The Amish Bride (7 page)

Ezra nodded and smiled, but I could tell he was deep in thought. Was he thinking about Indiana? Considering that we could marry? We crossed the covered bridge in silence. The horse lunged forward, taking the hill quickly and then heading toward the curve in the highway.

I’d grown up with a car and a computer and a public education. Now I had jeans and a stash of makeup and a stack of bridal magazines under my bed. I wanted desperately to get more schooling. But still, for him, in time, I would make the sacrifice and become Amish. If anyone could do it, I could.

As we turned into my driveway, I noted Mom’s car wasn’t back yet. Feeling sick to my stomach, I imagined her and Zed with my father, talking through the last fifteen years, laughing and sharing stories. I groaned, but Ezra didn’t notice.

“So you’ll think about Indiana?” I asked again as he pulled the horse to a stop. “I really do have family connections there. I bet we could work something out.”

“I don’t know if that’s one of the locations Will is pursuing or not. You could ask your mom.”

My smile faded. “My mom?”

“
Ya
. She gave Will leads on a bunch of people she knows who own dairy farms all over the country.”

Ezra was turning his horse and buggy around before I stepped into the dark and empty cottage. I stood for a moment, listening to the horse’s hooves as they reached the pavement. Once they had faded away, I shut the door firmly, leaned against it, and slid to the floor.

It was becoming clear as day. Not only did the Gundys want to get Ezra away from me, but so did my mother. And because of her business, she had contacts from all over. She knew midwives from other counties and states. She had clients who moved away from the area but kept in touch because they felt endeared to her. From the sound of things, she was using those connections to help Will separate Ezra and me as much as possible.

I heard the car in the driveway and struggled to my feet, but Zed pushed the front door into me before I had stood up all the way.

“Ouch!”

“What are you doing?”

“I just got here.” I retreated toward the woodstove and fed it a piece of pine, hoping to take the chill off the room.

Mom’s footsteps were heavy on the porch, and then she flicked on the light as she came through the doorway. “You’re home early.”

“Ezra had some work to finish up.”

A brief smile flashed across her lips and then disappeared. She took off her cape. “Your father said to tell you hello.”

“I don’t consider him my father,” I retorted.

She took a deep breath. “He would have liked to have seen you.”

I turned to face the stove, putting my hands out in front of me.

“He’s ill.”

“I don’t want to hear about him.”

“Ella.” She was making her way around the couch, moving toward me.
Zed retreated to the dining room, his coat still on. “I know you have a lot of bitterness toward the man, but some compassion right now would be appropriate too.”

“Compassion?” I crossed my arms, my hands warm against my sides. “You’re a fine one to talk about compassion, Mom. Especially to me.”

She stopped in the middle of the room. The strip of hair showing in front of her head covering was almost completely gray. She was shorter than me by a couple of inches. And though she’d always been stocky, it seemed that she’d grown even thicker over the past few years.

“Ella,” she finally said. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Dairy farms? From all over?”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Ezra?” My tone was accusatory.

“Oh, that.” She took another step toward me. “Will asked me if I knew anyone who owned a dairy, and I gave him some names.”

“From how far away?”

She flinched, as if I’d hit her, confirming my suspicions.

“Why can’t Ezra work on a dairy farm in Lancaster County?”

My mother shook her head a little. “That’s not our business, is it? That’s up to the Gundys.”

“It might not be your business, but it’s mine. They are trying to make me disappear from Ezra’s life. That’s why they don’t want him in Lancaster County.”

Mom closed her eyes for a moment, as if to gather strength. Finally she said, “He’s twenty years old, Ella. He needs to start making solid decisions. It’s not like the two of you have a future—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That condescending smile of hers started to creep back over her face. “Ella, you can’t join a church—especially not the Amish church—for a man.”

A dead silence hung between us.

My mother didn’t get it. She didn’t get anything, ever. Nothing about me. Nothing about love. Nothing about life.

I was stomping up the stairs when she added, “Joining a particular
church can’t be based on whom you want to marry. It has to be because of your relationship with Christ.”

I spun around and peered down at her. “Didn’t you join the Mennonite church because of a man?”

She blushed. “That was different. It wasn’t his church. Or mine. It was a compromise, a new one for both—”

I bolted up the rest of the stairs and was in my room before she’d finished.

I was pretty sure the majority of Amish youth who joined the church did so primarily because they had found a mate they wanted to marry. So what would be so wrong with me joining the Amish church to marry Ezra?

I could hear Mom’s footsteps on the stairs. I anticipated her quiet knock on my door, which came as expected.

“What?”

“Klara invited us to dinner tomorrow. The Gundys have been invited too.”

“Will
Freddy
be there?” I spat out his name like a poison.

She was quiet for a moment. “Of course not.”

“How about Ezra? Is he coming?”

“I don’t know. I imagine so.”

“Then are you sure you want me there? Maybe I should hop on a bus to the next state or something instead. He and I can’t be too close, you know.”

I hated the sarcasm I could hear in my own voice, but I just couldn’t help it. When my mother replied, she ignored the question completely.

“Ella,” she began, her voice tired, “essentially, you’re an adult now. Done with school. Nearly eighteen. I know you’re applying for jobs, but you and I need to sit down and talk about what your long-term plans are besides dreams of marrying Ezra or going to baking school.”

In other words, you want to crush those dreams before they have a chance of happening,
I thought but did not say. She was right about one thing. I was an adult now. I needed to sound rational, not petulant.

The problem was, I knew what she wanted for me. She’d said so several times. She thought I should go to nursing school, something I was certain she wished she’d done if she’d had the choice way back when. But being a
nurse would only be a little better than being a midwife. Neither appealed to me. Not even knowing my great-grandmother Sarah had worked as a nurse, for a while at least, had any sway on me at all.

“Can we do it some other time?” I said, trying to be mature about it. “I’m very tired.”

“Of course. It’s much too late for any more discussions tonight.”

After a minute I heard Mom’s door open and close. I thought of the photo on her nightstand, the only one in our house, of her and my father. I rarely went in her bedroom at all and could hardly remember the photo, but I knew it was there. Nothing in her room ever changed. An Amish quilt over the double bed. A small bureau with nothing on top. Four dresses on pegs. Two pairs of shoes in a corner.

When I heard her door open again and the sound of her steps going down the hall and into the bathroom, I hurriedly slipped from my room and dashed over to hers. Once inside, I headed for the nightstand, where the photo had always been. The light was dim so I picked it up to see it better.

She looked so young. Her hair, what I could see under her
kapp
, was close to the auburn color of mine. Her gray eyes were lively, even though there was only the hint of a smile on her lips. He was tall and blond, and his brown eyes sparkled as he grinned.

I heard a bump in the bathroom, and then the sound of the running water stopped.

I put the frame back down and hurried from the room, wondering why she’d kept it all these years. She wasn’t adamantly opposed to photos, but she wasn’t in favor of them either. She’d never owned a camera. When someone from our Mennonite church would give her a photo of Zed or me, she would thank them for it and bring it home, but then it would disappear. I’d looked before, several times, but could never find any pictures in our house at all except for this one.

I slipped into my room and pulled the door tight as my mother stepped into the hall.

Not only had she kept a photo of him, but she had kept it beside her bed all these years. There were about a million and a half things I didn’t understand about my mother. Could she possibly still be in love with the man?

My face contorted at the thought.

I knelt down on the floor and fished under my bed, past the stack of bridal and fashion magazines, all the way to the back to the wooden box with the farmhouse from Indiana carved on the top. There was no reason for me to hide it, not really. Zed wasn’t interested in it and neither was Mom. Still, I liked the thought of it under my bed. My hand landed on it and worked it forward until I had it in both hands and pulled it out. I stayed on the floor, crossing my legs and running my fingers over the carved surface. It was a little bigger than a laptop. The farmhouse was on a little rise and was two stories high, with what looked like additions on both sides. It was big, probably close to the size of Aunt Klara and Uncle Alexander’s house. A field was in front of it, and there was a stand of trees behind it. On the sides of the box were shafts of wheat.

I opened the lid and pulled out a copy of Sarah’s drawing. It had symbols of pies and shafts of wheat around it, in the same style as the symbols in her book, although she was much younger when she did the drawing.

I picked up her book from my bedside table and slipped it into the box.

I would talk to
Mammi
tomorrow about the relatives in Indiana. I’d see if she knew of any dairy farms in the area, ones that might be close to the Home Place.

Already, a new plan was forming in my mind.

T
he Gundys used to be in the same church district as
Mammi
, Aunt Klara, and Uncle Alexander, but that district had divided long ago. Because the population of the Amish was continually expanding but districts were limited to a certain size, splits were sometimes necessary. Ever since the one that had separated the two families, they tried to get together several times a year anyway to fellowship and catch up with each other. Just because they didn’t worship together anymore didn’t mean they were willing to give up those ties.

And the ties did indeed run deep, much deeper than just church membership. Our two families had been friends for generations. In fact, when Ada and several others went to Switzerland last spring, they learned how the families had first been connected way back in the 1800s. Apparently, my great-great-great-grandfather Abraham Sommers had been next-door neighbors with Ezra’s great-great-great-grandfather Ulrich Kessler. Abraham had helped finance the Kessler family’s emigration to America when the Mennonites came under persecution in Switzerland. Abraham hadn’t been Mennonite himself, but his daughter Elsbeth had joined, and she
and her husband had made the trip to the States with the same group the Kesslers were in. Elsbeth was friends with Ulrich’s daughter Marie, and the two women had stayed in touch for the rest of their lives.

Once in the United States, Ulrich settled in Lancaster County, but Elsbeth and her husband, Gerard, moved out to Indiana and built the Home Place. That separated the families for a time. But then, several generations later, Elsbeth’s granddaughter Frannie moved back to Lancaster County. A young widow with three daughters, Frannie knew of her family’s earlier connections with the Kesslers and had contacted Marie’s granddaughter Alice, whose married name was Beiler, when she got here. Frannie and Alice had become acquainted and soon were fast friends. Now that Frannie’s granddaughter Ada had married Alice’s grandson Will, five generations down from the original next-door neighbors of Abraham and Ulrich, our families had finally even been joined by marriage.