Mending Fences

by Suzanne Woods Fisher

  David slapped the reins and clucked to the horse to set it trotting; it lurched forward before settling into a steady walk. “Luke, there’s been a few changes in Stoney Ridge.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for one, Amos Lapp is now the deacon. Abraham moved to Florida to be with his daughter.”

  “And the ministers? Have they changed?”

  “Just one. Gideon Smucker.”

  “Sadie’s husband?” Luke squinted. “I always thought he was afraid of his own shadow.”

  David glanced at Luke. “He’s a fine minister. Wise and humble.” He handed Luke a sealed envelope.

  It was from Luke’s mother, Rose. He made no effort to open it. “Let me guess. She wishes she could’ve been here today, she really, really does. But Galen isn’t quite ready to welcome me home.”

  “Maybe you should just read it.”

  Luke sighed and broke the seal.

  Dearest Luke,

  I’m sorry, so very sorry, that I’m not in Stoney Ridge to welcome you home. I’ll let David explain our circumstances. Please believe me when I say that the timing of this opportunity had nothing to do with your homecoming. I am so proud of you, Luke. You’ve fought a great battle, as I knew you could. And I believe that a bright and wonderful future is ahead for you.

  Love,

  Mom

  Luke wasn’t surprised. He looked up. “So what are these oh-so-special and ill-timed circumstances?”

  “Galen was needed in Kentucky. His cousin breeds Thoroughbred horses down there and had some kind of accident. Broke his leg in two places, needed surgery and pins.” David shuddered. “Anyway, he asked Galen to help him get through the next few months. Busy months for horse breeding. Galen’s stable was empty—he hadn’t purchased any horses to train for the summer, so he said yes to his cousin. It’s just short-term. They left ten days ago.”

  Luke ran through the scenario in his mind. He knew of that particular cousin. Each spring, Galen would travel to Kentucky to buy two-year-old Thoroughbreds, retired right from the races, to train them for buggy work. He always stayed with that cousin of his. They loved horses more than people, Luke always thought. “She didn’t even say goodbye.” He cringed. Had he said that out loud?

  “Your mother wanted to. She did. But your counselor advised against it.”

  Luke snorted. “Because I might decide not to return to Stoney Ridge, had I known?”

  “Because you need to make your own decisions, based on what’s best for you. Your mother wants you to come visit in Kentucky, as soon as you’re ready.”

  Ready. What did that mean?

  As they reached the turnoff to the Inn at Eagle Hill, David drove the buggy right on by. “Uh, David, I’d like to go home.”

  “Well, that’s another one of the changes. The Inn is being run by someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “Ruthie.” He glanced at Luke. “Patrick’s helping her.”

  Ah, the second blow to Luke’s gut. Ruthie, David’s daughter, had been Luke’s childhood sweetheart, the one person who understood him, whom he counted on, up until that messy time when everything fell apart. Ruthie met Patrick and Luke ended up in rehab.

  “So where are you taking me?”

  “Windmill Farm.”

  Luke let out an indignant huff. “Oh, David, come on. Your own son used to call it Fern’s Home for Wayward Boys. I think I’ve gotten past that stage.”

  “Amos needs help with his orchards this summer, and . . .”

  “And what?” What was it that David didn’t want to say? That Amos was a kind man, and probably the only one who would be willing to host Luke.

  “Amos is willing to provide room and board for you, in exchange for working his orchards.” The horse had slowed to a crawl, so David flicked the reins to urge it back into a trot. “Birdy and I would have welcomed you into our home, but there’s not an inch of space to be spared, not with the babies. And there’s no work to be done. I’m no farmer.”

  “I could work at Bent N’ Dent. I could sleep in the back room. I could stock shelves. Make deliveries.”

  David was quiet for so long that Luke wondered what was running through his mind. Probably . . . that Luke might be bad for business. But then David surprised him. “Let’s try this first. If it doesn’t work out, then you can work at the store. But I think you might enjoy working for Amos. He’s a wealth of knowledge about farming. About all kinds of things. And he truly needs help this summer.”

  Luke was silent for the rest of the trip, eyes fixed on the rhythmic clip-clops of the horse’s shoes on the pavement. So, all these changes told him a great deal. His family had left town, he wasn’t trusted to run the Inn, or to work at the store, and no one in Stoney Ridge seemed to want him here. Why had he even come home at all? He had no home, no one to welcome him back. Where did that leave him? Without his old life and not quite coming up with a new one. In between, floating, nowhere.

  He still couldn’t answer why he’d come back to Stoney Ridge, even when the counselor had tried to get him to put feelings into words. For some inexplicable reason, Luke knew that David was right. The only path to manhood was to be here, to face his past and make amends. After that, he could leave.

  He would leave.

  two

  Amos Lapp tried not to let a smile slip out when he informed Luke Schrock that he’d be sleeping out in the barn. Luke looked stunned, and for a brief second, his mask dropped to reveal the face of a disappointed boy. Just as quickly, it disappeared, and the mask returned. That bright blaze of resentment.

  “I thought Jesse moved the buggy shop to the back of the Bent N’ Dent.”

  “Yup, that’s right. So?”

  “When David told me I’d be staying at Windmill Farm, I thought he meant I’d be living in that little room off the buggy shop. It’s not so bad at all.”

  “Not so bad at all. But I’m using it to store equipment. So for now, the only available place for you is the tack room.”

  “But, Amos . . . a barn?”

  Amos lifted a hand to end the conversation. “Don’t look so woebegone. Fern’s fixed it up real nice.”

  Head hung low, Luke followed him out to the barn. Amos didn’t think the tack room was such a bad place to be, not after Fern had worked her magic. There was a cot made up with clean cotton sheets, a goose-down pillow—Amos’s favorite—a flashlight, and a pitcher of fresh water to wash up. Luke would bathe and take his meals in the house, along with the family.

  Such a small family it was now. There was only Amos, Fern, and Izzy. And Izzy Miller was another reason Luke Schrock needed to be staying far away in the barn. Amos had raised three daughters, and he understood the way a boy’s mind worked. He was taking no chances. He felt a responsibility to Izzy. She was another stray David had brought to them, and it had taken a long time for her to settle in and trust them. When David asked him to consider taking Luke in, Amos’s first reaction was a sound no! “I don’t want Luke setting Izzy back. You know how careless he’s been with girls.”

  “I do know,” David had said. His Ruthie was one of those girls.

  Fern kept insisting that they agree to offer Luke a place to live, a chance to start again. “Who are we to say someone is beyond saving?” On top of that poignant remark, she had a healthy respect for the bishop. To his wife’s way of thinking, one didn’t say no to a bishop. Amos had no trouble saying no to David, nor to any bishop. He’d had good bishops and not-so-good bishops, and he knew they were just ordinary men, trying to do the best they could. When a church felt they couldn’t say no to a bishop, it had become an unhealthy church.

  Now that Amos was a deacon and privy to much, he believed that truth all the more. But Stoney Ridge was a healthy church, and David was a fine leader. Fern was probably right. Who was he to say the boy was beyond saving?

  He corrected his thinking. Luke was no longer a boy. He must be twenty by now, maybe twenty-one. He’d always been a tough one for Rose to manag
e on her own. Amos had never known Dean Schrock, Rose’s husband, for he’d died before they moved to the Inn at Eagle Hill. But even Fern admitted that Luke must take after his father. She’d always said Luke was more good-looking than any fellow should be, and Dean Schrock was supposed to have been a looker too. Doors opened too easily, Fern thought, when a person was assessed on God-given good looks and not on character earned. It was a danger, not a gift, she believed, to be unusually attractive. A person didn’t develop substance and resources to help them in life. Like a hothouse plant that couldn’t survive in the outdoors.

  She was probably right. Fern was usually right.

  Whatever it was that made Luke Schrock such a reckless boy, it had turned him into a holy terror by his late teens. Amos had to credit David Stoltzfus for not giving up on the boy. He knew why David sent him their way—no one else would have him! Who had forgotten the mischief that boy caused? The blown-up mailboxes, Patrick’s dead mynah bird, the road games of chicken. And there were plenty of other stunts he’d pulled on unsuspecting people.

  As he closed the barn door and headed back up to the house, he thought that if he were a betting man, which he wasn’t, but if he were . . . he figured Luke wouldn’t last a week.

  Luke flopped on the squeaky cot and looked up at the barn rafters. A barn. I am living in a barn. How low can a man go? Living among stinking cows and horses and mice and barn swallows. Sleeping in a tack room, along with blankets and bridles and reins, and shelves stacked with spare horseshoes and jars of liniment. There wasn’t even a proper ceiling to this cubby. Thick hand-hewn beams crossed above his head. Sunlight streamed through loose shingles on the steeply pitched roof.

  He lifted his head off the pillow. Why, there wasn’t even a door to the tack room. No door. No privacy. This was ridiculous. There had to be a better option than sleeping in a barn.

  He’d tried to press Amos to let him stay in the house, or better still, the empty buggy shop, but there was no uncertainty in his answer, no question or lingering pause. The only place for Luke on Windmill Farm was the barn. A barn. He thought of how often he’d gathered with friends in somebody’s barn to drink and dance and generally disturb the peace.

  His glance shifted to the hooks on the wall. There hung clothing for a Plain man, straw hat included. He sighed, thinking of Amos’s parting words to him. “Don’t forget. Church is tomorrow.”

  Luke squeezed his eyes shut. Church. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go. He’d always liked church, especially when David preached. Seeing his friends prior to church was fun, the fellowship meal at the end tasted especially good after sitting for three hours on a hard bench.

  Would there be any friends left for him tomorrow? Would anyone be glad he’d come? He wondered.

  He opened his eyes and looked at the clothes hanging on the hook. He pulled off his T-shirt and took the blue shirt off the hook. He caught a whiff of it and buried his face in the fabric, just for a moment, soaking up the clean smell of sunshine. That scent of clothes dried on a line, how he’d forgotten that sweet smell and all it represented. Someone cared.

  He heard a woman’s soft voice, singing to herself, and peered out the window. Coming up the field was Izzy Miller, shivvying some stray lambs to join the ewes at the top of the hill. Luke tucked his new blue shirt into his pants, grabbed his flat-brimmed straw hat, and ran out the door.

  Fern had told Izzy that a new farmhand was arriving today to help Amos with the harvest, and that he’d be living in the barn’s workroom. But she neglected to mention that he had come straight from Mountain Vista Rehabilitation Clinic in Lancaster.

  What was his name again? She couldn’t remember. He ran over to greet her like they were long-lost friends, then seemed shocked—absolutely floored—that she had no memory of him. But she had none. None whatsoever.

  She had just stooped over to rub noses with a black-faced lamb when she heard him call out her name. She straightened up and gave a curt response to his enthusiastic greeting, effectively ending the conversation as she squared her shoulders and continued moving the woollies up the hill. She loved this time of year, when the grass turned emerald green and the air turned warm and when she woke in the morning, there’d be another lamb or two born in the night, already part of the flock. Like magic.

  Izzy smiled as a mother ewe nudged her lamb to get it moving up the hill and, startled, it jumped in the air, butting another lamb. Both bleated loudly and unhappily, spooking the whole flock. It had taken months for her to grow accustomed to the skittish tendencies of sheep. At first, she kept thinking she was doing something wrong. After a while, she decided that sheep lived in perpetual panic. In a strange way, she got it. She got them, their panic. They reminded her of herself—she just kept her perpetual panic hidden a little better.

  Take that new farmhand. When he introduced himself to her, she felt a shiver of precognition, as if something was going to happen, as if he was going to cause something to happen—and it made her hackles rise. She could tell from the way his eyes lit up that he thought she was worth his attention, and she knew enough of his type—too handsome for his own good, that type—to know he considered himself something special. Izzy had more on her mind than dallying with a guy fresh out of rehab.

  When she reached the top of the hill, she turned around to see the farmhand weaving his way through a clump of woollies. The sheep lifted their heads to stare curiously at him, though he didn’t seem to notice. She watched him hop over the fence and head toward the barn. The bottom of the barn had low brick walls, as high as a man’s shoulder. She hadn’t noticed before, not until she saw the farmhand walking beside it.

  Below the big red barn was a fast-running stream bordered by cattails. She could see redwing blackbirds fly in and land near the stream, then swoop away again. Fern had taught her the names of the birds that frequented Windmill Farm. So many varieties! All colors and shapes and sizes. And just when she thought she knew them all, they’d fly north or south, depending on the time of year, and another new one would appear at the feeders. She could identify some of them, but not all. Not yet.

  A breeze came up, blowing soft and sweet against her face, ruffling her capstrings. Summer. It was coming. With it, endless chores. The garden needed constant tending, berries needed to be picked, fruits and vegetables canned. She lifted her eyes to gaze around the farm, at the snug house that sat at the top of the hill, at the squeaky red windmill, at the trees in the orchards behind the house that were starting to bloom. All in stages, all in their proper order of time, and Izzy felt intoxicated by her sense of longing. This. All this. A home, a family. She wanted this.

  The Rhode Island Red hens moved away from Luke as he crossed the yard and closer to one another, clucking nervously, looking behind them to make sure he was not following.

  It made him unhappy to see those hens scurry away from him. It reminded him of how he had felt at church this morning, how the women—and a lot of men—had treated him. Why were hens let loose in a yard, anyway? Especially on a morning when church was being hosted. They were a nuisance, noisy and messy.

  David had told Luke that he would need to make a public confession to the church, to make things right between him and other church members, between him and God. Luke had expected to sit on the sinner’s bench. It wasn’t a new spot for him. He’d sat there plenty of times, bent at the knee to express sorrow for veering off the straight and narrow path. This time, it was a little different. First off, he felt some genuine sorrow. That was new.

  And the response of others was different. Normally, all is forgiven and forgotten after confession. Not so today.

  Luke was prepared for people to look him up and down at church. As he bent down on the sinner’s bench, he felt all eyes—blue eyes, brown eyes, green eyes, scolding eyes, frowning and mocking eyes—were on him. What he hadn’t expected was such a cold shoulder from . . . nearly everyone. All but Birdy and David, and one curly haired boy who followed him everywhere from a safe distance.r />
  Edith Lapp wondered if he’d stolen any cars lately. Jesse Stoltzfus asked if he’d improved his pickpocketing skills. Big Teddy Zook, whom he had considered a friend of sorts, wouldn’t even shake his hand. Strange, that.

  But Hank Lapp might have been the worst of all. A tall man with a bushy white beard and wild white hair and eyes as bright as a hawk’s, he spoke in a shout. “WELL, WELL, WELL. SKIN ME FOR A POLECAT IF IT ISN’T LUKE SCHROCK,” he said. It was his regular talking voice. “BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES, FOLKS. LOCK YOUR VALUABLES. KEEP YOUR LITTLE ONES INSIDE. THE GUNSLINGER’S BACK IN STONEY RIDGE.”

  Luke sighed. His reputation had grown bigger than the truth.

  Naturally, everyone heard Hank. Children darted behind their mother’s skirt and around their father’s legs as if he were packing sidearms. A group of boys hid behind the bench wagon, peeking out to get a look at him as if he’d suddenly grown two heads. That was when he decided to cross the yard and sit by himself in the shade of the henhouse.

  “Psst. Do you really carry a pistol in your boot?”

  Luke turned around to see the curly haired boy staring at his boots. Behind him were three more boys. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “Him.” The boy pointed to Hank Lapp, napping under a tree.

  Luke had seen a clump of boys hanging around Hank, probably pestering him. He frowned. This was Hank’s way of shooing the boys away to get some peace and quiet. Luke looked each boy right in the eyes, then slowly, carefully, he lowered one hand down to his boot top. The boys yelped and ran off.

  Then there was Ruthie. His Ruthie. She never even bothered to glance at Luke, rarely left the side of Patrick Kelly except for during church when she had no choice but to sit with the women. Luke tried to catch a moment with her, just to say hello, but she kept slipping away from him, staying close to groups of older women. She knew he wouldn’t come near her. Few things were as intimidating as a knot of Amish mothers.