Fearless Hope: A Novel (27 page)

He still had no idea why he’d had the strange reaction to the Amish worship or to Ivan and Mary’s home and this house, but as he spent time around his new friends, he found himself wondering if their faith in the idea that God was in control of their lives was valid after all, and if perhaps God might even be in control of his. Had God deliberately drawn him to this place? It was hard to believe that the Creator of the universe would care enough about him to do something that personal, but it gave him a good feeling to think that perhaps God had known how
badly he needed this place and these gentle people and in His grace had brought him to it.

He found that it was
a lot easier to believe in God when one was surrounded by the vibrant, natural world he saw around him now that spring was here. The awesome variety of it all was staggering. He saw Hope and Simon planting tiny seeds and admired the miracle of programming within them.

“Come see what we’ve got, Logan!” Hope waved at him from the back of a van that had just pulled into the driveway.

He hurried down, wondering what type of miracle she’d purchased for the farm this time.

“It’s our baby chicks!” she called. “You have got to see these. They are so cute!”

He got there just in time to see her holding what looked like a yellow ball of fluff up to her cheek, a look of ecstasy on her face.

“So that piece of fluff is the start of your chicken farm?” he asked.

There were three heavy cardboard boxes in the van with holes in them from which he could hear a chorus of tiny chirps.

“
Ja
,” she said. “This is my chicken farm. Do you want to hold one?”

“No.”

“You will be sorry,” she said. “Baby chicks are like children, they don’t stay little for long.”

She seemed so disappointed, that he obediently held out his hand, and she deposited a slightly distraught chick there. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with it, but after cupping both hands around it, he had to admit that it did feel rather soft and nice.

As Hope got her organic chicken business started, he was fascinated with the process.

“These we will not eat,” she announced. “These are going to be our laying hens.”

This he was relieved to hear. He had not relished eating something that had already captivated him with its cuteness.

A barn swallow built a nest on his porch and he forbade Simon to remove it. He decided the bit of mess was a small price to pay for getting to watch the intricate nest-building process, and frantic feeding of baby birds.

All this land bursting with life was beyond miraculous to him. The wonder with which small children marveled at the natural world was nothing compared to Logan’s awakening to God’s great gifts. The marvel of man’s engineering accomplishments in building the great skyscrapers of Manhattan were nothing, in his opinion, to the mysterious instincts that brought the migration of songbirds to the North.

Hope’s cousin Levi heard about Logan’s fascination with barn swallows, and arrived one day with a large volume about birds under his arm. Logan found Levi to be a strong, quiet man with an encyclopedic knowledge of birds. They spent several early mornings together watching and listening. Levi was able to mimic many of the birdcalls and patiently taught him to discern between their songs. He also introduced him to the pleasures of formal bird-watching, and helped him begin his own life list.

With nice weather, Hope’s extended family seemed to be stopping by almost on a daily basis to help her with something or just to chat. One by one, he got to know these gentle people. He reveled in the fact that no longer was his connection to humanity based primarily upon a good morning from a doorman or a luncheon date with his editor, or waiting for Marla to come home from her job.

He realized now why the reviewer had called his characters cardboard. It was hard to sit in a room year after year and make people up out of thin air. A writer, he discovered, needed to be part of the rich stew of humanity if his characters were ever to become living, breathing people.

These days he could hardly write fast enough. The writer’s block was gone and floods of ideas kept him awake nights churning words and scenes in his mind.

“Living here was exactly what I needed, even when I didn’t know what was missing,” he said one evening on the porch when Ivan and Mary strolled over after supper. Mary had brought a fresh blueberry pie still warm from the oven. He’d added ice cream from his freezer, and they were enjoying the treat out on the porch. “Have you been thinking any more about going on that trip to Haiti with us?” Ivan asked. “We could use the help.”

“What you really want is for me to become Mennonite.” He laughed. “Just admit it and quit beating around the bush, neighbor.”

“When have I
ever
beat around the bush?” Ivan asked. “I admit, having you become a Mennonite wouldn’t exactly hurt my feelings, but it can get complicated. Especially in this neck of the woods.”

“How so?”

“Deciding on which Mennonite church to attend is a lot like this ice cream. There’s a lot of different ‘flavors.’ Some are pretty liberal. Women can dress in jeans, cut their hair short, and the people get to drive whatever they want. Some churches have strong opinions on what their people can wear and what kind of car they can drive. You have everything in between, down to the ultraconservative horse-and-buggy Mennonites. About the only pillars of faith left holding us together are a belief that Jesus is the son of God, adult baptism, the Bible being the Word of God, and nonresistance—or pacifism. We stand alongside the Amish in the belief that a man should not lift his hand against another. Including not participating in war.”

“There’s another thing we have in common,” Mary added. “Our relief organizations.”

“True,” Ivan said. “Helping people has been our way for centuries.

“Our son William once made a study of the teachings of Menno Simons. That’s one of our leaders from five hundred years ago. The name ‘Mennonite’ comes from him. He was a Catholic priest who converted after his brother, an Anabaptist like us, was killed for believing in adult baptism. I memorized this one quote because it gets to the heart of what we stand for.

“Menno said, ‘True evangelical faith . . . cannot lie dormant, but manifests itself in all righteousness and works of love . . . it clothes the naked; it feeds the hungry; it comforts the sorrowful; it shelters the destitute.’ ”

“In other words, a cup of pure water,” Logan said.

“Exactly,” Ivan agreed. “That’s our answer to pretty much everything, including war and political strife. We go in and we try to help others in the name of Jesus. We are most definitely not perfect. We stumble. We fall. We say stupid things. We wrangle over doctrinal issues sometimes—just like everyone else, but we
try
. We really do try to serve others.”

Logan had seldom heard anyone speak so passionately or honestly about their faith. The man and his family were truly living lives in service to God and others. He felt himself drawn to the ideal that Ivan had described.

“I think I’ll go ahead and get those shots,” Logan said. “You never know. I might just actually go with you sometime.”

H
ope felt guilty. She couldn’t help it, she just did.

It was so much easier running a farm with electricity . . . not to mention a house. Logan had put in a dishwasher, and she loved using it. The electric range was a flick of a button. A food processor cut down on so much time chopping and dicing.

The best things of all were the washer and dryer. She didn’t have to depend on the caprices of weather to know if she could do a wash. No more mad dashes outside when it rained. She could toss a small load of the children’s clothes into the washer every morning, then at lunchtime dry them with no more work than throwing them in and pushing a button.

Logan had been the one to suggest that she bring her and the children’s clothing to wash when she came, and she took full advantage of it. She had learned to pull clothing out of the dryer still damp and let it dry on the hangers—which meant no more ironing for her! Compared to filling a wringer washer with buckets of water and line-drying a week’s worth of clothes, and then sprinkling and ironing everything in sight, it felt like laundry had become no work at all. She could hardly believe how fluffy the towels came out—amazing!

Taking home a small basket of clean clothes with her each afternoon had, literally, freed up nearly a whole day each week. It was also convenient not having the entire world looking at her laundry and evaluating it every Monday. There was always the problem of how to dry unmentionables on an outdoor clothesline. Some simply put them right out there for God and everyone to see. Others—like her—dried their underwear inside, away from prying eyes. The last thing she wanted to see was pictures of her underwear showing up in some tourist photograph of Amish country!

Yes, a clothes dryer was a wonderful invention. She was Amish, but she wasn’t so Amish that she couldn’t appreciate the savings in time. She had also learned the joys of using a slow cooker. There weren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish all she wanted to do before the baby came.

Logan had been as good as his word. He seemed to be completely absorbed in his writing these days. She rarely saw him except when she went over the expenses with him.

This savings of time in using his appliances was a huge benefit, because it enabled her to spend more time implementing the changes she wanted to bring about on the farm. And all her industry was a godsend, because it wore her out and allowed her to fall into bed exhausted each night. It also occupied some of the time she might have spent thinking about Titus. Some days were better than others, but she found herself aching over what they could have accomplished on this property together!

Her grief was like an emotional toothache, always there, dull and throbbing, but she found that it was possible to plan and work in spite of that ache in her chest. Her love for her children and her unborn child helped her focus all her energies on creating a life for them.

She had taken to reading the description of the
virtuous woman in Proverbs 31 every morning, and it helped give her the
energy to continue her fight toward a better life for her family. It talked about how the virtuous woman considered a field, and bought it, and planted a vineyard on it. Hope could not yet buy a field, but by the grace of God, Logan had given her permission to use his land as she wished. She did not have to plant a vineyard, there were several that had already been planted by her father, but they had become neglected. She personally pruned them, affixed them to better supports, dug around the roots, and fertilized them.

She redug the asparagus plants, mulched the flower beds, replanted the strawberry beds she had so loved as a child. She hired help to come redig post holes and repair the fences. There was a forty-acre pasture where she intended to run beef cattle again.

Now that she was spending so much time there, she brought her little Jersey milk cow over one day tied behind her buggy, and fixed her up in a nice, clean stall. It was handier this way.

The spring weather was perfect in every way. She and Simon tried putting in a different rotation of crops than her father had ever used, and she had high hopes. There was every reason to believe there might be a good harvest.

Her mother, worried that she was doing too much, cautioned her about the baby, but Grace told her to do what she felt like doing except for heavy lifting and to rest if she got tired. She chose to follow Grace’s advice instead of giving in to her mother’s worries. All Hope knew was that she felt healthier and happier than ever as long as she was outdoors with her bare feet planted firmly on freshly plowed ground. Like one of those solar-powered outdoor lights her people were starting to use, the more she was outside in the sunlight, the better she felt.

Chicken wire, plus a design for two new chicken houses on wheels that Simon made for her, created a home for her little biddies, who could now feast on worms and bugs and scratch
the earth with their little feet like they were meant to do. Every morning, Simon would hitch one of their two horses to the portable chicken houses and slide them a few feet farther along in the field, giving the chickens fresh ground to work, and fertilizing the ground with chicken manure.

She’d looked into the purchase of some ewes, and would soon have her rabbit business up and running. With any luck, she would have extra vegetables to sell soon. She made a note to have Simon build her a small roadside stand.

The possibilities were just endless.

Logan had not criticized anything she had done or spent so far. Well, maybe one thing, and it wasn’t really a criticism, it was more like a joke. When he looked over the receipts she gave him for the money she used to pay drivers to deliver various items to the farm, he commented once that it would be a lot cheaper to buy a truck and teach her how to drive it.

The idea of actually owning a pickup truck and having the skill to drive it was an idea that just kept niggling at her. What freedom that would give her! She did not mind using a horse-drawn plow instead of a tractor—in her opinion the horses were better for the land than the heavy tractors anyway, although that was a subject debated all over Holmes County. But to be able to run to the feed store at a moment’s notice without having to call and make arrangements for some
Englisch
driver?

The idea just wouldn’t let her go.

At that very moment, Ivan drove by and waved. She waved back, as he went by with one elbow hanging rakishly out of the open window. He still wore a summer straw hat like he had when he was Amish, and he had never given up the suspenders. He was a godly man in every way, and she simply could not see where having exchanged horse and buggy for a truck had made that big a difference in his service to God.

Ivan had been like a surrogate parent to her most of her life.
His sons were like brothers to her and his daughters like sisters. She knew the family’s integrity and admired their faith.