Jo Brown - The Amish Suitor

With a chuckle, Miriam tossed her dust rag on the table and checked that her simple blue kerchief was in place over her hair. Why was she inside on such a beautiful day? School was starting at the beginning of the week—the reason why she’d been trying to get her weekly chores done today—so she wouldn’t have as much time to enjoy her garden.

She glanced around the large space with its quilt walls. The ones hanging as “bedroom doors” had been pulled aside to let air circulate. It was strange to live in a place like this one, but it was beginning to feel like home.

As she walked outside, she thought of how truly blessed she was. She had gut friends, including those in the Spinsters’ Club. She laughed. So far she hadn’t shared the name and their plans to enjoy outings together with anyone else. She wondered what the reaction would be. Though she’d considered mentioning it to Caleb, she hadn’t. He was so solicitous of her, and she wondered if he would think she’d lost her mind amidst her desolation about the canceled wedding.

The grass beneath her bare feet was as soft as the breeze making loose strands dance around her face. She curled her toes into the grass and drew in a deep breath as she watched Comet, their dappled-gray buggy horse, rolling like a young colt in the pasture. He was taking advantage of the day as she was.

Pausing to pluck a couple of weeds out of the flower bed to the right of the barn door, she glanced at the battered farmhouse. It was two stories high, but the roof dropped low over eyebrow windows. Caleb had replaced missing slats on the roof and installed drywall inside the house. Because he’d had to remove everything to the studs, he’d asked her to redesign the first floor. She’d made the kitchen bigger and added a mudroom and laundry room with a door to the yard, so it’d be easier to take laundry out to the line that ran from the house to the biggest barn. He’d put a movable wall between the two front rooms. That way, when it was their turn to host church, the wall could be shoved against the kitchen wall, making enough room for the Leit .

The outer walls would be painted white, and he’d agreed the shutters should be the same dark green as the shadows beneath the pine trees. The barns were a worn red, and he’d have to repaint them, too, but for now he was concentrating his scarce free time on the house.

Miriam admired the buds on the daylilies. They soon would be blooming. She planned to transplant her perennials along the front porch, and the best time for moving daylilies was August. She could wait longer to shift the daffodils she’d found in the woods. For the first two days after she brought the bulbs closer to the house, a groundhog had dug them up. She’d convinced the irritating burrower to leave them alone by dousing the flowers with a liberal amount of chili powder mixed with water. The strong scent had kept the animal away...at least so far.

She squatted by the flower bed and went to work. Less than five minutes later, she heard buggy wheels rattling toward the barn. Wondering who was coming, she gathered the weeds she’d pulled. She tossed them onto the compost pile before she walked around the barn’s corner. If someone was looking for Caleb, she’d have to admit she wasn’t quite sure where he was. He’d had a long list of errands to do in Salem and in Cambridge, about ten miles to the south.

She stopped in midstep, surprised when Eli climbed out of the family buggy. Why hadn’t he said anything yesterday about plans to stop by?

Her breath caught when his nephew hopped out behind him. The little boy looked around with the candid curiosity of a six-year-old, and he pointed to Comet. The horse wasn’t a common color for buggy horses. If the little boy went into the pasture and frightened him, it could be—

Stop it!

She scolded herself for looking for trouble where there might not be any. She wanted to stop reacting to the sight of a young kind , thinking of things that could go wrong, but she couldn’t. Kyle reminded her of Ralph Fisher. Both were spindly and all joints as their elbows and knees stuck out from their thin limbs while they grew like cornstalks.

Eli had noticed her dismay yesterday after the church service. Nobody else had, not even her friends in the Spinsters’ Club. She needed to keep her feelings to herself to halt the questions from beginning again—such as why a teacher hated kids. She didn’t hate them; she loved them. Because she loved them, she didn’t want to be the one to put any in danger.

“Gut mariye,” Eli called.

She waved to him and his nephew and waited for them to cross the yard to where she stood. A siren sounded from the main road, and she flinched.

Kyle did, too, and scanned in every direction to see what sort of emergency vehicle it was.

Eli kept walking as if nothing had happened.

How bad was his hearing?

It wasn’t her business. However, the teacher in her was curious how he’d managed to get by with only his young nephew to clue him in. A few quick tests he wouldn’t know were going on would tell her the extent of his hearing loss.

“I brought plans for the school,” he said when he reached her. “Do you want to see them?”

“Ja.” She didn’t nod to confirm what she’d said. “Seeing them is a gut idea because you want my help, ain’t so?”

His dark brows dropped in concentration. He must have heard some of what she’d said and was trying to piece it together. Wondering why he didn’t ask her to repeat what she’d said more slowly, she sighed. Even her grossmammi had resisted help for years because of hochmut , but pride did nothing to help her escape the ever-narrowing walls of her world as her hearing continued to fail. Nor would it help Eli.

She spoke to Kyle. “There’s chocolate pudding in the fridge. Go ahead and help yourself to some. Have some with a glass of milk, too, if you want.”

“Can I, Onkel Eli?” he asked.

More confusion fled through Eli’s eyes, but he nodded when the little boy made motions that must have conveyed the question without words.

Miriam bit her lip to keep from saying sign language had limits because it could be understood by a limited number of people.

When the little boy skipped to the door and disappeared inside, she saw Eli’s distress before he could mask it. Didn’t he realize that, with Kyle beginning school, he needed to learn a different way to communicate? He wouldn’t be able to depend so much on the little boy.

“Let me show you the plan I sketched for the school,” Eli said, motioning toward the barn.

Was he hoping to head inside where his nephew could give him hints about what was being said?

“It’s such a nice day, ain’t so?” She sat on the cement ramp’s edge. It would be used to bring equipment into the barn, once it was no longer their home. “Let’s go over what you’ve got out here.”

She thought he’d object, but he opened a large sheet of paper and spread it across the ramp beside her. He stood so close, each breath she took was flavored with the scents of his laundry soap and bleach. Unlike her brother’s, his white shirt pulled over his head and had a stand-up collar. The tab front closed with four small buttons. Beneath the cotton, the shadows of the muscles along his brawny arms drew her eyes.

She looked away. Eli Troyer was too handsome for her own gut . She wasn’t Leanna Wagler, believing in the possibility of a storybook hero coming to sweep her off her feet and carry her off to a wunderbaar life.

“What do you think?” he prompted, looking at his drawing. “It’s a rough sketch, but it should show you what I’m planning. Feel free to tell me changes you think will make the school better.”