The Stranger Gott Sent

Chapter 1

The town of Crystal Lake, Ohio, sat in a shallow valley between two high hills.

It was the sort of place the world seemed to have laid down carefully and then forgotten to disturb.

Six hundred souls lived there, and most of them were Amish.

In September, woodsmoke began to curl from every chimney in thin, bluish-gray ribbons that caught in the bare branches of the maples, already beginning to shed their leaves.

The marketplace on an early Saturday morning smelled of cinnamon bread, coffee, and the last of the autumn apples, which were turning sweet in their baskets.

It was, by any reasonable measure, a beautiful place to live.

Jodie Schwartz had stopped noticing the beauty some time ago.

She stood at the kitchen window of her father’s farmhouse, watching the last of the daylight drain from the sky behind the western ridge.

The light went the way late-September light always did in Crystal Lake—reluctantly, in layers, first the gold, then the rose, then a long blue hour that felt as if you were waiting for something that never quite arrived.

She absently pressed one hand to the low curve of her belly.

The baby, who had been restless all afternoon, turned once under her palm and then settled, as though she, too, was watching the light dip below the horizon.

Jodie was twenty-five years old. She was seven months along with her first child, and she was already a widow. It was a word that still did not fit her properly, like a coat borrowed from a taller woman that trailed along the ground.

Isaac had died in March of a chest infection that, at first, had not seemed especially serious.

That was the part that sometimes caught her, even now—not the grief, exactly, but the speed of his illness.

A cough on Monday. A fever by Wednesday.

By the following Sunday morning, Ruth Yoder had stood in this same kitchen with both of Jodie’s hands in hers and had said, very gently, that there was nothing more to be done.

Jodie had nodded as though she had understood, then gone out to the barn and stood beside Isaac’s old plow horse, Titan, for a long while, simply because the horse was happy to let her stand nearby without any interaction.

That had been nearly six months ago. Since then, she had learned a few things about him she would rather not have known.

The first was that her husband, who had smiled more broadly than any man in the valley and promised more freely than was wise, had left behind a ledger full of debts that read like a catalog of every family in Crystal Lake.

The Lapps were owed for seed grain. The Millers were owed for a repaired wagon wheel.

Old Conrad Gingerich was owed for something Isaac had written down only as “miscellaneous,” which Jodie suspected meant postage stamps bought on credit over the course of several years.

Bishop Hershberger himself—though he was far too dignified ever to mention it—had apparently lent Isaac a sum of money for a purpose that nobody, not even Jodie, could now identify.

The second thing she had learned was that a small community reserves a particular kind of cruelty for the person who reminds them that life does not always go according to plan.

It was not cruelty in a verbal sense. Nobody in Crystal Lake shouted at widows.

It was the cruelty of women who suddenly needed to examine their fabric bolts very closely when Jodie passed them at the marketplace, and of men who discovered an urgent need to consult their shopping lists.

Only midwife and medical woman, Ruth Yoder, who had delivered half the valley and buried a fair portion of the rest, still met her eye with something warm in it, and only David Graber, her father, spoke to her as though nothing in the world had changed for them.

She turned from the window. The kettle on the stove had begun to hiss and steam.

She moved it off the heat, lifting it carefully so as not to disturb the baby.

Pouring herself a cup of peppermint tea she did not especially want but needed, she sat at the table.

The kitchen smelled of the bread she had baked that afternoon and the vegetable and bean soup that had been made for their supper.

It was a good, easy-to-use kitchen. Her mother had scrubbed the same floorboards and hung the same slightly faded curtains as she did now.

On the cold winter nights, Jodie could sometimes almost feel her here, the way you feel the warmth of a fire in the next room without seeing it.

David stomped in from the yard, stamping his muddy boots on the mat.

He was fifty-two and had the look of a man who had worked hard his whole life, steady through the middle and a little gray at the edges.

He had been widowed for twelve years, and in those twelve years he had never, so far as Jodie knew, considered another woman.

He had simply folded his grief into his work and kept going.

“Ach, peppermint tea,” he said approvingly, eyeing the steaming cup. “Gut. The wind is beginning to blow. There will be inclement weather before morning.”

“Yah, I thought there might be.”

He looked at her a moment longer than necessary. It was one of his habits lately.

“You look tired, dochder.”

“Ach, Daed, I am always tired. It is part of my condition.” She gave him a small smile to soften it.

“I think I will walk out a little before supper, just to the fence line. I need a little fresh air to blow the cobwebs away. The baby has been kicking all afternoon, and I should like to tire her out, too.”

“It is beginning to get dark already. You need to be careful.”

“I have walked that path in the dark on my own since I was nine years old. I will be deheem before suppertime.”

David considered this. He had the stillness of a man choosing which battles to fight, and after a moment he nodded once and went to the hook by the door for her woolen shawl.

“Take the lantern,” he said, handing it to her. “And do not go past the lower pasture. If you are not back in twenty minutes, I am cooma out after you, and I will bring your cousin Eli with me. He’ll tell you exactly wat he thinks.”

“Yah, for sure,” Jodie said, smiling softly. Her father made a sound that, for him, was the nearest thing to a laugh.

Outside, the air was colder than she had expected and carried the scent of the beginning of fall—woodsmoke, falling leaves, and the first hint of frost hiding somewhere behind the wind.

The sky was moonless. A great press of cloud had moved in and now sat heavy in the ominous sky, the stars visible only here and there, offering vague moments of brightness.

The two hills on either side of the valley were black mounds against a deep gray sky.

Somewhere behind the barn, an owl hooted, reminding her that winter was on its way.

Jodie pulled the shawl closer around her shoulders and began to walk.

The gravel path from the farmhouse ran along the edge of the kitchen garden, past the old apple tree her mother had planted the year Jodie had been born, and down toward the fence that separated the yard from the lower pasture and, beyond that, the drainage ditch marking the eastern boundary of the Graber land.

She walked slowly. The baby, who had been asleep, stirred and pressed a small, firm foot against the underside of her ribs.

“I know,” Jodie murmured. “I know. Only a little way, I promise.”

When she reached the fence, she stopped and set the lantern down on the flat top of the nearest post. The yellow light pooled around her boots, caught the graying wood of the fence, and went no further than that. Everything beyond the edge of the light was simply unrecognizable shapes and forms.

She had come out here, if she was honest with herself, to pray.

Not the prayers of the Sunday meetings, where she knew which words to say and in what order.

Those prayers had grown thin for her during the long months after Isaac’s illness and had not, so far, returned.

What she had instead was something more like a conversation a woman might have with an awkward neighbor—frank, occasionally impatient, and not always as respectful as she suspected it ought to be.

She rested both hands on the top of the fence and looked up into the dark where the stars should have been.

Gott, she said silently. It is me again. I expect You are tired of hearing from me. I would be tired of hearing from me if I were You, too.

The wind moved through the trees at the edge of the pasture, rustling the few remaining leaves. A horse shifted in the barn behind her. No answer came, which was what she had expected.

I am not asking for very much. I am not asking for Isaac back—I am not sure, if I am honest, that I would know wat to do with him if You did send him.

I am not asking for the debts to disappear, though if You were inclined that way, I would not say no.

I am only asking for a sign. Some small proof that this is not all there is, that there is something ahead of me besides the ledger, the kitchen window, and the women at the marketplace pretending they cannot see me.

She paused. The baby moved again, more gently this time.

A sign, Gott. Only that. And I would be very grateful if You could make it reasonably clear, because You know I have never been especially good at reading cloudy messages.

She waited. She was not expecting anything, not really.

She had been having this sort of conversation for months now, and the answers, if they came at all, tended to arrive quietly, weeks after she had stopped listening for them.

She gave the dark one more moment out of politeness, then sighed, reaching for the lantern, and turned back toward the house.

That was when she heard it.

A sharp, splitting crack—the unmistakable sound of wood giving way—somewhere beyond the fence line, down where the drainage ditch ran along the property line.

It was immediately followed by a loud cry of pain, then a heavy thud.

Then nothing at all, except the wind in the trees and the thudding of her own heart against the top of her ribs.

Jodie stood very still, wondering what she needed to do.

Her first thought was that it was an animal—a deer caught in the ditch, perhaps, or one of the Miller boys’ dogs that sometimes strayed this far in the evenings.

Her second thought was that animals did not, as a rule, cry out in anything resembling human pain.

Her third thought, which arrived slowly, was that whatever it was, it was on her father’s land and therefore it was, in some way, their responsibility.

She looked down at the lantern in her hand. The small flame inside it leaned away from the wind, then steadied.

“Gott,” she said aloud, very quietly, to whoever might be listening, “if this is Your sign, I should warn You now that I am going to have something to say about Your timing.”

Then she hitched up her skirts, lifted the lantern, and headed down the slope toward the muddy ditch.