Loving Mariah

by Beverly Bird

  “Mariah—”

  “I’ll unhitch the horse for you, Miz Fisher,” Nathaniel said.

  She turned away from Adam to look at the boy. And Adam knew in that moment that the road behind him had been blocked. There was no turning around, no going back. All he could do was face the fork.

  A sudden wind screamed across the nearest open pasture. It tugged at her hair, pulling a strand free. And he wanted to touch it, to tuck it back into place for her, and there was no use in pretending he didn’t.

  “What, Adam?” She looked at him again. “You were saying something?”

  “Nothing,” he said hoarsely. “Never mind.”

  A door on the milking barn slid open with a sharp squeak. Sugar Joe came out, stomping his feet a little on a mat outside the door. “Hello!” he called out. He eyed the carriage as he passed it, chuckling. “Abe’s?”

  “Yes,” Mariah agreed softly.

  “Must be sweet on you. He’s outdone himself this time.”

  Mariah blushed to the roots of her hair. She looked quickly at Adam, as though pleading with him not to make another scene about it. He felt ashamed all over again.

  “Come on,” Joe said. “Sarah’s waiting.”

  They started across the road. And then Adam felt Mariah’s cold hand slide into his. She squeezed. Because, he thought, she was that kind of woman. No matter what had gone between them in the past hour, she knew and understood what he felt upon walking through that door.

  Adam didn’t trust himself to speak. He squeezed back.

  They went inside, through a glass-enclosed porch to another, more solid door. Inside he saw large, sprawling rooms to both the right and left of the entry. But the house was surprisingly narrow. A door directly across from them led outside again. There was another off to the right of that, and the smells and sounds coming from there told him it was the kitchen.

  His attention returned to the back door.

  It was ajar, and three kids were gathered around a pump just outside in the yard. A girl of about eleven worked the handle vigorously. Two boys jostled each other, thrusting their hands quickly under the splashing icy water to make it spray. The girl shrieked when she got wet from their shenanigans.

  One was the dark-haired boy Mariah had passed the note to on Sunday. The other was Bo.

  Adam’s heart simply stopped. He found himself holding on to Mariah’s hand hard enough to crush her bones. Then his heart finally moved again. It crowded up into his throat and he could hear nothing over its roar. His every muscle hardened to granite as he steeled himself against going out there, against grabbing his son and holding him for his own.

  He finally tore his eyes away and found Joe watching him. The man gave a slow, understanding nod and went to the back door.

  “Too cold to be swimming in it, boys,” he called out. “Let Grace have a turn at it, will you?”

  The boys backed up from the spigot, but when Bo turned away, the dark-haired boy slapped a hand through the tumbling water one last time, splashing his back. Bo veered about again and tumbled on top of him, fists pummeling.

  “Matthew’s eight,” Mariah explained in a careful undertone. “They’re close enough in age that they’re generally in trouble together.”

  “What one doesn’t think of, the other does,” Joe muttered, stepping outside the door this time. “Enough!” he bellowed, and the fists went still. Two heads popped up to eye him warily. “We have company. Can you pretend to be civilized?”

  “Yes, sir,” Matthew muttered.

  Bo nodded reluctantly.

  Sugar Joe grabbed the back of each small jacket and pulled the boys to their feet. “You’ve each got two minutes to get to your room, change into dry shirts and get back to the table.”

  The boys pushed past him and bolted up the stairs. The girl—Grace, Joe had called her—came in behind her father and crowded close to his back. She smiled shyly at Mariah and tried hard not to stare at Adam.

  Adam barely noticed. His heart was pounding too hard for sense now. The silence seemed to hang on interminably.

  “It’s the crazy anner Satt Leit,” Matthew blurted. He had changed his shirt in record time and came back to stand on the stairs, a little out of breath. A moment later, Bo joined him.

  Bo said nothing, nothing at all.

  He didn’t frown. He didn’t smile. He seemed lost in deep, profound thought. A little wrinkle appeared between his eyes. Adam wondered if they all would have stood like that indefinitely if a small, dark woman with chocolate eyes hadn’t come bustling in from the kitchen.

  “You’re here!” She seemed nervous. “Take their coats, Joe. Where are your manners? Did you meet everyone, Mr. Wallace? Gracie and Matthew and Noah? Dinah—our oldest girl—is helping me with dinner. And Nathaniel—”

  “He took our horse for us,” Adam said quietly, trying to put her at ease. “He’s a fine boy, Mrs. Lapp.”

  She seemed to relax a little. She gave a fleeting but genuine smile. “Yes, he is. Thank you. And he’s growing up so quickly, too. He spends an awful lot of time in Berks now, with Joe’s family.” She broke off. “I’m babbling, aren’t I? Well. I’ve got roast.”

  Mariah seemed to shiver a little deliberately. “I haven’t had that in a very long time.”

  “It’s difficult to make it right with only one chicken. That’s what I’ve found. It just doesn’t taste the same unless you make it for a crowd. This is some I saved from the last big batch I made for Gemeesunndaag.”

  Adam noticed that Sarah answered without looking at Mariah, but her response was clearly to her comment. It was an ingenious compromise, and in that moment Adam thought the world of Sarah Lapp, too. Her father, the deacon, could have been planted in the keeping room, watching them, and he would not have been able to chastise her for breaking Mariah’s Meidung. Yet already she had managed to make Mariah feel welcome and part of the gathering.

  “It’s chicken and stuffing,” Mariah explained, glancing at Adam. He looked at her blankly. “Roast,” she clarified. “It’s chicken and stuffing in a casserole.”

  He didn’t think it sounded extraordinarily appetizing, but he wasn’t here for the food.

  Her hand was still tucked in his. It was warm now.

  “How come you were watching us play hockey?” Bo demanded suddenly.

  Adam looked back at the stairs and searched for his voice. “Well, I like it.” And then he wondered if he had ever come up with a more inane response in his life.

  Bo, however, was satisfied. He nodded.

  “He cheats,” Matthew muttered.

  “Do not.” Bo elbowed him.

  “Do, too.”

  Adam found his voice again. “I never saw him cheat.”

  “He shoots goals when nobody’s looking,” Matthew complained.

  “You oughta be looking.” Bo looked at Adam again. “Do you like to play, mister? Is that why you watch us so much?”

  Adam shook his head. “Uh, no.” He wasn’t sure which question he was answering. The first seemed safer. “I never tried it.”

  “He likes baseball,” Mariah said quietly.

  Adam felt his heart kick and he looked at her. She had seen an opportunity to throw out a line, he realized, some unobtrusive, idle comment that might make Bo remember something. He was overwhelmingly grateful, because he couldn’t seem to think clearly enough at the moment to manage such a thing himself. But he saw in her eyes that it pained her deeply, that she’d had to force herself.

  In that moment he understood everything as clearly as he knew his own name—her strange behavior on the morning after Joe had come to the schoolhouse, some of her tension tonight. When this was over, when Bo remembered enough, they would go. And she didn’t want that She didn’t want him to leave.

  His heart staggered. The truth slammed into him. He wondered how much more he could be expected to deal with tonight. He felt swamped, overwhelmed, and touched in a place that scared him. Bo was saying something and his heart was trying to
go that way and pay attention to him. But Mariah’s eyes were haunted and he wanted to hold her, too, needed to tell her why he had to go before this could get any worse.

  “Baseball?” Matthew repeated.

  “What?” Adam asked vacantly.

  “You play baseball? We do that in the summer. Noah’s good at that, too. He’s good at everything.” This time Matthew elbowed Bo. But it seemed to Adam that there was a good bit of pride in his voice. His heart spasmed.

  Bo would miss this boy when he took him away, he realized.

  “Mama, I took everything out of the oven,” another girl said, coming out of the kitchen.

  “This is my Dinah,” Sarah said quietly, watching every proceeding with sad, dark eyes.

  Sugar Joe returned from the keeping room where he had put their coats. “Dinah, Matt, Gracie and Noah all go to school with Miss Fisher,” he explained for Adam’s benefit. “Nathaniel finished several years ago, so he never had her.”

  “They’re looking at another application,” Sarah burst out suddenly.

  This time she stared determinedly at a ceiling beam. At first Adam didn’t understand, but he noticed Mariah lose some color. Then it came to him—the deacons were actively looking for another teacher.

  Helpless anger washed over him.

  “I overheard it at my parents’ house,” Sarah went on, her skin flaming. “I think it’s supposed to be a secret.”

  “Why don’t you just say you were wrong, Miz Fisher?” Bo demanded suddenly. He looked near tears. “Then they’ll let you stay.”

  Mariah moved to the banister. Her face was pale. “Because that would be a lie.”

  “You’re not sorry?” He scowled. “But they make you so sad!”

  “I’m not sorry for learning,” she explained. “No, not for that. For hurting people, for doing it too late, certainly.”

  “Well, maybe you could just say that.”

  “It wouldn’t be enough, Noah. They’d want more.” She looked at Sugar Joe again, then at Adam, trying to put on a brave front. “It’s always been inevitable. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I always knew that.”

  “That doesn’t make things like this easier,” Sarah blurted, her eyes shining a little now, and they all knew she was talking about Bo this time.

  “Mama, I’m hungry,” Matthew complained, and the moment was broken.

  “And I’m the queen of England,” Sarah replied, finally smiling, running a trembling finger beneath her eye. “Who stole those eggs I put on the table earlier?”

  “But roast is special,” Matthew confided in Adam as they went into the kitchen. “Mostly we only get it on Church Sundays. I’m always hungry for that.”

  So, Adam thought, Sarah had pulled out all the stops for this. He was touched and his heart hurt for her, that she had put on a special dinner in honor of giving up a child she’d come to love.

  She caught him, coming up beside him just before they sat down. Her eyes were pleading. “Mr. Wallace,” she whispered.

  “Adam. Just Adam.” His voice was tight.

  She whispered so no one else would hear. “I need to ask. Could you...would you bring him back to visit once in a while when this is...done?”

  He couldn’t answer.

  Everything crammed in his throat, and if he had allowed himself to, he knew he could have unburdened himself to this woman with the deep brown compassionate eyes. He could have poured everything out to her, why he had to leave and why he had to stay away. He knew, once he told her, that she would understand. She had that kind of face. It possessed a weary kind of wisdom, an acceptance of life’s oddest quirks.

  “I’m not taking him tonight,” he said instead, and tried hard to remember a time when this issue had been simple, a black-and-white matter of just finding his kid and taking him home.

  The kitchen table was long enough to seat a small army. It was covered with a green-and-white checked cloth and a lantern hung from the ceiling above it. Sweeping butcher-block counters nearly encircled the room. Adam hadn’t been aware of being cold before, but here, in this room, he was warm. A wood stove gave off ample heat. There was a fireplace, too, and broad windows let in the falling night. A teapot stood on the stove, bursting with steam.

  The table was set with three places at one end. Then there was a small gap, and the remaining six plates sat a bit apart. But not, Adam noted, so far distant that conversation would be impossible. There were separate bowls of food.

  The kids went to one side, and Mariah moved to go with them. Far from seeming disturbed, she was glowing again. But Adam was uncomfortable with the situation, even as he knew it was for the best. No one could ask Sarah Lapp, the deacon’s daughter, to compromise more than she already had. And it was time, long past time, maybe even too late, to start putting some kind of distance between himself and Mariah Fisher.

  Damn it, he wasn’t her keeper, her champion, her guard dog, for God’s sake.

  Adam sat with Sarah at the other end of the table. Conversation billowed, burst, ebbed.

  “Eyes down,” Joe said, moving along the children’s end of the table toward his own seat at the head. Matthew kept staring at the casserole dish at that end. Joe planted a big palm on his crown and tilted his face downward. Matthew sighed.

  Joe sat and began a prayer. Something inside Adam stiffened in old habit and for a moment it was not Joe’s voice he heard but his own, old words he had prayed a long time ago, prayers that he had never gotten any answers to.

  Where were you when my mother was crying? Where were you when Dad was drinking and ranting? When Kimmie cringed behind the rocker to get away from him, so he picked it up and crashed it against the wall and got her anyway? Where were you when Jake sneaked into my bed, even though we were too old for that stuff, and he held on, crying, while the shouting and banging and the thud of flesh hitting flesh just kept on and on downstairs? I was supposed to be the older one, the smart one, but you wouldn’t tell me what to do, what to say to make it livable. So don’t tell me you care. Don’t tell me you love me. Because when something good came into my life, when my own kid grinned at me and laughed and I managed not to repeat the sins of my father, you took him away, too. You took everything that ever mattered, as though I was cursed from the moment I took my first breath, as though every one of us, every single Wallace, was beneath your attention.

  And then he realized that there was quiet, that Joe had finished. Adam looked up from his own sham of a prayer to realize that everyone was staring at him. For a horrible moment he wondered if he had spoken aloud.

  But the expressions were all curious, probably because he had taken so long to lift his head again. He glanced down the table, right into Bo’s eyes.

  His boy was back in his life. And the angel who had brought him was sitting beside him, and what did that say for unanswered prayers?

  For a moment Adam simply sat, unable to think. There was a coiling tension in his head, right behind his eyes, and around his heart. Then Sarah handed him one of the casseroles.

  Joe nodded at Mariah, who was busy heaping food on the little ones’ plates. “She’s the best teacher that school ever had,” he said quietly. “I hate to see this happen.”

  Sarah’s eyes came up from her plate. “Noah’s right, though,” she whispered. “The church has given her two years.” She shook her head helplessly. “If only she would just go to the deacons and beg their forgiveness, they’d give it. I know they would.”

  Joe smiled thinly. “But she’s right, too. She would only be committing another sin—one she can’t live with. She’d be lying, and she’d know it even if they didn’t.”

  “I don’t think they’d care if they did,” Sarah muttered, and that made Adam’s head hurt even more, that these anonymous deacons just wanted to make her crawl for defying their ways. They didn’t seem to particularly care what was in her heart.

  “You went to school, too, didn’t you?” Adam asked suddenly, looking at Joe. There was something about him, s
ome hint of worldliness and wisdom, or maybe it was his not entirely simple vocabulary. “Didn’t you?” he repeated.

  “Just high school,” Joe admitted. “Where I come from, that’s not frowned upon. And I did it before I was rebaptized here.”

  Contradictions. Rules. They infuriated Adam.

  “They—the deacons—are starting to realize they’re not going to break her,” Joe added, turning the conversation back to Mariah.

  “I could have told them that.” Sarah sighed. “She’s so stubborn. So strong.”

  “They’re about ready to give up on her,” Joe went on. “And that means returning to the fine line of their principles. They’ve edged over them a bit to let her teach.” He paused. “Noah, if those potatoes leave your plate, you’re cleaning them up and going to your room.”

  “Busted,” Adam muttered under his breath, watching his son slowly lower the spoonful he had been about to catapult across the table at Matthew. And then, as though he had heard Adam, Bo looked at him and grinned.

  “They splat good,” he informed him.

  “I know,” Adam answered, his heart chugging again.

  Bo’s eyes widened then got suspicious. “How?”

  “I’ve splatted a few of my own.”

  Something like respect touched his face. “Did your pa make you clean it up?”

  Adam decided not to get into what Edward Wallace had done on the rare occasions when he had been present, at all. “He wasn’t happy.”

  “Who’d you splat at?”

  “My brother.” Kimmie, he reflected, had been an infant at that point. There had been a good ten years between them.

  “Is he bigger than you?” Bo asked. “Your brother?”

  “He’s taller, but I’m stronger. Maybe. A little.”

  “Me, too,” Matthew announced. “I’m stronger than he is.”

  “No, you ain’t” Bo argued.