Hidden Mercies (21 page)

Abel carried in a homemade tin cup dripping with cold water from the well. She noticed that the cup had been made from the bottom half of a tin can upon which someone had soldered a handle. The Old Order Amish were excellent
stewards of their own resources, but by necessity, the Swartzentruber Amish were even more so.

“Just a few sips.” Claire wished she could have ice chips for the girl, but a Swartzentruber house did not have such things as refrigerators or freezers. “Now is not a good time to fill your belly with water.”

Dorcas obeyed. Then another contraction began. She dropped the cup and began to strain again.

“Get behind her, Abel,” Claire instructed, “and support her back.”

Abel did not hesitate. He put his strong arms around his wife, providing a living wall into which she could lean while pushing their baby out into the world.

And then came the moment for which Claire lived and breathed—that holy moment when a precious new little soul came into the world, straight from the heart of God.

“You have a son!” Claire lifted the baby from the water. “A healthy little boy.”

“Praise
Gott
!” the husband exclaimed.

Dorcas relaxed against her husband’s chest, panting from the effort.

Claire’s hands flew as she checked the time, cleared the baby’s throat with her finger, clamped and cut the umbilical cord, and then laid the infant high on Dorcas’s belly. She would weigh him later. Her eyes softened when she saw the husband tentatively stroke the newborn’s cheek while the red-faced infant squalled.

“A son.” There was awe in his voice. “We have a son.”

Ach
. That was as it should be. She had no respect for husbands who treated this moment as though it were nothing.

“Thank you for this great gift, my wife.”

Dorcas smiled up at her husband, relaxed and happy now that it was over. Her face was aglow with the look of triumph
that every woman wears after successfully bringing new life into the world.

It was an intimate moment, one that did not need to be shared with an outsider. While they acquainted themselves with their first child, Claire gave them a measure of privacy by going to the woodstove and taking a little more time than necessary pulling out one of the receiving blankets she had placed in the stove’s warming oven.

She glanced around the tidy kitchen, giving thanks to God that this young couple had been given the chance to purchase a small farm where they could nurture this child. Too many Amish families were being forced off the land because of the high cost. She knew that at least half of the young people from this particular church had moved away in search of more affordable property.

She thanked God that Abel’s grandparents were wise and generous people. Lilly had told her that Bess and Leroy were selling this homestead to Abel and Dorcas for barely a fourth of its value.

Had Bess and Leroy sold their property for what it was worth, they would be considered well-off by the world’s standards, but the Amish had always measured worth by a very different yardstick. Many parents and grandparents put more value on having their children living close, with the ability to support themselves at least partially from the land, than on putting “paper money” in the bank.

She respected Leroy and Bess for having sacrificed a small mountain of “paper money” for the sake of this young couple and for this precious life that had just fought his way into the world.

She brought the blanket, lifted the infant off its mother’s belly, and wrapped it in the blanket’s warmth. She would bathe the baby later.

“Here.” She handed the tiny, snug package to Abel.

Then came the other moment she loved. The baby, quieted by the secure tightness and warmth of the blanket, gazed up at his father for the first time, and Abel, so young that his husband beard was still thin and scraggly, gazed down into his little son’s wide-open eyes. It seemed to her as though the newborn was memorizing his father’s face.

Still gazing at his father, the baby worked his arm out from beneath the blanket and noisily began to suck his fist.

“He is a hungry one,” the new father said, proudly.

There was always a moment when, after a successful birth, she felt a sort of euphoria—a lightness and happiness over having used her skill and knowledge to help a mother come safely through the most intense moment of a woman’s life.

For the first time since meeting Tom, she found herself wondering if there was any chance that this was how he felt when he flew his helicopter to protect people like Grace who went onto battlefields to save the lives of wounded soldiers.

If so, it would be a hard thing to walk away. It had certainly broken her heart when Abraham forbade her to do this holy work.

As Claire kneaded Dorcas’s slack belly to help expel the afterbirth, she noticed Abel surreptitiously wiping away tears. Oh, this was very good! That boy would be a loving father . . . like his father before him, and his grandfather before him.

Claire felt the weight of her forty-four years as she realized that counting the new babe, she had known four generations of this family.

As Claire prepared to help Dorcas learn how to nurse her sweet-smelling little boy, Abel left to once again tend his livestock. She smiled when she glanced out the window and saw the new father striding out to the barn with such a spring to his step that his boots were barely touching the ground!

Dorcas was a lucky girl—only eighteen, with a farm, a house, a healthy son, and a good, steady husband with love in his heart for both her and his child. In Claire’s opinion, a better life was not possible on this earth.

A very small part of her—a part she would have been ashamed to admit existed—felt a sharp stab of envy.

If Matthew had lived, she would have been like Dorcas, with a fine, young husband, a precious baby boy, and the homestead that Matthew had rented for them.

There would have been no shame to endure. Instead, she would have had memories of a joyous wedding and a man who truly loved her. It would have been a much easier life.

Who would she have become had Matthew not died?

For one thing, she would not be the kind of woman who, for Levi’s sake, had to put away her grief long enough to convince herself to marry Abraham. At ten, Levi needed a man to lead him into adulthood. He did not need to learn how to cook and clean and sew—the skills she knew. He needed to learn how to plow and plant and harvest, like Abraham, who had been a skilled and canny farmer. Abraham could teach her son the intricacies of mending fences and harnesses. He could explain the breeding of cattle and rotation of crops.

The fact that Abraham was thirty-three and still unmarried should have warned her that there was a reason other women had turned down his proposals.

She had married for her son’s sake—and, truth be known, because she wanted more children—thinking she could learn to love a frugal farmer who owned his own farm and went to church regularly. There had been little courtship. He had been the only one who asked—and she had accepted.

Six weeks after their marriage, she had heard the whipping in the barn. The sound of Levi’s sobs—such a good little
boy always, so quick to try to please—made her want to take a pitchfork and run it through her new husband.

Instead, she waited until Abraham came out of the barn, and humbly asked what Levi’s great sin had been to deserve such a punishment. Abraham’s answer? The little boy had wept over the fact that his hands were cut and bleeding from trying to learn the skill of basket weaving from his new stepfather.

What kind of woman would she be now, if she had not been forced to fight not just to love her new husband but for the discipline to not hate him?

Levi was a quick child. He learned how to avoid his stepfather’s anger, and she helped him know how. She learned that the more subservient she became, the less Abraham felt the need to take his frustration with her out on her child. He became the best-fed man in their church, with the cleanest clothes and the tidiest house. These things kept him reasonably happy.

The whippings grew infrequent.

She often wondered what Grace would think if she knew that most of Claire’s expertise as a cook and homemaker had been developed out of sheer desperation to keep Abraham content enough to keep his temper down.

Grace would never know. Nor would Levi. Nor would anyone else. She would be too ashamed to tell anyone. She would also be ashamed to tell anyone how much she enjoyed the freedom of sitting down to a no-cook dinner of bread and milk, or of the pleasure she took in sometimes allowing the house to grow so messy that it would have sent Abraham into a rage.

Still, she acknowledged that she had received four important blessings from her years with Abraham. Her children. Her mortgage-free farm. Levi’s knowledge and ability to
make a living as a farmer. And her own strength. These were things she could, and did, often thank God for.

Sometimes she remembered the intense fires of anger she had felt after Matthew’s death. She had fought those flames down, also. There had been no choice. She had to come through those fires, and over to the other side of forgiveness, in order to have enough peace to survive.

Oh, those foolish young boys! How their foolishness had impacted so many people’s lives!

Tobias drinking and driving, Henry showing off his father’s valuable horse, Matthew racing an unfamiliar horse in the middle of the night. She could imagine it all so clearly, the high spirits, the illusion of youthful invulnerability, the exuberance Matthew must have felt flying through the night on a champion racehorse, faster than any animal he had ever ridden. That night had practically destroyed her life, as well as Jeremiah’s. Henry’s father had lost heart when his lifetime of working and saving for a chance to buy a horse like Ebony Sky went up in smoke. And then there was Tobias.

She often wondered what had happened to Tobias in the intervening years. No one, to her knowledge, had ever heard from him again after the funeral. It could not have been easy on him, just a kid completely on his own in the world. No ID, no driver’s license, no Social Security number, no education, no acquaintances outside the Swartzentruber community.

They had been such good friends growing up together. He had been one of the kindest young men she had ever known. She could hardly imagine how hard his part in his big brother’s death had hit him. Tobias had worshipped Matthew. They all did.

She hoped with all her heart that someday, before her life was over, Tobias would find his way back home so that she would have a chance to tell him that she understood. That she
didn’t blame him for what had happened. If she knew Tobias, however, he had probably spent the intervening years blaming himself for everything that had happened.

She hoped that wherever he was, he had found a measure of peace.

•   •   •

Ever since the night that Rose had come to Claire’s trying to sell her anniversary china, Tom had been keeping an eye out for Henry. Mt. Hope was so small, the odds were good that he would run into him if he just paid attention. He wasn’t sure what he would do if he did see him—he certainly was in no shape to give Rose’s husband a threshing, although he would have been happy to give it a try if it would help her and the kids.

Then it happened. He was headed to Lehman’s Hardware to pick up a part for an old lawn tractor Levi had gotten hold of. He’d planned on going there anyway, and it was Tuesday, the day Jeremiah had heard that Henry was picked up there by an
Englisch
man. At first, he wasn’t sure he would recognize Henry after so many years, but then he saw a man who looked like an older copy of Henry, standing right in the heart of Mt. Hope, on the very corner where Lehman’s Hardware was situated—just as his father had described. Older, paunchy, balding—but it was definitely Henry. He was pacing the sidewalk beside the hardware store.

Tom paused at the stop sign and watched. Every so often, Henry would stop pacing and look up the road to the north, as though he were waiting for someone. He was wearing his dress-up clothes, or as close to dress-up clothes as an Amish man got. Black pants. Black vest. Black coat. White shirt. A straight-brimmed, black felt hat. An Amish man would wear the same dress outfit for church, weddings, funerals, or . . . wherever it was that Henry was going.

In a few minutes, a dark sedan pulled up, stopped, and Henry got in. Tom watched as they sped off toward the south.

Tom had no desire to play detective, but the memory of Rose’s desperation sent him speeding south behind them, trying to catch up.

It was no trick to close the distance between them. An Amish buggy had slowed them down to a crawl. From that moment on, Tom followed as Henry’s driver, or perhaps friend, proceeded southwest, carefully driving the speed limit.

When he had heard of Rose’s plight, he had worried that Henry had found another woman. Infidelity was rare among married Amish men who had been raised from birth to be faithful husbands and fathers, but people being what they were, he was certain things like that happened. Henry had possessed quite a roving eye when they were young. Perhaps he regretted settling down with Rose as early as he did.

If Henry was bent on destroying his family because of some other woman, Tom wanted to know. Perhaps he could talk some sense into his cousin. If that didn’t work, he would be forced to mention it to the bishop. Or even better, he would tell Claire whatever he found out and let her deal with it. He trusted her instincts better than his own in this instance.

He followed them for over an hour, until he saw that his gas gauge was getting dangerously low. There weren’t many gas stations on these roads, so he was forced to pull in at the first one he saw. He knew there might not be any more for several miles. By the time he’d filled his tank, they were long gone. When he didn’t catch up with them during the next ten miles, he reluctantly turned back, knowing little more than he had an hour ago.

H
e had fallen into a sort of daily routine. He liked routines—a carryover from the military. He especially needed routines now. They gave him a hook upon which to hang his days.