The Lesson (22 page)

He looped the reins around the hitching post and walked into the sheriff’s office. Sheriff Hoffman was finishing up a phone call and motioned to the seat across from his desk. Chris sat down and took his black felt hat off, spinning the brim in his hands. Now that it was fall, he had switched from straw hat to felt, along with the other men in his church.

Sheriff Hoffman put the phone back on the receiver. “Chris Yoder. Got something for me?”

Chris shrugged. “I’d like you to tell me exactly what you’re looking for.”

The sheriff inhaled deeply, then blew the air out of his mouth. He leaned forward in his chair. “Look, Chris. This all happened when you were just a little kid. I’ve spoken to a child psychologist about this case. He’s been clear that it’s important to not put any leading thoughts in your head, to just see what you can remember. He said if I try to give you any clues, it might cause you to freeze up. All I can tell you is that every single thing you can remember is helpful to the case.”

“So . . . it is a case. An actual criminal case. Something my mother was involved in.”

“I don’t know for sure. It’s just a hunch.” The sheriff scratched his neck. “Have you given any more thought to undergoing hypnosis?”

“Absolutely not. I will not. You can’t make me. It’s against my church, my beliefs—”

The sheriff held up a hand to stop him. “Yeah, yeah. I got it. That’s what I figured. So, just keep trying to remember.”

Chris rose. “It occurred to me that any information I give you might end up connecting my mother to a crime. Have you thought of that?”

Sheriff Hoffman lifted his eyes and looked directly at Chris. “My job is to find the truth. Somehow, I think that’s what
you want too. ‘The truth shall set you free.’ Isn’t that in the Good Book?”

“The truth shall set you free.”
Chris had read those words all his life and never really thought about what they might mean. How would the truth of that day, fourteen years ago, affect him? And Jenny? What would it mean for his mother?

On the way back to the house, Chris pondered the conversation with the sheriff. Old Deborah made Chris read the Bible out loud to her by lantern light nearly every night after the supper meal. She claimed Scripture could be a powerful comfort and help if a person let the Lord’s message speak to his heart. Old Deborah’s faith was a big sweeping thing and his was faint and faraway.

When he reached his grandfather’s house, he hopped out of the buggy and walked around to release Samson from his rigging. He tugged on the bridle, guiding him toward the barn as the new moon slid behind a cloud.

“The truth shall set you free.”

But what if the truth meant Chris would lose everything?

It was a sunny, breezy Saturday in mid-October. Working together, Fern and Jenny hung the day’s laundry, shooing away those four little puppies that kept trying to snap at the luffing sheets. Fern kept surprising Jenny. She would have thought Fern would have no patience for something as silly as puppies. Instead, Fern stopped trying to hang laundry and gave her full attention to those crazy puppies. She tossed them sticks and tried to teach them tricks, until they finally wore out and curled up in a mound in the sun. Then she went back to hanging towels and sheets.

The comforting aromas of soap and sunshine scented the
warm air as the damp sheets made a soft fluttering noise in the breeze. Fern said she liked doing laundry; the act of scrubbing something clean felt good to her. Ten minutes later, they went inside to bake cookies.

Jenny pulled a tray of cookies from the oven and set them out to cool. Fern stuck her thumb in the middle of one cookie. “Do this with each one,” she said to Jenny. Then Fern carefully ladled a spoonful of raspberry jam into the indentation. “That’s why they’re called thumbprint cookies. They’re my top seller. Folks love my raspberry jam.”

Without thinking, Jenny said, “Old Deborah used to make these, but she liked to use blackberry jam.”

Fern glanced up from spooning jam into another cookie. “Sadie got her start in healing from a woman in Ohio named Old Deborah. In Berlin.”

Jenny’s thumb froze, mid-squish. She didn’t dare look at Fern.

“It was when Sadie was living with Julia and Rome for a few months, right after they got married. Julia is Amos’s eldest daughter. She married Rome Troyer, the Bee Man.”

Jenny swallowed. She didn’t know what to say.

Fern put the spoon in the jam jar. “You know Rome and Julia, don’t you?”

Slowly, Jenny nodded. “We lived with Old Deborah when our mother was . . . indisposed.”

“Ah,” Fern said in her knowing way. “I take it that Chris doesn’t want anyone to know.”

Jenny chanced a look at Fern. “Are you going to let him know I told you?”

Fern tilted her head. “But you didn’t tell me. I guessed. And if Chris isn’t ready to tell us anything more, we’ll just have to wait.”

Jenny’s eyes filled with tears. “Oh, thank you!” She flung her arms around Fern’s middle and burst into tears.

Now it seemed to be Fern’s turn to not know what to do. Slowly, she put her arms around Jenny and patted her. “Jenny, you know that you can always count on us to help you and Chris. Rome and Julia, too.” She cupped Jenny’s face in her hands, the same way Old Deborah used to. “You just need to let us know if you need help.”

Fall’s vibrancy was fading. Squash vines and tomatoes had withered to the ground; corn leaves were wispy brown paper flecked with fuzzy mildew, abandoned ears shriveled inside. But in the greenhouse at Windmill Farm, it looked and smelled as warm and humid as if spring had arrived.

When Chris had approached Amos about the market manager’s suggestion that lettuce was needed at the farmer’s market, Amos’s face softened for a moment with pleasure. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and sure. “Good for you. The greenhouse hasn’t been used since my eldest daughter married and moved away. Have at it.”

He sent Chris directly to Fern, who seemed equally pleased. “The market manager said folks will pay a premium for baby greens,” Chris explained, though Fern didn’t need any convincing. Together, Fern and Chris plotted out a plan to begin lettuce seeds in shallow wooden boxes in the greenhouse. Chris was discovering that Fern had the intuitive sense of a savvy merchant. She was already figuring out when the baby lettuce would be ready for the market, and how to bag them with a green polka-dotted ribbon. “We’ll call ourselves the Salad Stall,” she said, already at work on the sign.

Chris doted on those baby greens. Amos helped him with a few valuable tips: he added extra alfalfa meal into the soil to ensure a plentiful nitrogen supply. Lettuce, he said, needed a pH of 6.0 to 7.0. They selected a seed mix that included a variety of lettuces, since Chris would be hand snipping the leaves and not uprooting the plants. He showed Chris how to broadcast the seeds by hand and to tamp down the soil by gently massaging it with his palm. Keep the temperature of the greenhouse at 75 degrees, he told Chris.

None of this Chris knew. He felt as if he was getting a crash course in farming from Amos. He couldn’t soak up enough knowledge from him. It embarrassed him how little he knew when he started this venture. Within a week, he had read every book he could find about lettuce. He learned that lettuce was a member of the sunflower family, and it was one of the oldest known vegetables—dating back to Persia, six centuries before Christ walked the earth. He knew now that the word “lettuce” comes from an Old French word,
laities
, meaning milk—probably referring to the milky white sap that came out of mature lettuce stems after the farmer snipped off the leaves.

Chris misted the seedlings three times a day and monitored them daily for any weeds. The greenhouse was the first place he went as he arrived at Windmill Farm in the morning and the last place he left at night. Thirty days after planting, Chris had harvested a small crop of baby lettuce to sell at the farmer’s market on Saturday morning. He set up right next to the Fisher boys and their multicolored eggs. Jimmy helped nail Fern’s elegant hand-painted “Salad Stall” sign up to the back of the stall. It was a bitterly cold day, with few customers trolling the aisles. Chris noticed there had been a change in the stands at the market. Many local produce stands were gone
and crafts had filled their place: handmade wreaths, braids of garlic, shellacked gourds cut into birdhouses.

Maybe this was a mistake. It had seemed like such a good idea, but as the morning wore on and Chris had sold only three bags of lettuce, he felt like a fool. Only a novice would try to grow and sell lettuce in the late fall.

And then something miraculous occurred. First one customer bought a bag, then another, and soon he actually had a small line forming in front of his stand. At the end of the morning, he counted his earnings: forty-five dollars, minus ten percent for his stall fee. On the way back to Windmill Farm, he realized that he owed Amos money for the seed: forty dollars. That left Chris with a fifty-cent profit for a month’s work spent sowing, watering, weeding, cutting, and bagging. Fifty cents.

He grinned. He felt like a real farmer.

Teacher M.K. had the scholars practice handwriting every day, right after lunch. She made sure everyone made sharp-nosed
e
’s and perfect
o
’s and straight
i
’s with the dot right smack on top, not floating off into space. Anna Mae liked to make little hearts to serve as the dots on her
i
’s and the teacher did away with those. Barbara Jean was still learning the alphabet. She made Jenny laugh, because she was practicing so hard her tongue stuck out. Jenny wanted to make every letter just so. Perfect.

While they practiced their handwriting, Teacher M.K. read to everyone, walking up and down the aisles. It was a story called
The Jungle Book
by Rudyard Kipling about a young boy who was raised by wolves in the jungles of India. When Teacher M.K. read to the class, she acted out all the voices,
and Jenny forgot right away it was just reading. It got real, like being inside the book. She felt as if she was in that deep, dark jungle with bushes thicker and denser than you could ever imagine, and when the teacher stopped, Jenny felt shocked, as if she had woken from a dream.

Even Eugene Miller liked hearing about the boy raised by wolves. He had stuck around all week.

One afternoon, Teacher M.K. handed the upper grades books she had made with paper stapled down the center. “This is for you to write a story,” she told everyone. “Don’t worry about the spelling, just write. Anything you want to.”

She told the students they could even make things up. The stories didn’t have to be true.

Anna Mae and Danny and the other upper grade students were excited about writing a book. But not Eugene. He crossed his arms against his chest and looked mad.

12

E
ugene didn’t come to school one morning. M.K. felt discouraged. Things had been going so well. She had been trying all kinds of ways to help Eugene: she stopped having him read aloud in class, saving him that painful ordeal. Instead, she had a private time with him when he read aloud.

She had been surprised to discover that he could hardly read at all. He had to read slowly, so very slowly, and the big words gave him fits. She provided reading books for him far below his grade level, to help build his confidence. For the spelling bees on Fridays, she gave him the list of words to practice on Thursday. He needed so much practice. In mathematics, her goal was to teach him to estimate, and to finish a problem by asking himself, “Does this answer make logical sense?” She gave him a box of index cards for key words and formulas. She was doing everything she could to help him.