Chapter 2
The slope down to the drainage ditch was steeper than Jodie remembered, or perhaps it was only that she was now expecting a baby.
She went carefully, one hand on the top of the fence and the other holding the lantern out in front of her at arm’s length, the yellow circle of light moving along the grass ahead of her.
The wind was rising in earnest now. It came down off the western hillside in long, cool breaths that smelled of the outdoors and vegetation.
It moved the long grass at her ankles in soft, rushing patterns.
Somewhere toward the house, a loose board on the barn gave a small, complaining creak.
The night had that September quality where the cold had not yet settled into the ground.
“Hallo?” she called out, and her voice sounded thinner than she intended. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Hallo? Is anyone there?”
Nobody answered. She had not truly expected anyone or anything to. Whatever had cried out in the ditch had not cried out a second time, and that, Jodie thought as she went further, was not an encouraging sort of silence.
The drainage ditch ran along the eastern boundary of the Graber property in a long, shallow trench her father had dug by hand the year before Jodie was born.
In spring, it carried off excess water from the upper pasture and kept the lower field from turning into a quagmire.
In September, it was mostly mud, dead leaves, and the thin, dark line of water at the bottom that never entirely dried up, even in the hottest weeks of August. A broken split-rail fence marked the near edge of the ditch.
A thicket of young hickory and one very old oak marked the far edge.
It was the old oak that had dropped the branch in the rising wind.
She saw the branch first—a long, pale shape lying at an angle across the ditch, its broken end raw and white in the lantern light, the other end still attached by a strip of bark to the tree above.
It had split clean away from the trunk at the point where the wood had begun to rot from the inside, the way old trees sometimes did, with little warning.
Her father had spoken, only last month, of needing to come out here with the saw.
Her father, Jodie thought with a small, unhelpful bloom of irritation, spoke of doing many things but never quite found the time.
Then she saw the man.
He lay face down at the bottom of the ditch, half in the thin water and half out, with one arm flung above his head as though he had been reaching for something when he’d fallen.
He wore a plain black Amish-style coat and plain dark trousers, and his boots were the good, serviceable work boots of a man who walked a great deal.
His hat had been dislodged. His hair, where the lantern light caught it, was very fair—the color of wheat straw at the end of summer—and matted along the left side with something darker that Jodie, in the first shocked moment, had mistaken for mud.
Then she saw that the mud was running, and that it was the wrong color, a deep, rich crimson, and she understood.
“Ach,” she said softly. “Ach, nee, nee, nee.”
She set the lantern down at the edge of the ditch and lowered herself as carefully as she could manage onto her knees in the cold, wet grass.
The baby inside her protested the cramped position, immediately pressing insistently against her ribs.
“I know. I know there’s not too much room for you in there now.
Pliese, be patient, only for a moment.” She meant it for the baby and, she suspected, also for herself.
She leaned forward as far as the curve of her belly would allow and stretched out one hand toward the man’s throat, beneath the line of his jaw, in the place Ruth Yoder had once shown her to feel for the pulse of a laboring mare.
For a terrible moment, there was nothing, only the wet, cold feel of his skin and the sluggish pulse of her own fear.
Then she felt it—steady, slower than it ought to be, but there. A real pulse. A living one.
“Denki Gott,” she whispered.
She slid her hand up carefully to the side of his face.
He was cold—not the coolness of a man who has been out walking in late September, but the deep, settled cold of a man who has been lying still on wet ground.
The blood above his left ear was thick now, barely moving, which meant the wound itself was not as desperate as she had first thought; scalp wounds, she remembered her mother saying once, always bled as though a person were dying, even when they were mostly only injured.
She bent her face closer to his. She could feel his breath on her wrist—shallow, even, and warm against her chilled skin, a sensation that made her own breath catch with something akin to relief. He was alive. He was deeply and thoroughly unconscious, but at least he was alive.
“Can you hear me?” she said, low and close to his ear. “Can you hear me, freind? Can you make any sound at all?”
He did not stir.
She sat back on her heels and looked at him properly in the lantern light for the first time.
He was young. Younger than she had feared when she first saw him lying there—perhaps her own age, or maybe a year or two older, certainly not a man in the last years of his life.
His face, what she could see of it through the mud and the smear of blood, was angular and certainly not unhandsome.
His shoulders, she could see even under the heavy coat, were broad, built up from hard manual work.
His hands, with the one lying palm up above his head, were those of a person who did real work—calloused along the inside of the thumb and the knuckles, the nails cut short and kept clean.
A farm hand, then. Or a young farmer. Not a drifter.
She did not know him. She was certain of that immediately. She had lived in Crystal Lake all her life and could name every man in the valley without thinking. Whoever he was, he was not from around here.
“Well,” Jodie said to him, almost conversationally, “you have picked a poor place to rest yourself, and an even poorer evening for it. My Daed will have a great deal to say about you, I’m afraid. You should prepare yourself.”
She looked up at the old oak above her. The broken stub of the branch hung there in the wind, swinging gently, innocent.
She thought of the crack she had heard—the sharp splitting sound that had come before the cry—and now understood what had happened.
He had been walking along the ditch's edge in the dark.
Perhaps he had stopped beneath the oak. Perhaps the wind had taken the old wood at exactly the wrong moment.
Perhaps he had looked up at the last instant and seen it coming.
She hoped, for his sake, that he had not.
The baby moved again, low and heavy, and Jodie put one hand briefly on her own belly to settle her. “Ach, I know, little one. I know. We will not be long.”
Then she tilted her face up toward the dark and the unseen clouds and said, out loud this time, in a tone that was only partly reverent— “Gott. I meant wat I said before. About the sign. But if this is Your answer, I should like it noted that You and I are going to need to have a conversation about Your methods.”
The wind, predictably, said nothing.
She pushed herself to her feet—not easily, with one hand braced on the cold ground for balance—she gathered her skirts in one hand and the lantern in the other, then turned back up the slope toward the farmhouse.
She did not run. Running was something her body no longer allowed, and in any case the man in the ditch was not going anywhere.
If she fell on the slope in the dark, there would be two people lying senseless on the Graber land, and her father would have his own opinions about that, opinions that would last the rest of her life.
She walked fast instead. Fast and steady, the lantern swinging at her side, her breath coming in hard puffs of white in front of her, the cold wind pushing at her back.
When she reached the yard, she filled her lungs and called out, loud enough to wake the livestock in the barn and probably those in the lower pasture as well?—
“Daed! Daed, come quickly! Bring Eli and the lantern, komme now!”
The kitchen door opened almost before she had finished shouting. David was already pulling on his coat, his face set in a worried expression.
“Wat is it? Is it the boppli?”
“Nee—nee, Daed, the boppli is fine. I am fine. There is a mann down in the ditch by the old oak tree. A branch has komme down on him. He is breathing, but he is hurt and very kald.”
“Eli!” he called sharply toward the barn. “Eli, komme out here, bring a blanket and the long lantern, quickly now!”
There was a muffled thump from the direction of the hayloft, a sound very much like a young man falling out of bed fully clothed.
Then the barn door banged open, and Jodie’s younger cousin, Eli Graber, came across the yard at a half-run, his almost black hair standing up on one side and a horse blanket bundled under his arm.
“Wat? Wat is it? Is it the boppli?”
“Why,” said Jodie, “is that everybody’s first question?”
“Because you are about to have one,” said David, already moving past her toward the fence line, the long lantern held out before him. “Show me where this mann is.”
They went back down the slope together, the three of them, the two lanterns casting a wider, more confident pool of light than Jodie’s small one had managed on its own.
She led. Eli followed, the blanket bundled against his chest, his eyes wide.
David brought up the rear, with the competence of a man who had seen injured people and animals before and wasn’t going to be surprised by this one.
When they reached the ditch, Eli stopped short and said, “Ach,” in a flat, small voice, then, more practically, “He is very long.”
“Eli,” said David, “that is not the most useful observation you have ever made. Get down there and help me lift him. Jodie, stay where you are. You are not to so much as look at a slope in your condition. You can hold the lanterns.”
Jodie took both lanterns. The weight of them steadied her hands, which she noticed had begun to shake a little.
Her father and her young cousin lowered themselves carefully into the ditch.
David spoke to the unconscious stranger in a low, even voice as he worked.
“Easy now, freind, easy. We are going to lift you. It is going to hurt, but only for a moment.” He said the words as though he were sure the man could hear him, and perhaps, Jodie thought, some part of him could.
They lifted him out of the ditch between them, Eli at the shoulders and David at the knees, and laid him on the grass at the top of the slope for a moment.
David looked at the head wound, now fully exposed without the tree cover.
He touched the edge of the gash above the man’s left ear with careful fingers.
He had stitched more animals’ wounds in his life than he cared to count, and his mouth tightened as he announced, “He will live. But we need to get him inside, into the warm, and we need to do it immediately.”
“The front room,” Jodie said at once. “I’ll bring the cot in from the back porch. Let me go ahead and make up the bed and put the kettle on.”
David looked at her. For a moment, she thought he was going to argue. Then he looked down at the stranger in his arms—at the matted fair hair, the blood, and the young, exhausted, unfamiliar face—and looked back at her. Then something in his expression gave way.
“Alright,” he said. “Go on, then. But slowly, dochder. Slowly.”
She walked slowly, as slowly as she could make herself go.
Her heart knocked against the top of her ribs, and the baby wriggled inside her.
She pushed up the slope toward the warm square of yellow light that was the kitchen window.
Behind her, she could hear the men coming after her with their burden, their boots heavy on the ground, Eli muttering something and her father answering him in short, sharp sentences.
At the door, she paused for a moment and looked back over her shoulder into the dark, astounded that a young man she had never seen before had walked into Crystal Lake, hit his head on a rotting oak branch, and had nearly died there in the cold, with no one in the valley knowing his name.
“I do not know wu you are,” she said softly into the darkness, “but you will be in my haus soon. So, you had better wake up and tell me all about you.”
Then she lifted the latch and went inside to put the kettle on.