Chapter 15
With Bitsy on her feet and feeling better, Miri felt like a weight had come off her shoulders.
They headed back toward the house, Miri’s mind skipping forward.
She’d clean out the sick cows’ stalls again this evening, just to make sure their bedding was fresh.
She knew enough about reinfection to understand that recovering animals needed to stay dry, comfortable, and clean.
She’d been making a point of listening in when Tabitha talked about animal care or the different cases she’d worked on when she chatted with family, trying to glean as much knowledge as possible.
A fully licensed veterinarian in the family was truly a gift, even though they had to pay for her services like everyone else.
Miri took off her boots at the bottom of the stairs, then headed up, taking two at a time, and went through the side door and into the kitchen.
“I do feel better knowing that Bitsy is going to be okay,” Miri admitted.
“I’m glad she’s doing better too.” Moses stepped out of his work boots, and his voice was muffled by the distance.
She headed to the big wood stove, noticed that the woodbox was empty, and sighed.
She’d forgotten to refill it this morning.
She couldn’t start the fire in the stove unless she had more wood.
Doing all the chores herself—inside and outdoors—was a bigger challenge than she’d imagined, and she’d known it would be hard. She turned back for the door.
“Where are you going?” Moses asked as he came into the kitchen.
“I need wood.”
“I’ll bring wood,” he said.
Miri hadn’t considered asking him to get it, but it was nice all the same. He headed back out, and she went into the kitchen to wash her hands and start preparing some fruit and bread to go with the rest of the meal.
It didn’t take long for Moses to come clomping back inside, boots still on his feet and arms loaded with wood.
“Sorry about the floor,” Moses said.
“Never mind,” she replied. “Danke for the wood.”
He dumped it into the box next to the stove and looked down at his hand with a grimace.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I broke my nail.” He held out his thumb. The nail had been torn from the bed, and blood oozed from underneath.
“Ouch! That’s not breaking a nail.” Her stomach turned just looking at it.
It was one thing to injure herself, but seeing someone else’s pain always gave her stomach a tumble.
“You’ve almost torn it off.” She forced herself to look away from the blood as her head started to swim. “Moses, that’s got to hurt!”
“Yah, it does.” His face looked a little pale. They couldn’t both get light-headed. That was no use to anyone, and the one who wasn’t hurt had to keep her head about her.
“How did this happen?” She caught his wrist and led him toward the kitchen cupboard with the first-aid supplies.
“I caught it on the loose hinge of the woodbox out there. I need to tighten that up for you.”
“I can tighten it up myself.” But it was better to know about all those little fixes that needed doing. She opened the cupboard and pulled down some disinfectant and a package of bandages. “Now hold still. This is going to hurt.”
“You have no bedside manner whatsoever, do you?” Moses asked. “What about comfort? Sympathy?”
Miri paused, then looked up at him. A smile toyed at his lips, and he caught her gaze meaningfully.
“Are you joking?” she asked uncertainly.
“Sort of.”
“Well, cut it out,” she said. “I’m trying not to throw up.”
“Are you not good with blood?” he asked. He started to pull his hand back, but she tightened her grip.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m good with it or not, you need some medical attention,” she said.
“I guess I do.”
She loosened her grip on his wrist, expecting him to pull away and go bleed somewhere else, but he didn’t. He stood there, his hand resting in hers.
“Sorry,” she said. “But this is going to really sting.”
“Yah, I know.”
“Don’t pull away.”
“Do your worst, Miri.” His voice was a soft rumble next to her ear as she opened the bottle of disinfectant and dribbled it over the mangled nail bed. His arm tensed in her hands, and he sucked in a hiss of breath, but he didn’t pull back.
Miri closed the bottle and reached for a bandage. “Okay, now we’ll bandage this up nice and tight, and when it heals enough, that flap of nail will just fall off.”
“You sound like you’ve done this sort of thing before,” he said.
“Unfortunately, and on myself.”
“You do love your farmwork,” he said.
“Actually, I was chopping an onion,” she said, laughing lightly. “I’m more graceful with farmwork.”
She secured the bandage in place, and Moses surveyed her handiwork.
“Danke,” he said.
“No problem.”
“Do you remember that time we were racing in school, and you broke your little toe?” he asked.
Miri cast him a rueful look. “Yah, and I was convinced it was Gott’s punishment for my sin of pride.”
“Caring so much if you won?” Moses asked, a smile tickling his lips.
“Nee, I knew I would win. That was the pride.”
Moses laughed aloud. “I can see why you thought so. Thankfully, I did eventually grow.”
She looked up at him, all the way up to his face. He stood a head taller now, and his shoulders were broad and muscled. A shadow of stubble was just visible across his chin.
“Yah, you did,” she agreed.
“You still think you could win?” he asked, and there was a playful sparkle in his eyes.
Could she? Definitely not. Not anymore. But she wouldn’t admit it.
“I don’t need to prove anything anymore,” she said with a wry little smile of her own.
He didn’t drop his gaze, and she felt some heat hit her cheeks.
Moses had always been a good-looking young man, and now that he’d grown up, he was almost devastatingly handsome.
It was only a matter of time before he chose some grateful girl and married her, and Miri would learn how to run this farm on her own.
That was the plan, wasn’t it? A woman couldn’t hold on to her dreams unless she took hold of them with both hands.
“Um . . .” Miri tore her gaze away from his. “We need to eat.”
She turned away from him quickly and headed toward the stove. She dropped down to arrange the kindling, then struck a match. Focusing on the fire was a mite easier than focusing on Moses Yoder right now.
“You know it used to kill me that you’d beat me in every single race,” Moses said behind her.
She looked over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of him standing there, arms crossed. She leaned closer to the fire to blow it into life, kindling crackling and glowing as a lick of fire reached upward to the dry wood.
“I used to practice at home,” she said.
“Really?”
“Yah.” She closed the door as the fire started and rose to her feet. “It would have killed me to lose.” She shrugged. “That was a long time ago, though.”
“I don’t know.” Moses tipped his head to the side. “I still see that stubborn, fast-as-lightning girl in there somewhere.”
“I hope I’ve matured a little,” she retorted. “For one, I no longer goad my competition into footraces.”
“I never wanted to be your competition,” he countered, more gently now.
She pulled out a pan and put it on top of the stove. It would be a few minutes while the stove heated up, but she didn’t want to waste any time. She was hungry—they both were.
“You had no choice in that,” she said with a grin. “You were the one to beat. I couldn’t exactly go about racing Ginnie Wittmer.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“She was meaner,” she said matter-of-factly. “If I beat you, you acknowledged it and hated it, but you were fair. Ginnie would have teased me for being too boyish, gotten the other girls on her side, and then made me miserable.”
“For a footrace?”
“Yah, for a footrace.”
“Is Ginnie mean?”
“Not anymore, I’m sure, but she used to tease me all the time for being a tomboy, and I couldn’t compete with her. Not in the way that mattered. She was pretty and charismatic. And I was arm wrestling and running races.”
Moses frowned. “You were windswept.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means maybe you weren’t clean and neat and quiet and sweet. You were wilder, less predictable. And fast.” He smiled again.
“Well . . . between me and Ginnie, one of us is married with three kinner already, and one of us is not.”
One of them had inherited a whole beautiful farm, with pastures and fields of corn and oats, and a herd of cattle that now relied on her.
“I know you say that you’re not getting married, but do you sometimes want to?” he asked.
Miri looked through the window to the stable and the fields beyond. Did she want a husband at her side, marching out there to take care of men’s work while she dutifully made this house into a lovely little refuge from stress and strain?
“Nee,” she said. “Not really.”
“Why not? A man in the house would get in your way?” He sounded like he was only halfway joking.”
“Men want to be . . . men,” she said. “They want to rule the roost and take care of the cattle. They want to be fed and cared for once they come inside. They have a view of how things should be, and in their defense, it’s how things normally go in an Amish marriage.”
“You’d hate it that much?” he asked.
“I’d hate it that much if I was forced into the kitchen,” she said. “But as for having a handsome husband around the house, I’d like that part.”
She put a pat of yellow butter into the pan, and it began to melt in a puddle. Then she went to the gas-powered refrigerator and pulled out the sausages.
“You’re complicated,” he said.
“It’s easier to race me.” She shot him a teasing smile.
“Not anymore it’s not.” He sobered, and she wondered if he was thinking about the farm. She hadn’t been competing with him for it. She hadn’t even known Old Tom was considering any of this. She eyed him uncertainly as she headed back to the stove, but Moses was looking away.
She opened the package of cellophane, and one by one she picked the sausages up between two fingers and dropped them into the skillet with a hiss.
“So the husband part—a man in your life—you like that idea?” he asked.
“I do, but I also know that my chances of finding someone who’d put up with my peculiar ways are slim to none. So it’s better not think about it too much,” she replied.
She turned back to the pan.
A husband of her own—a man to hold her close and kiss her thoroughly .
. . a man to share the burdens with, to plan with for the future .
. . She wasn’t made of stone. Of course she wanted all of that.
Sometimes, when she wasn’t being careful enough, she even imagined what it might be like to have a handsome man fall desperately in love with her.
But she wasn’t an easy woman to match—she knew it. And even with Moses, a man she was starting to feel a rather special connection to, she knew it couldn’t work.
No matter what was sparking between them, there was an inheritance that stood solidly in the way.