The Imposter

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  He saw the rock ledge where the falcon had made her nest, and he remembered how steadfast and solid God is. He watched the trees dance in the breeze, and thought of how flexible and adaptive God’s Spirit could be, adjusting to the needs of every generation while still remaining unchanged. He studied the plants, grass, and trees scattered in a chaotic fashion and remembered that in the chaos of life, God remained in the business of making beautiful landscapes out of our messes. His eyes lifted to the sky, the blue, blue sky, and he took a deep breath of crisp morning air, a symbol that every day is a new chance to begin again.

  Then he noticed how many faithful church members were heading toward the farmhouse, heads bowed low with worn hope and fresh wounds from the week.

  Birdy is right! he wanted to shout to them. All around you, God’s great book of creation is being preached. Lift your heads! See what God has given you on this beautiful September morning. Signs of his glory, his wonder, his ability to make something beautiful out of your life. Lift your heads! You’re not alone in this journey.

  David smiled at Birdy, perhaps a beat too long, because her cheeks started to flame with a bright red streak and she spun around, straight into the path of an approaching horse and buggy. The horse shied and reared, throwing his tail, starting a chain of spooked buggy horses, which invited distressed whinnying among the horses in the field, wondering what the excitement was all about. Birdy apologized profusely to the first horse and buggy’s owner and scurried off to join a knot of women, gathered by the porch.

  But for David, the worship that had filled his heart remained with him all morning.

  The church rustled, bowing their heads. Birdy sat on the hard backless bench next to her identical sisters-in-law and let the quiet roll over her. In this time of waiting, of silence, with her family and friends close around her, she felt safe. She felt loved. She felt hopeful. And she thought of David.

  Birdy thought of him so much. When she woke up in the morning he was on her mind, and her first thought was whether she would see him that day. Church Sundays were her happiest days of all. She could sit and watch David all morning, to her heart’s content, and listen to his honeyed baritone voice as he preached. No one had a clue of all that was running through her mind. She did her best to keep her mind on the contents of the sermon—she knew it was a terrible sin to allow her thoughts to wander off in the direction they tended to go whenever David Stoltzfus was near.

  Oh, she was so sure they’d had a “moment” this morning. David had looked at her as if he was seeing her for the very first time and Birdy wondered if there might be something blooming between them. But not much after that, she crossed the yard to head toward the barn and nearly walked right into David. He looked at her and smiled, and Birdy didn’t turn away. For once, she didn’t knock anything over or trip over her own big feet. A sense of anticipation had skittered over the top of her skin, brushing the back of her neck, her elbows.

  Yes, she had thought, this was something possible. The thought made her feel giddy with joy.

  Not two seconds later, Katrina had appeared at her father’s elbow. “Dad, there’s someone here I’d like you to meet.” A beautiful woman stood behind her. “This is Mary Mast. She lives in the next town over. It’s an off-Sunday so she came to worship with us today.”

  As David turned to say hello to Mary Mast, Katrina sidled to Birdy’s side and whispered, “She was the most promising candidate of all the Budget letters. She’s a widow with no children. Cross your fingers. I think she could be the one.”

  Mary Mast beamed at David. Positively beamed. Birdy didn’t want her to be so pretty and charming. She was green with envy—another terrible sin.

  And Birdy’s delight over the brief moment she had shared with David had disappeared. Poof. Gone.

  Mary Mast had come as a complete surprise to Katrina. She’d forgotten all about Hank Lapp’s infamous Budget letter, but Mary Mast hadn’t forgotten. She had tracked Hank Lapp down and called him. Hank invited her to church on Sunday, then drove over to Moss Hill to tell Katrina what he had done, and to hand off the task to her. “You said you’d handle it from here,” Hank had said. “In the store, that was the last thing you told me.” He brushed his hands together. “I’ve done all I can to help get your father married off. The rest is up to you.”

  Katrina dug out Mary Mast’s letter, read it to look for signs of oddity or mental derangement but was cautiously optimistic about its mild content. Then, after meeting Mary, she felt the first glimmer of encouragement. Mary Mast was a widow who lived in a town nearby, had no children—a big plus, because Katrina’s own siblings were complicated enough, especially Jesse, though Ruthie could be sneaky—and seemed almost too good to be true.

  As she watched her father and Mary Mast chat before church started, she thought they made a striking couple. Looks weren’t important, or so everybody said, but her father was a handsome man, and Mary Mast was quite attractive. In fact, if Katrina squinted her eyes and pretended Mary’s hair was red, she even resembled her mother. A tiny bit. Her father had smiled at something Mary Mast said—a good sign. They had seemed to be enjoying each other.

  All in all, Katrina was rather pleased with herself about this unexpected turn of events and spun around to say so to Birdy, but she’d gone.

  Andy spanked the reins against the horse’s rump, and the buggy harness jingled. The wheels creaked into motion, squelching through the mud in the yard at Windmill Farm. As the buggy rattled over the corduroy bridge that spanned the creek, Katrina looked back to see Thelma lift her hand in a wave. She had decided to stay and visit with Fern, so Andy told her he’d return to pick her up later because it looked like it was going to rain soon. Katrina turned her back to the farm, settling down on the seat. Andy seemed quieter than usual as he flicked the reins. “Anything on your mind?”

  Andy’s gaze lifted from the back of the horse to her face and she saw something in his eyes, a sort of wary pride. “Your dad’s sermon. I haven’t heard a sermon like that before.”

  Katrina thought back to her father’s sermon, trying to remember if he had said anything significant. In truth, she hadn’t listened. Her mind had been occupied with how to get Mary Mast over for dinner this week on a night her father would definitely, absolutely, positively be home. “What were sermons like where you grew up?”

  “A lot of stories about Anabaptist martyrs, with a few Scripture verses thrown in at random. Rules and regulations to keep everybody out of moral potholes. Pretty thin soup.” He glanced at her. “Must’ve been different for you, to have grown up with your father’s way of thinking. You’re pretty lucky—to have grown up with a father like that. He’s the real deal, your dad.”

  Katrina looked at the windshield, partly because raindrops had started to fall, but mostly to avoid responding. She had never paid much attention to her father’s preaching. Or to any other preaching, for that matter. “What struck you as memorable?”

  “I’d always heard the Bible described as a manual. Do this, don’t do that. Your father talked about it . . . like . . . it was a story. A story to enter into, not a blueprint of rules to follow. And then when he said that we are part of that story today . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Oh that. She had heard her father talk about the Bible in that way. “My dad is always telling people to read their Bibles.”

  “And then that part about the Bible being a conversation, between a Creator and the ones he created, that it should be a conversation someone has firsthand, not filtered through the hearsay of others.” He tilted his head amazed. “That’s not the kind of sermon that would’ve been preached in my church.”

  “How so?”

  “The bishop didn’t want people to read their Bible much, or even to pray much. He said that hearing it once a week in church was plenty. When I was a teenager, he caught me reading my Bible.” A sneer came over his face. “He told me that I must be thinking of myself as godlike, to be so proud as to interpret Scripture for mysel
f.”

  “Sounds pretty proud himself, that bishop.”

  “Oh yeah, he was tough, all right.” He kept his eyes facing forward. “He was my grandfather. He’d made himself a bundle of money, but he didn’t want anybody to know. We didn’t even have indoor plumbing, though most everyone else did in our church. My grandfather would boast to his friends that he didn’t need it because he already had running water. I can hear him like it was yesterday: ‘Andy runs down to the lake with a bucket and runs back up the hill with the water.’ He thought that was hilarious.” He was quiet for a minute. “Funny how we rise and fall to the assumptions of others.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We become what others expect us to be.”

  She waited to see if he would say more. She thought he probably hadn’t meant to reveal even that much about himself. “Did you grow up on a farm?” She had a funny feeling the past years hadn’t been filled with happy moments for him.

  “Yes. And hated it. So when I was eighteen, I ran off and I joined the army.”

  He gave her a look as if he dared her to say something, to look shocked, to hop out of the buggy in fear or disgust. Both, maybe. But she wasn’t shocked or disgusted. She might be only nineteen, but she’d had enough experience to know that life takes a turn here and there, and you could find yourself mired in circumstances you’d never believed you could get yourself into. “Did you find what you were looking for in the army?”

  “Not hardly. Three tours of duty—two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq.” He glanced at her. “One thing I learned in the army—you can’t undo a thing once it’s done.” He glanced in the rearview mirror. “Much as I’d like to.”

  Katrina nodded. “I do know that.” She felt a nervous quiver in her belly and she unconsciously smoothed her apron. “So now you’re back on a farm. A moss farm.”

  “It’s better to grow things than to destroy them.”

  Something about the slant of his jaw, the set of his shoulders, told her there was much more there than that. She used a trick she’d learned long ago with her sisters—especially effective with Ruthie, who could be tight-lipped—of simply being quiet to let someone talk. After a few more blocks of silence, and as he turned up the hilly driveway that led to Moss Hill, she realized he might be the first who could out-quiet her. “I’m a good listener,” she finally said.

  “I don’t talk about it that much.”

  She gave him a sideways grin. “Still, I am a good listener.”

  He glanced at her, then had to focus on the road. “Yeah? Why is that?”

  She shifted, wiggled a foot, crossed her arms. “Everyone has a story to tell. Everyone.”

  Andy pulled the horse to a stop at the hitching post by the barn. He turned to face Katrina and said, “You know what I can’t stop thinking about? What really got to me was that last thing your dad said: ‘Awake my soul. That wakefulness is the first thing.’ He was looking right at me when he said that, like he meant it just for me.” He tilted his head. “What do you think he meant by that?”

  “I guess . . . I don’t know.”

  He propped his elbow on the window ledge and started talking then, telling her about his tours of duty, how he was given specialized training to find deposits of natural gas and petroleum and how, once, he barely escaped death in a flaring accident.

  She told him about the accident that took her mother’s life, and very nearly hers. Rain kept falling and they kept talking. When she talked, Andy’s attention was quiet, his face turned toward hers as he listened. It was almost an hour later that Katrina spied the time on the little battery-operated buggy clock. The poor horse! Standing in the rain all that time. “Oh, wow. You’d better get back to Windmill Farm to fetch Thelma before she wonders what happened to you. And I’d better get supper started.”

  “Would you let Keeper out to relieve? He’s in my room, curled up on the bed, no doubt.”

  She nodded as she closed the buggy door and hurried away, though she couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder as she ran toward the barn to let poor Keeper out. Andy waved, watching her.

  She waved back.

  Resting an elbow on the dresser top in his daughters’ room that night, David smiled softly, listening to the twins’ rationale about why they needed to keep a light on throughout the night. Lydie said that she needed it on to find the bathroom. Emily said she needed it on in case she woke up and needed to read.

  “What’s the real reason?”

  Lydie and Emily looked at each other and said, in unison as if they had rehearsed it, “We’re afraid of the dark.”

  “Ah, I see.” He decided to leave the light on for now. “Don’t forget that God made the night as well as the day. There is no dark so deep that you can’t still see God, if you try.”

  He went downstairs to the living room to read. Ruthie was curled up by the fireplace, her nose in a book. Loving books was one of the things they had in common, and he gave her permission to go to the library as often as she liked. Unlike Anna had done, he never censored anything she read. Ruthie, he’d observed, had enough sense of her own to know what was worth filling her mind with and what wasn’t.

  The kitchen door squeaked open, fell shut. Jesse was home from the youth gathering. He popped his head around the corner to say hello and good night, then went straight up to his room. The rain that had let up during supper began again, softly against the roof at first, and then a steady drumming. When the grandfather clock in the hallway struck nine, David put his book away and locked the house. Upstairs, he paused to check on the twins and noticed that the light was still on. He went in to turn it off.

  In these moments his love for his children swelled. Emily’s skin was warm and damp; she stirred and opened her eyes, then settled back into her dreams. “Sweet girl,” David whispered, and covered her.

  “Dad?” Lydie whispered from across the room. “I tried to see God in the dark but it didn’t work.”

  He knelt down beside her bed and looked into her big hazel eyes. “You don’t have to see a visible face. You can feel God’s presence, a feeling that everything is going to be all right.” He stroked Lydie’s hair until her eyes closed and he knew she had drifted off to sleep. He went across the hallway to check on Molly and found her sound asleep with her flashlight still on. He turned it off and set it on her night table. In the hallway, he closed Molly’s door gently.

  “Whatcha doing?” Ruthie asked, wandering upstairs from the living room. She had her finger in a book and that sleepy look that came from reading.

  “Just listening to the rain.”

  Ruthie padded down the hallway to her room and shut the door behind her. David stood for a minute in the rain-echoing hallway, moved by the great responsibility he felt for his children. He searched for a way to express the fullness in his heart but couldn’t find the words for the overwhelming love he felt for these six blessings. Surely for the ten thousandth time, he silently thanked God for the gift of fatherhood.

  And on the heels of that prayer came the yearning for things David missed—sharing a moment like this with a partner. A wife.

  7

  The spring was gone in Hank Lapp’s step. He hunched over to where Jesse was working on a buggy—the first time Hank had actually stuck around long enough at the buggy shop to teach Jesse something about buggies, but he was distracted and irritable and moody. More than usual. “What’s got you so discombobulated?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Hank said, his wide forehead crinkling in confusion.

  “Agitated. Disquieted. In a dither.”

  Hank nodded, but he still looked confused. “The weather. Thought it was going to rain.” He peered at the gray clouds in the sky. “Always promising, never delivering. That’s what I keep telling Edith.” He spun around to frown at Jesse. “She doesn’t want to get married.”

  “To you?” Jesse was incredulous.

  “YES. Me.”

  “Did she give her reasons as to why she’s r
efusing you?” Jesse could think of dozens. Hundreds.

  Hank tugged his ear thoughtfully. “She says things are just fine the way they are. And if I keep pestering her about it, she says she’ll have to break things off with me. She’s done it before.” He shook his head mournfully. “I might’ve poked a hornet’s nest.” He whistled softly, as he sometimes did in moments of crisis. “This is very bad, very bad.” He frowned. “I must seem like a crazy old codger.”

  “Nonsense! You had perfectly sound sense to hire me.”

  “So what am I going to do?”

  “Hank, I have had considerable experience in matters of the heart.” Jesse leaned forward. “Ignore Edith. Give her the cold shoulder. Drives women crazy. It works every time.”

  Fern snorted and Jesse jumped. That woman had a terrifying habit of materializing out of nowhere. “As if you should be the one giving advice to the lovelorn. Mim Schrock won’t give you the time of day.”

  How insulting! And what could Fern Lapp possibly know of Jesse’s temporary setback with Miriam Schrock? Were a man’s private affairs of the heart not sacred in this town? Mindful of his manners, Jesse stifled his outrage and politely asked her what she might recommend.

  “Yes, what do you suggest, Fern?” Hank asked. “I’m listening.”

  She had her answer ready, along with a slight smile. “Women like kindness. Sweet gestures.”

  The two watched her trail away, considering her words. Hank looked at Jesse. “Could be a trick.”

  Freeman, Levi, Deacon Abraham, and David met together at the store on Monday morning, after Sunday’s church service at Windmill Farm. They had about an hour before the store opened. David made fresh-brewed coffee and poured himself and Abraham a cup, waiting to hear why Freeman felt such an urgency for a meeting today.

  “David, you’ve complained that you’re not involved in decisions, so I wanted to get you up to speed on something.”