Little Amish Matchmaker (6 page)

H
ICKORY GROVE SCHOOL WAS
a beehive ofactivity the following Friday. All lessons had been put aside, serious artwork taking up everyone’s attention. The classroom must be decorated for Christmas.

They had already accomplished quite a bit, Teacher Catherine said, but they seriously needed to apply themselves, finishing the Christmas poster on the north wall between the two sets of windows. They hung navy blue construction paper for the back drop, which was the upper grade boys’ assignment. Elmer’s School Glue was used to attach all the pieces.

Michael took charge of the glue, applying it entirely too liberally. It squeezed out when he rubbed his fingers along the edge, so Calvin told him he was using too much, and Michael’s face got red and he told Calvin he didn’t know everything. That was when Isaac decided to work on the pond. It looked safer.

They leaned over the Ping-Pong table in the middle of the classroom, construction paper scattered everywhere, the tension crackling between them since Michael said that. As soon as Michael got up to get another bottle of glue, Calvin raised his eyebrows, Isaac pointed to the white construction paper and Calvin nodded. He glued the rectangular sheets of construction paper, then whispered to Calvin about the shape of the pond.

“Whatever you think, Professor,” Calvin whispered back.

Yes!

Isaac knew he could do the shape of the pond very well, making it look realistic. After all the construction paper was in place, they’d draw in bushes and trees, stars and a moon, skaters, horses tied and blanketed and a bonfire. It would be a grand poster, one the parents would talk about all Christmas season.

The girls were making bells with cardboard egg boxes. They cut out the little cups that contained the eggs and punched a hole in the top. They covered them with crinkly squares of aluminum foil, strung red and green yarn through them and hung their “bells” from the roller shades by the windows. They were Christmasy looking, Isaac thought, especially with those brilliant red, green and white candy canes in the background.

The white construction paper was designed, cut and attached by Isaac, and then the three boys stood back and admired their efforts.

Teacher Catherine came over and said it was very well done, and that the trees would look great done with black and brown Magic Markers.

“What about snow?” Isaac asked.

Teacher Catherine put one finger to her mouth, tilted her head to the side and considered this.

“There’s no snow on the pond,” Calvin volunteered.

“Good thinking, Calvin. The snow may have blown off the branches,” she said.

Isaac thought snow on the branches was an essential, mostly because the pine trees in the background would look so much better with snow on them, but figured he’d stay quiet. Dat often told him how important it was to give up your own opinion for a better one. It was more influential in the long run to keep your opinion to yourself, if it meant working together in peace and harmony as the end result.

Take barn raisings. Someone had to be the
fore gaya
, the one who ran the whole business. If each worker recognized this, contributed his share of talent, giving and taking, it worked.

One Sunday morning Dat explained the Scripture about the lion laying with the lamb, and he said it meant each of us must lay down our own nature to get along with others. Isaac had mulled that one over for days, and he still didn’t get it, really, but figured he didn’t have to until he was older.

Teacher Catherine was very pretty today, he thought. Her face shone with a soft light. Her red dress made her look like Christmas, her black apron just slightly lopsided from moving around, bending over desks, always trying to be at two places at one time. Well, the way these lower graders raised their hands was ridiculous. How could she be expected to get anything of her own accomplished?

Then Sarah started crying, rubbing her eyes, mewling like a lost kitten, her lips pouting, as she haltingly told Teacher Catherine that her puppy was supposed to be gray and it looked brown and wasn’t nice.

What a
brutz-bupp
! (Crybaby)

Sarah should have used a gray color instead of a brown one. She was in third grade and old enough to know better. Isaac thought Teacher Catherine should straighten her out, but no, her ever-loving kindness and patience was unfurled like a pure white flag, an example for the impatient ones like Isaac. Putting a hand on Sarah’s shoulder, she bent low, assuring Sarah that if she didn’t like the color of her puppy, she could start over with a new copy. Sarah wiped her eyes, sniffed, then marched proudly to the teacher’s desk for another copy, one woolen black sock falling sloppily over her Skechers. Third graders were an annoyance, no question. But if you went to a one-room Amish school, you just had to put up with them, that was the way of it.

So now. Night sky and pond in place. This was going to be awesome!

“Boys,” Teacher Catherine announced. “The girls will soon be finished with their bells, so they may help you with the freehand drawing of figures, horses, whatever. Isaac?”

Before he could stop himself, his arm shot up. “Well, we can’t have just anyone helping, can we?”

Then he was subject to the most awful glare of disapproval. It shot from her blue eyes, a laser of reproach. Not one word was necessary.

Isaac felt his face fire up to about 500 degrees. He wished he could turn into an ant and disappear beneath the baseboard.

He should have stayed quiet.

But these girls and their cutesy-pie drawings of flowers and butterflies and birds and stuff. How could they ever be expected to come up with anything decent? This poster was serious material.

Isaac cringed when Ruthie hung the last cluster of bells on the window shade and went to the cupboard for art paper. He had to admit, though, they had done a real good job on those handmade bells.

“Put your books away for lunch,” Teacher Catherine announced. Instantly there was a rustle of paper, heads bent to put things in their desks. “Davey, is it your turn to pass the waste can?”

Davey nodded happily, picked up the tall Rubbermaid waste can and slowly wended his way down the aisle as everyone hurried to throw their crumpled paper, bits of crayon, and colored pencil shavings into it before he moved on.

The wooden desks all had a hole cut on top, to the right, where pupils had kept their inkwells in times past. There were no more antique ink pens, of course, so that hole was perfect for stuffing crumpled waste paper.

Hickory Grove School was an older one, so they still had those desks, but the newer ones were made without the hole. Dan Stoltzfus and his helpers made school desks now, sleek and smoothly finished, the steel parts painted black, all glossy and shiny like the buggies.

Some of the Amish schools got the desks the English schools no longer needed. They were not attached to the floor, the lids opened and you could see your whole cache of books and stuff at once. Nothing fell out of those desks, which was nice, but the teachers complained about them being noisy, saying the tops were propped up too long while bent heads did a lot of whispering behind them.

Dora got the teakettle from the stove top, poured the steaming hot water into the blue plastic dishpan, then carried it to the hydrant beside the porch to add cold water. Why didn’t she fill it half-full with cold water first, then add the hot? If she thought, she wouldn’t have to carry all that hot water out the door.

You simply couldn’t get past it. Girls had very little common sense.

She set the dishpan on a small dry sink, added a squirt of anti-bacterial soap, and washed her hands, drying them with brown paper towels from the dispenser on the wall.

“First row,” Teacher Catherine said. Row after row, the scholars filed in an orderly fashion, washing their hands, drying them, grabbing their lunch boxes from the cloakroom and returning to their seats. Teacher Catherine bowed her head, the pupils followed suit and they sang their dinner prayer in a soft melody.

When they finished, the “amen” fading away, most of the pupils made their way to the front of the room, where the propane-gas stove held dozens of foil-wrapped sandwiches, hot dogs, chicken patties, or small casseroles containing the previous evening’s leftovers. Tiny Tupperware containers of ketchup were scraped over hot dogs and chicken patties and put on a roll. Juice boxes or containers of milk washed down the good, hot food.

Calvin opened his lunch and produced a ham sandwich loaded with lettuce and tomato. He popped the top of a can of grape juice and grinned at Isaac, who was wolfing down his sandwich made of homemade wheat bread, sweet bologna and mustard. A pint jar of chocolate milk, made with the good creamy milk straight from the bulk tank in the milk house and flavored with Nestle’s Quik, accompanied his sandwich. Mam bought the chocolate mix in large yellow cylinders at Centerville Bulk Food Store. Sometimes he wished Mam would buy fancy Tupperware drink containers the way other mothers did, but she said all her children used glass pint jars for their chocolate milk, and she had no intention of stopping now.

There was a gasp from Ruthie, as Daniel and Reuben started to tussle, spilling Daniel’s juice all over everything.

Teacher Catherine laid down her sandwich deliberately, her mouth set in a straight line as she got up, grabbed Reuben by the arm and marched him back to his seat. “You know you have to stay in your seat at lunchtime,” she said firmly. Isaac didn’t know whether Reuben was pinched, or if the reprimand alone was enough, but he bent his head and cried softly.

The classroom became devoid of sound as Daniel was marched to sit in an empty desk, without his juice. Dora helped mop up the sticky mess with paper towels, but it was Teacher Catherine who had to use warm water and soap in a bucket, get down on her knees and wipe it all up properly, while her sandwich got cold.

It served that Reuben right. Daniel, too. Those little second graders couldn’t hold still one minute, not even long enough to eat their lunches. The pupils had to remain seated for 15 minutes, which was the most cruel thing the school board had ever invented. You could easily eat a sandwich in five minutes, drink all your chocolate milk, grab your bag of pretzels and be out the door.

Recess was only 45 minutes, which wasn’t long enough at all. Especially now, with all this snow. So they ate in a big hurry, sat together with their feet in the aisle, traded snacks and talked.

Calvin said there was a fire on the other side of Georgetown; the fire engines had made an awful racket. Isaac asked him how he knew already, and Calvin shrugged his shoulders, so Isaac figured one of his brothers who was at the
rumspringa
age had a radio or a cell phone, maybe both.

You just didn’t talk about those things in school, those objects being
verboten
(forbidden)the way they were. It was not a good subject to discuss, especially with the more conservative children like Isaac, whose family would never own anything the church frowned on. It was called ­respect.

Isaac knew Calvin’s brothers were not like Sim. They each had had a vehicle for a short time, even. Isaac and Calvin never talked about it, though, which was good. That was a separate world, and to avoid that subject meant they could like each other tremendously. They lived in their own young world of friendship, discussing only matters of importance, like horses and sleds and scooters, and really awesome ideas like making a better scooter, how to fire up a stove with the right kindling and who was the best skate sharpener in Lancaster County.

When the long hand on the clock finally reached the three, they moved fast and efficiently, throwing their lunch boxes on the shelf with one hand, grabbing their coats and hats or beanies with the other, and moving to the front door with long strides that were not really running, but certainly not quite walking, either.

The minute their heads popped out the door, a nanosecond ahead of their feet, yells of pure elation broke out. They dashed to their sleds, grabbed the rope handles and raced out of the schoolyard, around the fence, and up Eli Esh’s slope.

Sledding was the only time they were allowed out of the schoolyard. They had to be closely supervised, staying off the road until they were safely in the field, which was free from traffic. But the “big boys” were allowed to go ahead, before Teacher Catherine appeared with the smaller ones.

They had already reached the top of Eli’s hill and were on the way down. The paths they had cut to smooth perfection on Monday, now slick from the sun’s rays, had frozen and melted and frozen again. It made for glorious sledding.

The sun, the flying bits of snow, the absolute speed, the cold, all filled Isaac’s mind. So when the horn sounded, the brakes screeched, the children screamed and screamed without stopping, it took a while until he knew something wasn’t right.

In fact, something awful had just occurred.

I
SAAC WAS OFF HIS
Lightning Flyer before it stopped, left it and began to run.

The vehicle had skidded to a haphazard stop, sideways on the road. A small black figure lay inert on the cold, hard macadam.