Stephanie Mittman Read online

  “You’ll be over Sarrie’s death by then, I promise,” he said, coming to his feet and poking about in his cabinet once again.

  “Perhaps,” she agreed. “Given long enough. But will I be over you?”

  Abby took off her coat and quietly put it on the peg beside the Herald‘s door. Seth hadn’t said a word in response to her admission. He’d looked at her as if she were some pathetic little creature—which she supposed she was—and had held her coat up for her to put on. “Button up there, Miss Merganser,” he’d said as she’d stood in his doorway waiting for any sign that he returned just a modicum of the feelings she had for him.

  “How’s the doc doing?” Ansel looked up from the freshly printed proof of the week’s Herald. “I bet he’s missing Sarah something awful.”

  “Doctor Hendon,” she said, “is the same as always.”

  “Miserable as ever, then,” Ansel said, circling some error. “Mrs. Wilkins is having a public pee to raise money for the new church? I wonder how that’ll work. And Abby, despite what our father might think, the Lord is not going to fix those eyes of yours. You’ve got to wear those glasses—”

  “Seth is not miserable,” she said, placing her spectacles on her nose and hooking the wire arms around her ears. “He’s merely serious. And it’s a tea Mrs. Wilkins is giving.”

  “While you were out spitting in the wind, Frank Walker stopped by to place an advertisement for a sale at the mercantile,” Ansel said. “‘Course he said he’d come back when you were here.”

  Abby nodded. Frank Walker was always dropping by the Herald with one excuse or another when it was as plain as the missing tooth in his smile that he was trying to work up the nerve to court her. She did everything she could to discourage him, but still he came by, week after week, always telling her that her dress was pretty or that he admired her penmanship.

  “Nice man, Frank,” her brother said. “Uncomplicated. Kind. The kind of man that could make a woman happy.”

  “How would you know what kind of man would make a woman happy? How would you know what tugs at a woman’s heart or warms her soul? What would you know about feeling like a piece of yourself is missing and that only one man can fill that place in your heart, whether or not he’s willing?”

  “More than you might think, Abby. But what if he’s just not willing? What if it means being alone forever rather than settling for someone else?” Ansel stood at the press, holding out his hand for Abby to pass him the t and the a so that he could correct her mistake, and waiting for her to admit that Seth might never love her.

  Well, maybe he wouldn’t ever love her, but it couldn’t change her loving him, wanting to be near him—heaven help her, wanting to touch him and have him touch her. Intimately. The way a man touched a woman. The way she thought a husband touched a wife.

  She struggled to find the t, squinting behind her glasses. There was no question that her eyesight was getting worse all the time. Despite her father’s immutable faith that the Lord would mend her vision, it seemed more likely that she would have to make a trip to Sioux City and have her eyes examined and new spectacles made. For so long she hadn’t wanted to leave Sarah, but now she supposed she should make arrangements to go. Maybe Seth wouldn’t mind taking her….

  “You could learn to love someone else,” Ansel was saying. “Okay, maybe not Frank Walker. But what about Emmet Sommers? Emily says that Emmet—”

  The thought of Emmet Sommers touching her, even to brush a fly off her arm, turned her stomach. “You know I love your wife like a sister—better than that, actually, but she does have a habit of saying pretty dumb things.” From what Abby could see, Ansel loved Emily the same way she did—like a sister. So if anyone was an expert on settling for someone he didn’t love passionately, it was surely her brother. But at least he’d gotten Morton Cotter’s newspaper, The Weekly Herald, along with Morton Cotter’s daughter, and he did dearly love the newspaper.

  “She just wants to see you happy,” Ansel said. “We all want to see you happy.”

  She found the t and thrust it at him. “I am happy. I love my life and my family and my job, just the way they are. I’m delirious with joy. Or at least, I will be.”

  “When, Abby? You sound just like Pa. Like wanting will make it so. It doesn’t work that way, believe me.”

  “I’m not just sitting around praying for Seth to love me—I’ve got a plan.”

  Ansel looked worried. So maybe a plan or two of hers had gone awry in the past.

  But this plan had to work. It had to. Losing Sarrie was painful enough. Losing Seth, too, would be unbearable.

  Ansel pulled a hankie from his back pocket and wiped her cheek with it. “Tears of happiness?” he asked, brushing back her hair and trying to get her to look at him.

  “I’ve lost my very best friend,” she answered, meeting his gaze and feeling grateful that he cared so much about her and was so tender with her. But she was embarrassed that he could pull the thoughts from her head and the feelings from her heart.

  “Both of them,” he said gently, touching the tip of her nose. “But the doc isn’t the man for you, Abby, and now that Sarah is gone, you’ve got to move on.”

  “I don’t think I can. I think I’m in love with him,” she whispered.

  “Oh, I am so sorry, honey,” Ansel said just as softly, pulling her against him and letting her find shelter in his arms. Despite the fact that she had two sisters and another brother much closer to her in age, it was always Ansel, the oldest, who took the time to talk with her, who loved her unconditionally. “So sorry.”

  “Maybe Seth could be the one who learns to love,” she suggested, her voice muffled against Ansel’s apron.

  “Honey, he’s too old for you.”

  “Maybe when I first had these feelings it would have made a difference, but I’m grown now, and fourteen years doesn’t seem like so much. Ma’s almost ten years younger than Papa, so I hardly see—”

  “Grown, huh?” her brother said. “Honey, it’s not just the years. Doc’s plum old. He’s been old ever since we were children. Ever since he and Sarrie came down with scarlet fever and she never quite recovered.”

  “Seth had scarlet fever, too?” And she thought she knew everything there was to know about Seth.

  “We were around fifteen, Seth and me. Another year and we might not even have gotten sick, since we’d have been done with school. But we did. Nearly everybody did. At least all the school-age children. Back then the schoolhouse was up on Healy Hill, and the wind ran through it like they’d never put up walls. Becky Chaplain had it first, and then we all came down with it.”

  “But Sarah was just a baby then. She wasn’t …” Like lightning, it struck her. And suddenly, finally, so much made sense. “Sarah caught it from Seth.”

  Ansel nodded. “That’s why he became a doctor, I always figured.”

  “Poor Seth.”

  “Losing Sarah had to be hard for him. He really thought, when he came back from Philadelphia, that he could cure her.”

  “He gave her much more time than Doc Spinner thought she’d have.”

  “I suppose you pointed that out to him,” Ansel said, just as the little bell rang above the shop door.

  Abby turned around, ready to see to a customer, but found her father in the doorway instead. His small shoulders were hunched, and his cherubic face was almost hidden by a black muffler that Abby’s mother had made. Only his eyes, wet from the cold air and bright with excitement, were clearly visible.

  “God bless the Holy Trinity!” he said, then blushed slightly and waved away the words as ridiculous while he unwrapped his muffler to reveal his clerical collar. “Praise heaven for the bright blue air and the clean, crisp sky.” And then he sneezed, dug for a hankie in his inner pocket, and blew his nose thoroughly before looking heavenward. “Testing my strength, are You? A cold shall not lay me low, nor all the plagues deter me. I am a man with a mission.”

  Abby could not remember a time when her f
ather hadn’t been a man with a mission. The mission might be to feed the town’s hungry, to shelter its poor, or it might be to have the shiniest shoes on Sunday so that they would reflect the Lord’s light right back up into the heavens.

  Ever since the church had burned down at Christmastime her father had only one mission in mind—to replace the little white church in the woods with a grand affair in the center of town. Late one night he’d admitted to her that he was afraid that since he was only a lay pastor, if he didn’t have a church, the bishop in Iowa City would turn his parish back over to a circuit preacher—a fate Abby knew he considered worse than death.

  “What is it this time?” Ansel asked, as irreverent as always. From the time Ansel could talk, no one had ever thought that he would follow in his father’s religious footsteps. Of course, back then her father hadn’t been a minister. He’d been a drunk, and Ansel had never forgiven or forgotten his behavior. “Has God told you how to pay for a new church?”

  “Indeed he has,” their father said cheerfully. “The Lord taketh away and the Lord provideth.”

  Under his breath, Ansel muttered a quick “Say hallelujah!” while Ezra Merganser took off his heavy overcoat and hung it beside Abby’s.

  He put up his hands as if he were at the pulpit and announced, “Joseph Panner has seen the light and shut his eyes in prayer. He has become a citizen of the Kingdom and has decided to make the church the beneficiary of his God-given largess—”

  Ansel cranked the press, which moaned loudly. “It sounds like when the Lord taketh Joseph, Joseph will provideth the new church,” he said.

  “And where do you think Mr. Panner’s ill-gotten was gained?” their father asked, flapping his arms to warm up and looking rather like a goose trying to take to the air but failing. “Did it fall from the sky, or did God place it at his feet for some greater purpose than to abuse his mind and amuse his body?”

  Abby inked the brayer as she spoke. “Papa, stand by the fire and warm up. I can’t believe you’re this excited about Joseph Panner. I thought that you had no use for him and his evil ways.”

  “A pastor looks after his whole flock,” her father said. “Even the stray pig must be found.”

  “That’s the stray lamb,” Ansel corrected.

  “Not in Joseph Panner’s case,” Abby said. “The man has every dirty habit under the sun, living up there in sin in that big house which, if I’m not mistaken, he won along with that gold mine of his in some bawdy-house poker game when he was no doubt well into his cups, I might add!”

  “Exactly!” her father said. “The Lord redeemed me when I lost my faith in the bottom of a bottle, and now the Lord has given Joseph Panner a chance to repent. And to save our church along with his own soul! What a wonder God is! Imagine! The Lord sent me to Ridder’s Pond to seek the answer and there it was, drowning!”

  “The answer was drowning?” Abby asked.

  “That’s right! That’s right! I got to the pond just in time to witness the miracle.”

  “How did we get from Ridder’s Pond to Panner’s mine?” Ansel asked. “Did the Lord write some message in the ice?”

  “You can doubt all you want, son, but yes, he did. In a way. He carved a circle, and Joseph Panner fell right through it. If I hadn’t come along, he’d have died the sinner that he was, unrepentant, unwelcome in Heaven. But just as I was pulling him out of that frozen hole straight to you-know-where, the Lord spoke to me again and told me that it was a good time to explain to Joseph how leaving his ill-gotten gains to the church would save his soul—just in case he didn’t make it, that is.” He looked as if his own soul had just been saved. Again. “‘Who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may turn from his wickedness and live.’ Clearly, God gave that mine to Joseph Panner so that he could give the profits he made to me.”

  “Why didn’t God just give them directly to you and leave out the middleman?” Ansel asked. “And the ice?”

  “Because I don’t gamble,” her father said simply. “So how could I have won that mine? And besides, the Lord didn’t need to save me again, Ansel. I’ve already seen the light. I’ve had the gifts and the graces. It was Joseph Panner’s soul that needed saving, and my church that needs building, and with one hole in the ice the good Lord killed two birds.”

  “So Panner’s just planning on giving you all his money?” Ansel asked. “Not that I believe he’s got that much left. That mine was played out years ago.”

  “The man’s got more gold than Judas. I’m going for Mr. Youtt now so he can draw up the papers for Joseph to sign, as soon as the feeling comes back to his fingers, that is.”

  “Did you tell Seth? I mean Dr. Hendon? Has someone gone for him?” Abby asked, pulling off her spectacles and heading for her coat.

  “The doctor? My heavens! You don’t think the good Lord saved him from drowning just to—”

  “You didn’t tell Seth?” Abby asked, hitting something with her foot and tipping her head to see that it was one of the cats that roamed the Herald’s office because she refused to heed Ansel’s warnings not to feed them. She apologized to the kitten and slipped her coat over her shoulders.

  “A doctor? After such a miracle?” Her father appeared confused. “‘Blessed is he that hears the word of God’—and I shouted it in his ear till the poor man couldn’t hear anything but the Lord. I’m telling you it was nothing short of a miracle. I summoned the Lord and laid my hands upon Panner’s body. And I could feel his soul rise up in worship!”

  “I’m very happy for his soul, Pa. But what about his fingers and toes? Who’s seeing to those?”

  For a moment her father looked confused. “I told you. The Lord is—”

  “I’m getting Seth,” she said, sidestepping her father but feeling his hand on her shoulder.

  “Seth, is it? Oh, Abidance. Don’t you go losing your heart, now. Remember, this is the same Seth who doesn’t come to church, who refused the sacraments at his sister’s burial. You were surely doing the Lord’s work when you saw to Sarah Hendon when she was alive, God rest her soul. But I see that while I’ve been watching over my flock, your mama and your brother have allowed my littlest, dearest lamb to stray from—”

  “All you see is a young lady fetching the doctor for a sick man, the way you should have,” Ansel said, coming toward the door himself. “Don’t go imagining things. Abidance is no more interested in the good doctor than I was in his sister.”

  Abby supposed she would have stood there all day, her breath caught in her throat, her jaw dropped, her brother’s words ringing in her ears, had Ansel not all but pushed her out the door.

  SETH HAD GRABBED HIS MEDICAL BAG AND HURRIED to Joseph Panner’s home, Abby on his heels, despite his telling her to go back to the newspaper office. He was glad now that she’d come along, since he needed help with the cold dressings he was applying to Mr. Panner’s fingers and toes in hopes of saving the frostbitten digits.

  “I’m telling you,” Joseph Panner said, his teeth chattering so that it was hard to make out his words. “This was the biggest walleye you ever saw. That fish was big last fall, but he’s ready for me now.”

  “Can you feel anything when I touch here?” Seth asked Panner, running his fingernails against the end of Panner’s toes and ignoring the man’s fish story.

  “He can feel the Lord in every breath,” Abby’s father, who had been hanging back in the doorway until now, hollered.

  “Great, but it’d be a shame to save his soul and lose his toes, don’t you think?” Seth responded, gently rubbing the unnaturally white skin and directing Abby to do the same to the toes on the man’s other foot. She was good in an emergency—better than he expected from a girl her age, not to mention the upbringing she’d had.

  “Oh, just so, just so. But it was the Lord saved this man,” Reverend Merganser said to Seth as he watched him work. “Dr. Hendon, that was the Lord’s hand.”

  “It was your hands,” Panner said, his voice quivering with chills. �
��You pulled me out of that ice, Reverend, and I owe you my life.”

  The reverend’s face colored, and he waved away the gratitude with his hand. Then his eyes got big and round, and he said, almost as if he were surprised at the revelation, “The Lord brought me to that spot, that very spot, at that very moment, just to do His will. Why, I never go past that old pond. And yet today I was drawn to it. Oh, ye of little faith! Oh, me of little faith! I woke up thinking that perhaps my church would never be—that I would remain forever a believer without a home, a servant without quarters in which to do my work for the Lord.”

  Her father looked out the window and shook his head in amazement. “Just when I was sure that the bishop would decide to take back my appointment, seeing as how I barely passed my course of study and it was only because the town built a church and there wasn’t another minister around that he let me be the pastor in the first place….” He mumbled this last, then, in a stronger voice, added, “And now, when I was at the end of my rope, He made a loop for me to hold on to—the means to build my church!”

  Panner smiled weakly. “I still can’t feel my toes, Doc,” he said, raising his head to see over his belly and down to where Seth and Abby were gently rubbing his stiff toes.

  “That’s not surprising,” Seth said. “You were in the pond a while. It’ll take some time for the flesh to thaw.”

  “Can’t I just stick ‘em in a tub of hot water?” Panner asked, his voice still quivering. “I’m not going to lose my toes, am I?”

  “Well,” Seth began, not one to lie to a patient, but not anxious to have the man panic, either. “I don’t—” he began, only to have Abby interrupt him.

  “So, Mr. Panner,” she said, her voice light, as if the man weren’t in the least bit of danger of losing his toes. “I’ve never played poker. What do you have to do to win?”

  “Abidance!” her father gasped, but Seth knew that Abby was just trying to distract Panner. And it was working. Panner’s voice came out stronger and clearer as he answered her.

  “You gotta be braver and smarter than the next fellow,” he said, and Seth thought that maybe, just maybe, there was a little bit of pink now to Panner’s big toe. “You gotta have a good bluffing face, Miss Abby. Like you believe you’ve got a winning hand despite the cards you mighta gotten dealt.”