Hidden Mercies (5 page)

She found herself savoring the word
shower
. It had been only a little over a year since Levi put in plumbing for her. Leaving the conservative Swartzentruber Amish sect for the Old Order Amish had been an agonizing decision, but it had allowed some amazingly welcome additions to her life—like a bathroom, and a windshield on her buggy for when it rained.

“Supper is on the stove,” Maddy said. “I made chicken stew.”

“If your hands prepared it,” Claire said, “I know it will be wonderful good.”

She had started up the stairs to her room, when she heard a man’s voice on the front porch. It was the kind of voice that sounded rough, as though ruined by too many years of smoking cigarettes, and it held no hint of the Germanic lilt of her people.

She did not mind the women tourists who stopped. They were almost always polite and considerate, but a lone man worried her.

The shower would have to wait until the man was safely gone. It was comforting to know that Levi was only a few yards away, in the workshop.

She hurried into the front room as Amy wheeled herself into the house. A tall man with short, salt-and-pepper hair held the door for her. This was the person she had seen at Mrs. Yoder’s a few days earlier.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

The moment the stranger saw her, his expression changed. There was a look of recognition there that disturbed her.

Once, long ago, when she was a young woman, she had received many unwanted glances from men. Now, as a middle-aged Amish woman, she was used to being overlooked, nearly invisible, which was something she fervently welcomed. No decent Amish woman wanted to attract the notice of an
Englisch
man.

In spite of the recent scars, the man still somehow managed to be attractive. He was well built and held himself straight, but she did not like the pallor that she saw coming over him. When sweat suddenly popped out on his forehead, the healer in her grew concerned.

“Are you all right?” she asked. “You do not look well.”

“I’m—I’m sorry.” He dropped into the nearest chair. “I’ve only been out of the hospital a few days. I honestly thought I was stronger than this.”

From the looks of him, she was half afraid this strange man was about to faint.

“Put your head down.” She was no longer afraid of him. A man so weak he couldn’t stand up was not a threat. He leaned over, both elbows on his knees.

“Shrapnel.” He answered a question she had not asked.

Ah. That explained much. This man was a soldier, as she had thought two days ago when she’d seen him at Mrs. Yoder’s.

She remembered his limp—it was his left leg that he favored—and the way he struggled to extract some bills from his wallet with damaged hands. In fact, in her opinion, she remembered him just a little
too
well. Why would she bother to memorize so many details about an
Englisch
man?

Then he slumped and completely lost consciousness. She found herself bearing the full weight of this stranger, trying to keep him from hitting his face on the linoleum of her front room floor.

Maddy walked into the front room, ready to go work for Rose, and stopped dead. “What’s going on?”

“Get Levi, Maddy. Quick! We have
Druwwel
.”

“Levi,” Maddy yelled as she ran out the door, “come quick! We have trouble!”

T
om awoke, disoriented, in a room as bare of decoration as an army barracks. More bare, actually. Sometimes there were pinups in a barracks.

A dark blue curtain was swagged to one side of the window in front of him. He moved his head slightly to see where he was. That slight movement brought an angel to his side.

Not an angel, of course. He blinked to clear his head. An Amish woman in a light blue dress and a white head covering.

The fog cleared a little. This wasn’t just any Amish woman. It was Claire. She held a pill bottle in front of him. “How many of these did you take?”

He squinted at the bottle, trying to remember. “Four.”

“When?”

“Maybe a half hour ago. On my way here.”

“That’s more than double the dose.” Claire’s voice was laced with disapproval.

“I’m sorry.” He tried to push himself up off the couch that he had no memory of lying down upon. “I’ll go now.”

Yet again, this was not the sort of situation in which he wanted to apologize for that fateful night. Not like this, lying on his back, barely able to string two thoughts together.

“You”—she looked at the pill bottle label—“Mr. Tom
Miller, passed out cold in my front room and scared me and my girls out of our wits. I’m trying to decide whether or not my son should take you to the hospital.”

“No, please,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

To prove it, he gave a great effort and sat up. He intended to go straight into a standing position, but all he could manage before succumbing to the dizziness again was to push himself upright. It didn’t last. He found himself sliding back down onto the pillows.

The last thing he needed was to be taken to the hospital for what would be marked as an accidental drug overdose.

Her voice softened. “How long ago did you eat?”

He thought about it. “Last night.”

“Ach.”
She clicked her tongue. “An empty stomach and morphine is not a good combination. You will have some soup now.”

Even in his misery, he smiled at the take-charge tone in her voice. She didn’t ask if he would like some soup. She told him that he was going to have some.

Claire had always been a little bossy—but only for the good of others. He and his older brother, Matthew, thought it was cute. Matthew, already a man, had delighted in her while Tom quietly and painfully worshipped from afar—as only a teenaged boy could.

The young girl he had met outside on the porch now maneuvered her wheelchair to a spot near the couch and peered down at him. “Hi. I’m Amy. You are a first, you know. We almost had a woman give birth in our kitchen once, but we never had a tourist faint in our front room.” She paused for a breath. “What happened to your face?”

“Leave the man alone, Amy,” Claire called from another room from which he could hear the clatter of dinnerware. “I am sure he does not feel like answering your questions right now.”

He turned his head. Through a connecting doorway, he saw Claire busy in the kitchen, an older girl at her side. Both were bustling about, lighting the gas stove, opening a mason jar of what looked like vegetable soup, slicing bread. His almost-sister-in-law had changed a little. Her blond hair, what he could see of it, had streaks of gray. Her body had grown slightly heavier—perhaps with childbearing.

As his head cleared further, he noted that Claire was barefoot, and her skirt stopped several inches above her ankles. This was a surprise. No Swartzentruber Amish woman showed that much skin. They wore their dresses completely down to the tops of their shoes, and the fabric was darker and heavier. Claire’s dress was light blue, and the material thinner. He glanced down at the floor. Linoleum. It even had a small pattern. No Swartzentruber church would allow something that fancy. It was wooden floors for them. Period. Even the finish used on the wood floors was prescribed.

Either the Swartzentruber Amish had drastically changed their ways or she had become Old Order Amish. That was practically unthinkable. The ultraconservative Swartzentrubers considered the Old Order Amish too modern even to have fellowship with them. If Claire had become Old Order Amish, that meant that she would have been excommunicated by the church where she had grown up.

“Did you get hold of your wife, Levi?” she called from the kitchen.

“Yes,” a man’s voice answered from a place near Tom’s feet. “Grace was at the grocery store with Sarah, but she should be here any minute.”

Tom had to raise his head slightly to see who had spoken. It was a familiar-looking young man sitting in a chair with a rosy-cheeked toddler on his lap. He thought there was the look of his brother, Matthew, in Levi’s features, but it had
been a long time since he’d seen his brother, and it wasn’t as though he had any photographs to keep the memories fresh.

Not that he didn’t have clear memories of Matthew. The last night of Matthew’s life was emblazoned in his mind in ways that made him wish he
could
have stuffed it in a photo album and shoved it in a drawer somewhere, instead of having it lodged forever in his brain.

“I am Levi Troyer,” the young man said. “We are pleased to see you come back to consciousness. My wife will be here, soon. She is a nurse practitioner and will know what to do with you.”

“Thank you . . . Levi.”

Tom knew exactly who Levi was. He had thought about that little boy ever since he had read about his existence in
The Budget,
the Amish newspaper printed in Sugarcreek, Ohio, which collected news from all over the world from various Amish and Mennonite church districts. Every now and then, a copy would catch up with him, and he would read every word. Each issue was a bittersweet experience, giving him a small window into what was going on back home.
The Budget
took the place of the letters from home that were never written or received.

When he read about the birth of his brother’s child, he was surprised at first. Matthew had not mentioned a pregnancy to him. Chances were the pregnancy was still so new that even Matthew didn’t know. It was possible Claire also had not known then.

For a long time after that, all he could think about was how hard it must have been for Claire to bear a child out of wedlock exactly nine months after a wedding that, thanks to him, had not taken place. Matthew had been killed around four o’clock on the morning of what was supposed to have been their wedding day. He and Claire would have said their
vows about noon. The girl had been only eight hours away from being a married woman.

Pregnancy was tough on any woman. He remembered the morning sickness and swollen ankles his mother had endured with his little sister, Faye, but he hated to think about how hard an unwed pregnancy must have been on Claire, stranded as she was within the ultraconservative Swartzentruber sect. He hoped that, under the circumstances, their people had been understanding.

Several years later, another copy of
The Budget
mentioned that she had married Abraham Shetler, who owned the farm next door to his father’s. This had been as great a surprise as the announcement that his brother had fathered a child.

He had known Abraham, but he’d never particularly liked the man. It surprised him that Claire had chosen to marry him. Unless—and this thought made him feel half sick—she been offered no other marital option.

He would have come home and married her himself if he’d had the slightest inkling that she would have considered it. The problem was, he knew she would never consent to live the life of a military wife, and there was no chance that he would ever go back to living the life of a Swartzentruber. He had loved Claire Keim as long as he could remember—but the thought of going back to being a Swartzentruber was unbearable. He’d seen and experienced too much in the intervening years. He could not possibly put himself back into that tightly closed box.

After that, he didn’t read
The Budget
anymore.

“Geili!”
the little boy on Levi’s lap demanded.
“Geili!”

“You want another horsey ride already?” Levi chuckled. “You will give me leg cramps.”

Levi sat the toddler astride his right leg and began
pretend-trotting as he sang a nursery rhyme that Tom had forgotten existed.

Reide, reide Geili,

halb Schtund de Meili,

Geili schpringt da hivvel nuff

Boomp—fallscht du nunner!

Tom closed his eyes. It seemed like a hundred years ago that he’d been trotted on his father’s knee to the words of exactly the same nursery rhyme.

Ride, ride a horsey,

Half an hour a mile.

Horsey runs up the hill,

Bump—you fall down!

As he lay in Claire’s house, with her family nearby, he wondered if he should tell her who he was yet. Like her sister, Rose, there had been no hint of recognition in Claire’s voice or eyes. It was strange to know that he could walk among his people with complete anonymity if he wished.

Funny, he had always assumed his people would recognize him if he ever came home, but how could they? He had grown another three inches after he left home, and gained at least forty pounds of muscle after joining the Marines. Instead of the below-the-earlobes bowl haircut that every other Swartzentruber man wore, his hair was now cut close to the scalp. The shrapnel had left one side of his jaw permanently scarred. He knew that not even his voice was recognizable. The heat from the blast had left him with a permanent hoarseness.

There was every reason to believe that he could remain in the area without having to reveal his identity unless he chose. This was a novel idea. And tempting. He had planned
to move on after making his apologies. Perhaps he wouldn’t have to.

Maybe he could go see his father without being tossed out on his ear after a few sentences. Perhaps the physical changes were profound enough that his own sister and
daed
would not recognize him.

His
daed
. There were so many mixed feelings and emotions tied up with Jeremiah Troyer.

“It should have been you!” That was the sentence that had reverberated down the hallways of his life. “It should have been you.”

Why did
Daed
have to say those words to his sixteen-year-old son? No parent should say that to a boy at the grave site of his brother. No boy should ever have to hear it, no matter what the circumstances.

His father was right, of course. It should have been him who died that night. But
Daed
didn’t have to destroy him when he was already riddled with guilt and grief over his brother’s death.

The horsey ride now over, the toddler began to fidget on his big brother’s lap.