The Amish Bride

by Mindy Starns Clark

  After we told her goodbye and headed out to Mom’s car, I realized I had another clue—a big one—to Sarah’s book. Mammi was the swallow. Sarah had borrowed a symbol from the Bible and then prayed for Mammi based on that verse.

  Zed still wasn’t allowed on the computer because of his concussion, so I had it all to myself that evening. First, I viewed the raw footage he’d put together for his film class, at his request, while he rested on the couch. It started out with a still photo of Lexie’s box with Amielbach carved on the top and then a photo of Abraham Sommers.

  “Where did you get this photo?” I called out. The man had dark hair, a beard, and intense eyes. He wore a suit with a thin tie.

  “Herr Lauten sent it to me.”

  There was footage of the box with the Frutigen bakery on it, a still of my box with the Home Place, then the outside of our cottage and Aunt Klara’s house, and then scenes from Lexie’s wedding and our train trip out to Oregon and back. He’d included the footage of Freddy, along with a close-up of his face I hadn’t seen before. He had footage of the back of an Amish girl—Izzy, I was sure—toward the end.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Take another film class next year,” he said. “I have to figure out what my story is.”

  “Good luck,” I muttered. He definitely had a lot to work with, but I didn’t envy him figuring out how it all fit together. Designing a cake was obviously a whole lot easier than putting together a film, even a short one.

  Next, I pulled up an online Bible concordance and started looking up different birds. Both the sparrow and swallow were referenced in the verse in Psalms. There was a reference to a hen and her brood in the New Testament. There were quite a few references to hawks, owls, and eagles. I had already decided the last one represented David. I wasn’t sure about the crow, though.

  I wished I could just mention the secret code to Zed to see if he had any ideas, but there was no way I would. I just hoped there was someway we could figure it out for Mammi’s sake, now more than ever, knowing why she so desperately wanted to find out what Sarah had written.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Rosalee told me she would send a driver to pick me up at the bus station in Nappanee. As I stepped off the bus, I looked for someone familiar—one of the drivers she sometimes used. Or even Penny. But no one was there. As the bus driver hoisted my bag out of the luggage compartment, I was just about to reach for it, when an Amish man stepped forward, his back toward me.

  “Pardon me,” I said. “That’s mine.”

  As he turned toward me, I realized it was Luke. A smile spread slowly across his face, but at the sight of him I began to cry.

  He blushed as he directed me away from the bus with the nod of his head.

  I wanted so badly for him to hug me, but I knew he wouldn’t, certainly not in public and probably not even in private. He put my bag in the back of his buggy and then helped me up to the bench, squeezing my hand before letting it go.

  After he climbed in, he turned toward me. I’d found a tissue in my purse and was blowing my nose.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “Just emotional.”

  “I really am sorry about your daed. And Zed. And Ezra.”

  I started to cry again. All the tears I’d been holding in came rushing out. Luke put his arm around me, a little awkwardly, but still it felt comforting.

  “Someone will see,” I said.

  “Ach,” he replied. “It doesn’t matter.”

  I leaned against him then, gently, and cried some more.

  He waited quietly, and once I’d stopped and he eased the buggy onto the road, he urged me to talk as we slowly made our way to the Home Place. He asked a question now and then. By the time we reached the lane, I’d dried my tears. By the time we reached the bakery, I was smiling. By the time I saw Eddie on the lawn of the Home Place, jumping up and down, waving his arms at me, I was laughing.

  I redid my final with Pierre, using one of Sarah’s cake recipes, the sour cream spice cake, and a simpler design than the first one. I only used swallows instead of all the birds in Sarah’s book, but even at that I was pretty sure it was the last fancy cake I would ever do.

  Pierre groaned when he saw it and said, “Not this fowl cake again.” Then he laughed at his pun. He grew serious and added, “Such a waste of talent. You could do so much better.”

  “I like it,” I answered.

  He gave me a mark of eighty-five out of a hundred and then offered me the job anyway.

  “No, thank you,” I answered. “Your shop is too fancy for me.”

  “So you’re sticking with that little backwater bakery? Where the fanciest thing is a turnover?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “Such a waste,” he said again.

  I thanked him for all he taught me, knowing I’d learned far more than he intended.

  “Why?” He threw up his arms. “You won’t use a fraction of it!”

  “I will,” I said. “Wait and see. Somehow I will.”

  Then he touched my sleeve. “I still see you as a cook. Making big farm breakfasts. Feeding a family. Lots of homemade breads and soups and stews. Then a pie to top it all off.” He sighed. “Just know, even though I teased you, how important that work is. What I wouldn’t give to have a family to feed. There is nothing more important.”

  “Where’s your family?” I knew it wasn’t any of my business, but I asked anyway.

  “Outside Paris. I have two boys. They are grown now. Raised by their mère and beau-père—stepfather.”

  “How long has it been since you’ve seen them?”

  He shrugged.

  My eyes stung as I realized that was Pierre’s unfulfilled recipe for life. Baking and teaching and a successful enterprise were all rewarding, but now I realized what he’d given up to have it.

  “This business is hard on a family. Long hours. Lots of wine. Too many beautiful women.” He shrugged. “After my family disintegrated, I fled France. I meant to go back…” His voice trailed off.

  “Do you have time for a story?” I asked, chancing his ridicule.

  He nodded.

  I told him about Freddy and how his asking for my forgiveness had freed both him and me. “We found our mise en place,” I added.

  Pierre patted my hand, thanked me, and said he’d think about it.

  “How sweet you have become,” he added, and then he winked at me. “Just do not lose that spice. And remember, I expect you to fill my order for one hundred sticky buns a week, maybe more. My drivers will do the pickups on Wednesday and Friday mornings, six a.m. sharp.”

  After I was two weeks back in Indiana, I realized I had no desire to return to Lancaster. I missed Ezra, and even more I missed the dream of the life I thought we would have, but I didn’t regret breaking things off with him. Not once. I missed Mom and Zed, but I enjoyed being with Rosalee, Eddie, and Luke more than ever.

  One evening when Luke was working in the shop, fixing a sprinkler head, I brought the carved box and Sarah’s book out to him, hoping he might have an idea about the code and wondering why I hadn’t asked him months ago.

  The carving of the Home Place was as familiar to me now as my own hands, but I remembered when Ada first gave it to me and how impressed I was with it. Although Luke had seen it before, he took a closer look now, marveling over the craftsmanship. When I opened the box and pulled out the book, he stepped to the utility sink and washed his hands.

  Once he was done, I pointed out the tiny code and explained I thought Sarah had scrambled the numbers, that they had to correlate with letters, but I just couldn’t figure it out.

  “Do you have any idea how to break it?”

  He tilted his head as he studied it. “What about the weird writing?”

  “I think that’s just a ruse,” I said. “I’ve done some reading about number codes way back before I came out here the first time.”

  He flipped through the book, loo
king at several entries. “Was Sarah left-handed by any chance?”

  “I don’t know.” No one had ever said, one way or the other.

  “Let me think about it,” he said. “Show me again tomorrow.”

  The next day, in the afternoon, he rode his bike into town without telling me why and when he returned he had a book with him.

  “I read this a few years ago,” he said. “I wonder if it might help.”

  It was a library book on Leonardo da Vinci. Granted, Sarah was gifted, but not in a Renaissance man sort of way, I knew. It turned out I was wrong, at least partly.

  “Go get her book,” Luke said. “And a mirror.”

  The only mirror I had was the magnified handheld one I packed in the box I’d sent ahead to Penny’s house when I first came to Indiana. I retrieved that from my bottom drawer and pulled Sarah’s book from the top of the dresser.

  Luke was on the porch, the library book open on the picnic table. “Da Vinci was a mirror writer. He wrote what wasn’t intended for other people to read from the right side of the page to the left, backward. Of course, he wrote in Italian, but I wonder if Sarah did the same in English.”

  I sat down beside him. “Wouldn’t that be really hard?” I asked, imagining holding a mirror as one wrote, trying to get it right.

  “No. Apparently, a small percentage of people can mirror-write naturally, without any effort. Perhaps she was one of them.” He nodded to the mirror. “Want to give it a try?”

  I opened the book up to a line written in code, and held the mirror below it. It was still hard to read, small and scribbled like all of her writing with upside-down numbers inserted randomly through the words, but with the magnified mirror I could make out Gus Stoll.

  “Oh, my!” I moved the mirror to the next passage. What if Gus wasn’t Mennonite? Would I be thinking of marrying him? And then: Hunting with him today. I found a sassafras tree. Also some wild dill. As we walked, a hawk circled overhead. I teased Gus that he was like a hawk. He is. Smart. Keen. Alert. Powerful. Determined. He got a buck, a four-point.

  Luke was looking over my shoulder. “Try it on the picture of the hawk.”

  I did, holding the mirror below the drawing. Embedded in the feathers was a G.

  “For Gus,” I said out loud.

  I moved it to the next passage. Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom, and stretch her wings toward the south? Job 39:26

  And then, I can’t imagine not spending the rest of my life with Gus. He is so full of life. So determined. I think a Christmas wedding is what we’ll do. Alvin will no longer be able to call me an old maid at 21.

  I skimmed the next entries not written in code, after she married Gus and didn’t think she had any reason to hide her writing, about them praying for a baby, Alvin accidentally shooting Gus when they were hunting, Gus dying, and Sarah moving back to the Home Place.

  She wrote: November 3, 1911—I caught Alvin with my book. He’s 25. Much too old for that. I guess it’s back to the code. The next entries were all in code, starting with, I do wish he would grow up. I think he feels somehow responsible for me now, but the truth is I’m much more capable than he is. It doesn’t help that Mother babies him.

  The next entries were also written in code and were about how much she missed Gus and the children she thought they would have together. She wrote she was drawing more and studying about herbs and fowl. I think I will increase the flock of chickens to earn some money of my own and dry more herbs and start making more tinctures too. I found Alvin pawing through some of my drawings. I’d done a crow with his eyes, and I think he recognized himself. He is a crow, going forth to and fro like it says in the Bible, with no direction, no purpose.

  I put the mirror under the picture of the crow and sure enough there was an “A” drawn into its chest. She wrote about doing domestic work for other people, selling eggs, raising chickens, and drying herbs to sell. By 1915 she had saved enough money to move to Indianapolis to go to nursing school at Robert W. Long Hospital.

  The next set of entries I’d already read, all about Clive and the war and the flu pandemic and her decision to return to the Home Place. Sure enough, there was an upside down C in the feathers of the owl. I didn’t even need the mirror to spot it.

  Now I was on to one of the sections I was most curious about. Why Sarah joined the Amish church. I positioned the mirror on the last section of the April 12, 1919, entry. It read: If God ever does still bless me with a brood of chicks, however that may be, I’m never going to risk them going off to war. Ever, ever, ever. If I join the Mennonites, I may choose to leave again. Or think I want to take up nursing in a hospital again and meet another doctor. If I am blessed with children, boys in particular, they may end up in some future war. I have no doubt this was NOT the war to end all wars. Mankind is too fallen for that.

  If I join the Amish, I’ll never leave. I’ve already written Bishop Berg, telling him of my intentions.

  She didn’t join the Amish to marry David after all. My growing suspicions were correct, but I never guessed her reason was because of her nonresistant beliefs. I moved the mirror to the next line and kept on going.

  June 1, 1920—A new year. A new church. A new life—except I am still at the Home Place. However, maybe not for long. David Berg lost his wife six years ago in childbirth. He has proposed marriage to me, saying he knows I would make a good wife to him. I know I do not love him, but I do respect him. I do love his eight-year-old son, Caleb, though. If, as is a possibility, I’m never able to conceive, this is the one way I can be a mother.

  I have known young love. I have known all-encompassing love. I am fine with platonic love. I can be a wife to David. And a mother to his son.

  She wrote that she was learning to trust God as never before in a calm and steady way. I felt He failed me when Gus died. I bargained with Him over Clive. I wanted His protection, but I didn’t want to take the time to truly trust Him. Now, I’m willing to ask Him each day what He has for me.

  A month later she wrote: I have been honest with D. about how I feel. He is in agreement. He also says I can continue with my art as long as I don’t draw people. That is fine with me.

  Next was the picture of a flock of geese, flying in formation, with just one side of their bodies shown. The second one had the same eye as the hen.

  Then the next entry was the one, not in code, that I’d read many times before: October 3, 1920—Hang the bird feeder. Finish quilt. Sort the herbs. Marry D.

  There was nothing until March, 4 1923. I moved the mirror down and deciphered, Caleb has found my book, so I will keep writing in code. She went on to write that her brother Alvin died. He’d never been strong, but he’d been especially weak all winter, short of breath and with swelling in his legs. I’m wondering if Mother was right all along, that something had damaged him. I think he died of kidney failure, but the doctor said he couldn’t be sure.

  I wondered if that was what Sarah thought Paul had died from too. If Luke wasn’t with me, I would have flipped ahead to find out but I liked the fact that we were reading it together. It made it easier to bear the hard parts.

  Mother and Father are beside themselves. D. and Caleb and I are moving to the Home Place, and D.’s brother will take over their family farm. I am going home. Haymet. What a beautiful word.

  I knew haymet meant home. It was one of the words Eddie had taught me.

  I kept reading. Three times now I couldn’t wait to leave the Home Place. Now I can’t wait to return. I am going to have a boppli. It is true. Soon I will be the mother of two—my own little brood of chicks.

  I skimmed through the recipes written in her small script I had read before. Sour cream spice cake. Snow biscuits. Baked rice pudding.

  The next entry written in code was on June 12, 1923. She’d had a baby boy, but he was stillborn. He came three months early or thereabouts. These are times when it’s hard to trust the Lord, but what other choice do I have?

  Next was the entry about Enoch being born a
nd her father dying, both not in code, and then an entry in code about her brother. I’ve been missing Alvin. As my boys grow older I think of him more. I never blamed him for Gus’s death, but I wasn’t kind to him about it either. I know he carried that burden heavily. And I did hold it against him. Now it’s too late to release him from the pain of that. I wish I would have been gentler with him and more understanding, and not just about that but about all the challenges he faced.

  The next entry was Gerry’s birth and then Frannie’s. In code she wrote: My Frannie. I pray she will grow up like the swallow in the temple, in a nest next to the altar of the Lord. Mother is overjoyed. The boys adore her.

  Caleb is nineteen and planning on going to Pennsylvania to work with a friend. We will miss him. He has visited twice now and although he hasn’t said, I believe he is sweet on a girl there.

  There were more recipes and then, in code, January 17, 1939—Mother passed away yesterday. She was 88. My, the changes she saw in this lifetime. Frannie is beside herself with grief. The only thing that comforts her is the carved box of Amielbach that Mother gave her. I haven’t told her the place will belong to her someday. That’s more than a nine-year-old should know.

  “What’s Amielbach?” Luke asked.

  “A family property in Switzerland. Mammi sold it when my cousin Ada was a baby. It’s kind of a long story…” I would tell him later. I jumped to the next entry in code, June 30, 1944, and then gasped. We received word today that Enoch was killed in France. Oh, the horror of it. We didn’t know until three months ago that he’d joined up. My heart is broken. Oh, my son.

  “Oh, wow,” Luke said.

  Mammi had never told me about her brother who was killed in battle. She would have been fourteen. If I’d had a brother killed when I was fourteen, I don’t think I would have ever stopped talking about it—but I couldn’t know for sure. And besides, Mammi and I were obviously very different people.