Keys of Heaven (21 page)

Amanda nodded. “Miriam told me he'd been deserted by his fiancée on their wedding day—just as the ministers were upstairs with them before the service started. And that it has taken him years to get over it. He's a little bit like
Englisch
Henry in that way. And maybe even you.”

Sarah resisted being linked with Henry in anyone's mind, even though it seemed to happen no matter what she did. “When you love, you don't stop with the person's death—or marriage to someone else,” she said. “Some days, it seems as though I've just lost your brother. Other days, our wedding day seems so far in the past that it might have happened to someone else. But on both kinds of days, the love is still there. Still strong.” She paused. “If Silas has come to the place where God is prompting him to find another to share his life, then it's
gut
he's obeying that prompting.”

“By asking you if he could court you,” Amanda said glumly.

“
Ja.
It was a step. Whether it was in the right direction is up for debate.”

Amanda tried to smile, and failed. “But what should I do? The feelings that had been in my heart have just…died. As though a frost has settled on them and killed them.”

“Is there any hope that they might come up again in a different season?”

“I don't know,” the girl whispered. “I may not have a season to find out. He may just go home and court someone else.”

“Will it bother you if he does, is the question.”

But Amanda just shook her head. “Poor girl. She would be third best.”

“It's not profitable to look at it that way,
Liewi
. Instead, think of it like this—his feelings for me must not have been that deep if he could turn to you so soon and see all your good qualities. Which is what I wanted him to do with all possible speed.”

This time the smile perched on her lips, swaying, before it fell away. “What should I do, Sarah? Tell him to stay? Or let him go?”

“I don't think you should tell him anything. I think you should be your usual self, and he won't want to go away. Let your smile come when it wants to, and sing if you feel like it. Use my skin cream and eat blackberry pie when you want some. Get some sleep and think on what God says in His Word…and like a bee coming again and again to a flower, he won't be able to leave. And then you'll know he's staying for the real you—and that you are first among women.”

Amanda patted the last of the salty tears from her cheeks. “You make it sound so easy.”

“These things are not up to us, you know. If Silas is the man God has chosen for you, you'll know it—and so will he.”

“I—I hope he is,” Amanda whispered. “Maybe there is a green shoot or two still surviving under the frost.”

“Then wait for the sun to come and thaw it out,” Sarah advised her with a smile. “Now, come and gather up these dock leaves with me, so it doesn't get back to Silas that I was neglecting the health of the
Gmee
while we sunbathed in the grass—after I told him I was dedicating myself to that purpose.”

Amanda retrieved the scissors and they finished harvesting the leaves. As they carried the green armfuls back to the house where Sarah had left her basket, she wondered again at just how much Amanda saw in people that they didn't realize themselves. It was a little like diagnosing an illness—and in some cases, there was no cure.

Like loving those who were lost.

Not for the first time, she gazed over the cornfield that climbed the hill behind her five acres. The hill that stood between her home, filled with life and good food and noisy boys, and Henry Byler's solitary, shabby house, filled with silence.

H
enry snapped open the latches on the heavy lid of the kiln and glanced down at Eric, who shifted with a mix of impatience and anxiety next to him. “Ready?”

“What if it broke? Then what?”

“Let's take one thing at a time. You did everything right. The likelihood of breakage is no greater on your lantern than it is on any of my batter bowls. Come on. Let's have a look.”

The lid swung up and Eric gripped the top edge, gazing into the cooled kiln as though it were a wishing well. The pieces they had stacked in here for the firing made a riot of color against the drab brick walls. Henry removed the cones, which melted when the kiln reached the correct temperature, and discarded them. Then he began to lift out the pieces.

On the top level were four batter bowls, two with the peony-leaf handles and glazed in a tawny green and gold, and two with handles that ended in a flourish like a wave curling against a shore, painted in his new sky and water glaze.

“Look at that,” Eric breathed. “Did it come out the way you wanted it to?”

Henry held up the bowl, which gleamed with iridescence along the rim and handle, the gentle lines his thumbs had made suggesting water and the movement of air. He nodded, slowly, hardly daring to believe that so many weeks of work had come to fruition in a piece so beautiful.

“It's almost exactly how I saw it in my head,” he said on a long breath that mixed relief with quiet satisfaction. “I might add the iridescence to the interior on the next batch.” He handed the bowl to Eric. “What do you think?”

But Eric shook his head. “I think it would be too much. You don't see the light in the deep pools in the creek where people swim, do you? Just along the edges, where the water is moving faster.”

Henry gazed at him with the respect of one artist for the opinion of another. “I didn't think of it that way. But you're right—if I'm going to work with natural forms, they should behave the way they do in nature, shouldn't they? Otherwise, I'm serving myself and my own tastes, not what the piece is meant to be.”

Eric grinned back at him, his narrow shoulders relaxing under his clay-stained
Star Wars
T-shirt. “I thought you'd be mad at me for criticizing.”

“Honest critique with positive value is a different animal from criticizing. Now, let's move these over to the bench, and we'll unload the next layer and get to your lantern.”

Henry removed the spacers and revealed the next layer, then bent in and took out the top and bottom pieces of Eric's lantern.

“Here you go. Put them together and we'll have a look.”

The finished dome gleamed with a coppery glaze on the bottom that continued into the flat tray of the base. But above, like the sky seen through autumn leaves, the copper color gave way to a speckled blue and finally, at the knob handle, to a blue so pale it almost looked white. On the sides, the cut-out geese shapes flew from right to left, their edges smooth and uncracked.

“It's beautiful, Eric,” Henry told him. “Good work. I like the color choice, even though I wasn't sure how it would turn out. Good for you for sticking by your decision when I was all hung up on the yellow instead of the blue.”

The boy cupped a hand around the top and rocked it in its groove. “The bottom's still uneven. See how it doesn't sit quite right?”

“Your first major piece and you're worried about that? It'll come in time. Give yourself a chance.”

“But the admissions people will see it.”

“They'll be so taken up with the goose shapes and the way you graduated the color that a little unevenness in the body won't even register. This is a good piece of work, Eric. Be proud of it.”

“Caleb says pride is bad.”

Of course he did. “All right, then, be glad you created something that's not only useful, but it can also give pleasure to others. How's that?”

Eric touched the lantern, tracing the cutouts as if checking for any roughness he'd missed. “Do you think Mom would like it? Her birthday's in September.”

“If you're going to submit it to the school, she'll see it. It won't be a surprise.”

“That's okay. I want her to know it's hers, especially if it gets me admitted. Then it'll mean something, you know?”

Henry couldn't help himself. He ruffled the boy's hair, then slipped a companionable arm around his shoulders. “It already means something, kiddo. It means talent and hard work and guts. And if it comes to mean acceptance, too, then good on it, but it doesn't need the approval of other people to be a very cool piece of art.”

“Is that how you feel about your batter bowls?”

And with a strange feeling of recognition, he realized he did. “Yes. Yes, I do. I mean, it's great that D.W. Frith wants them, and I'll be able to pay the taxes and fill the fridge for the rest of the year. But mostly, I'm pretty happy with what we've got here, and if I never show a single thing or get written up in another paper for the rest of my life, I still know the work is good. And for us artists, maybe that's all we need to know.”

That sense of satisfaction stayed with him as he showed Eric how to pack the pieces in the crates he'd ordered from the Amish pallet shop in Whinburg. Eric's lantern got its own small crate, but before they packed it, Eric took a picture with his phone.

“To show Mom and Dad,” he said, his thumbs busy typing out an e-mail.

In less than a minute, the phone pinged and Eric dug it out of his pocket again. “It's Dad.” Then he handed the phone to Henry.

“Tomorrow?” Henry repeated, handing back the phone. “That soon? It feels like you just got here.”

“It feels like I've been here for, like, a century,” Eric said. “In a good way. At first I hated it, especially getting up so early. But Sarah's nice and Caleb is cool, too—you know, for an Amish kid.”

“You're pretty cool for an
Englisch
kid,” Henry informed him, reaching out to ruffle his skater-boy hair again.

Eric grinned, dodged under his hand, and scooped up a last handful of packing popcorn. “I don't want this getting busted on the way home. Can you drive me over to Sarah's? It's too heavy to carry over the hill.”

“All right. And then do you know what? I think we should have a farewell party for you. If your dad is coming tomorrow, you won't have a chance to get around and say good-bye to everyone you know here.”

“Oh…no, do I have to?”

“Eric, it's not a matter of have to. It's different here. You get involved with people—like Priscilla and Benny, for instance, who helped you in the first place. And Sarah, and Caleb, and Jacob and Corinne. Even Ginny. She asks about you every time I see her.”

“Can you do that? Make a party like that?”

“Well, not as well as Sarah or Ginny could. Why don't we ask Sarah first? Then if she says yes, we can invite the others.”

Sarah wasn't in the garden when they got to her place, but when Eric carried the crate into the house, Henry saw movement in the compiling room.

“Sarah? It's me, Henry. I brought Eric back with his lantern. It's all done.” He paused in the doorway, watching the slender figure in the sage-green dress and black kitchen apron moving confidently from shelf to table.

“I'll just be a minute.” Carefully, she measured a dropper full of liquid into a small brown bottle, then put a funnel in the mouth of the bottle and filled it to the top with—he squinted at the label—grape seed oil.

“What's that?”

“I'm making oregano oil. It cures toenail fungus.”

That would teach him to ask questions he didn't really want to know the answers to.

“I have a customer who's
Englisch
and as stubborn as an old mule. It's taken me two months to convince him to eat his vegetables. Now he tells me he's had toenail fungus for months and did I have something to cure it. Sure I do. He has to soak his toes in white vinegar for ten minutes every other day, and then put a drop of this oil on each toenail afterward. But if he follows my instructions even once, I'll be surprised.” She stuck a handwritten label on the bottle. “Why do people resist being made well?”

“Maybe they don't really believe that something so simple will help them. We
Englisch
are used to just going to the doctor and taking a pill.”

She gave him a sharp glance at “we
Englisch
,” but said nothing. Just in case she had ideas along that line, he changed the subject. “Eric heard from his dad this morning. He'll be here tomorrow night to pick him up. It would be nice for Eric to be able to say good-bye to the friends he's made here, but I don't think there's time for him to get around to everyone. I was wondering…could we have a farewell dinner for him here?”

“What a good idea. When?”

“Tonight?”

She glanced at her watch. “It's already nearly noon. That's not much time—we go over to Jacob's, you know, on Friday nights, so I don't have anything prepared for a company dinner. But I thought you said his father was coming tomorrow. Can you wait until then, so he can join us?”

It hadn't even entered his head. “I suppose we could, if you thought that would be better.” He wasn't sure Trent Parker would fit in so well in an Amish kitchen, but what did he know? Maybe the man would surprise them all.

“It would. And since it's Saturday night, we should keep it small and quiet—and early. Many of us will want to prepare for Sunday. Church is at Lev Esh's, you know. Caleb has been helping at the work frolic over there today.”

“I wondered where he was. I was thinking Jacob and Corinne, and Priscilla, and Benny Peachey, and Ginny. Those are the people Eric knows.”

Sarah turned away. “Benny will be thrilled at any excuse to give Priscilla a ride over here. I'm not so sure how thrilled she'll be. Can Ginny pick her up?”

“I was going to collect Ginny.” And take her home again. Which was the first time he'd thought of it, but now that he had, he didn't want it any other way.

“Oh.” Sarah's voice was muffled as she squirted the strong-smelling oregano extract into another bottle, then diluted it with grape seed oil. “Of course. Well. I'll invite Jacob and Corinne, and Priscilla. You'll have to drive over to the Peacheys' to tell Benny—they don't have a phone, and there's no shanty on that spur of the road. It's a dead end.”

Henry nodded, though she wasn't looking at him. “I can see you're busy, so I'll head out. I'll check in tomorrow and you can tell me what you need from town in the way of groceries.”

“
Denki
, Henry.”

But she spoke absently, measuring and eyeballing levels in the brown bottles, and he slipped out the door without disturbing her further, wondering what he'd said to bring on the chill.

Since he had the car out, he'd swing by the Peachey farm now and issue his invitation to Benny Peachey, and drop by Ginny's afterward instead of calling. Then again, Henry thought as he bumped and crunched his way down the Peacheys' weedy lane in low gear, it might have been smart to leave the car out on the road and do this on foot. An
Englisch
vehicle had probably not come down this drive in years, if the tall weeds swaying between the dual set of buggy tracks were any indication.

He was wrong.

When his car emerged from the trees into the yard, he found that not only was there a big Chevy diesel truck parked there already with some telecom company's logo on the side and a toy-hauler hitched to it, but the whole family was out there, hugging each other and hooting and generally whooping up such a ruckus that he wondered if he'd come to an
Englisch
farm by mistake.

But no, there were Benny and Leon, red-faced and breathless, hanging on to each other as if they'd fall down otherwise. Benny pounded on his thigh with his free hand and hollered, “I knew it! I just knew it would happen someday!” He caught sight of Henry as he got out of the car, and galloped over, Leon on his heels. “Henry! Did you hear the news?”

“Did you win the lottery?” Henry asked before he realized what he'd said.

But Benny didn't miss a beat. “Naw, even better. This ain't the wages of sin, so the bishop won't make us give it up. Dat and Onkel Crist, they finally hit it big, and that man there with the truck is the one who made it all happen.”

“Who is he? What happened? Is your mother all right?”

For Ella and Linda were hugging each other on the front porch, both of them in tears—but from here, Henry couldn't tell if they were tears of joy or of despair.

“It's a shock, but she'll get over it. She and Linda, they had a hard time believing, even though they never said a word to us boys. But they'll believe now. See, Dat and Onkel Crist, they didn't plant a second crop of corn—or a third, either—this year at all. They sank the money they had left into solar panels and batteries.”

“Uh-oh.”

Leon chimed in. “We got talked to by Bishop Troyer, which is kinda funny because he does mechanical conversions himself, and you'd have thought he'd see where this was going.”

“Where what was going?”

“It's for them cell towers, Henry,” Benny said eagerly. “They run on county power, but when the power goes out, they got these big old battery packs for backup. What Dat and Crist did was invent a battery pack powered by solar panels. So not only does it use less power, but the solar chips in and helps out, so it costs less to run.”