Chapter 4
Ruth Yoder came by on the third day.
She arrived shortly after nine in the morning.
Ruth was a woman who moved through the world at a pace that suggested the world would wait for her, and it generally did.
She was sixty years old, broad across the hips and steady through the shoulders.
She had the hands of a woman who had spent forty years bringing other people’s children into the light and was not inclined to be hurried about anything, least of all a social call.
She came up the path from the road with a covered basket on one arm and a shawl around her shoulders that did very little to ward off the cool September wind, but it didn’t appear to concern her.
Her face, when Jodie opened the kitchen door, was warm and wore a feigned innocence that Ruth put on when she wanted people to believe she had come for one reason when she had, in fact, come for another.
“Jodie, leibling,” she said, setting the basket on the kitchen table. “I have brought a freshly baked apple cake. I was up early baking, and I know David cannot bake a cake to save his mortal soul, so I thought I had better bring it over for you.”
“Ach, that is wunderbar,” Jodie said. “Would you like some kaffe?”
“Yah, denki.” Ruth settled into the easy chair by the kitchen window, the one with the best view of both the kitchen and the yard. “And how are you keeping? Is the boppli moving well? Any swelling in your ankles? Let me see your hands.”
Jodie held out her hands. Ruth took them in her own and turned them over, feeling the fingers and the backs of the wrists with the quick, practiced touch of a midwife. She nodded once, apparently satisfied.
“Nee, they are good. I believe your color is better than last week. Are you eating well enough?”
“Yah, I am eating well, Ruth.”
“Nee, eating properly, I mean, not standing over the stove picking at cold soup.”
“Yah, I am eating properly,” Jodie said again, setting the kettle on the stove before turning back to the table. “You did not come here for my hands, did you, Ruth?”
Ruth’s eyebrows rose, very slightly. She hadn’t expected to be found out quite so quickly. Folding her hands in her lap, she looked at Jodie steadily.
“I heard,” she said, “that you found a young mann face down in your father’s drainage ditch two nights ago, and that he is presently lying in your front room on a cot that is too small for him.
He does not appear to know much about who he is, where he came from, or why he is here in the first place. ”
“Conrad Gingerich?” Jodie said, but really asking.
“Yah, Conrad Gingerich.” Ruth accepted this without apology.
Conrad Gingerich, technically Crystal Lake’s retired postmaster, was the gravitational center of the town’s information network.
A letter could not arrive at the post office without Conrad knowing its contents by the weight and shape of the envelope.
And now, a stranger could not fall into a drainage ditch without Conrad knowing about it before the blood was even dry.
“He told Martha Lapp, who told her sister-in-law, who told me. I would have come yesterday, but I had a birth out at the Hostetler farm, and the boppli took its time coming into the world.”
“Ach, how is Leah Hostetler? Wat did she have?”
“Tired, happy, and in possession of a very large bouncing boppli boy who looks exactly like his father did when I birthed him some twenty-five years ago. It is a pity, but it cannot be helped.” Ruth waved a hand. “Never mind Leah Hostetler. I want to see your stranger.”
“He is not my stranger.”
“He is in your front room, on your cot, eating your food. He is your stranger until he can stand and walk out, and even then, he will still be your stranger in the eyes of everyone in this valley, so you had best get used to the phrase.” Ruth stood. “Where is he?”
Jodie led her through to the front room.
Lloyd was sitting up on the cot with his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out before him, giving him the look of a man who had been folded into a space designed for someone considerably smaller.
His color had improved over the three days since the ditch incident.
The wound above his ear was healing cleanly under the linen bandage, and his eyes, when he looked up at the two women entering the room, were clear and steady.
He was holding a bowl of porridge flavored with cinnamon and brown sugar that Jodie had given him an hour earlier. She noticed he had not finished it.
“Lloyd Kauffman,” Jodie said, “this is Ruth Yoder. She is our town midwife and handles all medical matters. She has delivered most of the valley’s babies, and she has come to look at your head.
I would advise you not to argue with her about it, because nobody in Crystal Lake has ever won an argument with Ruth and lived to feel proud of it. ”
Ruth was already crossing the room. She set her hands on either side of Lloyd’s face before he had finished deciding whether to be alarmed.
She tilted his head toward the window light and examined the wound above his ear with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had seen a thousand injuries in her time.
“Follow my finger,” she said, moving her hand slowly across his line of sight. He followed her crooked pink digit. “Again. Gut. Any ringing in the ears?”
“Some. It comes and goes.”
“Dizziness when you stand?”
“Yah.”
“Nausea?”
“Only on the first day. Not since.”
“And wat do you remember? Before you fell into the ditch.”
Lloyd was quiet for a moment. The silence as he carefully turned something over in his mind.
“My name,” he said. “That I am from Pennsylvania. That I came here on the train, a short while ago. Beyond that…” He paused, lifting his hands palm side up.
“There are pieces. It is as if I have dropped a jar and I am looking at the fragments on the floor, and I cannot yet see how they fit together.”
Ruth studied his face for a long, quiet moment.
Jodie, standing in the doorway, watched Ruth study him.
She had seen Ruth do this before—this steady assessment, this looking past what a person said to what lay beneath.
Ruth had done it with every frightened husband she had ever sent out of a birthing room, with every grieving person she had ever held through the small hours, and with Jodie herself, more than once, in the long bad months after Isaac’s passing.
“The memory will come back,” Ruth said at last. “It usually does after a knock like this. It will come in pieces, then all at once, and when it does, it may not be comfortable.” She released his face and stepped back.
“In the meantime, rest and take care. Eat whatever Jodie puts in front of you. Do not stand up too quickly, and do not lift anything heavier than that cup of broth for at least another week.”
“Yah, denki,” Lloyd answered, almost feeling the need to salute.
“It’s Ruth.”
“Yah, denki Ruth.”
Ruth gave him one more long look, then turned and walked back to the kitchen with the satisfaction that she had done what she wanted to do.
Jodie followed her. They stood together by the stove, and Ruth accepted a fresh cup of coffee.
She wrapped both hands around it as though she needed the warmth to seep into her cold bones, which, in Jodie’s experience, meant she was about to say something.
“Well?” Jodie said.
“His eyes are honest,” Ruth said simply.
Jodie waited. There was always more where Ruth was concerned.
“And I believe he is grieving someone,” Ruth went on, more quietly now.
She looked down at her cup. “You can always tell. There is a way a person carries grief. It is as if they are carrying a heavy sack they have forgotten they are holding. The weight of it changes how they sit, how they hold their shoulders, how they look at a room when they first come into it.” She lifted her eyes to Jodie’s.
“You had some of that about you yourself, for a while. After Isaac.”
Jodie was quiet. The kitchen clock ticked on the shelf above the stove. Outside in the yard, she could hear Eli splitting wood with enthusiasm, each blow followed by a small grunt of effort and, occasionally, a muffled word of disappointment.
“Ach, I was not grieving Isaac,” Jodie said at last, and the words came out quieter than she had intended.
She looked through the window. She could see the edge of the lower pasture, the fence line, and the dark shape of the old oak at the boundary where everything had begun.
“I was grieving wat I had hoped he might be. Wat I thought he would become, if I only waited long enough and believed hard enough.” She paused.
“I think that is a different kind of grief. A smaller one, perhaps. But it has sharp edges.”
Ruth set her coffee down and took Jodie’s hand. She did not say anything for a moment. She simply held it, and that was enough, because Ruth had always understood that sometimes the most useful thing a person could do was to be present and quiet, without trying to fix anything at all.
“It is not a smaller grief,” Ruth said at last. “It is only a less obvious one. And you have carried it with great dignity, leibling, whether you think so or not.”
Jodie blinked hard. She did not cry. She had not cried since the night Isaac died, and she was not about to start now, in her kitchen, over a cup of coffee and a plate of apple cake.
But she pressed Ruth’s hand once, firmly, and Ruth pressed back, and that was their whole conversation on the subject, and it was enough.
Ruth left shortly before noon, leaving promises to return at the end of the week and strict instructions about Lloyd’s rest and Jodie’s diet.
Jodie stood at the kitchen door, watching her go, feeling, as she always did after Ruth’s visits, as though someone had opened a window in a room that had been closed for too long.
It was David who brought the complication.
He came in from the yard in the late afternoon with his coat over his arm and a look on his face that said he had some news but would rather not share it.
He hung his coat on the peg by the door, then poured himself a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove.
He sat down across the table from Jodie, who was working through a column of figures in Isaac’s ledger with a pencil and the grim expression of someone who could see that the numbers were not going to add up.
She looked up. She knew that face.
“Wat is it, Daed?”
David turned his coffee cup on its saucer, once, as though the cup might somehow rearrange itself into a better way of saying what he needed to say.
“I was at the post office this afternoon,” he began.
“Conrad had something to tell me. He has heard on the grapevine from Houndsville, Pennsylvania.” He paused.
“A frau has been asking after a Lloyd Kauffman. Conrad said she has been asking with considerable persistence. Apparently, there was an understanding between them. The young mann left before any formal betrothal could be concluded.” He paused again.
“The frau does not appear to interpret his leaving as the end of the matter.”
The kitchen was very still. The clock ticked louder than it really did. In the front room, Jodie faintly heard the squeak of the front door as Lloyd slipped out.
“Does Conrad know her name?” Jodie asked.
“Nee, he does not. Only that she has been asking in several towns between here and Pittsburgh, and that she is not, by any account, a frau who gives up easily.”
Jodie looked down at the ledger. The figures blurred for a moment, then came back into focus.
She set the pencil down carefully on the table, aligning it with the edge of the book.
If she did not do something precise with her hands, she was going to have to say something, and she was not ready for that.
“I am not asking you to do anything,” David said. His voice was careful and kind. “I am only telling you wat I’ve heard.”
“Yah, I know, Daed.”
She looked up, past her father, through the kitchen window.
In the yard, Lloyd was standing beside the woodpile, one hand braced against the fence post for balance, his face turned up to the thin September sun.
He had gone outside for the second time that afternoon, still a little unsteady, still pale beneath the returning color.
Eli had found him something useful to do—sorting the split wood from the unsplit and stacking the good pieces against the barn wall.
It was relatively light work, and Lloyd was doing it with the meticulous, unhurried care of a man who needed to be of use.
He looked, Jodie thought, as though he was a man who had walked a very long way to get somewhere and was not yet sure he had arrived at his destination.
“I know, I understand,” she said again, a little quieter this time. Then she picked up her pencil, and went back to the figures, and said nothing more about it for the rest of the afternoon. She needed time to absorb the news, and she didn’t want her father to read into her thoughts.
She watched Lloyd through the window. She observed him stacking the wood and saying something to Eli.
Then he stood for a moment with his hand on the fence post, looking out at the rolling hills in the distance, as though they might tell him something he had forgotten.
The feeling that moved through her—not sharp, not sudden, but slow, deep, and quiet, like water finding its level in a field that had been dry for too long—was not one she was ready to name.
She wasn’t sure she would ever be ready to name it.
But it was there, and it didn’t leave. When Lloyd turned from the woodpile, caught her eye through the glass, and gave her the smallest, most uncertain of smiles, Jodie Schwartz looked down at her ledger and felt the pencil tremble, just once, in her usually steady hand.
Lloyd Kauffman was having an effect on her, one she wasn’t sure she wanted to admit to.