With Winter's First Frost

by Kelly Irvin

  “It won’t be too much for you?” Elijah frowned at Laura. “Rosalie’s sister could come up from Seymour.”

  Zechariah’s snort could hardly be called polite. Did he want her to stay? It didn’t seem likely. Something was going on here. The three younger men were not in his good graces. But it didn’t take much to get in Zechariah’s bad graces.

  “No need.” She did need help. The trip into town earlier in the day had taught her that. But no need for Rosalie’s sister to leave her own children to come up. Laura had a plethora of grands who needed something to do. And one in particular. Tamara. Gott, You are so smart and so wise. Laura ignored Elijah’s perturbed expression. “I have someone in mind to help.”

  “Who?” Seth’s lips pursed. “What are you up to?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Then we’ll get going. Dawn comes early.” Ivan tucked his hat on his head and nodded at Zechariah. “We’ll get back to you on that other thing.”

  “You do that.” Zechariah waited until the men cleared out before he picked up his coffee cup and stood. “A new book came in the mail today. I think I’ll take a look at it by the fire while you discuss your family business.”

  “We’ll be out of your hair in a bit.” Seth cocked his head at Carrie. “We have plenty to do at home.”

  Laura waited until Zechariah made his way from the dining room. She turned to Seth. “What did Aaron say?”

  “He’s sick about it. Ashamed. Sorry. Sad. Worried about how Hannah will do without a mann. How she’ll do during the bann. He said to go to Cyrus if Freeman is sick. Not to wait. The longer we wait, the worse it’ll be.”

  “He’s right about that.”

  Seth rose and stomped from the table to the stove and back, his heavy boots thudding on the wood. “I can’t believe this has happened. I can’t believe she did this to us.”

  “To you?” Laura wrapped her hands around her coffee mug and tried to smooth the irk in her voice. “Is that what you think she did?”

  “He knows she didn’t do it on purpose.” Frowning, Carrie plucked a lemongrass teabag from her cup and laid it on the saucer. She squeezed in enough honey for three cups and set the plastic honey bear down with a thump. “No teenager does, but we taught her better. She knows better. She’s seventeen. She knows the difference between right and wrong. She knows the consequences.”

  “When it comes to these matters, it has nothing to do with what you know, only what you feel.” Laura grappled for words that would be acceptable for a woman—a grandmother—to utter in the presence of a man—her grandson. “You’re not so old that you don’t remember. I’m seventy-three and I remember.”

  “Groossmammi!” Seth frowned. His bushy eyebrows got a workout. “We don’t speak of these things.”

  Which was why it was so difficult. Biting her lip to keep from telling Seth so, Laura stared into her mug. No one talked about it. Folks tried not to even think about it. They prayed their children would do the right thing and avoid temptation. They hinted about it. They hemmed and hawed about it but never came out and asked if there were any questions. There had to be questions and concerns and worries and uncertainty about what exactly was wrong and where to draw that line between sweet and forbidden.

  The more forbidden, the more enticing.

  Maybe Seth and Carrie had forgotten, but Laura hadn’t. Eli with that come-closer smile and those brilliant blue eyes. Soft, wavy blond hair over a face tanned from working in the sun every day. Dimples. Strong, farmer hands. Broad chest. Not an ounce of fat on him. Muscles built through hard work.

  But it wasn’t his looks—granted they didn’t hurt—that made him so desirable. When he smiled, the world slowed and disappeared. When he spoke with kindness, tenderness, and a touch of laughter in his deep voice, he made her feel like no one else in the world could.

  He was The One. Her Only One. There might be more than one for her friends Bess and Mary Katherine and Jennie, but for Laura, God had chosen only one. Eli Kauffman, father of her nine children and owner of her heart, lock, stock, and barrel.

  His touch sent a current through her that vibrated from her head to her toes.

  She’d never told a soul, but there was a reason they’d married at twenty. They were afraid if they didn’t, something untoward would happen. They didn’t want anything to sully their bond. So they married and never looked back, never looked left or right.

  “Laura? Laura!” Carrie’s voice startled Laura from her reverie. “Where did you go? We’re trying to strategize here.”

  Carrie talked like that. Strategize. She might be Amish now, but she had been English for the first twenty-two years of her life. Until she met Seth. She insisted she wanted to embrace the Plain way of life because of her faith, but Laura suspected it had much more to do with Seth’s blue eyes and dimpled cheeks and broad chest than the articles of faith.

  Still, Carrie had never given them reason to regret welcoming her into the faith and the community.

  “It’s hard to strategize, as you call it, without talking about it. We tiptoe around the subject. Maybe that’s part of the problem.” She managed to meet Carrie’s gaze but drew the line at looking directly at Seth. “We don’t talk about it and how to ward off temptation.”

  Carrie smiled for the first time. “I turned myself inside out and upside down because of that feeling of being in love and all that goes with it. I love being Plain. I’m content and happy and where I must be. I love this faith that I have now. But it all started with the feelings you’re talking about.”

  She glanced toward her husband, who growled and made another trip to the stove and back to the counter. “Women,” he muttered. “Always talk too much.”

  “Laura’s right. Sometimes talking helps straighten things out before they get out of hand.” Carrie shrugged and patted her nose with a tissue. “It could have saved us a lot of heartache.”

  “It doesn’t need talking about.” Seth smacked his hand on the counter and stared out the window over the sink. “We do too much talking around here. Hannah will do her freewill confession of Fehla to Freeman, she’ll be under the bann for a few weeks, and then she can do her kneeling confession at a meeting. She’ll be done.”

  “Except for the bopli.” As the mudder of eight children, Carrie could envision how this part would go too. “That will not be done.”

  “She should stay in the dawdy haus at Ruby’s until her time is done.” Laura wanted Hannah close. She was barely a woman. She shouldn’t go through this alone any longer than necessary. “I’ll be here for a few weeks at least, maybe longer. Ruby can keep an eye on her from the main house.”

  “If the Gmay agrees.”

  “Do you intend to talk to the boy’s parents?”

  “He’s not a boy. He’s a man.” Seth turned and leaned against the counter. He crossed his arms. His scowl burned a hole between Laura’s eyes. “We’ll do what Freeman tells us to do.”

  “Do you think he’s told them?”

  “I don’t know.” Carrie shook her head. “Word will travel fast. His family will hear of it if he doesn’t tell them first. But that won’t stop him from going to Indiana or wherever with no burden to bear. It’s always been that way with men.”

  “Don’t be throwing us all into the same corral. I would never do what Thaddeus intends to do.”

  Carrie hopped up from the chair and scurried across the room to her husband. “I know that. I didn’t mean to imply such a thing. Forgive me.”

  She was a good wife.

  “I can’t believe this is happening.” Seth sighed. “She was such a gut girl. A gut helper. Kind to her bruders and schweschders.”

  “She still is all those things.” Laura swallowed the lump in her throat. The memories overwhelmed her. Huddled in a rocking chair, she held the tiny bundle of bones with a big cry who arrived early and cuddled her after her long, fierce battle to see the world. A cold winter wind blew outside the window. Branches dipped and scraped the roof. She kissed
the damp curls and sang “Amazing Grace” over and over until the newborn slept. “We’ll forgive her and move on.”

  “Alone with a baby.”

  “With us to help her.”

  “But not a mann.”

  “One thing at a time.”

  “I think she should give the baby up for adoption.” Carrie stuttered the words. She hugged Seth’s arm to her chest and eyed him with trepidation. “Then she could start fresh.”

  “No one will forget she’s had a bopli.” Seth tugged his arm from her grasp. “This bopli is our grandchild.”

  Therein lay the crux of the matter. Despite the circumstances, this baby would be welcomed and loved and grow up just like any other member of the family. A baby was a gift from God to be loved and cherished. No matter the difficult circumstances. The Gmay would forgive Hannah and welcome her back into the fold, if she recognized her failure and accepted her punishment as deserved.

  “I agree with Seth.” Laura sought to pluck the words from the mire of her thoughts. “But we must make sure this is what Hannah wants. She is the bopli’s mudder. She will raise him. There will be consequences for her, with either choice.”

  Seth nodded, but the pain that etched his face made him look much older. So much like his father, Aaron, who looked like Eli. How would Eli have reacted to one of their children in this situation?

  Like a hurting father who wanted to fix it but knew the child must face the consequences of his or her actions. Grow from the mistake and move forward. Forgiven.

  Forgiving was easy. Facing the consequences much harder. For Hannah and for her parents.

  TWELVE

  ODD SHADOWS FROM THE FIRELIGHT MINGLED WITH THOSE thrown by the propane lamp’s wispy shadows. Zechariah held a new book that had come in the mail—National Geographic Complete Birds of North America—in his hands, but it rested in his lap. Either lamps weren’t throwing as much light as they used to or he needed a new pair of reading glasses. Or maybe King Eider and northern bobwhite quail held no sway over him when he was tired after all the company for supper—and the obvious tension among those at the table. He relaxed against the rocking chair pillow and let the fire’s heat seep into his bones. It felt good. Not moving, except for the occasional twitch, felt good.

  This room felt as much like home as any place since Marian died.

  His sons could decide his fate. Two of his grandsons could decide to bail out of their Gmay and move to Indiana to work in a factory. That much he knew. Gott, take me home. I’m ready. I know it’s on Your time, not mine, but I can’t help but ask. With humility. I try to be obedient but I’m tired. If I sound whiny, I apologize and ask for forgiveness. I’m in my second childhood, according to my kinner.

  Laura’s quick, light step in the hallway signaled her impending arrival. Zechariah straightened and tugged at the book. It fell open to page 73, which featured the loon and how to identify it in flight. For some reason this made him laugh the crazy laugh of a loony man.

  “What’s so funny?” Laura pulled the other rocking chair closer to the fire and sat. Her joints creaked in a familiar, achy sound. “I thought maybe you were asleep by now.”

  “Did you know the loon’s song is loud, mournful, eerie, and far carrying?”

  “I did not. I feel like a loon after this day.” She tilted her head from side to side, making her neck pop. “It’s hard to believe it all happened in one day. I just went to town for sewing supplies and boom, life happened.”

  At least he wasn’t the only one. Of course, her children didn’t pass her around like a horse that could no longer pull his own weight. Put out to pasture. “As it tends to do. Everyone down?”

  “Kinner asleep and company gone.” She leaned forward and held her hands near the fire. “It’s chilly. The fire feels gut.”

  Small talk was fine, but life was short. “I gathered all is not well. Not that I was listening.”

  “You really had no choice, I suppose.” Laura let her hands rest in her lap. She leaned back. Her eyelids drooped. She might drift off in front of him, and he could sit here next to her in silence, secretly enjoying company that required nothing of him. She stirred. Or not. “I guess you gathered that my Hannah is in a family way.”

  It wasn’t a topic for mixed company, but Laura had become one for directness since her husband passed. As if she had no reason to care. Or thought she’d be going along soon herself and didn’t have time to meander. Like Zechariah. “They’ll do their punishment as Freeman and the others see fit. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last.”

  “The boy wants to leave. He doesn’t want to marry her and well he shouldn’t if that’s the way he feels.” Sadness laced the words. She was a good grandma who hurt for these young folks who had sinned in such an egregious way. “My grandson and his fraa are beside themselves with shame, but we can’t always control what our kinner do. And at a certain point, they become responsible for their own actions.”

  “Fornication is a biblical sin. They have to take responsibility for it.”

  “She shouldn’t have to do it alone.” Her retort matched a glance as hot as the fireplace flames. “The daed shouldn’t be able to walk away unscathed.”

  “No one who commits a sin and fails to repent walks away unscathed.”

  Her scowl died. “You’re right.”

  “That must’ve hurt.”

  “What?” She frowned, but the fire had dissipated. “What are you talking about?”

  “Admitting I’m right about something.”

  She laughed and began to rock. He did the same.

  The quiet didn’t feel as empty as it had before.

  “Your Marian was a gut woman, a gut fraa. We had gut laughs while we canned and sewed and planted.”

  “She was.” He tried to conjure up Marian’s face. Soft, dimpled cheeks, full lips, caramel eyes, pink skin in summer, never brown, never tanned. “I had no complaints.”

  “Me neither. With Eli, I mean.” She rocked harder. “We were twenty when we married.”

  “Me too. Marian, nineteen.”

  “We were in a hurry.”

  “Us too.”

  “It went so fast. Those forty-five years.”

  “Gut years do.”

  “How is it possible? Eli’s been gone eight years this Christmas Eve.”

  “Time is like that. I have trouble remembering what Marian looked like and she’s only been gone two years.” When folks got to be their age, they often watched as family members and friends were laid to eternal rest. Still, it didn’t seem right that sons would go before their parents. “What she looked like doesn’t matter. It’s who she was and how she . . .”

  “Made you feel.” Her gnarled fingers moved in her lap, restless, plucking at her apron. “I look at my suhs and see him. My suh Luke has been gone three years and I see him in his suhs. I reckon that is Gott’s intent.”

  “It’s been five years for Robert. Two for Marian.”

  “I should remind you that their days were done.” Laura managed a soft smile. “That Gott knew how many days they had from the very beginning. That kinner are gifts from Gott and He takes them home on His schedule, not ours.”

  They shared a bond no one wanted. Parents who had watched their children be buried. He could understand as no one else could what that felt like. “But you won’t because you know it was cold comfort when they stuck Luke’s body in the ground.”

  “He wasn’t there. I know that. But it was so cold that day. Just as it was when we buried Eli.” Her gaze shifted and examined the fire as if seeking its warmth to banish the cold she felt in remembering those dark, frigid winter days. “I wish to be absolutely without doubt that they were home and warm and not wanting for a single thing, not even me, but I know that it is impossible to be thus.”

  “So we just do the best we can and keep our lips buttoned up.”

  She nodded and smiled. Her gaze veered from the fire and met his head-on. She had a spark in her eyes that remi
nded him of what it was like to be young and full of passion. Keeping her lips buttoned up would be a difficult task for a woman like Laura. Eli had his hands full.

  Eli was blessed.

  Laura stopped rocking. She leaned forward, her face intent, her frame bent by old age, tense and still. “You are not used up, Zechariah. Nor a child. No one babysits you.”

  The agility of a mind that made such a leap and so quickly. “Then what are you doing here?”

  She stood and tugged at a small table until it sat between them. It held a set of checkers scattered across the board. “I like to play checkers. It’s hard to do at the dawdy haus when I’m all alone. Here, I have an opponent.”

  “They want to move me again.”

  “You have a say in it. Don’t let them tell you that you don’t.”

  “I said as much. Then I felt selfish. They say Ben and Rosalie will have too much on their hands with the twins and Rosalie not being well. They can’t take care of me too. They don’t see that it can be the other way around.”

  “Then make them see it. I’m here to help with Rosalie and the babies. I’m here to help, period.” She began to arrange the checkers in their proper spots. “Let’s play.”

  She would pick something that required a steady hand. Zechariah’s body tensed and then jerked at the mere thought. “I’m not good at games.”

  “Afraid you’ll be beaten by an old woman?”

  She didn’t know what it was like not to have control over your arms and legs. Never knowing when one or the other would decide to jerk. He studied his boots. They were scuffed and worn. Even though he did no work. Dragging his feet was no doubt hard on them.

  “It doesn’t matter.” The words were gentle, her tone soft. “I don’t care. It’s just you and me and these four walls. Who will know if you fling a checker at me? I might fling it back.”

  He swallowed against a sudden lump in his throat. A tone as soft as peach fuzz. A caring that soothed aches and pains with a simple word. He missed that too. “Fine. I’m red.”

  “Fine, be red. I’d rather be black anyway. And I get first move.”