Seeds of Hope

by Barbara Cameron

  “In the mail?”

  He nodded.

  “Seems to me that a person should do that sort of thing in person. Break things off in person, I mean.” Miriam walked to the sink and set a pitcher under the tap. After it was filled, she set it on the table and put another in the sink. She got ice cubes from the refrigerator freezer and dropped them into the pitchers. “Seems pretty coldhearted to do it by mail.”

  “I had a friend whose fiancée broke up with him by text.”

  “By text,” she repeated. “By sending a message over the phone?”

  “Yes.”

  Miriam shook her head. “That is wrong.”

  Mark shrugged. “Sometimes people just can’t face giving bad news.”

  “It’s cold. Just so cold.”

  He watched her shiver. An ice cube slipped through her fingers and skittered across the floor. She bent to pick it up and held it in her hand for a moment, studying it.

  “I tried it on.”

  “What?”

  She looked at him as she dumped the melting ice cube into the sink. “I tried on the ring. I wondered what it would feel like. Englisch women love them so, don’t they?”

  “Well, some of them do.” He shrugged.

  Miriam stared at her hands and chuckled. “Tiffany has thinner fingers than I do. It got stuck.”

  “Tiffany’s thin. All over.” He frowned. “Too thin.”

  “Can an Englisch woman be too thin? Seems to me they like that.”

  “Absolutely. I didn’t think it was healthy, the way she obsessed over her weight. We argued. Oh well, someone else’s problem now.”

  “I’m sorry. You deserve someone who loves you.”

  Mark stared at her. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  Miriam broke their gaze, reaching for a dish towel to wipe the bottom of a pitcher. “Well, I mean it.” She carried the pitcher to the table, then returned to the sink to lift the other pitcher and wipe the bottom. “I should get these outside,” she said without looking at him. But she didn’t move. “You know, I don’t even know what she looked like. You never showed me a picture of her.”

  “No? I thought I had.” He pulled his cell phone out and tapped the screen. “Here.”

  She leaned closer. “She’s pretty.”

  Mark turned the phone so he could study the photo. And then he sent the picture to the phone’s trash bin.

  “Well,” Miriam said. “I guess that means it’s over. I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks.” He picked up one of the pitchers. “We should get these outside before everyone goes back to the fields.”

  His grandfather gave him a curious look when he returned to the table, but he didn’t say anything. Miriam walked around pouring more cold water for those who wanted it.

  Mark couldn’t keep his eyes off her. The way she’d expressed her outrage over the way Tiffany had broken up with him touched him. But there was something more going on. It seemed . . . that there was more than friendship in the way she’d told him he deserved more, deserved better. There had been something more emotional, an intensity in those beautiful blue eyes of hers.

  No, he was imagining it because he was feeling so down, so rejected.

  If he were honest with himself, he had to admit Tiffany had been slipping away from him before he’d been told to take some time off from the job. He’d blamed it on her being involved with planning the wedding but . . .

  He’d been so busy with work he hadn’t noticed as he should have. Too much time, too much attention went into work. His father had done just the same, and Mark had been so determined not to follow in his footsteps. But he’d done it.

  After all, his mother never complained. She had her own job, her own interests. And as much as he loved her, he could also admit that she enjoyed the luxuries his father’s high paying job brought in. So, too, Tiffany had enjoyed his ability to take her to the popular places she wanted to go.

  But in the circles she ran in, there were other men who could do the same.

  And they didn’t have a cloud hanging over their head the way he did right now.

  As if to echo his thoughts, a rumble sounded overhead. Clouds were forming, obscuring the blue sky. Rain, the curse of harvests, was coming. The men took a last, hurried drink, tossed down their paper napkins, and headed back to the fields.

  “We’ll finish,” his grandfather assured him as he got up. “We have a good hour before the rain starts and we’re nearly done.”

  If anyone knew the weather, his grandfather did. But Mark didn’t linger. He thanked the women for lunch and followed the other men into the fields.

  As always, the work helped chase thoughts of pain and rejection from his mind. The men got in the last of the crop just as the first raindrops hit.

  Now thunder boomed instead of rumbling. Rain began pelting down. The men led the horses off the field, hitched up their buggies, and headed for home. Mark heard a loud crash off in the distance just as he reached the barn doors.

  “I saw a flash of lightning over yonder, at the King place,” John yelled over the noise of the storm as they stood in the door of the barn. “Hope it didn’t hit.”

  But the plume of smoke that rose in the air said that it did. Without speaking, they hitched up the buggy and raced over to the King farm.

  Saul and his sons had already led their horses outside to safety and were hosing the barn down when they arrived. A fire truck pulled in and fire fighters directed big hoses that streamed water on the blaze.

  But the barn was half-gone before they had the blaze out.

  “Old buildings like this go up quick,” Mark heard someone say.

  “Reckon we know what we’ll be doing on Saturday,” someone else said.

  Mark had been thinking about heading into Philadelphia for a day or two to check on his place, talk to Tiffany, and see how the private investigator was doing.

  Well, he was actually just wanting some time in the city. But now he’d be staying here, helping the men to rebuild the barn for the King family.

  Much as he’d enjoyed using his weak carpentry skills at a barn raising—something he’d done just once, but had enjoyed—he sighed.

  “It’s a shame, for schur,” his grandfather said at his side.

  Mark didn’t tell him the real reason he’d sighed. “Sure is.”

  “Well, nothing else we can do here now. Let’s head home.”

  They hadn’t fought the fire, but as they climbed into the buggy Mark could smell smoke on their clothes. Both of them were silent when they reached their own barn and unhitched the buggy. The King place wasn’t that far away. It could have been their barn that had been hit.

  Their gazes locked. “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” John said simply.

  Mark hadn’t seen or heard anger from the King men as the blaze was fought. He wasn’t so sure he could have stood there, stoic, if it had been his property that burned.

  Instead, the Kings had taken what had happened with grace and acceptance.

  He’d once had the bumper dented on the BMW by a distracted driver and had a fit.

  Life here sure was different.

  Fourteen

  Miriam watched the men building a new barn for the King family and heard Fannie Mae sigh.

  She turned to her friend. “Why the sigh?”

  “The men get to have the fun.” Fannie Mae set a big platter of cold fried chicken down on the wooden table with a thump.

  “Fun?”

  “They’re having a lot more fun climbing around up there hammering than we are preparing the food.”

  Miriam grinned. “I never thought about it that way. Looks like hard work to me. And I don’t much like heights.”

  She shaded her eyes with her hand and watched Mark climb around on a high beam with ease. He’d helped build a barn just once before, but he seemed to be in his element. He was dressed like the other men, in a plain blue shirt, dark pants, and a wide brimmed straw
hat, but she had no trouble picking him out from the other men.

  He was a handsome man, so tall and strong, a tool belt slung at his hips like a Western gunslinger. She and Naomi had secretly exchanged a Western romance once that Naomi had bought in town. The hero on the cover was a sheriff holding a woman dressed in a long, old-fashioned gown in a romantic embrace. His face hovered over the woman’s as if he was about to kiss her . . .

  Suddenly warm, Miriam waved her hand at her face. “Let’s get the rest of the food out here and serve. The men must be getting hungry by now. They’ve been working for hours.”

  She wrinkled her nose. The smell of burned wood hung in the humid summer air.

  “I’m thankful no one was hurt when lightning struck the barn,” Fannie Mae said as they walked back to the house. “Saul says one of the horses nearly trampled him as he ran to get it out.”

  Miriam cast a last glance at Mark up on the top rafters of the barn, then walked with Fannie Mae back into the house. She was really quite happy with her role as a maedel and wouldn’t have wanted to be anything else. Women in the community still did most of the caring for kinner. They still were most often chosen as teachers in schul, although she corresponded with some male Amish teachers. And men didn’t get to have boppli.

  What could be better than that?

  The day passed in a busy haze of serving the meal, pouring endless glasses of water and lemonade and tea, and cleaning up afterward. She enjoyed her days teaching more than the days spent in summer “vacation,” but both parts of her life had a comforting pattern to them, a seasonal regularity. It was the cycle of life here and she’d never had a desire for the kind of life Mark and other Englisch she knew experienced in their world.

  Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Sometimes she’d wanted to be Englisch so she could go to college . . . see what Mark’s world was like.

  Did he think she was boring? Sometimes she’d wondered why he talked to her when he had so much more education than she did. After all, he’d gone to college, traveled, met so many different people. But he’d never made her feel she lacked anything.

  He didn’t linger after the long day was over, but left clutching his cell phone in his hand and wearing a frown as he read the display on his way to his car.

  She had the feeling it wasn’t good news he was reading.

  The next morning, she was back in the kitchen garden, supervising her schweschders as they weeded and harvested late summer vegetables for market day. The day went by swiftly as she moved from the garden to canning and preserving vegetables and fruit just hours from the rich soil.

  A glance at the kitchen clock had her shifting again to cooking a simple meal and packing it up for John and Mark. Before she left, she went upstairs to her room, splashed water on her face, and toweled it off. Then she changed out of her workday dress into a favorite one of cornflower blue. Her kerchief came off, a freshly pressed kapp got pinned on.

  She stared at her reflection. She didn’t think of her looks often, but when she did at times like now, she thought she looked average. Many Amish maedels had a similar look. After all, their ancestors were strong stock from Germany, Holland, and Switzerland, and settled here in Pennsylvania, met and married others from the same ancestry. Add clothing of a similar pattern and design dictated by the Ordnung, the written and unwritten rules of the Amish, and ya, there was a similarity of appearance.

  She sighed. Oh, well. There was nothing wrong with that. Everyone was here for a common purpose, a common goal of being one, of being a community.

  And now she had a purpose: to take supper to John and Mark as she did many afternoons. It was a pleasure to help John since it was harder for him to get around these past months. And it hadn’t been an easy thing for him to pick up cooking for himself after his fraa died. He hadn’t given in to the pressure he’d confessed he felt from the bishop to remarry. Most here felt there were fewer problems if there were married couples, instead of a lot of unattached widows and widowers or young single men and women.

  Her fingers stilled on the covering pins she was using to secure her kapp. Marriage schur wasn’t in the imminent future when she didn’t even date.

  It was her own fault, of course. Not when they had to measure up to Mark. With a sigh, she turned from the mirror and went downstairs.

  “I’m taking supper over to John’s,” she told her mother as she lifted the wicker basket she’d packed.

  Sarah turned from the stove and frowned. “Your dat just took the buggy. He’ll be back in a half hour.”

  “I can walk. It isn’t that heavy.” And it was a short walk on a nice day. “I’ll be back soon to help you with supper and the kinner.”

  As she walked, she couldn’t help noticing how more and more of the fields had been harvested. It wouldn’t be long now before the hard work of harvest would be over. Would Mark stay after the need for him passed? Any day his firm could call him back.

  The thought of him leaving weighed on her, making her steps slow and the basket heavy.

  Sometimes she wished she could go back to those early summers when he’d come to help his grandfather. They’d had long talks catching up on each other’s lives since they’d seen each other the previous summer.

  Miriam always loved hearing about his studies. The schools he attended were so different from hers in the one room schul. He attended classes with students his age, not a mixture of all ages like hers. His day sounded like a whirlwind filled with subjects they didn’t even study here, like science, although she was schur glad she hadn’t ever had to dissect a frog. Why would you want to do that? They were so much fun to watch as they hopped from one lily pad to another and to listen to as they called to each other on warm summer nights when the windows were wide open for the breeze.

  And Mark traveled—he’d even gone to France and Italy during holiday break one year.

  “My mom insisted we go on a gondola ride in Venice,” he’d told her as they sat on a quilt on the grassy slope of a pond at a park.

  She’d packed a picnic lunch of the fried chicken she’d learned to make this past year, and it must have turned out pretty gut because he’d eaten three pieces. On the other hand, he and all the men who worked so hard in the fields had hearty appetites.

  “Tell me about Venice,” she’d prompted. “I saw pictures of it in a book I borrowed from the library.”

  “It’s too bad you couldn’t go instead of me,” he’d said ruefully. “My parents say they want to expose me to history and they say it started in Europe.”

  “They’re right. That’s where our ancestors came from, after all. So come on, it must have been a thrill to see something of another country.”

  “Yeah, it was, even when I couldn’t understand the language and when they insisted I try food I’d never seen. Imagine eating octopus and snails and eel. I gotta tell you, it was weird. Just plain weird.”

  She laughed at the face he made. “Nee, I can’t imagine.”

  He made light of those times, but as he got older, she saw that his education and travels had made him into the man he was now: smart, polished, and successful.

  Would she have been as interested in reading so much after she graduated if she hadn’t wanted to keep up with him when they talked all those summers? Because he was interested in talking to her in a way the local boys weren’t. She and Mark talked about more than this small part of the world in which she lived.

  Last summer, his visit hasn’t been long—his work at the law firm didn’t give him much time off—but he’d taken her for a picnic, and that’s when he told her about the woman he’d met, fallen in love with, and asked to marry him.

  And when he left, the last of her golden summers with the boy she loved had ended.

  Mark sat on the side of his bed and stared at his running shoes. They sat on the floor next to the dresser, silently accusing him.

  He hadn’t gone for his morning run since the day he’d come here.

  The Amish didn’t g
o for morning runs. They got enough exercise working hard every day whether they farmed or worked in other businesses. Running was an Englisch habit—one he embraced. He loved the way he felt when he ran and missed it. Sure, he could have kept it up while he was here. But he rose well before the sun was up and worked a day so long and hard that it had taken weeks before he’d adjusted to the manual labor of harvesting.

  And he sure hadn’t needed or wanted any more exercise at the end of the work day. It wasn’t long after supper that he found himself nodding off when he tried to read or talk to his grandfather. He turned in early and fell asleep the instant his head hit the pillow.

  So there was no going for a run or even a long walk. But already he could see and feel the difference in his body from the hard physical labor, and he sure hadn’t been someone who’d let himself go soft behind a desk.

  So he left his shoes there, laced up his work boots, and started out of the room. As he did, his glance fell on the small velvet box on top of the dresser.

  What did a man do with an engagement ring? He didn’t have any friends who’d gone through a broken engagement and had their ring returned. Did jewelry stores have a return policy? Somehow he doubted it. Rings were bought brand new. He remembered the outrageous amount of money he’d spent. The salesman had been so unctuous with advice on how much to spend—apparently there was a formula based on how much a man made.

  He touched the box. He had savings to protect himself, but maybe he should look into selling the ring somewhere. Just exactly where, he had no idea. eBay? Craigslist?

  Well, that was a thought for later. For now, it was time to start his day the Amish way. Caring for the horses and other farm animals. Eating a huge breakfast of eggs and bacon. Both of them managed to cook breakfast fairly decently and there would be biscuits or homemade sweet rolls Miriam dropped off periodically. Breakfast here was a meal that was a far cry from the bagel and coffee he usually grabbed from a drive-through on his way to the office.

  He still felt he had one foot in the Amish world and one in the Englisch, especially when he worked all day as a farmer, then took a drive in his BMW. How long would he be in limbo?