The Letters (8 page)

She saw Bethany come hurrying toward the house with the boys trotting close behind, spilling with news about the bald eagle pair they had been watching for a few days.

Vera knocked on the window and hollered to them to hush up. “Er is en re Saegmiehl gebore.”
He was born in a sawmill.
It was what she said to the boys whenever they were too loud, which was often, or didn’t close doors, which happened regularly.

“Sorry, Mammi Vera,” Bethany called out, but there was fire in her eyes. Something must have happened at work, but Rose didn’t know what. There were times when Bethany seemed to get in a frame of mind that was prickly as a stinging nettle. Bethany went right into the kitchen. Rose saw her crouch beside her grandmother to talk to her. It was Vera’s only bright spot of the day—when Bethany came home from work.

“Mom, we think them eagles is going to build a nest in the dead tree on the top of the hill. Near the creek,” Luke said.

“
Those
eagles are going to build a nest,” Rose corrected.

“Exactly,” Sammy piped up. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

Grammar was forgotten when the boys were excited. Rose couldn’t help smiling at the look of wonder on the boys’
faces. “It would be something special to watch.” Before the boys could start in on more details about the eagles, Rose sent them to the barn to fill the wheelbarrow with hay to feed the goat and sheep. “Don’t forget to latch the gates, Luke and Sammy. That goat’s been getting out on a regular basis. We want to be good neighbors to Galen.”

“We
are
good neighbors,” Luke said. “He just doesn’t like goats.”

No one liked goats, Rose thought, but didn’t say. She had already soundly scolded Luke today for trouble at school. Sometimes, she thought that boy learned everything at school but his lessons. Mim said she was mortified to own up to having him for a brother. Today, it appeared Luke drew a very exaggerated picture of Sammy’s ears on his arithmetic workbook. Sammy was sensitive about his rather sizable ears. He took it upon himself to correct Luke with a sound punch as soon as they were out to recess and away from the teacher’s eyes. Mim said that the boys were rolling together across the playground, each trying to get in a good punch.

Teacher M.K. had little patience with such boy nonsense. They were kept after school and sent home with a note, explaining their crimes. Rose knew she was a fine teacher and needed to keep discipline in the schoolhouse, but she had to smile when she pictured them tumbling around the playground. Rascals to the end.

As she finished folding the last sheet, Rose felt her heart set to right. She was ready to face the evening.
Thank you, Lord, for bringing a little sunshine into a winter day.

5

L
ately, Miriam Schrock had set her mind to finding solutions. A few nights ago, she had gone down to the kitchen, late at night, and had seen her mother at the kitchen table, answering letters from investors. She had sneaked a peek at the letters one time and found a similar theme in all of them: “Greetings in the Name of Jesus! I had $2,452.95 (or $3,497.34 or $1,496.75) . . .”—mostly amounts under $5,000. It was impressive to Mim that each letter-writer knew the figure down to the penny—“in Schrock Investments with Dean Schrock and I would like you to know I need that money very badly.” The writer would describe his or her current ailment or financial need and conclude with: “I hope and pray you can send me my money back. Thank you kindly.”

That night, Mim could see the anxiety in her mother’s face as she tucked a $10 or $20 bill in the letters. She knew what her mother was doing. Rose Schrock would pay back every cent, no matter how long it would take her. She was advised by the SEC man to not do anything until the claims had been settled. But her mother didn’t pay any attention to the advice of that SEC man. So Mim insisted that her mother keep track
of what she was paying people and created a color-coded accounting book for her. It included pages for income from the new inn, pages for outgo, pages to pay bills, and pages to keep track of payments to former investors.

Her mother was pleased and said Mim was a first-rate problem solver. That made Mim feel very happy, because she knew her mother was facing a mountain of problems. Frankly, Mim didn’t know how some of the problems created by her father’s investment company would ever get solved, but it made her feel good to help where she could.

Bethany’s suggestion was to ask the letter writers to forgive the loans. Her mother refused. She said it was a matter of honor. Those people offered the money in good faith, and in good faith, her mother would return it to them.

“Dad was the one who lost those people’s money, not you,” Bethany would respond. Her sister was angry with their father, for many reasons, mostly because of his puzzling and untimely passing. “Are you going to spend the rest of your life paying for his sins?”

Her mother always had the same answer to give. “Bethany, your father didn’t set out to hurt people. He got in way over his head and didn’t know how to find a way out of it. He got desperate. That’s why he made the decisions he made.”

That answer didn’t make any sense to Mim. Instead, she refused to think about her father. At least not about his passing. Everything about his death was complicated and illogical, and Mim liked logical and uncomplicated problems.

Besides, she had another pressing problem on her mind.

Mim had fallen in love. She did not fall in love quickly. She had been in love only 1.5 times. One time with an Irish boy named Patrick who had carrot red hair and worked at
the library near Mim’s old house. She thought that any boy who would work at a library must be a wonderful boy, even though Patrick had never noticed her. The .5 time was when she first laid eyes on Jimmy Fisher, whom Bethany called Mr. Irresistible in a sneering voice. He had made Mim breathless with his winks at church. When she discovered that he winked at all the girls, including the ancient ladies who lived in the Sisters’ House, she reversed her feelings. That was the only logical thing to do.

But then she was seated next to Danny Riehl in school last August, and she knew her heart was in trouble. Danny Riehl was the smartest, nicest boy she had ever met. He knew more facts than anyone she had ever met. She watched Danny Riehl’s long fingers curl around his book, one leg stretched out, one bent under the chair. She liked to hear him read aloud. He was at that age when a boy’s voice was especially squeaky.

Today, Teacher M.K. had asked Mim and Danny to stay late and help her take old pictures off the wall and put up new ones. When they were done, Mim and Danny were in the coatroom, gathering their overcoats, hat and bonnet, and lunch containers. Mim felt she must say something. “My mother saw a shooting star streak across the sky.”

Danny looked up in interest. Great interest. To her knowledge, he had never noticed or acknowledged Mim before that moment. “A few weeks ago? When there was a new moon?”

She nodded.

“It was a meteor.”

Dumb, she thought with a sinking feeling in her stomach. Of course it was a meteor. She should know that. It was as obvious as saying that he had a black hat on. Or both his legs ended nicely below his trousers. She searched her mind
for something better. “Astronauts can see the Great Wall of China from outer space.”

He nodded. “It’s the only man-made object that can be seen from the moon.” Danny put on his jacket, then opened up his lunch cooler. Inside was a small mouse, quiet and friendly looking. “I found it in the schoolhouse. If Teacher M.K. had seen it, she would have whacked it senseless with her broom. I’m going to set it free in a field behind the schoolhouse.” He looked at Mim. “Want to come?”

“Yes,” Mim said before he could change his mind.

They walked to a farmer’s field and Danny carefully set the mouse free near the base of a corn shock. It stayed in one place for a moment, whiskers quivering, before scurrying off. When it disappeared, he turned toward Mim. “What would you be, if you could be anything?”

Mim frowned. Was this a test? She saw an eagle circling over the pond and wondered if it was one of the eagles that had been buzzing around her farm, and if so, if it was the mister or the missus. “I suppose I might like to be an eagle.” She shielded her eyes to watch the eagle soar in the sky. “They live for thirty years and like to eat fish best of all and their nests can weigh up to two tons. And they mate for life, which I think is terribly romantic.” She cringed.
Oh no!
Why had she added that part about mating for life? Why couldn’t she have just stopped at the nest part? It’s actually true, she thought, that you could feel your own flush crawl up your neck.

But Danny didn’t seem at all embarrassed. He nodded solemnly. “Do Luke and Sammy know those facts?”

“I have told them but I don’t know if they listen.”

“Sammy, probably.”

“Yes. Sammy might be listening. Not Luke.”

“Come on,” Danny finally said, as if he had been deciding something. “I’ll show you what I want to be.”

Danny led Mim on a trail up a hill that framed one side of the lake. There was a telescope in a case, wrapped inside a big plastic trash bag, hidden in the branches of a tree. “This is a reflector telescope that my dad bought for me at a yard sale. We had to fix it up, but it’s better to use a reflector than a refractor because it uses mirrors to reflect the light, instead of lenses.”

Reflectors? Refractors? Mim had no idea what he was talking about.

Carefully, he unwrapped the telescope, set it on the ground, aimed the scope at the sky, and slipped in an eyepiece from a little velvet-lined box. “This is the best spot I’ve found for studying the planets. Usually I come at night, but lately I’ve been coming early in the morning. Looking for Saturn. It’s just starting to be visible in the east. Since I keep my scope outside but covered, it remains the same temperature as the air. Otherwise the lens can get fuzzy.”

He stepped away so she could look through the eyepiece. He had it centered on the thin moon, rising in the east. It was amazing to see it through a telescope—even in the daylight, she could see the faint tracing of the dark side of the moon.

“That’s called earthshine,” Danny said. “A few days after a new moon, when there’s just a very slim crescent, you can sometimes see earthshine on the unilluminated portion of the moon. Earthshine is caused by sunlight reflected off the earth and onto the moon.”

Fascinating facts! “I’ve never noticed earthshine before, but I’ve never looked through a telescope before, either.”

“You can use binoculars. Beginning astronomers don’t
realize they don’t need an expensive telescope. Really, just a dark night and sharp eyes. You don’t need much else.”

She straightened. “Danny, do you want to be an astronomer?”

He pushed his glasses up the ridge of his nose. He hesitated, as if he was weighing whether he should admit something of such great importance. “No. I want to be an astronaut.” He took off his hat. “Almost. I want to be almost-an-astronaut.”

The sun had already begun to set by the time Mim parted ways with Danny and walked up the driveway. There had been a spurt of snow the day before, and a little of it lingered in shady places. It crunched under her feet as she approached the house.

Her mind was filled with the moon and school and facts. Mostly she thought about Danny, stargazer and mouse rescuer. Danny with the lovely blue eyes and the glasses that were held together at the hinges with a paper clip.

Mim stood outside her mother’s room, watching her fold a mountain of laundry that was on top of her bed. Her sleeves were pushed up past her elbows, her curly brown hair wild around her face. By her mother’s feet there were laundry baskets, one piled on top of another, clothes pouring out, one basket filled to the brim with socks.

“Ah! I see you there.” Her mother smiled at her.

Ask me. Ask me about being in love.
“Hello.”

“You look as happy as Christmas morning,” her mother said, turning her attention back to the laundry basket. “You must have had a good day at school.”

Just as Mim opened her mouth to tell her about why it was a good day, about Danny Riehl and his telescope, a ringing bell sound floated up the stairs. Her grandmother needed something.

Her mother’s shoulders slumped. “Mim, would you finish folding this laundry while I tend to Mammi Vera?” She tossed a crunchy sun-dried towel to Mim and hurried down the stairs.