Through the Autumn Air

by Kelly Irvin

  The same could be said for the bride. Her kapp was askew and she had what appeared to be grease stains on her blue dress. She looked exactly like her mother had thirty-seven years ago when she married Moses Ropp, if Ezekiel’s memory served. Even then Mary Katherine had been a force to be reckoned with.

  Mary Katherine seemed unfazed by her daughter’s precipitous entry or her accusing tone. “I had a little accident. You need to get back to the eck. Joseph will be looking for you.”

  “He’s busy roughhousing with the boys. They’re ribbing him hard. They’re being so silly.”

  “You have no business in the kitchen.” Mary Katherine fixed her other daughters with a glare that would send children of any age ducking for cover. “The rest of you are supposed to be serving. Ellen, we need more clean silverware. Go on, go. I’m making a plate for Ezekiel while he gets cleaned up.”

  “But Mudder—”

  “Go.”

  The women scattered except for Barbara, the bride, apparently as stubborn as her mother. She headed to the stove.

  Rubbing at the frosting with a wet washrag only served to make a bigger mess. Ezekiel shoved his hands in the warm water and wrung out the rag a second time. No luck. His shirt had blotches top to bottom.

  “Let me try.” Mary Katherine commandeered the rag. Her head bent, expression intent, she scrubbed hard. Ezekiel propped himself against the counter to keep from stumbling back. She glanced up, her face reddened, and she took a wide step back. “That’s a little better.”

  “Here’s your food.” Barbara had taken it upon herself to fix the plate. She frowned as she shoved it between them. The frown deepened as she glanced at her mother, and then him. “You should be able to get a seat at a table. The first round has finished.”

  “He can sit right here at the prep table. You go sit with your husband.”

  With one last glance at Ezekiel, Barbara flounced out. Ezekiel sat. It felt good to get off shaky legs. He tried to remember if he’d eaten breakfast before the service. No. He’d overslept—something he never did. Inhaling the scent of chicken, green beans and bacon, a vinegary coleslaw, barbecue baked beans, and dill pickles, he picked up his fork. The roasted chicken was tender and juicy, the gravy savory, mashed potatoes creamy. He dug in and ate with a gusto he rarely felt.

  Owning and working daily in a restaurant had stolen some of his love of food. That and the sheer lack of time. He started work at the Purple Martin Café before sunrise and finished the last scrap of paperwork and cleaning well after sunset six days a week. He fell into bed at night, his head still whirling with all the balls he had to keep in the air—the staff, the bills, the produce and staples that had to be bought, the endless cleaning, the health code, keeping the books. Restaurants were labor-intensive, massive undertakings.

  “This is gut.” He waved his fork toward the plate. “Did you make all of this?”

  Her nose wrinkled, Mary Katherine scrubbed her dress with such force it was a wonder she didn’t tear the fabric. She pushed her glasses up her nose with the back of her wrist. “With help.”

  “You are a gut cook.” Plain women learned to cook as little girls. Ezekiel had learned that lesson in the ten years since he opened his family restaurant. “Every dish is gut.”

  “I appreciate your opinion.” She stopped scrubbing long enough to offer him a smile. She seemed to have a good supply of them. That was something he appreciated in women—in people in general. His customers ran the gamut from appreciative to cranky to downright obnoxious. “I reckon most Plain women can cook.”

  “Some better than others.”

  “You’d know gut food when you taste it.” She stopped and looked up at him, her gaze keen with interest. “You also know everything that’s going on. Tell me. What do you know about the break-ins?”

  Ezekiel let his fork drop to his plate. “You want to talk about that now, at your daughter’s wedding?”

  “What else would you expect from the district’s scribe?”

  “You’re also more curious than ten cats. They should rename The Budget to The Gossip.”

  She tossed the washrag in a tub of soapy water and plucked a notebook from between a stack of dirty plates and a skillet. A blob of grease decorated the cover. “You spend your day at the roots of our grapevine.” She pulled a stubby pencil from behind her ear. “Someone stole a crib quilt heirloom from Bess’s house last week. She’s heartbroken. And it’s not the first time. What is Freeman doing about it? Have they talked to the sheriff?”

  “It’s the third burglary in the last month. Every time it’s something of no material value but of importance to the family.” Ezekiel had been invited to sit with Freeman, Cyrus, and Solomon, the church elders, while they struggled with how to address the problem. No one wanted the Englisch sheriff messing in their business. Even if it was his job. Yet the safety of their families was of great importance. “It’s a mystery we haven’t been able to unravel. Why steal from us? We don’t have any computers or cameras or TVs. Because the value is so small, they’d rather keep it within the Gmay.”

  Mary Katherine’s harrumph said more than a hundred words.

  “You don’t think that’s a gut plan?”

  “We don’t care about material things, but neither do we appreciate someone breaking one of the Ten Commandments in our homes.” Her blue eyes snapped with electricity. Her cheeks were pink. She was so alive.

  Ezekiel forced his gaze to his plate. He had no business cataloging Mary Katherine’s fine physical qualities. Still, some things simply could not be ignored. Even by a tired old man.

  Her energy flowed around him. Ezekiel inhaled it and the exhaustion lifted. It was the food, not Mary Katherine. He simply needed to eat. An idea flitted by. He chewed a succulent piece of chicken and snatched the thought back for deeper scrutiny. “You cooked at the bed-and-breakfast a while back, didn’t you?”

  “I did. Are you changing the subject?”

  “I am. We should leave the thefts to Freeman and the others. They know best.”

  She rolled her eyes like a teenager. “Fine. I’ll pester Thomas some more.”

  “I have no doubt you will. You’re worse than a mosquito at a summer picnic. Did you enjoy cooking at the B and B?”

  “It didn’t matter whether I enjoyed it. At the time I was needed.”

  If the grapevine had the story correctly, Mary Katherine had taken the job to shepherd her friend and new widow Bess Graber through a dark time.

  Bess had remarried and no longer needed her older friend’s mentorship.

  “We need a cook at the Purple Martin.” That was an understatement. Keeping staff at the restaurant was one of the many thorns in his side. They’d been through three different cooks in a month’s time. One Plain and two Englisch. Didn’t seem to matter which. No one could keep up with the pace needed. One had simply been a bad cook. Another cried and ran out of the kitchen never to return when he suggested she needed to add more salt to the potatoes. Every time one of them quit, he had to take on more work. “It doesn’t pay much and it’s hard work, but if you like to cook, it’s a gut job.”

  She sighed and nestled the notebook back in its hidey-hole. The pencil returned to its spot behind her ear. “I’m not looking to work in a restaurant.”

  “I figured since Amish Treasures closed, you might need another way to earn a dollar.” The fire at Mary Katherine’s store and Lazarus Dudley’s greedy property grab had been the talk around many of the tables in Ezekiel’s restaurant the entire month of July. “We sure could use a good cook. We’ve been having trouble keeping them since my daughters married.”

  It was good that Leah and Carlene had started families of their own, but he missed seeing their faces in the kitchen every day. Taking over the restaurant from another Plain family after Lucy died had allowed him to make a living after he sold his floundering farm and still spend each day with his children. The Purple Martin kept his family together. Customers loved Leah’s chicken-fried steak and
gravy. Carlene’s buttermilk pie garnered raves as well. But once they’d started families of their own, continuing to work was out of the question. His sons had no interest in running a restaurant.

  His children had grown up and become good men and women. Ezekiel was blessed. Yet he was left with a what-now feeling that pressed on his chest until he couldn’t breathe.

  Had the Purple Martin outlived its purpose? Was it worth the exhaustion that weighed him down each night as he stumbled to bed? The aching back and legs? The numbers that swam in front of his eyes when he did the books and paid the bills?

  The cinnamon-laden scent of apple pie baking in the wood-burning stove flirted with his nose, enticing with it a memory of Lucy standing in front of him at the kitchen table, serving him a slice of pie. Her presence was so real he felt the soft skin of her hand on his and saw the curve of her lips as she smiled and leaned into him, the way she always did when he returned from a day in the fields.

  “I have plenty to do.”

  The sharp edge of Mary Katherine’s tone tumbled him back to the present day.

  She was the Gmay’s Budget scribe. She had at least twenty-eight or twenty-nine grandchildren—a person lost track after a while. She belonged to a letter-writing circle. She was first with cards for card showers. She never missed a work frolic or hesitated to help a sick friend. Ezekiel knew these things because he listened and he watched. Taking his time, he took another bite of mashed potatoes and gravy, savored their peppery flavor and creamy texture. “Maybe so, but give it some thought.”

  Mary Katherine had turned to discuss the dearth of clean silverware with Laura Kauffman, so she didn’t hear. Or pretended not to.

  He burped softly and scraped the plate clean. Mary Katherine might be used to getting her own way, but so was he.

  She turned toward him. “I’ll take that plate—and the fork.”

  He stood. “Come by the restaurant when you’re ready to talk about the job.”

  “I don’t—”

  “I know.” He tipped his hat. “But you will.”

  On that optimistic note, he dodged Laura and headed for the door before Mary Katherine could say no again.

  THREE

  Some experts say the older a person gets, the less sleep she needs. Mary Katherine flopped onto her back and stared at her old buddy darkness. Apparently, they knew what they were talking about. Despite spending the entire day cleaning up after the wedding, she couldn’t sleep. Every muscle and bone yearned for it, but her brain refused to give them what they so desired.

  It might be because she was alone in this house for the first time in thirty-six years. Barbara and Joseph were spending the night at Joseph’s sister’s, the first of many post-wedding family visits before they moved into the house they’d built on his father’s property. Mary Katherine rolled back on her side and stuck her clasped hands under the pillow where it was cooler.

  Maybe it was the knowledge that she was alone in the house and someone was making a habit of breaking into Plain homes and stealing precious mementos. The hair on her arms prickled. Her ears strained to hear any tiny noise. Was that a thump? The power of suggestion. She peered into the darkness. Stop it. Close your eyes.

  She forced them closed. Go to sleep.

  Her mind refused to cooperate. Maybe it was her rancor at Thomas’s latest lecture regarding the cake incident that kept her awake. He’d been embarrassed in front of the others. That gave her no pleasure. It had been an accident. Ezekiel’s offer of a job roosted in her brain right next to the lecture. She didn’t want to stand on her feet eight hours a day five or six days a week. Did she? She liked to cook. Cooking for ten children gave her joy. When they gathered for the holidays with all twenty-seven grandkids spilling out into the yard and running from corral to barn to pond and back, she reveled in their appetites and their appreciation for the food she and the other women cooked.

  The money would allow her to rebuild her nest egg. Which meant she could take Dottie up on her offer to partner in a bookstore. She loved reading as much as she loved cooking. She loved books and libraries and stories. She loved words.

  A path to her desire. A plan for the years that may or may not stretch in front of her as a widow with no husband for whom to keep house and cook. A place where she belonged. A place where people saw her as a vigorous, alive woman whose work still had value. Not as a widowed grandmother who needed tending as much as the kinner. It might be her desire, but was it God’s plan?

  The question squeezed onto the roost in her brain next to the others. Freeman and the other elders likely would see her working at the restaurant as a better place for a widow woman such as herself. Not going off on her own with an Englischer to open a shop that would sell all sorts of worldly books.

  But working at the restaurant would put her in close proximity to Ezekiel. Ezekiel with the warm, pensive eyes and time-weathered face. She snorted aloud. The power of suggestion. The girls had planted that seed with their silly chatter after the wedding.

  What would it be like to have a man around again? She rolled over on her back and stared into the darkness. A man not Moses. She would never know another person the way she knew Moses. The way a woman knew a man who was the father of their ten children. Through croup, measles, the flu, through broken bones and hurt feelings, through endless rumspringas and the joy of weddings and the birth of grandchildren. Joys now missed by Moses.

  The house creaked and groaned in the September wind as if feeling her pain. Despite the cool air wafting through the open windows, heat raced through her like a flash fire. Irritated down to the last fuzzy gray strand of hair on her head, she ripped off the thin cotton sheet and sat up. Getting old was not for the faint of heart—especially for women.

  Of course, she knew nothing about what men suffered as they aged. Moses had left her before she had a chance to find out. Before he had a chance to know himself. That could be seen as a blessing—for him, not her.

  “You are a crotchety old woman tonight.” His deep voice, with its ever-present hint of laughter, bellowed in her ear. “Are you planning a pity party for one?”

  “No, I’m not. If you must know, I have a story percolating. I plan to finish it.”

  Moses didn’t have a literary bone in his mammoth body with its size 14 feet and hands like bushel baskets. But he seemed to take true pleasure in settling into the rocking chair by the fireplace, arms around a child on each knee, to listen to the story she’d composed that day while kneading the bread and weeding the garden. His blond beard bobbing, he rocked, he nodded, and sometimes he chuckled. When she stumbled over her own words, unable to read her hasty scribbles, he chipped in with a suggestion. His ideas were always good.

  “Gott gave you a gift, Fraa. He truly did.” He’d uttered that same sentence after every story, raising his voice over the children’s clamor for more.

  Every time, she reveled in the sweetness of those words of affirmation coming from the only man she’d ever loved. Would ever love.

  The first time he’d said those words—long before they were married—she knew he was the one. He didn’t call her lazy or a dreamer the way her mother had. Her mother couldn’t understand her daughter’s penchant for living in a make-believe world. She’d tried hard to squeeze it out of Mary Katherine. To her everlasting disappointment, she couldn’t.

  No use agitating over the past. God was good. Period. End of story. She’d been telling herself that for seven years.

  “Might as well make use of the time.” She fought with her sweaty nightgown, tangled around her thighs and knees, and stood. Her knees creaked and her back complained. “Just never you mind. You’ll be fine once we get going again.”

  Fanning herself with one hand, she trudged barefoot to the small, square pine table pushed up against the window that faced her front yard. If it could talk, it would groan under the weight of copies of The Budget, notebooks, half a dozen books she intended to read, and stacks of cards for the card showers. She had a noteb
ook for her Budget articles, another for short stories, and one for poems, as well as the one with the pink cover, which she reserved for ideas. Her idea book—ideas for stories, ideas for business, ideas for life. She kept a similar set on the table in the kitchen. The less wear and tear on her knees from the stairs the better.

  Propped in the windowsill was her ledger for household accounts. The one for Amish Treasures lay on the floor under the table. Ignoring that irksome memory that smoldered in the corner of her mind, she lit the kerosene lamp. The pungent odor stung her nose. She plopped into the mismatched straight-back chair, put on her glasses, and grabbed the pen that waited patiently for her next thought. Her spiral notebook lay open to a page half filled with her haphazard scrawl.

  She perused her article in The Budget with its list of all the out-of-town visitors who came for the wedding. Added the Borntragers from Bee County, Texas. Done. Tomorrow she’d take it to Dottie to be faxed from the library. Her hand moved to the notebook with her latest work in progress.

  “Fine, Sophie, tell me what you’ve been doing since we last talked.” She wiggled in her seat and closed her eyes for a second. “The chuck wagon’s axle broke. The wagon toppled over and sent you flying onto the hard, rocky ground. Goodness. Did you lose the food supply?”

  Delighted with this new hardship, Mary Katherine opened her eyes. The pen flew across the page. She loved getting lost in the story. Sophie had her hands full, posing as a man to be a cowboy-cook on a cattle drive. It was the only way women could work a cattle drive on the Chisholm Trail in the 1880s. The only way to have the adventure of making the nine-hundred-mile trek from Fort Worth to Dodge City with three thousand head of cattle.

  Wrinkling her nose, she stopped and stared out the window. She could see nothing. An adventure would be nice. What a fanciful thought. A woman with ten children and twenty-seven grandchildren didn’t have adventures. “I’m not that old.”