Hester Takes Charge

by Byler, Linda;

  “Hello. My name is Hester Zug. I am seeking employment as a cook or housekeeper.”

  Before she could finish, the woman rolled her eyes, shook her head from side to side, and closed the door with a whoosh, a clunk, and the decided snap of the heavy latch.

  Hester wiped her face gently with the palm of her hand as the sun climbed the midmorning sky. She had walked far, she was thirsty, and could only do one thing—keep knocking on doors.

  The neighboring house was made of stone like the first. The only difference was a deep porch on two sides of the house, setting the side windows and doors into a cool shaded area. A strip of cut green grass bordered the steps, and some coneflowers and iris nodded in the sun’s heat as she made her way up to the front door.

  She knocked, lifting the brass ring and letting it fall. Immediately, Hester looked up into the haughtiest face she had ever seen—the butler, she guessed, wild-eyed.

  “My name is Hester Zug. I am seeking employment.” Before she could finish, the butler spoke in clipped, icy tones: “The house is fully staffed. Good day.” The door creaked and banged, the latch fell, and that was the end of that. Hester felt like knocking again to tell him the door needed to be oiled, and perhaps they could use a door oiler, but she went back down the steps, her pride intact, and kept on trying.

  From house to house, always asking the same thing, Hester met with varying degrees of politeness, but she was always refused.

  Discouraged, hungry, and thirsty, her feet throbbing in her black shoes and stockings, Hester couldn’t stop thinking of Bappie’s garden out on the farm, the ruined, storm-ravaged garden, her place of previous employment. Digging in the good earth with her hoe, pulling weeds, harvesting vegetables—she had never appreciated the job enough, those sun-filled days with Bappie, even that pest Johnny King, who finally realized they simply didn’t want his company.

  That was all gone now. Her bottled tinctures, along with her dreams of helping people, healing, and curing—which she believed in strongly, along with the wisdom of the Indians—had been thrown into the outhouse in the small Lancaster backyard.

  She stopped in the shade of a deep eave on the north side of a brick building. She needed only a moment to get out of the sun, to wipe her face with the edge of her apron, then she’d continue home.

  There was no use trying to find a job. These homes were all filled with Negro servants. Hester was curious if they were slaves or free. Likely they were free, working in those grand houses, perhaps having relatives in the South who were in bondage. It made her shiver. At any rate, these well-to-do landowners’ houses were fully equipped with capable people, so that avenue to employment had just been closed off.

  She bent over to tie a loose shoelace, then continued on her way, stepping smartly, her mind on the cool mint tea down cellar, along with bread and cheese and perhaps a slice of apple pie waiting for her at home.

  The sun was merciless, straight overhead, the tall buildings on either side shutting out the faintest whisper of a breeze. But she marched toward home, resolving to forget this forenoon and to never try such a foolish thing again. If all else failed, she could always move in with Levi and Bappie.

  She heard a horse approaching from behind and wondered vaguely who would be in such a hurry in the downtown. It was foolish, besides being downright dangerous.

  She turned and froze. Noah sat astride an impressive horse. He was a commanding presence with his way of sitting on the saddle and looked completely in control. For years he had ridden in that position on a horse the cavalry provided.

  Time stopped for Hester. The heat of the sun, the teams passing by, the sparrow’s chittering music, everything slid out of her senses. Only Noah filled her world.

  He reined in the magnificent animal, who tossed his head and fought the bit, slewing his head from side to side. Then he rose on his hind legs as his front ones pawed the air. Hester remained beside the street but shrank away, afraid the animal’s hooves would flail in her direction.

  “Hey, whoa, whoa, there,” Noah called, his teeth flashing white in his face, his eyes squinting beneath the brim of his straw hat. His white shirt was splattered with mud and splotched with grease, along with his trousers and boots. The horse danced, stepped sideways, snorted. When Noah spoke again, the animal’s ears flicked back and forth, but the whites of his eyes did not show, speaking of a quiet temperament. He was merely too full of energy to behave.

  “Good day, Hester!” Noah said, tipping the brim of his hat as his smile spread wider. The blue of his eyes reflected the blue midday sky.

  “Hello.” The word was choked, her happiness at seeing him an obstruction in her throat.

  “I was on my way home from the blacksmith. This horse needed new shoes, and it appears he needs a good long run on them now!”

  Hester smiled up at him openly, her eyes alight. “He’s beautiful.”

  “I have two. A matched pair.”

  “Both black?”

  “Yes. They’re part Percheron, a cross. Bred for hard work and endurance. I should put them in the plow, but part of me doesn’t want to make regular work horses out of them.”

  “I can’t say I blame you.”

  Noah’s eyes held hers. “What are you doing out and about in this heat?”

  “I was on a fruitless search for employment.” Hester lifted her shoulders, spread her hands, palms up, to show Noah the defeat she felt after the responses from behind the grand doors she had knocked on.

  Noah acknowledged this with a disbelieving stare. “You were what?”

  Hester felt the color rise in her cheeks. “Looking for work.” She spoke quietly, the humiliation suppressing her words.

  “Why?”

  “Noah, why do you think?” she burst out. “I’m a woman alone, now that Levi and Bappie will be married.”

  With that, she turned on her heel and walked stiffly away, bouncing a bit by the pace she set for herself, getting away from Noah as quickly as possible.

  She kept walking rigidly, her arms pumping as her long strides covered the heated dust of the street. She heard the hoofbeats, heard his call, “Hester, wait!”

  She increased her speed, turned the corner, and ran, where there was no one to see her lift her skirts, allowing her leather-clad feet to pummel the street. Her breath soon came in hard jerks, and perspiration dripped from the end of her nose, making glistening rivulets of salted liquid down the side of her face. Still she ran, not stopping until she reached the doorstep of their house, let herself in through the front door, and collapsed on a kitchen chair, her chest heaving.

  She did not cry. The only emotion she felt was the fierce pride that caused her to run. He was not going to sit on that horse and look down his regal nose at her, making her feel like the beggar she was. She may as well have been sitting by the gate of the orphanage with her tin cup when he rode by in all his finery. She wished she could take back the words she had spoken, unashamedly telling him what she had been doing. A fine example, she was, of speaking before thinking.

  Ah well, the deed was done. Luckily, he didn’t follow her. And Bappie was nowhere around, inserting her nosy questions like pesky starlings fighting over potato peelings.

  Bappie was a bit too full of herself these days, Hester mused, as she wet a clean rag in cool water and mopped her face. She drank a glass of tepid water, longed for the cool springhouse in Berks County, considered buying ice from the ice house on Strawberry Street, then thought better of it. Much better to keep the small amount of cash she had in the carved wooden box on her dresser upstairs.

  When Bappie returned, her face was glowing, every freckle darkened by her exposure to the midsummer sunlight. The crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes gathered a few freckles and pinched them in the folds when she smiled and laughed, which she alternated with words. She strung her sentences together with fervent enthusiasm, punctuated by exclamations of a future so bright she could hold nothing back.

  Levi was digging the foundation
for a tobacco shed. She had helped him haul limestones up from the low fields by the creek. Did Hester have any idea how lucrative tobacco was? Buyers would come from the north; they’d even get orders from overseas, Levi said, like the gentry from England. There were some problems with tariffs and laws, whatever in the world Levi meant by that, but yessir, Hester, we’ll be rich.

  Acres and acres of tobacco. They would make ten times the amount of money that little truck patch brought in. They would have to hire help in the summer. Cows were out. They didn’t need to get up early and have their lives ruled by five o’clock milkings. Sheep. They’d graze sheep in the pastures, raise coonhounds and tobacco, and keep the barn for the sheep.

  On and on she went, as she built a small fire to heat some potato soup, peppering it with a heavy hand. She brought out the apple pie, bread, and elderberry jam, stopping midsentence to ask why Hester hadn’t thought to make lunch.

  Hester mopped her face and glared, halfway through thinking that the coonhounds might eat the sheep, and there would always be drought or hailstorms or flooding to take care of the tobacco and all the future wealth Bappie envisioned. She was warm and without any hope of a future even a portion as amazing as Bappie’s, and she wasn’t about to sit here and goad her on with exclamations of wonder. Bappie had plenty of wonder gathered and stored.

  “I was too hot to think of eating. Why do you need to built a fire for soup on the hottest day of the year?” she asked testily.

  Undeterred, Bappie informed her it would taste good and she was hungry, then launched into a ribald account of hers and Levi’s plans, their conversation on the wagon, how pitiful his straw hat was, and how she just had to get that thing off his head somehow. And on and on and on.

  It wasn’t until the sun burned the edge of the sky red, losing its power as it slid below the Lancaster County fields and woods, that Hester washed in cool water, dressed in an old, thin, cotton dress, leaving off the black apron and white muslin cap, and sat on the black stoop as the twilight spread its promise of comfort across the backyard. The maple leaves looked spent, drooping with retained heat, the waxen grass like melted candles below.

  The chickens lay in low corners of their dusty chicken yard, their wings spread out, trying to find a bit of cool, damp earth to relieve themselves from the heat of the day. The rooster strutted around, his thick, red comb wagging in a princely fashion, the clucks’ low, homey sounds like backyard music as he bent to pick at a stray ant or bug.

  She could hear the distant, muffled clopping of hooves, a child’s cry, a door swinging shut, the deep barking of a large dog.

  She felt a contentment settle around her, chasing off the anxieties of the day. Lancaster was her home; this is where she would stay. Some form of employment would show up somewhere.

  One of the barn cats, the large gray one, came out from beneath the steps and rubbed along Hester’s bare toes, emitting a long, healthy purr. Hester reached down to stroke its back, then laid her cheek on her knees, talking softly to the animal, telling her what a pretty creature she was, what a fine mouser, and that when Bappie left, she could stay with her.

  She heard footsteps come close, figured it was Bappie, and stayed in that position. When she heard a deep voice above her, she sat up so fast the cat bolted, streaking across the yard and disappearing underneath the wooden fence that separated their property from Walter Trout’s.

  Yes. It was him, and here she was with no covering on her head, wearing no apron, her feet bare.

  “Noah!”

  “Just me once more,” he grinned.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I walked.”

  “All that way?”

  “It’s probably less than five miles.”

  Hester didn’t know what to say to that, as clearly he was right, and, clearly that distance was likely soon covered with his long, powerful strides.

  “Beautiful evening,” he said. She heard the kind smile in his voice, his way of speaking that was tender yet careful, as if each word was meant to portray goodwill toward the world.

  Hester blinked and pulled the hem of her skirt down as far as she could to cover her feet. That task accomplished, she didn’t know what to do with her hands or her eyes, so she clasped her fingers tightly and leaned over them, as if this movement would help with the part about meeting the blueness of his eyes.

  Noah tried again. “Really warm today.”

  When no response was forthcoming, he took stock of the situation, noticed the bare step beside her, and sat down, the length of him brushing against her as he did so.

  “I think, Hester, that there is a very real possibility that the cat got your tongue.”

  He didn’t know for sure whether she had heard this stab at conversation, until he saw her shoulders become more rounded, then begin shaking as she started laughing.

  She sat up then, and turned to face him. Unprepared, his closeness undid her battered pride and broke down her self-applied tower of resistance. The scattering of her thoughts, and the need to lay her head on his shoulder and weep like a child with a skinned knee, made her turn away so quickly, that Noah sighed.

  And then he spoke, his words thrown out into the mild summer evening, without fear or caution. They were merely a question. “Hester, would you consider accompanying me to Berks County? Annie is not well. I have a team of horses that would benefit from that long trek. I think that before we step further into the future, that we need to step back into our past. Will you do that with me?”

  CHAPTER 15

  HIS WORDS WERE ASTOUNDING.

  Oh, she wanted to go. As the crow flies, her spirit had soared countless times, far above the trees, the patches of corn, the barns and roads and gardens. Over the mountains that lay between them, the rivers and creeks and puddles of water, over every tiny thing and every large thing that kept her from seeing her home one more time.

  But to go with Noah?

  To retrace her footsteps by herself, her memories wrapped around her head like a turban, would be effortless compared to sitting beside him on a wagon, to be in his company every day. It was too hard work to keep the barrier up, protecting herself from the dizzying encounters with the blueness of his eyes. She always started out firm, serious, steadfast, but after a few hours she would fall away, forgetting to guard the feeling of severity, of distance, and there she’d be, as helpless as a newborn lamb.

  No, she could not go. She told him so.

  He did not say anything for a long while. When he spoke, his words were raw and devoid of kindness. “Listen, Hester. Why don’t you try, just this once, to forget about your foolish pride? You know you want to see your home.”

  She nodded. “I do.”

  “Well, then.”

  “What would people say?”

  “We’re brother and sister.”

  “Like Abraham lied about Sarah, entering that town, huh?”

  Noah looked at her and was met only by the tops of her lowered lids. He turned away, sighing. “I’d like to leave in a week or so. It will be a bit warm for the horses, but I figure it will be better to spend the night, in case we need to camp somewhere.”

  “Camp?” Hester breathed, the thought alarming.

  “There are inns along the way, but they’re not always a place for an Amish woman who’s been sheltered from many things.”

  When Hester had nothing to say to this, he got to his feet and stood over her. He took in her black hair, darker than the surrounding twilight, the part in the middle the divide between a raven’s two wings. She looked small and childlike. But underneath he knew there lurked a will of iron, a stubborn mind of honed steel. Neither made him change his mind. They only presented a challenge, an obstacle he would enjoy, given enough time.

  “I look forward to seeing the Berks County mountains,” he said. “Hopefully, you’ll be willing to accompany me.”

  With that, he was off, his long strides covering the backyard in a few seconds, leaving Hester with one hand exte
nded, her mouth open, the call for him to come back balanced on the brink of her voice, then pushed back and swallowed by the force of her pride.

  So great was her turmoil, she slept only a few hours that night, flipping from side to side, punching and rearranging her pillow, angry, sometimes mellow, and crying, praying into the blackness of the night, unsure if God heard her or not, wondering why he withheld answers when she so desperately needed them.

  In the morning, Bappie was off to the farm. Hester knew that according to tradition, it was highly unusual for a single woman to be spending full days with a widower. Hester told Bappie so, waking into the gray morning with a temper so short, Bappie stayed out of her way.

  “Yeah, well, tradition is fine in its place, but Levi needs me out there. Nobody sees me going so early in the morning, and if they do, it’s no business of theirs, so that’s that.”

  Hester made porridge but left it uneaten to congeal on the dry sink, deciding to see if they would hire her at the dry-goods store. Perhaps the milliner might. She smiled to herself, thinking of an Amish woman fashioning the outrageous hats and bonnets of the wealthy women who sailed the streets of Lancaster on Sunday. Their hoopskirts swayed, their fans swished, their arms firmly tucked in the stalwart, richly clad, top-hatted gentlemen’s, who walked slowly to accommodate the showboats beside them.

  Sometimes Hester wondered if her best answer would be to leave the plain, restricted life of the Amish, the life where humility and hard work, fear of God and the denial of all frivolous things were the bedrock of their faith.

  Oh, she knew, Jesus Christ was the cornerstone of the plain people. This fact she never doubted, hearing the ministers speak of it every two weeks. And it was true.

  She could always hear the words of Ben Kauffman, his visage dark with effort, his long white beard wagging with the vehemence of his words. The commitment to deny oneself all worldly pleasures, along with the sins they brought, to take up the cross of self-denial and follow our Lord, was serious.