Andrew

by Jennifer Beckstrand

  It irritated him that he should be the one to feel bad when Mary was the one who’d done something terrible. If she wanted to ruin her own life, that was her business. Andrew wouldn’t stop her. But he couldn’t forgive her for tearing the Zimmerman family apart.

  His chest shouldn’t feel this hollow. It shouldn’t hurt to breathe. He was glad to be finished with Mary. She’d brought him nothing but embarrassment. Some of die youngie wouldn’t talk to him anymore, and he knew for a fact that Sammy Zook and Junior Eicher had gone smoking behind Eicher’s barn and hadn’t invited Andrew—not that he was friends with Sammy or Junior, and he certainly wouldn’t have smoked, but still, he got left out of a lot of stuff these days because of Mary.

  Now that Mary was out of his life, he could get back to normal, maybe start courting some nice girl who would never dream of jumping the fence or getting pregnant or having a boyfriend like Josh. It would be better now that he wouldn’t see Mary ever again.

  But how much longer before things would get better?

  Mary had seemed so small yet so feisty sitting at Bitsy’s table wincing in pain but keeping her calm, even after Wallace Zimmerman had yelled at her. Seeing her there, so vulnerable and alone, Andrew’s chest had tightened with longing for something he didn’t even want. Even as angry as he had been, he couldn’t leave her when he understood what was really happening. And when he’d held her in his arms, it felt as if she belonged there, like a missing piece that had finally been found.

  By the time they had gotten to the hospital, his heart had softened considerably. He felt sorry for her, the poor girl who was so alone and had just burned her last bridge in Bienenstock. She had been so brave, and he felt himself aching to protect her, to make sure no harm came to the baby.

  But any tenderness he might have felt for her was gone. Mary couldn’t be trusted. She had betrayed the entire community, and Andrew felt like a fool. A fool who was going to lose a fingernail.

  The barn door opened, and Andrew heard the shuffling of feet. Two pairs of eight-year-old feet. Alfie and Benji had pretty much avoided him for a whole week. He’d come home from the hospital and announced that they weren’t going to Bitsy’s farm ever again, and if Benji and Alfie disobeyed him, he threatened to tell Mamm about the tree and the smoke bomb and climbing out the window. They’d tiptoed around him ever since.

  The twins came around the hay bales that served as a sort of wall to Andrew’s woodshop. Benji’s wide eyes sparkled in the lamplight, anxious and doubtful. Alfie was holding a wad of money in his fist and looking quite sure of himself. Andrew frowned. By the light of the lantern he couldn’t be sure, but the skin above Alfie’s upper lip looked discolored, as if he was trying to grow a moustache.

  “What happened to your lip?” Andrew said.

  Alfie instinctively put a hand to his face. “I can’t tell.”

  Benji nodded. “It’s a secret.”

  “I think you better tell me.”

  “You’ll tell Mamm.”

  Andrew’s heart sank. He’d been very disloyal to his bruderen just to gain their cooperation. He knelt on one knee to get closer to eye level. “I won’t tell Mamm.”

  Benji’s bottom lip trembled. “You said you’d tell her all those things we did.”

  Andrew shouldn’t have been so hard on Benji and Alfie. They meant no harm to anybody. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve already agreed not to tell any of it, and I won’t.”

  “Even if we go over to visit Mary?” Benji asked.

  Andrew kept his casual expression in place and nodded slowly. “I already told you I wouldn’t tell Mamm, and it wouldn’t be honest to go back on what I said.” There were other ways to keep his bruderen from Mary’s house.

  “Tell him about your lip,” Benji said.

  Alfie sheepishly shifted from one foot to the other. “I’ve never shaved before. I wanted to know what it felt like. It just felt like a paper across my skin, except I cut my lip.”

  Andrew looked closer and noticed a small nick near the corner of Alfie’s mouth. “You . . . cut yourself?” Visions of blood and severed lips made Andrew dizzy. He was tempted to tell Mamm even though he’d just said he wouldn’t. “Alfie, do you know how dangerous that is? You could have really hurt yourself. You could have given yourself a scar.”

  Alfie brightened. “That would have been neat.”

  “Not if you’d cut your lip off. Girls don’t like to date boys without lips.”

  “I don’t care about that. I want a scar.”

  “You’ll care a lot in about ten years.” He laid a hand on each of his bruderen’s shoulders. “I want you to promise me that you won’t try to shave again until you get whiskers. At least ten years.”

  “But Mammi says in the Bible it tells us not to swear at all,” Benji said.

  Andrew pursed his lips. “I think this one time would be okay. Razors are sharp, and doctors are expensive. Mamm would not like to pay a doctor to sew you up.”

  “I could do it myself,” Alfie said.

  “Nae, you couldn’t. And neither could Benji. Mamm would probably yell at you for three weeks.”

  Alfie slumped his shoulders. “Okay. I won’t shave again. It made my lip hurt.”

  “I can see that. You should put some ointment on it.”

  “But then Mamm will know,” Benji pointed out.

  “She’ll think you have a sore lip. That’s all.” Andrew loved his bruderen. He really did, but he was just about finished keeping secrets for them. He wasn’t their mater and didn’t want the job.

  Benji nudged Alfie again. “Ask him the other thing.”

  Alfie held out his fistful of money. “Benji and me want to hire you to build something for us.”

  Andrew glanced at the money in Alfie’s hand. It looked a little more substantial wadded up like that, but it couldn’t have been more than five dollars. “What do you want me to build?”

  “We want you to make a crib for Mary’s buplie. Willie Glick says she sleeps in a drawer.”

  Benji wrinkled his face like a prune. “Mary doesn’t sleep in a drawer.”

  “Not Mary,” Alfie growled in disgust. “The buplie.” Alfie turned back to Andrew. “We’re willing to pay.”

  Andrew’s heart pounded against his chest at the very mention of Mary’s name. Lord willing she was feeling better, even though her life didn’t really concern him anymore. She hadn’t wanted him at the hospital, and he had paced in the waiting room until Bitsy arrived. Then he’d gone home, glad he hadn’t wasted more of his time. He’d heard Mary had delivered her buplie later that night while Andrew had been in the barn working his wood. He was grateful he hadn’t spent his whole day at the hospital.

  Andrew didn’t know what to say to his bruderen. An outright refusal wouldn’t go over very well. “How much money do you have?”

  “We can pay you six dollars today, and seven more when the tomatoes are ripe.” Mamm had given Alfie and Benji a small plot in the garden to grow their own tomatoes. The boys sold them at their own little roadside stand every summer.

  Andrew’s heart sank through the barn floor. He couldn’t make a crib for Mary’s buplie. He was trying to forget Mary, not keep her fresh in his mind, and he’d see her face every time he worked on the crib. He gazed at his bruderen. Both boys still had their wide-eyed, freckled innocence. Andrew wouldn’t quash that for the world, but he couldn’t say yes, either, not if he wanted to learn how to breathe normally again.

  As if sensing his hesitation, Alfie held the money closer to Andrew’s nose. It was probably every cent they had in the world. “We can pay more if there’s lots of tomatoes.”

  Andrew stood up and cupped his fingers around his neck. “I don’t know if that’s such a gute idea, boys.”

  Alfie held the money higher. “Why not?”

  “Mary is . . . I don’t know. I think you should make other friends.”

  “I don’t need more friends.” Alfie counted on his fingers. “There’s Willie Glick, Ve
rnon Schmucker, Petey Gingerich. The Masts and Eldon and his sister, even though we’re just pretend friends. Mary and Bitsy, Yost Weaver and Jerry Zimmerman and Dawdi.”

  Benji ran his finger along the wood on Andrew’s table. “Why don’t you like Mary anymore?”

  The question caught Andrew off guard, though he didn’t know why it should have. Benji never did anything expected. “I like her just fine,” Andrew snapped, before thinking better of it. His bruderen weren’t going to give up without a sincere answer and a truthful explanation. “Cum,” he said, then lifted both his bruderen to sit on his work table so they could talk man to man. “Mary left the community two years ago.”

  “Don’t you believe in forgiveness?” Benji said.

  “Of course I do.” But he had been arrogant to think that he was the one to do the forgiving. Only Gotte could forgive Mary. Andrew’s job was to behave like a Christian and show forth love.

  Love.

  He suddenly couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t a job to love Mary. It came as easy as peanut butter and chocolate pie.

  He smothered the thought and the feeling and tried to remember what he’d been talking about. “Mary talked Jerry Zimmerman into leaving the community and gave him money to go, and she shouldn’t have done that. His parents were very sad.”

  Alfie nodded. “We heard he was gone.”

  Scratching his head in puzzlement, Benji squinted in Andrew’s direction. “Did she make him?”

  “Make him what?”

  “Did Mary make Jerry go?”

  That was a silly, irritating, eight-year-old question. “Of course she didn’t make him.”

  Benji switched hands and scratched the other side of his head. “Then why are you mad at her?”

  The aggravation bubbled up inside him. He didn’t have time to explain every little obvious thing to an eight-year-old. “Mary told Jerry to go.”

  “She gave him an order, like a bishop?” Alfie chimed in. “Mary’s nice, and she liked Jerry a lot. Why would she make him leave?”

  “She didn’t make him leave.” Andrew resisted the urge to growl. What did the twins know about anything?

  Benji eyed Andrew in confusion. “One time, LaWayne Nelson told me to eat a worm, but I didn’t do it.”

  “LaWayne is a dumbhead,” Alfie said.

  Benji nodded. “Jerry didn’t have to go, even if Mary told him to. It seems like maybe he already wanted to leave.”

  “Mary made it easier for him,” Andrew said. “She talked him into it. He would have stayed if Mary hadn’t been such a bad example. Then she gave him some money.”

  “That was wonderful nice of her.”

  Benji didn’t understand the significance of what he’d said, but it was as if an invisible hand clonked Andrew in the head with the handle of his hammer and knocked some sense into him.

  Ach, du lieva and oy, anyhow.

  That was wonderful nice of her.

  He really hated that his baby bruderen were smarter than he was.

  Mary had agonized over her decision to leave for months, maybe years before she actually did it. Maybe she had wanted to ease Jerry’s suffering and help him understand that it would be okay. That was the kind of person she was. She wanted to give Jerry the support she had never gotten.

  Half the community was suspicious of her. Had Andrew really convinced himself that Mary could single-handedly talk Jerry into leaving? Wallace Zimmerman believed it, but his foolishness was born of grief. It was a ridiculous notion, and Andrew would still be believing it if it weren’t for his bruderen. In a moment of shock and anger, he had forgotten that Mary was the most levelheaded, honest person he knew, kind to a fault, and inclined to nicely tell people what they didn’t want to hear but needed to. For sure and certain, Mary had warned Jerry about choices and consequences, and if she’d given him a sisterly hug and wished him happiness as he was leaving, well then, she’d left Jerry with a gute memory to hold on to in New York. There was nothing wrong with that.

  As long as it had been a sisterly hug.

  Andrew shoved his hands into his pockets to keep them from trembling. How could he have been so blind? He loved Mary. Loved her. He knew that now with the certainty of all his mistakes. He should have stood by Mary when Wallace accused her, but he got caught up in the fear and pain of the Zimmermans, needing someone to blame as surely as they had. Hadn’t Mary admitted to using Josh to get what she wanted? Andrew had let his doubts consume him, and Mary had been the one to suffer for it.

  He hadn’t trusted Mary, hadn’t shown her the mercy she always showed him. What must she think of him?

  He didn’t have to guess. The pain in her eyes when she told him to go home was plain enough. She hated him, and he was going to be sick.

  Alfie studied Andrew’s face. “We could maybe do twenty dollars.”

  “What if we sold the bookshelf?” Benji said.

  “Mammi would find out.” Alfie had never looked so forlorn. Those boys really disliked family reading time.

  Andrew was even more forlorn. He couldn’t bear the thought of losing Mary or the thought that if he did, it would be his own fault. He was so dumm sometimes. An iron fist tightened around his heart. What if Mary decided to leave the community because of him? What if she refused to see him so he could have a chance to explain? His heart felt as heavy as a table saw, with the table.

  There was only one thing to do. He’d have to enlist some help. “I’ll tell you what,” Andrew said. “I will take your six dollars so I can buy some wood, and you can pay me the rest in favors.”

  “Favors?”

  “I need you to help me.”

  Benji let Andrew help him off the table. “You need our help?”

  “Jah.” Andrew swung Alfie from the table too. “I wasn’t very nice to Mary last time I saw her.”

  Benji grimaced like a pickle. “We know. We heard you. You really messed it up.”

  “Sometimes you don’t got any sense,” Alfie said.

  “I need you to get me into that house. I really need to talk to Mary, but Bitsy might point her shotgun at me, or Mary might tell me to go away.”

  His bruderen grinned mischievously at each other. “We can help,” Benji said. “We have walkie-talkies.”

  Alfie poked Benji in the ribs. “You’re not supposed to tell.”

  “We can tell him. He’s on our side now.”

  Andrew felt worse already. He was truly in trouble when his best hope was two little boys with a pair of walkie-talkies, six dollars, and an undisclosed length of rope.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Ach, Mary. She is perfect, just perfect,” Hannah Yutzy said, snuggling Elizabeth June and stroking her tiny fingers. Hannah, usually so loud and enthusiastic about everything, had lowered her voice to a whisper so as not to wake the baby. Mary knew that it wouldn’t have mattered how loud Hannah was. Elizabeth June slept through everything. She only woke up to eat.

  Mary brushed her hand across the dark fuzz on top of Elizabeth June’s head, so soft she almost couldn’t feel it. She had never known this much love existed, that she could be so completely head-over-heels with a small pink bundle barely bigger than her heart. But there it was, and there was no going back to who she had once been.

  Mary sat on the sofa with Hannah while the other women talked and laughed and worked on Elizabeth June’s first baby quilt. The quilt had been Bitsy’s niece Lily’s idea, but Mary was astounded at how many women had come to help tie it. She didn’t think there were this many people who cared about her in the whole world, let alone in her small Amish community.

  Serena Beiler, whom Mary had met at the haystack supper, had come, even though she and Mary barely knew each other. Ada Herschberger must not have been able to warn Serena away. Hannah Yutzy and her sister Mary were there along with Frieda’s mamm Edna, Lily, Poppy, and Rose—Bitsy’s nieces—and Ruth Miller. Andrew Petersheim’s mamm had dropped by for a few minutes to see the baby, but she said she had to get back home to help with her
father-in-law. Even though Rebecca had been affectionate and more than kind, Mary was relieved she hadn’t stayed. Mary didn’t want to guess if Rebecca felt the same way about Mary that Andrew did—that Mary had betrayed the whole community and didn’t deserve a place here.

  Mary tried to put both Rebecca and Andrew out of her mind. She didn’t need the heartache, not when all she wanted was to care for her baby and provide a loving, beautiful place for her to grow up.

  The other women crowded around the baby quilt, each taking a few stitches, each waiting for her turn to hold the baby. After having endured Ada Herschberger and Treva Nelson, Mary was almost surprised that she felt nothing but love from each of them.

  Serena didn’t seem the least bit indignant that Mary had given birth out of wedlock. She threaded her needle with pink yarn. “Mary, did you name Elizabeth June after Bitsy?”

  “Jah,” Mary said. “And June is my mamm’s name.” She tried to ignore the twinge of pain that greeted her every time she thought of her mater. Mary had hoped that her parents would set aside their pride and at least want to meet their granddaughter, but neither of them had been over to see the baby. They already had seven other grandchildren from legitimate marriages. Maybe they couldn’t make room in their hearts for an illegitimate one. And Jerry’s leaving a week and a half ago couldn’t have helped matters. There were some in the community more set against Mary than ever. That group probably included her parents.

  But apparently, not any of the women who’d come to help make a quilt for Elizabeth June were outraged by Mary’s behavior. The acceptance she felt from them made her want to weep in relief. It was a reminder that there were many, many good people in the community. Maybe she hadn’t been looking hard enough.

  “Will you call her Bitsy?” Serena asked, squinting into the eye of the needle. She was having trouble with that yarn.

  “I don’t know,” Mary said. “I thought of Lizzy or Eliza or even Bitty, but the one that seems to fit her the best is ElJay.” She glanced around at the faces turned to her. “It’s . . . it’s not really a proper Amish name, but I kind of like it.”