At Home in Pleasant Valley

by Marta Perry

  “Okay, I will.” Funny, how easy it was to fall back into an English way of speaking.

  “Great.” Rosemary gave her a quick hug. “See you later.”

  Maybe Rosemary just wanted someone to talk to, but that didn’t really matter. Anna had found a friend, and she hadn’t even realized that she needed one.

  • • •

  Anna stood on the back porch, Gracie in her arms, watching the family gathered in the backyard for the picnic. With the meal over, adults settled in their seats to talk, while the children, too restless to wait for the cake and ice cream, chased each other around the yard or lined up for turns at cranking the handle of the ice cream maker.

  Once again Anna had that dizzying sensation of seeing them as an outsider did. Who were they, these people who dressed so strangely and spoke a different language? That was what an outsider would see.

  An outsider would see her as one of them. Same clothes, same language, same mannerisms—quiet, unassuming, humble. No outsider could look at her heart and know what was happening there. Sometimes even she couldn’t.

  Gracie tugged at Anna’s kapp string, one of her favorite occupations. Anna caught the chubby little hand and kissed it, making Gracie laugh. Certainty settled in her.

  What she felt or didn’t feel at this moment didn’t matter. The only important consideration was keeping Gracie safe.

  “Anna, you’re keeping that beautiful boppli to yourself, ain’t so?” Mahlon’s Esther hurried up the porch steps, Mahlon close behind her. “Let me put these dishes in the kitchen, and then I want to take her.” She paused to coo at Gracie. “She remembers Aunt Esther, don’t you, little schnickelfritz?”

  Gracie babbled something incomprehensible, clasping her hands and then stretching them up, as if ready to fly out of Anna’s arms.

  Anna was swept with the need to hold her close. Don’t be so eager to fly away, little bird. You need your mammi still.

  Would she ever feel ready to let Gracie go? Somehow she doubted it.

  Mahlon held out his hands to Gracie. “Come and see me, little one.”

  Gracie hesitated for a moment, giving him a coy smile. Then she lunged into his arms. Laughing, he lifted her over his head, making her shriek with glee.

  “Careful,” Anna warned. “She just had her supper. You don’t want applesauce and mashed potatoes all over you. Maybe I should take her.”

  Mahlon settled Gracie high in his arms. “You’re just jealous because she wants Uncle Mahlon now. I’ll look after her.” Before Anna could answer, he marched off the porch with the baby.

  Gracie would be fine with him. Maybe Mahlon didn’t know a lot about babies yet, but he wasn’t the careless boy he’d been. He was a grown man, perfectly capable of watching Gracie. Probably he and Esther would be starting a family of their own before long.

  Anna should be helping Myra bring out the birthday cake instead of standing here worrying. She headed for the kitchen, her thoughts flickering to the girl she’d been. That girl had never taken responsibility for a thing, if she could help it. She couldn’t have imagined how she’d feel as a parent.

  “Anna, look at the cake Leah brought.” Myra was cutting thick slabs of chocolate cake. “Barbara brought snitz pies. Maybe get that cream out to go with. And the birthday cake is all ready except for lighting the candle.”

  Nodding, Anna went to the propane refrigerator for the whipped cream. She had made the cake herself that morning, yellow cake with white frosting, trimmed with pink icing. She wasn’t good enough with icing to write Gracie’s name, but Gracie wouldn’t know.

  There would be no photos to hold the memory. The ban on cameras irked her, but then, she wasn’t likely to forget this day. “Shall I take coffee out then?”

  “Ja, that would be fine.” Myra looked up, her cheeks flushed. “Joseph looks gut tonight, ain’t so?” Her eyes grew concerned. “I was afraid he’d be too tired for this. You don’t think it’s too much for him, do you?”

  Anna glanced out the kitchen window. Joseph sat in the rocking chair they’d carried out for him, a pillow at his back to cushion the sore ribs and a footstool under his feet. He was deep in conversation with Samuel and Leah’s Daniel, young Matthew nearby listening in respectfully to his elders.

  “Joseph looks fine right now,” she said. “We can keep a close eye on him in case he starts getting tired.”

  “Ja, you’re right.” Myra shook her head. “I worry too much, but . . .” She hesitated, and Anna knew without more being said that she was thinking about the babe she was carrying and the test results she was still waiting for. “I’m glad you’re here, Anna. I don’t know what we’d do without you just now.”

  “I’m glad, too,” she said, picking up the coffeepot.

  To her surprise, that was true. The trouble with the car that had landed her at Joseph and Myra’s door seemed to have brought her to the right place at the right time. Whatever the future, she was here with them now.

  The future. She carried a tray with cups and coffeepot to the door, pushing the screen open with her hip. Let her mind go there, and it would start spinning again. With no money and no viable transportation, she couldn’t leave now if she wanted to.

  Samuel saw her coming. He jumped up to take the heavy tray from her, his fingers brushing hers. “I’ll carry that for you.”

  “Denke, Samuel.” She withdrew her hands quickly, afraid someone might see. Might comment.

  “He just wants you to hurry back for the cake and pies,” Joseph said, smiling. “He’s still hungry.”

  “I think you’re talking about yourself, Joseph,” Daniel put in. “A man needs plenty to eat when he’s recovering, ain’t so?”

  Joseph patted his lean stomach. “Wouldn’t hurt, I guess.”

  “There’s a piece of cake and pie with your name on them,” Anna assured him.

  She glanced around for Gracie, and found her sitting in the grass with Sarah. They both had small wooden toys their grossdaadi had carved for them—a duck for Sarah and a dog for Gracie. The end of the picnic table held a stack of other gifts for the birthday girl.

  Sarah held up the duck in front of Gracie’s face. “Quack, quack, duck.”

  “Quack,” Gracie parroted. Everyone laughed, and Daadi bent to pat her head.

  Heart full, Anna turned back to the kitchen for the birthday cake.

  When she came back out, the mood had changed. She sensed it the moment she approached the adults, reading it in the lowered voices and troubled faces.

  “What is it?” She put the tray of cake down.

  “Nothing,” Mahlon said quickly. “It’s nothing.”

  “Barbara was just telling us the gossip that’s going around,” Samuel said evenly, his gaze meeting hers.

  A surge of gratitude went through her. Samuel understood better than anyone that she’d rather know than guess.

  “What are they saying?” She stood stiffly at the end of the picnic table, feeling like the accused.

  Barbara’s normally ruddy cheeks were flushed even more. “Levi says I should have kept my mouth shut, and maybe he’s right. But that Mary Stoltzfus is just plain mean-spirited.”

  “Barbara . . .” Levi said.

  “Well, she is.” Barbara glanced at her boys, chasing each other around the oak tree. “Maybe because she had no kinder of her own, she always thinks she knows more than anyone. Well, she was wrong about our Anna, and I told her so right to her face, right there in Mueller’s store.”

  A mix of feelings roiled in Anna—surprise that Barbara had stood up for her mingled with annoyance that she’d done it in so public a place, along with anger at Mary Stoltzfus and her interfering.

  “What is she saying?” She managed to say the words evenly.

  Barbara’s color deepened to a dull brick shade. “That little Gracie is really your child, and that the r
est of the story is a pack of lies. And I said to her, ‘Mary Stoltzfus, you should be ashamed and on your knees in front of the congregation yourself. Elias Beiler himself saw the papers making Gracie our Anna’s adopted child, and the bishop is the one to know Anna’s heart, not you.’ That’s what I said, and I’d say it again.” She looked around, as if wanting someone to argue with her.

  Anna couldn’t say a thing. That Barbara, of all people, should be the one to spring to her defense—well, as Samuel had once pointed out to her, she’d never given Barbara much cause to like her. Her throat was almost too tight to speak, but she had to.

  “Denke, Barbara. Denke.”

  She’d have tried to say more, but Gracie picked that moment to take two wavering steps. Even before Anna could exclaim about it, Gracie suddenly seemed to realize what she was doing, wobbled, and fell onto her hands and knees. More surprised than hurt, she burst into tears.

  Daadi reached her before anyone else could. “There, there, little one.” He scooped her up in his arms, cradling her against his chest. “You’re all right, ain’t so? You’re just learning to walk. It takes a few tumbles to learn something new.”

  Gracie sniffled a time or two and smiled, with an effect like the sun coming from behind the clouds. She patted his beard. “Ga-da,” she announced proudly.

  “Ach, she’s trying to say grossdaadi, the little dear,” Esther said.

  Murmurs of agreement, of love, sounded. Daadi’s eyes were bright with tears as he smiled and kissed Gracie.

  Anna tried to swallow the lump in her throat. She wanted Gracie to be safe, and so she was. The family would give Gracie more than Anna ever could alone.

  And if, in the end, she decided they should leave, at least Gracie would have known their love.

  Longing welled up in her. Anna wanted to say something, do something, that would show what her heart couldn’t express.

  She thought of the car—two cars, really. A car had taken her away from them, and another had brought her back again. That was the car that was parked in the barn, mute cause of Joseph’s pain.

  She patted Gracie, secure in her grossdaadi’s arms. “Daadi, I think it’s time to get rid of the car. Do you know someone who would haul it away?”

  He nodded, his eyes bright, his expression telling her that he knew exactly what she was saying.

  “Ja, Anna. I will take care of it for you.” He clapped his hands, getting everyone’s attention. “Komm, it’s time we lit the candle on that birthday cake.”

  • • •

  Anna slipped out the back door into the dusk, much as she had when she’d been a teenager. Back then, she’d have been planning to hitch up Mamm’s buggy and go off to meet her friends, sometimes Amish but more often English.

  Now, she simply wanted a few minutes to herself—that, and to find the toy dog Daadi had carved for Gracie. Somehow in the midst of all the cleaning up, the toy hadn’t made it back into the house.

  She stepped down off the porch and switched on the flashlight she carried. She’d never find the small object in the grass without it. If the house had electric lights on the outside, as so many English farmhouses did, she could throw a switch and illuminate the whole area.

  The Amish dictum had usually been that if it runs on batteries and doesn’t depend on a connection to the power grid, it’s acceptable. With the advent of so many other battery-operated gadgets, from boom boxes to cell phones and iPods, the lines had to be drawn over and over again.

  She swept the flashlight beam across the yard in an arc. Could she get used to this way of life again?

  She could give up electric lights, she supposed. But could she give up her independence after all she had gone through to get it?

  The flashlight beam picked up a glimmer of white, and she stooped, but it was only a paper napkin, probably blown off the table.

  She wanted to give Gracie the best life possible. Was an Amish life the best for her? What about college, a profession, all the things that the outside world considered important? The more she thought about it, the more she felt as if her head would explode.

  “Have you lost something, Anna?” Samuel’s voice came out of the dark beyond the range of her light. She swung around, the beam striking his blue shirt, his tanned face.

  He put up a hand to shield his eyes from the glare, and she lowered the torch immediately.

  “I’m sorry. You startled me. I didn’t realize anyone was out here.”

  “Just making the rounds of the barn and henhouse,” he said, moving closer.

  “Don’t you need a light for that?”

  He gave a low chuckle. “It’s not dark out yet, Anna. Switch that off and let your eyes get used to it. You’ll see.”

  When she didn’t move, he put his hand over hers on the flashlight and turned it off. She began to protest, and he held up his hand.

  “Just wait.”

  They stood, not speaking. The rhythm of the evening settled over her—the rustle of the breeze among the tall sunflowers along the fence, the chirp of crickets, the lonely call of some night bird, answered by the whoo-whoo of an owl.

  Her tumbling mind seemed to still along with her body. She inhaled. Exhaled. Saw the rhythmic flashes of the lightning bugs rising from the grass.

  Gradually, as if the lights went up slowly in a theater, she realized she could see. Her eyes picked out the picnic table, the chairs, even a ball one of the children had forgotten. And there, in the grass almost at her feet, the small carved dog.

  She bent and picked it up, closing her fingers around the smooth wood. “This is what I was looking for. Daadi made it for Gracie. I must have dropped it when I was taking her in.”

  “Ja?” He took the dog from her, turning it over in his hand. “I saw her playing with it, but I didn’t realize Elias made it. He’s a gut grandfather, he is.”

  “And father.” Daadi understood so much, it seemed. All the things she didn’t say.

  “Ja.” The word came out a little rough, and she remembered about his own father, who’d lost himself voluntarily in the English world, leaving his family to fend for themselves.

  “I heard what you said to him about the car,” Samuel said. “It’s ser hatt for you, giving that up.”

  So hard. She nodded. “That car was the first one I ever owned. The only one, maybe. I guess it meant freedom to me.”

  “Ja, I know. I wanted a car first thing when I jumped the fence.”

  She should go in, but it sounded as if Samuel wanted to talk. Given Myra’s worries about him keeping everything to himself, she couldn’t discourage him. She sat on the picnic bench and patted the space next to her.

  “Komm, sit for a minute. Tell me about it.”

  He folded his long frame onto the bench, propping one elbow on the table behind them. “Not much to tell. I found out that it’s not so easy to get a car when you don’t have a job or a credit card or even a telephone.” He shook his head. “I was so green. Totally not ready for what it was like out there.”

  She studied his face in the dim light. “Why did you go, then? It seems so out of character for you. You were never a rebel.”

  “Like you,” he said, his teeth flashing in a smile.

  “Like me,” she agreed, not even sure now what had been so important about that rebellion of hers.

  Samuel looked down, his face growing serious. “It was my daad’s leaving, first off. It unsettled all of us. I kept trying to fill his shoes, thinking I’d be able to go on without him.”

  “But you couldn’t,” she finished for him.

  “I tried. I got baptized into the church, I courted Rebecca Miller, and we talked about marrying. But the closer it came, the more doubts I had. Mamm was still grieving about Daad, and I couldn’t seem to feel right about anything, not knowing why he’d left. I got it into my head to go after him.”

&nbs
p; It made sense, and it also made her reasons for leaving seem frivolous in comparison. “You risked so much.”

  “I did. The church doesn’t look lightly on baptized members leaving. I could have talked to Bishop Mose, explained what was in my mind. That’s what I should have done. Instead I went running off, not telling anyone what I intended, hurting my family even worse.”

  His voice roughened, and the sound hurt her heart.

  She touched his hand lightly, wanting to comfort him. “I’m sure your mamm understood.”

  “I hope so. But it pained her. It made it seem like I was siding with him.” His fingers curled around hers, as if he needed something to hang on to.

  “Did you find him?”

  He was still for so long that she thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he took a ragged breath.

  “I found him. You know, I pictured him living in a shack someplace, maybe drinking himself to death, ashamed of what he’d done.” His fingers clutched tighter and he stopped, as if he couldn’t go on.

  “It wasn’t like that,” she guessed, trying to help him along.

  “No. Instead I found he had a whole different life, living with a woman who had a farm outside Columbus, Ohio. He looked prosperous and happy. He was so at ease that you’d think he’d never lived any other way, even though it was her money that put the clothes on his back and the car in his driveway, I’d guess.” His words were heavy with bitterness.

  “I’m sorry.” Anna tried to imagine it and couldn’t.

  “I felt like I’d never known him. Like maybe he didn’t even know himself.”

  Through the bitterness, she sensed what it was that Samuel feared. She longed to comfort him as she would Gracie.

  “You’re not like him. You’re not.”

  “I hope I’m not. But how would I know for sure? When I came back, Rebecca wanted to pretend my leaving had never happened, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t marry her, not knowing if I wouldn’t suddenly make up my mind to walk away.”