A Simple Winter: A Seasons of Lancaster Novel

by Rosalind Lauer

  “Thank you for your good help.” Nate touched the brim of his hat and winked at Simon. “I’d best set to milking the cows.”

  Adam nodded good-bye to Nate, grateful to end this conversation with his uncle before Nate delved too deep into Adam’s personal life. Ordinarily, the older generation left the younger ones to their own devices when it came to courtship, but there was nothing ordinary about Adam’s situation, a single man left to lead his siblings after their parents’ deaths.

  He turned to Simon. “Go find Ruthie. Tell her it’s time to go,” Adam instructed, and the boy scurried off as Adam went to the back of the barn to fetch his horse.

  In the steely gray light of dusk he led Thunder to the line of buggies parked in a row at the front of the house. The horse nickered as Adam hitched him up to the covered carriage, Dat’s finest, with glass windows and nearly enough seats for the entire family.

  “Think we’ll be getting more snow?” The question came from behind Adam, and he turned to find his cousin Jacob checking his horse’s harness. Jacob King was still in his rumspringa, and from the stereo speakers and spoiler installed in his buggy, Adam could see he was enjoying it.

  “Not today,” Adam said, “but it’s only January. I’d say we’re in for some more winter storms.”

  “I’m thinking of getting rubber tires for my buggy,” Jacob said with a grin. “That would be good in the snow, ya?”

  “Probably better than steel.” Adam didn’t mention the fact that sleighs were more functional in heavy snow. Rumspringa was the time for a boy to enjoy customizing his buggy.

  Studying the row of buggies, he saw that Gabriel and Jonah had taken the smaller one home when they’d left an hour ago to start the afternoon milking. Eager to return and help with the chores, he climbed into his carriage, clicked his tongue, and eased Thunder toward the main house.

  The King women approached the carriage, Susie and Leah first, followed by their grandmother.

  “It’s cold out here.” Susie blew out a puff of air and jabbed at the small cloud with her finger. “I can see my breath.”

  Adam came around the carriage just in time to notice that her fingertips were red. “What’s that on your hands, Susie?”

  With a grin, she slipped her hands out from under her shawl, revealing red-tinged palms. “Beet juice,” she said with a smile. “Did you know that’s the secret ingredient in Aunt Betsy’s chocolate cake?”

  “A healthy ingredient,” Adam said, “though we’ll have to check and make sure it’s on your diet.” Susie suffered from glutaric aciduria, an inherited metabolic condition that required a low-protein diet. Adam pretended to scowl over Susie’s stained hands, though he couldn’t keep it up. Susie’s smile was quick to melt the sternest disposition.

  “Oh, Aunt Betsy’s chocolate cake is wonderful good and I’ve had it plenty of times,” Susie said. “But beets! Imagine a vegetable in cake. It’s no wonder she keeps it a secret.”

  “But not a secret anymore, ya?” There was a twinkle in Mammi’s dark eyes as she proceeded toward the carriage. When she placed a hand on Adam’s shoulder, he felt a swell of love for the grandmother who had showered them with strength, wisdom, and love this past year. As bookkeeper for the farm, Mammi Nell was a solid mathematician and a practical planner. She kept a steady eye on the farm budget for the family.

  He helped her into the back of the carriage, then turned to his twin sisters. “I hope you watched the baking carefully so that you can make us something delicious at home.”

  Leah pressed two fingers to the side of her white prayer Kapp. “It’s all up here, and you know I have a good memory.”

  “That you do,” Adam said.

  “Careful to make way.” Mary trudged out of the house bearing a bundle of old towels covering hot bricks from the fire. More than anyone, Mary had taken over Mamm’s duties in the past year, and sometimes Adam worried that it was too much for a girl of twenty. Granted, most Amish girls that age had families and babes of their own, but to inherit an instant family of eleven in a cloud of such heartbreak and grief … that was too much.

  “You’ve a fine head for books, Leah, but sometimes I think you’d forget to wear your kapp if it wasn’t sitting by your bedside,” Mary said as she used a folded blanket to deposit the hot bricks in the back of Adam’s carriage. “How about fetching the other warming bricks from the fire?”

  As Susie and Leah hustled back into the house, Simon appeared with Ruthie, her cheeks pink from the cold, ice skates dangling from her mittened hand.

  “You remembered to warm the bricks! Denki, Mary.” She plopped her skates into the back of the carriage and climbed in. “I was just about to turn into a snowman!”

  “Now share this, and mind it doesn’t slip away,” Mary said, tucking a blanket around Simon and Ruth.

  When everyone was settled in at last, Mary climbed onto the seat beside Adam, and they were off, following a handful of carriages bumping along the dirt drive. Nightfall came early this time of year, and Adam was eager to get home and help his brothers with the cows, their udders swollen with milk by now.

  As he steered his horse toward home, the horizon unfolded before him: frozen winter fields and western sky. A ribbon of peace. The sun, a golden glow bleeding to the purple of night, was a reminder that nothing of consequence could be rushed. They would get home soon enough to tend the livestock.

  They passed a flock of women who turned at the fork in the road—neighbors who had come to help ready the house for tomorrow’s church meeting.

  “Bye, Hannah … Miriam!” Mary called, waving from the carriage.

  “You’ll see them tomorrow at preaching service,” Adam said, pulling the reins in the opposite direction.

  “There’s nothing wrong with being social.” Mary shifted in the leather seat beside him. “A lesson you seem to have forgotten.”

  “I didn’t forget. I just don’t have a spare minute for socializing, what with the cows to milk and the winter repairs.” Not to mention eleven of us to keep fed, clothed, safe, and happy. More than anything the idea of leadership weighed on his mind, but he didn’t want to sound like he was complaining. Especially to Mary, who tackled so many chores every day, and cheerfully at that. “The work doesn’t scare me, but many times I don’t know what to do first. When the cows bellow to be milked and the stalls have to be mucked and the chickens are waiting to be fed, I don’t know where to start.”

  “We all have our chores, Adam, but still Jonah and I find time for singings and courtships.” Mary rarely missed the chance to slip out on a Saturday night or attend a Sunday singing with her beau, John Beiler. Nicknamed Five because, when he was twelve, his hand-me-down overcoat was so large, five boys fit inside it, John Beiler had won over Mary soon after she began her rumspringa. Adam was surprised they did not marry last December, during wedding season. “You ought to join us tomorrow night,” Mary went on. “Annie was just saying she’s hoping you’ll be there.”

  Adam kept his eyes on the road. “Are you setting me up with Annie? That’s where this is going?”

  Mary heaved a sigh thick with frustration. “Do I have to spell everything out for you? Three years you spent with the English and you lost the ability to see the most obvious things.”

  “My eyesight is fine, denki.” Though he hadn’t seen the plug for Annie coming. Was that the source of the giggles and whispers between Annie and his sister whenever he saw them together?

  “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Annie is very good with Katie and Sam. Ruthie, too. The children like her.”

  “I see that.”

  “I’m just saying. You might want to pay Annie some attention.”

  “It’s not that way between Annie and me,” Adam said quietly. When he thought of Annie Stoltzfus, he could see those naturally red lips that always brought him back to that summer day more than a decade ago when she had been picking berries with Mary. The girls were ten or so, and a bee in the strawberry patch had stung Annie on
the back of her hand. Although Adam had been detasseling corn in a field nearly half a mile away, he had heard her wail as it echoed through the rows of corn. He ran to help, only to find Annie collapsed in the brambles, her mouth stained with red from strawberries that didn’t make it into the pail.

  Adam helped her back to the house that day, and ever since, Annie had marked him as her hero. She made it clear that she looked up to him. She enjoyed being with him. Life would have been simpler if Adam felt the same way, but every time he looked at her, he saw a whimpering ten-year-old with a face stained by berries.

  “There you go again, getting lost under your own personal storm cloud.” Mary poked him in the ribs.

  “Ouch,” he complained, though it didn’t really hurt.

  “I wonder how you would know what it’s like to spend time with Annie, since you’ve never really tried it?” Mary’s words were puffs of steam in the cold air.

  “Sometimes you just know. The way you know that you and Five belong together?”

  “Oh, now you’re turning the topic to me?” Despite the light trill in her voice, she turned away and stared down at the road.

  Personal relationships were just that—personal, and not something to be discussed, even with a sibling. Adam knew that, but it wasn’t often he could tease his sister.

  “Are you blushing?” He leaned toward her for a closer look at her face. “You are!”

  “I’m just red from the cold.” Mary unfolded a blanket over her lap. “I’m chilled to the bone. Do you want some of this?”

  “The warming brick will do me fine.” The heat threading up his legs from the hot stone reminded him of the many winters when Mamm wouldn’t let them leave home until there was a warming brick in the carriage. He turned to his sister, who looked so like their mother, cheeks pink from cold, her dark hair scraped back neatly, her face framed by her black winter bonnet. “Good thinking, Mary. You take excellent care of us.”

  “Everything I know, I learned from Mamm.” She wrapped the blanket closer, tugging it over her shoulders. “I still miss them. Sometimes in the middle of my chores, hanging laundry or rolling out dough, I hear Mamm’s voice and it’s as if she’s right behind me, telling me not to knead the dough too much, reminding me to go easy on the seasonings. ‘Just a pinch of salt,’ she used to say. ‘Mind you don’t add too much salt.’ ” Her voice caught, and she pressed a hand to her mouth.

  Adam felt a tug of pain at the wound Mary was probing, but he kept his eyes on the frozen road. He would have liked to take his sister in his arms and hug her, try to console her … but it was not the Amish way.

  She pressed the edge of her shawl to her wet eyes. “Bishop Samuel preaches absolute forgiveness. We must forgive the man who killed our parents, and truly, I have no hatred in my heart. But still, I do miss Mamm and Dat. I do.”

  “I miss them, too,” Adam admitted, at a loss as to what to say to ease her pain. He wasn’t sure what had prompted his sister’s tears. Perhaps it was the fact that they were approaching the anniversary of their parents’ deaths, which, as a rule, they didn’t discuss. Or was it simply Mary’s own feelings that had been pent up all year? “There’s nothing I wouldn’t give to have them here with us, heading home on a winter’s day. We all miss them, Mary. It’s part of the healing.”

  “And Simon …” She glanced behind her. “He’s nodded off, God bless him. I don’t think he spoke but a dozen words for months after it happened, but he’s gotten so much better lately. Have you noticed?”

  “Ya.”

  “And the way he follows you around, trailing you from barn to wood shop like a duckling chasing his mama duck. He’s grown so attached to you, Adam. I thank the good Lord that you traveled home to us when you did, when Simon needed you most.”

  He nodded. “I always knew I’d come back.”

  “Is that so? With you being gone for nearly three years, some of us weren’t so sure.”

  “Oh, ye of little faith.” Having left during his rumspringa, he had not broken any rules of the Ordnung. However, his father and the bishop were not happy with his absence, his departure from the Amish way of life. Had he returned before the murders, he would not have been so quickly welcomed back, but the terrible circumstances that brought him home had folded him back into the congregation quickly.

  In a flash he recalled the panic … that overwhelming anxiety at being too far from home, unable to act fast enough when he got news of his parents’ murders. Looking back, he realized there was no way he could have saved his parents. God’s will was not to be changed. But the miles he had to cross in the journey home had added to his grief, and he’d arrived here to find more questions than answers about his parents’ killer.

  Since then he had given up hoping for some sort of justice—a concept that did not exist here in the Amish world, a notion he had vowed to turn his back on with his baptism. Still, at times he tried to piece together the events of that day. It was the only way to calm the questions burning in his mind like a firebrand: What were Mamm and Dat and Simon doing out on that wooded road, Juniper Lane? It was an out-of-the-way road beyond the edge of their farmstead, not a well-traveled route. The police had found the family rifle in the buggy, but for what purpose? And why had the killer spared Simon?

  Just the memory of those panicked days set fear burning through his body like a fever. Dark, dismal days laden with sadness, guilt, and anguish.

  “I had to come back,” he said as the steel wheels of the carriage thumped over a frozen bump in the road, and they both bobbed in the front seat.

  “Well, it’s been good for Simon, having you here.” She pulled the blanket tight around her and seemed to retreat into its cocoon, her hazel eyes focused on the slope of frozen white fields.

  Her tender mood kept Adam from any more teasing. Instead he let his eyes fall on the silhouette of their farmhouse, the two barns set apart in an L-shape, domed silos rising beyond the stand of bare beech trees. Like a scattered set of building blocks, the smaller outbuildings sat awash in golden sunset.

  When he closed his eyes and thought of home, these were the pictures he saw. None of the majestic mansions of Newport, with their views overlooking the water, could bring him the peace he found in this land; none of the relationships with the Englishers he’d met could hold a candle to the bonds in his family. Despite his journeys and worldly success during his rumspringa, Adam had always known he would return here to his Amish home.

  Whenever he passed the wood shop in the maintenance shed, he thought of the hours he’d spent there shaping furniture from raw wood, learning how to fit things together and go with the grain. As a boy, even as a teen, he’d been happy, working alone in there, but his arrogance, his hochmut, had driven him to make more of his carpentry skills. In the headstrong path of youth he had indulged himself, overlooking the importance of home and family. If only his father could have known that his oldest son would one day come back to the Plain way of life …

  The brick glowed near his feet, warming his legs and easing his heart. A quick glance behind him told him that most of the passengers were fast asleep, lulled by the motion of the carriage. Mammi Nell had nodded off with Ruthie asleep on her lap, and the twins snuggled with their heads together. They would rest well tonight, tired by a day of conversation, activity, and brisk winter weather. The clip-clop of horses’ hooves was the music to a melody he’d been born to, a straightforward life on the earth but not of it.

  Adam had always known he would come back to Halfway. His greatest regret was that he had not come home sooner, before his parents were lost to him. Just a week earlier … that would have made all the difference.

  TWO

  loodlights splashed silver over the frozen lawn of the brick Colonial. Remy McCallister parked her car along the sidewalk and killed the engine, wondering if the family who now lived in this suburban Philadelphia house was asleep inside. She didn’t want to disturb them. Although the residents might be alarmed if they realized a stranger w
as outside, Remy could not resist stopping by to soak up old memories from the brick and mortar of their home.

  Sometimes she needed to reconnect with the only true home she’d ever had—even if that meant gazing from the curbside.

  Turning in the driver’s seat, Remy hugged herself at the notion that the old house was grinning at her, its two porch columns goofy white fangs hanging over the grin of the wide double doors. This was the home of her youth, the house where her mother had sung her to sleep with lullabies, served her hot corn bread dripping with honey, helped her capture fireflies on summer nights. Just sitting here, staring at the brick façade, brought her back to those days, a halcyon period when she’d thrived in her mother’s embrace, wrapped in boundless love.

  At the time she had not thought it possible that those sweet days could end so abruptly. How could she have known … a seven-year-old girl who’d lost her mother overnight from heart failure? In her grief and confusion Remy could not imagine how her life would change after her mom’s death. She had not expected to lose her father to another woman, her home to a larger mansion in a tonier neighborhood, a cold box of high ceilings and wrought-iron grillwork that reminded her of prison bars.

  A house where loneliness echoed in the spacious corridors.

  Pulling the collar of her jacket up to cover her neck, Remy shook her head at the idea that Herb’s second wife, Sonja Allen, had chosen the house in Wynnewood over this. Maybe it was about helping Herb move on. More likely Sonja had been looking for a home that would boost their social status. Either way, the house and the marriage had been history before the year’s end.

  Remy’s search for a home had almost been fulfilled during her time in New York, when she and her friends had set up housekeeping in a Greenwich Village apartment. During college Kiara and Dakota had become the sisters she’d always longed for. The arrangement had been so copacetic that, despite the fact that Remy knew the end was inevitable, she had been crestfallen when her friends finished their degrees and moved on.