Christmas at Rose Hill Farm

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  “Maggie,” Lainey warned in a sharp tone. “So what exactly is the troubling part?”

  “Troubling for every unmarried woman from the age of sixteen to ninety. Bess, you’re safe, but my life is in peril. Complete peril.” Maggie took a spoonful of baked oatmeal. “My dad is on the hunt for a new schoolteacher. Very worrying.”

  “If you say so,” Jonah said, not sounding at all worried.

  Maggie seemed astounded at Jonah’s casual response. “It is worrying! If you were eighteen years old and your father was the bishop, you’d be worried sick, Jonah.”

  He still didn’t seem too worried.

  “Why am I so hard to believe? I always tell the truth.” Maggie shook her head. She took a few more bites of baked oatmeal and looked up, as if something had just occurred to her. “So Billy, I always wondered, why did you leave?”

  Silence fell over the table. Even Maggie noticed. “Okay then, next question. Why did you come back?”

  All eyes were on Billy. “A rose,” he said in a quiet voice.

  Maggie’s face lit up. “Ha! Of course!”

  “He’s a rose rustler,” Bess said.

  “Oh, that sounds exciting! Like cowboy cattle rustling in the Old West.”

  “No,” Billy said, shaking his head. “Nothing like that. What I do is legal.”

  “What is it you do?”

  “When people come across a rose they don’t recognize, they find me and I try to figure out its parentage. Its identity.”

  “How do these people find you?”

  Billy shrugged. “Rosarians know how to find each other.”

  “Rosarians. Sounds very official and important.” Between bites, Maggie pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “But that doesn’t explain why you’re at Rose Hill Farm. You must know all Bertha’s roses inside and outside and upside and downside and any other side.” She peered at him. “Don’t you?”

  Jonah handed Maggie a platter of hash browns. “Bess came across one that had somehow escaped everyone’s notice. We weren’t sure about its identity. Right, Bess?”

  Billy noticed that Bess kept her eyes down. He still had a feeling she knew something about this mystery rose that she wasn’t telling him. What? And why?

  Maggie chewed a piece of bacon thoughtfully. “Billy, how does a person go about finding a rose’s identity?”

  “I compare its characteristics on a database. If I still can’t figure it out, I’ll call a few Rose Societies and see if they have seen it before.”

  “Ever been stumped?”

  “Not yet.” He glanced at Jonah. “Maybe this will be the one to flummox me.” But if it did, that would mean it was a very, very unique rose. He turned back to Maggie. “I have to wait until this rosebud opens to confirm its identity.”

  Maggie lowered her spoon and looked up. “When do you think it’ll open up?”

  “Maybe in a week or two. Hopefully before Christmas.” Oh, how he hoped. He couldn’t handle being near Stoney Ridge for Christmas. Near, but so far away.

  Maggie clapped her hands. “Oh good! Then you’ll be here for Bess’s wedding.”

  Billy felt frozen in place, but his gaze was drawn to Bess, whose cheeks had started to flame. Her napkin slipped to the floor and she nearly overturned her juice glass when she bent down to pick up her napkin.

  It took him a beat to recover and reply sensibly, “Ah, no. I’m not staying.” He said it without moving a muscle. He saw Bess cast a furtive glance around the table. Lainey was wiping Lizzie’s face, Jonah was stirring sugar into his coffee. Bess jumped up to rescue toast burning to a crisp in the oven.

  He turned to Maggie. “And who is Bess going to marry?”

  “Amos Lapp.” She tapped her chin. “Let’s see. Amos is your cousin on your father’s side. I’m your cousin on your mother’s side. So I’m not related to Amos, but we’re both related to you. Sometimes it seems that everyone in Stoney Ridge is related one way or another, a twig on a tree. Bess, doesn’t it sound like one of those math puzzles in school? If a train is traveling at a certain speed, when does it arrive at the station? Why are manholes round? What did we call those, Bess?”

  Bess kept her eyes on the burnt toast she was scraping in the kitchen sink. “The teacher called them brainteasers. We called them conundrums.”

  “Yes! That’s the word I was looking for! Conundrums. Because they made no sense.”

  An awkward silence filled the air. Bess sat back down at the table with the scraped toast and put heaping spoonfuls of boysenberry jam on top, carefully spreading it to the edges.

  “When?” Billy asked, a little louder than he intended. So that’s what Maggie meant when she said Bess was safe—she couldn’t be the new schoolteacher because she would be married. “When will the wedding be?”

  “In a few days,” Bess said at last, the words coming out on a soft gust of breath. Her gaze held his for a moment, then flickered aside.

  My best friend. She’s marrying my best friend. Overwhelmed, Billy did the only thing he knew how to do: clamp his jaw shut and reset his features, cutting off all traces of emotion. He took a bite of baked oatmeal and chewed it, trying to look calm and thoughtful and nonchalant. The oatmeal had lost its taste. He swallowed past a large lump stuck in his throat. “I’m sure you’ll both be very happy.” There were a thousand more churning thoughts seething for release, but Billy kept them carefully concealed, like he was drawing the shutters in a house that was getting pelted by a rainstorm.

  The grandfather clock gonged and Maggie jumped up. “Look at the time! I better get home to help Jorie. I have a job interview at the Sweet Tooth Bakery this afternoon. Wish me well!” She bolted to the door and skidded to a halt when Jonah called her back.

  “Maggie,” Jonah said in a solemn voice, “I’d rather you not tell your father about Billy. Or the rose.”

  “Got it. Top secret.” She twisted her fingers on her lips as if locking a key, waved goodbye to Billy, and sailed out as gustily as she’d sailed in, leaving him feeling as if he’d just taken a ride on a tornado.

  Without Maggie filling the air with chatter, the meal became strained. What little there was of conversation was stilted and came to sudden stops until finally they forsook talk altogether.

  Throughout the rest of the meal, Billy ignored Bess, unable to look at her without a suffocating sense of defeat and discouragement. The family, sensing his mood, was silent. All but the toddler—what was her name again?—who hummed as she ate her scrambled eggs.

  The minute the tense meal was over and Jonah offered up a silent prayer, Billy sought solace in the place he loved best. He pushed away from the table, gave a nod of thanks to Lainey, said goodbye to Jonah, and walked to the greenhouse, head bowed, footsteps automatic.

  And then Bess was running to catch up, calling his name, but he didn’t break his stride until she seized his elbow and yanked him to a halt.

  “Please! Let me explain.”

  They stood a foot apart, facing each other. “Billy, I was going to tell you about my plans. I just hadn’t found the right time—”

  “Your plans,” he echoed. The bitterness in his voice was unmistakable.

  Bess wrapped her arms around herself to stay warm; her eyes watered from the cold. “Yes. My plan. Our plans. Amos’s and my plans.”

  Billy shrugged and looked at his wristwatch. “I don’t care about your plans. It doesn’t matter to me who you marry.”

  Bess recoiled as if Billy had slapped her. “Do you mean that?”

  He held her gaze. “Yes.”

  She took a step backward. “When . . . ,” she started, a sob catching in her throat. “When did you get so hard?” She turned her back and fled to the house, leaving Billy standing in front of the greenhouse, adrift as a ship without a mast.

  6

  When did you get so hard? Billy tried to appear calm, but a band of hurt cinched his chest when Bess spat out those words. The greenhouse door squeaked when he opened it, the first thing to
register on his troubled mind. Trying to let his indignation recede, he found an oilcan in the barn workshop and returned to oil the hinges of the greenhouse door, scarcely aware of what he was doing.

  Hard. Hard. Hard. The blood rushed to his face afresh as he recalled Bess’s words. It was true. He was hard. But how dare she throw it in his face! Vehemently, he whacked the greenhouse door shut, slammed the oilcan down, marched down the aisle of the greenhouse, and tried to concentrate on this rose. This exasperating, inscrutable rose . . . that wasn’t going to be hurried for anyone’s sake.

  Amos. Bess was marrying Amos. His best friend, his favorite cousin whom he loved, who had seen him through one of the worst times of his life.

  One wouldn’t guess it by watching him now, but Billy was usually slow to anger. He was uncomfortable with it—maybe because of his brothers’ volatility—and tried to avoid it.

  How, then, had the last two days spawned such belligerence in him? In frustration he slammed his open palms against a wooden shelf. He hadn’t felt this kind of anger, this powerless, frustrating anger, since that pivotal day when he left Stoney Ridge.

  But that was then and this was now. He shook his head and came back to the present. He wished he’d remembered that book on lost roses today. He stared at the rose, willing it to grow. Open, rosebud. Open. As soon as it did, he would be able to determine if this might be related to the Perle von Weissenstein. Maybe as old as the Perle. Possibly . . . older?

  And if it were, it would be the biggest rose found of the decade. He would be credited for the identification and he could leave Stoney Ridge behind. This time, for good.

  The sun disappeared behind a cloud, casting a gray pallor that matched his frame of mind. Squinting at the sky through the glass roof, he watched the cloud cover, wondering if it would thicken or diminish as the day wore on. When he heard someone say his name, he nearly jumped. “George! What are you doing here?”

  George was standing in the open door of the greenhouse, studying the squeak of the hinges as he opened and shut the door. “Needs a little oil.”

  “I know. I thought I’d put enough on it.” He scratched his neck. Why hadn’t he heard it squeak when George came in?

  “I noticed you forgot this. I thought you might need it.” George handed him the book of lost roses, the very one he had forgotten.

  “You came all this way? How’d you know where I was?”

  George reached into his pocket and held out that piece of paper with the address of Rose Hill Farm on it that Jill had given to him Friday morning. “You keep dropping this.” He stared at a row of jars that lined the back of the workbench. He reached out to pick up one jar of dried rose petals and held it up to the light. “Ah, roses as remedies. For the herb gardener in a medieval monastery, R. gallica ‘Officinalis’ offered the cure for many a malady.”

  Billy squinted at him. This erudite hobo thoroughly baffled him. “How would you know the Latin name for a rose?” He was thunderstruck. “How on earth?”

  George tipped his chin in Billy’s direction, though he didn’t look at him directly. He set the jar of rose petals back in its place. “Have you had a chance to see your father?”

  A current of indignation mixed with rage sprang up in Billy. Last night was the first time he’d spilled out his feelings to someone about his father and brothers, about the hurt they’d caused all those years ago, about how the hurt could be so intense yet, when he’d thought it mastered. But he hadn’t really expected to see George again and he certainly didn’t expect him to show up in Stoney Ridge where the story began. And ended.

  ———

  Late summer 1973. Billy had gone to the barn to tell his brothers that supper was ready and found them adding scoops of sawdust to the bottom of empty flour sacks, then pouring freshly threshed wheat grain on top of the sawdust. “What’s going on?”

  His brother Ben was the first to speak. He stepped in front of Billy, hands on his hips, chin jutting. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just what the die-hinker are you doing here?” echoed Mose. Some said Mose was skewed in the head, mostly because he never had a thought there that hadn’t started in Sam’s or Ben’s head first. He followed his brothers everywhere, most often into trouble.

  Billy ignored Mose. Ben glowered at him, but he always had something to be angry about, and Billy had learned long ago that the best way to handle him was to stand up to him. “Why would you put sawdust in the gunny sacks?” Billy sidestepped around Ben up to the sacks of grain as a horrible discovery dawned on him. “Are you trying to add weight to the grain?”

  Ben scowled at him. “We’re keeping the grain from getting mildewed. It’s common practice.”

  That was a lie. “If they mill the grain into flour with that sawdust in there, then it’ll mean folks are eating—”

  His oldest brother Sam, overgrown—easily twice Billy’s size—reared to his feet, his belly and thighs knocking into a barrel of oats so hard it rocked. He pulled back his hand and slapped Billy hard enough to send him flying across the aisle. He yanked Billy to his feet, swinging him around to face him. Eye level to Billy was the Adam’s apple on Sam’s throat, and when he saw it working strongly, he thought there was a chance Sam would let him go.

  “Wait’ll Dad hears this . . . ,” Billy said, hoping to convince him.

  A loud snort punctuated the air, coming from Mose. Billy glanced at him and saw he was holding up one of the sacks, handling it almost lovingly.

  Sam gripped Billy’s shoulder so tightly it left a bruise. “Not only does he know, but he’s the one who told us to do it. He’s been doing it for years.” He released Billy with a hard jerk. “Now, get outta here.”

  Mose gripped the gunnysack in his fist, shaking it before Billy’s face. “You heard ’im. Git.”

  Billy looked at the sack in Mose’s hand, feeling weary and sick and scared. This was wrong.

  He backed cautiously out of the barn, forgetting his hat. It all started to make sense—his father’s grain delivery to Great Harvest Granary in Lancaster hadn’t been reduced in the last few years since he had started no-till farming, though Billy knew the yield had dropped. His father had not only been cheating the granary but he’d added sawdust into flour destined for people’s pantries.

  For a long time, he stared at the barn, then at the farmhouse, back to the barn, back to the farmhouse. Finally, he made a decision and took off running to Beacon Hollow, straight to Caleb Zook to tell him what he had just discovered.

  Appalled but without seeming entirely surprised, Caleb acted fast. He pulled the shipment of Lapp wheat from the granary—effectively causing Billy’s father to lose the year’s crop. Next came the part that Billy hadn’t anticipated. Under church discipline, Caleb and the other ministers paid a visit to the Lapp Farm to put Billy’s father under the Bann. For six weeks, his father had to eat at a different table than other church members—family members included—and couldn’t conduct business with them or accept gifts. At the end of that time, he would confess before the church and be restored to full fellowship.

  Billy braced himself for backlash. He expected his father to be openly furious, his brothers to be stealthily vindictive. This time, there was a marked change. This time, there was nothing.

  ———

  George cleared his throat, patiently waiting for Billy’s answer: Have you had a chance to see your father?

  Billy started rifling through the lost rose book, irritated. “No. And I’m not going to.” Absolutely not. And what business was that of George’s? A wave of regret washed over him—why had he revealed his underbelly to this hobo?

  George picked up a pair of clippers. “May I?” He touched a few dead leaves on a rosebush with the tips of the clippers and waited for a nod from Billy before he began to snip them off. “Time is fleeting, Billy,” he said softly. Snip, snip. Two dead leaves fell to the ground, one at Billy’s feet.

  Billy wanted not to understand his meaning. Was George suggesting that
he take the first step toward reconciliation? Billy wasn’t the one who had done anything wrong. He had no intention of according his father a morsel of sympathy or understanding. “Time passes on both sides.”

  If George was surprised by the sharp shift in Billy’s tone, he didn’t show it. He was preoccupied with the rows of potted plants. “This is where you first learned how to graft roses?”

  “Yeah.” He bent over to study a print, then his head snapped up. “How’d you know that? I don’t remember ever mentioning grafting roses.” But maybe he did. It was late and he was tired.

  “I think you mentioned something about it last night. Plus I saw a lot of your grafting work back in the greenhouse at College Station.” George bent over to sniff a rose blossom, an Old Blush China. “Grafting is fascinating work, isn’t it? The tissues of one plant fused with another.”

  Billy nodded cautiously, head bent toward the book, but aware of George from the corner of his eyes.

  “There are countless illustrations in the natural world that point to another reality.”

  Billy lifted his head, confused. “Say again?”

  “Let’s take the concept of grafting. Divining one green thing from another. You could liken it to how an individual becomes part of the family of God. You, for example. You’re on your own, cut off from your family.” He spun around to face Billy. “But you could choose to graft yourself to new rootstock. The living root. The source.”

  “What are you talking about, man?”

  George’s eyes swept over the plants in the greenhouse. “You can’t love the stream without knowing the source.”

  Billy closed the book and placed the palms of his hands on the workbench. “George, this is probably just the reason you haven’t been able to get regular work. Were you ever in the military? I’ve heard stories of what it was like Vietnam. Hard stuff. Left good men with lingering problems. You’re not alone. We can get help for you.”

  “No. No, I’ve never been in the military.”

  Really? Billy bit his lip. “Then . . . did you used to do drugs?”