Stoney Ridge 03 - The Lesson Read online

  “I’ll come too,” Fern said, appearing out of the barn like magic, startling Amos. He practically jumped.

  “Everybody knows Fern has a knack for turning up out of the blue,” M.K. whispered to Jenny. “You’d think Dad would be used to it.”

  The way Jenny looked at her then, almost giggling, filled M.K. with some relief. It was the first time Jenny hadn’t peered at her with that suspicious, birdlike glare. Maybe she was finally thawing out.

  Chris decided that he wouldn’t seek the sheriff out on his trip to town today, but if he happened to see him, he would tell him about the memory—or was it a dream?—that seemed to pop into his head last night.

  Maybe. But maybe not.

  Of course, just as he pulled into the edge of town, he saw the sheriff’s car at the silverstream diner, The Railway Station. Chris thought it was a strange choice for a diner name because Stoney Ridge didn’t have a train running through it, but he had heard the burgers were good. If he ever had an extra ten dollars to spend, he should take Jenny out for a burger and shake. If he had an extra twenty dollars, he might consider asking Mary Kate Lapp out for a meal.

  Maybe. But maybe not.

  After all, she was spoken for by Jimmy Fisher. A pang twisted Chris’s gut, and he knew it wasn’t hunger. Thinking of M.K. with someone else didn’t set well.

  Chris had taken pains to avoid Mary Kate after finding out that particular piece of news. This morning, he was even a little rude to her. She brought him coffee in the barn and he refused it, brushing past her as if he was on his way to put out a fire. He wasn’t the kind who would ever take another fellow’s girl, especially a friend’s. And Jimmy Fisher had been a friend to him. He had come over again last Saturday afternoon to help Chris tackle the overgrown yard.

  Chris knew Jimmy had an angle—he was itching to borrow Samson for a horse race. That wasn’t going to happen, not ever, despite Jimmy’s strong hints. Still, Chris couldn’t help smiling at the challenge. Jimmy Fisher was the type who made a competition out of everything. How fast you could hammer nails. How quickly you could rip boards off the porch. Everything was an opportunity for a race. Even stupid things, like thinking you could race a hot-blooded stallion at the tracks. Everybody knew you didn’t take a stallion to the tracks. Too distracting. Stallions instinctively tried to create a harem. Everybody knew that.

  Besides, the thought of gambling repulsed Chris. It reminded him of his mother—always wanting something for nothing.

  Jimmy Fisher had an answer for gambling, when Chris asked him why a Plain person was at the tracks. Jimmy said that horse racing was in the best interest of the animal. “These horses are trained day after day to forget the instincts they’re born with.” Jimmy insisted that racing helped a horse work out its desire to be free, to roam wild, so that it could return to the fieldwork as a happier beast, knowing it had reached its full potential.

  There was no point in responding to such a bogus explanation. Jimmy had an answer for everything, Chris had quickly discovered. Still, he found himself enjoying Jimmy’s company. Jimmy was hard not to like.

  Chris pulled the horse over to the side of the road, trying to decide if he would go in to talk to the sheriff or not. Maybe. Maybe not. Should he? Or shouldn’t he?

  He’d come so far these last few months, and the slightest misstep could wipe all that out.

  “Got something else for me, Yoder?”

  Chris practically jumped at the sound of the sheriff’s voice right at his buggy window. “Last night,” he said, “I woke up from a dead sleep. I had a vision so real that I couldn’t remember if I dreamed it or it was real.” He took a deep breath. “There was a woman who had come over to help us sometimes. She took pity on our family and used to bring food. She would give me her son’s hand-me-down clothes. Stuff like that.”

  “Go on,” Sheriff Hoffman said, leaning his arms against the open buggy window.

  “One afternoon, my mother sent me upstairs to check on the baby. Jenny was crying, and I remember hearing my mother’s voice get louder and louder. I crept down the stairs, and I saw the neighbor lady holding my mother’s arm as if she was trying to stop her.”

  “Stop her from what?”

  This was what was hard to say. “From doing drugs. My mother is—was—is a drug addict. Methamphetamine. Back then, she would buy a lot of Sudafed and make her own meth.”

  The sheriff didn’t miss a beat. He was probably used to this kind of thing, but it still shamed Chris. “Go on. What happened next?”

  “My mother became angrier and angrier at the neighbor. She saw me on the stairs and yelled at me to get upstairs.” Chris paused to collect himself for a long moment. “The neighbor lady was trying to calm my mother down, but my mother was shouting at her to leave and mind her own business. Then, suddenly, there was silence. A strange silence. The next thing I knew, my mother raced upstairs, grabbed a suitcase, and started to throw things into it. She picked up the baby, told me to get in the car, and we left Stoney Ridge.”

  “Did you see the other woman leave the house?”

  Chris shook his head. “No. We went out the back door of the kitchen to get to the car.”

  Sheriff Hoffman rubbed his chin. “What do you remember of this woman? Do you remember her name?”

  Chris squinted his eyes, thinking hard. “No, I can’t remember her name. Only that she was Amish.” Out of the blue, a name popped out at him. “Mattie. No—Maggie.” A cold chill ran through Chris. He had a feeling that he had just made things much, much worse by telling the truth. He should not have said anything at all. But he had to know. “Why? Did something happen to that woman? Did something happen that day?”

  Sheriff Hoffman gave an infinitesimal nod of his head. “I was just a rookie that spring. I was told to make an arrest for accidental manslaughter. I did what I was told. I made the arrest. But something never added up to me. Something always bothered me about it.”

  “But . . . who did you arrest?”

  Sheriff Hoffman’s penetrating stare was unnerving. “Your grandfather. Colonel Mitchell.”

  Was it possible? How could this be? Amos followed Jenny Yoder’s instructions to drive to her house. He felt a shiver up his spine when she pointed to a narrow drive that led to Colonel Mitchell’s house. He hadn’t been to this house in fourteen years, and he had never wanted to cross the threshold again. Not ever.

  Fern and Jenny were debating bread dough and starters and yeast and he couldn’t even make any sense of their conversation. All that he could do was to pray one prayer, over and over and over: Herr, hilf mich. God, help me. When Amos reached the house, he saw the water spewing out from the side yard pipe. He hopped out of the buggy and went straight to the pipe. He needed time to think and was grateful for something to do.

  When he noticed Fern climb out of the buggy, he called out, “This won’t take but a moment. You stay put.”

  She snapped her head up at the sharp tone in his voice and gave him a strange look. “Jenny is going to show me the house. It won’t take long.” She turned her attention to Jenny and helped her out of the buggy.

  Fern didn’t understand. But how could she, when he had never told her how Maggie had died? He had only told her it was an accident. That God had been merciful and Maggie hadn’t suffered. He hadn’t told her that she had been trying to help the English neighbor that bordered their farm, because there was no father, and the mother wasn’t quite right. The woman had a little boy, a few years older than M.K., and a baby girl who cried a lot. And she lived with her father, Colonel Mitchell. A tough guy, he liked to call himself. A former Marine. And a former football player, in the days when helmets were flimsy, he would say.

  His mind racing, Amos looked around until he found the main water pipe to the house and turned it off. Then he went to the broken spigot, wrenched off what remained of it, screwed on the new spigot, turned back on the main water. Checked to see if there was any leak, gathered his tools.

  Why was Chris Yod
er living here? Why, why, why?

  And then it hit him—so hard he had to sit down. A melee of emotions—dread, anger, guilt—struck him all at once. He realized why he thought Chris looked vaguely familiar. Chris was the Colonel’s grandson. Chris was that little boy Maggie was always worried about. Too serious, Maggie had said. Much too serious for a little boy. Always worried about his mother and his baby sister. It was as if he hadn’t been allowed a childhood.

  And Jenny—she was only a baby. A baby with colic, like his own son, Menno. Maggie had found goat’s milk helped Menno’s indigestion as a baby, so she wanted to take goat’s milk over to the Colonel’s house. He vividly remembered the day—it was the first warm day of spring after an exceptionally cold winter. The crocuses were blooming, and Maggie had been so excited to see her first robin that very morning. “Spring is finally here,” she told Amos as she explained where she was headed. Julia and Sadie were in school. Menno and M.K. were in the barn with him, playing with some new kittens.

  “Let them stay and play,” he had told Maggie. “I’ll watch them.”

  She had kissed him on the cheek and promised she wouldn’t be long.

  But she never returned.

  Looking back, Amos viewed his life as if divided into two halves: before Maggie died, and after. He believed that God’s hand was on Maggie’s passing. He believed that her life was complete. He believed that God had a purpose. God had a plan. He believed that with his whole heart. He banked his eternal life on that belief. But the reality of living without Maggie was a harsh one. He likened it to how someone must have felt if he lost his sense of taste: a person might continue to eat, to provide sustenance and nourishment to his body, but life had lost all flavor. Grief-stricken was just the word: grief had literally reached out and struck him, and left a permanent mark.

  “Amos, are you all right?”

  Fern and Jenny appeared beside him, shocking him into the present. He picked up the wrench and the broken spigot. “Yes. Yes. I’m fine. I’m ready to go.”

  Fern looked at Jenny and dusted her hands together the way she always did when she was making up her mind. “I think we should organize a work frolic to help Chris with some repairs.”

  Jenny’s face scrunched up. “I don’t think Chris wants any help.”

  “Nonsense. It’s our way,” Fern said, being annoyingly practical. “Come back to the house and we can make plans.” She started back to the buggy.

  Jenny looked to Amos to intervene. “I don’t think Chris is going to like that.”

  Amos had no idea how to respond. He still felt as if he was trying to process through a mountain of buried memories. “We can count on Fern to know what to do,” he managed at last.

  Back in the buggy, Amos flicked the reins over the horses’ backs. Slowly the buggy started off again. His heart and mind, though, remained at Colonel Mitchell’s house.

  14

  Early Monday morning, Teacher M.K. stood by the schoolhouse door, waiting for the scholars, smiling and talking with everyone in her mile-a-minute way. As hard as Jenny tried not to, she found herself growing increasingly intrigued by Teacher M.K.’s unique teaching style. And Teacher M.K. wouldn’t let Jenny fade into the background like she usually did. She simply wouldn’t allow it. She would call on Jenny in class even when she didn’t raise her hand. She would read parts of her story out loud as if she thought they were any good. And they weren’t. Jenny was sure they weren’t. Anna Mae Glick told her so.

  With Teacher M.K., the world got bigger and then it got smaller. Jenny was amazed. She was starting to notice things she had never noticed before.

  First, Teacher M.K. taught them about the stars in the sky, and how the ancient mariners could find their way across the oceans by charting the stars. She brought in seashells and pieces of coral that she had found at a garage sale. She pointed out how a conch seashell looked like the inside of a person’s ear, and that coral looked like veins and arteries.

  Next, she brought in an old microscope she had bought for $5 at that same garage sale. She had the class look at things that were too small to see. She said there were much stronger microscopes that could see things even smaller than they could see with the garage sale microscope. A drop from the water pump became a regular sideshow of squirming cells. Jenny hadn’t taken a sip of water from that pump since.

  Today, Teacher M.K. had brought in fern leaves and put one on every single desk. “Tell me what you see,” she said.

  The room went very still as the scholars counted the leaves. Even the rowdy boys who usually whispered and snickered throughout the lesson sat as still as mannequins.

  “The lines on the leaf are like blood vessels,” Danny Riehl said. He adjusted his spectacles for a better look. Danny had this way of looking at things very carefully, even little things. He was always taking things apart and putting them back together. Anything he was curious about. Jenny was a little sorry that Danny was younger than she was, and even more sorry that Anna Mae had dibbs on him. Jenny thought he showed great promise. “And would that be the nervure?”

  “He’s always making up them big words,” Eugene Miller sputtered. “He talks like he’s playing Scrabble and is looking for points.”

  “Nervure is a word for the rib of a leaf,” Teacher M.K. said. “It’s just a more precise way of explaining something.”

  Danny looked at Teacher M.K. and smiled that smile of his, like when she told him about black holes in the sky and stuff like that. In a strange way, Jenny thought they understood each other.

  Teacher M.K. said that there were all kinds of illustrations in nature that pointed to the Creator of the universe. God’s handprint was on all of his work, just like when we sign our drawings. Just like that.

  Gazing at the fern leaf, Jenny blurted out, “Count the little leaves! They come out just right! Look. On each row there’s just one more leaf less, until it gets to the top.”

  Teacher M.K. looked pleased. “You, Jenny Yoder, just figured out today’s arithmetic problem.”

  Imagine that, Jenny thought. Me. Arithmetic.

  Mary Kate had been teaching for nearly ten weeks now. She had good days and she had bad days, but she wasn’t thinking quite as often about running off to Borneo. Last week, she had a terrible, awful day and promptly sent off her passport application in the mail. Eugene Miller had gone too far, yet again, and put a snake in her pencil drawer. She hated snakes! Always had. She blamed Jimmy Fisher and a certain black racer snake.

  Getting her picture taken for the passport made her feel as exposed as if she had run through Main Street in her underwear. She waited at the post office until she was sure no one was around whom she might recognize. Then she quickly had her picture taken by the postal clerk. As soon as it was ready, she signed the application, stuck the money order in the envelope with the application, and handed it to the clerk without allowing herself a second thought. It was a weak moment, one she wasn’t proud of, but knowing it was a done deal gave her a feeling of satisfaction.

  In the meantime, she had taken Erma Yutzy’s advice to heart. She tried to find ways to connect to each pupil, to look for that golden moment. Teaching had become strangely satisfying, though winning the affection of the pupils was proving to be harder than she had expected. Not with the little ones, like Barbara Jean, or the bright ones, like Danny Riehl. But some of the older boys and girls were harder to convince, like there was Jenny Yoder. Jenny remained cool and distant. A bright spot occurred today when Jenny started to notice the patterns in the leaf and connected it to math patterns. That was good. Very good.

  But later in the day, she had asked Jenny and Anna Mae Glick if they might like to stay after school and help her set up the art project for the next day. She had hoped that if Anna Mae could get to know Jenny, she might start including her with the other girls. But Anna Mae wrinkled her nose and scrunched up her face so tightly that M.K. thought she might suddenly be in pain. “Danny likes me to walk home with him from school.” She swiftly
made her escape without a word of farewell.

  M.K. knew that wasn’t true. Danny usually burst out of the schoolhouse as soon as she rang the dismissal bell and disappeared into the cornfield before Anna Mae had time to gather her things.

  Jenny watched Anna Mae flounce out of the schoolhouse. And then she said, almost in a whisper, “She acts like I’m invisible.”

  “You’re not, you know,” M.K. pressed.

  Jenny hesitated, her intense eyes searching M.K.’s face. “Not what?”

  “Invisible.”

  Jenny looked at M.K., then looked away, but not before M.K. saw the way her eyes narrowed and two lines formed between her thin little eyebrows. “Fern is expecting me.” She turned and hurried out the door.

  M.K. could have kicked herself. Why did she always seem to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing when she was around those Yoders? Just when they started to open up, she had to say something that scared them off. A turtle in its shell.

  Wouldn’t it be nice, Jenny thought as she walked to school, if you could shorten the bad days and save up the time to make a good day even longer? This morning, for example, she would like to swap out for two Christmas mornings.

  She knew the entire day was headed in the wrong direction when she overcooked the scrambled eggs for breakfast. Fern had warned her to cook eggs slowly, but Chris was in a hurry, so Jenny turned up the flame on the stove. She burnt her finger on the hot pan handle and couldn’t find a bandage. Then the eggs ended up looking like rubber cement. They tasted worse. Chris didn’t complain, but Jenny was disappointed. Yesterday, Fern had given Jenny those brown eggs, still warm from Windmill Farm’s henhouse, and Jenny had wasted them. Eggs were precious.

  Chris hurried off to work and Jenny got ready for school. She heard a knock at the door and ran to get it, thinking it was Chris. But no! Rodney Gladstone, that overeager real estate agent who was always dropping by, stood at the door with that greasy smile on his face. He held out a handful of mail to Jenny. Her mail. On top was a thin gray envelope with her mother’s familiar handwriting on it.