Arms of Love (37 page)

Adam saw that the furniture in the keeping room had been moved out and that about a nine-by-twelve-foot space on the floor had been painted a cheerful pumpkin color already. He watched John completing the stencil sketch on the space and was amazed at the boy’s talent.

Jars of paint in red, blue, yellow, and black surrounded the area, and Lena sat on the floor beside her brother with a round bristled brush in her hand.

Adam decided he might as well make the most of the last time he would see Lena. He grabbed a brush from a nearby table and eased himself down next to her. She looked at him with a soft smile on her lips. He longed to tell her that he was leaving, but he was content simply in that moment to sit by her . . . to see her familiar and beautiful eyes and the tempting tendril of hair that always worked itself loose from her prayer covering.

The painting began in earnest, with even his mother wielding a brush. Jars of paint were teasingly fought over, and the design began to take wonderful shape. Then Adam noticed that Lena’s hair had somehow become dipped in the red paint. He reached an automatic hand to the curl, then froze as if the earth had opened up before him and he teetered on some precipice between truth and sanity. He fell . . . vast, wrenching depths that snagged at his mind and tore like splinters from a rock face. He made a strangled sound of despair in his throat as the scene flooded back to him with utter clarity. He was standing in snow, staring at a lock of blond hair across a man’s chest, tainted with blood . . .

Somehow he got to his feet and dropped the brush.

He staggered from the farmhouse and down the wooded road; he felt devastated and moved as though his body belonged to someone else and he was but a mere captive to the space he occupied with each step. In some distant, alive corner of his mind, he sensed that Lena longed to follow him, but everything seemed to be swallowed into the dream that took slow formation of reality in the shock of his mind.
His father was a murderer . . . and he himself, a young boy, had helped to dig the victim’s grave
. . .

Adam finally collapsed to his knees and stared up at the blue of the sky between the treetops. He wondered with fleeting awareness how the earth could continue to move, how the sky could be normal when he felt as though all that he knew of his world was crashing apart in bloodied fragments of consciousness. A hoarse, primal cry came from the back of his throat as he stared at the sky. “
Gott
! Dear
Gott
in heaven! Help me! Help me!” And then, from the depths of his heart, something Dale had said reverberated through his body, and he cried out once more. “Dear Lord, help my fater!”

Chapter 33

L
ena ignored the mingled stares of her family and her betrothed as she hurried to the door, which Adam had left gaping behind him.

Then she heard the heart echo within that compelled,
nee
, commanded her as clearly and loudly as a bell on a crisp autumn day.
Go! Go after him
! And she knew the blessing and freedom to follow her heart.

“I beg of you all,” she called as she gained the open door, “forgive me, but I must follow him.” Her eyes swept Isaac and her fater for one blazing moment of truth. “I must always follow him.”

She spoke with ringing clarity, then closed the door as she raced across the porch and down the steps.

“Well, now, here’s a fine pickle.” Ruth stood and clapped her hands together, feeling like she should do something in the abject quiet of the room. “Who wants more cookies?”

“Uh . . . ya . . . cookies.” Ellen Wyse took up the trail. “Children?”

But John and Abby sat transfixed, their mouths slightly open.

Bishop Mast cleared his throat. “Well, now may be an opportune time, Isaac Wyse, for us to talk about your future goals. I understand that you desire to serve the Lord as a bishop one day.”

The gaze of the room swung to Isaac, who was sitting on the floor, frozen, with a blue-tipped paintbrush dripping onto the knee of his breeches. “
Ya
. . . a bishop.”

“Hmm . . .” Bishop Mast stroked his beard. “Since your impending nuptials seem to have taken a turn for the . . . er . . . difference, might I invite you to accompany me instead, and study as is proper training for a man aspiring to your position?”

Isaac’s face took on a reverent glow from Ruth’s perspective. He dropped the brush and rose to his feet in excitement. “You mean it?”

“I never say what I do not mean,
buwe
. Of course I mean it. We travel by mule far and deep into the mountains. I have sort of a base home in a small cabin, where an elderly woman and her granddaughter tend to me as the widow did with the old prophet in the Bible. You will have to be willing to face hardships, though. Closed folks and troubles.”

“When can we leave?”

“Isaac,” Ellen Wyse gasped, clearly confused by the rapid-fire turn of events.

“It is all right,
Mamm
. This is what I have been praying for, hoping for . . . You know that.”

“But what about Lena?” she said.

Isaac laughed, the sound seeming to break the spell that held the room. “She loves Adam,
Mamm
. Always has. Always will. And I find that I would rather have a
gut
friend of a
bruder
than the half heart of a wife.”

Samuel spoke up clearly. “
Ya
, ’tis right. Only I was too prideful to admit it, except to Adam and Lena.
Gott
has His hand on this day, to be sure, and I will not interfere.”

Ruth smiled at him, then moved to pat Ellen’s shoulder. “Come, have some hot cider.”

And then the room was an excited babble of talk and questions as Ruth served the soup, praying silently that Lena and Adam would return home soon.

He heard her soft voice from somewhere far away, like an echo in a dark cave, and he tried to cling to the sound.

“Adam . . .
ach
, what has happened?”

He felt her touch his shoulder, an ocean away, as he rocked himself back and forth on his knees. His words came haltingly, broken and forlorn.

“We were hunting . . . my father and I.”

“Today. For the panther? I did not know.”

He shook his head and felt the roaring in his ears level to a muffled drone, like he’d heard in a seashell once.

“I was nine. Just nine. We hunted, but found nothing . . . until him.”

He saw her blue eyes level with his own, swimming with tears, concern. He wanted to be lost in the blueness, swallowed whole, but the scene kept playing out with relentless profusion in his mind.

“Him?” she asked.

“
Ya
,” he sobbed, then began to talk as if outside himself, telling a story like a distant narrator, saying his own name as though it did not belong to him . . .

“Run back to the farm, sohn. Now.”

Nine-year-old Adam knew better than to hesitate when his father gave him an order, but there was something wrong with the moment that stilled his feet in their snow-covered moccasins. He and Fater had been hunting without success for nearly an hour when Adam heard the rustling in the underbrush. He’d readied his small bow and looked to his father for direction.

Then a trapper, dressed in bloodstained buckskins and a coon cap, had stepped from the woods, and the sunlight caught on a long golden lock of hair tied to a thin piece of leather hanging outside the rough man’s cloak. There was no mistaking the hair. Adam’s
mamm
had hair that rivaled sunshine in full summer—not that she ever revealed it unbound to any but the family. But a drifting trapper had torn her hair covering from her head and cut a lock from her waist-length curls when she’d been alone in the farmhouse nearly a week ago. She hadn’t been hurt, only badly frightened. The family had counted it merciful that Fater had returned from the fields when he did, leaving the intruder to flee without a trace.

“Adam.”

Fater
’s voice held a low undertone of warning, and Adam hastened to turn, though he wanted badly to stay and see what might be said between the two men. Of course, he knew that only words would be exchanged, and the attack most likely forgiven. It was the steadfast way of his people not to retaliate against evil or take up arms to hurt another. The Amish followed the way of Christ—but Adam didn’t know if the trapper cared about such things.

He decided to hurry as he trudged back through the snow to fetch his older brother, Isaac, whom
Fater
had told to stay at home with
Mamm
. But he’d gone no more than thirty feet through the vast forest when the strangled groan of a man reached his ears. His heart began to pound as he turned back, running as fast as he could, terrified for his father’s sake. He staggered into the small clearing, gasping, then stopped dead still.

The trapper lay on the ground, crying out, in a widening pool of crimson against the white of the snow.
Fater
was stabbing the man with his great hunting knife again and again. The trapper’s groans turned to choking gurgles, and then there was no sound but the wind through the pines.
Fater
leaned back on his heels, the bloodied knife still in his hand. He looked up and saw his son.