Butterfly Garden (26 page)

“Butterflies?” Lena looked as if her heart took to beating double as Katie dragged them into the yard.

Lena took Sara’s hand in a grasp that hurt when she saw the children around the large stone-lined ring of plants. “Is that ... is it—”

“A butterfly garden,” Lizzie said. “Datt planted it special the day I was born, Mommie said.” Lizzie looked at Sara with suddenly wide and regretful eyes. “Our first Mommie, I mean.”

Sara kissed Lizzie’s kapped head. “I know, Sweetheart.”

“Did your Mommie tell you why your Datt planted such a garden?” Lena asked, almost begging for an answer, but Lizzie shook her head.

“I will tell you then.” Eyes bright, Lena knelt in the grass and took the three girls into the circle of her arms. “When your Datt was a very little boy—small as you, Pris—I planted a butterfly garden for him, because your Datt was a sad little boy, and I ... I was not strong enough to make him smile. I wasn’t even strong enough to tell him I loved him, so I planted a butterfly garden to show him that I did. Butterflies are a sign of God’s healing, and he needed lots of healing back then, your Datt.” She looked up at Sara. “I think he still does, but I believe that he has found the one who can heal him, except that he does not know it yet.”

Sara’s heart filled with hope at her mother-in-law’s words, and she knelt beside them in the grass. “Tell me about this butterfly garden your Datt planted,” she asked Lizzie. “Did he ever tell you anything about it.”

Katie knelt at the edge of the well-tended ring, her curls breaking free of her kapp, her beautiful little face lit from within. “Datt says this one will bring the pretty blue butterfly over there.”

“The Azure butterfly,” Lizzie said, kneeling beside her younger sister. “And this is a Juneberry for the Banded Purple butterflies. And that heart-shaped plant is a bleeding heart, my favorite because of all the little hearts hanging from it.

The bleeding heart ... a beautiful and sad flower, Sara thought, its name alone a reminder of the girls and their father, with hearts in need of healing.

“The butterflies go away in the winter,” Katie said sadly. “But they come back to our garden every year.”

“Butterfly bush,” Pris said, shaking a fragrant bush with spiked lavender flowers and making Sara and Lena laugh.

“She’s right,” Lizzie said. “That’s what it’s called. Painted ladies come for that flower.”

“Yes,” Sara said. “But will butterflies come?”

Lena thought her grandchildren’s giggles somehow charmed even the butterflies flitting about them.

“We’ll have to bring Hannah out here and teach her about the butterfly garden too,” Sara said. “I need to learn too.”

“You can learn later,” Lena said, taking her arm again. We need to talk.” She turned to her oldest granddaughter. “Teach Pris for a while, then come inside for lunch. Your Mommie and I have something to discuss.”

Inside the house, to Sara’s surprise, Lena’s joy disappeared. Rather than begin the discussion she spoke about, she became pensive and quiet.

Sara sensed the need to be quiet, also, so she brewed some peppermint tea and poured it before she spoke. “I have been meaning to ask you, Lena, why Adam thought you were dead. I’ve asked him, but he doesn’t answer.”

Lena sighed and took her hand. “Let me tell you first that Adam does not dislike his children. He loves them. He just doesn’t know it.”

“I would like to believe that, Lena, but—”

“There is proof. We just saw it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I planted him a butterfly garden to show him my love, knowing that the garden and the butterflies would say it for me every spring.”

“Lena, why didn’t you just tell Adam you loved him?”

“Because I could not, not without causing him harm.”

“That makes no sense—”

“Shh. Listen. I believe Adam planted his butterfly garden for the same reason I planted mine, to tell his children he loved them. His father, the man I foolishly married, was not a good man,
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, not like our Adam is. Amos demanded perfection, even from a child. And for a child who stammered and had a frail body, like Adam, he had no patience. Worse than that, he was cruel. He told Adam he was unfit for farming, that he was worthless. Amos would get so mad with Adam’s stuttering, he hurt the child in his determination to force him to stop the bad habit.

“Adam got whipped, Sara. He got his fingers crushed in doors, his toes crushed under the very rocker his father sat in.”

Sara was too shaken by such cruelty to speak.

“He got locked in the smokehouse, the outhouse, overnight, summer or winter. He has scars, on his body, and sometimes, I fear, deeper.”

Sara rose to hide her shock and disgust, not only at Adam’s father, but at his mother as well. But she could not hold her feelings back. “How could you allow such cruelty?  How could you let your husband hurt your own son?”

“Adam was always strong, strong enough to endure—”

“You just said he was frail.”

“Of body, he was, back then, but not of mind. He was stronger than Emma, at least.”

Sara caught her breath. “Her father is why she fears men?  Because of beatings?” As if that were nothing, Sara thought, and yet, anything worse was impossible to imagine, let alone voice.

“Because of beatings, only. Amos was cruel, but he was not … sick—”

“Oh, but he was, Lena. He was.”

Lena paled to the color of flour paste and a forlorn sob escaped her. “He beat her, only, and never badly, not like he beat Adam. Adam saw to that. But Adam looks now like Amos did then and I think that’s why Emma is afraid of him. When Adam is angry, it is his father’s temper for certain that he struggles with, yet it is not so bad as my husband’s was.”

“Couldn’t you have gone to the Elders and told them what your husband did?”

“They would never have believed that the pious Amos Zuckerman could harm his children. I feared being shunned for lying or disrespect to my husband. I could not take the chance. If I was right and I had been shunned, Amos would have had control over the children and my protection would have been removed from Emma. Adam was strong enough to bear his father’s anger. But even you can see that Amos would have broken Emma.” Lena sobbed again. “Maybe even killed her.”

As much sorrow for Lena as for her son and daughter rose up in Sara and she embraced her mother-in-law. “You have lived in hell, I think, but you are safe now with us. Emma too.”

Lena stepped back and raised her chin. “You would have been proud to see how little Adam turned his father’s fury away from his smaller sister and pulled it toward himself. He proved he was strong in the way he drew his father’s anger and allowed himself to be beaten so Emma was not.”

If it were possible, Sara fell more deeply in love with her big, bad, mad husband, though he was no longer any of those things to her. He was a good man who had suffered in his life and was suffering still. Now, only his heart she saw as big, and the ‘mad’ she had taken into her own heart for what he had suffered. “Tell me about the butterfly garden,” Sara said, sitting, patting the chair beside her at the table.

“I was afraid if I interfered between Adam and his father, Adam would have clung to me, making Amos see him as weaker still, and more in need of a strong hand. I told Adam the butterflies brought sunshine and healing because I didn’t know how else to tell him that all things ugly pass and God’s beauty reigns in the end.”

“Adam was only five when you left him with your husband. What made you do such a thing, leave him, I mean?”

Lena sighed. Her hands shook. “My sister was ill, dying alone. I went to care for her, despite Amos warning me not to. Adam tells me his father said I took Emma and left for good. It made my son hate me, and with cause. Within the week, Amos told him we died in a carriage accident and he brought Adam here to Ohio.”

Lena’s face looked suddenly ravaged, old, her look begging forgiveness, understanding. “All these years I looked for my son, and now I have found him, only to find, as well, the horror I wrought with my own weakness.”

Sara took Lena’s hand and squeezed it. “I understand, in a way, why you could not tell Adam you loved him, why you planted a butterfly garden for him. But why can’t Adam just tell his girls he loves them, if, as you say, he does?  Why does he need a butterfly garden?”

Sara went to gaze out the window. Three beautiful little girls were chasing the butterflies their father had all but provided. Then she envisioned that same man giving them away. “Why, for heaven’s sakes was he willing to give those beautiful babies to me, if he loved them?”

“I don’t know,” Lena said, the words a cry of torment. “I wish to God I did.”

* * * * *

While Adam was gone, Sara and Lena spent time every day with the girls in the butterfly garden. One morning the ‘rat-a-tat’ of a woodpecker caught their attention. Lena took the girls to the tree and they saw the bird fly up to a nest in its upper branches. Lena told them the mother woodpecker likely expected little ones soon and maybe they would be able to show her babies to their Datt when he returned.

Sara learned all she could about the plants that brought butterflies. Some were feeder plants for the caterpillars to eat. Some were bright and showy to attract particular species.

The first time Sara actually saw scores of butterflies, all at once, she and the children sat right down in the grass to watch. They were beautiful, the butterflies, that is. Her children were beautiful too, their eyes aglow, rapt and eager to watch and study the bright creatures, as if storing new bits of knowledge to share with their father later.

He was a good man, their father. Sara knew it, even if Adam did not. He had put his own well-being in jeopardy to save a family in a blizzard. He had put even his horses’ safety before his own, leaving them with that family, making it necessary for him to walk for miles on his bad leg. Then, without a second thought, he had walked even further that same night, sick as he was, to save her life as well.

As to why he had hit that father for abusing his son; there was no question in her mind that he did it for the child, to save him, and his sisters and brothers, from further beatings. Now he was taking them and their mother to safety.

From the good and generous boy who had taken abuse onto his own shoulders in his sister’s place, had come a good and generous man. A loving man.

His sister loved him, the memory of him as a boy, that was. Now, either she feared that Adam was like their abusive father, or she thought he
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their abusive father. If the first case were true, eventually she would learn that Adam was gruff, but gentle, loud but kind. If the latter were true, Sara didn’t know if they could ever make her understand.

Pris’s giggles brought Sara back to the half-circle she and the girls made around the butterfly garden. It didn’t take her long to notice, following Pris’s pointing finger, that Hannah, sitting in her lap, had a butterfly perched on her kapp.

“What kind of butterfly is it?” Sara softly asked so as not to frighten the winged beauty.

“A Monawk,” Pris said.

“Right, a Monarch,” Lizzie said. “That’s good, Pris.”

“A bright orange butterfly that thinks Hannah is a big white flower,” Sara said.

Katie doubled over with laughter.

Pris lay in the grass and folded her hands on her chest. “My’s a flower too.”

“My too. Lizzie too.” Excited, Katie lay down beside her sister, and Lizzie shrugged and reclined as well.

Sara was chuckling at the three of them, side by side in the grass, when she looked up to see Adam standing there watching them. Watching her. Lord and didn’t the sight of him pound her heart and weaken her knees?  Seven long weeks he had been gone.

Handsome, Lena had called him. Ya, he was that. And big too, especially of heart. And the dearest man Sara had ever known. She was so happy to see him, she swallowed so she wouldn’t weep for missing him. She also kept herself from jumping up to throw herself in his arms. Somehow, she didn’t think he’d want that … then again, from the look in his eyes, she might be wrong.

Maybe, like her, he yearned for a few things he didn’t dare reveal, even to himself, which possibility, she would ponder at another time.

“I have been learning about butterfly gardens,” Sara said. “The girls have been teaching me. And look here at the baby.” Sara pointed to the tiny little kapped head where the Monarch sat, wings spread wide, sunning itself. “This butterfly thinks Hannah is a pretty white flower.”

The girls, solemn, unsmiling, had all sat up to watch their Datt, the look in their eyes much like his right now, as if they wanted things they could not name and were afraid to breathe, they wanted them so badly.

“Look, Datt,” Katie said pointing to the huge old oak not too far distant. “There is a woodpecker in those branches, building a nest. I think she will have some little peckers soon.”

Adam’s eyes actually twinkled.

“Come,” Sara said on a chuckle, extending her hand to him. “Come and sit by me and teach your wife and your daughters more about butterflies.”

Adam came and sat so close, his shoulder brushed hers, and she knew it was not an accidental touch, but one born of yearning.

To tell him she understood and shared his need, Sara nudged him back and ended up staying that way, shoulders touching. When he turned to face her, silent, wide eyed, as if he didn’t believe her response, Sara made so bold as to kiss his cheek. “I missed you.”

Adam looked down at his hands. Sara regarded them as well. Beefy, big-knuckled hands, trembling like a leaf in a breeze, hands that would never hurt a child.

To prove it, Sara placed the baby in them. “Hannah missed you too.”

Startled, Adam grasped his tiny daughter as if she were made of spun glass, panic a near thing.

Sara refused to give into her inclination and take Hannah back. “Don’t worry; she won’t break.”

“My missed you too, Datt,” Katie said, from right beside him. She bent to kiss his cheek too. Then she sat on his leg, put her arm around his neck and her head on his shoulder.

Hannah, still in his lap, batted Katie’s kapp-strings making the both of them giggle.