Stoney Ridge 03 - The Lesson Read online

  Amos felt disgusted by the treachery Grace Mitchell had pulled over her children. Even animals cared for their young better than that woman.

  But there was a tiny glimmer of happiness inside of Amos. It shamed him to admit it, but he couldn’t stop the thought from taking shape: Now, surely, Chris Yoder would leave Stoney Ridge. There was nothing to keep him here.

  And then he silently upbraided himself for his selfishness.

  A knock at the door interrupted his conflicted thoughts. He got up and opened the door to find Jimmy Fisher standing there.

  “Come in, Jimmy.” Amos pulled him in and closed the door. Ah, finally. Finally, Jimmy Fisher showed up when he was needed. Jimmy stood awkwardly in front of the family.

  “Have you eaten?” Fern asked.

  “Yes. No.” Jimmy scratched his neck. “I have a couple of things to tell you.” He looked at M.K. “First, Eugene Miller wanted me to give this to you.” He handed her a note and waited while she read it aloud.

  Deer Teecher M.K.

  I am running off fer good. Don’t worry about mee. I will bee fine. Yurs trooly, Eugene Miller

  P.S. I am not leaving cuz of your teeching. Yur not half-bad.

  M.K.’s dark brown eyes, so much like Amos’s own, widened. “He’s gone. Eugene Miller left home. He’s run away.” She passed the note to her father.

  Amos’s heart went out to his daughter. She had been encouraged by the progress Eugene had been making. He was just about to say something to comfort her when Jimmy blew out a big puff of air.

  “There’s something else.” Jimmy moved from foot to foot, ill at ease. “Something I need to say, and I need to say it right away, while I still have the strength.” He cast a furtive glance in Chris’s direction.

  “Did something happen to Samson? Is he hurt?” Chris jumped up from the table.

  Jimmy looked at M.K., then took a deep breath. “He’s not hurt. He’s fine. More than fine. But . . . something has happened.” Jimmy folded his arms against his chest. “I raced him. Over at the track.”

  “Domino Joe’s gambling field, you mean,” Fern uttered under her breath.

  “Samson’s not much of a racehorse, I discovered.” Jimmy rubbed his hands together. “I underestimated his—” he glanced at Fern—“manliness.”

  Chris groaned. “His instincts would make him try to prove to the other colts that he’s the boss. He’s the keeper of the fillies.”

  Jimmy rubbed a hand through his hair. “Apparently.” He cleared his throat. “But I was just so sure he would be a crackerjack racehorse.” His eyes nervously took in the room. Quietly, he added, “So I bet on him.” Jimmy carefully studied a crack in the ceiling. “And I lost.”

  There was a terrible silence that no words could fill. All eyes were on Jimmy.

  Chris came around the table. “What exactly did you bet?”

  “Samson,” Jimmy said, barely a whisper. He cleared his throat. “I bet Samson. And I lost. I lost Samson to Domino Joe.”

  It took a moment for Jimmy’s confession to sink in. A solitary feather would have knocked everyone down. It hit Chris first, full force. He opened his mouth as if forming an answer, then clenched his jaw and closed his eyes in despair. “The only thing that was mine . . . the only thing left . . . and you lost him in a pathetic pony race . . .” When he opened them again, he turned to M.K., then to Amos, with wounded eyes. He snatched up his hat and coat and left the house without a word, closing the door gently behind him.

  Jimmy wrinkled his face in confusion. “What does that mean—the only thing left?”

  M.K. looked at Jimmy with disgust. “Why don’t you ever do what you’re supposed to?”

  He shrugged. “Because I can never figure out what that is.”

  Mary Kate leapt up to grab her coat off the wall peg.

  “You’re not going after him,” Amos said.

  She ignored him and put her coat on.

  “Did you hear me?” Amos repeated. “There’s more to the story than you know.”

  “What’s the whole story?” Jimmy asked, eyes bouncing from Amos to M.K. and back to Amos.

  M.K. glared at Jimmy, then turned to her father. “I know more than you think I do, Dad.” M.K. pointed to Jimmy. “I know you’d rather I go out with him—a liar and a cheat and a gambler—”

  “Hey,” Jimmy said. “That’s a little harsh.”

  “All true,” M.K. snapped. “I know you’re the one who has been dipping into everyone’s coffee cans to pay off your gambling debt to Domino Joe.”

  Jimmy raised his eyebrows. “How would you . . .” He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it, closed it, as if he thought better than to deny it. “I’m not proud of that,” he mumbled. “And I have plans to pay it all back.”

  “Out there is a man—not a boy—” she gave a glance in Jimmy’s direction—“who keeps his word. Who is fiercely protective of his little sister. Who has plans and dreams for a future. And that future keeps getting ripped from him—through no fault of his own.” She threw another dark glance in Jimmy’s direction.

  “This has nothing to do with Jimmy,” Amos said. “This is about Chris. Chris and his mother.”

  “What about Chris and my mother?” Jenny asked. Everyone looked at her as if they had forgotten she was there.

  A pained look crossed Amos’s face.

  “Dad, I know about Mom’s fall. I know there’s more to it than just an accident. Chris told me all about it in Ohio last night. He told me every detail.” She walked up to Amos and took his large work-roughened hand in hers. “I realize this is complicated, but hasn’t he paid enough?”

  “I want to save you heartache, M.K. I want to stop you before it’s too late. Before you think you’re in love with him.”

  “With who?” Jimmy piped up.

  Amos saw his daughter’s face change before his eyes, from a young girl to a young woman. Before his very eyes. There was no mistaking. She wasn’t his little girl anymore.

  “Dad,” she said gently. “It’s already too late. You can’t fall out of love with someone.” She squeezed his hands one last time and went outside.

  As she was closing the door, Jimmy pulled a chair out and said, “Think Chris is gonna finish that sandwich?”

  “Immer dreizehn,” Fern sighed. Forever thirteen.

  Chris leaned his head against the door of Samson’s empty stall. He had led Samson in there just a few mornings ago, gave him water and fresh hay, and told him he’d be back for him. Samson was gone. He couldn’t believe it. He wondered if this was what Job of the Bible felt like, as messenger upon messenger brought him news of horrendous proportions. Bam, bam, bam. One blow after another. How much could a person bear?

  Chris was rendered as motionless as stone, his brow furrowed. In his head, he heard Jimmy speaking about betting on Samson, he heard Rodney Gladstone talking about selling the house, but the sounds came to him as through a long tunnel, over the rush of a freight train roaring in his head. He fought to breathe, to maintain his footing. All he could picture was his mother.

  How much would God give a person to bear? How many times had he asked God for guidance and help? To cure his mother of her addiction? To give him wisdom to take good care of Jenny? But apparently God didn’t listen to prayers of that sort. Or maybe he just didn’t listen to his.

  “Where are you, God?” he shouted, pounding the rails of Samson’s stall. “Old Deborah said we should trust you. She said to leave everything in God’s hands. Now look at this mess! Where are you?!”

  “Fern always says that when God seems most absent, he is most there.”

  Chris whirled around to face Mary Kate. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “It just gets better and better, doesn’t it?” He put his hands on his hips, gazing at the empty stall. His eyes were bleak. “You shouldn’t be near me. Your father’s right. My family is like poison.”

  She gave him a gentle smile. “I don’t believe that.”

  “Of course not. How co
uld you? You don’t understand, Mary Kate. You couldn’t possibly.” His face contorted. “This is what it’s like with my mother. This is what my life is like. Every time Jenny and I would get settled in somewhere, she’d swoop in and disrupt it all. Today is no different than the way my entire life has gone. This is what it will always be like. She will always find a way to take what doesn’t belong to her.” He snapped his fingers. “Everything gone in the amount of time it takes to fill your lungs with air one time. Gone.” He snatched up an empty bucket and hurled it down the barn aisle. The sound of clinging and clanging down the cement path startled the horses so much that they shuffled in their stalls.

  Mary Kate was unruffled. “She might. Or she might not. It doesn’t matter. She can’t take what’s truly important.”

  The horses went back to their quiet munching of hay.

  Could she be right?

  Chris went very still, and for a long minute he frowned as he stared at Samson’s empty stall, but little by little, tension drained from his shoulders.

  He looked over at Mary Kate and he saw her tears through his own. And before Chris realized what was happening, she flung herself at him, clinging tightly to him, sobbing against his chest, telling him that she thought he was wonderful, crazy mother and all. He wrapped his arms around her, hugging her in return—the first embrace he had given or received for a very long time.

  Right then, something happened inside his chest. Not a lightning bolt zinging him, but a soft and breathtaking peace that one day, someday, everything would be alright.

  As Fern got Jenny settled into Sadie’s old room for the night, Amos stood in front of the fireplace, watching the flames dance. He was hardly aware of the clinking and clanking of dishes as Fern cleared the table and put them in the sink to soak. Suddenly, he realized she was standing right next to him.

  “Don’t you think it’s time you told me what’s been eating at you?”

  Amos put his face in his hands, then slowly dropped them. His voice shook with the effort of getting the words out. “I don’t know how to tell you this. It’s about Maggie.”

  Fern’s look changed, softened. She reached up and brushed back the hair from his right temple. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”

  They sat in front of the fire as Amos told her how Maggie had befriended Colonel Mitchell’s daughter. He was able to keep his emotions at bay while he spoke, until he got to the part on that spring day when Maggie was long overdue from a quick visit to take goat’s milk over to Grace Mitchell to help her colicky baby. Then, his voice choked up and he had trouble getting the words out.

  Fern waited patiently as the scene of that afternoon played through his mind, as vividly as yesterday, and he tried to gather the words to tell her . . .

  By the time Julia and Sadie had returned from school, Amos knew something was wrong. Maggie should have been home hours ago. He put Julia in charge of Sadie, Menno, and M.K., and crossed the field to go to the Colonel’s house. As soon as he crested a hill, he saw the red flash of police car lights. He ran the rest of the way. There was an ambulance and three police cars. Amos knew something horrendous had happened. He charged through the backyard and was blocked by a policeman.

  “My wife is there,” Amos said, with a voice he didn’t recognize as his own. He shoved the police officer away and went around the side of the house. And there he saw his Maggie, his darling, beautiful Maggie, motionless on the ground with a paramedic by her side. Colonel Mitchell sat in the back of a police car, his head hung low.

  “She’s gone,” the paramedic had told Amos gently. “It looks like she was pushed down the porch steps. She hit her head on that rock and fractured her skull.” He gave Amos a sympathetic look. “She must have died instantly. I doubt she ever knew what happened.”

  The police had pressed him with questions. Did he know why Maggie had gone over to Colonel Mitchell’s house? Yes. Did Maggie have any kind of conflict or dispute with the inhabitant? Of course not! Did he know of any reason why Colonel Mitchell might have argued with her? No.

  In the end, the coroner ruled the death as accidental manslaughter. The Colonel confessed that he was responsible for the accidental death of Margaret Zook Lapp, though he would not say anything else. Not how it happened. Not why.

  It never made any sense to Amos. It never did. The Colonel was a hard man, but he was reasonable. And despite being a career military man, he was not violent.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out that the Colonel was protecting his daughter, Grace Mitchell. But the problem was that Amos knew who was truly responsible for Maggie’s death. He knew, and he didn’t do anything about it. Not a thing. It didn’t even occur to the police to ask if the Colonel had someone else living at his house. Amos could have volunteered that information, but he didn’t. If the Colonel didn’t admit it, he wouldn’t either.

  There was a little part of Amos that felt justified. Vindicated. Someone should be held responsible. If not Grace, then the father who raised her. Weren’t parents responsible, to some degree, for the moral outcome of their children?

  And then swept in a wrestle with his conscience: who was he to make such an accusation against another child of God? God did not call him to judge another. He was given one soul to account for—his own.

  But he knew. And he did nothing. The Colonel was sent to a minimum-security prison and died while serving his sentence, from some kind of swiftly moving cancer.

  “So that’s the whole story,” Amos finally said, after relaying everything to Fern in fits and starts and sobs. “I just can’t look at Chris without thinking of Maggie’s death. Everything about it—the Colonel’s look on his face while he was in the police car. The guilt I feel because I remained silent when I knew it was Grace Mitchell who had caused Maggie’s death. I’m not saying she tried to kill Maggie. It might have been an accident, but she never owned up to her responsibility. As far as I know, she never came back to Stoney Ridge. Not even for her father’s funeral. Maybe it’s not fair or right or logical, but I can’t get past it.”

  Fern didn’t say anything for a long while. “Maybe you’re not supposed to get past it.”

  He looked at her. “What does that mean?”

  “God brought Chris and Jenny into our lives for a reason. They began here, then ended up with Old Deborah, giving them the opportunity to get to know Rome and Julia. Then back they come to Stoney Ridge. You told Bud at the Hardware Store that you needed someone to help you cut hay on the same day that Chris came in, looking for work. Who would have believed that Mary Kate would be teaching school this term? And that one of those pupils is Jenny. Coincidence after coincidence after coincidence. A sure sign of God’s silent sovereignty. I don’t think he wants you to get past this. I think he wants you to get through it.”

  “Fern, I don’t know how.”

  “Every single day, you pray to God to help you forgive Chris and Jenny’s mother. Pray for mercy for her soul.”

  Amos wiped his face with both of his hands. How long had he held on to this information, rolling it over and over in his mind? Always simmering, always in the back of his mind, like a wound that couldn’t heal. He was exhausted. “I’m afraid I can’t find the strength in myself to do that, Fern.”

  Fern leaned forward, smiling tenderly. “Good,” she said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  But Fern wasn’t done yet. “Amos, you need to reach out to Chris. To show him how to live with a problem that doesn’t go away. Because something tells me we haven’t heard the last of that mother of his.” She rubbed her hands together like a little girl. “But I have just the idea to start redeeming this big mess.”

  Amos looked at his wife, amazed that she still loved him after what he had just confessed to her. “I don’t deserve it.” Grace, Amos meant. And mercy.

  “None of us do,” Fern answered, understanding.

  On Monday afternoon, the pupils stayed late to finish up an art project. It was Uncle Hank’s idea: he had a few way-past
-their-prime rainbow trout in the freezer that Fern insisted he toss out, and M.K. had extra paint, so the pupils made fish prints. The schoolhouse smelled horrible but the pictures were wonderful. She thought about Eugene Miller, missing whatever his creative mind would have conjured up for a fish print. His empty desk grieved her today. It grieved everyone. Where was he? Was he going to be all right? She knew she would worry about him for the rest of her life. All she could do was to pray for him.

  Mary Kate hung the last picture on the wall and stood back to look at the room. It was surprisingly cheerful. Everything about her life surprised her. Not only that she was a teacher, but that she liked it. In fact, there were moments, like today, when she was starting to love it.

  She heard a knock at the door and Chris popped his head in. A big smile creased his handsome face. “Can you come outside for a minute?”

  She hurried out to meet him. Chris stood beside a pitch-black stallion. “Samson!” She crossed the porch and put her hand out to Samson’s velvet nose. “How in the world did you get him back?”

  “I didn’t,” Chris said, grinning. “Your dad and Fern went to an auction this morning and bought him back from Domino Joe. Cost a pretty penny. I told your dad that I wanted to pay him back, but he said no, that it was a down payment.”

  “Down payment on what?” M.K. stroked his long neck.

  “He said something odd—something like ‘refreshing the sponge.’ Fern explained that was bread baker’s code for a fresh start.” Samson dipped his big head up and down, making Chris take a step back. “I finished up minor repairs on the bishop’s buggy today. The bishop was happy about that. He seems pretty determined that I should help your uncle in the buggy shop. But I don’t want to step on your uncle’s toes.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Uncle Hank wants to retire from buggy repair. Just last night he said he’s going full time into finding water. Much more lucrative, he thinks, especially after Edith Fisher corrected him about the puppies’ mother. Turns out she isn’t a poodle at all. She’s a Portuguese water dog. So now he has a theory that he can train the puppies to find the water for him. All four.”