With Winter's First Frost

by Kelly Irvin

  “You brought her a Christmas present.” The idea delighted Laura. For the first time that day, a burden lifted from her shoulders. The past held less weight. The dark fewer memories. Eli would like this young man. “That’s sweet of you.”

  Considering Hannah’s circumstances, his bravery astonished Laura.

  “I suppose it is against the Ordnung, isn’t it?” He glanced over his shoulder as if expecting Ben or Cyrus or Solomon—or all three—to pop out and drag him away for a confession. “I thought if I didn’t actually talk to her it would be okay.”

  “I thought the same thing.” Laura made her voice reassuring. “It is Christmas after all. We’re celebrating the birth of Christ and the forgiveness of sins that He represents. Surely, that means we should show grace to poor Hannah.”

  “What did you get her?” Suddenly, he sounded so much younger, like a little boy comparing notes. “The same as the other kinner?”

  He’d been at the program and the recipient of some of her baked goods. He was a tall young man, with a wiry build, but he could put away the cookies. “Sweets, but something special too.” Feeling silly, she leaned closer and whispered, even though no one else was around. “A crib quilt for the bopli and a nice shawl for her. I also bought her a book of children’s stories at The Book Apothecary.”

  “She’ll like that.”

  “I didn’t know you and Hannah were freinds.”

  He mimicked her earlier movements by leaning closer and whispering. “We’re not. We were in the same class at school. I saw her at the singings, but she always . . .”

  Always had eyes for another who had left her high and dry.

  Hannah had given her love to someone who didn’t deserve it. Someone who might someday, because God was good, regret taking a girl’s sweet innocence and giving her nothing in return.

  But here Phillip was. He hadn’t given up, even in the face of Hannah’s obvious, flagrant sin. What a sweet boy. Kind. Perhaps he would like to be Hannah’s friend. Like Zechariah could be Laura’s friend? Which seemed like a Christmas miracle. Phillip saw through Hannah’s weakness and her failing to who she was. “But you’re being her freind now and that is very gut of you.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes. None of us is perfect. We are taught to forgive.” He shrugged. “I haven’t always done the right thing. Maybe this makes up for that a little bit.” His hand waved toward the big cardboard box that now blocked the door.

  “Well, aren’t you going to tell me what it is?”

  “It’s a cradle.” He shoved his hat down on his head and turned away. “I made it.”

  “Wunderbarr!”

  The dark hid his expression, but his actions trumpeted his caring. He deserved a hug. Before Laura could move, he whirled and headed away in the dark.

  A cradle. The baby’s father should’ve made that cradle. What kind of man made a cradle for a baby who wasn’t his? A good man. One worthy of consideration. Gott, let Hannah give him that consideration. Thank You for this blessing You have bestowed on a poor, wayward girl who doesn’t deserve it. Any more than I deserved forty-five years with Eli.

  Laura laid her packages on top of the box and turned to leave.

  “Groossmammi?”

  Laura froze. She swiveled. “I can’t stay, my dear.”

  “Who was that with you? I heard voices. A man’s voice.”

  Laura glanced toward the buggy now retreating in the distance, its reflectors twinkling in the moonlight. “Someone who wants to be your freind.”

  “No one wants to be my freind these days.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. We’re waiting for your bann to be done and then we’ll welcome you with open arms. You know that.”

  “I’ve had a lot of time to think.” Her disembodied voice quivered in the darkness. “I go over and over it and I don’t understand how I got myself into this predicament. No one else I know or have ever known has done this. Only me. Me and Thaddeus.”

  “Many others have done the same, my child.” Laura grabbed the porch railing to keep from bursting into the house and wrapping Hannah in a hug. “You’re not the first or the last. You only need make sure you don’t make this mistake again.”

  “Never. Never.” She hiccupped a sob. “Even if it means I spend the rest of my life alone.”

  Laura eyed the box on the porch with its homemade gift constructed with kindness and grace. “We don’t know what Gott’s plan is.”

  “Tamara came by last night, after dark.”

  Anger swept through Laura. The girl was a meddling busybody. Much like her grandmother. “Tamara means well, but you must not listen to her. She is going down a path of no return. You don’t want to go there too.”

  “She said I could go with her when I leave. That her doctor freind would help me too.”

  The road to hell was paved with good intentions and Tamara skipped blithely along it. “You know your family loves you and will love your bopli. Out there you’ll only have Tamara, and she’ll be busy becoming a doctor. How would you support yourself and the bopli?”

  “That’s what I told her.”

  “Gut.”

  “She told me to think about it. She said she’d be back before she leaves. In case I change my mind.”

  “You must send her away.”

  “She doesn’t judge me. She says our ways are old-fashioned and the bann is mean-spirited. That it punishes us for being human.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I gave a special gift to Thaddeus that should’ve been reserved for my mann.” Tears choked her words. “I can never get it back. I don’t know how I’ll explain to my bopli about his daed.”

  “Cross that bridge when the time comes. For now, concentrate on having a healthy bopli and being a gut mudder.”

  “I’ll try. Danki for coming here to check on me. I feel better just seeing a kind face.”

  “Actually, I didn’t mean to talk to you. I only meant to leave you something.”

  “A Christmas present?” She sounded nine. Not like a grown-up woman who would be a mother in the coming year. “For me?”

  “Nee, for the postman. Of course it’s for you. And the bopli.”

  “That’s so sweet.”

  “There’s also something else. Another gift.”

  “From the man who was on the porch?”

  “Jah. You didn’t recognize his voice?”

  “Nee. I only heard whispers, one gruff, one soft like yours when you used to tuck me in at night and whisper a prayer over me when you spent the night after Callie was born.”

  Memories as sweet for Laura as they were for her great-grand. “Then I won’t spoil his surprise. I have to go.”

  “Groossmammi?”

  “Jah.”

  “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, my sweet girl.”

  “Next year will be different.”

  God willing. “We all will be different.”

  Laura tightened her coat around her and blew on her mittens as she headed for the buggy. The wind picked up and whipped her bonnet strings across her face. Icy snowflakes dusted her nose and cheeks. Poor Mary Katherine would be frozen to the buggy seat.

  “You, there in the dark, stop. Who are you? What are you doing sneaking around here?”

  Her heart pounding in overdrive, Laura skidded to a stop. Her chest hurt and the icy air burned her lungs. Like a teenager caught coming in after midnight, cigarette smoke on her breath and gasoline fumes on her clothes. Had she ever been that young? She swallowed the idiotic fear.

  Ruby’s husband, Martin, approached. His accusatory tone wasn’t much different than the one he used when she ate supper with them. He always made her feel as if she’d overstayed her welcome. She couldn’t see much in the black, starless night. But the short, rounded form belonged to him.

  When Laura had moved into the dawdy haus and Ruby’s family took over the main house, she learned the difference between close and too close. She learned to enj
oy her tiny space and leave the bigger, familiar, full-of-memories space to her daughter and—truth be told only to her innermost self—least favorite son-in-law. “It’s me, Laura.”

  Martin switched on a hefty flashlight with a beam that scoured the dark far beyond her figure. She thrust her hand over her forehead and ducked her head against the powerful light that danced left, then right, up and down, as if searching her, a pat down as the writers in her mystery books called it.

  “What are you doing here at this hour? Visiting Hannah? You know better.”

  “Lower the light. You’re blinding me.” He might be a man, but she was thirty-five years his senior, his mother-in-law, and she was entitled to a minuscule amount of respect for the elderly. “It was my intent to leave her a Christmas gift without speaking. No rule against a groossmammi doing that for her great-grand, even one in the bann.”

  “You didn’t go inside?”

  He was debating whether he would have to tell Ben. That would be his call. Nothing weighed on her conscience. “Nee.”

  “Did you speak?”

  “Only because she heard . . . me and called out to see who it was much as you’re doing now.” A sin of omission. Why not tell him about Phillip? Because the boy’s heart was in the right place, even if the timing was wrong. She would pray forgiveness for her sin later. “Don’t blame her. Blame a sentimental old lady with bad timing.”

  Silent, Martin let the flashlight dance across the field behind the dawdy haus. Snow sparkled like tiny jewels in pinpoints of light. Elegant frost hung from stalks of grass. Nature offered its own light display with no need of electricity or wires hung across porch railings, eaves, and the outlines of windows. Laura inhaled the cold night air, trying to assuage the ache brought on by the beauty of Christmas Eve. If only Eli could see it. He would understand.

  “Ruby tells me you’ve been speaking with Tamara. How’s that going?”

  “It’s hard to say.” The abrupt change of subject brought relief and a sense that greater problems weighed on this father than the wayward child of another living on his property. He didn’t need to know his daughter had visited Hannah right under his nose and tried to convince her to leave too. It would break his already aching heart. “She’s still here. She loves Rosalie’s kinner and she’s born to be a mudder and fraa herself, if she would allow herself to see it.”

  “If only there were a man who could make her see it.” The sound of Martin’s boots kicking at the muddy snow at his feet filled the night air. “Courting may be private, but my fraa says she hasn’t seen any signs it’s happened. Ever. What is it about my dochder?”

  He really meant to ask what had he done wrong, where had he gone wrong. Men especially tended to think they played a strong hand in the outcome of their children’s lives. They couldn’t accept that children grew up and made their own mistakes. They couldn’t simply learn from their parents’ mistakes. God’s design called for something different. Free will.

  “She’s too smart for her own good.” Laura gentled her voice, making it less of a criticism and more of an observation. “She wants to serve. She wants to make a difference. She wants to be who she is.”

  “You sound as if you agree.” Martin turned up the collar of his coat with his free hand. His voice shook with cold, but he didn’t seem inclined to end the conversation. “We didn’t bring her up to abandon her faith for a wild-goose chase into the Englisch world of medicine. She’ll never marry or, worse, marry an Englischer. She’ll never be baptized. We won’t see her kinner. They won’t know us and we won’t know them. Is this Gott’s will?”

  He stopped, but his angry breathing still spoke of anguish.

  “I don’t know.” For the first time Laura caught a glimpse of what her daughter saw in Martin when she married him. A stout believer with a heart for those he loved. A man who loved with ferocity, the kind that could take a woman’s breath away. “But, no, I don’t agree. However, I do remember what it was like to be that age and to be torn between two worlds. The Gmay gives our young ones this period of rumspringa in order for them to answer the question of whether they want to commit to the faith for the rest of their lives. We don’t always get the answer we hope for.”

  “Then you believe all hope is lost?”

  “All hope is never lost. Too many people are praying for Gott’s will in this.”

  “I don’t understand it. How could she do this?”

  “She wonders the same thing.”

  “I wouldn’t know. She hasn’t spoken to me about any of this.”

  “You’re her daed. Does that surprise you?”

  Her father and a man. Even Laura, old, wrinkled, and far past any embarrassment on most topics, found this more than awkward, more than embarrassing. She longed to dash past her son-in-law and get lost in the dark shadows.

  “Martin, what are you doing? The kinner are ready for bed.” Ruby’s voice floated from the big house.

  “You better go.”

  “You won’t say anything?”

  “Nothing to say.”

  “I’m sorry I put you in this position.”

  “I’m glad Hannah will have a bit of Christmas. We must always show the grace that was shown to us.” Martin pivoted and headed back to the house. His boots crunched in the snow and ice, but his step was sure. The flashlight bobbed in the trees and bushes. “I’m coming, Fraa, no need to shout to the entire world.”

  Danki, Gott, for the Christmas gift of knowing my son-in-law better. And forgive me for judging him. I could use some of that grace and mercy too.

  Even at seventy-three, a woman could learn a lesson. Better late than never.

  TWENTY-SIX

  IF ANY DAY DESERVED PRAYER AND CONTEMPLATION, IT was New Year’s Eve. Laura leaned into the pew in front of her and pushed herself up. The Englisch loved to have parties, champagne, and fireworks. The Plain spent the evening with a service followed by family time and a potluck dinner. Each to their own. Saying goodbye to the old year and praying for God’s grace and mercy in the new one.

  Laura’s knees popped and her legs refused to cooperate. Her behind was numb and her ankles like rubber after all that sitting and kneeling on Solomon’s red-oak plank floor. Ruby grabbed one arm and Tamara the other. Together, they hoisted Laura to her feet.

  “Danki.” It was indeed a sad state of affairs when a woman couldn’t kneel in prayer and then get herself back up. “I could’ve just stayed down there until you’re ready to haul me out of here to the house.”

  “You’re so silly, Groossmammi.” Tamara giggled. “We love your creaky knees. They make music with all that popping. Like the cereal. Snap, crackle, pop!”

  “You’re the silly one.” Laura loved to see the girl—young woman—smile. She seemed content. She hadn’t complained once during her stay. In fact, she seemed content caring for the twins. Diapering, bathing, singing, and playing with them. She and Delia had become best friends with tea parties and story hour every night before bed. It was hard to say who was the bigger child. “You love me so much, why don’t you bring me a plate from the smorgasbord?”

  “I will.” Her grin had nothing to do with food. Her gaze fell on a tall figure standing by the Styrofoam plates and plastic utensils at the first table. Emmett Bays. “What do you want?”

  Her tone suggested she likely would not hear Laura’s answer. “A little of everything, but especially the five-bean salad and the macaroni-and-cheese casserole. And Mary Katherine’s chocolate German cake.”

  “Got it.”

  It seemed unlikely, but Laura smiled and shrugged at Ruby. Her daughter’s worried gaze followed Tamara. None of the festive holiday spirit imbued her face. She looked scared. “What is it, Ruby?” Laura sat and patted the spot on the bench next to her. “You don’t look like you have high hopes for the new year.”

  Ruby’s eyes reddened with tears. Her mouth opened and closed. She mopped her face with a huge white handkerchief.

  “Dochder, what is it?” Laura took
her hand and squeezed. More tears. More mopping. “What’s got you so heartbroken? Is there something I don’t know about?”

  Ruby was the youngest and most softhearted of Laura’s four daughters. Victoria, the oldest girl, didn’t have time to be softhearted, what with five brothers and three sisters. Marilyn and Lena, the two middle girls, took turns caring for Ruby, who came at the tail end after three boys. She followed her sisters around everywhere. She was born to be a mother and wife. All Plain women were, but some fell into it more naturally than others.

  “I’ve prayed for forgiveness. I know my worry is a sin.” Ruby sniffed. Laura followed her gaze. Tamara picked up two plates. She spoke to Emmett. He took one of the plates and followed her along the tables that groaned with the massive weight of casseroles, sandwiches, ham, turkey, side dishes, breads, and desserts. “I can’t bear the thought of losing her. She’s too smart for her own gut. Where did that come from, Mudder? I’m not smart. Martin is a gut, decent man who has tried to bring our kinner up right. How could this happen?”

  “You know what they say about worry?”

  “I do. Worrying about tomorrow takes the joy out of today.”

  “She’s doing better. Look at her. It’s obvious she likes Emmett.” Laura had tried, with no luck, to find out how much. Two buggy rides didn’t a courtship make. But it could be a fine start. It had been with Eli. Tamara managed to duck every inquiry with a self-satisfied smirk. “She’s done well at Rosalie’s. She’s like you, born to be a mudder and fraa. She’s seeing that every day.”

  “You think so?” Ruby’s anxious gaze dropped. She kneaded her fingers in her lap. “Martin is beside himself. He says if she runs off to the college, she’ll never be welcome in our home again. He says he can’t have her influencing the other kinner.”

  “He is right.” Laura tried to soften the words. Martin had to keep the two teenagers still left at home free of worldly influence. That was his job as a father. One Ruby shared. “But she could very well change her mind. She understands what an important decision this is. She knows what it will mean to her and to you and your mann. She’s not immune to the pain it will cause.”