by Amy Clipston
“Then what am I doing here?” Tommy’s plaintive voice rose. “Why couldn’t I stay with my friends Elias or Moses?”
Both families had offered to take him. Plain folks were like that. What was one more mouth to feed? “Because this is what your father wanted.” Why, Henry had no idea. The letter from Josiah’s sister had arrived the previous week. When Henry called to speak to her, she had already passed. Tommy’s one remaining family member was gone. “It’s getting late. You’ve been on the road since yesterday and probably want a good night’s sleep before church tomorrow.”
“I’m not going to church.”
One leg up to climb in the van, Henry paused. “What?”
“I don’t believe in Gott anymore.”
Henry exchanged glances with Calvin. The driver shrugged and grinned. “Now that’s something I ain’t seen before. An atheist Amish.” He revved the engine. “Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor. You got your work cut out for you.”
Henry had inherited an atheist Plain boy.
That didn’t sound like something the Ordnung allowed.
2
Leesa Yoder stared out at a sea of expectant faces. Eighteen pairs of eyes watched her. They’d been waiting for her to say something since she tapped the bell on her desk to signal quiet. She was in charge, but her mind remained blank. A cool September breeze filtered through open windows. Her sweaty palms gripped her fresh pale-blue dress. She inhaled the scent of chalk, fresh paint, and first-day-of-school anticipation.
Her family, the scholars’ parents, and the school board thought she could do this. She could do this.
She opened her mouth. Her throat closed. No words came out. First-day nerves like prickly burrs pierced her. Come on, come on. Say something.
“Teacher, are you going to read some verses?” Her oldest scholar, eighth grader Amy Plank, raised her hand and voiced the question they must all be thinking. “Mercy always started with a devotion.”
There it was. Two minutes into her new job as teacher in the West Kootenai parochial school and one of her charges had already reminded her that her younger sister had held this post first. Mercy was tall to Leesa’s short. Mercy loved to read, camp, hike, and hunt. Leesa would rather quilt, bake, and can.
They were opposites in every way.
Mercy loved teaching. Now she loved being married.
“Jah. Of course.” Leesa’s voice quivered. She cleared her throat. “We’ll start with Psalm 1.”
“Jah, that’s a gut one,” Diane Moser volunteered. “Mercy helped us memorize it.”
Maybe they should start with something else. Uncertainty flooded Leesa. She never should have agreed to take her sister’s place. She belonged at home, baking bread, washing clothes, and taking care of babies.
Ian’s babies.
Even after almost a year the pain caused by this unwelcome thought hadn’t abated one iota.
Her scholars wiggled in their seats. Charlie Moser whispered something to his friend Joshua Miller. Joshua giggled. The first graders, on their first day of school, doodled on their spelling books. One of them, she didn’t remember his name, laid his head down as if to nap.
“Teacher?” Amy wrinkled her nose. “Are you sick? You look sort of green.”
In a way Leesa did have a sickness. She had a broken heart. Such a silly notion, according to her mother, who said things happened for a reason. It was better to know sooner rather than later that Ian wasn’t right for her. As far as Leesa was concerned, it had been later. She’d given her heart to Ian. He’d returned it like a piece of clothing that didn’t fit and then made a mad dash to Kansas after wildfires devastated their tiny Montana community.
“Don’t dwell on it.” Another piece of advice from Mother. She had many of them. It was time to move on. Teaching was one way of doing that. Mother and Father agreed. Leesa had no choice but to go along to get along.
Resolute, she clapped her hands. “No talking unless I ask you a question. And raise your hand before you speak. Those are the rules.”
She grabbed a piece of chalk and turned to the chalkboard where she’d dutifully listed the first arithmetic assignments. At the very top, she wrote her new rules.
A steady buzz continued to build behind her.
She whirled. “Stop talking.”
The room fell silent.
Esther Mason jumped to her feet and shrieked. “A spider! A spider!”
The boys roared with laughter. Molly Plank climbed onto her chair. Charlie rushed across the room, scooped up the spider, and held it up for everyone to see. “Just a bopli, you fraidy-cat.” He waved it toward Molly. “He’s my new pet. Want to hold him?”
“I’m not a fraidy-cat.” Tears trickling down her freckled face, Molly stomped her feet. “I’m not a fraidy-cat.”
“That’s not very nice.” Molly’s older sister, Carrie, rushed to her defense. “Don’t tease her.”
“I’m not teasing her.” Charlie stuck out his tongue. “I’m sharing with her.”
A chorus of high, excited voices filled the one-room schoolhouse.
“Stop. Stop! Everyone hush. Right now!” Leesa lurched into the fray. “Name-calling is also against the rules. Talking is against the rules.”
No one seemed to heed her rules.
“What’s going on here?”
The deep voice boomed from the back of the room. Leesa tore her gaze from her latest failure to find that Henry Lufkin stood at the back of the classroom, a small boy at his side.
“Nothing. A spider. It’s . . . nothing.” Her face hot with embarrassment, Leesa raised her voice over the cacophony. “Just a moment.”
She clapped her hands. “Silence. Silence! Back in your seats now.”
Blessedly, the noise subsided.
Leesa sucked in air. “Third through eighth grade, take out your notebooks and write fifty times, ‘I will not talk in class.’ Diane, help the little ones practice writing their names. The next scholar to talk out of turn will receive black marks on his or her report card.”
To her surprise, they obeyed.
Leesa arranged her face in what she hoped was a teacherly expression and strode to the back of the room. “How can I help you?”
“This is Tommy Bontrager. He’s ten. He’s new to the area.”
Leesa surveyed the boy. He surveyed his shoes. Henry nudged him. “Say hello to the teacher, Tommy.”
Tommy’s gaze flitted over Leesa’s shoulder. He had beautiful blue eyes with long pale lashes. What she could see of his hair under his hat was dark blond. Her fingers itched to give him a decent haircut. “Tommy, my name’s Leesa. I’m new too.”
Tommy hunched his shoulders. “I can tell.”
“Hey, that’s not nice.” Henry laid his big, tanned hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Everybody has a bad day.”
As if he knew. Was it simply first-day jitters or the first in a long line of bad days? Leesa kept that thought to herself. “Why don’t you have a seat next to David. He’s a fifth grader. He’s the one with the red hair.” Leesa pointed out the scholar. “We’re a little behind today, but we’ll get started as soon as I talk to Henry.”
Tommy clutched his book bag and lunch box to his chest. “Do I have to?”
“We talked about this.” Something flashed in Henry’s face, but the tone of his deep bass didn’t change. “You have to go to church. You have to go to schul. Sometimes you have to take a bath. It’s what kinner your age do.”
Scowling, Tommy clomped past Leesa without saying good-bye to Henry.
“I walked with him this morning so he would know his way.” Henry shoved his hat back. His expression eased. In fact, he looked relieved. “Maybe you can ask the Schrock kinner to guide him to my cabin after school. It’s on their way.”
“You were late. Schul starts at eight thirty.” Leesa cringed inwardly. Her words were true, and wouldn’t a teacher point this out to a parent? Children were expected to be on time. “Discipline start to finish.”
That’s what Mercy had said. “Start to finish.” Still, Leesa was afraid she sounded surly. “It’s important to start off on the right foot.”
“I didn’t know.” Henry drew himself up tall. He towered over Leesa. A frown deepened the lines on his acne-scarred face. “I’m new at this.”
So new Leesa had never seen him with a child before. He couldn’t have a child. He wasn’t even married. Henry was an enigma to Leesa. He and Andy Lambright were good friends. Andy was married to one of Mercy’s closest friends. Henry was older than all of them. Maybe twenty-six or twenty-seven. He never went to singings, and he didn’t talk much. Mostly he seemed to stare at the mountains with his mournful jasper eyes as if looking for someone or something. “I didn’t know you had a child.”
“I don’t.”
Leesa waited for him to fill in the blanks. The silence stretched. What would Mercy do? “He didn’t want to come to schul. It might help me to know why.”
“He lived with his aenti in Kentucky. She died. So he came to live with me.”
“When?”
“Friday.”
“So he hasn’t had time to adjust. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Leesa tried to sound sure of herself. She had something in common with Tommy. She hadn’t wanted to come to school today either. In fact, she’d pulled the quilt over her head in the dark before dawn and prayed God would give her another choice. Mother’s voice urging her to rise and shine had forced her from her bed. Mother had made banana chocolate chip pancakes to celebrate and packed Leesa’s lunch for her. Even her siblings Hope and Job, who numbered among her scholars, had cheered her on.
“It’ll take a firm hand.” Henry’s tone left no doubt he saw that as a problem for her. “I didn’t know you were teaching.”
“Mercy and Caleb got married.”
“Jah, I guess I didn’t make the connection.” Now that he had, he didn’t seem very happy about it. “Like I said, he’ll require a firm hand. They all will.”
“I’m capable of maintaining discipline.” She drew herself up to her full height. It didn’t help that she never grew beyond five feet four inches. “Mercy gave me pointers, and I’ve read the Blackboard Bulletin articles on how to organize the grades—”
“Just don’t let them see you’re scared.”
What did he know about teaching? Or how Leesa felt? “I’m not scared.”
“Your hands are shaking, and you’re sweating even though it’s cool in here. It’s September and summer is gone for good.”
“Don’t you have a job you should be at?”
Henry looked loath to leave Tommy. He clearly didn’t trust her.
“I’ll make sure he gets home.” Leesa waved both hands in a shooing motion toward the door. “Go on.”
Henry’s eyebrows rose. His steely gaze raked over her. “I’ll come by for him.”
“You’ll make it harder for him to fit in with the other kinner.”
“Walking home with the teacher won’t do the same?”
He obviously didn’t remember his school days. “It’s considered an honor to walk the teacher home, but most of the kids ride their bikes.”
His rugged face filled with uncertainty. “Should I get him a bike? I saw a lot of them out there.” He jerked his thumb toward the door. “Now that I think about it, I see kinner riding them all over the place.”
“That’s up to you, but it gets them home faster and they like it. They burn off energy after sitting all day. Don’t worry about it today. I’ll get him home.”
“As you wish.”
He was out the door before Leesa could remind him of one basic fact she’d learned over the last year since the wildfires turned her life upside down. Most people didn’t get their wish.
She certainly hadn’t.
3
“What do you mean ‘out of control’?”
“Just what I said.” Henry picked up a piece of sandpaper and gripped the bottom rung of the chair he was working on. Caleb Hostetler didn’t pause from his work of using a draw knife to peel the outer bark from a lodgepole pine log that would soon be part of a table. Henry’s closest friend could talk and build beautiful furniture in Montana Woodwork’s warehouse without missing a beat. Henry tried to do the same. “Kinner were crying and laughing and talking. I never saw anything like it in a Plain schul before.”
“It was Leesa’s first day.” Caleb picked up the pine log and studied it with a critical eye. “Mercy said she was nervous. She’ll get the hang of it.”
“Tommy dug in his heels and didn’t want to go. We were late. She acted like we’d broken the Golden Rule.”
Henry had shared Anna Mae Bontrager’s letter with Caleb and no one else.
“You’re criticizing her for not keeping eighteen kinner under control when you couldn’t get one small bu to the schul on time?” Caleb’s chuckle wasn’t unkind. “It sounds like the plank is in your eye.”
“I don’t know what Anna Mae was doing with Tommy, but he’s not like any ten-year-old Plain bu I’ve ever met.” Tommy refused to bow his head for grace before their meals. He balked at taking a bath. Yet this morning he’d made coffee, bacon, toast, and scrambled eggs for both of them before Henry climbed out of bed. He also helped himself to a cup of coffee with more milk and sugar than coffee. “He has some strange ideas about things, but he can cook and he knows how to sew on buttons, so that’s something.”
“He spent most of his life with a single woman who had no family. Did you ask him about her?”
“He’s not talking.”
Other than to reject God, baths, and fried eggplant. In that order.
“You two should do well together, then.”
Henry ignored Caleb’s jab and low rumbling laugh. There was a reason he preferred Dodger’s company to that of people. Dodger didn’t argue with him about God’s existence or complain about his food. He might not be a fan of baths, but he subjected himself to a hosing off whenever he rolled in some dead, stinky critter.
So what if Henry liked hunting and fishing by himself? So what if he was relieved that summer was over and his job as a guide for tourists who wanted to hike and hunt in the Montana mountains had tapered off. He could work part-time at Montana Woodwork and hike, camp, fish, and hunt on his own. Until now.
“What Tommy needs is a mudder.” Caleb straightened and stretched both hands toward the ceiling. He rubbed his neck and cocked his head from side to side. “Gott has a way of leading us to water, doesn’t He? Now you just have to drink.”
“Here we go again.” Ever since Henry revealed to his new friends that his first wife had died in a buggy accident, they’d been angling to set him up with someone new. Four years had passed since Vivian’s death. Henry’s pain had eased. Memories were more sweet than bitter. A simple contentment with his lot had settled in. Caleb called it inertia. Henry called it life. “Don’t presume you know what Gott’s plan is. I don’t know why Josiah wanted me to care for his suh, but I’m willing to stand in the gap for him. I’m not reading anything else into this.”
“So what did you think of Leesa, beside the fact that she might not be a gut teacher?”
“Did Mercy put you up to this? Leave the matchmaking to her. The role is ill-fitting on your big frame.” Henry gently rolled the chair to the opposite side so he could reach another rung. “You’ve put on some weight since you married.”
“I’m eating for two.” Caleb dropped the knife and put up both arms like a wrestler. He was a tall man, once lanky, with sandy-brown hair and pale-blue eyes. These days he always seemed to be smiling. A happy marriage did that to a man. “Plus, Mercy’s a gut cook. She’s finally getting used to being at home all the time, but she still bakes more than two people can eat.”
“Mercy’s the one eating for two. Feel free to bring some of those baked goods to work. You saw at church how skinny Tommy is.”
“I did. Stop changing the subject.” Caleb inspected his log again. It had a perfect skip-peeled texture created
by leaving a layer of inner bark. He laid it aside and picked up another log. “It’s been a year since Ian bailed on Leesa and moved back to Kansas. She should be ready to move on.”
Ian had been Caleb’s roommate in a bachelor cabin that burned to the ground during the Caribou Fire. According to Caleb, Ian led Leesa to believe they would marry and then abandoned her with no explanation to go to Kansas alone. Apparently everyone else thought they would marry too. Everyone except Henry, who worked hard to remain disconnected from the grapevine. He had no idea who dumped whom. Nor did he want to know.
“People recover from heartache at different speeds. If anybody should know that, you should.” Henry shook his head at Caleb’s glib comment. Like many men, Caleb avoided introspection as much as possible, but Henry’s friend had suffered his own woes of the heart on the way to marrying Mercy. “But that’s wholly beside the point. I’m not interested in courting.”
“You’re just going to grow old alone until you dry up and blow away one day while you’re out camping. We’ll search for you and find an empty sleeping bag and a Coleman lantern.”
“I should be so blessed to go like that.” Henry had no fear of dying. Living what remained of his earthly life well would be the greater challenge. “I’m sure Leesa’s a nice person—”
“Truth be told, Mercy’s worried about her. She used to be the bouncy sister who saw the world through rose-colored glasses.” Caleb tapped his razor-sharp knife on the workbench. “She never met a person she didn’t like. Now she drags herself around like the sky is falling and she needs a boulder to hide behind.”
That morning she had looked determined. Resolute. Fierce. Her cheeks had turned crimson. Her dark-blue eyes snapped. She didn’t simply walk to meet him. She hustled as if she had no time to waste. “She hides it well.”
“From what you told me, you had your moments of darkness and despair too.”
Memories crowded Henry. Days when he couldn’t pull himself from his bed even though he couldn’t sleep. Days when he didn’t eat. Days when dark shadows loomed even though rays of sun danced across the floor next to his bed.