Beacon of Light, page 29
When everything was complete, May stood back, her little hands clasped in front of her, sighing in satisfaction. She turned to Oba, who had flopped back on the grass, watching her with disinterest, never quite understanding why someone would go to so much work for a pretend tea party. But since he was hungry and had nothing better to do, why not go about this for real? He’d be the father, and she could be the mother, but then there was only one thing wrong with that situation. She would want children, which meant a grunting piglet or one of those grausich (disgusting) cats she kept doctoring up.
“Come, Oba. Dinner is ready,” she trilled excitedly.
Oba pulled himself to his feet, sat very seriously and put his hands in his lap, ready to put “patties down,” the Pennsylvania Dutch phrase for folding hands in laps and bowing heads for a lengthy silent prayer.
“You be the dat, okay?” May asked, meaning he would be the one to lift his head first, a signal the prayer was over.
“I’m not going to be the dat today. We’ll be sister and brother, like we are for real. If we do that, we won’t need children.”
May looked at him, her eyes big and brown, her small face the face of a promising beauty.
“Okay. All right. But you look up first.”
So he did.
She poured the tea, without spilling a drop, and he helped himself to a sugar cookie, cutting it in half, then half again, so it would fit on his plate. He added a dollop of cornstarch pudding, then cut into the cookie with the side of his spoon.
“Mm. May, this is really good. Taste it.”
Always eager to oblige, she followed suit, nodded her head eagerly, in total agreement.
“Oba, you would be my child, okay?”
“But I can’t. I’m bigger than you.”
“That doesn’t matter. You would be very small. And your name is Albert.”
“Albert? Whatever for?”
“Albert is a nice name. You would be at a babysitter’s house, then I would come get you. The babysitter wouldn’t be a nice one, okay? She would not have fed you one single thing all day. Go away now, Oba, then I’ll come get you.”
Oba shoveled the last bite into his mouth, then walked behind the house as May set her little table to rights. Then she smoothed her skirts and walked behind the house to find her poor, hungry child. When she reached him, she told him he had to walk on his knees, that would be much more real, so Oba did, thinking he would go along with whatever she wanted, if it meant more cookies and cornstarch pudding.
She took his hand. “Come, Albert. Poor child. Was she being very mean today?”
“Albert” nodded his head up and down, his mouth puckered into pretend self-pity.
“Well, she was not in a good mood. I’m going to have to have a talk with her, aren’t I? Come, we have crackers and jelly. You want some crackers and jelly?”
“Albert” nodded, his mouth still puckered with a pretend baby face.
She tied a dishcloth around his neck, told him the bib was very nice, patted his head, and gave him a drink of tea from one of the little cups, then wiped his mouth with her tiny square handkerchief.
“Now, Albert. Would you like a cracker with jelly?”
He nodded, completely absorbed in being the child, and May performed the part of a doting little mother quite admirably. She fed him bits of cracker and jelly, alternating with sips of tea, and wiped his mouth before setting him down on the grass and telling him it was naptime. Obediently, he lay on his side, drew up his knees, and folded his hands beneath his chin, then closed his eyes too tightly, so they quivered and appeared in an unnatural sleep.
May giggled, told him to stop closing his eyes quite as tightly. He looked up at her, gave her a genuine grin, before reverting back to being Albert, who needed lots of care and attention, and May walked resolutely behind the house, where she approached the kerosene tank and proceeded to knock on the erring babysitter’s door. She had a long and harried exchange with the unrepentant person, finally lifting her shoulders and saying, “Ya vell, don. (Oh well then.)”
As she marched away, she tried speaking in English, because the babysitter was an Englishy frau (English woman), and she thought she needed the last word, after all. So she shook a very small finger and said forcefully, “Well, ich huff all your cookies fa-gthrots. (I hope all your cookies become moldy.)” It would not be quite as outrageous if it wasn’t poor Albert being so terribly hungry, and she having cookies to spare. Albert was yusht glay (just little), and who did she think she was?
Her love for Oba in real life had always bordered on worship, so now when they play acted, she was free to defend him as fiercely as her lively imagination would allow. She sat down delicately, poured a bit of tea from the flowered teapot, and sipped indignantly. She checked on Albert, who was still fast asleep, then helped herself to another cookie before carefully spreading a bit of jelly on a saltine cracker.
Oba ate everything May handed him, thought there was nothing wrong with being the child as long as he was enjoying the food. He watched May with her little black bowl-shaped covering on her blond head, and only for a moment, he thought how awful it would be to be without May. She was his only and favorite sister.
May looked up and smiled, a sweet smile of adoration. “Oba, you would fall down and hurt your leg, then we’d take you to the hospital.”
“But how would I fall hard enough if I stay on the ground?”
“You could climb up on the porch roof and fall down.”
“May!”
“I mean, jump down.”
She covered her giggles with both hands, when Oba said he would never jump down from the porch roof.
The fall was still in its planning stage when the rattle of steel wheels became apparent. They both looked up to find their mother driving the black Percherons, a load of loose hay stacked high, bits of hay trailing after the rolling wagon. They watched as she slapped the wide leather reins, brought them down on the massive backs as she called out.
“Git up! Hi! Git on up there! Tom! Dan!”
The Percherons dug their great hooves into the dirt, their haunches lowering as they threw themselves into their immense collars, drawing the loaded wagon up the incline to the top story of the bank barn. May winced as the wide steel wheels clattered across the cement threshold before rumbling across the great wooden boards, resting on massive beams.
May sighed when everything was quiet.
“My mom is a brave person,” she said, in her small, serious voice.
“Puh,” Oba said. “Lots of women drive hay wagons.”
“I bet not into the barn, on a hill.”
“Yes, they do, May.”
Emphatic as always, Oba tried to prove his point, saying Aunt Ruthie did, Alvin said she did, but May tilted her small head and stared back at Oba, completely aware that both Alvin and Oba schnitzed (lied). They both looked up as their slender young mother walked toward them, her face flushed with the heat of the day, her smile wide. The kind of smile that spread to her eyes and crinkled the brown into a deep line of happiness.
“Hey!”
“Mam, I’m the mom, and Oba is my child. His name is Albert. His babysitter did not give him any food. She would be English.”
Fronie laughed, before sitting in the shade by the small table. “Oh now. I don’t know any English people who are unkind. That is not a very nice thing to play.”
“Well, then she could be Amish.”
“I don’t know any unkind Amish people either.”
May’s brow wrinkled with a perplexed expression. “Mam, maybe there could be.”
“Oh, we hope not.”
To be out under the maple tree on a warm, dry summer day, the world filled with love and security, life as simple and uncomplicated as the blue and black butterflies hovering over the zinnias in the garden, who could understand the shadow that passed across Fronie’s pretty face?
She could hear the drone of a faraway airplane, a sound she had heard occasionally before without any adverse reaction, but today, a deep sense of melancholy seized her. A sorrow, almost. She blinked her eyes to focus on her children, shook off the sensation of foreboding, took a deep breath, and blamed it on the heat.
She was very thirsty, so she went to the pump, lifted the handle till she was rewarded by the gurgle of fresh, cool water, flowing into the tin cup that always hung from the cast iron pump by a length of string.
“Mam!”
She finished her drink, then turned.
“We still have cookies leftover. Would you like one?”
And her world turned right, revolved around her precious children, as always. She blamed the dark shadow that claimed her for a moment on her thirst. She should not have waited so long to drink from the pump.
That evening, after the children were in bed, she sat beside Eliezer on the porch swing, trying to catch a cooling breeze before entering the stifling bedroom. He reached for her hand, which she drew gently away.
A small laugh escaped her. “It’s too warm for any hand holding.”
Eliezer smiled to himself, then patted her hand. “I understand. It’s just that I love you so much and need to show you how close I am to you.”
“Thank you. I love you, too.”
The chain on the hook creaked as their feet pushed against the boards of the porch floor, providing a gentle rocking motion. A tired-sounding katydid began a low-key symphony, was answered by another more energetic tone. Somewhere in the hollow south of them, a bullfrog set up his deep bass chugging, as a dog barked in a high-frenzied sound. There was no moon, so the sky was black, with a scattering of stars like broken jewels.
“Eliezer.”
“Yes, dear.”
“I felt the strangest sense of foreboding today, out of nowhere. It was like a sudden wave of grief, but for no reason.”
He did not know how to reply to this, so he reached for her hand, without thinking. This time she let him hold it, needed the comfort.
“I heard an airplane above me, which of course I’ve heard before, on occasion. But I was gripped by an overshadowing sense of . . .” Her voice fell away.
“Oh, Fronie.” He squeezed her hand.
“Maybe it wasn’t anything at all. I thought later I was probably tired. I know I waited too long to get a drink. But I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“If it was something, there is no need to fret. You know God has our future planned for us, and all we need to do is keep on trusting. Sometimes, when times are hard, like now, with the money situation we’re going through, we are anxious and don’t realize it. You’re doing a great job stretching food and clothing, everything.”
And so Fronie was comforted by the sweet appreciation in her husband’s voice and forgot about the dark cloud having overtaken her that afternoon. But as time went on, she realized the immensity of the feeling, the stark reminder cropping up intermittently, at times when she least expected it. With her faith as her shield, she accepted this strange phenomenon, without fear or undue anxiety.
Perhaps it was a woman’s intuition, and perhaps it was a test of her faith in God, but whatever it was, it was indeed very real.
Realizing her own restrictions as a mere mortal, she kept this to herself, untroubled by it. And sometimes, for no reason at all, she gathered her children in her arms and held them as if she could never let them go. And she prayed.
She asked the Lord to keep them in His tender care, to allow them the courage and faith to meet adversity head on, to accept Christ as their personal Savior, so they could all reside in Heaven someday.
Fronie lived her life with joy and love, without understanding of the steep, rocky path that lay before her precious children. It was the way the Heavenly Father designed His perfect plan.
She watched Oba and May play so sweetly and prayed that they would always love each other. She could not have guessed the mysterious ways that God would honor her prayers and that the love between those two would be the very thing that pulled each of them through the hardest moments of their lives.
THE END.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LINDA BYLER WAS RAISED IN AN AMISH FAMILY AND IS AN active member of the Amish church today. Growing up, Linda loved to read and write. In fact, she still does. Linda is well known within the Amish community as a columnist for a weekly Amish newspaper. She writes all her novels by hand in notebooks.
Linda is the author of six series of novels, all set among the Amish communities of North America: Lizzie Searches for Love, Sadie’s Montana, Lancaster Burning, Hester’s Hunt for Home, the Dakota Series, and the Buggy Spoke Series for younger readers. Linda has also written several Christmas romances set among the Amish: Mary’s Christmas Goodbye, The Christmas Visitor, The Little Amish Matchmaker, Becky Meets Her Match, A Dog for Christmas, A Horse for Elsie, and The More the Merrier. Linda has coauthored Lizzie’s Amish Cookbook: Favorite Recipes from Three Generations of Amish Cooks!
READ THE WHOLE TRILOGY
OTHER BOOKS BY LINDA BYLER
LIZZIE SEARCHES FOR LOVE SERIES
SADIE’S MONTANA SERIES
LANCASTER BURNING SERIES
HESTER’S HUNT FOR HOME SERIES
THE DAKOTA SERIES
CHRISTMAS NOVELLAS
CHRISTMAS COLLECTIONS
NEW RELEASES
BUGGY SPOKE SERIES FOR YOUNG READERS
Linda Byler, Beacon of Light
