for the next hour or so, not speaking unless it pertained to the porch. When all of the rotted boards had been replaced, a small girl brought out a pitcher of water and two glasses. Jimmy had seen her at church and at Windmill Farm once or twice. He had figured out she was Chris’s sister, Jenny, but he had a hard time believing she was in eighth grade. She reminded him of an elf. She stared at him as she handed him a glass, as if she had never seen anyone who looked like him before. It was a stare he was accustomed to by women of all ages. He knew he was handsome, had known it all his life. He wasn’t being proud. It was just a fact. He gave Jenny his most charming smile and she practically gasped. Her little feet barely made a noise on the steps as she hurried away. She wrenched the door open. It banged shut behind her.

  Chris and Jimmy sat on the new porch floor and gulped the water down.

  “Did you just happen to be passing by?” Chris asked. “How did you figure out where I live?”

  “M.K. Lapp told me.”

  Chris took a sip of water. “Know her well?”

  “I do. Very well. I’m planning to make her my missus.”

  Chris started coughing, as if he had taken
in a sip of water down the wrong pipe. Jimmy whacked his back with enthusiasm. He was always trying to be helpful.

  “I owe you a favor,” Chris said. “You saved me more than a half day’s work.”

  “Glad to help,” Jimmy said. He turned around to look at the old house. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of work to do. I could try and come over now and then to help.”

  “I could use the help, but I can’t pay you cash. If there’s some other way I can return a favor, let me know. I don’t like to be beholden.”

  Jimmy took another swig of water, his mind working. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He looked at Samson, grazing in the paddock. He grinned. “Well, now, if that’s the case, we might just be able to figure something out.”

  13

  Chris jerked awake from a heavy, dreamless sleep and sat straight up, blinking, trying to gather information as fast as possible. Where was he? Was there any trouble? What had his mother done now?

  The soft light of dawn splashed on the slanted walls of his bedroom.

  No, he didn’t have to worry about his mother. She wasn’t here. She was in Marysville, Ohio, in a rehabilitation treatment center. And he was in Stoney Ridge, Pennsylvania.

  With a sigh of relief, he fell back on the soft bed and scrunched the pillow under his head like a nest. It was still super-early. Too early to get up.

  He didn’t want to think about his mother. He didn’t want any news about her.

  But he did.

  When it came right down to it, it just wasn’t that easy to give up completely on the family you were born into. As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t rid himself entirely of the hope that one day his mother would be well.

  Chris wished he’d been born into a regular family, one where everyone was just a normal person. But right from the start something was wrong, because there was no father, and his mother was not equipped for motherhood. She was young, immature, selfish, and loved to party. Chris ended up living with his grandfather, who never did know what to do with his rebellious daughter, even less with a baby. Then his mother moved back home again and life took on a reasonable calm, until his mother and grandfather started fighting all the time and his mother started using drugs for the first time. The thing about methamphetamine was that it was highly addictive. One time, two times, and she was hooked.

  The counselor at the rehab center said that meth changed your brain chemistry, so you weren’t the same person. There was always hope, Old Deborah would say. Always, always hope.

  Hope. He turned that word over in his mind, the way a gold miner might examine a rock for specks of promising glitter. No sooner would he feel the comfort of the word and fear would swoop in from the sidelines to snatch it away. He lifted his head and peered out the window to see what kind of day it was, but his mind was still on Old Deborah.

  Old Deborah talked so strangely, so intimately about God, as if the Almighty spoke to her the way he spoke to people in the Bible.

  Chris believed in God, of course. He had attended church ever since he started to live with Old Deborah after they moved to Ohio—when he was eight and his mother had been put in jail the first time, for using credit cards from a lady who had asked them to housesit while she visited her sick daughter. His mother was in and out of jail or rehab after that, mostly in. She believed the world owed her something, and she had no problem helping herself to it. Her chief income strategy was to live off the generosity of others, and she always seemed to find kindly people who were willing to give her another chance. Chris didn’t believe his mother had the capacity to change. Old Deborah would tell him that nothing was outside of God’s capacity to redeem. But it wasn’t God whom Chris doubted—it was his mother.

  The morning was chilly. Winter was coming. Chris got up, dressed, and went to the living room. He made a fire in the fireplace and it finally began to heat the downstairs. He stayed by the fire for a moment, warming his hands. Samson would be expecting breakfast soon. As he put his boots on, he looked around the room. The walls were repaired and painted. The broken windows were replaced. The stair railing was fastened. The broken latticework around the porch foundation had been fixed. He had ripped out the rotting kitchen flooring and laid new linoleum—he was able to buy linoleum tiles for a bargain because the hardware store had ordered the tiles for a lady and she didn’t like the tan color. He didn’t really like the color, either, but he liked the price.

  He still had a long list of things to do, but the house was getting into shape. He thought his grandfather would be pleased. Memories flashed at random intervals, faster than he could take them in—the way his grandfather ducked his tall frame when passing through a doorway, his uncanny accuracy at reading the night sky and knowing tomorrow’s weather, and how his old dog would respond to his slightest whistle. He remembered the way his grandfather would scold him for slamming doors, how mad that used to make him. Chris could never figure out why that was a big deal.

  Flashes of his previous life surprised him like this. He sure wouldn’t mind hearing his grandfather scold him about those slammed doors now. No, he sure wouldn’t.

  The sun was hanging low in the sky, casting a mellow autumn glow across the garden. Amos checked the ripening pumpkins. Soon, they would be ready to pick so Fern could can them. He whistled for Doozy and strolled out to the orchards, with the dog trotting behind him.

  As he reached the orchard, he feasted his senses, turning his face into the warm breeze. He sampled a still-tart, late-to-ripen variety of apple off the tree and examined the pears, swelling toward perfection. M.K.’s brown bees had worked their magic again.

  Ah, Mary Kate.

  Amos had stopped in at the schoolhouse this morning to drop off M.K.’s forgotten lunch, and thought he might stay for a few moments, quietly observing in the back. He ended up spending two hours, mesmerized.

  Amos glimpsed a side of his youngest daughter he had never seen before. Her quick brown eyes took everything in—she could listen to one scholar’s recitation while simultaneously managing the entire wild pack of big boys. It seemed to him that she was a born teacher—patient, creative, dedicated. If a pupil had trouble grasping a concept, he saw her search for a new approach. He observed her trying a different explanation until the light of understanding finally lit a pupil’s eyes. He never saw her lose her temper or grow impatient, no matter how thick-skulled or stubborn the pupils could be at times. And Eugene Miller, he noticed, could be both.

  Usually, he cut M.K.’s descriptions about people in half. Some truth, heavily embroidered with exaggeration. Not so for Eugene Miller. Watching that boy’s sulky behavior, he decided that she was telling the complete and total truth.

  “You can do this,” she would urge him. “It’s not as hard as it seems, take your time.” The satisfaction on her face when Eugene finally caught on told Amos that for M.K., the joy of teaching was its own reward. Who could have imagined it? Fern had been right all along—M.K. would rise to the challenge of teaching.

  Children. You think you have a sense of who they are, the person they’ve become . . . and then they surprise you by becoming another person entirely.

  He squinted against the sun. His eyes swept over the orchards. These orchards, planted by his grandfather years ago, added to by his own father, had kept Windmill Farm solvent during some lean years when Amos had heart trouble. He stood there for a while, amid the long, even rows of trees, branches weighed down with heavy fruit. A farmer always looked forward, sacrificing long hours in anticipation of a good harvest. A reflection of God’s character.

  The trees were lovely reminders to him of God’s steady reassurance—that goodness and gentleness will someday prevail. He ran his fingertips over a branch and almost marveled, as if he could imagine his grandfather planting the tree as a mere twig. He lifted his head, breathed deeply of the pear-scented air, felt his heart tighten with gratitude.

  Herr, he thought, denki. Lord God, thank you.

  A Saturday came, silent and sun-dazzled.
M.K. turned off the burner under the pot of beans. She sprinkled some brown sugar into the pot, then a little ketchup. She stirred in some more of each, then added salt and pepper. She tasted it. Not bad. She got the apple cider vinegar out of the cupboard and stirred in a little of that and tasted it again. Better.

  M.K. moved the pot to the oven, where it could bake peacefully.

  She opened the kitchen door and stepped out into her yard.

  There, coming up the driveway, was Jenny Yoder. M.K. crossed the yard to reach her.

  Jenny was soaked with water. “I’m looking for my brother. Do you know where he is?”

  “My uncle Hank talked him into going into town to pick up some buggy parts at the hardware store,” M.K. said. “He shouldn’t be too long, if you want to wait. What happened to you?”

  Jenny looked uncertain. “I was trying to fill a water bucket for the horse and when I turned this, it broke off in my hands.” She held up a water spigot. “I can’t get the water to stop. It’s shooting everywhere, like a geyser!”

  Amos was on the far side of the barn, hooking Cayenne’s bridle to the buggy shafts.

  “Let’s ask my dad what to do,” M.K. said. She took the water spigot from Jenny and explained the situation to Amos.

  He looked at the rusty edges of it. “M.K., get my wrench from my workbench. And see if you can find another spigot in the top right drawer.” He looked at Jenny. “Hop in. We’ll get that water shut off in the blink of an eye.”

  “I’ll come too,” Fern said, appearing out of the barn like magic, startling Amos. He practically jumped.

  “Everybody knows Fern has a knack for turning up out of the blue,” M.K. whispered to Jenny. “You’d think Dad would be used to it.”