A Promise for Miriam

by Vannetta Chapman

  She’d been younger then, really only a baby—barely six. But she remembered pappi Mose making her promise. What she didn’t remember was ever being this cold, and she’d never been lost before. She peeked out from under the tree branches again.

  How would her dad see her scarf wrapped around the tree’s branch? She could barely see it. And the snow was piling up higher and higher. When she became thirsty, she tried putting some of the snow in her mouth. It worked a little at first, but now she needed to use the bathroom awfully bad and she was hungry as well as cold.

  All of those things kept her from thinking about how scared she was. She’d never been afraid of the dark before, but then she’d never been outside alone in the middle of a blizzard. Crawling back under the tree branches, she sat down with her legs crossed. Unbuttoning her coat pocket enough to slip her hand in, she ran her fingers over Stanley.

  She needed to be brave—for Stanley.

  And for her father.

  The last thing she wanted was to be crying when he found her.

  So instead, she lay down, and pulled her knees up to her chin. Maybe if she went to sleep for a few minutes, when she woke up she’d be warmer.

  Chapter 15

  Gabe couldn’t believe the amount of buggies lined around his barn and pasture fence. He might not be able to see the fence through the blizzard, but there was no mistaking the buggies. As each man arrived, Miriam’s youngest brother, Simon, took charge of stabling the horse after directing the man to Gabe.

  He didn’t want to think about where Simon was putting the horses, because the barn certainly wouldn’t hold them all.

  Joshua had insisted that Gabe stay at the house and coordinate the efforts. Gabe had argued with Miriam’s father about that, and it wasn’t in his nature to contradict his elders. It went against his nature to sit still. He wanted to be out walking the fields, looking for his daughter.

  “I understand, Gabe. I do, but that’s the reason you need to be here. No one knows this spread like you do. If there are any questions, you’re the one who can answer them. And when we find Grace, you need to be here to greet her.” That last reason had stolen any other argument he might have offered.

  So he’d taken Grace’s drawing pad, made a rough sketch of the place, and begun marking off sections as teams went out into the storm.

  His kitchen hardly resembled anything he recognized, there were so many women about. Actually, it was only Miriam and two others, but with all the activity the place seemed as busy as a hive.

  When he was sure there couldn’t be anyone else coming, another buggy would arrive outside the window. A man would hop out and hand the reins to Simon, who would be standing there almost before the horse had stopped. Miriam or one of her friends would be at the back door as the man knocked the snow off his shoes, and then someone Gabe didn’t know, someone he couldn’t even remember from Sunday, would be assuring him that everything would be all right, that they would find his Grace, and that he was ready to go search.

  Gabe would consult his sketch and assign an area of the farm, and before he could thank the stranger—no, before he could thank the neighbor—Miriam would have filled his Thermos with hot kaffi and sent him on his way.

  And though he couldn’t abide the thought of eating, though he’d had nothing since the cheese biscuit nearly twelve hours before, he was grateful something delicious was baking in his oven. The men working deserved to be fed.

  Noah appeared in the doorway between the mudroom and the kitchen, but he didn’t walk into the room. Beside him was Pepper, who barked once, and another man whom Gabe couldn’t place. In fact, he was sure he’d never seen him before.

  In his twenties, clean shaven, and with a pleasant smile, Gabe noticed that he made eye contact with Miriam before reaching down and settling the dog with a single hand gesture.

  “We’re ready to go out with him,” Noah said. “Gabe, this is Aden Schmucker. He lives a couple of districts over. His parents own the farm next to mine, and he happened to be there visiting this weekend.”

  “Thank you for coming.”

  “Ya. Of course.”

  Miriam stepped forward. If he wasn’t mistaken, there was a slight blush to her cheeks, but it could have been the heat from working in the kitchen. “Aden’s one of the best hunters in these parts. He helped to train Pepper when we first bought him.”

  “He’s a gut dog,” Aden said. “It was a gut idea to use him to look for your little girl.”

  Gabe nodded but didn’t add anything. There were dynamics at work here he didn’t understand, and truthfully he didn’t care. All he cared about was finding Grace.

  “Do you have something he can get her scent off of?” Aden asked.

  Gabe glanced toward Miriam. She pulled Grace’s mitten out of the pocket of her apron.

  “Has your daughter worn this recently?” Aden asked.

  “Ya,” Gabe said. “She has. I found it on the floor in the mudroom. I think she dropped it as she went out.”

  Aden squatted down beside the dog and spoke to him softly. Gabe couldn’t make out exactly what he said, but after a moment Aden placed the mitten in front of Pepper and spoke two short commands.

  Pepper began to walk around the mudroom, his nose to the ground. When he reached the back door, he barked once.

  “All right. Let’s go.” Aden pulled on his gloves and Noah wrapped his scarf more tightly around his neck.

  Opening the door, they both stepped out into the night, the wind pulling away any words they might have shared.

  Gabe stood there watching them go, feeling helpless and hopeless. Wanting to believe and afraid to believe.

  “It’s going to be all right, Gabe. They’ll bring Grace back to you.” Miriam placed her hand softly on his back. He remembered when he had opened his front door and she had fallen through it.

  He remembered the feel of her in his arms.

  All he wanted right now was Grace back in his house, but it helped to know that the woman standing beside him also cared about his daughter. She understood what it was to watch Grace struggle each day in her unique way, struggle and overcome. Maybe those daily battles would give her the strength to survive until someone found her.

  He stood there longer than he should have, connected to her by their feelings for Grace. The others were helping because it was the right thing to do, but he and Miriam were the two who knew Grace, who understood her even if they had come to different conclusions about what was best for her future.

  He thought of apologizing, but he knew that it wasn’t the right time.

  So instead he pulled in a deep breath and asked for more kaffi.

  Miriam didn’t think her feelings could become any more jumbled. She was so worried about Grace that one more drop of kaffi would send her stomach into somersaults. Every time she looked at Gabe, it was as if she experienced his sorrows with him. Plainly his heart was breaking with each moment that passed. The man had been through so much and now this. Physically he was big and strong, but it was obvious that emotionally he was near a cracking point.

  She had heard Aden Schmucker was in town for the weekend, but when he’d appeared in the doorway, her emotions had nearly bubbled over. Her relationship with Aden was complicated, and she’d made no attempt to clarify things. In fact, she’d been ignoring the situation for more than two months, ever since the fall festival.

  Ignoring had seemed simplest.

  She handed Gabe his kaffi and then moved back to the other side of the kitchen to stir up another batch of biscuits.

  “It’s a real blessing Aden is here this weekend,” Ida murmured. Her sister-in-law had arrived with Noah, explaining that the children would be fine with her parents. They had built a grossdawdi house next to theirs, and Ida’s mother and father often came over to lend a hand with their seven children.

  “He’s gut with Pepper,” Miriam agreed as she measured the ingredients for the biscuits.

  “He seemed happy to see you as well.”
Eva Stutzman, Eli’s sister, peered over her glasses as she pulled a pan of bread out of the oven. In her fifties, she was the midwife for their families and often worked in conjunction with the Englisch doctors. Miriam never quite understood why Eva hadn’t married. Though she had a pronounced limp, that certainly wouldn’t have stopped her from having a husband and a family.

  “Ya. I’m sure I saw him smile at you, Miriam. Didn’t you go out with him several times during the fall festival?” Ida and Eva kept their voices low as they moved efficiently about the kitchen.

  Miriam didn’t think tonight, while Gabe was worried about whether his daughter was alive or not, was the right time to be talking about her dating prospects—or her lack of them.

  She glanced over at him to make her point and then shrugged her shoulders as she finished mixing the biscuits. She was surprised Ida and Eva had thought to bring the ingredients for making biscuits and bread. How had they known that Gabe wouldn’t have all that was needed? Perhaps they had guessed because he was a widower. Or perhaps they’d heard talk?

  “Don’t worry about him,” Eva said in a low voice. “I doubt if he’d hear a workhorse clomping through the sitting room. We’re background to his agony, is all. If anything, the normal sounds of women’s work is a balm to his spirit.”

  She pulled another fresh loaf of bread out of the oven and placed it on a cooling rack, covered it with a cloth, and put more dough in the pan. When she had it in the oven, she perched back on the chair she’d pulled over from the table and resumed knitting. “So tell us about Aden.”

  “There’s nothing much to tell,” Miriam admitted, but she couldn’t stop the heat rising in her cheeks.

  Ida smiled at Eva, which only made it worse. Older women. It seemed to Miriam they were always imagining romance where there was none.

  “Think I’ll see if Gabe wants any of this bread.” Miriam swept the loaf off the cooling rack onto a plate and then swiped a knife from the counter where Ida had been chopping walnuts to put into a walnut-banana bread batter. She turned and walked toward the table near the window, aware as she did that both women were murmuring in an amused way.

  Let them murmur, as long as they kept baking.

  When the men arrived back with Grace, everyone would be mighty hungry.

  Chapter 16

  When Grace woke up, she couldn’t see anything.

  At first she thought she couldn’t see across her room, but then she remembered she wasn’t in her room. She couldn’t see the trees she knew were standing tall all around her. She couldn’t even see her fingers when she wiggled them in front of her face.

  She slipped her hand into her pocket to check on Stanley. Her body must have been keeping him warm. The little mouse nudged her fingers and then scampered to the other side of her pocket.

  Grace buttoned the pocket closed, sat up, and rubbed her eyes.

  How long had she been sleeping? And why hadn’t her dad found her yet?

  She pulled her wool cap down tighter around her ears, over her prayer kapp, and then she tried to crawl out of the shelter on her hands and knees, but all she did was bump into a wall of snow. Falling back onto her bottom, she rubbed the top of her head.

  Something was wrong. Why couldn’t she get out the same way she had before?

  Her heart started thumping faster, like when she played “statue” with her cousins back home in Indiana. This wasn’t Indiana, though, and she should be able to crawl out from under the trees.

  Reaching forward with her hand in the darkness, she tried to push out from under the trees. This time her hand hit the wall of snow.

  It was as though she’d been buried alive. How was she able to breathe?

  She reached up over her head and felt tree branches. So the trees had protected her?

  Maybe she could crawl up and out. Or maybe she should stay put.

  Grace sat back down where she thought she’d been sleeping before, and she started to cry.

  She didn’t want to cry, because it made her feel like a baby, but she was really afraid. Maybe more afraid than she’d ever been. Even more afraid than when mamm died—the thought whispered in her head, a terrible thing she didn’t want to be there.

  Once she realized how afraid she was, it was an idea that grew and grew. It was scarier than anything else. Scarier than all the tree limbs around her or the darkness or the cold.

  What if her scarf was under the snow? What if her dad didn’t find her? How long could she live in a snow cave?

  The tears sliding down her face made her cheeks burn, so she scrubbed them with her hand, the hand without a mitten. She’d been keeping it in her pocket—the pocket Stanley wasn’t in. But rubbing her cheeks made them hurt, and that made her cry harder.

  Now she didn’t only feel like a baby, but she was being a baby.

  She’d done a lot of stupid things before—drank sour milk once by accident, ate a worm on a dare, and even touched the stove when it was hot and burned her finger.

  She knew it was stupid not to talk. She heard kids call her stupid, and mostly she didn’t blame them. It was just that once she stopped, she didn’t know how to start again.

  But this? This was beyond stupid.

  Why had she gone outside? Why had she taken Stanley out of his box? Why had she managed to get lost in a blizzard?

  Her throat was dry and scratchy and she wanted something to drink—anything to drink, but she didn’t want to put any more snow in her mouth. She was crying so hard she could feel Stanley running back and forth in her pocket. Her cheeks stung like the time she had sunburned them, and that didn’t make any sense to her.

  She must be going crazy.

  Maybe that’s what happened right before you froze to death. First you imagined you were hot, and then you heard voices.

  What a horrible way to die, especially if you were only eight. She wished she could write a story about it and warn the other students in her class. She would title it “Freezing: The Worst Way to Go.”

  First your cheeks sunburn. Then you hear voices. And last you dream up a dog.

  This dog sounded awfully close. Why would she be hearing a dog?

  Grace tried to stand up, but she couldn’t do that under the tree limbs. When she did, clumps of wet snow fell down on her. Then she had an idea. Maybe she wasn’t dreaming. Maybe she actually was hearing voices. Scrubbing the tears off her cheeks, she crawled forward until she bumped into the tree trunk.

  She couldn’t stand up, but she could reach up and shake the branches. If snow fell down in here, maybe some snow would fall down on the outside too. Maybe someone was on the outside—and maybe they would see the branches moving and the snow falling.

  Shaking the branches made her arms ache, and it made the snow fall on to her head and shoulders.

  But it didn’t bother her because suddenly she was filled with hope.

  She was sure she heard voices now and the sound of a dog. She’d only met one dog since they moved here to Wisconsin. That dog was Miriam’s dog, Pepper, and he liked to find things.

  It seemed to take forever, but soon she could hear two people calling her name. They were saying things like, “Don’t worry, Grace,” and “We’re almost through.”

  And best of all, she heard one man say, “Praise Gotte. What a smart girl to hang her scarf on the limb.”

  That made her feel warm all over when the man called her smart. She knew pride was a sin—she’d heard her bishop in Indiana preach on it before. She could pray for forgiveness later. Right now it was good to know she’d done one thing right on this terrible night.

  Finally there was a tunnel through the snow, and the first thing she saw was Pepper’s nose poking through.

  Someone pulled the dog back and made the hole bigger. Pepper barked once very loudly, and then he did it again. This time when Pepper came through, no one stopped him.

  He licked Grace on the face, and Grace threw her arms around him and buried her fingers deep into his silky fur. She’d never felt
anything so warm before, anything so happy. She put her cheek against Pepper’s neck, and then she started crying again, but this time it was different. It wasn’t a sad crying.

  When they pulled her out from under the trees, no one seemed to mind about the tears. In fact, she noticed that the older man wiped at his eyes, but it could have been because of the wind. No one was angry with her, and no one pulled her away from Pepper.

  They bundled her in a warm blanket and offered her something warm to drink. She’d been thirsty for so long. When they handed her the warm Thermos she almost jumped for joy. Then she took a sip. It tasted like the kaffi her dad liked. She swallowed it even though she wanted to spit it out. Then she handed the Thermos back.

  Turned out she wasn’t as thirsty as she thought.

  Chapter 17

  Every time a team of two men trudged back through his mudroom, hope surged through Gabe’s heart, but it only took one look at their expressions to know they had no good news for him. They had found no sign of Grace.

  It was as if she had simply vanished.

  Bishop Beiler walked in with an Englischer, an officer named Jack Tate. In his mid-forties, he seemed efficient enough, though he admitted there wouldn’t be much they could do until morning. He’d had a difficult time making it out with the roads closed, driving his car as far as he could and then finally riding with the bishop in his buggy. He explained to Gabe that it would be impossible to assemble a search crew before sunrise.

  He seemed to understand their ways. He didn’t ask for a photograph of Grace, which meant he knew the Amish didn’t take pictures, and he never questioned why Gabe would have allowed Grace to go to the outhouse by herself.

  After he’d taken Gabe’s statement, he accepted a Thermos of kaffi from Miriam and prepared to go out to cover the last area of acreage Gabe had to assign, accompanied by Simon. Miriam’s brother had been working all night settling horses and caring for the buggies, and he was eager to be actively participating in the search.