Which Way Home?

by Linda Byler

  Ah, William. So much like Annie, Hans’s second wife. What had he said the day he met her at her father’s wedding? Be careful, be careful of that family. And he a cousin of Annie’s.

  Folks went to church, counted themselves Christians, followers of Jesus Christ. Amish, Mennonite, Baptist, Lutheran, all following this man called Jesus. In Hester’s battered spirit, she pieced together remnants of her past, filled now with guilt made from the unfairness and cruelty of good Christian people. Each one a dark square of abrasive wool fabric that hurt her fingertips as she threaded the steel needle up and down. She wanted to add a square of color and light, to give William and Annie the benefit of the doubt.

  Jesus had been nailed to the cross, and he prayed God to forgive the Roman soldiers as they pounded the rusty nails through his palms. She would try to do the same. Everyone who believed in the man called Jesus was called upon to forgive.

  Perhaps William did not know how he hurt her. He was well steeped in the laws of the church, like a pot of tea come to a dark green color of perfection after just the right amount of time, the required amount of tea leaves added at the right time. So important to him, this perfection.

  She sighed, prayed to God, begged his forgiveness. Like the petals of an unfolding flower, the beauty of God’s love was revealed to her. The luxury of his grace and forgiveness arrived in waves of peace, filling her heart, enfolding it in a kind of pureness, almost like the purity of an angel’s wing.

  For who could know? Perhaps she had behaved immodestly. Had she fueled Johnny’s desire for her? First, there was Hans. And now the brother-in-law.

  She cringed, then, with shame and humility that quite effectively eliminated the fresh breath of God’s love. Over and over she blamed herself, heaping measures of self-loathing on her own head as she remembered moments with Hans. Now, here again she was to blame.

  How much better it would have been if Kate had left her to starve as an infant. Death would have been merciful. Quick. Better. She was forever torn between two cultures, and now, two voices, one enveloping her in the security of God’s love, one accusing her of her own heathen ways, the Indian in her, the thorn in her flesh.

  Suddenly she remembered a time with Noah when Kate was still alive. They were playing together, brother and sister, one as dark as the other was blond and light-eyed. They were swinging in the barn on the long rope swing Hans had attached to the rafter for them. She could smell the dry hay and see the slivers of light that sifted between the barn boards, carrying tiny pieces of dust, catching the gleam of her straight, black hair.

  She had just completed a wide arc, flying high above the hay, lithe, strong, and supple, her hands around the knot at the end with a tight, well-placed grip. Strangely, Noah had reached out, touched her hair, and said she was like “a schöna Indian, so dark.”

  She remembered looking into his pale blue eyes, afraid to blink. She knew then that Noah was special. He was so much like Kate, who found it hard to confront anyone, to demean them with words of rebuke.

  Ah, but Noah and Kate had accepted her. All of her. Being Indian had not been a loathsome trait, but an honor.

  She would try harder yet again. William might come to appreciate her if she continued with the work of being a healer. She remembered, then, his destruction of her medicines. How like Annie and her goal to destroy the book of herbal remedies.

  A stabbing thought about Emma Ferree’s premonitions of William suddenly pierced Hester. In one moment, she was face-to-face with the thin film of resistance she had allowed to cover the truth from this astounding little woman. Emma’s goodness of heart was sweeter than anything Hester had encountered since she’d left her childhood home. She knew now that Emma had been right. The truth was like a branding iron. If only Billy had let her die in the granary of the livery stable.

  Long into the night, a mixture of peace and despair, truth and unacknowledged lies, spilled and rolled around Hester’s heart. Her weary eyes were swollen when William heaved himself from bed and went out into the cold, dark, snowy morning to begin the day’s milking.

  At breakfast Hester was silent and downcast, her white cap pulled so far front on her head that very little of the beauty of her dark hair was revealed. She had drawn the strings up beneath her chin in a large bow of humility.

  She had fried the mush crisp and thin, cooked the eggs sunny side up, and finished them with boiling water cooking up furiously beneath the lid, just the way William liked them. The porridge was firm, the tea dark and piping hot. They ate together in silence, the new set of dishes like mocking sentries, a show of love and affection.

  William broke the silence only when he poured the steaming tea onto his saucer to cool it. “Hester, I forbid you to leave the house for six weeks now. I expect you to think upon your sins, read your Bible, and repent. It is because of my love for you that I require this. I do love you, Hester, and am glad you are my wife.

  “I just need to train you well in the ways of a devoted Amish housewife. I believe Kate was a bit loose with you. My mother always talked of it, wondering how the household would ever turn out with her lack of discipline.”

  He gave her a sad look of righteousness, a sniff. “I guess this latest episode answers my mother’s concerns and questions. You ran away from home and lived English for a while. Noah has gone off to the war, I hear. They say Isaac got on a river barge with a man named Lee who worked on the river.”

  Hester successfully hid any sign of caring or having heard. She acknowledged his words with a mere dipping of her head, a sipping of her tea. A fierce gladness welled up in her before she could quell it. Let Hans reap what he sowed. Let all his neglect come home to roost. He had never cared for those two boys, and now they apparently did not care for him.

  “Why don’t you answer me?” William’s voice was harsh. He leaned forward, his blue eyes intent, his mouth compressed into a slash of discipline.

  “Oh, no, I mean, yes. I hadn’t known about my brothers.”

  “They are not your brothers. You have no ties to them.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Did you know this riverman named Lee?”

  Rigid, with eyes downcast, Hester tried to decide quickly. If she shook her head, he would catch the lie, as sharp and perceptive as he was. If she said yes, he would see the past in her eyes.

  “Well?’

  “Yes. He poled us across the river a few times.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes.”

  Miraculously, he believed her.

  Her hands shook as she held the cup, stirred the tea with a spoon.

  “I want Mother to teach you quiltmaking.”

  A sickening thud of her heart was followed by nausea roiling her stomach, churning the food she had eaten. “But I am not skilled with a needle.”

  “Till the winter is over, you will have learned.”

  The thought of spending time with his mother, her hands clumsily plying the needle through fabric cut in exact squares and triangles, brought on a cold sweat, an acceleration of her heart.

  On the very next afternoon, Frances suddenly appeared in the kitchen like a dark ghost of discipline. Hester was sweeping the hearth and looked up to find her standing by the table.

  One eyebrow was elevated, one lowered. “Dishes not done yet?” was her way of greeting.

  “Yes, well, not all of them. I overbaked a cake. It’s soaking.”

  “What kind of cake?”

  “A molasses. William’s favorite.”

  “He likes gelbkucken best.”

  “He does?”

  “Why of course.”

  “I’ll make him one next time.”

  “He wants me to teach you quiltmaking.”

  Gripping the back of a chair, Hester nodded.

  Out came the tumble of scraps. The scissors flashed in Frances’s capable hands as she sliced expertly around the templates, cutting exact triangles and rectangles. Bits of fabric grew into tall stacks as her scissors rac
ed along, keeping time to the staccato words from her thin mouth.

  So Hester had overstepped her bounds with Johnny. That’s what happens when a woman has no children. Like a cavorting heifer. William was so disappointed. Very generous of him to forgive her for such a wrongdoing.

  She, too, could forgive. It was her duty. A Christian was called upon to do this. In time, she was sure that Hester would make a good wife.

  Hester acknowledged her words with a humble dip of her head. When she spoke, her eyes were clear, glistening with truth. “I am not to blame for Johnny’s overtures. He was drinking apple whiskey. I went down to the cellar, and he caught me about the waist. I struggled.”

  When Frances met Hester’s eyes, the truth in them found its mark, accurately piercing the false lies in her own. But expertly, in the same way she plied the scissors, she cut off the truth and flung it away with contempt. “Puh! They all say that. Every loose woman always comes up with an excuse.”

  Calmly, her eyes glowing, Hester spoke again, her voice clear, low, and husky, like bells enhancing her words. “Then you must live with what you choose to believe.”

  When Hester struggled to thread her needle, bending over the triangles she was laboriously bringing together, Frances noticed her long, uneven stitches. Patiently she showed her how to shove only the tip of the needle into the fabric to make one tiny stitch, which immediately helped Hester improve.

  Frances soon noticed Hester’s eye for color, the way she alternated the blue with the golden maize fabric and the red with the green like a holly bush or a cardinal in a fir tree. But she was careful to withhold praise, careful to keep Hester from becoming schtoltz. Words of praise would only serve to give her more free rein than she already had.

  Till the week’s end, Hester had acquired a new level of quiltmaking. She endured Frances’s words of rebuke and her criticism like an unwelcome cold. She dealt with her inability to please, stayed patient, and was rewarded with a perfect quilt top that contained a star pattern, its symmetry so pleasing that her eyes lit up with delight.

  Frances almost warmed to her beautiful daughter-in-law.

  William was happy beyond Hester’s expectations. He praised her work and told her about the verses in Proverbs that lift up a woman who pleases her husband by the work of her hands, then takes her goods to market. She cooked his meals the way he liked them, stayed at home for the required weeks, went to church, and held little Baby Abner. She whispered senseless bits of news and gossip with her friend Sarah, evading her questions about the tinctures and the herbs, saying in winter it was hard to find them. Amos was doing better, but could not stand to do a full day’s work yet. Hester said the sun in spring would help.

  The snows came often, piling around the stone house and blowing across the Lancaster landscape in great, white, stinging clouds, whipped up by a relentless north wind that created drifts higher than a man’s head. Horses floundered up to their bellies in packed snow. Sleds overturned, spilling loads of firewood into deep white drifts. The men shouted and shoveled through the snow, their faces red with cold and irritation, clapping their gloved hands down on the crowns of their black felt hats as the wind tugged at their wide brims.

  William came into the house for a scarf that he tied under his chin, tucking his beard beneath it as well. Hester laughed, thinking him very handsome without the long, bushy black beard, and told him so, blushing. He smiled at her, then held her securely in his arms, kissing her soundly before he went outside to join the shoveling crew.

  At times such as these, Hester believed she did love him. She did. Perhaps she expected too much from the word “love.” Obedience, having no will of her own, brought good times. Weren’t her quilts a visual display of her obedience? Wasn’t Frances’s teaching a blessing?

  When the news of sick children reached her ears, a longing welled up in her so intense that she felt she had to go somehow. When a four-year-old succumbed to lunga feeva and a ten-year-old to seizures because of an escalated temperature caused by the same disease, she battled with her will to go nurse them, to be allowed to administer the herbs of her foreparents. She fiercely believed that the old Indians carried a wealth of information that they passed down from one generation to the next, and she knew many of these remedies.

  Miserable, she stood in the snowy graveyards, her black hat hiding her sorrow, her black shawl wrapped around her desperate longing to save these children. She cried with parents remembering her mother, Kate, and her sister Rebecca. She listened to mothers, looking on helplessly as their children choked on swollen tonsils and thrashed feverishly on soiled beds, the doctor unable to save them.

  She baked pies and bread and took them to houses with William by her side. She bent to view yet another child lying white and lifeless, its eyes closed, dressed in white, a life cut off before its time by the dreaded diseases of winter.

  One cold winter evening, when the stars hung like little individual icicles, the wind moaning around the eaves, the blowing snow whispering the sadness of the little children’s deaths, Hester could bear it no longer. She laid aside the pattern of triangles she was sewing, gathering the ends to fold them into the rye grass basket at her side, breathed in, and turned to her husband. “William, must these children die?”

  Astounded by her words, William raised his head from the German Bible he had been reading. “Why, Hester, I am surprised at your question. Have you not heard Bishop Joel say so clearly that their time was up? God needed these children in heaven. They are angels now.” His eyes were heavy-lidded with the patience he needed to exercise over his wife’s childish question.

  Hester shivered and drew the corners of her light shawl around her neck. “But if God put all these herbs on the earth for our use, then gives wisdom to… to, um, to people in how to use them, surely there is wasted knowledge somewhere.”

  “The doctors did all they could.”

  “The doctors don’t know enough!” Hester flung the words into the room with unbridled desperation and the repression that suffocated her spirit.

  Instantly, William was on his feet, towering over her with the strength of his anger. “Are you telling me, Hester, that you know more than the doctors? That thought is so preposterous it’s laughable.”

  “No, I don’t know more. Just a better way.”

  “You don’t know anything.” William grated out his words like a rasp on an oak board.

  “But I do, William. I want to help the sick children, just for the love of these suffering little ones.”

  “Your Indian knowledge is witchcraft.”

  “No, William, it is not. I believe that viper’s grass made into a tea would help these little ones’ lung fever.”

  William was breathing hard now, his eyes containing desperation. Here was his wife rising up again, displaying her own will, just when he thought that the winter months, tempered with the tutelage of his mother, had finally cured her of this nonsense. “Viper’s grass! You speak of your medicines in terms of serpents even.”

  “Ach, William. No. It is merely a grass. It grows in low places by the water. Hence its name.”

  Frustrated, angered, and without a thought other than the contesting of his will and the need to stop it, he brought back his hand and administered a sharp crack to the side of her face.

  Hester’s head snapped sideways. The shock in her eyes made William flinch, but only for a moment. He gathered his wits hurriedly and said she must never speak of these things again, ever, in his house.

  Hester’s face stung, but she lowered her eyes. He gathered her limp form into his arms, whispering words of love, saying that if she rose up against him like a rebellious child, he would have to treat her as one. It was all done out of his great love for her.

  Never again did Hester contest her husband’s will. That one blow finished any thoughts of changing his opinion about the herbal medicines and her ability to use them.

  She spent the remainder of that winter learning the art of quiltmaking. William
praised her choice of colors. He built a small wooden frame for her, a clever device to hold portions of a quilt so that she could stitch the pieced top to the bottom layer of homespun fabric. Her needle flashed in the light of the oil lamp, her dark head bent to her work as she immersed herself in the skills her husband and his mother asked of her.

  Elias, her father-in-law, was a man of few words, a distant man who kept to himself, minding his own business. He was tall, like Frances, and spare, with the same loping gait as his sons. One evening he asked Hester why she no longer made tinctures. Sam Riehl had asked him the question in church.

  Flustered, Hester could not find words to fit the situation properly. William came to her aid immediately, however, telling his father that she had seen the error of her ways, recognized the powwowing of the Indians, and did not wish to continue.

  Slowly then, Elias King cracked a chestnut with the nutcracker, popped a portion into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and then met Hester’s eyes. For only a second, a love like Kate’s shone from his eyes, warm, soft, and so mellow and approving it was like a balm to a broken heart. He said, evenly, “Well, William, some of these old Indians know more than we do. And I personally don’t think the devil has anything to do with it.”

  No one but Elias saw the look of warm gratitude Hester bestowed on him. And no one knew how Elias yearned to help his daughter-in-law, seeing how caught she was in the net of marriage covered by the deceit of piety, the same as he was.

  CHAPTER 15

  WHEN THE SNOW BEGAN TO MELT IN MARCH OF that year, the earth turned into a swamp of mud and water. The rains that poured from leaden skies caused the Conestoga and the Pequea to rise above their banks, the churning brown water spilling over them and spreading across the land. Monstrous swells ate up the dormant cornfields and licked greedily at fenceposts, sagging gates, trees, and bushes. The angry waters carried away farm wagons and logs, sheds and chickens, bleating sheep and terrified cows. It rolled buggies and carriages along, end over end, smashing them against stone foundations of bridges, treating them like matchsticks.