Keeping Secrets
Authors: Linda Byler
Sadie’s Montana
Book Two
Linda Byler
Chapter 1
E
VEN WHEN YOU HAVE
a firm grip on it, hope can be torn away by the sound of your mother’s voice. That’s another reason why it’s easier to love a horse.
Horses are sympathetic. You can tell by the way they lower their faces, very still, unmoving, when your fingers comb the silky forelock of hair.
Driving horses don’t have that forelock. Their Amish owners keep it cleanly cut so that it is easier to put on the bridle. A driving bridle has two bits that must be coaxed between the horse’s teeth, and shiny, patent leather blinders attach to the side of it. When the top of the bridle goes up over the ears and the chin strap is secured, the horse looks neat, and, well, Amish.
Sadie Miller’s thoughts moved with the steady
ca-chink ca-chink
of the hoe as she chopped resolutely at the stubborn crabgrass between the rows of string beans. The unceasing Montana wind moved the tender garden plants restlessly, their green leaves swaying and bending like funny, green dancers.
Her mother moved ahead of her, bending over to remove the weeds from around the new string-bean plants, her graying hair tossed in the breeze like the bean plants. Her
dichly
, that triangle of blue handkerchief cut diagonally and hemmed on the sewing machine, moved and flapped wildly at the wind’s command.
Mam was not overweight. She was not thin, either. She was just right for 50 years old. Her sage green dress whirled around, lifting above her knees, and she grabbed at the pleated skirt impatiently.
“Ach! Will this wind never die down?” she asked Sadie.
Sadie didn’t answer, simply because it felt good to let Mam know she was sulking unhappily.
Why? Why did Mam have to come down on her like that? It wasn’t fair. She was 21 years old, and Mark was as good as forbidden.
Ah, Mark. That tall, impossibly dark-haired, dark-skinned youth of her dreams. Not really youth. A man, at 31 years old. He was the only person Sadie had ever truly wanted. And now this.
Sadie had opened the subject earlier. She was the only one in the garden with her mother, and she was glad to tell her about meeting Mark on the day when Reuben accompanied her on the quest for a buckboard they had seen advertised in the local paper.
Sadie had been riding Paris, her beloved palomino, while Reuben was on Cody, the small brown mare. They had first thought the horses were from a wild herd. Later they discovered that the animals had been stolen from a wealthy rancher in Hill County. Richard Caldwell, the owner of the ranch where Sadie worked, had contacted the owner of the stolen horses to make things right. Meanwhile, Sadie continued cooking in the huge, commercial kitchen for as many as 25 ranch hands with Dorothy Sevarr. Dorothy was rotund, and she was aging, but she had a heart of gold despite her fiery personality. Kindness flowed from her in great, healing quantities.
Dorothy’s husband, Jim Sevarr, still drove his ancient pickup truck back and forth from Sadie’s house, providing her transportation to work. He was an old cowboy, much more comfortable on the back of a faithful horse than driving his cranky pickup, whose gears were never where they were supposed to be.
Sadie and her family lived on the side of a wooded ridge, thick with pines and aspen trees. Their log home had been built by Sadie’s father, Jacob, a carpenter and builder.
They had moved to Montana from Ohio about five years earlier, the age-old lure of the west drawing Jacob Miller. The family had settled into the budding new church and community, which the Old Order Amish had started in the beauty of the Montana landscape.
The move, however, had taken its toll on Sadie’s mother, Annie, who had slid down a despairing slope of depression, her condition steadily deteriorating into severe mental illness, which Jacob found difficult to acknowledge.
Mam’s continuing silence made the space between them an uncomfortable irritation that Sadie could not let go. Inside her, disobedience raged while rebellion infuriated her. Tears lodged in her throat.
Yet as Sadie watched her mother’s nimble fingers tugging at the stubborn weeds, she did thank God again for the educated doctors and the hospital stay that had enabled Mam to begin her long climb out of the pit of misery that she endured so bravely and silently.
Still. How could she? Did mothers have a right to forbid their daughters from seeing someone?
Life with Mark, or more precisely, the hope of life with Mark, was unthinkable now. Her future rose before her, black, bleak, and windswept. She would turn into a spinster, no matter her beauty or her hair shining like a raven’s wing. It shone black actually, depending which way the light settled on it. It nearly matched her blue, blue eyes fringed with thick, black lashes.
Sadie Miller was too pretty for her own good, the old ones said. Beauty could be a curse. Once it got into a young girl’s head and puffed up her pride, it became a great, heavy mushroom of vanity that would inevitably take her down every time.
They watched Sadie in church and shook their heads. God was already moving in her life, they whispered. Look what had happened to Ezra. Killed when the buggy went down over the bank on Sloam’s Ridge. Sadie almost losing her own life. Ezra would have been the perfect husband for Sadie—loyal, steady, conscientious.
She was just different, that one.
Jacob and Annie had her hands full with three more daughters, one as pretty as the next. Leah, Rebekah, and Anna were all as pleasing to the eye as their oldest sister, but Sadie was the only one gallivanting around on that horse, as far as they knew. She rode around on that palomino horse named Paris, which was downright unladylike. If Jacob and Annie knew what was right and proper, they would rein her in with a firm hand.
They clucked, wise in their years, but they also knew that Jacob Miller’s daughters added spice to their lives, mixing some flavor into their work-focused existence.
None of them dating right now either. Not one. Robert Troyer’s Junior would be a good one for Rebekah, now wouldn’t he? Him being so tall and fair. They clasped their hands and mostly thought these things, but with an occasional slip of the tongue to each other, accompanied by a knowing twinkle in their eyes.
“Mam!”
Mam straightened her back at Reuben’s call. She lifted a hand to shade her eyes, searching for her only son, her youngest child.
“Here we are, Reuben. In the garden.”
“Can I have a popsicle?”
“How many are left?”
“A whole bunch.”
“Okay.”
Mam bent to her task, her back turned, and resumed weeding. Sadie cleared her throat, never breaking the hoe’s rhythm. The dirt was loosening nicely, although it wasn’t the fine loam they were used to in Ohio. The growing season was shorter here in Montana, and having a good, productive garden was much more challenging.
The evening sun began its rapid descent behind Atkin’s Ridge. Sadie often thought the sun was like a drop sliding down a tumbler of water. It didn’t move very quickly until it neared the base of the glass. Then, in a rush, it was gone. That’s how the sun was.
So once it began its descent for the evening, you didn’t have much time left in the garden, or to return from a ride, or whatever it was you were doing in the evening.
The silence stretched between the women, until Mam straightened her back, rubbed it with her fist, and groaned. There was no sound from Sadie. Mam turned, watched her eldest daughter’s silent hoeing, then stood solidly, her hands on her hips, her eyes narrowing.
“Now Sadie, you can just quit your
poosing
this second. I told you how I feel, and that’s the way it is. If you don’t want to listen to your father and me, then I suppose you’ll have to suffer the consequences.”
Sadie stopped her steady hoeing and learned on the handle with the back of the hoe resting on the ground.
“You don’t have to say it again, Mam. You already told me once.”
Mam watched Sadie lower her eyes and shuffle the hoe back and forth with one hand on the handle.
“Come, Sadie. Let’s go sit on the porch swing. Then we can talk. I’ll listen awhile and promise to stay quiet this time.”
Sadie looked up, blue fire in her eyes.
“What is there to say? If you and Dat forbid me to see Mark at all, then there’s nothing to say.”
“It would be different if we knew his background. He says he was raised Amish, but where? By whom? Who is his family, if they exist at all? What kind of name is ‘Peight’?”
Sadie sighed and lifted her hoe, the skirt of her green dress swirling as she turned and walked decidedly out of the garden.
Mam watched her go, then slowly made her way to the house, her shoulders stooped with dejection.
Sadie put the hoe into the small, log garden shed. She picked up an empty bag that had contained black sunflower seeds for the bird feeders by the window in the dining room. She put it into the trash barrel and wondered why Reuben never picked up anything.
It was the same way with his clothes. He shed his trousers and shirts beside his bed, both turned inside out. His socks, also turned inside out, remained where he conveniently peeled them off.
No shower for Reuben in the evening. He hated showering before he went to bed. He did it only in the morning, so his hair stayed straight and silky all day, swinging handsomely, the brown and blond strands throwing off the light so that no one knew what color his hair actually was.
Reuben wouldn’t talk about girls. He thought they were an unhandy lot, especially in school, bossy know-it-alls who weren’t worth a lick at baseball. The only one who came close to being normal was Alma Detweiler, who could bat a ball over the one-room schoolhouse, and often did, making a home run in the process, her long, thin legs churning with admirable speed as she rounded third base, her head turned to watch the ball.
He had taken to dabbing a bit of cologne on his shirt from the wee bottle of Stetson that Leah had given him for Christmas. The practice was a source of knowing winks from his older sisters, who of course never said a word to him.
It was hard enough being 13 and the only guy in the family.
Sadie closed the door, turning the latch firmly, then watched the sky change from blue to orange then lavender, and, finally, purple. The sunsets were nothing short of spectacular here in Montana, and she never tired of them, ever.