Taking the Reins

by Carolyn McSparren

  “We have an Amish co-op to sell produce and cheese and Amish arts and crafts,” Helga said proudly. “Not cheap tourist things that are made in China. Marthe works there.” She poured Jake some lemonade without ice and handed it across the table to him. Without looking at him, she asked, “So, you have seen China?”

  “I took a vacation there several years ago.”

  “I want to go to China!” Zebulon said. He leaned across his grandmother, picked up a ginger cookie—his fourth since they’d sat down—and tried to stuff all of it into his mouth at one time.

  “Zebulon! You know better.”

  About wolfing the cookie or wanting to go to China?

  Zebulon finished the cookie and drank half of his milk. “I want to see the ocean, too. I want to climb Mount Everest.”

  Helga spoke to him sternly. “Go finish your homework for tomorrow.”

  “But Nana, I want...”

  “Go, your mother will be here soon.”

  He didn’t quite stomp out of the room, but he came close. Helga watched while he climbed the stairs and slammed a door, then turned back to Jake with a sigh. She poured herself some lemonade and sipped at it. “He is too much like you. It is the schools that make them discontent with the plain way and hungry for English ways.”

  “Like me.”

  “Yes, Jacob Zedediah Thompson!” She shook her finger at him. “Exactly like you, but he has also computers at school and television and cell phones and bomb boxes—”

  “Boom boxes,” Jake said automatically. “And nobody carries those any longer.”

  “You see? Nothing is permanent for them. They are never still, never quiet. The cars race up and down on the road with the radios so loud the house shakes. Some of the children driving them look no older than Zebulon, although I know they must be. How can they think with all that noise all the time?”

  “Many of them can’t.”

  “And you? Can you think when you are a soldier with a gun and booms going off all around?” She held up her hand. “I know it is booms. Do not correct me.”

  “You think of staying alive and in one piece and keeping your men alive and in one piece, too.”

  “You must be good at it. They made you a major.”

  She had to have kept up with his life if she knew his rank. “A retired major. I tore up my knee in Afghanistan. I’ll always limp.”

  Both her hands flew to her mouth. “Oh, Jake, I am so sorry. I didn’t know. Are you in much pain?”

  “Not from my leg.”

  The back door slammed. Helga jumped and her eyes widened.

  “Helga, who is from the car outside on the road?”

  Jake recognized Johann when he stomped into the kitchen. He’d been five years older than Jake and powerful even then. He was just under Jake’s height, and had swelled over the years to twice Jake’s width. Except for his burgeoning belly, his weight looked to be pure muscle.

  Without the hat he would wear out of doors, his hair was still thick and black, but streaks of white ran from the corners of his mouth to where his beard stopped at midchest. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and his black pants were held up by black suspenders. He looked like the Amish farmer he was, who had spent a hot day working his farm.

  Johann recognized Jake, as well. He crossed his arms and glared. “I feared when I saw the car it was you come back,” he said. “You must leave.”

  Helga came out of her chair and grabbed his arm. “No, Johann,” she pleaded.

  “It was not proper to feed him, Helga.” His eyes never left Jake’s face.

  Helga gave Johann a shove that set him back two steps. “No! No man will enter this house and not be fed.”

  Jake got to his feet. No way would he make trouble between Johann and Helga. It was no more than he deserved. What he’d expected, but not what he’d hoped.

  “Sit, Jacob,” Helga said in a voice that cut like ice. Johann backed up another step. “And you, Johann, sit down at the table. I will bring lemonade.”

  “No, Helga...”

  “Sit! This is nonsense. Jacob is here. I am going to send Zebulon to tell the others to come. Mama must be fetched. She may not see him again.”

  “She won’t recognize him now.” Johann had come down from commanding to plaintive. “I am sorry, Jacob. The doctors say your mother has Alzheimer’s.”

  “Don’t look like that,” Helga said to Jake. “Of course, we took her to the doctors.” She turned to the doorway and called up the stairs. “Zebulon, I have an errand for you. Right now.”

  Helga shooed the men into the living room while she bustled about to get refreshments ready for whoever would come after Zebulon notified them about Jake.

  He stared at the fat Hereford cattle in the paddock outside and thought about his mother, lost to them all while she was still alive. Would she know him? How could he bear seeing her if she couldn’t recognize him?

  Johann didn’t speak, but Jake could hear him huffing into his beard.

  “I didn’t come to make trouble,” Jake said.

  “Huh. You always made trouble. Helga refused to marry me for a year after you ran away. She said if you came back, she would welcome you whatever the bishop said and it should not be my problem. And now she has.”

  “Will they shun her, too?”

  “I doubt it. Such things are not done any longer for running away or for giving aid to those who do. We save shunning for people who commit crimes or heresy. But you will cause scandal and gossip again and all the family will have to live with that.”

  “Johann, I want to see my mother and my sisters. Surely you can understand that.”

  “Sure I can. I cannot understand running away and staying gone for over twenty years. Why do you come back now? Are you dying?”

  “Not that I am aware of.” How could he explain his timing? Because he had to try to apologize for the hurt he had caused? Because the farm in Tennessee made him remember what it was like to be at peace? To have a family? To love and be loved without reservation? Because he missed them all?

  Because he had to start somewhere?

  Or because he could only offer Charlie his love if he became a whole man again.

  * * *

  HIS RELATIVES BEGAN to arrive as soon as they could hitch their buggies and drive up. Helga said that they all lived close. They pulled their Standardbreds and Morgan horses under the shade of the big oaks, set their brakes and left the horses untethered.

  Rebecca, his second sister, lived closest and came first with a teenage daughter she did not introduce. “The boys will come with Samuel,” she said as she climbed down from the buggy. He remembered her as slim as a nymph with long brown hair that she plaited in a single braid and wrapped under her cap. Now she outweighed him, but like Johann, she looked muscular. Her eyes were stern. “So, you show up from nowhere, ain’t?”

  Marthe arrived with her boss in his automobile. Before she was even allowed to greet Jake she had to listen to Zeb’s tale about the newfound English who his grandmother said was some kind of relative, and about China. She gave Jake a cool nod and went straight to her mother in the kitchen.

  Finally, Joan, his baby sister, came with her husband and young daughters. Joan had not changed so much as Rebecca and Helga. She was still slim, with blue eyes that reminded him of his mother’s. He reached out a hand to her, but she didn’t speak to him. She barely glanced at him before she went to the kitchen.

  He followed her and asked, “Is my mother coming?”

  Becca turned her head. “She comes with Roger in the big buggy where she is more comfortable. Helga said we must bring her. I would not have.”

  The unair-conditioned house seemed ready to burst at the seams and explode into flames, as well. Jake wiped sweat off the back of his neck with his handkerc
hief, uncertain what to say.

  “Move to the yard,” Helga shouted. “All of you! Zebulon, you organize games for the children in the back out of everyone’s way. Johann, go get ice from the icehouse. Marthe, watch after the children. Joan will make the lemonade. She makes it better than you.”

  No one argued. They moved. Jake had known a dozen generals who couldn’t command an entire division of troops nearly as well. Helga must have learned it from Pappa. Mama was never much of an organizer.

  “Put the food on the tables in the backyard in the shade,” Becca called. She followed Jake to the porch and said, “When Zeb showed up and said you were here, we picked up dinner and came.” She walked out of sight around the house.

  “Remind you of old times?” asked Samuel, Joan’s husband. Helga said he was a farrier and a good one.

  “We never had parties,” Jake said. “My father thought parties were borderline sinful, and my mother usually went along with him. She’s twelve years younger.”

  “Joan told me his first wife died of pneumonia.”

  Jake nodded. “We worked, went to school as long as the state forced us to and to church on Sunday. My mother conned Pappa into letting me stay until I had the credits to graduate a year early. I did my reading in the school library and worked with the horses at home.”

  “Do you ever regret it?”

  “I miss my family all the time. Do you mean was I wrong to leave? No. I was right to leave. I only wish I had not hurt my family so badly when I did.”

  “Did you have rumspringa?”

  “Never.”

  “I had rumspringa,” Samuel said. “I went away to farriery school in Colorado. I didn’t plan to come back.” He smiled over at his wife. “Then, I met Joan on a visit. That’s all she wrote.”

  “Are you content?”

  “Yes. I belong here. You left because you did not. I don’t blame you.”

  Becca came around the corner of the house and pointed down the drive. “Roger is here with the boys and Mama.” She crossed her arms and scowled at Jake. This time his heart did just about jump out of his body.

  Roger climbed from his buggy and handed down a tall, straight old lady whose snowy hair peeped out from under her cap. Jake recognized nothing about her except those still-bright eyes the color of a bluebird’s wing. Then she smiled at everyone. The same smile he remembered and cherished without even the luxury of a photograph to cling to.

  His father had not produced children with his first wife, nor in his first years with Jake’s mother. Helga came along after they had given up the idea that they would ever have any. Then, as if Helga had unblocked the road to fertility, Rebecca came a year later, Jake eighteen months after Becca, then finally Joan two years later, definitely unplanned. His mother found herself with four young children and no family close by to help her take care of them.

  She always smiled and never complained, although she must have been perpetually exhausted. He’d expected her to be bent and shrunken, but the disease that had attacked her mind had not yet wrecked her body. In a way it had preserved her.

  Becca settled her in the white wicker rocker on the front porch. Jake dropped to his knees in front of her. “Mama?” he whispered, and took her hand. “Mama, it’s me, Jacob.” Her hand felt like twigs covered by raw silk.

  She looked at him narrowly, then giggled and shoved him away. “You certainly are not my Jacob. You’re an old gray-haired English.” She pulled her hand from his grasp. “My Jacob is young and ran away to the English. Do you know him? Is that why you say you are him?”

  Standing at her shoulder, Becca shrugged. “This is not one of her good days. Don’t upset her.”

  He patted his mother’s hand.

  “One day my Jacob will come back to run the farm. If you see him, tell him I miss him.” She nodded and covered his hand with hers.

  He felt Becca tug on his shirt. “You saw. She does not know you. Now come away.”

  “Let me at least try...”

  “Come away! Now!”

  He sat back on his haunches. His knee hurt like blazes, but he managed to stand without hanging on to the rocker. His mother had already forgotten him. She lay back in the rocker with her eyes closed, humming tunelessly.

  He jumped off the edge of the porch and walked away while he fought tears.

  “I told you,” Becca said. She followed close behind him.

  “I doubt she’d recognize me on a good day. She’s right. I’m an old gray-haired English.” He looked back. “She looks remarkably good, Becca. Can’t be easy taking care of her. Do you have plenty of help?”

  “Don’t go there, Jacob. We are not rich, but we have all we need for us and her, too.”

  “I didn’t mean...”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “She’s my mother, too. Surely I can contribute to her care?”

  “I told you not to go there. You never did before.”

  “I tried every way I knew, but the money always came back in my face.”

  “So you walk in on us from nowhere and expect us to welcome you?”

  “Not welcome, but at least see me, speak to me.”

  “Johann is afraid that you want to come home, to take back the farm.”

  “No way. Pappa disinherited me, remember?”

  “English law works different. Or you could buy a farm where we would have to see you.”

  “Would that be so bad? All these people—children, grandchildren that I didn’t realize existed...”

  “Stay away from our children!”

  For a moment he felt certain she was going to slap him. Her cheeks turned red, and her fingers flexed.

  She took a breath so deep it was almost a sob.

  “Becca, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “Upset me? I’m not upset. I wrote you off years ago when Pappa died and you didn’t come.”

  “I didn’t know, Becca. The army didn’t receive a death notice and not one of you wrote to tell me. Would you even have let me into the funeral if I’d come?”

  She waved him off. “You should have tried, since he died of the broken heart you gave him.” She pointed to the barn. “Johann found him stretched in the aisle by the milk cows. Alone.”

  “That’s not true!” They’d been so intent, neither had realized Helga had come up to them. She stepped in front of Becca.

  “You know the doctors said Pappa had that weak blood vessel in his brain since he was a child, maybe.”

  “He might have lived with it for twenty more years they said. It was Jacob.”

  “Helga, Becca...”

  “Hush!” Helga snapped. He shut up. “Pappa lived almost ten years after Jake left. You know it. Look into your heart that you cannot forgive.”

  “Jacob ran away in the middle of the night and hid!” Becca said. “He at least should have told Mama that he was leaving.”

  “I didn’t want her to have to choose between me and Pappa.”

  She rounded on him. “Did you ask if we wanted to go, too?”

  He recoiled. “Would you have left, Becca?”

  “That is not the point. You didn’t trust us.”

  “You’d have had to lie to Pappa. Surely you see that?”

  “He was right to leave.”

  “What?” Becca sounded thunderstruck.

  Quietly, Joan walked over and stood at Helga’s shoulder like reinforcement. But she wasn’t smiling. She looked, if anything, angrier than Becca.

  “Pappa would never have let him go,” she said. “He only wanted Jake to be happy the same way he was.” She turned to look at Jake. “Jacob would have been miserable all his life. Mama knew it. I knew it. Helga knew it. You most of all knew it.”

  “We loved him and he left!”r />
  “And now he has come back.”

  “He should have come when Pappa died.”

  “I was in Guam, Becca,” Jake said. “I found out because I got a letter of condolence from one of my non-Amish friends, who thought I knew. The family didn’t notify the army, so they didn’t notify me.”

  Becca turned on her heel and strode up the hill toward the buggies. Helga followed her and signaled him to stay with Joan.

  “I wrote to all of you,” he called after her. “You sent the letters back unopened, refused. My friend said I was still shunned, that you couldn’t speak to me.”

  “You’re here now,” Joan said. “Why did you not at least tell me, Jake? All those nights you and me, we looked up at the stars and talked about the things we would see and do when we left. You should have asked if I wanted to go with you.”

  He lowered his head, unable to meet her eyes. “Pappa could throw me out and everyone would say I betrayed him, so good riddance. He would have sent the whole community to bring his baby girl back.”

  “You should have given me the chance, Jacob Thompson!”

  “Would you have been happy away?”

  “I have a good husband, beautiful children, a good life. I am happy here.” She shoved him. “But you should have asked!”

  As she turned away, he caught her arm. “Wait, please, Joan. I’m so sorry. I’ve regretted it ever since. I wrote again and again to tell you....”

  “But Pappa and Johann sent the letters back.”

  He nodded.

  “Oh, Jacob!” She had to reach up to put her arms around him. He hugged her back. “I forgive you.”

  “Joan?” came her husband’s voice. “We need more lemonade.”

  She laughed. “Coming, Samuel.” She touched Jake’s cheek and ran to the house.

  “Is that what you want? That we should all forgive you?” Becca stood by the hydrangea, watching him as though he were a rattler ready to strike. Helga stood behind her as if to head her off if she attacked. “You want to come home again? Be a good Amish man?”