Courting Ruth (14 page)

“I want to do what God wants,” Ruth said.

“You have only to listen. He will tell you.” She pulled a pocket watch from her apron and her expression softened. “Lunch break should be over.” She took a black lunch box from under the seat, opened it, retrieving a sandwich. “Have half of this,” she offered. “It’s your favorite, chicken salad.”

Ruth took her section of the sandwich, heading up the lane to the school. “I haven’t heard the bell yet,” she said between bites.

Mam folded the waxed paper and put it back in the lunch box to use again tomorrow. “I left Elvie in charge of the little ones,” she explained. “She might be so busy making eyes at Elmer over her lunch that she didn’t notice the time.”

Ruth couldn’t help smiling. “Elvie and Elmer? She’s too young to be thinking of boyfriends yet, isn’t she?”

“Elmer is more interested in Eli’s motorbike than girls, but Elvie has always liked him, and he could do worse. Her parents are good church members and solid, God-fearing people. Besides, Elvie is the oldest, and she has no brothers. She’ll inherit land.”

“Don’t tell me you’re matchmaking your eighth graders.”

Mam laughed. “Not me. But Elvie knows her own mind. Mark my words, when he turns eighteen, Elmer will be trailing after Elvie like a fly on jam. And we’ll be going to a wedding.”

By the time they reached the school yard, Ruth had acknowledged to herself the truth of her indecision. She
had
been vacillating, whipping in the wind, not knowing what direction she was going. It was just that Eli had confused her. The way he made her feel when he was close confused her. He made her doubt her decision to remain unmarried.

But it was clear what Mam thought and wanted. Ruth would pray, but obviously her duty was to her family. Mam was no longer a young woman. She’d reached her mid-forties, and she needed the care and devotion of a daughter.

It would never work out with Eli, anyway, Ruth told herself. He was too handsome for her, too good a catch to really be interested in her. He didn’t really want to court her. He was just pursuing her because she’d told him she wasn’t interested.

Ruth needed to just let the whole thing go. She wasn’t meant to be a wife. And in time, her deep attraction to Eli would pass. The happiness and well-being of those she loved most must come ahead of any personal desires.

It seemed like the right thing to do, but Ruth’s heart felt heavy. Never to marry…It would be a sacrifice, maybe a greater one than she’d ever expected, since Eli came into her life. The heaviness in her chest turned to an ache in the pit of her stomach and spread through her. Resolutely, she pushed back the image of Eli’s face and the sound of his voice. She would be strong…she would do what was right…what God wanted.

As she reined the horse into the drive that led alongside the school, Ruth saw that Mam had been right. The students were still at recess that followed lunch, some playing ball, others on the swings, and a few still finishing their lunches. Lydia’s Abraham, a gangly nine-year-old, was walking the top rail of the split-rail fence with his lunch bucket balanced on top of his head. Elvie, who was supposed to be in charge, was nowhere in sight.

“See, what did I tell you?” Mam said. “Recess should have been over ten minutes ago.”

Eleven-year-old Herman came running around the school, saw the buggy and shouted, “Teacher’s back!” As children hurried toward the building from all directions, Abraham lost his footing and tumbled off the fence. The boy rolled and came up on his feet laughing, none the worse for wear. One of his brothers had reached the steps and was ringing the cast-iron bell to signal the start of classes.

Mam got out of the buggy. “I don’t see Samuel,” she said. “He must have walked home. Can you take the rig back to his barn?”

Ruth nodded. “I’m sorry about what happened.”

“Let it be for now. But think on what I said. You have decisions to make.”

“I think I already have, Mam. Don’t worry. I’d never do anything to shame you or my sisters, I promise.”

The entrance to Samuel’s lane was only a few hundred yards south of the schoolhouse. Once Mam had her lunch box and notebook, Ruth guided the horse in a circle, preparing to drive out of the yard. But as she turned right, she noticed two boys wrestling on the ground next to the shed. “Hey, you two,” she called. “Recess is over. Didn’t you hear the bell?”

Irwin scrambled to his feet, grabbed his hat off the grass and shoved something into his pocket. The top button was missing off his shirt, and one suspender hung off his shoulder. Weeds were tangled in his scarecrow hair. The other boy, Samuel’s son Peter, had more guilt than dirt on his face, and his shirttail was out, but he seemed to have gotten the best of the tussle.

“Were you two fighting?” Ruth demanded. She got down out of the buggy and walked toward them. “Irwin, what did you put in your pocket?”

Peter’s face blushed a deep red, and he looked as though he were about to burst into tears.

Irwin hung his head and stared at his bare feet.

“Well, Irwin, I’m waiting.”

“What’s wrong?” Mam came up behind her. “Why are you boys out here when everyone else has gone inside?”

“I think they were fighting.” Ruth dropped her hands to her hips. “Irwin put something in his pocket, and he won’t show me what it is.”

“Were you fighting?” her mother asked.

A tear rolled down Peter’s cheek.
“Ya,”
he squeaked. “We was.”

“I’m ashamed of you both.” Ruth looked from one boy to the other. “Peter, what would your father say?”

“There is a better way to solve problems than violence.” He mimicked Samuel’s deep baritone voice so well that it was all Ruth could do not to smile.

“Your father is right,” Mam said. “Fighting is not our way. You both are old enough to know better.” She held out her hand. “Irwin? What do you have?”

He took a step backward and reluctantly dug into his pocket and produced a pack of matches.

“Is this what you were fighting over?”

More tears streaked Peter’s face as he nodded.

“Are these yours, Irwin?” Mam took them from him.

He didn’t answer.

“Peter, do you have anything you want to say about this?”

The boy shook his head.

“Very well. Peter, you take your father’s horse and buggy home and come right back. Tell him that you will be staying after school today. You will both write,
‘There is a better way to solve problems than violence,’
two hundred times in your best cursive. And you will both stay after tomorrow afternoon to scrub the schoolhouse floor, wash the blackboards and the windows. Is that clear?”

“Ya,”
Peter said.

Irwin nodded.

“I will keep the matches.” Mam tucked them into her apron. “If I ever catch either of you with matches again, you
and
your father, Peter—and in your case Irwin, Lydia and Norman—will answer to the school board. Now, off with you. Irwin, I hope you remembered your math homework today.”

Both boys ran.

Ruth watched the boys go. “Something has to be done about Irwin before someone is seriously hurt.”

“Something has to be done all right, but I have a feeling there’s more to this than they’re telling. You see the look in Peter’s eyes? You, of all people, Ruth, know things aren’t always what they appear. I’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise you.”

“I just hope it’s not too late. He’s on our farm all the time. What if he burns our house down?”

“He isn’t going to burn the house down or hurt any of us. He’s an unhappy child, and we have to find a way to help him.”

“He’s a bully. You saw him trip Rudy at the picnic. He’s always shoving or—” Ruth sighed in exasperation. “Mam, you’re too easy on him. He’s a real troublemaker. And he seems to have it out for Samuel’s twins. He picks on them the most.”

“And why is that, do you suppose?”

Ruth stared at her mother.

“What do Rudy and Peter have that Irwin doesn’t?”

“A father, but—”

“A father who adores them.” Hannah started across the grass toward the schoolhouse, and Ruth walked with her. “Their own ponies. New shoes and new lunch buckets.”

“But Lydia and Norman are good to him. It’s Irwin that makes people dislike him,” Ruth said.

“He has a good heart, daughter. And if we can find a way to reach it, Irwin will return the love we give him twofold.”

“I think you’ve already given him too many chances.”

“Doesn’t the Lord do that with us? No matter how many times we fail Him, His love is always there for us. We must try to do as much for Irwin, Ruth. If we can’t give him hope and a sense of belonging, he will be as lost to us as his family is to him. And that I couldn’t bear, as a teacher or as a mother.”

M
orning sales at Spence’s were so busy that it was one o’clock by the time Ruth felt she could leave Miriam. She’d made plans to have lunch at the Amish Market with Dorcas and two of their girlfriends, and the girls were waiting impatiently to go. Charley’s sister Mary and her cousin Jane had already sold all their cut flowers and herbs and packed their wagon for the trip home.

“Go on.” Miriam waved them away. “I’ll be fine. John said he’d bring me back a sandwich and lemonade.”

Jane whispered something to her cousin, and the two giggled.

“I see how it is,” Mary teased. “Miriam wants to get rid of us so she can talk to the cute new vet.”

“Dr. Hartman is a friend of the family,” Miriam corrected, but Ruth noticed how merrily her sister’s eyes twinkled. Mam had called John, who had recently joined his grandfather’s large animal practice, to help deliver a calf that spring, and he and Miriam had hit it off. He often stopped to see Miriam at Spence’s when he grabbed lunch between appointments.

“Remember, your aunt Martha has her eye on you,” Jane warned. “Don’t do anything with that Mennonite boy that I wouldn’t.”

“It’s lemonade,” Ruth defended. “They just talk horses.”

“
Ya
. Horses.” Mary rolled her eyes. “You know what they say about those Mennonites. She just better keep her
Kapp
on.”

Dorcas laughed, too, although Ruth wasn’t certain she got the joke. Dorcas wasn’t exactly slow, but neither was she as quick-witted or as daring as Charley’s sister or Jane. Ruth often thought that Dorcas acted and, worse, appeared closer to forty than twenty.

It didn’t help that Aunt Martha, who made all of Dorcas’s clothing, was frugal and not the most skillful seamstress. Dorcas’s dresses usually were made over from secondhand ones Aunt Martha acquired when someone passed away. It was a shame, really. Although no one could accuse Dorcas of being anything but Plain, she did have nice eyes.

Mam thought that clothing that fit her niece better would improve her appearance and attitude by leaps and bounds. It might even help Dorcas to find a husband. The truth was, there were always more available young Amish women than marriageable Amish men, and Dorcas’s chances were hardly better than Anna’s.

Together, the four girls walked past a table laden with dusty glass knickknacks and tattered paperback books. There were stands selling DVDs and records and even used children’s clothing, as well as fruit and vegetables. Tables of toys stood side by side with those lined with belts and wallets. One booth was hung with robelike dresses from the far side of the world. An Amish boy from another church district stood amid the garments, fingering one and talking to the proprietor. He seemed to be attempting to get the man to lower the price, but what the boy would do with the foreign-looking dress, Ruth had no idea.

She liked coming to Spence’s, and she enjoyed spending time with Mary, Dorcas and Jane. She was the eldest of the four, but they always had fun together. Even Dorcas rarely whined or fussed when Jane and Mary were a part of the group. The cousins were too upbeat and full of fun to put up with Dorcas’s sullen moods.

“So,” Jane said, clasping Ruth’s hand and smiling up at her. “Tell me. What is Eli like? Have you ridden on his motorbike?”

Mary laughed. “Has he tried to steal a kiss?”

“I don’t want to talk about him.” Ruth’s tone sounded sharper than she’d intended. She didn’t want to offend her friends, but Eli wasn’t a subject she was willing to discuss right now. Maybe not ever.

Jane must have realized that Eli was a sensitive subject because she quickly turned the jest on her cousin. “Maybe you should ask Mary why she’s so interested in kissing.” She linked her arm through Mary’s. “Charley said she was awfully friendly with that Kentucky boy who’s visiting at Silas Troyer’s. Charley said she served him three slices of strawberry pie and four cups of coffee at dinner after services on Sunday.”

“He needed the coffee after all that ham
you
served him,” Mary said. “And he likes pie.”

“I’ll admit he wasn’t hard to look at,” Jane said.

“And he was really nice,” Mary defended. “Silas said…”

As the girls walked, Ruth’s thoughts drifted. She spotted an English woman in her thirties, with the same round face and distinctive eyes as Susanna’s. She was carrying a shopping bag of vegetables for an older woman who had to be her mother, and the two were laughing as they walked between the stalls.

Ruth thought about an incident at dinner the night before. Susanna had been carrying a bowl of steaming potato soup to the table and had tumbled and spilled the soup over herself, burning one wrist and her ankle. By the grace of God, her dress, apron and stockings had protected her skin from serious burns, but her wrist had taken the worst of the spill.

Whenever Susanna hurt herself, she dissolved into tears. Luckily, Ruth had been in the room and been able to put her sister’s wrist under running water to wash away the hot soup. A little ice and some soothing cream on her ankle had dried Susanna’s tears, and they’d been able to eat supper before everything was cold. But the incident had reminded Ruth just how challenged her little sister was. What if she’d burned herself cooking while Mam was at school? What if she accidentally started a fire? Mam couldn’t be in two places at once, and once Miriam and Anna married, if Anna could ever find a husband, the burden of caring for Susanna would fall on her mother. Like the woman with Down syndrome Ruth had just seen, Susanna would need supervised care the rest of her life.

Mam must have been thinking the same thing because after the incident the previous night, she’d stopped outside Ruth’s bedroom door on the way to bed and hugged her tightly. “You’re my rock,” Mam had murmured. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

“Ruth? Hello, Ruth?” Chuckling, Jane waved a hand in front of her face.

“I’m having black forest ham and cheddar on a sesame roll,” Dorcas said. “What about you, Ruth?”

Ruth looked up and realized they had reached the deli in the Amish food market. The clerk on the other side of the counter was waiting impatiently for her sandwich order. Embarrassed, Ruth didn’t even look at the menu on the wall. “I’ll have the same.”

“With root beer?”

Ruth nodded and followed the others to a picnic table in the aisle. There were coolers of cheese and sausages on both sides. The food stalls were crowded with customers and the high-roofed building was noisy. The odors of sizzling scrapple, baking bread and brining pickles filled the air. There was about an even mix of English and Amish here today, but Ruth was too distracted to pay much attention to the antique hunters and shoppers.

She kept thinking about how frightened Susanna had looked the night before and how much she wanted to take her in her arms and kiss away her tears, just as she had when Susanna was small. The further she removed herself from the feelings she’d experienced sitting on that bench with Eli, the clearer it was to her where her loyalties had to lie, and the choice her mother expected her to make. She had promised Mam that she’d always be there for her, and she couldn’t let her feelings for a boy, feelings she didn’t even know for sure were real, come between her and her family duty.

“Eli Lapp,” Dorcas said. She smiled, showing a broken front tooth.

Startled to hear his name while she was thinking about him, Ruth looked across the picnic table at her cousin. “What about him?”

Jane giggled and pointed. “Behind you. It’s Eli Lapp. Hello, Eli Lapp.”

“Want to have lunch with us, Eli Lapp?” Mary offered, joining in on the joke. She scooted over on the bench to make room for him.

Ruth felt Eli’s hand on her shoulder, and for a moment she froze.

“Sorry, I can’t,” he said kindly to Mary. He looked down at Ruth, his hand still on her shoulder. “I need to talk to you. I went by the house, but Susanna said you—”

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Ruth stammered, getting up and taking a step back so he couldn’t touch her. She just couldn’t stand feeling the warmth of his skin against hers. She just couldn’t. “This isn’t…” She looked around, thinking they should move somewhere more private, but that would only make this harder on both of them.

Mary popped up from the bench. “Oh, I think our sandwiches are ready. I’ll get them.”

Ruth looked at Eli and then averted her gaze. The lunch area was loud, and the voices buzzed around her. “This isn’t the place to talk.”

He tried to catch her hand, but she didn’t let him. “Then where is? I have to talk to you. I need to—”

“I can’t do this,” she whispered, interrupting him. There was a lump in her throat that warned her that she was close to tears. It seemed like everyone was staring at them, English and Amish. “Eli, I’m sorry if I let you think—”

“Ruth.” He didn’t let her finish, and when she looked into his eyes, he seemed to be pleading with her.

These feelings aren’t real,
she told herself.
It’s infatuation. Nothing more.
“Please don’t make this hard,” she asked him. “Just go.”

“A couple of minutes. That’s all I need.”

She sat down on the bench and swung her legs under the table. Dorcas was staring at them, hanging on every word. Aunt Martha would know what had transpired between Ruth and Eli by supper.
Good,
Ruth thought.
Then everyone will know and the matter will be settled; there was nothing between her and the boy from Belleville.
“You should go, Eli.”

“You won’t even let me—”

“
Ne,
Eli.” She presented her back to him so she wouldn’t see the hurt look in his blue eyes, the pain she could hear in his voice. “You’re a nice boy, but we were friends, nothing more. And I think it’s better if we don’t see each other at all…for a while. So…so people don’t think we…”

“So people don’t think what? That we like each other? Because we do, Ruth.”

“
We
don’t.” Ruth knotted her fingers together, her hands resting on the table. “Just go.”

He stood there for another moment and then turned and stalked way, nearly colliding with Mary, her arms full of sandwiches and sodas.

“Aren’t you staying?” she called after him, turning with the tray in her arms.

Eli didn’t look back.

Two days later, after supper, Eli returned to the Yoder farm. His pride was still smarting from what had happened at Spence’s right in front of half the people he knew in Seven Poplars, but he wasn’t ready to give up yet. Hopefully, Ruth had just been upset about being caught holding hands at the chair shop, and once they talked, everything would be okay between them. Hopefully, they would be better than okay.

Hannah was right. It had been inappropriate for he and Ruth to be holding hands, and he had endangered Ruth’s reputation by his actions. He needed to do this right. As soon as Ruth gave her permission, he intended to ask Hannah for permission to court her.

Ruth was in the garden with Anna and Miriam. As he walked up the lane, he saw the three sisters and Irwin Beachy. He knew Ruth saw him, but when he reached the garden gate, she was gone.

“She’s in the house,” Anna said. He knew by her expression that Ruth had told her she didn’t want to talk to him, but he walked to the back porch and knocked just the same.

Hannah answered the door.

“I’ve come to see Ruth,” he said.

Her mother shook her head. “I’m sorry, Eli. She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Is it you or her who doesn’t want me here?” He shuffled his feet, feeling like a boy in front of his teacher. “It’s important.”

Upstairs on the second floor, a window slammed shut. Eli looked up, knowing Ruth had been there looking down at him. He could feel his throat and cheeks flush with heat. Ruth must still be angry with him for getting her in trouble. Why wouldn’t she give him a chance to apologize? His gut twisted. Maybe it had been a mistake to come today, but he couldn’t help it. He had to see her. He had to make the attempt to set things right between them, and he wouldn’t believe that she didn’t want to see him…that she didn’t feel the same way he did.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you. Not today.”

Irwin came around the corner of the house with the puppy that Ruth and he had found in the hedgerow. The little dog still looked thin, but its eyes were shining, and a pink tongue flicked Irwin’s arm. “He’s better,” Irwin said, holding it up for Eli to see. “He eats good.”

Eli stopped to pet the pup as he came down the steps. Irwin was holding it as carefully as if it were a real baby. “You’re gentle with him,” Eli said.

“I know about dogs.” The boy looked up earnestly. “I had one of my own once.”

“And you’ll have another if you’re not careful,” Hannah said, following them out onto the stoop. “I never saw an animal take to a boy more.”

Irwin came as close to a smile as Eli had ever seen.

“Irwin’s going to train him for us,” Hannah explained. “It will be good to have a watchdog around here again.”

Eli scuffed his boots in the hard-packed dirt. “Tell Ruth I asked for her, will you?”

“She don’t want you here,” Irwin announced matter-of-factly. “She said so.”

Hannah smiled. “You come again another time, Eli. And we’ll talk, just you and me.”

“No need if Ruth doesn’t want me here,” he answered, feeling a dull hollowness in his belly. He couldn’t remember crossing their yard, but he was certain that he felt Ruth watching him from the window as he walked down the lane.

Ruth woke just after sunrise on Saturday morning to hear raindrops pattering on her bedroom windows. She raised the shades to find the garden and fields hazy and wet, a perfect day, considering the restless sleep she’d gotten last night. She’d made her decision, and she wasn’t about to change her mind. But that didn’t keep thoughts of Eli from troubling her dreams and conscience. It broke her heart to hurt him, but if someone had to suffer, better him than Mam and Susanna.