Butterfly Garden (2 page)

Spinster Sara, never at a loss, stilled.

Time stood as if suspended.

“The children?” she asked. “Your children?  Keep them?”

A lump, scratchy, choking, and big as a hay bale, caught in Adam’s throat. It swelled and tightened his chest. He could barely draw breath. For the sake of his children, he could not turn back. The nod he gave her was weak, but strong enough, because for the first time in his memory, the rebellious spinster looked as if she did not have all of life’s answers.

“What are you talking about?”  Even her voice trembled.

Sending his children away was the only way to protect them; his father had taught him that at least. And it had not taken half the punishment the devil doled out for him to learn it.

Just remembering brought a measure of sanity. Adam shifted and squared his shoulders. “Take them home with you. Raise them.”

Sara’s flash of almost childlike wonder turned so quickly to shock, Adam doubted seeing it, but even the possibility gave him hope. “I’ll pay you.”

“
Mein Gott
, you are mad.”

“So they say.”  Madness, he believed, ran in his family.

“You can’t mean till they’re grown.”

Forever, he prayed. “For a while . . . until I can make other arrangements.”  Until you cannot bear to let them go, he thought. It would happen. He knew it would. He only hoped Sara’s strength and determination — misplaced though it was with midwifing — worked in his children’s favor, rather than in her ability to part with them.

“If this is grief,” she said. “You have an odd way of showing it. Those children are yours. You’re their father.”

“Abby wanted you to have them.”  Adam hated the heat of embarrassment that consumed him — for the simple lie, yes, but more for the canker that created the need for lies. He wasn’t getting away with it, though. Sara’s expression demanded more. He sighed. “They need you,” which was truer than she would ever know. “They don’t need me and I don’t need them.”  Not wholly true, but close enough so it didn’t matter.

“Right. They’re just babes, not good for much. They can’t help on the farm.”

“That’s so.”  Adam turned to hide the agony clawing at his belly and climbed the stairs to his bedroom. He was aware that Sara followed, because that knife slid deeper between his shoulders.

He watched her wrap the babe tighter and lift it from the cradle, the mighty hand of fate squeezing his chest, forcing the breath again from his lungs.

Abby would have been pleased to die giving him a son, but she would have thought she failed otherwise. He had not had the heart — beyond ascertaining that the swaddled babe in his dead wife’s arms lived — to discover whether Abby had died fulfilled.

“What is it?” he asked.

The woman touching a tiny hand to her lips, the one who thought she could save the world, looked sharply up and all but hissed. “A babe. An innocent.”

Another, he could not love. “A girl,” he said, covering defect with indifference. “I guessed as much.”  He was almost glad. A boy would have made Sara stab him with the question of whether a son was worth the cost of his mother’s life.

It was not.

Adam knelt by his wife’s bed, lifted her thin, work-rough hand and turned it to stroke her callused palm with his thumb. When emotion threatened to swamp him, he reminded himself that grief and punishment must wait. Urgent matters needed settling.

Abby had promised to protect the children. Now he needed someone else to do it. Someone willful and single-minded to the point of stubbornness, someone strong — stronger than Abby. Someone who would fill their lives with butterflies and sunshine.

Spinster Sara.

Adam whispered a prayer for the dead and was surprised to hear Sara recite it with him, surprised she was still there. When he finished, he allowed his gratitude to show, but he could see she didn’t understand that he was grateful for so much more than her prayer.

* * * * *

Sara watched Adam stroke Abby’s cheek and turned from a sight too intimate to witness, her anger tempered by bafflement, her embarrassment by yearning. She had sometimes secretly longed for a husband’s touch, though never from such a husband as this.

“You think I killed her,” he said, surprising her, forcing her to gaze, again, upon the sight of a man grieving for his beloved wife, but Sara was too bewildered to answer.

“I think you’re right,” he said, and Sara knew, not the satisfaction she might have expected, but an astonishing need to offer comfort. Rather than give it, she reminded herself that this was the man who would give away his children.

Adam threw aside Abby’s blanket and cringed at so much blood. “Why?  How?” he asked, his gaze locked on the gruesome sight, his question filled with torment.

Choked of a sudden with remorse over her earlier accusation, which now appeared horribly prophetic, Sara raised her hand toward Adam’s back. But she lowered it again without making contact. A man such as he would not welcome solace, not from anyone, but especially not from her.

She saw no sign of the afterbirth. Abby had bled to death. “It wasn’t—”  Sara swallowed to soothe her aching throat. “Sometimes—”  She shook her head. “I’m not a doctor, just a midwife. It might not ... I mean it can happen with the first or tenth, close together or not. I am sorry for your loss, sorry for judging. I was wrong.”

As if he had not heard her feeble attempt at absolution — as if she had a right to give it! — Adam lifted his wife in his arms.

“What are you doing?”

Again, he seemed surprised by her presence. “Get out,” he shouted for the second time that night.

Her involuntary step back seemed to recall him to his surroundings. He shook his head as if to clear it, looked back at his wife, touched the sleeve of her bloody gown and sighed. “I need to wash and dress her for her final journey. Roman went for the casket after he fetched you.”

Sara stilled. Roman had dropped her at the end of the drive and kept going. Had he received the request for a casket before he fetched her?  Had Adam sent for her after Abby died?  It made no sense. No, she must be mistaken, as she could very well be about this man. Abby had once implied as much.

Adam placed Abby back on her bed. “Dress and feed the girls,” he said, sounding suddenly tired. “I hear them stirring.”

“Let me wash Ab. The girls will need you.”

“No!  By God they won’t!”  His fury was back with a vengeance, but it was nothing to his aversion. If he disliked his children so much, they would be better off with her. Was it because they were girls?  Boys, he had wanted, to help with the farm.

“Go to them.”  This was an order, and Mad Adam Zuckerman issued orders to be obeyed.

“I cannot take them.”  Sara wondered why she refused to accept what she’d wanted forever, children, a family — however temporary — a treasure she had almost given up hoping for.

One of the two suitors in her life had said there would be no children for her. She was as bossy as a man, he said, too bossy to bed. The other had not been as kind.

Four little girls. Oh, Lord, she wanted them as dreadfully much as she wanted to be a midwife, but she could not take them. She could not.

They were his. Not hers.

“It’s because you’ll have to give up midwifing if you take them, isn’t it?” Abby’s angry husband asked. “Giving up would be hard for a stubborn one like you.”  He looked her up and down in that icy way of his and Sara wondered how a look so cold could make her so hotly aware of her own shortcomings. “Well, what is it to be, Spinster Sara?” he asked. “Children of your own?  Or a life of watching others bear fruit while you wither on the vine?”

Another hit, more direct, more painful. Sara squared her shoulders to hide the hurt. “Even if I could take them — which I cannot — I would not give up delivering babies.”  Sometimes she felt as if she could do anything. Most times she knew better. But taking Abby’s girls away from their father was wrong. She could not help noticing that a barely-discernible discord existed between Mad Adam Zuckerman’s words and his actions, between what could be seen and heard, and what could not. Ab would have told her she wanted her to take the girls in the event something happened. Besides, Sara sensed that deep down Adam Zuckerman did not want to give away his children. So why was he?

Perhaps this was why they called him mad.

Adam sighed, in defeat or weariness, Sara could not tell. “Take them till after the funeral then. Please.”

Adam Zuckerman, pleading?  “Why me?”

He considered for too long, she thought, as if he were choosing and discarding a series of possible answers. “You have no one,” he simply said. “No one.”

Unable to bear the pain in that truth, Sara silently took the newest Zuckerman to her fast-beating heart and into the kitchen to wash, and when the babe opened her big Zuckerman eyes, Sara was lost.

Before long, the mite was clean and soft in Sara’s arms, her tiny heart-shaped mouth pursed in sleep, her full head of chestnut hair a fluff of wayward curls.

Sara shut out the pain and absorbed the pure and simple pleasure of human contact. She rocked, hummed, and savored, until four-year-old Lizzie, ranked-and-professed big-sister, barefoot, hair in her eyes, dress on backward, entered the kitchen from the enclosed stairway and came right to her. “Hi Sara, what you got?”

Before Sara could answer, from the enclosed stairway came a bit of whining and some childish Penn Dutch chatter. Then three-year-old Katie, all smiles, curly hair and big eyes, dragged Pris over. Two-year-old Priscilla, eyes downcast, pouting as usual, companion-blanket in hand, stepped behind Katie.

Sara reached over and tugged on the blanket, drawing forth the shy, sullen Zuckerman who had just been displaced as baby of the family. Pris looked, not at Sara but at the floor. Sara lowered her head to see Pris’s face, and with a whine, the child lowered hers even more.

This continued until Pris was on all fours, whining for all she was worth, brow touching the floor. What had always seemed a game to Sara disturbed her more than she would like, though she’d never followed it through to this sad conclusion before.

“Pretty Pris,” she said, not daring to touch those dark curls. And she would be pretty, Sara thought, if she were not so sulky.

With nut-brown hair and storm-gray eyes, they were, all three, the image of Adam Zuckerman. Lord, and weren’t they the most beautiful little girls in the world. Sara wanted to gather them up, hug them tight, and protect them forever.

“Where’s Mommie?” Lizzie asked.

The pain in Sara’s heart might have come from a blade, it cut so sharp. They had no Mommie anymore. They had no one. She shook her head in denial and determination. Even if she didn’t take them home with her, they had her now. Sara held the baby forward so they could see her. “Look what you’ve got. A new sister.”

“What’s her name?” Katie asked.

“I waited for you to wake up so we could name her together. Let’s each say a name, then pick the one we like best.”

“Noodle!” Katie shouted on a giggle.

But Lizzie was, as usual, serious and wise. “Can we call our baby Hannah?  Mommie said Hannah, if we got another sister.”  She ran across the kitchen. “I’ll go ask her.”  But Lizzie stopped in her tracks and stood stiff-backed and unmoving, because her father suddenly filled the entrance to the enclosed stairway.

For each of Adam’s steps into the kitchen, his oldest took one backward, never removing her gaze from his.

Sara feared he’d tell them their mother was dead in his cold, harsh way. But she needn’t have worried, he didn’t tell them anything; he just passed them by.

Katie ran after him, “Datt, Datt. My got a baby. My want Mommie, Datt. My’s hungry.”

He ignored his high-spirited daughter, the only one who did not seem afraid of him. “Sara will feed you,” he growled.

“We named the baby, Hannah!” Sara yelled at his back as the door slammed behind him. She was right. He didn’t care.

With Lizzie’s help, Sara got Katie and Pris dressed and fed, her need to weep having less to do with not knowing how to care for the girls and more to do with the joy Abby would never know.

Stooping down, Sara bundled Lizzie in her cape and bonnet to send her to the barn. “Go ask your Datt for a lambing bottle so I can feed Hannah some milk. I’ll watch you from the window.”

Shaking her wise little head, Lizzie placed her hands on each side of Sara’s face, as if she must pay strict attention. “No, Sara. Mommie will feed Hannah with her Mommie’s milk.”

Sara swallowed hard and blinked to clear her vision. She covered Lizzie’s small hands against her face with her own. “We’re going to try the bottle for Hannah. Cow’s milk will make her strong.”

 That must have made sense to Lizzie, because she nodded and skipped off on her errand.

As Sara watched the child approach the barn through the window, she touched her cheek to baby Hannah’s and let her tears fall. Behind her, Katie giggled and Pris whined.

* * * * *

In the lower level of his huge bank barn, Adam paced. Cows lowed. A mule kicked its stall. Ginger ran to and fro barking needlessly. Even the sheep in their pens bleated; the stupidest animals God created, and even they knew something was terribly wrong.

Why had he let Abby talk him into trying again for a boy?  Yes, he wanted sons. A man did need sons on a farm. Everyone knew that. But not at such a cost.

Dear God, Ab, what have I done?

She might have been content with the girls, but she thought giving him a son would make him love her. He never did succeed in making her understand that he couldn’t love anyone, for their own good.

“I do this because I love you.”  He could hear the words in his father’s voice, words he could not, would not, say to his children, not to another soul, for the cruelty doled out in their wake was not to be borne. Love. He could never dare feel it.

Abby had known and said she accepted it. She had known enough to protect the children. Now she was gone and it was his fault. He hadn’t let himself love her, and still he destroyed her.

Adam punched a hay bale, over and over, until his knuckles bled. He wanted to hit something bigger, harder, throw his whole body into the fight, but he couldn’t. Not yet. His punishment for killing Abby could wait until after her girls were settled.