The Haven (20 page)

She didn’t answer. Instead, she went to the door and brought back a bag of books. She set it on a desk. “These are all the poetry books you sent me while I was in Ohio. I know you wanted me to read them. I’m sorry to tell you this, but I didn’t read any of them.”

“Not one?” All of those little notes he had placed so carefully in the margins?

She shook her head. “The truth is, Gid, I don’t like to read. Not unless I have to. I know that’s a disappointment to you. I know you’ve wanted me to be a person who liked stories and poetry and enjoyed long discussions about them. But that’s not me.” She gave Gid a long look. “I’m just not sure where what you want for me ends and what I want for me begins.”

Those words hung between them, suspended, waiting for Gid to respond. Struck dumb by her lengthy, emphatic speech, he could only gaze at her in wonder. She’d always been pretty to him. Now, with the sun pouring through the window, gilding her skin and reflecting off her hair, her looks held something more, something deeper than beauty—strength. He read it in her broad cheekbones and determined chin, the firmness of her mouth and set of her shoulders.

A bead of sweat rolled down his back, awakening him from his stupor. As Sadie turned toward the door, his mind struggled frantically for the right words, the ones that would free his speech.

“Sadie, I didn’t send you these books because I wanted you to be a different person. I wouldn’t change anything about you. Not a thing. You’re yourself, and that’s what I love. What I’ve always loved. I wish I had learned long ago how to put into words the feelings that I have for you. Instead, I’ve only known how to use what others have written. I sent those books to you so that they could tell you what I couldn’t—to tell you how much I care for you. That I love you. Just the way you are.”

But by the time he got the words out, it was too late. Sadie was already halfway down the road to Windmill Farm.

The thing about a rainy day that Amos liked was that it gave a man a chance to catch up on indoor chores. Amos had been hammering new boards in Cayenne’s stall after the horse had kicked holes through the wall. He wondered if he should consider selling that hot-blooded mare. Fern and Sadie wouldn’t get near her. He and M.K. handled her well, but it didn’t seem right to have a buggy horse that took such serious managing.

“Amos?”

Amos spun around to find Ira Smucker standing behind him. “Ira? What brings you here?”

“My love for Fern. It brings me here.”

Such a revelation didn’t surprise Amos. It was clear that Ira Smucker was very interested in Fern. Amos still felt the shock of it, though, that Fern, whom he thought was a mature, intelligent person, seemed to be responding quite warmly to Ira’s poky and cautious method of courtship. Here was just more proof of the great mystery—how could you ever figure women out? He was fifty-one years old and he still didn’t understand women.

Then Amos chastised himself for thinking uncharitable thoughts about his friend. A minister, to boot! It’s just that Ira was so deliberate in pace, so measured and careful—identical to Fern’s nature—that Amos was certain nothing so seemingly passionless could qualify as real love.

Amos looked at his friend. “You love Fern.”

“Yes. I do. I would be a happy man to have her as my wife.”

Amos’s stomach tightened. “Have you asked her?”

“No.” Ira’s chin lifted. “I thought I should be asking you.” His eyes turned to a barn swallow, flitting from rafter to rafter. “There was a time when I thought you might be fond of Fern, yourself. I would never take her from you, Amos. I’m asking you plain, are you wanting Fern for yourself?” Ira searched his face.

Amos looked away. What could he say? If Fern wanted to marry Ira, he would never stand in her way. He couldn’t answer Ira’s question. “So, you’re asking me for Fern’s hand?”

“No.” Ira shook his head. “I’m telling you I’m marrying her. I’m seeking your blessing, though.”

Will couldn’t sleep. He threw the covers back and went outside to look at the moon. It was full tonight, pocked with craters. He listened for a while to the sounds of the night: the howl of a coyote, the hoot of an owl.

He couldn’t wait to tell Sadie about the hatched chicks. Imagining her catching a breath and looking so pleased when he told her there were four eyases now, all hatched out and healthy. It crossed Will’s mind that he was thinking about Sadie again. He shut down the conversation in his head as soon as he realized what he was doing. It wasn’t like him to have his mind linger so long and so often on a girl.

Unsettled. That’s how he felt after he spent time with Sadie. He remembered what he thought when he first met her—that if he walked into a room, she wasn’t the one he would have noticed. But oddly enough, long after he left the room, she was the one he kept thinking about. She was quiet, more of a mystery; her strengths sneaked up on him instead of smacking him front and center.

It amazed Will to see the knowledge Sadie had of healing herbs. Her education was, for the most part, limited to the four walls of a one-room country schoolhouse. And yet, she seemed to have an intuitive sense of what ailed a person.

Earlier today, he had found her out in the enormous vegetable garden, tending to her herbs. “I envy you,” Will had told her when she stood to greet him, brushing dirt off her hands.

She looked at him, surprised. “Whatever for?”

“Your healing work.”

“But you’re the one who is going to be a doctor.”

He shook his head. “Not anymore. Besides, even if I were able to talk my way back into medical school, it would only be a vocation. For you, it’s a
calling
.” He stood up straighter. “I guess that’s how I would describe my father’s passion for medicine.”

Somehow, Will realized, conversations with Sadie wound their way back to his father, even though he didn’t intend them to. “He was always at the hospital, never present for any of the events in a kid’s life where you’d want a father to be. Not for school plays or birthday parties. We couldn’t even count on his appearance on Christmas morning.”

“Is he that important of a doctor?”

“Sadly, yes. How can a kid complain about that, either? The guy was out saving lives.”

“But a family is important too.”

Will shook his head. “I’m only important to him as long as I do everything he wants me to do and wants me to be. The minute I step outside of that line, I’m cut off.”

Sadie was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “You need to forgive him.”

That was the last thing he wanted to hear. Shouldn’t his father be apologizing to him and asking for his forgiveness?

Softly, she added, “Will, I’m sure you’ve hurt people too. We all have. You need to be forgiven by others. Why shouldn’t you extend forgiveness to your father?”

Sadie’s words stuck with him all day, like a burr under the saddle. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was having trouble moving on because he wouldn’t let his father off the hook. Leaning against the porch post, he said out loud, perhaps to God, perhaps to himself, “Okay. I forgive my dad. I am responsible for my own life. I will stop blaming him.” Nothing dramatic happened. No lightning, no thunder, no warm feeling that he had done the right thing. A little disappointed, Will went back inside to try to sleep.

Every dawn and every dusk, Amos spent time with binoculars around his neck, watching the falcons. They were magnificent—with their golden brown dappled coloring, black streaks on their heads. Will had told him scientists had documented that falcons ate a variety of over four hundred and fifty types of birds. He said that they have been observed killing birds as large as a sandhill crane, as tiny as a hummingbird, and as elusive as a white-throated swift, but a favorite treat was bats. The only bird Amos was happy to hear was on that list was starlings. He had no love in his heart for starlings.

He was up on the hillside tonight, watching Adam in a hunting stoop, when suddenly Fern appeared at his side. You’d think he’d have grown accustomed to her out-of-the-blue appearances, but he was always flustered. He watched her as she gazed at Adam. He wondered what she might have been like when she was Sadie or Julia’s age. She must have been beautiful. But there was something added to her face that was better than youthful beauty.

She had character.

“I can’t help but think how Menno would have loved these falcons,” he said, handing her the binoculars. “He would have every fact known to man listed on index cards and read them out to us at supper.”

“Better is one day in God’s court than a thousand days elsewhere.” She held the binoculars up to her eyes. “Menno has a better view of God’s magnificent creation than we do, Amos. And he doesn’t need index cards to remember anymore.” She twisted the knobs for a moment, peered through the binoculars again, then handed them back to Amos and went back down the hill.

He held them to his eyes and discovered he now had a much clearer view of Adam. He watched Fern’s receding figure for a moment, then smiled. Fern was always doing that—fixing things that were slightly out of focus.

It was the strangest thing. A few days after Will had looked up at the moon and said he forgave his father, he noticed that he could think about his father without a default response of bitterness and defensiveness.

That moment in the night on the cottage porch—something had happened to begin to affect his feelings about his father. He knew it wasn’t just a situation of mind over matter. Something—some One—was changing him, inside out.

Questions started buzzing around his mind like pesky mosquitoes:
If this is God’s doing, just who is he? What is he like?
When he went into town with Amos that week, he slipped into a bookstore. He told Amos that he was going to get his phone battery charged up and that was true. But he also wanted to purchase a Bible. He ended up buying an easy-to-read translation, small in size so he could keep it in his backpack.

As a freshman in college, he had taken an Ancient Literature class that included some readings from the Bible. The professor had ridiculed the Bible to the class, pointing out all of its inconsistencies. She had been much kinder with
The
Odyssey
, he remembered. But that class had shaped his views about the Bible—as an irrelevant, flawed collection of fables and myths. He tried to set that assumption aside and read the Bible with fresh eyes. There was only one question he asked himself: What is God like? That was all.