The Atonement (27 page)

———

Clint had sprained his ankle and was perturbed to be sitting out the first football game of the season, beating himself up for jumping down a flight of stairs to show off for the guys.

Dottie and two of her girlfriends came down from the bleachers after the game, encouraging him that in a few short weeks, he would be back on the field. Clint wasn't so sure, not as swollen as his ankle was. But he could see that Dottie's friends were eyeing the other players, while her attention was fully on him.

Dottie's thick brown shoulder-length hair and pretty face caught his eye, but she looked away, the shyest girl in their sophomore class. And as he got to know her better, it became clear that Dottie wasn't as pretty on the inside. When he invited her to a youth gathering at his church, she quickly refused, even though they'd gone to several activities at their school together, he on crutches, she helping him along.

By the time they were seniors, Dottie had fallen in with a
fast crowd. Clint, popular because of his status as a quarterback, continued to focus on his studies and help with the youth department at church, eager to attend college.

At the end of the first semester, Dottie dropped out of school. Clint worried she might never graduate and heard she was frequenting bars and spending time with older guys. Unknown to her, Clint had been thinking about her since tenth grade, asking God to watch over her.

Four years passed, and after college, Clint went on to graduate school, getting a degree in accounting. He landed a job working in a firm with other certified public accountants and bought a house near Amish farmland. In his free time, he served as the youth pastor for his church. Clint had a few dates with some young women from the church, but nothing came of them.

Then, one rainy springtime afternoon, he ran into Dottie at the Bird-in-Hand Bake Shop on Gibbons Road. She recognized him immediately, and he experienced the same joy at seeing her again. They talked in the checkout line, catching up on each other's lives, and Clint invited her for supper the next evening.

One conversation led to another, and they began seeing each other regularly, until he boldly invited her to attend church with him.

“Oh, Clint,” she said, shaking her head. “I'm no church girl. Have you forgotten?”

But Clint didn't give up praying for her, and while they continued to occasionally see each other as friends, he couldn't get Dottie out of his mind.

Another year passed, and their coffees and dinners became less common as they grew apart once again. Clint would see her from time to time from afar in different places around Lancaster County. Eventually, he heard she'd moved back home to help her mom look after her ailing brother, so Clint decided to visit them one Sunday afternoon.

———

“Barry was the light of Dottie's life,” Clinton told Lucy. “And when leukemia took him before his thirtieth birthday, Dottie was overcome with sadness.”

Stirring just then, Dorothea's eyes fluttered open. “Barry?” she asked weakly. “I saw him last night . . . he came into this room.” She struggled to speak. “Never said a word . . . but it was . . . so real.”

Clinton frowned. “Barry's been gone for years, darling.”

Dorothea nodded drowsily.

“Our friend Lucy's here now,” Clinton told his wife, leaning near. “I've been telling her how you kept me at arm's length all those years.”

Dorothea gave him a momentary smile and closed her eyes again, sighing deeply.

Clinton looked steadily at her, his gaze nearly reverent. He turned to Lucy before resuming his story. “It was after Barry's death that Dottie surprised me a week later by sitting in the row in front of me at church. As before, she warmed to my attention, and soon we were again seeing each other every weekend. Our dates consisted of lengthy discussions about life and the choices she'd made, many of them poor. Dottie was down on herself and realized we were polar opposites in temperament and ethics. ‘You're nice and I'm naughty,' she would say.”

Polar opposites.
Lucy thought suddenly of Tobe.

Clinton stopped and inhaled slowly. “Just when I thought Dottie was going to surrender her past, her sadness . . . she broke up with me.”

Lucy winced.

“Nearly every time we were together, Dottie said she didn't deserve someone as kind and good as me. Yet only after the breakup did I really begin to think there was no hope for us.”

———

Another four seasons came and went, and Clint kept busy with his accounting work, especially at tax time, his client list growing as word spread of his integrity and competence.

One day, he picked up the society page in the newspaper and saw a picture of Dottie Kreider alongside an article. She was hosting a holiday house tour, and the man posing beside her was Phil Buchner, a linebacker from Clint's old high school team. He read the article, curious to know if she was married, and was tempted to look up Phil in the yearbook. That night, he hurried home to search his rec room bookshelves and found it. Holding the yearbook, Clint realized how futile this was. He and Dottie had no future together. That was apparent—God had not answered his prayers, at least not in the way Clint had desired. Why torture himself further?

Clint dropped to his knees, asking the Lord to come into Dottie and Phil's lives in a powerful way, to draw them tenderly to Him. “Bring godly people across their paths,” he prayed whenever he thought of Dottie.

Then, late one night, he received a call from a gas station down near Quarryville. Phil had been drinking . . . Dottie's car was totaled . . . would Clint mind coming for her?

Without delay, he got out of bed, pulled on jeans and a shirt, and headed out, his heart in his throat. By the time Clint arrived, the police had filed the accident report, and Phil had been arrested, the car towed away.

When Dottie saw Clint, she threw her arms around him, sobbing. Clint wondered if she, too, had been drinking, but that was not the case. She was battered and bruised, but the paramedics determined there were no broken bones. Dottie wanted desperately to talk, which she and Clint did over coffee and brownies at a nearby twenty-four-hour coffee shop. Dottie had witnessed her life flash before her, and she'd despised what she'd seen. She pleaded with Clint to take her back, and he gently reminded
her that she was the one who'd kept leaving. “I assumed you'd married Phil.”

Shaking her head, she looked most serious. “I'm ready for your church, your kind of life . . . and your Jesus,” she said sincerely. “I'm a mess, Clint, but if God's Son is anything like you . . . I want to know Him.”

The following Sunday, Dottie went with Clint to his church. At the end of the sermon, she walked the aisle to the altar and never looked back on her old life.

———

“That day totally changed her self-worth . . . her sense of who she was,” Clinton said, tears on his face.

“Your prayers were answered at last,” Lucy said, her heart deeply moved.
He had such patience.

Dorothea's eyes were half open now, her head nodding.

Clinton raised his wife's slender hand to his lips. “None of us deserves God's great love,” he whispered. “That's why Christ came and bridged the gap. And that's where the footbridge comes in.”

Dorothea looked at Clinton fondly. “Tell Lucy . . . darling.”

The door opened, and the nurse entered to check Dorothea's vitals, then asked Lucy to leave so she could administer a shot.

Lucy stepped outside, leaving Clinton with his wife, trying to imagine what Clinton might tell her about the bridge.

C
HRISTIAN
WAS
FINISHING
UP
a few chores when one of Caleb's farmhands came by the house to say that Dale Wyeth had called. “He wondered if ya might come over at your convenience, sometime today or tomorrow.”

Christian thanked him, then hitched up and headed over to Dale's place. There, he was warmly welcomed and ushered into Dale's kitchen, where the plans for a goat shelter were sketched out and laid on the table. Dale's work on the hen house seemed to be going well enough that Christian wasn't sure why he needed to sign off on Dale's next big project.

Yet Christian looked it over and agreed it was a well-thought plan.
Does he have something else on his mind?
He noticed the framed pastoral farm scene on the opposite side of the kitchen, featuring the Twenty-Third Psalm.
Like my Dat bought for Mamm's kitchen years ago.
He could not dismiss the coincidence.

Dale asked for the name of the feed salesman the Amish farmers preferred, then took Christian out to see his new generator. “Little by little, I'm getting there,” Dale said, smiling. Was
it Christian's imagination, or was the young man more jovial than usual?

They walked off the perimeter of his plot, and Dale mentioned possibly thinning out some of his white and red pines in the woods near his field to let the hardwoods grow. “I've read oak and maple are best for heating the house . . . though I'll have to buy most of my wood.”

Dale's certainly serious about all this.

Dale asked his opinion on what crops to plant come spring. “I'd like a much larger garden than I put in this year. I also need to have Lucy and her sisters come over sometime and show me how to preserve food.”

“Honestly, my girls are busy enough as it is,” Christian told him, making this very clear.

“There's always next year,” Dale acknowledged as they turned back toward the house. “I still have much to learn.”

About making friends with an Amishwoman?
Christian wondered.
How much has Lucy told him about her past relationship with an outsider? Anything?

“Ah, yes . . . the footbridge.” Clinton seemed to enjoy telling Lucy how fond he and Dottie had always been of the lovely setting, even during high school days. “I tried to be casual about it when I suggested Dottie meet me there at the bridge on September twelfth that year of her accident. I'd chosen the spot not only because she thought it was such a pretty area, but because of her rejection of Christ all those years. The bridge symbolized, at least in my mind, the all-encompassing love of our heavenly Father, connecting humankind to His grace and love.”

Lucy pondered this, starting to understand.

“When Dottie arrived, I waited for her at one end of the bridge, slowly walking toward the center. As she met me there,
I knelt on one knee and opened a small ring box. ‘Will you be my dearest love?' I asked.”

“She didn't waver—it was as if Dottie had sensed what I'd planned.” Clinton smiled, tears rolling down his weathered face.

Dorothea roused just then and lifted her head a bit, her eyes fixed on Clinton. “I said . . . yes . . . to my beloved,” she whispered huskily from her now elevated bed. “And yes . . . to my Savior.”

Lucy was captivated by Dorothea's radiance—like a bride on her wedding day. The sight was sweet, even sacred; Lucy almost looked away out of respect. But in spite of the intimacy of the moment, she could not take her eyes off the couple.

Dorothea struggled to breathe, and Clinton rang for the nurse.

Getting up with much effort, Clinton left his cane at his chair and stood over his wife, leaning against the bed rails. He bowed his head, one hand in hers and one raised toward heaven. “Be merciful, O Lord.”

Dorothea gazed innocently into his eyes for a tender moment.

Clinton leaned down to kiss her and placed his hand on her heart. Some time after the nurse arrived, Dorothea joined the church triumphant, as Clint described her heavenly homegoing.

Lucy brushed away her tears, yearning for such a precious love of her own. And for all the rest of the day, she basked in their story, having seen them year after year, commemorating their engagement at the little bridge.
The beginning of a love for a lifetime . . .

Hesitant to return home just yet, Lucy slowed her scooter when she came to the footbridge. She pictured Clinton's marriage proposal there—the towering trees much smaller decades ago, swaying gently around the couple. Lucy wondered how many times the bridge had been repaired or replaced over the years since that momentous day.

Leaving her scooter on the roadside, she made her way down over the small embankment, planting herself on the sidewalk, gazing at the bridge ahead.
Divine grace bridged the gap for Dorothea,
she thought, recalling her father's recent talk with her, as well. The kind of enduring love Clinton and Dorothea had experienced could only have come from the Lord. He, alone, had been the most important key to their relationship from the start.
And despite all Dottie did wrong, Clinton was there for her. . . .

When Lucy returned home, she went to the hen house, her mind occupied with thoughts of the upcoming grief class. Would Clinton feel up to attending the group so soon after Dorothea's passing? She'd already decided she wanted to go to the funeral.
Knowing Dale, he'll want to be there, too.
Clinton and Dorothea, like Kiana and Van, were another link between her and her newfound
Englischer
friend.

When Lucy brought in the basket of eggs, Mamm and the twins were chopping vegetables. Mamm was silent, but Lettie smiled and Faye looked glum—a complete switch for those two.

“Remember the older gentleman I told ya 'bout, Mamm? The one I saw at the footbridge, then at market, some time ago?” Lucy sighed deeply. “Well, his wife, Dorothea, passed away this afternoon while I was there with them at the hospice.”

“Oh, my dear, I'm sorry,” Mamm said, opening her arms to Lucy.

“I'm awful glad they were together at the end. Such a sweet couple.” Lucy stepped away to check the eggs, handling them carefully to make sure they weren't broken.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Lettie told her. “Your friend Kiana called Uncle Caleb's barn phone and left a message for you.”

“
Denki.
I'll do the rest of my chores first.” Lucy hurried to her room, glad for this—something to brighten up a rather bittersweet afternoon.

After helping her sisters with the supper dishes, Lucy returned Kiana's call amidst the bellowing Holsteins at her uncle's farm.

“We're all moved in, thanks to you, Lucy.” There was a lilt in Kiana's voice.

“I'm so happy for ya!” She offered to visit next week and take them for a ride in the family buggy. “Van might like that.”

Kiana sounded thrilled at the prospect of not only seeing Lucy again but of some additional fun for her son.

“
Denki
for callin', Kiana. I'll see ya once you're settled in, and bring the promised check, too. All right?”

So it was agreed that Lucy would come by with the horse and carriage next Monday.

Christian was out in the stable after supper that evening when Deacon Miller came rushing in,
The Budget
all rolled up in his hand like he was looking for flies to swat. “Have ya seen what your daughter wrote?” He slapped it against the wooden post.

“
Jah
, read it last Friday, when it was delivered.” Christian wondered why Edward was frowning so.

“There are rumors 'bout you takin' an English fellow under your wing—showin' him what to do in case the lights go out. And this confirms it.”

“I have nothin' to hide, Deacon.”

“Well, then, I advise you to reconsider helpin' this young man. I've heard from more than one person that Lucy's taken a real shine to him. James and Rhoda Blank saw this outsider and your previously
rappelkeppi
daughter at a coffee shop in Bird-in-Hand. What's worse, Lucy rode away with him in his truck—on the Lord's Day, no less!”

“I have a world of respect for ya, Deacon, but whatever Lucy
was doin' with Dale, I doubt they were on a date.” Christian wasn't sure who to be more put out with—Dale Wyeth or the deacon. As for himself, he had never been one to spread gossip, nor pay it any mind. “It's an odd time for this discussion, Deacon.”

“The way I see it, it's the
bescht
time, considering our fasting day comin' up. Sweep out all the sin in the camp.”

He must think Lucy's at risk.

“Listen, Christian: If this young man might lead your daughter astray, why not cut ties? Or at least let him know not to seek her out.”

Christian could not deny the wisdom of that. Nodding, he agreed, “Since ya put it that way. . . .”