The Haven

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  They locked eyes.

  “I believe in you, Sadie Lapp, and your goodness.” He’d only known her for a week now, but he could tell she was a genuinely kind, genuinely good person.

  “But I’m not, Will. No one is truly good. We’re all on the same level in God’s sight. We’re all sinners in need of his mercy. But the amazing thing is that God loves us anyway. And he can straighten us out and smooth out all the wrinkles and put us to use again.”

  Will opened his mouth but nothing came out. He was seized with a sudden curiosity about Sadie. What would she have been like as a child? What did she want her life to look like in five years? In ten or twenty? There was so much about her that he didn’t know. He raised her hand and impulsively pressed a soft kiss on the back of it. “Thank you for lunch.” He jumped up and hopped over the fence to get back to work. Before he climbed back on the plow, he tipped his cowboy hat to her and grinned.

  The week dragged by interminably—but finally it was Saturday. M.K. charged into the kitchen, her very being radiating sparks of excitement. She had a plan all worked out for today. The most brilliant plan she had ever come up with! She knew Fern wondered why she was so especially cheerful, but she would have to wait to find out.

  Edith Fisher and her son Jimmy pulled up to the house at eight o’clock sharp, as expected. Uncle Hank and M.K. were waiting for them, arms filled with tools and gloves and hampers filled with groceries. From the backseat of the buggy, M.K. directed Jimmy to drive to a tired-looking house on a tired-looking lane. She hadn’t been there since before Menno had passed, and it had looked bad then. Knee-high weeds filled the front yard. Spiderwebs hung from every corner. The old man was sitting in his rocker on the front porch, like he had been expecting them. Then she remembered that he might be, since her father and Fern had dropped by earlier in the week to let him know they were coming today. Fern had taken him a casserole and come home clucking with disapproval that an elderly Amish man was living alone. “What is the world coming to if the Amish aren’t caring for their own?” she muttered all afternoon.

  M.K. would never say it aloud, but sometimes she thought that Fern sounded downright prideful about being Amish, as if they could do no wrong, unlike the English, who could do no right. Such thoughts were best left unsaid, she decided, and felt that it was a sign she was growing up. She was starting to have a filter—just like Fern always said she needed—and it amused M.K. that the filter was being used for Fern!

  When the Swartzentruber colony decided to up and move to Ohio, Annie and her grandfather stayed behind. Amos thought it might have had something to do with the baby’s arrival, though Fern chimed in that she was pretty sure Annie had taken pains to hide her pregnancy. There weren’t many signs of a baby in that house, she pointed out. “Certainly no signs that a baby was going to be staying.”

  Amos said he had tried to encourage Annie’s grandfather to join up with the Ohio colony, but he refused to leave. He was just waiting and waiting for Annie to return.

  Annie’s grandfather was really old. So old that the skin on his neck moved up and down like a turkey wattle as he swallowed hard. So old that the veins on his hands stood out like large, blue hoses. When he noticed M.K., he squinted so hard that his forehead knotted up. “ANNIE?”

  “No, I’m Mary Kate. MARY KATE LAPP.”

  The old man crumpled. She nearly fibbed and said she was Annie after the old man looked so disappointed. But Uncle Hank read her mind and elbowed her, nodding his head toward Edith and Jimmy to fob her off. It wouldn’t be right to lie, not with Edith Fisher standing right next to her with her can-and-string telephone line, direct to heaven. M.K. didn’t think God would mind a little white lie to make an old man happy, but Edith Fisher would think otherwise.

  They walked inside the house and found it was worse than the outside. The kitchen was a wreck—crusty pans in the sink, a sticky floor that needed a good scrub. Smelled bad too, an acrid smell that was worse than Joe-Jo’s diapers. They went out to the backyard and couldn’t even see the path to the barn, the weeds were so tall. Leaning against the barn was an old buggy—a black top without the reflective triangle on the back—belonging to a Swartzentruber.

  “Where do we even begin?” Jimmy said under his breath.

  M.K. had no idea.

  Off in the distance, M.K. heard the sound of an arriving horse and buggy. Then another, and another. She rushed to the front. It had worked! Yesterday, she had quietly invited all of her friends and neighbors to come to help.

  “What is—” Jimmy started to say as he came up behind her and saw the lane crowded with buggies.

  “What is going on?” was what he was going to say, M.K. thought, oozing smugness. During Friday lunch, she had one of her brainstorms. It was a bolt from the blue, and not a minute too soon. She felt very proud of herself for coming up with the idea, even though she was a little disappointed that it had taken her so long to think of it. “I invited them. Thirty-three of them.” She turned to him. “I figured that if we have to give up thirty-five hours, it would be more efficient if thirty-five people gave up one hour. Then we’d be done with this community service nonsense and I can have my Saturdays back for fishing with Uncle Hank.”

  Even Jimmy Fisher couldn’t hold back a grin of admiration on his handsome face. “Bischt net so dumm wie du guckscht.” You’re not as dumb as you look. “Think it’ll work?”

  M.K. looked up at him. “Absolutely!”

  “Graeh net zu gschwind,” said a familiar voice from behind her. Don’t crow too soon.

  The wind went out of Mary Kate.

  Fern! So meddlesome!

  Jimmy started laughing so hard at M.K. that he had to double over.

  Combining double bossy powers between Fern and Edith Fisher, folks were organized in groups of two or three and given tasks to complete. M.K.’s plans for the day fizzled as she finished a task and was given another one, again and again. And again.

  By midafternoon, the work crew had made a serious dent in the transformation of Annie’s grandfather’s house, inside and out. There was food in the cleaned-out refrigerator, fresh linens were put on his bed, rugs were beaten, floors swept and wiped down, windows washed. Outside, the weeds had been mowed. Fern had even brought some potted flowers for his porch. “To cheer him up,” she said, “while he waits for Annie.”

  “She’s never coming back,” M.K. said. “She gave us that baby because she’s never coming back.”

  “You can’t be so sure of that,” Fern told her. “A mother has mighty strong feelings for her baby.”

  “Not so strong that they stopped her from abandoning the baby,” M.K. said.

  “She didn’t really abandon him,” Fern said. “She put him in Sadie’s care for safekeeping. She must have been awfully scared and overwhelmed.”

  “Then she should have just married someone.”

  “Marriage isn’t always a solution to a problem.” Fern smoothed some stray hairs off of M.K.’s forehead. “Things in this world aren’t always so white and black.” She picked up a broom and a pail filled with dirty rags and headed out to the porch.

  “Well, at least we have Annie’s grandfather set up so he’ll be all right by himself,” M.K. said hopefully.

  Fern eyed her over her shoulder. “We have him set up so that you and Jimmy can come each Saturday and keep up with the housework and bring him fresh food.” Out loud, she subtracted seven from thirty-five. “Let’s see. Just four more Saturdays.”

  “That many?” M.K. asked in a puny voice.

  Fern wasn’t listening. “Don’t you agree, Hank?”

  Uncle Hank was helping Annie’s grandfather into his chair on the porch where he liked to sit and watch the world go by—not that much of the world was going by this little dirt lane. He lifted up the old man’s feet and placed them on a pillow. “You betcha! I might even come with you two next Saturday. I’ll bring my checkers.”

  Annie’s grandfather brightened at that thought. But it worried M.K.
Since when did Uncle Hank volunteer for work? Ordinarily, he woke early and tinkered with a few buggies that were sitting in his buggy shop, since he was up at that hour anyway. But then he figured he’d done his day’s chores and off he’d go to fish at Blue Lake Pond.

  “What would you say to that, Edith? You coming too?” Uncle Hank looked over at Edith and winked, which flustered her. Edith Fisher never flustered.

  Edith looked away, and her hand crept up to the knot of hair on her neck. “We’ll see.” A rosy blush crept over her face.

  Their eyes met.

  M.K. and Jimmy exchanged a dark glance, a rare moment when they saw life from the same vantage point.

  What was happening to the world? Everything was upside down.

  14

  Weeks passed, and life at Windmill Farm fell into a routine. With the weather growing hotter and more humid, the family tried to rise early in the morning and do chores before the worst of the day. The baby slept for longer stretches now and was putting on weight. Now and then, he would have a colicky day, but the goat’s milk had helped considerably.

  Sadie loved the baby’s soft, round cheeks best of all. She couldn’t stop kissing those fat cheeks. She wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for love and familiarity to set like mortar in bricks. Maybe that was the process described as bonding: knowing a child so well you knew him as well as you knew yourself.

  As she cradled Joe-Jo in her arms, she thought about her neighbor Mattie Riehl, who had been a foster mother for a baby girl and had hoped to adopt her, but then the birth mother changed her mind and refused to relinquish parental rights. Afterward, she remembered Mattie saying that life felt overturned, like freshly plowed earth. Life had to start over.

  At least every other day, someone stopped by Windmill Farm to seek Sadie out for a remedy or advice. She felt encouraged to keep going, to continue learning about healing herbs and offer remedies to people for minor ailments, aches, and pains. She loved helping others, but she assumed that she was making little difference in the day-to-day lives of most people. She rested in the knowledge that she had given them all she could to make their lives a little better.

  Deacon Abraham stopped by one sunny morning to ask Sadie if she would pay a call on his wife, Esther, who suffered from persistent headaches. “She’s been to every doctor and chiropractor she can find, had every treatment and test and scan imaginable, and they can’t find anything that’s wrong.”

  This was just the kind of ailment that worried Sadie. The very reason she didn’t charge people for her remedies. If the best medical minds of Lancaster County couldn’t help Esther, what could she possibly do? And on top of that worry bounced another one: Esther frightened her. Sadie had never seen a smile rise all the way to her eyes.

  Abraham sensed her hesitation. “Just . . . go talk to her, Sadie. For my sake.”

  So Sadie went to Abraham and Esther’s farm. The brick house lay nestled amidst a sea of carefully tended greenery and neat outbuildings. Chickens clucked in a fenced yard, and a cow lowed from a small pasture. Esther’s mare stood within the buggy shafts, her head low, apparently dozing. Sadie drew her buggy alongside Esther’s and the mare stirred, nosing the visiting gelding. He nickered in reply.

  Leaving the horses to get acquainted, Sadie walked stiffly across the yard to the house.

  Esther met her at the door. “Now’s not a good time for a visit, Sadie. I’ve got a frightful headache today.”

  “Abraham asked me to come by.” She held up a little bag. “I brought some special tea that might help.”

  Esther looked suspiciously at her. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

  She opened the door and led Sadie to the kitchen. As Sadie brewed the tea, Esther told her all about the headaches. When they started, how often she had them, how they made her head pound as if a woodpecker were hammering away at her. How incompetent doctors couldn’t find any reason for them. She left nothing out, filling the air with blame for others, as if they had given her the headaches. Did Esther always look for the dark side of things and judge?

  Before Esther could start on another grievance, Sadie handed her a cup of tea, and she sipped it, then made a face. “It tastes like tree bark.”

  “It is. It’s made with the bark of a willow tree.” Sadie sat down beside her. “So you say the headaches started a few years ago?”

  Esther nodded.

  Sadie felt a strange stirring in her heart. “And the doctors can’t find anything wrong?”

  “No. But that doesn’t stop them from taking my money.” That thought inspired her to launch into another tirade against modern medicine.

  Sadie wasn’t really listening to her. She had traveled back to a time when a woman arrived at Old Deborah’s door. The woman’s face was tight and pale, riddled with anxiety. Old Deborah listened to her ailment—Sadie couldn’t exactly remember what it was but thought it was something like neck pain. Similar to Esther, this woman had spent a fortune on doctors and treatments and tests and scans—without any relief. Old Deborah listened carefully in that wise, knowing way she had. Then she took the woman’s hands in hers and told her what she thought the problem was. At first, the woman was shocked, angry even. Then she cried. But when she left, she was a different person. Calm, at peace, and as far as Sadie knew, her neck never bothered her again.

  Sadie had the strangest feeling that the cause of Esther’s headaches was the same as that woman with the neck pain. As Esther kept talking, Sadie was praying, and waiting for an answer, listening for God’s voice to speak to her heart. She had learned that the most important part of her prayers was the waiting and listening. Go ahead, she heard God whisper. It’s okay to speak the truth in love.

  Sadie’s lips quivered. Her chest grew tight. She was clasping her hands so tightly her knuckles ached. She forced herself to relax her grip, flattening her palms on her thighs. She knew one thing—she had to be willing to speak up, regardless of the response she might get. Please, Lord God, give me boldness.

  “Esther, there is something I’d like you to think about. Emotions can affect the health of our bodies, for good or for bad. Stress, anger, and resentment can have powerful negative effects. Those bitter feelings are like an acid that eats away at its container.”

  Esther looked at Sadie as if her barn was short a rafter.

  Sadie’s heart was thumping so loudly, she was sure Esther could hear it. Why did she have to say anything like this? She could have just given Esther the willow bark tea and left it at that. That’s all Abraham had asked of her.

  For a brief second, Sadie thought about running. Just dropping everything and bolting. No explanation. But what would that serve other than to confirm to Esther that Sadie Lapp was crazy? This made no sense! Still, she felt that strange inner stirring to keep going. Oh Lord God, please help! “Is there anyone in your life whom you have not been able to forgive?”

  Esther’s face frosted over. Minutes ticked by while Sadie waited for Esther’s response. She opened her lips, but no sound came out.

  Sadie was scared. Deborah had always said that some health problems were spiritual and emotional in nature, but she didn’t tell Sadie which ones. What right did Sadie have to ask someone such a personal question? Especially someone like Esther!

  Sadie studied Esther carefully. A vision popped in her mind of watching a cobra puff up, fangs glittering, preparing to strike. Sadie scooted her chair back a little, just in case. But after a few more long, painful seconds, Esther suddenly deflated like a balloon in her chair, dropping her head to her chest. She uttered a name that Sadie would never have expected to hear from her.

  “Emma.”

  For a moment Sadie thought she had misunderstood Esther.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Emma. My daughter. For leaving the church, like she did. With that man. Steelhead.”

  Sadie had forgotten that Esther’s daughter had left the church. It had happened years ago, when Sadie was just a little girl. “Do you
want to tell me about it?”

  Without hesitation, Esther began to talk, describing how Emma had eloped with an English man—a former convict, she hastened to say, wrinkling her nose. “Emma works in a quilt shop in town. Right in Stoney Ridge! And never comes by to see me, not ever. Not once.”

  “Have you ever invited her to come for a visit?”

  “Of course not! Emma is shunned. I’m married to a deacon. I’m held up as an example to others. Emma is the one who chose to leave. There are consequences to that decision. There are reasons for shunning. Sin endangers us all.”

  “I understand your feelings,” Sadie said. “It’s clear that you feel stress over Emma.”

  Esther held her hands tightly in her lap, so tight that her knuckles had turned white. But she wasn’t ushering Sadie to the door, as Sadie had thought she would.

  “You feel as if you’ve lost a daughter.”

  “I have lost a daughter.”

  Sadie nodded. “Maybe you even feel that she’s rejected you, as well as our church. But, Esther, this bitterness toward Emma might be hurting your health and stealing joy from your life.”

  She paused for a few moments to see how Esther was responding. Her eyes were downcast, fixed to the tabletop, but her hands were tight fists in her lap.

  “Jesus said that if we forgive others, he will forgive us. But if we don’t forgive others, God will not forgive us.” She reached out and covered Esther’s hands. “I think you need to forgive Emma.”

  Esther looked genuinely surprised. “I don’t know . . . how I can do that.”

  As soon as the words left her mouth, she began to weep. Sadie got up and scrambled to find a box of tissues.

  This was new territory for Sadie, but she had an idea of what needed to come next. “If you’re willing, we can pray, right now, for your heart to be changed.”

  Esther was crying so loud that Sadie handed her the whole box of tissues. “I’m going to pray now.”