Accidentally Amish (7 page)

“Don’t you need his help?” Sophie asked.

“Yes I do,” Rufus said. “I just don’t want him to get hurt again.”

“You pay him to taxi you, don’t you?” Sophie said.

“Yes, of course.”

“Then if you don’t ask him to drive you, you won’t be paying him, and you’ll hurt his business.”

Rufus tilted his head. “Maybe it’s better if he only taxis for us when we have appointments, and he should not carry my lumber.”

“That’s up to him to decide,” Lydia said.

“If you don’t ask him, you’ll have to find someone else,” Sophie said. “And who will want to taxi for you if they think it’s dangerous?”

Rufus looked from one sister to the other. “When did you two get so smart?”

“What is the dress for?” Jacob asked before shoveling more oatmeal into his mouth.

“What dress?” Franey asked.

“The pupel um,” Jacob mumbled.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

Jacob swallowed dramatically. “The purple one. I saw it in the barn this morning when I watered the animals.”

Rufus blanched.

“What is he talking about?” Franey asked her eldest son.

“
Verhuddelt.”
A mix-up. Rufus pushed his chair back from the table. “I’ll see.”

He was out the back door before his mother or sisters could say more. Offering Ruth’s dress to Annalise had been a silly gesture in the first place, but leaving the garment in the barn was sheer foolishness. Rufus went directly to the empty stall and picked it up, still neatly folded.

Rufus blew out his breath.
Hochmut.
His own pride would not let him walk through the house with the dress now and stir up another round of questions. In fact, he did not want to go back inside the house at all, preferring to let the incident fade from notice. Instead, he laid the dress between two buggy blankets on a shelf just inside the entrance to the barn.

Out of sight, out of mind
, he told himself as he turned to take Dolly’s bridle off the hook. He had work to do.

Annie squinted at the digital readout on the clock next to the bed. 8:36. She sat up immediately. The business day was well under way, and she was losing time with sleep. As she swung her feet over the side of the bed and raked fingers through her loose hair, a rumbling stomach reminded her that breakfast would end in less than a half hour. If she missed the motel’s fare, she would lose even more time walking to town in search of food.

Annie pulled on the jeans and T-shirt from the day before, splashed water onto her face, ran a brush through her hair, and went in search of food, which theoretically would be available for another seventeen minutes.

Annie closed the door behind her, not bothering to lock it since she left nothing of value. She kept her shoulder bag with her at all times. Paranoid or not, she was not going to leave her computer unattended. She moved down the porch toward the lobby, unsure what to expect after yesterday’s crash. Pieces of shelves lay stacked in one corner, and assorted tools suggested a carpenter was already on-site. Annie moved through the lobby toward the small dining room where she presumed breakfast awaited. Despite the noises in her stomach, food held little appeal, but when would she have another opportunity to eat? That depended on the result of phone calls she had yet to make and e-mails she had yet to read. The attorneys on her list were now ranked in order of preference. If she could get hold of them, she would interview all three by phone before making a decision, but she was determined to have someone on her side before the end of the day.

A few motel guests sat at small tables under the wall-mounted television, which was blaring morning news. A small girl played under a table, humming as she bounced a rubber ball. The food counter looked picked over, but the coffee’s fragrance was robust. She drifted toward the dated fifty-four-cup urn just like the ones she used to see at church. She found a large Styrofoam cup with a plastic lid and instantly made the decision to take food back to the room. Eating between business actions was a familiar habit. A whole-wheat bagel smeared with cream cheese and a banana would round out a breakfast she was certain she could carry. At the last minute, she also dropped an apple into her bag for later. With the bag over her shoulder, coffee in one hand, and the bagel and banana in the other, Annie smiled absently at her fellow guests and headed back through the lobby.

When she saw Rufus Beiler line up his measuring tape on the wall, Annie’s brain flashed the command to back out the other direction, and in that instant of hesitation, a rubber ball rolled from the dining room and under Annie’s foot.

When her feet went out from under her, instinctively she let go of her breakfast and clutched her bag, making sure her computer would not take the first hit of the fall. Her head slammed the door frame between dining room and lobby, and when she hit the floor, she was flat on her back. Her first thought was whether she had smashed her phone. The next was that manufacturers of Styrofoam cups should make lids that stayed on during perilous descent.

“Ow! That’s hot!” she screamed into Rufus Beiler’s face as he kneeled over her. And then she understood why the old cartoons showed characters seeing stars when they hit their heads.

September 1737

S
he never imagined such a wicked wind, nor the number of times they would huddle in it, hardly able to breathe for its force and feeling as though their knees would buckle.

Verona Beyeler put one hand to her mouth and extended the other to touch her husband’s elbow. She meant to hide both her horror at the sight and the nausea that hit whenever she came up on deck, as she steadied herself against Jakob’s solid form. The ship rolled on the rhythmic, swishing swells of the North Atlantic, its sails strung at carefully calculated heights and angles. Verona avoided looking up at the towering masts for fear that dizziness would toss her over the railing. The day had been bright. Only in the last thirty minutes did the dismal overcast fittingly claim the horizon.

A gust snatched the corner of Verona’s shawl, sending it flapping, and instinctively she let go of Jakob to retrieve it and clench it back into place. Jakob’s head turned for a moment at her gesture, and then his eyes returned to the small shrouded bundle on the board. Verona tugged the strings of her prayer
kapp
to be sure it could not come loose as well.

Not another child. She did not know this child’s mother well, and for the moment she did not let herself feel the woman’s heartache. As they stood among the dark-clad mourners, about a dozen, she felt the weight of the group. Sorrow turned to numbness rapidly on these occasions, which were far too frequent.

A man’s voice droned words Verona did not want to hear. The wind swallowed most of them, for which Verona was grateful. The children began dying before the ship even left Rotterdam, starting with Hans Kauffmann’s little girl. Five more died during the nine days in port at Plymouth. Now they were in the middle of the ocean, and the dying continued. The youngest children seemed the most vulnerable. Already more than twenty children had succumbed to measles and smallpox. Adults who would not forsake caring for their children fell as well. Hans Zimmerman’s son-in-law died, depriving him not only of a beloved family member but a practical laborer with whom to homestead. Jakob and Hans were already conniving to claim land next to each other—now with one less man to work the acres.

According to Charles Stedman, captain of the
Charming Nancy
, land was still at least two weeks away, perhaps three. Verona’s own five children occupied her hands almost constantly, but her mind was free to fill with dread.

The child on the board now could not be more than two years old. Lisbetli’s age. If Verona had seen the bundle lying idly on the deck, she might have mistaken it for tightly wadded bedding waiting for the wash.

Two men picked up the board, balancing one end on the deck’s railing. Fathers put on their hardened faces, and mothers pulled scarves up to hide quivering lips. The droning man pronounced his final words, and the two attending the board gently tipped the end up to an acute angle. The bundle lost grip and slid. A few seconds later came the slight splash, barely noticeable in the wake of the ship.

The mother’s wail rent the air but was soon stifled.

Verona turned and once again reached for Jakob, this time with a gasp. Behind them stood two of their daughters. At eleven, Anna was a help with the younger children, but at five, Maria demanded unceasing attention.

“How long have they been there?” Jakob asked softly.

Verona shook her head. Unless the girls could not see past the mourners, they would have seen the body go into the sea, not a memory she wished for them.

“The sickness is not a secret,” Jakob murmured. “Anna is old enough to know what happens, and Maria will probably forget what she saw.”

Verona was not so sure. As the funeral onlookers dispersed, she stepped across the deck as steadily as she could manage and reached her daughters.

“What are you two doing up here?” she asked.

“Maria got away,” Anna explained. “Maria always gets away. She was halfway up the ladder before I saw her.”

Verona planted a kiss on the top of Maria’s head. “Go back below. It’s cold up here, and the sun has gone away.” She would not ask what they saw and make them unnecessarily curious.

“Can we come back later?” Maria asked.

“Maybe. If the sun comes out. Now go down to our berths.” Verona touched both girls at the shoulders to turn them around and sent them back to where they had come from. “See if Barbara needs help with Christian and Lisbetli.
Daed
and I will be down in a few minutes.”

She felt Jakob’s presence behind her and turned to meet his gray eyes. “Tomorrow it could be Christian bundled up on a board.”

“It won’t be,” Jakob said.

“You can’t promise me that. He’s been sick for two weeks.”

“He’s getting better or you would not have left him alone with Barbara,” Jakob pointed out.

“If we had stayed in the Palatinate, he would not be sick.”

“You don’t know that,” Jakob said. “The first children who got sick were probably infected before we boarded in Rotterdam. You know I’m right.”

“But at least the children would have had fresh air and some decent food. That might have kept him well. Maybe it was a mistake to come.”

Jakob took Verona’s face in his hands and captured her violet eyes. “It was no mistake. We made this decision together. We cannot practice our faith in Europe without putting ourselves in danger. Christian would grow up to be drafted into one war or another, and I can’t take that chance. We barely have enough money to make a fresh start now. If we had waited any longer, I hate to think what we would have faced.”

Verona said nothing, her eyes no longer meeting his.

“William Penn’s sons offer us a new life,” Jakob continued. “The process takes time, but it is fairly straightforward. We can afford more land than we could ever hope for in Europe, even if others would have left us alone and let us believe what the Bible says.”

“I have heard stories of people waking up in their berths to find someone dead beside them.” Even thinking about it, Verona felt the feverish heat of Christian’s skin as he lay next to her during her nightly vigil to assure herself he had not gone cold.

With one hand, Jakob gestured widely to the open sea. “There is no turning back, Verona. We have to see this through.”

“At any cost?”

“Leaving Switzerland was the best choice for us. You know it was. Anywhere in Europe, life for true believers is unbearable. The Romans and the Lutherans will never accept the Anabaptists.”

“We were both baptized when we were babies,” Verona said. “Are you sure we had to be baptized again? Are you sure we have to separate from the world?”

“Why all these sudden doubts?” Jakob tugged at the strings of her
kapp.
“Have I ever asked you to believe something you did not know in your heart to be true?”

Verona shook her head. The bun of brown hair at the base of her neck wobbled.

“We chose this together,” Jakob said. “We chose our faith. We joined the church because we wanted to. We chose this new life.”

“I did not know it would be this hard.” Verona’s voice cracked. “And we are not even there yet.” The dreary horizon now carried rain. She could feel it spattered in the wind.

“We will have
land
, Verona,” Jakob said. “I will build you a beautiful home. I will open a tanyard. We will grow acres and acres of food for the children. William Penn’s vision was for a place where people could come to live peaceably and worship according to their conscience. We will have a good life.”

Verona swallowed hard. “If Christian dies—”

He put a finger to her lips and shook his head. “He won’t. He will clear fields at my side. He will grow up to inherit our land and have a good life. Perhaps he will become the first Amish bishop to come of age in the English colonies!”

Verona smiled at the thought.

Jakob gently nudged her out of the path of two families approaching on deck.