Sunshine and Shadow

by Sharon

  She knew she had to get the fight with Seth's father out of the way right off. "I guess your father doesn't think much of me."

  "He doesn't mean anything by it." Seth gave her a flex of his lips that couldn't quite work up to a smile. "You didn't seem to take it too serious."

  "Not too."

  "You have to be careful, Susan. You don't know what it's like out there. You don't know what the English are like."

  That was the way it was with Seth, the English this, the English that, as if all the evil in the world were out there past the county line, where the English houses started. He had run away from home as a teenager and lived in some big city in California for two years. She remembered how he'd looked when he'd come back with hair so long it went right down his back. He had a tattoo as well. Her brother Levi had seen it when the boys were swimming, though he wouldn't say what it was. What had happened to Seth in those years, nobody knew, but it had to have been terrible, the way he'd talked about the English ever since then.

  Seth had ways that were hard to understand. You never had the feeling you knew all there was to know about him. He kept something back. It might be the time in California that had done it to him. Or maybe it was living as he had, with his father and no mother. Maybe in a family like his one learned to keep things way back.

  It had been her sister Rachel who had helped him put himself back together after he came home, and everybody said, "Isn't it something, the way that girl is so good to that poor troubled boy?" No one remembered now. Too much sadness had come after, and now Rachel was gone and there would be no more memories to make.

  Susan snapped herself away from the unhappy thoughts and stole Seth's hat to get him off the subject of the English, which it did, fast.

  The warmth in the old barn was infinitely peaceful that night. Susan had shared the work in this barn and the acres beyond with her husband, John; now she shared it with her brother Daniel. Under a hissing Coleman lantern, she sat half-tucked beneath the wide girth of Muffin, one of their Brown Swiss cows, her forehead nestled against its flank.

  "Have you been thinking you might have Seth?" Daniel's voice lifted from the shadowed box stall beyond, where he was teaching a heifer calf to take milk replacer from a pail.

  The question came as a surprise. "Have him for what?"

  "Anything."

  She shook her head and smiled. "He hasn't asked for anything."

  He let the subject drop. Then, "Did you get enough asked about your run-in with the movie business?"

  She straightened, arching her back, running her hands underneath her shawl to find and press the hollow of her spine. Bending again, she said, "More than enough."

  "Too bad. I was just working around to it myself."

  She grinned. She'd known he would get around to it sooner or later. Daniel had a way with his teasing; never unkind, but always accurate. When he teased, it was like watching a sharpshooter pick off clay birds at a trap shoot. No one could match him. Tenacious, she thought, savoring the new word. Every day she tried to learn a new word and make use of it at least once. This morning her word had been "tenacious." Daniel is tenacious, she thought with pleasure, then with resignation.

  She heard the click of tiny hooves, as the little heifer lost patience with its tedious new method of taking nourishment. Daniel spoke to the calf in a low tone, his murmur as dulcet as the rustle of the doves in the eaves and the faint brushing sounds from their contented animals. The aroma of warm, fresh milk drifted around her along with the fragrance of hay in the mow above.

  She closed her eyes, letting scent and sound ply their magic. "What are they doing around here, anyway, do you know?"

  "You remember how people were saying back in March about that group that was going to rent the historical buildings at Greyling? Said they were coming from California to make an educational movie about Wisconsin wild flowers in the spring? Turns out that was a false story they put about to keep away the crowds while they were shooting out of doors. That's why you ran into them without knowing. What they really are is a fancy Hollywood movie company. One of the fanciest. You'd think we'd have guessed, because they weren't likely to take rooms for a hundred people or lease huge sheds for their equipment just to take a few pictures of flowers." He chuckled, and in the pause she could hear the warm sound of splattering milk as he scooped thick handfuls to the calf's pink muzzle. "Innocents, aren't we? That seems to be why they chose this area. The story in the movie takes place more than a century ago. Hereabouts we don't have power lines and television antennas for them to worry about. They like having a few dirt roads, too."

  From another Amish, such easy talk about the movie business would have sounded strange. But Daniel was different. For one thing, he had read a good deal of books -one didn't find in Amish homes, and he had a good number of English friends. There wasn't much that their dad or the Bishop or anyone else could do about it, because Daniel hadn't taken the vows of baptism and joined the church, the way she and Rachel had at eighteen. In good conscience, he'd said, he could not. He had things to resolve in his own mind first. Well, you couldn't force a man to take vows to God he couldn't keep, but her parents used to do their share of pushing. They'd pushed, he'd pulled away more, and they'd quit their pushing fast. And Grandma recalled that their own dad had taken his vows late, too, at twenty-six. Baptized and married in the same year, he'd been, when he took a trip east to Pennsylvania and met Mother. In the Amish church there was no wedding without both members of the couple being baptized first. And since there was scarcely an unmarried girl in the county who wouldn't have Daniel in a minute if she could, her parents had a pretty good idea their son would succumb sooner or later.

  Daniel could do things that would cause talk if done by other people. Even if he had some wildness in him, he was so full of love, he could get by with all manner of actions and talk. Even the Bishop said, "If the Lord takes anyone to Heaven, He'll take Daniel."

  What the Bishop didn't know was that for more than a year Daniel had been in secret defiance of the order to shun their sister Rachel.

  A sudden chill touched Susan's hands, and she warmed them in her skirts.

  "Alan Wilde spoke to you." Daniel's voice sparkled with the teasing smile she couldn't see.

  "Hardly at all."

  "Think of the danger you were in!"

  "What danger?"

  "The magazines at the grocery store write about him often. He's lived unwed with some beautiful women—well-known ones, mostly."

  "Has he? I suppose if I'd known that at the time, I'd have keeled over dead from the shock of it." There was humor in her voice, but an image of Wilde, of the light, clear eyes, the wide mouth, had remained with her, beckoning her to an odd restlessness as the night wind had done. How strange he was to her. It was beyond her power to imagine the part of life he must have tasted, and yet, almost as if those eyes had fed it to her, she sensed the depth of his experience and, somehow, its taint. Had this man's life begun to turn, twisting back like a venomous serpent in his hands until the days brought despair rather than peace? The child in him seemed to have died. Oh, yes, his eyes had summoned her, but they held no promises.

  She compared Wilde's eyes to Seth's. Seth's were those of a disappointed boy, and Wilde's were more those of someone who had been forced to sup with the devil. And yet there had been laughter in his eyes, too.

  It was hard to understand why Wilde's broken life fascinated her. She was no longer in her rumspringa, the time of running around, before marriage, when banned intimacies called like sirens. She remembered the vague longings. Then marriage had come… and quiet disappointment.

  Daniel emerged from the stall and crossed his arms on Muffin's back, looking down at her. Mischief gleamed in his dark eyes. His broad hat angled forward over his long coal-black hair. "Think of all that sin coming in your direction." He wriggled his fingers drolly at her. "Did he look you all over in a wicked way?"

  An unwilling grin broke over her face. "Go on. Y
ou'll make Muffin kick the pail."

  "Answer. Did he?" Daniel ducked under the cow's neck, his face commanding her gaze with bright, humorous eyes.

  She was disconcerted to find her grin widen, and warm dewdrops of color rose in her cheeks, because even though Alan Wilde had been far from giving her a wicked look, there was some guilty part of her that seemed to wish he had.

  Daniel must have absorbed the unexpected intensity of her reaction. One black eyebrow swept up, and two dark eyes began to search hers. Daniel was tenacious, she thought, and this time amusement accompanied the insight. Resting her elbows on her knees, she tucked her chin into her curled fists and met his scrutiny with a candid stare.

  "Speaking of sin…" she said, "I might have a question or two for you."

  "Oh, you might, might you, now?" He took a seat on a pile of burlap feed sacks, his elbows propped behind him, his body comfortably stretched. His smile was faintly wary but not unwilling. The placid lamplight held them like a golden bowl, cupping them in its safe world. Delicious night murmured outside, inviting confidences.

  "Have you ever seen a movie?" she asked, and held her breath, wondering if he would return with an answer or an evasion.

  A pause. "Yes."

  There was something nice between them—trust. They didn't speak this openly with frequency, but when it came, it was without the nervous qualifications: Please don't mention this to anyone. Promise you won't repeat this.

  "Do they always have monsters?"

  His involuntary smile told her she had asked an odd question. "No. They don't always have monsters."

  "Were they… There've been a lot of them that you've seen? Tell me the name of one."

  "Well… Animal House."

  "Oh. Was it about a zoo, then?"

  He got that smile again. "No. College."

  He stood up, ending the conversation, and she bent back to the milk pail, saying it was good that if he had to go and see movies, at least they were about such lofty things as college.

  While she was pouring milk for the barn cats and laughing as she watched them come running on light feet with their tails upraised, she looked up to find Daniel still smiling at her.

  "You know, Susan, if someone ever does look you over in a wicked way, there's a chance or two you just might not realize it." And then they were both laughing as he let her wrestle him to the straw to stuff a handful of hay down his shirt.

  Chapter 4

  Susan ran through the yellow light of dawn, the sun in front of her a halo on the horizon. The ground was cool. The meadow grass smelled like night and licked dew on the hem of her dress. The air shivered with birdsong.

  Her donkey Clover was missing from her pasture this morning. In the evening, her little sisters had been to visit the donkey, and probably one of them had forgotten to latch the gate when they were leaving, and Clover was an opportunist. "Opportunist" was today's word. She stopped her search to grin and stretch in the middle of an open field. Today felt wonderful.

  Like a cloud covering the sun, the brief unease following her run-in with the movie company had vanished. Summer was just around the corner, peeking like a child. The warming sun would bake well-being like syrup into a reluctant earth. Things would come right.

  She drew her shawl more tightly around her against the morning nip, thinking how perfect it was to walk at this time of year before heat unshelled the swarms of summer insects. Bugs. She thought of them banging against her screen door on a hot evening, trying slyly to steal inside. Things of nature, yes, but a little hard to love. Except for ladybugs and fireflies… She spared a warmhearted thought for fireflies. And who could be melancholy watching a butterfly lilt from petal to petal, or lying on a soft lawn observing ants in their sturdy industry?

  But mosquitos were a mistake, Lord.

  She could feel the flow of an infinite wisdom answering her with amusement. The emotion-rich flow became manifest in her thoughts. You think so, do you, Susan Peachey?

  I do. She smiled, and felt the returning smile. Soon her garden would be filled with growing things. As the season advanced and the rains became fewer, there would be trip after trip from the pump to the garden, quenching thirsty tomato plants and beans. So many trips. She thought longingly about how nice it would be to have a hose, a good, long one stretching in a cool green strip across the wan dust behind the barn. But hoses were expensive, and every spare penny she had was going into the jar for Rachel. There'd be few enough pennies to spare soon, when school let out next week and the income from that was gone for the summer. She hoped that the Bishop would not say no if she wanted to find work cleaning at the nursing home. Even the money she earned there would barely scratch the surface of Rachel's need.

  But hope sprinkled through the honeyed air of morning. It will come out all right. It must.

  On the other side of the meadow she climbed a wooden stile over the barbed-wire fence, wound through a sun-speckled thicket, and came into the bright open stretch of freshly tilled earth, rich brown and fragrant.

  She saw Clover near the far fence, the donkey's taffy-colored muzzle nosing in the hedgerow near the curving strip of dirt road. Susan felt no surprise. This had happened before. Freedom for Clover meant a chance to wander toward the home farm where she had been born and raised by Rachel's absent hands.

  She felt no particular alarm as she began to cross the softly corrugated soil, clasping Clover's rope bridle. Then as she came closer, her sharpening view picked out the glinting strands of wire fencing that separated her from the small animal. Clover was on the wrong side. Somewhere a fence must be down.

  Uneasily she quickened her pace. Four feet of sloping ditch were all that protected Clover from the road, and though traffic was infrequent, cars came fast around that curve.

  Clover eyed her with interest as she approached the fence, speaking in an encouraging tone. With amusement and dismay, she could see mischief brewing in those great liquid eyes. Sure enough, as she parted the wire strands with care to crawl through, Clover skipped playfully up the embankment onto the road. At the same time, Susan heard the roar of a car engine fast approaching, made invisible by the curve. She hurled herself between the barbed-wire strands, her breath coming in a frenzy. Racing up the slope into the roadway, she was in time to chase Clover, onto the far shoulder, though she barely escaped being struck herself. The churning wheels came close, spitting gravel across her skirts, sending vibrations from the roadbed up her legs. A push of after-draft flattened her clothing to her body.

  She tumbled down the steep shoulder to where Clover stood amid a ramble of trees and the ribbon of a creek that trickled through a culvert underneath the road. She was breathing heavily as she slid the halter over the donkey's flossy nose. Shaken and only half-aware, she hardly noticed that the car had stopped not far up the road until she heard the gravel crunch under advancing footsteps.

  "Gracious. What an exciting life you lead."

  The words, spoken ever so softly, came from above her. She turned her head. Her startled gaze found Alan Wilde. He stood at his ease, his curving palms braced on the gray stone bridge that crowned the culvert. Morning breezes lifted tentatively at the deep burnished brown of his hair. His shoulders seemed perfectly relaxed under a supple leather jacket, but his light hypnotic eyes were vivid with his unknown thoughts.

  Alan Wilde.

  He moved away from the bridge and began to find his way down the embankment toward her. It became imperative that she collect her scattered wits—imperative, but impossible. "Gracious," he had said to her, "what an exciting life you lead." How odd it was that she knew the words were sardonic, though there had been no trace of that in his tone. For one thing, he was obviously the kind of man who didn't usually say "gracious."

  He stood looking at her at the base of the hill, his silhouette sharply real against the slope of spring's uneven grass, raised in tufts. She had never thought of herself as timid, and yet she grew tremulous. Her throat became arid, her face tense. Her hands s
earched backward for support, coming to rest on Clover's neck, and the small of her back settled against the donkey's consoling warmth.

  Wilde began to walk toward her. She assumed in her bewilderment that he would stop some feet away, but he came so close that she might have reached, out with her hand to touch the enchanting upcurve of his elusive smile.. She would have said something then, anything, but his gaze stopped her, holding her quiet and still and frightened.

  He removed one glove and lifted that, hand to her cheek. Very, very lightly she felt the back of his fingers brush her. A cold flutter tingled along her nerves as his hand skimmed slowly lower, following the meandering trail of her bonnet string over her jaw, her neck, her collarbone, her upper chest. And then the caress of his fingertip became a lazy glide following the gauze strand as it climbed her breast. The delicate pressure grazed her nipple, stroking her through the sudden tightness of her thin wool dress.

  Holding onto Clover for dear life as his hand left her body, she gasped out the first words that came to her.

  "Are you going to touch me again?"

  "Do you want me to?" His eyes were full of secrets, his smile pagan.

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "I… I… Clover might get away."

  He gave a soft laugh and stepped back, and she began to breathe again. Her thoughts were a quagmire, her senses prickling.

  "Clover is the donkey's name?"

  "Yes." Even the simple monosyllable stuck on her tongue as it became obvious to her that she ought to have protested. Somehow she'd been too aghast and now it was a bit belated. Too late, Susan. He's already done it. He had touched her in that terrible, throat-catching way, and then asked her calmly if Clover was her donkey's name. Trying to understand him, to clear her distracted thoughts, she looked down, lowering her chin. He lifted it on the arc of his finger, his light gaze examining her face.