Meek and Mild (29 page)

“Am I interrupting?” she said.

“Scrappy Andy had a question, which I have just finished answering,” her husband said.

Andrew stood, puzzling how he might ask Mrs. Yoder if her husband had fallen ill in the last two days. Though the bishop had been quiet during Sunday’s service and the meeting that followed, no one had remarked that he seemed unwell.

“You ought to stick to your appointments.” Mrs. Yoder touched her husband’s shoulder before setting the basket on the counter and glancing at Andrew. “The bishop has always preferred to give careful thought to how to respond to a spiritual matter.”

Illumination washed over Andrew. She was protecting her husband.

“The lessons are not buried so deeply. They will find them.”

“The pages of the Bible are one.”

“We look into a glass darkly. Thus saith the Lord.”

“The ninety-nine and the one. The word of the Lord is irrefutable.”

Caroline Yoder, Andrew realized, was not surprised that her husband might not make sense.

“Is it today?” Sadie asked.

“Is what today?” Fannie leaned forward in the glider and reached for a foot to rub. Lately her feet were not happy in shoes and not happy barefoot.

“The quilts. The ones that aren’t finished yet.”

“The quilting bee?”

“Yes. That’s what I mean. This is Wednesday, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid we missed it,” Fannie said.

“The whole thing? It’s supposed to last all day, isn’t it?”

Sometimes Fannie wished that Sadie did not listen quite so carefully to the adult conversations around her. She wasn’t sure where Sadie gathered her information, but she’d absorbed it correctly. This was indeed Wednesday, and indeed quilting bees lasted most of the day.

“It’s too late to go now,” Fannie said.

“Can’t we still go?”

Fannie sucked in a breath in the hope that the exhale would bring patience.

“It just didn’t work out for us this time,” she said. “There will be another bee.”

“And we’ll go?” Sadie came close and widened her eyes to stare into her mother’s.

“We’ll see.” Fannie kissed Sadie’s forehead. “Do you think you could go pick some beans for supper all by yourself?”

Sadie dashed off for a basket as Fannie knew she would. Her daughter thrived on opportunities to prove her independence.

Her mother was going to the quilting bee. Plain and simple, that was the reason Fannie could not muster enthusiasm for the event.

Fannie missed Martha—at least, the balance between them as Fannie waited for a second child. She missed confiding monthly disappointment to her mother. She missed knowing that Martha stood with her in prayer for a child. She missed being in and out of each other’s homes several times each week.

Martha’s pregnancy changed everything. Fannie could not look at her mother without resentment. And no matter how guilty she might feel about the attitude, she couldn’t change it. Every day that passed, she cared less about it.

She cared less about everything.

Fannie leaned back in the glider and pushed it into motion. She was upright, not napping in the middle of the day. In a few minutes she would engage in a needed task. But the effort or normalcy exhausted her.

The screen door thwacked. The footsteps crossing the kitchen were Elam’s. He came through to the front room.

“I’ll get your lunch,” Fannie said, though her muscles did not respond to the thought with movement.

“I expected I would be on my own,” he said. “Isn’t this the quilting bee day?”

“A bee is a long day,” Fannie said. “If anyone tries to leave early, the others make a fuss. It’s better to stay home if you don’t feel well.”

Elam did not speak. Fannie met his gaze for as long as she could bear it. Now she insisted that her feet find their place and support her weight. When she walked past him, he reached to catch her hand but she pulled it from him.

At the sound of the
English
motor roaring toward him from behind, Yonnie took his horse and open buggy as close to the edge of the road as he could without risking the ditch. Traffic on the farm roads was less threatening in the days before Henry Ford decided that every household in the country should have an automobile. Fewer and fewer of the English used horses to move around the county, and along with their former habit they had dispensed with a sense of the speed at which horse and buggies traversed safely.

Yonnie glanced over his shoulder at the approaching car, a green Model T with the roof down stirring up a cloud of dust. With an irritated groan, Yonnie pulled the horse into the middle of the road and slowed almost to a stop. If Andrew insisted on driving an
English
machine, then let him be the one to drive along the ditch.

Andrew honked his horn. Yonnie ignored it, refusing to turn his head again. The automobile crept along behind the buggy.

“Yonnie, move over!” Andrew shouted.

Yonnie hunched his shoulders but gave no command to the horse, instead maintaining his position in the center of the road at a near crawl for more than a mile. Andrew should not take lessons in impatience from the
English
.

At the widening of an intersection, Andrew accelerated past the buggy. What Yonnie had not expected was that Andrew would swing his car around to block the road, forcing Yonnie to stop. Andrew got out of the car and leaned against it.

“You can’t block the road,” Yonnie said.

“You did,” Andrew shot back over the idling engine.

Yonnie rearranged the reins in his hands. “You could use your knowledge of machinery in other ways to serve the community. You don’t have to be like the
English
.”

“I have not abandoned the community,” Andrew said. “It is you who presumes to know what is in my heart on the matter.”

“You have no family to keep you here. What is to stop you from one day driving away from the church?”

“Do you think an automobile has more power over my actions than my own conscience?”

“You put yourself at risk.”

“Do I? Or do you push me toward that edge by thinking you know what a man-made machine means to me?”

“You cannot serve both God and mammon, Andrew.”

Andrew glared at Yonnie. The horse nickered. Andrew got back behind the wheel and sped off, leave Yonnie to cough in the dust.

C
lara pushed the wheelbarrow through the barn, pausing at each stall to throw in a layer of fresh straw and assess how soon mucking would be required. Rhoda thought of the barn as her husband’s purview and rarely entered. Helping in the barn now, with Josiah wrangling a wide broom behind her, transported Clara’s mind back to the days when she was the child trailing Hiram. Those years held their grief, but the framework of life had been simple and predictable. The line between Hiram and Clara had been straight and clear.

When had life in a family become so complicated?

Clara threw her brother a smile, and his grin soothed her.

“Are you going to help me muck when it’s time?” Josiah said.

“Of course.” Cleaning animal stalls was Clara’s least favorite chore, but if it meant she could spend time with Josiah without wondering when Rhoda would snatch him away, Clara would do it gladly.

She pushed the wheelbarrow out into the bright daylight. In a couple of weeks, summer’s furnace would cease its blasts. The harvest would swallow up every free moment for farmers and their families. Hiram had already struck his deals for selling the portion of the Kuhn crop that he did not need for feeding his family and animals through the winter.

A buggy turned off the main road and progressed down the lane toward the house. Clara released the wheelbarrow handles and pulled a sleeve across her forehead before brushing off her apron.

“
Gut mariye
, Mrs. Brennerman,” Clara said, surprised that the visitor who emerged was the woman who rejected her offering a week ago.

“I’ve brought Rhoda’s pots back,” Mrs. Brennerman said.

“I trust everyone is well.”

“Well enough. Is Rhoda home?”

“Yes,” Clara said. “Please come to the house.”

Clara took the dishes from Mrs. Brennerman, hoping that that food had nourished the family after all and had not been thrown straight to the pigs. She led the way across the yard, up the front steps, and into the house.

Inside, Rhoda offered coffee to Mrs. Brennerman—not to Clara—and the two of them withdrew to the kitchen. Clara took quiet steps across the wood floor and stopped outside the kitchen, to one side of the open door. This could be the moment Rhoda learned of the stories. Clara wanted to hear Mrs. Brennerman’s account for herself.

“Have you heard about the bishop?” Mrs. Brennerman said to Rhoda. “He’s fallen ill—quite ill, I believe.”

“We must remember to pray for him,” Rhoda said.

“His wife has him in seclusion. She believes he needs complete rest. No one is to try to speak to him.”

“We do have three other ministers,” Rhoda said. Clara heard the cups in her hand clink.

“There are some who would take advantage of Bishop Yoder’s illness.”

“He will recover.”

“He is quite ill,” Mrs. Brennerman repeated.

Clara stepped away. Of course she would pray for the bishop’s recovery to full strength.

But what if he did not recover?

Andrew had expected only to buy a box of nails while he was in town, not to hear that Bishop Yoder was too ill to see anyone. The news did not surprise him. He let pass the speculation that the illness was likely the same one that had infected other households. In a few days the bishop’s appetite would return. He would be back to preaching by Sunday.

Andrew was certain that was not true.

He didn’t take his buggy home to his own farm. Instead, he unhitched his horse behind the old Johnson barn with the confidence that the animal would not wander far. John Stutzman was the man Andrew wanted to talk to, and he lived on the other side of the district. The Model T was running well these days, and Andrew had practiced enough to believe he was not a menace on the road. This would be a useful demonstration of the time the automobile would save. Andrew pushed open the barn door, cranked the engine to life, and drove onto the main road.