A Cowboy at Heart (25 page)

Luke nodded farewell to Jonas and Butch, and then he looked at Jesse. “You take care, buddy.”

“Always.”

Luke dug his heels into the horse’s sides. They stood watching until he’d cantered out of sight.

When Jonas started toward his new cornfield where the horse and plow stood waiting, Jesse stopped him.

“You think you could teach me how to work that thing?”

Jonas’s eyebrows inched upward. “You are well enough to plow?”

Every day Jesse noticed more improvement. The waves of dizziness had stopped, though an almost constant headache still plagued him sunup to sundown. He’d finally given up on trying to shoot left handed, figuring his efforts were better spent getting his right arm back to normal.

“I figure hard work’s about the only way to regain my strength.” Jesse lifted his arm above his head to demonstrate. “Might as well make myself useful, seeing how you just lost one of your helpers.”

Jonas looked toward
Maummi
Switzer in a silent request for approval. Her answer was a shrug.

“All right, then.”

Jesse grinned. It was strange how eager he was to put his hand to a plow, the ultimate sodbuster activity. But anything was better than sitting around watching the grass grow.

And how hard could plowing be?

Jesse moaned, but then bit it off when the sound came out louder than he thought and filled the dark bedroom with proof of his aching muscles. He held still, listening for signs of activity on the other side of the door. The straw tick in this bedroom wasn’t nearly as comfortable as
Maummi
Switzer’s feather tick downstairs. He hadn’t noticed it so much in the three days since he had vacated her room and moved upstairs to what he was told used to be Rebecca’s bedroom, but before tonight his muscles hadn’t been as sore as a green bronco rider after his first rodeo.

He swallowed another groan and eased himself over onto his side. Jonas made plowing look easy, but holding that blade straight as it carved through hard soil that had never seen a plow had proved to be a skill requiring strength and endurance. When he got to the end of his first row, he’d been embarrassed to see the zigzagging furrow alongside Jonas’s straight ones. And he’d lost as much sweat today as a hot day in the saddle on a cattle trail. His back ached so that he worried he’d ripped something open in there. Finally, after two rows, Jonas had taken pity on him and set him the task of clearing the rocks unearthed by the plowshare.

His throat was drier than dirt. No way would he get back to sleep with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His aching muscles protested when he rolled over and put his feet on the cool floorboards. He glanced at the peg on the wall, where his britches and shirt hung. Nobody was up at this time of night. His long
johns would be clothing enough to get him down to the kitchen and back again.

Moving as silently as a cat on the prowl, he crept across the floor and cracked the door open. The sound of muffled snores came from two directions. Down the hall, from behind the door to the room where Butch slept, and the quieter snores that drifted up the stairway from the direction of
Maummi
Switzer’s room. He tiptoed downstairs, easing his weight onto every stair with care for a telltale creak. That woman had ears like a jackrabbit.

In the kitchen he headed for the water pitcher she kept sitting on the work surface. He filled a cup and downed it in a single draught. Still thirsty, he filled the cup a second time and drank more slowly. His thirst finally slated, he wiped the cup dry with a towel and covered the pitcher the way
Maummi
always did.

As he turned away from the high table toward the stairs, something caught his eye through the window. Moonlight illuminated the yard and glimmered off the leaves of the big tree. Branches swayed, stirred into an eerie nighttime dance by the ever-present Kansas wind. Gyrating shadows skittered across the grass. But to the left, in the direction of the barn, the black of night was relieved by an orange glow.

Jesse planted his hands on the sturdy wooden worktable and leaned forward for a better look. His stomach clenched.

“Fire!” He whirled and bolted across the room, his hands clenched into fists. “Jonas, wake up. The barn’s on fire!”

He directed his shout up the short staircase, pounding on the wall for good measure. The snores came to an abrupt halt, both from
Maummi
Switzer’s room and from upstairs. Good. He wasted no more time but sprinted for the door.

Part of his brain burned with a fury that rivaled the flames now visible through the open barn door as he ran barefooted across the grass. This was Littlefield’s doing. He didn’t doubt it for a minute. That scheming skunk had retaliated in the most cowardly way possible, striking under the cover of darkness.

He focused on the task at hand, rescuing the terrified animals who had been corralled into the barn for the night.

“Rex!”

He ran into the barn and made straight for Rex’s stall. Smoke filled the dark interior, pungent and heavy. It seeped into Jesse’s lungs, a menacing presence that threatened to steal his breath permanently. With a sickening realization, he detected another odor. Kerosene.

The horse stamped with fright, his breath snorting through his nose when he caught sight of his rider. Jesse threw open the stall door.

“Go on, boy. Get out of here!”

Rex galloped off while Jesse dashed to the second stall, where white rims showed around Big Ed’s eyes. Jesse released him too, and the horse hurried after Rex. From here he could see where the fire had started. Hay filled the barn’s upper level, dry from sitting all winter and spring, the perfect kindling. Jesse searched for the source of the orange glow. If the fire were contained to the straw, maybe they could shovel it through the high opening on the back of the barn.

No good. Though smoke billowed from the straw, he caught sight of flames licking up the wooden back wall toward the pitched roof and heard the crackle of burning wood.

A figure brushed past him toward the two stalls in the rear. Jonas.

“I’ll get this one,” Jesse shouted.

While Jonas ran to the stall on the left, he dodged right. Inside, the frightened bleating of goats drowned out the snapping fire. Jonas confined his small herd in the barn at night to keep them from
Maummi
’s vegetable garden. Jesse opened the door and the terrified animals rushed away from him to cower together at the back of the stall. He ran inside to shoo them out. They joined their brothers and sisters, released by Jonas, in a stampede for the exit.

“Get the buckets!” Jonas motioned toward the place where they were stored as he shouted, and then grabbed a pitchfork and began climbing the slat ladder.

“Be careful up there!” Jesse shouted after him, and then he lurched for the buckets.

As he exited the barn, a slender figure joined him. Butch, holding his shirt out from his stomach to form a pouch, the inside full of squirming kittens.

“Go for help!” Though the sound of the fire was not loud out here, Jesse shouted in a voice fueled by urgency. “Take Rex and ride south.” He pointed down the road toward the next Amish farm.

Butch’s gaze darted to the barn. “The saddle’s in there.”

“There’s no time for saddles. Just go.” Jesse put a hand on his back and gave a gentle shove in the direction of the road as he continued running toward the pump. “And tell them to bring buckets.”

“Yes, sir.”

The boy scrambled toward the porch with the kittens, yelling for Rex. He passed
Maummi
Switzer, who ran at a speed Jesse
wouldn’t have thought possible for a woman her age. She rushed forward and thrust a bundle into his arms.

“Here.”

Jesse realized she’d handed him his clothes and boots. He’d forgotten he was only wearing his skivvies. Grinning his thanks, he turned the task of filling the buckets over to her while he pulled on his britches.

It seemed as though half of Apple Grove showed up to help the Switzers put out the fire. The first wagon arrived in what felt like only minutes after Butch galloped away on Rex. Before long a parade of buggies and wagons, the horses trotting at top speed, began arriving. Men and women alike formed a solid line from the pump to the burning barn, buckets passed from hand to hand as quickly as they could be filled. Even the children helped by running empty buckets from the barn back to the pump. The Amish of Apple Grove worked tirelessly, calling directions to each other and to those inside the barn struggling against the flames.

They would have succeeded in putting out the fire if the people who started it hadn’t saturated the entire upper level of the barn with kerosene.

Finally, when it became obvious that their efforts would prove ineffectual, Jonas called a halt. Amish men, their clothes covered with ash and reeking of smoke, filed outside, coughing and taking in great draughts of clean air. The task at that point became ensuring that the flames did not spread to the house, a frightening
prospect that appeared all too possible due to the winds. Sparks flew on the breeze, a few coming dangerously close to the upper floor of the Switzer home.

Jesse sat in the grass beneath an apple tree, his back leaning against the rough bark, and watched the men on the roof of the house pouring water down the siding. Around him were scattered half a dozen men in various poses of rest. His limbs felt heavy, and exhaustion vibrated through his veins. The sun had not yet risen, but the sky in the east was beginning to lighten. A day of plowing and hefting rocks, little sleep, and then several hours of frantic work were taking its toll. His eyelids closed against his will.

“Would you like a drink?”

He pried his eyes open at the soft, familiar voice. Standing above him, a pitcher in one hand and a cup in the other, stood Katie. She smiled, and for a moment Jesse thought surely he was caught up in a dream.

“Thirsty?” She offered him the cup.

He took it, embarrassed when his hand trembled as she filled it from the pitcher. Water sloshed onto his pants.

“Sorry. Guess I’m kind of tired.”

“You are well?” She searched his face, her expression concerned. “Your shoulder is hurting?”

He heaved a laugh. “No more than the rest of me.”

The water quenched a powerful thirst he hadn’t realized until that moment. He would have downed it quickly, but then she might leave and move on to the next thirsty man. He lowered the cup, still half full, but did not return it to her. Instead, he used it to gesture toward the men at work around the house.

“Pretty amazing, the way everybody showed up to help.”

“Amazing?” She shook her head. “It is what we do, we Amish. The need of one is the need of us all.”

“I thought it was only Jonas who felt that way, back when I first met him.” His gaze followed the tireless workers. “I’m beginning to see that there are others like him.”

“
Ja,
it is our way. If two are stronger than one, as
die Bibel
says, then how much stronger are one hundred?”

“I have to say, that sounds better than the way most folks behave.” He ducked his head toward the barn. “Folks who’d pull a stunt like this would stoop to anything.”

Startled, Katie followed his gaze. “This fire was not an accident?”

Jesse answered with a bitter laugh. “Not unless you can think of a way kerosene would accidently get spread over hay and a match struck.”

She regarded him with round, solemn eyes. “It was the
Englisch
man who wants Jonas’s farm?”

“I think that’s a safe bet.” He spotted a man breaking away from the others and heading in their direction. Bishop Miller. And judging by the rigid set of his spine and his jerky pace, he wasn’t happy.

He got to his feet so he could look Katie in the face as he spoke quietly, aware that they had only a minute before they were interrupted. “Katie? Have you ever considered leaving Apple Grove?”

“Leaving? This is my home.”

“I know, but…” Behind her, the bishop stalked toward them. Jesse spoke in a rush. “Not only leaving Apple Grove, but leaving the Amish. You know, like Emma and Rebecca.”