The Amish Midwife (3 page)

“I will,” I whispered.

“When your grandmother gave you to us, she handed over a box as well. A carved box.”

A box had never been part of the story. I sat on the edge of the bed, and he relaxed his grip on my hand and turned his face toward me.

“Why didn’t I know about this?”

“It wasn’t something to give a small child, not like the quilt, so we put it away until you were older. Time passed, and then your mother…” His voice trailed off.

Then my mother died, and either he forgot or he chose not to tell me. I held my breath as I waited for him to continue.

“What can I say but forgive me? She would have told you about the box years ago.”

“Where is it now?”

“In my closet.”

I glanced toward the closed wooden doors.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

“Some old papers.” He coughed again. “That sort of thing. Nothing of too much importance, as far as we could ever tell.”

He coughed some more, stirring the rattle from deep in his chest.

“I’ll look at the box later.” I squeezed my father’s hand.

“The key is on the bureau.” He placed his free hand flat over his chest, over the double wedding ring quilt my mother made their first year of marriage.

“The key?”

“To the box. It’s in my coin dish.”

I remembered coming across a key when I chose coins for my Sunday offerings as a child.

“Don’t forget,” he said.

“I won’t.” I let go of his hand and picked up his Bible again. Under any other circumstances, especially with Dad’s blessing, I would have been tearing the closet apart as I searched for the box, but at the moment I couldn’t bear to leave his side, not even for that.

I continued to read, even though he fell back to sleep by the time I finished Psalm 24. When Sophie let herself into the house, I was on Psalm 50.

“Go on,” Sophie said, sitting on the edge of the bed, taking my father’s hand.

I finished with, “Whoso offereth praise glorifieth me: and to him that ordereth his conversation aright will I show the salvation of God.” I closed his old Bible with a thump.

“How did it go?” I asked.

“A boy. Five hours, two pushes, and six brothers thrilled with his arrival.”

I smiled. I didn’t see births like that very often in the maternity ward where I worked—that many siblings awaiting the baby’s arrival, the whole family celebrating together.

“Have you decided what you’ll do with the house?” Sophie asked.

I shrugged. I hadn’t decided anything. I didn’t want to sell it, rent it, or live in it. Nor did I want to sell the orchard. I wanted Dad in both the orchard and the house, alive. “I don’t know,” I said softly.

“How are things going with James?”

Sophie knew I had a habit of dumping men who became too serious. I thought I would feel differently with James because we’d known each other so many years, but now I wasn’t so sure. We started going out right after Dad was diagnosed last year, which might have been a reaction on my part to my fear of losing my father. I’d always found James attractive, even when I’d pretended to hate him during high school, but there was a part of me that was afraid to trust him, to trust any man besides Dad.

James and I didn’t talk much about our future. Sophie, the ladies at church, friends from work, and the people he went to school with all assumed we would get married. I knew James wouldn’t ask me until he was done with graduate school and had a job, though. He’d become hopelessly old-fashioned in that way.

Two months ago I wanted nothing more than to marry him and start a family. But lately I had no idea what I wanted.

An uneven breath from Dad caught both Sophie’s and my attention. He inhaled again. We waited. Finally he exhaled.

“Sweetie,” Sophie said as she stood. She reached for my hands and
placed them on top of his, on top of his chest, on top of the quilt. “Sweetie,” she said again. “I think it’s time.”

“No.” I laced my hands in his, leaning over him. It was too soon. I wasn’t ready.

He inhaled again. We waited.

“Come quickly, Lord Jesus,” Sophie whispered.

“Breathe,” I countered. But he didn’t.

He had never been overly affectionate with me, nor I with him, but now I kissed his face, his cheek, his eyelids, his forehead.

“He’s gone,” Sophie said.

“I know.” I squeezed his hands.

“Death is so holy, just like birth.” Sophie smiled as tears spilled down her face.

I let go of his hands, hoping he was right and that he and Mama had just been reunited.

“God rest both your souls,” I said, but the words rang hollow. I turned away and wept.

D
ad’s house was located just outside of Aurora, a small town in northern Oregon. Founded in 1856 as a Christian communal society, it consisted of period cabins, houses, and stately white meeting halls. The commune was made up of German and Swiss immigrants, but they disbanded when their leader died nearly thirty years later.

In comparison, the Mennonites were latecomers to Oregon, not arriving until 1889. What they did have in common with the Aurora Commune was that their roots, although a bit tangled, originated in Switzerland and Germany too.

That’s what I thought about as I drove through tiny Aurora on my way to the funeral home in the larger nearby town of Canby. I was trying to distract myself from my grief, but it didn’t work. As I passed by the barbershop where Dad got his hair cut, tears filled my eyes yet again, as they had all morning.

By the time I reached the funeral home, I had managed to compose myself. Almost on autopilot, I went inside and made the arrangements. Back out in the car when I was done, I sent a text to James, telling him that it was all finished and that I had scheduled the service for the day after next. He texted back to say he’d just completed his presentation and
would head down in about an hour. I responded, asking him to wait until the next day. I needed time alone. I didn’t tell him I felt as if I were moving under icy water, as if my thoughts were drowning, as if my words were bubbles floating upward to a cold and swirling surface.

I went home and put clean sheets on my parents’ bed, carefully folding the hospital corners, and then smoothed the quilt back in place. Then I sat on the end, running my hand over the cherry footboard, nicked here and there by time but still smooth.

I grasped the post of the footboard, as if the action might pull me upward, out of my underwater world, and stood, opening Dad’s top bureau drawer and running my hand over rows of cotton handkerchiefs. I closed the drawer. Dad’s comforting scent filled the room. He always smelled fresh, as clean as a bar of soap. His shaving cup and brush were still on the bureau, left by me after the last time I shaved him, three days ago now.

Next to his cup was his china coin dish. I picked through it, sorting the quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies, and stacked them on the linen runner the way I had when I was little, until all that was left in the bottom of the dish was the key. It was smaller than I remembered, and tarnished. I shoved it into the pocket of my jeans and hoped the box contained a photo of me as a newborn. Or a photo of my birth mother. Or my grandmother. Maybe even a simple letter, explaining everything.

I went to the closet and started on the lower shelf, sliding the clothes on hangers to the side to make sure there wasn’t anything behind them. I saw nothing more than shoes and Dad’s work hat and dress hat. I reached with my hand to the top shelf but didn’t feel anything, so I pulled the straight-back chair from the corner of the room into the closet, wrestling it through the narrow door. I felt along the top shelf and flopped my hand around, trying to reach the far corner. Nothing. Then my fingertips hit against something. Bull’s-eye. I scooted the object forward to the front of the shelf. I felt the carving before I could see the box, but a moment later I cradled it in my hands as I stepped down from the chair.

It was about a foot long by a foot wide and six inches in height. The wood was dark and intricately carved, as Dad had said. And it was dusty.

First I brushed the box off with a towel, examining the carving as I did. Trees and rugged mountains were carved around the sides, and on the top was a grand old building with turrets, balconies, and shuttered windows
with a waterfall off to the right. The box was beautiful and unlike anything I’d ever seen. I sat down at the oak table in the dining room and turned the key in the lock, but nothing happened. I wiggled it, took it out, and inserted it again. Still nothing. I ran my hands along the lid, searching for some sort of trick to open the box. Again, nothing. I tried the key one last time and felt something give. I turned it as far as it would go. The lock clicked. I opened it quickly. Dad was right. There were papers in the box. Handwritten, in German. I’d taken a year in high school but could barely remember a thing.

The document was two pages long, yellowed, with the words
Die Schweiz
at the top. I willed there to be a photo—something personal. There wasn’t, but from between the pages fell two locks of hair, each tied with a thin strip of black cloth. I carefully picked them up to study them. One lock was obviously the fine blond hair of a newborn. The other was thicker, longer, and darker. Mine and my mother’s? Holding a lock in each hand, I couldn’t take my eyes from the one I just knew was hers.

Finally, reluctantly, I put the locks back into the box and examined the document again. It appeared to be a letter to someone named
Elsbeth
, dated 1877. On the last page was a fancy signature that read
Abraham Sommers
. Elsbeth and Abraham. Were they husband and wife? Father and daughter? Something else? Maybe my great-great-grandparents were wealthy German timber barons in Pennsylvania during the nineteenth century. That fit in nicely with what I’d concocted years ago in my mind about my birth family. But why would my grandmother have wanted me to have the box and letter? Why had she included the locks of hair?

I stretched my back. Plenty of people in Dad’s church spoke German. I would ask Sophie tomorrow. Both she and James were coming then to help me get ready for the funeral.

Scrubbing was something that brought me comfort, so I tackled the kitchen while James de-cluttered the living room and Sophie turned on the vacuum cleaner. I would go through Dad’s clothes and books later by myself. James was such a packrat that if I let him help, I knew he would cart more things to his already overcrowded studio apartment in Portland than I would be able to take to Goodwill. This issue was a sore point between us, and I had no intention of contributing to the problem.

I cleared the kitchen counters and sprinkled cleanser over the worn
Formica. Dad had always kept the house spotless when I was growing up and trained me well in that, but in the years after I left he began to let things pile up. A stack of newspapers here. A tower of books there. It wasn’t as if he lived as a teenager—the dishes and laundry were always done—but it was as if he relaxed his standards a bit. As if he finally cleaned just for himself without having to worry about me. And that was a good thing.

“What’s this?”

I turned toward James as I clenched the large gritty sponge. He stood in the kitchen doorway, the carved box in his hands. I’d left the box open on the table beside Dad’s easy chair the day before.

“Oh, that.” I tossed the sponge into the sink. “I found it yesterday.” The vacuum cleaner stopped in the background, and Sophie appeared next to James.

“There’s a letter.” He held it up. “And two locks of hair.”

I nodded.

Sophie’s cap tilted a little to the left. “Who’s it from?”

“From my birth grandmother. At least that’s what Dad said.”

“The letter’s in German.” James held the document in one hand and balanced the box in his other.

“I know.” I rinsed my hands. “Do you know who could translate it for me?” I turned toward Sophie.

“Mr. Miller probably could. He used to teach German.”

“That’s right.” I’d forgotten he’d taught for years at the community college in Salem. “I’ll take it,” I said to James as I finished drying my hands. He slipped the items back into the box, carefully closed the lid, and passed it to me with a reluctant smile.

Feeling oddly vulnerable and exposed, I stashed it back in Dad’s closet, high on the shelf.

I finished the kitchen, scrubbing the decades-old appliances until they gleamed again. Dad was gone. Tears filled my eyes, and I stood up straight, brushing them away with my forearm. I’d never been one to cry easily, but now I was afraid if I started I might not stop. I slipped out the back door into the bright, cold day and stopped under the windmill next to the wooden bench that had been there as long as I could remember. It was weathered and gray. Behind me was the hazelnut orchard, all that remained of the original farm.

The back door slammed, and Sophie stepped out with the throw rug from the hallway. She shook it over the porch railing with vigor, snapping it back and forth. She was amazingly strong for such a small woman.

“Are you all right, Lexie?” she called out. I nodded and looked up at the metal blades of the windmill that were just beginning to stir in the slight breeze.