Butterfly Garden (34 page)

It humbled Adam that Sara might have chosen the fancy medical man to marry, but she had chosen him, instead, a big,
dummkopf
Amishman.

“I love you,” he whispered against her hair as he took her into his arms for the first time in two days. “Don’t leave me again, please. Ever.”

Sara smiled through happy tears. “I never will. Can we go home, now?”

Within the hour, they pulled up to the front, rather than the back of the house. “What is going on?” Sara asked when she saw all the carriages.

Adam shook his head as he took his bundled son from her arms and helped her get down, then he handed his boy back and walked her up the front walk.

Once again, like on the night Abby died, she stood at the base of the porch steps, and for a long minute she hesitated, overwhelmed by the gifts she had been given, and especially by the cost. But the door to her home stood open in welcome, and inside, she saw, people were waiting.

Sara entered and stopped. In her best room, all but empty of furniture, save the chairs against the walls, sat Bishop Weaver, Roman, Lena, and Emma. But on the cleared floor sat a number of women, Amish and English alike, and as many—more—children, babies, dolls even.

Mercy gave her a smile that eased the guilt Sara felt for holding her own healthy newborn. She was grateful Jordan had convinced her the triplets could not have survived under any conditions. Gossypium root bark might actually have given them half a chance, Jordan said, had the boys been bigger or stronger.

As if reading her, Mercy reached out, and Sara took her hand and squeezed it, before she turned to her other guests. “I am so glad to see you all, but what are you doing on the floor?”

“Saramay and I are among the women you helped and the babies you delivered,” Mercy said. “Hetty, Lydia, and everyone here are your successes, Sara. We wanted you to see how many altogether. Not everyone could come, though.”

“The dolls,” Adam said, “are for the babies you will never deliver if you do not remain a midwife. Imagine missing all those miracles. Imagine some of those babes’ chances, if you are not there to bring them into the world.”

Bishop Weaver stood, smoothed his beard and placed his hands behind his back. “That would be a great loss to our district,” he said. “Sara, we want you to be our first Amish midwife.”

“Please, Sara,” Mercy said.

Their
first
, Sara thought, with a mixture of wonder and fear over what she had wrought, but she could not keep from accepting the challenge with a full and grateful heart. When everyone cheered, she had to bite her lip to keep her tears in check.

“But Sara,” the Bishop said, his voice carrying a note of censure of a sudden. “Mind the color of your dresses!” He raised his arms in supplication, or defeat. “I saw two more that color just today!”

Sara’s chin came up. “It’s a
good
color.”

Adam rolled his eyes.

The bishop nodded and gave her an exasperated smile. “It
is
a good color. But some are not. Come and see me and we will discuss which is which.”

Sara beamed and Adam chuckled as he moved aside to reveal their girls, also on the floor. He sat beside them, and Pris climbed into his lap. “We too would be lost without you. All of us,” he said, his voice gruff. “All around you, Sara, are people who care about you and need you.”

“We love you,” Lizzie said.

Despite the color riding up his neck, Adam gave a half nod. “We do.”

Sara felt weak with the need to sit, and cry, and kiss everyone at once.

Katie pointed her finger at Sara. “You cannot get away from us.”

Pris rose, ignoring her father’s, “stay,” and ran to throw her arms around Sara’s legs and beam up at her.

Everyone rose then, all talking at once.

Lena passed plates of Peach Kuchen and Sand Tarts, and Emma filled glasses with cider.

Adam and the girls came to stand beside the chair Bishop Weaver had vacated so Sara could sit. She kissed each of her children in turn. Even Adam bent forward for his kiss, right there before God and Bishop Weaver.

Then Sara unwrapped the baby and showed him to the girls. “Here is your new brother,” she said. “What shall we name him?”

“Sunnybunny,” Katie said.

Lizzie shook her head. “Papa said Noah, like your brother, if we got a boy.”

Sara looked at her husband, big, bad, Mad Adam Zuckerman, and her heart overflowed. “Noah,” she said. “A brother who will play with his sisters in the butterfly garden amid the warmth of their father’s love.”

If you enjoyed

Butterfly Garden

here is an excerpt from

Jacob's Return

Annette Blair's first historical set in a 19th Century Amish community

Available now

As an e-book in Kindle, E-pub
RTF and PDF formats.

ISBN:
978-1-897562-84-0

And in trade paperback

ISBN: 978-1-897562-85-7

Jacob’s Return

Chapter 1

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, June 1885

Jacob Sauder drove his buggy toward the home he left four years before, never intending to return. Same old dirt lanes bisected greening patchwork fields and plain Amish farms, untarnished by time. But despite the landscape, time had passed. Life had changed. And unlike the panorama that quickened his heart, Jacob Sauder had been tarnished.

Uncertainty had dogged him since his decision to return, but this sense of anticipation — this was a surprise.

Jacob stopped the buggy at the top of Hickory Hill and scanned the valley. Lancaster looked the same, yet different, trees taller maybe, grass greener surely.

Home. He had come home after all.

But would they let him stay?

He flicked the reins setting Caliope to a trot. Right before he left this place — at his mother’s funeral, no less — he told everyone, God and the Bishop included, to go to hell. Then he’d turned from Mom’s open casket, and the dirt hole waiting to swallow her, climbed into his buggy, and never looked back.

He’d tried to become English, which his people called anyone not Amish, and broke every rule he’d been taught, some as slight as wearing buttons on his coats … others, much, much worse. And he might have gone on that way, if fate had not taken a hand.

Anticipation skittered his heart.

Dread weighed him down.

How would his father feel about his unexpected return? How would Rachel feel? She who’d filled his empty soul when his twin sister, Anna, had died. Rachel who became, somehow, his missing half. Rachel Zook.
Mudpie
– he called her. His brother’s wife.

How were Datt and Rachel? Had they changed?

Jacob slowed when he spotted thirty or so Amish buggies outside the Yoder barn. His heart skipped as he turned into the drive. A good sight, these buggies. “You are home, they said, and welcome.”

If only he believed it.

“You are not welcome here!” came a familiar voice.

Well, his brother, Simon, had not changed, not in looks, certainly not in disposition. Jacob shook his head. “Missed you, too.”

“Go back to where you belong,” Simon said, approaching with an angry stride.

Jacob climbed from his buggy. “This is where I belong.” It tickled him to skin Simon’s knuckles, especially with faulty sentiment.

Simon’s thin lips firmed, his eyes narrowed. “You would come on Church Sunday, especially this one.” He straightened his frock coat and raised his chin. “I am to be ordained Deacon this morning.”

Jacob was taken aback by the news, but it explained Simon’s solitude; he was waiting to make an entrance. His brother would be a stern, humorless deacon, but some people needed that, Jacob supposed. “You must be pleased.”

“I am pleased to do God’s will. Unlike you.” Simon walked away. “Just go,” he said, and disappeared into the barn.

Very unlike me, Jacob thought, as he made his way around his buggy, raised the back flap … and grinned. After all these weeks, he still could not get over the sight of them, his two-year-old twins, now snuggled in sleep like newborn pups. “Come, Pumpkins,” he said. “Up we go.” What a surprise they’d been. What a joy, despite the fact that he deserved no joy. He held them, one in each arm. He was getting good at this, he thought, considering he’d only had them a short time. Two sleepyheads, one kapped, the other hatless, nuzzled his neck.

Good. They felt good there.

When Jacob walked into the Yoder house after four silent years and carrying two small children, whispers grew, then, “Shh, Shh, Shh.”

Suddenly, not a sound could be heard save the chafing of his new black broadfall pants rubbing one leg against the other. Rough they were and itchy, not smooth and comfortable like the buckskins he’d worn when he pretended to be English.

He stopped and stood in the middle of the group, the sight familiar yet foreign. Row upon row of men sat ramrod straight on simple backless benches. In the opposite room, facing the men, sat rows of women, on matching benches, the folding doors between the two rooms open for this purpose. The women were white-kapped, the men bearded, marking them Amish.

Jacob’s own beard had been shaved daily during his sojourn into the English world, with only three weeks growth now to show for his decision to return. This marked him a rebel. And a liar. Only married men let their beards grow.

He saw old friends, nodded at a few. Some smiled back, but not many. This should not anger or surprise him, but it did. Emma sighed in her sleep, reminding him of his plan to raise his babies here. Knowing that a bad attitude could make for a bad beginning, Jacob swallowed his urge to declare that he was not sorry he left.

His father was not to be seen, but Ruben Miller, fellow rebel, grinned a true welcome. Jacob grinned back.

 Where should he sit? He belonged in the men’s section. The babies belonged in the women’s. Unheard of, this, a man raising his babies alone. He would be expected to court a mother for his children soon. But how could he, when the woman he loved....

He saw her watching him and was jolted.

Rachel was more beautiful than he remembered, but she looked....

She buried her anger — he saw the effort it took — and came to him. “They’re yours?” she asked.

Drinking in the sight of her, he could only nod.

“Their mother?” she asked.

Gave them life with her last breath, he thought, but he shook his head, his remorse too great for words.

“What are their names?”

Jacob swallowed his yearning, and his regret, and found his voice. “Emma and Aaron.”

Rachel opened her arms. “I’ll take them.”

“I can’t ask you—”

“Oh, please,” she said, her maple-syrup eyes wide and pleading – revealing a different kind of anguish.

And Jacob knew within the deepest part of himself that Rachel longed to hold his babies with an ache as acute as his own had been these many years to hold her.

He’d almost forgotten this ability they shared — to feel each other’s emotions, as if each lived inside the other. It had happened often to them as children, less as they grew older.

But this, just now, had been powerful. Except that she should be holding her own babies. “Thank you,” he said. “Sit first. It’s tricky when you’re standing.”

They held everyone’s attention, he knew … the prodigal and the woman who’d tossed him away, passing babies back and forth, her marriage to his brother like a cloud between them.

Jacob sat in the back of the men’s section. Everyone opened the
Ausband
and turned to the hymn named. As always, the
Vorsinger
began the chant. The High German song soothed him, their blended voices the only music. The words and chant had been passed from one generation to the next. The same song sounded different in other settlements. Better here.

With an ordination, service would be longer than the usual three hours, but he’d already missed the vote for Deaconate candidates. Simon, by the grace of God — according to Amish belief, not Jacob’s — had obviously been the candidate to choose the Bible with the slip of paper naming him Deacon. And from what Simon said, the ordination and laying-on of hands was yet to come.

When it began, Simon was in his element, eyes downcast, brought high in his humility for all to see.

During the ceremony, Jacob could not keep from watching Rachel, his babies asleep in her arms, her slim fingers gentling them. He closed his eyes and imagined the lips that touched Emma’s tiny forehead, touching his.

He remembered how Rachel’s hair, now hidden by her white heart-shaped kapp, would look and feel set free as it grazed his cheek. She had hair the color of blackberry wine, with unruly curls all over her head. And if he were to wrap sections of the silky softness along one of his fingers, he could make the ringlets into long curls that hung down her back like a veil of evening mist after a new moon. And it smelled like honey straight from the hive. Honey with that extra scent of musk it had on a summer afternoon, the sun high in the sky, and you had to fight the swarm to win your prize.

He had removed her kapp on just such a day, let down that beautiful hair, and kissed her for the first time.

Back then, he thought she would always be his.

But she belonged to Simon now. Still, Jacob could not keep from imagining that musky scent … until the words of the new Deacon’s sermon stung him.

“A cankerous apple left in the barrel will rot those around it! It must be plucked, discarded so as not to spoil the rest.” Simon looked straight at him, the bad apple, and all but pointed an accusing finger as he urged all to thrust him from their midst.

Jacob almost laughed. It would take more than a vengeful sermon to scare him away. He’d lived English; nothing could frighten him now.