Читать книгу Leah's Choice - Emma Miller - Страница 11

Chapter Four

The following morning, as golden rays of April sunlight spilled through the bedroom window, Leah sighed and snuggled deeper beneath the crisp blue and white Bear’s Paw quilt that had been her Christmas gift from her eldest sister, Johanna. Below Leah’s window, from a perch on the top rail of the garden fence, a wayward rooster crowed. Just a few more minutes, Leah thought, burrowing under her pillow. All I want is a few more…

A high-pitched giggle pierced her groggy haze. “You a-wake, Leah? Mam made pancakes!”

Leah caught the scent of fresh coffee, felt the mattress bounce and groaned. It had been nearly daylight when she’d finally gotten to bed, and she couldn’t have had more than three hours’ sleep.

“An’ bacon!” proclaimed the cheerful voice.

Leah opened one eye and smiled into the round, red-cheeked face hovering only inches from her own. “Morning, Susanna-banana,” she mumbled.

Her sister giggled again. “I’m not a banana. Get up, silly. I’m hungry.” She pushed a mug of coffee under Leah’s nose. “Brought you coffee.” It came out sounding more like toffee, but Leah had no trouble understanding Susanna’s sometimes childish speech.

“You’re always hungry,” Leah replied, but it was impossible to remain out of sorts with Susanna, even too early on a visiting Sunday when there was no church and they could sleep in. Her sister was such a sweet-natured soul that simply being near her made Leah smile. “Thanks for the coffee. Tell Mam I’ll be downstairs in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

“’Kay.” Susanna’s mouth widened in a grin as she scooted off the bed, carefully sliding the brimming cup to the end of the nightstand. Then she trotted out of the bedroom and down the hall toward the stairs.

Leah stretched and rubbed her eyes before reaching for the coffee. As always, Susanna had sweetened it to her own taste and drowned it in heavy cream, but it was hot and bracing and washed some of the sleep out of Leah’s brain. Yawning, she padded barefoot to the window and threw up the sash. The sun was already high, and the sky was a robin’s-egg blue without a hint of clouds. Spread out before her were Mam’s kitchen garden, rich farm fields and fruit trees in the first blossom of spring.

“Thank you, God,” she murmured as she breathed in the sweet smell of newly turned soil and fresh-cut grass. “Thank you for keeping Joey safe through the stormy night and letting us find him.” Closing her eyes, she offered a simple and silent prayer, asking His blessing on her family and community and for guidance through the coming day.

Almost instantly, a sense of contentment and pure joy washed over her. How was it possible that last night, an evening that had started so fearful, had turned out to be so wonderful?

Not only had Joey been returned to his family without harm, but she’d met a dynamic stranger and helped him deliver a new life into the world. Goose bumps rose on Leah’s bare arms as she exhaled softly. Nothing like that ever happened in Seven Poplars, but it had happened last night, and she’d been part of it. She couldn’t wait to tell her sisters about her adventure, especially Johanna. Of all of them, Johanna shared her sometimes rebellious spirit and would understand best how she felt.

Leah had loved coming home after almost a year in Ohio taking care of Grossmama, but things here had quickly fallen back into the ordinary. Not exactly boring… There were always chores to do and new challenges to face, especially now that Anna had married Samuel in a whirlwind romance, leaving only Susanna, Rebecca, Irwin and her at home to help Mam. But after the hustle and bustle of Grossmama’s more liberal Amish community, her new Mennonite friends, and the relative independence she and Rebecca had experienced in Ohio, it wasn’t easy settling in under Mam’s authority again. And she did have to admit to herself that sometimes Seven Poplar’s conservative customs seemed a little old-fashioned.

So many changes, Leah thought wistfully. When she and Rebecca had left for Ohio last year, the house had been bursting with unmarried sisters, and when they’d returned, three had found husbands, and Mam had hired and then practically adopted Irwin, a thirteen-year-old orphaned boy who had lived with Joey Beachy’s family. It all took a little getting used to.

Not that her beloved sisters were far away; Miriam and Ruth were just across the field in the little farmhouse with their new husbands, and Anna and Samuel’s farm was next door. But they had their own families and households, and it wasn’t the same as waking up every morning to a gaggle of giggling girls or having so many to share secrets and gossip with after the lights had been blown out at night. Plus, Grandmother Yoder, no longer able to live alone, and her sister, Aunt Jezebel, were now part of Mam’s household.

Grossmama was going to live with Anna and Samuel this summer. Anna had wanted her to move in sooner, but Mam had been firm. She’d insisted that Anna needed a few months to adjust to being a wife and mother to Samuel’s five children before taking on Grossmama, no matter how well the two of them got on together. That would leave Aunt Jezebel here, but compared to her sister, Aunt Jezzy was a dream.

“What’s taking you so long?” Rebecca called from the doorway. “You aren’t even dressed.” She came in and plopped onto the unmade bed. “Grossmama won’t be happy if her pancakes are cold.”

Leah rolled her eyes and forced back a snappy response. “Sorry. I didn’t expect anyone to wait breakfast on me this morning.” She went to the corner where her clothing hung and took down a fresh shift and a lavender-colored dress.

“Mam said not to wear that,” Rebecca said. “Wear your good blue one. Aunt Martha thinks that the lavender is too short, and she’s bound to come visiting today. She’ll want to hear all about that Mennonite preacher you were running around with in the dark last night.”

Leah wrinkled her nose. “Since when does Mam take Aunt Martha’s advice on what we should wear?”

Rebecca shrugged. “I’m just telling you what Mam said. I think Mam thinks it’s too short, too.”

Leah’s mouth puckered as she hung the lavender dress with its neat tailoring back on the hook and took down the dark blue one her mother had given her for her birthday. Leah liked the blue. It went well with her eyes and her dark auburn hair, but she was particularly fond of the lavender dress she and her Mennonite friend, Sophie Steiner, had cut and stitched. Sophie’s mother had a new electric-powered Singer that practically sewed a garment for you. Maybe the lavender was a little shorter than the blue dress, but it covered her knees and the neckline and sleeves were modest enough to satisfy even the bishop.

“And your good kapp,” Rebecca added. “No scarf today.”

Leah sighed. She and Rebecca had spent so much time together in the last year that they should have been as close as Ruth and Miriam, but somehow, this sister always brought out the worst in her. She loved Rebecca dearly, but they were just too different to have the relationship she had with Johanna or dear Anna. Leah loved to be doing something with her hands: picking blueberries, making jam or selling vegetables to the English tourists at Spence’s Auction. By contrast, Rebecca was happiest at home, drinking tea with Mam or Aunt Jezebel, reading a prayer book or writing a letter for publication in the Budget.

Rebecca never questioned the rules. She’d always been the good girl of the family, the serious one. She’d been baptized at age sixteen, before she’d even ventured into the outside world. It never occurred to Rebecca to be cross with Aunt Martha for her criticizing or bossy ways. In Leah’s mind, Rebecca was simply too meek for her own good. And worse, Rebecca couldn’t understand why Leah sometimes longed to kick out of the traces, and why, at almost twenty-one, she had yet to make the lifelong commitment to join the Amish Church.

Leah gathered her brush, kapp and her clean underclothes and started for the bathroom. “I’ll be quick,” she promised her sister. “Tell Mam, five minutes.”

“What was he like?” Rebecca asked.

“Who?”

Rebecca raised an eyebrow. “You know who. The Mennonite preacher. Was he as fast as they say?”

Annoyed, Leah stopped short and glanced back over her shoulder. “As fast as who says? Who around here knows him well enough to say something like that? That he’s fast?”

Her sister smiled. “It’s what they say about all Mennonite boys, isn’t it? People say that they’re wild, that they try to take liberties with Amish girls.”

“That’s nonsense. And Daniel isn’t a boy. He must be twenty-five, maybe older.”

Rebecca snickered. “And it’s just Daniel now, is it? But then you probably got to know him well out there in the woods. He didn’t try to steal a kiss, did he?”

“No. He didn’t. And Daniel Brown’s not a preacher. He’s a nurse, a good one.”

“And you know that how?”

“Because he helped a baby goat to be born when we were out looking for Joey. It was stuck, a leg tangled. The nanny would have died and the kid with her if Daniel hadn’t known what to do.”

“So he’s not a preacher. But he is a missionary. He must have been lots of places, known lots of English girls. Fancy foreign girls, too.”

“I suppose he has, but he was nice. Is nice. And when he gives his program, I’m going to be there to hear it.”

“If Mam lets you go again.”

Leah’s brow creased as she tried to hide the annoyance she felt at Rebecca’s words. “Ne, sister,” she answered softly. “That’s not what I said. I said I’m going to hear Daniel’s talk and see the pictures of Spain and Morocco. I’ll be twenty-one in a few weeks, and I’m an adult. I think I can decide for myself if I’m going to hear a missionary speak about his experiences in spreading God’s word, without asking for my mother’s permission.”

Rebecca slid off the bed, moisture gleaming in her dark eyes. “I’ve made you angry.”

Leah shook her head. “Not angry.”

“Ya.” A single tear blossomed on Rebecca’s cheek. “I never say the right thing to you, Leah. I try, but it always comes out wrong. I worry about you.”

Leah opened her arms and Rebecca came into them. Leah enveloped her in a hug. “Worry about me? Why? Because I hunted for a lost child last night—”

“Ne.” Her sister switched from English to Pennsylvania Dutch. “You have a good heart. It was wrong of me to tease you about the Mennonite boy. I only did it because I’m frightened that we might lose you.”

“Lose me?” Leah pulled away to look down into her sister’s face. Rebecca was a small girl, like Miriam, not tall like Mam’s side of the family. “How could you lose me?”

Rebecca clasped her hand and squeezed it hard. “You move too easily in the outside world. Since we were children, you always have. The English don’t make you uncomfortable, as they do me.”

“But why should that frighten you?”

“We’re Plain folk—we’re a people apart. Do you forget the martyrs who died that we might worship according to our beliefs?”

Leah leaned close and brushed a kiss on her sister’s temple. “How could I forget? Being who I am—who we are—is bred into me, blood and bone. Surely, listening to a Mennonite tell about his mission work doesn’t change that.”

“It’s not just that.” Another tear followed the first. “It was the Mennonite friends you made out in Ohio. You went to their charity auctions, and you went to the fair with Jeanine and Sophie. And at least once, you helped out at their bake sale for their church.”

“I did, but that was to raise money for a mission in the Ukraine. They wanted to send books and school supplies to orphans in a remote town. I wasn’t attending worship services. And going to a fair to look at animals and eat cotton candy doesn’t mean that I’ve forsaken my own faith,” Leah protested. “I haven’t.”

Rebecca’s chin quivered. “Everyone thought that you’d start classes for baptism this spring, but you didn’t. Even Ruth is concerned about you. She and Aunt Jezzy were talking about it last week after church.”

“And Mam? What does she say?”

Her sister sighed. “You know Mam. She just smiles and says, ‘All in God’s time.’ But it’s past time, Leah. You’re the prettiest girl in Kent County, but you’ve never had a steady boyfriend, and you don’t even let any boys drive you home from frolics and singings.”

Leah wrinkled her nose again as she thought of Menno Swartzentruber, who’d tried to get her to ride home in his buggy last Sunday. “Maybe I haven’t met the right boy. The ones around here seem too young and flighty.” Menno was a hard worker, but his idea of a good joke was piling straw bales across the road to stop traffic in the dark or filling a paper bag with cow manure and leaving it on an Englisher’s porch. No, she couldn’t see herself dating Menno.

“And what about Jake King from the fourth district church? He’s what? Twenty-eight or twenty-nine? He likes you, and you can’t think Jake’s too young.”

“I like Jake—he’s a good man. But his wife’s only been dead six months. I wouldn’t feel right walking out with Jake so soon after his loss.”

“You see how you are.” Rebecca stepped away and straightened her kapp, which had come loose when they’d hugged. “You always have a good excuse. But wearing that Ohio-style dress doesn’t help. You know how people are—how they will talk. They start to wonder if you are drifting away from us.”

“It sounds as though you’ve been talking to Aunt Martha,” Leah said. “Or Dorcas.”

“Aunt Martha has a sharp tongue,” Rebecca admitted. “But she means well. She knows Dat would have been worried about you.”

“You miss him a lot, don’t you?” Leah murmured. Their father had been dead almost three years, but the hurt hadn’t faded. Rebecca had taken the loss especially hard.

“I do.”

“Me, too,” she admitted softly.

“Leah! Leah!”

Both Leah and Rebecca turned toward the stairs as the clatter of footsteps echoed down the hallway.

“Leah! There’s a man!” Susanna’s eyes were wide, her cheeks red with excitement. “In a truck! In the kitchen!”

“A truck in Mam’s kitchen?” Leah teased.

“Ne!” Susanna was breathless from running up the steps. “An Englisher man. He wants…” She inhaled deeply. “He wants you!”