A Plain & Fancy Christmas

by Cynthia Keller

  As they were about to go inside, Isaac King emerged from the dairy barn. He came over to the women, and gave Ellie a smile, his eyes twinkling.

  “You have come back. Maybe this week will give us time to know each other better.”

  “I hope so.” She smiled back. “That’s why I’m here.”

  He nodded. “Good.”

  “I wonder if you might teach me something about the animals, when you have a chance.”

  “Even better. Tomorrow morning, you’ll help me milk the cows.”

  “Oh.” Ellie tried to hide her surprise. “Okay. Great.”

  Isaac gave a quick wave, and turned to go back to his work.

  Rachel picked up the empty laundry basket and accompanied Ellie to her car to get her suitcase. “There’s a bedroom upstairs for you, near mine.”

  They made their way to the small room, which had two single beds made up with colorful quilts, a nightstand in between, and a low double dresser. Short, pale blue curtains framed the windows.

  “This used to be my sister Sarah’s room, but now it’s for guests,” Rachel explained. “My daughter’s bedroom used to be for my other sister, Laura. Years ago, we three sisters were together up here at this end of the house.”

  “Sounds like you must have had fun, sisters together like that.”

  “We did, yes. A lot of laughing and teasing.”

  Both women were silent, each one struck by the significance of Rachel having memories that, under different circumstances, would have been Ellie’s.

  “I’ll leave you to get settled in.”

  “What will you do now?” Ellie asked.

  “Start cooking supper.”

  “If I finish up here quickly, may I help?”

  Rachel nodded as she left the room. Ellie unpacked, her nervousness returning, then went downstairs to offer her assistance in the kitchen. Leah stood over a large pot of chicken in gravy, while Sarah assembled a salad and Rachel cut up potatoes. Katie, carrying silverware toward the table, stopped when she saw Ellie.

  “Hello, again,” she said with a bright smile. “You’re going to stay with us this week.”

  Ellie smiled back. “That’s right. I hope I can spend some time with you.”

  “That will be nice.”

  Katie set down the knives and forks on the table, and Ellie helped her lay out the place settings.

  “Come over here by me,” Leah called to Ellie. “You can cut these onions. Wash your hands first.”

  Leah talked to her as she cooked, going over what she was serving that evening and which of the ingredients they had grown on the farm. Later, she said, after they ate and the animals were attended to, most of the family would sit together outside to enjoy the summer night.

  “Then you will find out all about us,” Leah said. “Not just the little things, like before.”

  She and Ellie exchanged a smile. So, Ellie thought, she also feels like we didn’t accomplish anything the first time. They both wanted to get past that initial awkwardness and start again. It made her feel a lot better.

  At six o’clock, the family gathered for supper. Ellie exchanged greetings with Moses, Sarah’s husband, and was introduced to their three small children. Isaac came in with Rachel’s younger brother, Daniel.

  “You couldn’t stay away, could you?” Daniel asked with a grin as he hung his straw hat on one of the hooks beside the door. “We are irresistible.”

  “Daniel!” Leah King reprimanded her son, but she couldn’t suppress a smile.

  It wasn’t clear to Ellie why Daniel deserved the reprimand, so she kept her answer neutral, “I’m happy to be here.”

  “We are happy to have you here,” Leah put in.

  Ellie noticed that Rachel was watching her mother with obvious surprise, and what seemed like displeasure. The situation with Rachel was fraught with emotional peril, as Ellie knew all too well. It wasn’t going to be easy for either one of them.

  “Are Amos and Hannah here?” Ellie asked.

  “They are visiting Amos’s brother tonight,” Isaac said. “But you will see them tomorrow morning.”

  Ellie was able to relax a bit during supper. Perhaps it was because there was a smaller group at the table than the first time, she thought, although eleven people hardly qualified as a small group. Or maybe it was just because she was exhausted by that point. She was a long way from comfortable, but it was a start. As opposed to her previous visit, this time she bowed her head during silent prayers before the meal, then listened to the conversation, which was minimal, while the family ate their meal. She didn’t try to fill the quiet with words, or ask questions about things she didn’t understand. Instead, she concentrated on taking in what was going on around her without making assessments or judgments. She took some of the food offered to her, but not everything. No one seemed to notice.

  After supper, she helped with the cleanup, and then followed the women and Katie outside to make sure everything was neat and in its proper place. At last, they sat down on the side porch to enjoy the summer evening. Isaac emerged from the house, reaching into his pocket to produce a small mouth organ. He started to play, the notes ringing pure and clear in the night air. The children gathered on the ground in a circle around him. Everyone stopped what they were doing to listen.

  Ellie observed it all in fascination. These people had been working hard for hours without rest—her own fatigue could vouch for that—and now they were taking the time to appreciate the idyllic summer evening. No computers or phones with which to contend, or on which to waste time. Nor, for that matter, any meetings to plan, or clothes to lay out for presentations to be made in the morning. No rushing around. Just being there, together, smelling the perfume of the summer flowers, speaking softly below the darkening sky. She was still a stranger, but she could see how appealing this could be. And it couldn’t be any more different from her own life. Of course, maybe a week of this would drive her crazy. In fact, she wasn’t sure how she would feel after just a few days of playing at being an Amish farm woman.

  When Isaac finished, his wife began to sing a slow hymn. Leah’s voice was only average, but the words were heartfelt. Beautiful, Ellie thought, genuinely moved. She looked up at the vast night sky, visible everywhere she turned, nothing to obstruct the view. Whatever might happen, at this moment she was glad and grateful that she had come to this place, and to these people.

  Chapter 16

  Ellie was awakened by a series of loud knocks at her bedroom door.

  Disoriented, she managed to get out a weak, “Yes?”

  “Time for the milking.” It was Isaac’s voice.

  “Oh … of course.” It was dark in the room. “I’m up.” She reached out to the night table and felt around for the travel clock she had put there the day before, struggling to focus on the numbers. Four-thirty. “I’ll be right there.”

  “Come to the barn.”

  His footsteps faded away as he went downstairs. Ellie threw back the covers, groggy and panicked at the same time. She recalled their conversation about her joining him to milk the cows today, but she had not been sure he was serious. He certainly hadn’t warned her they would be doing it in the middle of the night. Apparently, this was when the day began here. Not so surprising, she thought, considering that everyone had gone off to sleep last night by nine-thirty. She had followed their lead, but lay in bed, wide awake, her mind darting everywhere, from the events of the day to the office to what she had left undone in her apartment. The last time she had looked at the clock, it was past midnight.

  She fumbled to find her jeans and a T-shirt in the darkness, trying not to cry out when she banged her knee against the bed’s wooden footboard. After hastily jamming her feet into sneakers and a quick stop to brush her teeth and throw water on her face, she hurried outside, still hopping on one and then the other foot as she struggled to tie her sneaker laces, embarrassed to see that it was already ten minutes to five. And that’s without stopping for even a sip of coffee, she
noted, which she would have dearly loved. She made her way in the dark toward the enormous white barn. At least it was warm outside. She shuddered to think what it must be like to do this in the winter months.

  Entering the barn, she tried not to show any reaction to the strong smell. She saw two long rows of black and white cows, all facing away from the center aisle that ran the length of the building. They were huge animals, she realized, larger than she had expected, some swishing their tails, a few letting out gentle mooing now and then. Some rested on the ground, but most were standing. The floor had been swept completely clean. The smell, she realized, was the unfamiliarity of animals and the manure they produced, passing through grating on the floor beneath their hindquarters.

  She spotted Judah, Moses, and Daniel at the far end of the barn.

  “Good morning,” she called out. Her voice seemed to boom through the building, making her cringe. The three men looked up and each gave her a quick wave.

  “Morning to you,” Judah replied, his words softer, but loud enough to carry.

  She noticed they were all wearing tall rubber boots, and made a mental note to buy a pair when she had a chance. Taking a few steps down the row, she located Isaac, seated on a low stool between two cows. He held up a collection of tubes and metal, immediately launching into an explanation of what he was doing.

  “This is a milker. I attach a tube to each of the cow’s teats, and it milks the cow, easy, like a person.” He pointed as he spoke. “The milk goes through this hose from the barn to the cooling tank in the milk house, which is a separate building outside.”

  Ellie tentatively reached out to pat the cow on the back.

  “We also put disinfectant on the teats after milking to stop them from getting any infections or cracking and such.” Isaac smiled. “You have milked a cow before?”

  “You can tell I haven’t, I’m sure.”

  “That’s all right. Try it.”

  He turned to the cow on his other side and moved the stool closer as he put a bucket beneath the cow.

  “This is the udder. These are the teats. Put your hand around one, like this.” He demonstrated. “Then squeeze. That’s all there is to it.”

  She sat down and reached to take the cow’s teat in one hand, giving it a squeeze. Nothing happened. She tried several more times, still with no results.

  “Don’t be afraid. You’re not hurting her.”

  “I can definitely do this,” she said with exaggerated determination.

  Suddenly, milk squirted out into the bucket.

  “There you are,” Isaac said.

  Grinning, Ellie kept at it, amazed, not only that she was actually milking a cow, but at how thrilled she was to be doing it. She felt somewhat ridiculous; here she was finding something people had been doing for centuries such a big deal. For all her talk about organic this and green that, she knew next to nothing about animals or growing anything at all.

  Before she knew it, they were leaving the barn, and her watch read six-fifteen.

  “You do this twice a day, every day, right?” she asked.

  “Three hundred and sixty-five days,” Moses answered. “Cows don’t take holidays or vacations.”

  “It went quickly today,” added Judah, “because we were all there. Doesn’t always work out that way.” He smiled. “And today, you were also there. Our special assistant.”

  “Ready for some breakfast?” Isaac asked her as they got close to the house.

  “I am, but it’s not like I did anything to work up an appetite.” She smiled. “Mostly hungry from asking questions.”

  “Test on everything tomorrow.” Daniel grinned.

  She entered the kitchen with them to a table already set up for breakfast. Leah, Sarah, Rachel, and Katie busily set out platters and bowls of food, Sarah’s children darting among them. Everyone took their seats.

  Leah put a glass pitcher of orange juice on the table. “As soon as Amos gets here, we’ll eat,” she explained. “He’s finishing up with the horses. His wife, Hannah, went to bring some of her special medicine to a friend a few miles from here.”

  As she spoke, Isaac’s father, Amos, appeared in the doorway and said a general good morning. Ellie hadn’t seen him since her last visit, so she went up to the older man to greet him.

  The corners of his blue eyes crinkled as he smiled. “I heard you were back. You are learning how to be Amish, yes?”

  “I think that could take me a long time to learn.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe it is in your blood.”

  Ellie wanted to tell him how much she wished to know if such a thing might be true, but she wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.

  “We will do our best to teach you,” Amos added.

  Ellie felt a rush of warmth toward him. He seemed truly kind. As did everyone here, she realized.

  After the silent prayer, they helped themselves to pancakes, sausages, oatmeal, fruit, doughnuts, and bread with butter and strawberry preserves. Ellie usually had only coffee in the morning, but today she was glad to accept the offer of a bowl of oatmeal with fresh blueberries. It was beginning to dawn on her that there was a reason these people ate so much at meals; if they always worked as hard as she had seen them working since she’d arrived, they needed those calories to get through the day.

  “Ellie,” Leah said, as she refilled coffee cups for the adults, “maybe you will spend today with me. I am ironing in the morning, and later, we can work in the garden.”

  “That would be lovely. Thank you.” Ellie took another sip of the steaming hot coffee.

  “If Ellie is with you,” Rachel said to her mother, “then I can finish a quilt instead of working in the garden. Is that all right?”

  Leah nodded, then turned toward her granddaughter. “Katie, you come with us as well.”

  Ellie saw Rachel give her mother a sharp look and open her mouth as if to speak, then apparently think better of it. Katie only smiled in agreement as she smeared strawberry preserves on a slice of bread and bit into it with obvious satisfaction.

  It was a morning of constant activity, as Ellie helped clean up after breakfast, then straightened her bedroom and the nearby bathroom before assisting Leah in bringing clothes in from the line.

  Leah ironed while Ellie folded the pressed clothes or put them on hangers. They had said little while collecting the laundry outside, but Leah began to talk as she moved the iron back and forth across the brightly colored dresses and shirts.

  “My husband’s grandparents—Amos’s parents—built this house, the original part. When they were older and Amos took over the farm, he built that attached part for them to live in. They died, and after Isaac and I got married, we got the farm, and Amos and Hannah moved into that part. Many Amish families do this, you know.”

  Ellie nodded, although she hadn’t known.

  “When our daughter, Sarah, married Moses, we built their part of the house. But each is separate, with its own kitchens and all. Judah is across the street with Annie. We are together. It’s good. Many hands to help, and we are never lonely.”

  She looked over at Ellie. “Do you get lonely? You live by yourself, and your people are not near you. You go to an office every day. What is your life like?”

  Ellie positioned a man’s royal blue shirt on a hanger and smoothed the front. “I guess I was brought up believing I might get married or I might not, depending on what I chose to do. And that I should be able to support myself, so I would be free to choose. But my parents are nearby, and I see my brother and sister. Not like you do here, of course …”

  Leah frowned. “I cannot understand this kind of living. You are happy this way?”

  “Yes, I suppose. I like my job, and I meet a lot of people.” She paused, wondering why she was having trouble displaying a lot of enthusiasm for her life. “My work is interesting, I get paid a good salary, I have a nice apartment.”

  Leah set down the iron as she thought about Ellie’s words. “But the people around you? You are
part of a community?”

  “When you work as much as I do, the people in the company become like a community, because you spend so much time with them. I have some friends. I date.”

  Uncomfortable, Ellie turned away. For some reason, she felt obliged to defend her life, but she wasn’t being truthful. The people in her office weren’t a community by any stretch of the imagination; they were competitors who occupied a spot on the corporate ladder either above or below her, and not much more. She had few friends, since she allowed her job to consume most of her life, maybe, she understood, as an excuse not to face her distrust of people. To say she dated was also a stretch, as spending time with Jason hardly qualified as such, and even that was over. She certainly hadn’t mentioned the number of times she had recently been struck by unsettling feelings of deep loneliness.

  Leah was quiet for a while, sliding the iron back and forth over a pair of black men’s pants.

  “I’m sure your life is very nice,” she said.

  Ellie doubted the other woman thought anything of the sort.

  “I hope,” Leah continued, “you’ll think our life is very nice, too. To have another daughter is such a gift. It is hard to understand what happened, but I have faith that it was supposed to be this way and I am happy you are here. I do not expect you to become Amish; that would be very difficult to do. But I want you to understand who we are. And that we are your family.”

  “Thank you for saying that. This has been hard.”

  “Hard for Rachel as well. You can see that we have not said anything to her daughter Katie about this, but while you are here, you two should get to know each other. At some time, Rachel will have to tell her the story. It would be good if the child has some knowledge of you, more than just a guest in the house.”

  That explained Leah telling her grandchild to work in the garden with them, Ellie thought. It was to start preparing her for hearing the truth. Very smart.