Chapter 8
Susan stayed.
She stayed three days, and on the morning of the fourth day Jodie found herself standing at the kitchen window watching Susan carry a cup of coffee across the yard to the barn where Lloyd was working.
The weather had turned. The bright golden mornings of the week before had given way to a grey damp autumn day that settled into the valley and didn’t appear to be moving anywhere fast. The maples had dropped the last of their color leaving them skeletal.
The yard was a colorless pale grayish brown with muddy puddles interspersed over the ground.
The air smelled of woodsmoke and the thin sour sweetness of apples going soft in the cellar.
It was the kind of weather that made Jodie’s lower back ache and the baby press restlessly against her ribs all through the night, and it matched her mood so precisely that she suspected God was being heavy-handed with the symbolism.
She threw herself into work. She had known, even before Susan’s arrival, that being still gave her too much room to think.
She preserved the last of the Pippins. She turned out the linen cupboard.
Then she scrubbed the kitchen floor on her hands and knees until David came in from the yard and stopped in the doorway.
“Dochder!”
“Ach, the floor needed doing, Daed.”
“The floor was done yesterday, and the day before that.” He crossed the room and took the soapy brush from her hand with a gentleness that made her throat ache. “Jodie. That is enough.”
“If I stop, Daed, I will think. And if I think, I will feel. And if I feel, I will not be able to stop feeling, and then I will be of no use to anyone.”
David was quiet for a moment. He set the brush down by the sink and lowered himself into the chair across from her, his knees creaking the way they always did in damp weather.
“Your mamm used to do this,” he said. “When she was troubled, she would clean things that did not need cleaning. I came deheem once, and she had scrubbed the inside of the chicken coop until it almost sparkled. The chickens were very confused.”
Jodie almost smiled. Almost.
“Wat was she troubled about?”
“Me, usually.” He folded his hands on the table. “She worried I worked too hard and said too little. She was not wrong about either. She rarely was wrong.”
“Some things do not change.”
“Nee,” he agreed mildly. “They do not.”
She looked at him then—at his steady, weathered face, the sprinkling of gray hairs at his temples, and the patience in his eyes that had cost him, she knew, far more than he ever showed—and she wanted, very badly, to tell him everything.
About the barn. About the fall. About the way Lloyd had held her and how his heart had hammered against hers.
How he had said her name on the morning he had woken on the cot, quiet and careful, as though he was putting it somewhere safe.
She wanted to say: I have done the stupidest thing a woman in my position could possibly have done.
I have fallen in love with a man who may belong to someone else.
She said none of it. Not yet. Instead, she pushed herself up from the floor, pressed her father’s shoulder once as she passed him, then went back to the window.
In the yard, Susan was leaning against the barn doorframe, speaking to Lloyd in the low, confiding tones Jodie had come to recognize—the voice of a woman weaving a shared past into a shared future. Lloyd was listening. He was nodding inattentively. He did not look toward her at the kitchen window.
He had not looked at the kitchen window once in the past four days.
Gott, Jodie thought, with a weariness that went all the way to the bone. I am becoming tiresome even to myself.
She turned from the window and went down to the cellar to finish sorting the apples.
The cellar was cold, as it always was in late September—the deep, settled cold of stone below the frost line.
It smelled of earth, iron, and the sweet mustiness of stored fruit.
The single oil lamp on its hook cast a circle of yellow light that did not quite reach the corners.
Her breath made small clouds in the cool air.
She was on her knees beside the wooden crate of Pippins, sorting the sound from the soft, when the pain came.
It arrived low and insistent, a slow, tightening band from the base of her spine to the front of her belly. Not the dull ache she had lived with for weeks. Something else entirely. She went very still, with an apple in each hand.
“Ach,” she said softly. “Oh, nee. Not yet. This is too early. We had a plan, remember? I had a plan. You were supposed to come after—after all of this was settled.”
She set the apples down carefully, placing both hands flat against the cold stone floor.
She tried to push herself up, but the tightening came again.
This time it was stronger, accompanied by a warm, unmistakable rush that soaked through her apron and dress and told her, with absolute authority, that her daughter had made her decision and was not interested in her mother’s plans.
Gott. I need my Daed. And I need Ruth here, right now.
“DAED, komme quick, pliese!”
The cellar door banged open above her. Cool air rushed down the steps, and then David’s voice, sharp with the alarm no parent can disguise:
“Jodie? Are you hurt? Is it?—”
“The boppli, Daed. She is coming. My waters have broken.”
One second of silence, and then David Graber came down the cellar steps at a speed that, for a man of fifty-two with creaking knees, was nothing short of remarkable.
He was beside her in three strides. Taking one look at her, at the wet apron, and at the apples scattered across the flagstones, he became, in the space of a single breath, the calmest and most competent man in Ohio.
“Alright,” he said. “Alright, dochder. Can you stand?”
“Yah, I think so, with hilf. The contractions are not too close yet.”
“Gut. Up, then. Slowly. I have you.”
He lifted her under the elbow with a tenderness she had not felt from him since she was small enough to be carried.
They climbed the cellar steps together, one careful stair at a time, Jodie leaning into his solid warmth.
At the top, he guided her into the kitchen and settled her into the rocking chair by the stove.
“Sit. Do not move. I mean it, Jodie—not one step more.”
“Nee, I am not going anywhere, Daed. I am certain of that.”
He knelt in front of her, taking both of her hands in his, and for a moment the urgency left his face, leaving only the tender, frightened steadiness of a father looking at his child.
“You are going to be all right,” he said. “Do you hear me? You are going to be all right.”
“Yah, I hear you.”
“I am going to fetch Eli. He will run for Ruth. I will be gone for less than a minute.”
“Go. I will still be here when you come back. I do not think either of us is going anywhere soon.”
He almost smiled. Then he was gone.
She heard him at the back door, his voice carrying across the yard with a sharpness she had not heard since the night she was twelve, when the barn roof caught fire in a lightning storm. “Eli! Eli, komme here, now, quickly!”
A muffled thump came from the hayloft. Boots on the ladder. Eli’s startled voice: “Onkel David? Wat is?—”
“The boppli is cooma. Run for Ruth Yoder. Do not walk. Do not stop. Tell her that Jodie’s waters have broken and to bring her bag.”
“Ruth Yoder. Baby. Bag. Yes, Onkel David. I am going.”
“Eli.”
“Yah?”
“Shoes.”
“Right. Shoes. Yah.”
She heard Eli running across the yard, properly shod this time, the creak of the gate, and then the rapid diminishing thud of heavy boots on the road. Within a minute, David was back at her side, pulling his chair close and taking her hand again.
A contraction gathered, and Jodie breathed through it, her eyes closed, her fingers tightening around her father’s. When it passed, she opened her eyes and found his face very close to hers. Tears were in his eyes, which she had not seen since the morning they buried her mother.
“Daed. Do not cry. If you cry, I will cry too, and then neither of us will be any use.”
“Ach, I am not crying. It is the damp air.”
“Nee, it is not the damp.”
“Nee,” he said. “You’re right, it is not.” He pressed her hand against his cheek for one fierce moment. “You look like your mudder, dochder. You always have. But just now, more than ever.”
She could not speak for a moment. She held his hand and breathed deeply. The clock ticked, the fire hissed, and outside, the gray morning went on about its business.
“Daed,” she said when her voice would allow. “Where is Lloyd?”
David hesitated. She watched him consider whether to give her the truth or something gentler, and she watched him choose the truth, because David Graber had never given his daughter anything else.
“He and Susan went to the railway station this morning. She said she had a trunk to collect. They took the wagon.” He paused.
“But Jodie—there is something else. I heard that Susan bought train tickets. Conrad’s boy saw her at the booking office yesterday afternoon.
Two tickets to Houndsville on the eleven o’clock train. ”
The kitchen was very still. Jodie gazed into the fire. The flames flickered, hot and bright, but they told her nothing she wanted to hear.
“She means to take him deheem,” Jodie said.
“It appears so.”
“And he has gone with her to the station, thinking he is collecting her trunk.”
“Yah, I think you are right. He told me he was going to collect Susan’s trunk with her. Wat he does after that—” David stopped. He watched his daughter’s face with a look of concern.
“Jodie,” he said gently. “Is there something I should know?”
Another contraction. She gripped his hand and breathed slowly and steadily. When it had passed, she looked at her father with the clear, bright eyes of a woman who had decided to stop pretending.
“I think I love him, Daed.”
The words came out quietly, as though she were hearing them for the first time.
“I do not know when it started. I do not think there was an exact moment. It is the way he says my name. It was when he mended the chicken coop without being asked. It was how he read the land as though it was talking to him. It was the time he caught me in the barn and held me, and I don’t think he wanted to let go, and truthfully, neither did I.
” She paused. “He is at the railway station with another frau, and the boppli is cooma. I am telling you now because I am done pretending, Daed. It is not dignified and it is probably not wise, but it is the truth, and I want you to hear it from me.”
David became quiet. His thumb moved slowly over her knuckles. The fire shifted noisily in the grate. The clock’s ticking seemed impossibly loud.
“I have known, dochder,” he said at last. “I have known for some time.”
“You have?”
“Yah, I have been watching you look at him through that window for a while, and I have seen him making sure he doesn’t look back at you.
That takes a great deal more effort than watching.
It tells a man everything he needs to know.
I knew this day would komme, but I didn’t think there would be a complication. ”
She made a sound that was not quite a laugh and not quite a sob, then the next contraction came and took the rest of whatever she had been going to say away. She held her father’s hand, squeezing it tightly. He did not say anything. He simply stayed by her side.
From the road came the sound she had been straining to hear—the quick, sharp clatter of hooves and the rattle of a small buggy. Ruth Yoder’s stout gray mare knew the way to every farm in the valley, and Ruth, when occasion demanded, did not spare her.
“Ruth is here,” David said. He stood and went to the door.
Jodie closed her eyes. She placed one hand on the curve of her belly where her daughter—her coming-whether-anyone-was-ready-or-not daughter—pressed outward against her palm.
“Alright, little one,” she whispered. “Alright. It is you and me, and we are going to be just fine.”
She paused. The next contraction gathered pace again, and she breathed through it. In the space between one breath and the next she sent upward the smallest and most unambiguous prayer she had ever offered.
Pliese Gott, hilf me.
Four words, and they would have to do.
The kitchen door opened. Ruth came in, brown leather bag in her hand, her unlost shawl falling from her shoulder, talking rapidly, giving her father instructions.
David followed, steady and close. The gray September morning pressed against the windows.
Jodie Schwartz, twenty-five, a widow, in love with a man who might, at this very moment, be boarding a train to Houndsville, took a long, slow breath and prepared herself for the hardest and most important day of her life.