An Amish Family Christmas (4 page)

She dropped her eyes. “Well, I will never be able to read them.”

“So then I’ll tell you how I feel now that I’m here.”

“Until they order us to cease speaking to one another Sunday night.”

“My eyes will tell you all you need to know.”

“Micah—”

“I saw hundreds of desert sunrises and desert sunsets, Naomi. None of them more beautiful than the beauty God has put in you.”

She kept her eyes down. “You shouldn’t say such things.”

“I’m your husband. I’m your lover. Who else should say such things?”

She couldn’t think of a retort or any sort of response.

“Where is my clothing?” he asked after a moment.

“I stored it at our house. In the room you will use.”

“What room is that?”

“Well, the room where I’ve put the broken things to be fixed. Your sister has the other spare room.”

Micah laughed. “So who will come and fix me? You? God? The bishop?”

“None of this is funny.”

“I disagree, Omi, this is very funny.” He used the pet name she hadn’t heard since his enlistment. “What are you going to stick me in with? Busted clocks? Cracked sinks? Chairs without seats? Porcelain figurines that need to be glued?”

She tried unsuccessfully to hold back a smile. “There is a cuckoo clock,
ja.
The farmer and his Percheron won’t come out at noon to look around.”

“I remember the clock. Well, I’ll squirrel away with my tools and a bottle of glue and spend my evenings repairing him and his friends. Soon enough he’ll be eager to come out like any Amish farmer and see what I’ve done. Old Moses Fischer, he comes to mind.”

Naomi imagined the bishop’s father and couldn’t stop her smile. “Shh.”

“Why, with the right bottle of glue and a pair of strong clamps I think I could fix Old Moses up right as rain too.”

“Oh, hush.” She put a hand to her mouth and her eyes crinkled. “I don’t want to laugh and you’re making me laugh.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“A year you’ve had to grow up and you’re still a crazy boy.”

“
Ja, ja,
crazy, that’s me.”

Their eyes came together again and the rich golden brown in his made something hard and stiff and full of edges vanish inside her.

She looked away from him. “I made up my mind I wouldn’t be kind to you or intimate with you. But now all I can think of is that I haven’t seen your eyes or heard your laugh for a whole year. Your arms haven’t been around me and you haven’t unpinned my hair in the slow and careful way you like to do. I’m a failure at keeping you away from me.”

She reached out a hand and awkwardly stroked his cheek as if she were a teenage girl touching a boy for the first time. “I wish you could come to some sort of agreement with the bishop and the ministers. I can’t bear the thought of having you under my roof and not being able to touch you. It’s already been more than twelve months. Oh, Micah, it will be an agony. Can you not make peace with the leadership?”

He put his lips to the palm of her hand as she stroked his skin. The kiss made things move around inside her.

“Not unless they wish me to be unfaithful to myself and to my God,” he replied.

“Micah, I can’t endure another season of silence with you. I really cannot.”

“I pray it won’t be a long season.”

“What makes you say that? You’re stubborn, they’re stubborn...it could last a thousand years.”

“It won’t. You know it won’t. God will do something. He’s the only one who can be a just arbitrator in this business.”

She almost gasped. “God will do something? For him one day is as a thousand years! Why don’t
you
do something instead?”

“What would I do?”

“I don’t know. Repent. Change the rules. Fix the bishop with your tools and your glue.”

Micah smiled. “There
is
something I can do. Steal a kiss.”

Her face reddened as if she were a schoolgirl. “Steal a kiss? We’re not to have any relations.”

“I asked the bishop if I could be permitted a welcome home kiss.”

“And what did he say?”

“Bishop Fischer waved his hand in the air as if it were not a big thing. ‘
Ja, ja
,’ he told me, ‘kiss, kiss.’ So that gives me at least two kisses under the
Ordnung.
Though I’m pretty sure I get more because I think his ‘kiss, kiss’ is plural...you know, that it means as many kisses as I like.”

The smile crept over Naomi’s mouth again. “That’s what you think.”

He shrugged and reached out to brush his thumb over the full redness of her mouth. His touch sent an electric shock through her from head to foot.

“
Ja
, that’s what I think,” he replied. “Come, let Maria take us around to the back of the house where the Zooks and the Harshbergers don’t have eyes.”

She kissed his thumb. “You make me feel like I’m sixteen.”

“
Ja
? Well, I intend to do something that will fortify you until this whole enlistment and shunning controversy is put to bed and settled.”

“Fortify me? What do you have in mind?”

“You’ll see.”

He steered the buggy along their lane and behind the house. Now all that could be seen were acres of dry brown hayfields. Gently he removed her dark bonnet and drew the pins out of her hair one by one.

“A woman’s crowning glory is her hair,” whispered Micah. “Paul knew what he was talking about.”

“You’re going to quote the Bible to me now?”

“Of course, why not?”

“I think Paul meant if a woman had abundant hair it was a glory to her for it covered her head.”

“I could start with the Song of Solomon if you wish.”

“Oh, stop. You make me blush.”

“Your hair is just like a shining night. There’s scarcely any difference. You have no idea how many times I wrote that in my letters. You have no idea how many times I looked up at the desert stars far away from the bright lights of Kandahar and thought of how your hair moves through my fingers and how it flows over your shoulders and down your back at bedtime. Thinking of you was like fire eating me up. You consumed me, Naomi, you took everything.”

“Hush. Don’t exaggerate so.”

“I’m not exaggerating.” Her dark hair was loose over her neck and dress as he took her face in his hands. “How I love you. How I thank God for you, my bride.”

Tears cut down her cheeks. “I feel the same way...oh, I feel the same way. Forgive me for holding back, forgive me for not welcoming you home with a hug and a kiss.”

“Welcome me now, Naomi Bachman.”

His mouth came down over hers. She responded by returning the kiss with a surge of passion. He rejoiced in the farm-girl strength of her arms and hands as she held him tight. He poured all the long nights into his kiss, all the desert heat, all the danger, all the fear that he would never see her again, the death, the dying, the wounded he saved and the wounded he couldn’t save, the tears, the pain...everything from a war ten thousand miles away that had cut him in two. When they finally gently released each other, he touched his lips to her long hair, to her throat, to the curve where neck and shoulder met, back to her eyes, her cheeks. He pried her hands away from him and covered them with kisses, he drank in her scent and her warmth, and it was never enough, it had been too long.

“Micah.” She pulled back with a gasp. “If you keep this up there will be nothing left of me.”

“I want you fortified for the weeks ahead.”

“Fortified? I have no reserves left. You haven’t fortified me. You’ve besieged me.”

“So you surrender?”

“I surrender.”

“I was saving all of it up for an entire year.”

“
Ja
, it feels like that.”

“It is like that.” He glanced at the back door of the house and the sheet of plywood that covered it. “If I were free to do so I would tear the board off that door and carry you inside.”

“Oh, it would be cold inside, Micah.”

“Not for long.”

“Make peace with the leadership, and I will let you do that.”

“I would start a fire in the stove first, believe me.”

“Why bother?”

He smiled. “So now my mischievous Amish Annie is back. How long will she stay?”

Naomi traced her finger over his lips. “Forever. I still don’t understand why you did what you did, but you’re my man, my husband, and I love you.”

“What did you say?”

She laughed. “I said I loved you.”

“If we have come that far that fast, it calls for another kiss.”

Naomi pushed him back with both hands. “Oh no you don’t. We need to get back and see how your sister is getting along with Luke. And I need to pin my hair up.”

“I can help with that.”

“Oh, sure, you can help! I put one pin in and you pull out two!” She took a hand off his chest and lifted a finger in warning. “Keep your eyes out for gossips and give me three minutes.”

Micah leaned back with a smile on his face. “And what exactly do you want me to do if I see gossips?”

“Push my head down so they don’t see me and then wave to them.”

“Ah, wave to them. Do you think they will wave back to a soldier?”

Naomi had her hands up in her hair, gathering it at the back of her head, pins in her mouth. “They don’t know you’re a soldier,” she mumbled with difficulty.

“But if they recognize my face they’ll know. I don’t think there’s a welcome for soldiers here.”

Her eyes were a strong dark brown as she looked at him, putting the finishing touches to her hair. “Your sister and your mother and
father have welcomed you. Your wife has welcomed you. It took her a while,
ja
, but she finally did the right thing. The Lord alone knows—the day may arrive when the whole Amish community will welcome you home with open arms.”

“You don’t really think that, do you, Naomi?”

She fastened her prayer
kapp
back on her head. “A day ago I would have said no. Two hours ago I would have said no. Now something in me says
ja
.”

“Something in you says
ja
but you have no idea how this change of heart is supposed to suddenly sweep down on hundreds of people?”

Her eyes and lips smiled. “The Christmas spirit maybe?” She kissed him on the cheek. “It’s not my problem. Or yours. It’s God’s.” She linked her arm through one of his. “You should drive us home now, my husband.”

Rebecca was standing at the door with her hands on her hips as the buggy pulled into the yard.

“You two have been gone a long time,” she said. “I was worried.”

Naomi climbed down from the buggy. “Worried about what?”

Rebecca studied her friend’s face. A smile slipped over her mouth. “Oh, worried you might have been fighting. But now that I see you, I realize that’s not the case.”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone has been kissing,” Rebecca whispered.

Red sprang onto Naomi’s cheeks, and Rebecca’s smile grew. “This is a good thing,
ja
? After all, he is your husband and he’s been gone a long time. When you left the house you were ice. You come back and you have thawed. So I praise the Lord. That’s one prayer answered, and answered very quickly for such a difficult
matter. Now I have high hopes all the other prayers I’m praying will be answered just as swiftly.”

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