Huckleberry Summer (5 page)

Aden didn’t seem offended by her subtle reprimand. “Do you want to know why I went to jail? The truth is probably less dramatic than your imagination.”

“It’s none of my business. I should not let your past keep me from doing my Christian duty.”

His lips twitched upward. “Sounds like something an Amish fater would say.”

This young man was infuriatingly perceptive. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. I heard a lot of talk like that in Ohio, and yet people still avoided me.”

Lily smoothed her hand along the dog’s neck. His fur felt especially soft there. “We’re not like that here in Bonduel.”

“Your fater told you to stay away from me. It sounds like you’re exactly like that in Bonduel.” He pinned her with that brilliant gaze. “Or maybe it’s just you, Lily Eicher.”

Lily’s face felt like she stood right next to a blazing-hot cookstove. “Don’t blame me for your choices. You did something bad enough to be arrested. I would be
deerich
, foolish, not to be cautious around you.”

Her words didn’t seem to anger him, but they hit their mark. He slumped his shoulders in resignation. “You are right. Of course you are right. For all you know, I could be a murderer.” Then the bitterness crept into his voice. “Four feet isn’t near far enough from someone like me.” He picked up his twine and scissors and stood up. “I’ll go weed tomatoes.”

Lily felt a little hitch in her throat as she watched him tromp away. She’d been hurtful when all she’d wanted to be was right. A sense of shame washed over her. She had always tried to befriend the ones that everybody picked on, not alienate them.

The dog rolled and lifted his head. Lily pulled her hands away. She’d been petting Aden’s dog. How had that happened? The dog stood up, gave Lily a yip of disapproval, and turned away from her. He followed Aden to the vegetable patch without looking back.

It seemed she was unworthy of even the dog.

Well, good, because he was a dirty, bothersome brute. She pulled a small bottle of sanitizer out of her pocket and slathered it all over her hands, but she still felt germy and unclean. There wasn’t a bottle of hand sanitizer big enough to sterilize her nagging conscience.

 

 

Aden trudged into the house for a drink.

Mammi, it seemed, had been watching for him. She greeted him at the door with a plate of gingersnaps. “How are you two coming along out there?”

“The tomatoes are weeded, but the raspberries are going slow.” Aden grabbed a cookie and bit into it. Or tried to. He’d forgotten about Mammi’s rock-hard gingersnaps. The cookie scraped against his teeth like a pebble. “Delicious, Mammi,” he said, slipping the cookie into his pocket to be eaten when he could soak the thing in a glass of milk.

“What about Lily? Isn’t she wonderful?”

“We’ve decided to stay away from each other.”

Mammi threw her hands up in the air, which was a bad thing because the cookies on her plate flew in several directions. One bounced on the table and leveled the salt shaker. “My goodness,” she said, “look what trouble I’m in.”

Aden motioned for his mammi to stay put, got on his hands and knees, and gathered the scattered cookies.

Mammi bent over so she could look Aden in the eye while he crawled around. “You young people are so uncooperative! I feel like I have to do all the work myself.”

Aden remembered how much he loved his mammi and tried not to sound frustrated. “She’s not interested.”

“Nonsense. She barely knows you. If you stay away from her, she’ll never get to know you, and then how, might I ask, will she fall in love?”

Aden found all the cookies he could, stood up, and deposited them on the plate Mammi held out to him. “Mammi, I know you mean well, and I’m happy to let you find me a wife. I don’t want to sound picky, but do you think you could find me a girl whose fater doesn’t hate me?”

Mammi looked puzzled for a moment. “David Eicher just needs to get to know you. He smothers that girl so she can’t hardly breathe. Things will get better. Have another cookie. They’re my special recipe.”

Aden sighed inwardly and grabbed two cookies off the plate. They might as well have been golf balls.

Mammi would never give up.

He lost all hope.

Aden listened as the preacher droned on and on about Matthew 5:9.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Even though this was his first time at gmay, Aden had a sneaking suspicion that the sermon was meant specifically for him. He didn’t intend to take the message lightly, but he found his mind wandering. Contrary to what the people in his new district might believe, Aden had spent his whole life trying to be a man of peace. He just seemed to stir up a lot of trouble at the same time.

Aden shifted on his bench. Some men, no matter how righteous, were not meant to preach sermons. This particular preacher might as well have been reading the phone book.

Aden peered across the room at Lily. She sat with her arm around a Down syndrome girl who looked about the same age as Lily. Lily, in rapt attention, nodded at all the appropriate moments in the sermon. Well-behaved. Lily Eicher was well-behaved. He found that particular quality quite endearing. Aden always desired in his heart of hearts to be well-behaved. He admired people who could actually do it.

She glanced at him and caught him staring, quickly looked away, and turned bright red.
Oy anyhow
, how she must hate him. It was his own fault. He’d put her on the defensive the other day and no doubt hurt her feelings. The poor girl wanted to be obedient to her father. He couldn’t blame her for that.

She was, after all, well-behaved.

In hopes of finding a more suitable marriage candidate, Aden let his gaze travel over the girls sitting on the same bench as Lily. She was prettier than any of them by a country mile, but good looks weren’t the only important thing in a wife. Maybe he should hold interviews after services.

One of the girls sitting on Lily’s bench held a baby, probably a little brother. He fussed while she patted his back in quiet rhythm. He coughed and then spewed the milk from his stomach onto the girl’s white apron. She gasped and passed the baby to her mother, who sat on the row in front of her. The front of her apron was soaked through to her dress.

The preacher took no notice. “When the righteous die, they enter into peace. There is no peace for the wicked.”

A younger girl in the back row tittered softly. Ladies on the bench in front of the wet girl passed burp rags and tissues to clean her off with. She took the offerings and wiped her apron as her eyes filled with tears. No flimsy tissue would dry her.

With a minimum of fuss, Lily reached across two other girls and took the drenched girl’s hand. She gave the girl a reassuring smile, pulled her from between the row of benches, and led her down the hall to a bathroom.

Aden slid off his bench as the preacher called for a prayer. Once the prayer ended, everyone got back on the benches and pulled out their
Ausbund
hymnals. The
Vorsinger
, or lead hymn singer, sang the beginning of each new line and everyone chimed in after him. Halfway through the hymn, Lily and the other girl reappeared.

The girl had removed her soaking apron and wore what must have been Lily’s apron over her wet dress. Her eyes were red with crying, but she only sniffed twice before Lily led her back to her seat. Lily, wearing the wet apron, took her place next to the special girl, who smiled brightly at Lily’s return. In her blue dress, Lily looked like a patch of sky peeking out from behind the clouds.

Not that she needed anything to make her stand out. Her golden-yellow hair and full, pink lips succeeded in doing that just fine. Was she aware of her beauty? Probably not. Such things were not discussed among the Plain people. A well-behaved, humble girl would not want to attract attention.

Once services ended and Aden had helped the other men move benches and stack them into tables, Aden found a spot between two strangers for the noon meal. They were both boys about his age.

The boy on his left had a pleasant face, straight dark hair, and unusually long eyelashes. Aden sat down, and the boy immediately turned to him and stuck out his hand. “Tyler Yoder.” He had a firm handshake and a confident, serious air about him.

Aden smiled. “Aden Helmuth.”

Tyler looked at the peanut butter sandwich on Aden’s plate. “I hear you only eat vegetables.”

Aden chuckled. “Nae, I don’t eat meat. But I eat most everything else.”

“Peanut butter?”

“Jah.”

Tyler studied Aden’s face and nodded. “You have a heart for the animals.”

Aden almost dropped his jaw. Tyler was the first Amish person Aden had encountered who didn’t act like he thought being a vegetarian was strange. Tyler seemed to understand or at least refrained from passing judgment on Aden’s choices.

“There are a lot of reasons to be a vegetarian,” Aden said. “But yes, I’d rather not see any living thing die for my eating pleasure.”

“You take after your dawdi,” Tyler said. “Felty has been known to catch spiders in his house and set them free in the woods.”

“Jah. I am very like my dawdi, bless his heart.”

“Are you an environmentalist?” Tyler asked.

Again, Aden couldn’t hide his surprise. “I didn’t think any Plain people knew what that meant.”

Tyler’s eyes seemed to smile although his lips stayed put. “I dabble in stuff like that.”

“Really?”

“My dat and I have an organic dairy. Organic milk sells for almost twice what you can get for regular milk.”

Aden’s heart swelled at the thought of someone he might be able to relate to. “I’m hoping to have my own organic farm someday if I can find a gute piece of property.”

Tyler lifted his eyebrows. “No joking? My dat will want to meet you. We’ve read some books, but I don’t wonder if you know some things we haven’t thought of.”

“Probably not, but I’d love to hear all about your dairy.”

Tyler put a hand on Aden’s shoulder. “We can help each other. I know I could learn a lot from an environmentalist.”

Aden grinned. “I’m more of a conservationist than an environmentalist. Environmentalists seem to want to pick fights. I don’t want to quarrel with anybody.”

“Are you coming to the gathering next week? It’s at my house. We can talk more then.”

“I wasn’t going to. I’m not one of those boys that everybody likes to have around.”

“Now I know you’re joking.” Tyler, still excessively somber, pointed to a group of girls huddled in the corner, whispering and giggling as only teenagers could. “The girls have talked about no one else since you’ve been here. They think you’re handsome.”

“Have they heard about my wicked past?”

“You mean about getting chained to a tree?” Tyler asked.

Aden raised an eyebrow.

“Lily told me. That’s how I knew you were an environmentalist, or, I mean, conservationist. You were trying to save the tree, weren’t you?”

Aden nodded.

Tyler raised an eyebrow. “It doesn’t seem to bother those girls over there.”

“It’s their faters who have issues with me.”

Lily, with her blue dress and flaxen hair, passed their table with an armload of paper plates. The special girl followed close behind, as if Lily carried the sun in her pocket. Lily glanced in Aden’s direction but otherwise took no notice of him. “And Lily Eicher. She is bothered by my police record.”

“Jah, that kind of thing would spook Lily. But don’t despair. Once she decides to be friends with you, there is no one more loyal or more kind.”

“It doesn’t matter. Her fater has ordered her to stay away from me.”

Tyler coughed as he swallowed a bite of pickle too fast. “David Eicher is a gute fater. He lost his brother several years ago, and the experience made him doubly protective of his daughters. But he has a gute heart, and Lily would do anything to please him. I like that about her. She’s not one to kick against the pricks.”

Jah, Lily held strictly to the letter of the law, and Aden could imagine that there were no
i
’s undotted and no
t
’s uncrossed in her behavior.

It was going to be a very long summer.

As if reading his thoughts, Tyler said, “I will talk to David. He must know how hard it will be for Lily to work on Huckleberry Hill and stay away from you at the same time.”

“We agreed on a four feet distance.”

Tyler cracked a smile at that. “That sounds like something Lily would do. But it’s impractical, just the same. Like as not, David thinks you shot somebody or stole a car. I’ll tell him you were in jail to save the life of a tree. He won’t understand, but I might persuade him to be less rigid when it comes to Lily.”

“Denki. It is uncomfortable working alongside someone who won’t even talk to me without checking with her fater first.”

Tyler stood. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I would like to talk to Lily, and since you can’t come within four feet of her, I am leaving you. But you will come to the gathering? The Wednesday night after next?”

“Jah, I will come.” Aden studied his new friend closely as Tyler sidled next to Lily. Tyler was seemingly content to stand by Lily without saying much. Lily acted friendly but didn’t gush. A girl who gushed was a girl in love. Aden wasn’t sure how Lily felt about Tyler, but she didn’t gush.

Aden turned away. Lily’s preference in boys was none of his business. But Mammi might want to know if Aden’s intended bride loved somebody else.

Mammi’s plans for Aden’s wedding weren’t going to work out. There were too many other boys to contend with. Aden didn’t have a chance.

Why were his palms sweating?