Chapter 9 #2
“I feel,” he said, very carefully, “that the first clear thought I had when I remembered everything was her face. I feel I was meant to be where she is. I think that if I board that train with you, I will spend the rest of my life sitting in a house on gut land, with a creek through the pasture and timber on the ridge, but I will be empty, and you will know it. That situation would be worse for you, Susan, than anything I could say on this platform.”
Susan stared at him. The stationmaster’s whistle sounded again, final and impatient. Something stirred behind her eyes—not acceptance, not yet, perhaps not for a long time—but the beginning of something that might, eventually, become understanding.
She picked up her bag and straightened her shoulders. She lifted her chin with the fierce dignity of a woman who would rather die than be seen crumpling in public.
“You are a foolish, foolish man, Lloyd Kauffman.”
“Yah, I know.”
“And you will regret this.”
“Perhaps. But I would regret going back to Houndsville more. And so would you.”
She looked at him one last time. In her face, he saw it all—the anger, the wounded pride, and the exhaustion of a woman who had poured a lot of time into a pursuit that was ending on a railway platform in a town she had never wanted to see.
Beneath it all, the loneliness. The loneliness of a person who has loved someone who was unable to love them back.
“Goodbye, Lloyd,” she said.
“Goodbye, Susan. I hope you find wat you are looking for. I truly mean that.”
“Wat I was looking for,” she said quietly, “was you.”
She turned and walked to the train, stepping up into the carriage without looking back.
The doors closed. The wheels began to move.
Lloyd stood on the platform with the crumpled ticket in the gravel at his feet and the cold September air blowing on his face.
He watched the last carriage disappear around the bend where the landscape swallowed the track.
He stood for perhaps three seconds.
Then he heard the sound of someone running toward him along the station road at a speed that suggested the world was ending—Eli Graber, coat flying, hat gone, face scarlet, arms pumping, shouting Lloyd’s name at a volume that startled the elderly couple on the bench and caused the stationmaster to drop his whistle.
“Lloyd! Lloyd, you must komme, It is Jodie. The boppli is cooma, Ruth is on her way, but David said I had to run and find you. I have been running so fast I cannot feel my legs and?—”
“Eli.” Lloyd caught him by the shoulders. “Breathe, Eli.”
“I am breathing, but I also feel as though I am dying. Both things at the same time.”
“The boppli. Is Jodie alright?”
“She is… she is. But the boppli is cooma now, Lloyd. Right now, and I think she wants you there.”
Lloyd looked at the road that led back to the Graber farmhouse, and he ran. Leaving Eli in his wake.
He ran the whole mile. Past the marketplace, past the post office, where old Conrad Gingerich stood on the steps with his pipe, blinking and observing, “Well, I never,” and had to sit down with all the excitement.
Past the turn onto the Miller’s property, past the Hostetlers’ property, and across the lower pasture at full stride, his own coat flying, his lungs burning, his heart hammering with something that was not exhaustion but the fierce certainty that he was running toward the only place he was supposed to be.
He arrived at the front door at the exact moment Ruth Yoder hurried from the kitchen with a basin of warm water, creating a brief collision neither of them had the breath or inclination to apologize for.
“Out of my way, yung mann,” Ruth said firmly, and squeezed past him.
David stood in the doorway. His face, when he saw Lloyd, was unreadable. Not hostile, but not altogether welcoming either. The face of a man performing the most important calculation of his life.
“Is the boppli is cooma?” Lloyd asked, still breathing hard.
“Ach, that is wat I said,” Eli confirmed, arriving a short distance behind him, bent double, hands on his knees. “I said it first, but nobody listens to me.”
Lloyd looked at David. He did not look away. He did not try to make the situation smaller, easier, or more polite than it was.
“I need to be in there,” he said.
“You can’t be in there,” David said quietly. It was not unkind, but it was the truth.
“I know it. I have no claim to anything in this house. I have no land, no money, and no completed life to offer your daughter. But I love her, David. I remembered everything this morning, and the first clear thought in my head was her face. And I am asking you—not telling you, asking you—to let me be in that room when her boppli comes into the world, because I want to raise that kin as my own.”
David considered his request. Behind him, from within the house, came the sound of Jodie’s voice—sharp with effort, clear as a bell in the still, gray morning:
“Pliese, komme in, Lloyd.”
Both men turned toward the sound. David looked at the door behind which his daughter was about to bring a new life into the world.
He looked back at the young man, cinder dust on his trousers, his hair dark and glistening with sweat, his deep green eyes steady and unguarded, full of something that David Graber, who had loved one woman for the whole of his adult life, recognized as plainly as his own reflection.
He stepped aside.
“Then go in,” he said. “And do not let her down.”