Chapter 10
Ruth Yoder had delivered precisely two hundred and fourteen babies in Crystal Lake and the surrounding valley.
She had done it in kitchens, bedrooms, and, on one memorable occasion, in the back of a wagon during a hailstorm.
She had opinions about who belonged in a birthing room and who did not, and she expressed them now in three languages as Lloyd Kauffman came through the Graber front room door with cinder dust on his trousers and his heart in his throat.
“Absolutely not,” she said in English. She followed this with something brisk and emphatic in Pennsylvania Dutch, and then, for good measure, a phrase in German that Lloyd suspected was not complimentary at all. “This is nee place for a man. Out. Out, out, out.”
“Ruth,” Jodie said from the bed.
Ruth turned. Jodie was propped against the headboard, her hair loose around her shoulders, her face flushed with effort, and her blue eyes clearly certain in a way that brooked no argument from midwives or anyone else.
“Pliese, let him stay,” Jodie said.
“Jodie Schwartz, in forty years of bringing boppli’s into this world I have never once?—”
“Yah, I know, but I am asking you to make an exception. For me.”
Ruth looked at Jodie, then looked back at Lloyd. She gazed up at the ceiling, as though consulting a higher authority on the question of whether the world had entirely lost its senses. Then she pointed at the chair beside the bed.
“There,” she said. “Sit there. Out of my way. If you faint, I am stepping over you. If you are sick, there is a basin in the corner. If you touch anything I have not told you to touch, I will put you out of this room myself, and I am stronger than I look.”
“Yah, Ruth.”
“Do not ‘yah, Ruth’ me. This is not how things are done.”
“I know,” Lloyd said quietly. “Denki.”
He sat beside the bed. Jodie’s hand found his immediately, her fingers lacing through his.
Gripping hard, the shock of the contact—her skin warm and damp, her pulse quick under his thumb—went through him as the memory had gone through him on the platform, sudden, clarifying and impossible to look away from.
She was gazing at him intently, and he was staring back at her. The room was small and warm, with the scent of beeswax polish and clean linen. Ruth was moving around them with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had work to do, regardless of what other people’s hearts were getting up to.
“You came back,” Jodie said.
“Yah, of course, I came back.”
“Nee, it was not ‘of course.’ I heard there was a train and that there were tickets for that particular train.”
“Yah, there were tickets,” he agreed. “But I did not use mine.”
“Where is Susan?”
“On the train going back to Houndsville.”
A contraction gathered, and Jodie’s grip tightened on his hand until his knuckles ground together.
She breathed through it, eyes closed, the tendons standing out on her neck with the effort.
Lloyd held on. He did not flinch. He had helped mares through foaling and ewes through lambing, and he knew that the most useful thing a person could do in these moments was to be steady, present, and quiet.
To let the woman doing the impossible work know she was not alone.
When the contraction passed, Jodie opened her eyes. They were very bright but also weary.
“Was it your choice?” she asked. “The train. Staying. Was it your choice, or did she leave you behind?”
“Entirely my choice.”
“Why?”
He looked down at their joined hands. Her fingers, fine-boned and strong, threaded through his heavy, calloused ones. It looked right, he thought. It seemed as if they had been meant to fit together for a long time, but had only just been allowed to.
“Because my memory came back,” he said. “On the platform. I fell, hitting my head and my knee. Then everything came back at once. Aaron. Houndsville. The conversation I botched with Susan before I left. Everything.”
“And when it came back—when you remembered everything—wat was the first thought you had?”
He lifted his eyes to hers. The afternoon light from the window fell behind her, catching the loose chestnut waves of her hair and the curve of her cheek. She looked, in that moment, as though she were the most exhausted and the most beautiful thing he had ever set eyes on.
“You,” he said. “You were my first thought. You were the only thought that mattered.”
Jodie’s breath caught. Not from a contraction. From something else entirely.
“Lloyd Kauffman,” she said, in a voice that was trying very hard to be steady and was not quite managing it. “Your timing is absolutely terrible.”
“Ach, I know.”
“I am in the middle of having a boppli.”
“Yah, I know that too.”
“This is not the moment for—for declarations and—and looking at me in that way.”
“How?”
“As if…” She faltered. Another contraction was building. She gripped his hand. “As if I am the answer to something.”
“You are the answer to something,” he said quietly. “I did not know the question until I met you. But you are the answer to it.”
Ruth, from the foot of the bed, said, “If you two are quite finished, there is a boppli who would like to join this conversation.”
Jodie laughed. It came out broken and breathless, mingled with the effort of the next contraction, but it was still a laugh, and it filled the small room with light. In that moment, Lloyd thought that if he lived to be a hundred, he would never forget how joyous it sounded.
The work went on. Ruth commanded the room with the authority of a woman who had been doing the job since before either of them was born.
She spoke to Jodie in the low, even tones of a midwife guiding a mother through the hardest passage of her life—“that’s it, breathe now, breathe and push, you are doing beautifully”—and she spoke to Lloyd only to tell him to move his elbow or to fetch the second basin of water from the kitchen, which he did as quickly as his legs would carry him. He was back within thirty seconds.
Jodie worked hard. There was no other word for it.
She worked the way a woman works when bringing something new into the world—with her whole body and a determined grace that Lloyd could only watch and be humbled by.
Between contractions, she rested her head against the pillow, closed her eyes, and breathed deeply.
He wiped her forehead with a cool, damp cloth and whispered things he was not sure she could hear.
“You are the strongest person I have ever known,” he said, his voice low and close to her ear.
“You are the bravest. You found me in a ditch, Jodie Schwartz. You brought me inside and gave me broth. You told me my name was enough to start with, and it was. It was enough. You were enough. You have been enough every single day since.”
“Stop talking,” Jodie said between her teeth.
“Yah.”
“Nee. I didn’t mean that. Keep talking. Tell me something else.”
“The east field is going to be extraordinary next spring. The drainage is working wunderbar. The soil is turning over beautifully. Your father’s land is the best I have ever seen, and by March you will not recognize it.”
She made a sound that was half laugh, half sob. “You are telling me about drainage, while I am having a boppli.”
“You asked me to keep talking. I talk about land. It is wat I know.”
“Tell me something you do not know, then.”
He was quiet for a moment. Ruth was speaking in low, urgent tones. The room was very warm. Outside, the gray afternoon had begun to darken toward evening, and the lamp on the bedside table cast long amber shadows up the wall.
“I do not know how this happened,” he said.
“I do not know how I walked into a ditch in the dark and woke up in a room with a woman. Someone I had never met, who handed me a cup of broth, looked at me with bright blue eyes, and turned my whole life around. I do not know how that works. I don’t know wat to call it. ”
“I call it Gott’s sense of humor,” Jodie said, and then the last contraction came, the one that was different from all the others, and Ruth said, “Now, push, now,” and Jodie bore down with every ounce of effort she could muster. Lloyd held her hand and did not let go.
Greta Schwartz arrived at precisely twenty minutes past seven in the evening.
She announced herself with the volume and conviction of someone who had opinions about the world and intended to make them known from her very first breath.
Her voice was enormous. It filled the small room, spilled into the kitchen, and crossed the yard to where Eli was pacing by the barn door.
It reached David, who sat sedately at the kitchen table with his hands folded and his eyes closed.
The blissful noise made him stand so quickly that his chair fell over behind him.
Ruth wrapped the baby with swift, practiced hands. She wiped the small red face and checked the clenched fists, nodding in the brief, satisfied way of a professional who has seen the job done well. Then she placed the tiny bundle—still protesting, still magnificent—into Jodie’s open arms.
Jodie made a sound that Lloyd had no word for, something between a sob and a laugh. She brought the baby to her neck, closed her eyes, and her whole body curled around the small, warm weight of her daughter like a hand closing around something eternally precious.
“Hallo,” she whispered. “Hallo, Greta. Hallo, Liebling. I have been waiting to meet you for such a long time.”
Lloyd could not move. He was still sitting beside the bed, still holding Jodie’s hand, though her grip had loosened now into something softer.
He gazed down at the baby in Jodie’s arms—at the dark, damp hair and the tiny, furrowed forehead.
Her delicate mouth, already searching for something—and he felt, with a bolt of love, that he had just witnessed a miracle.
Jodie opened her eyes. She found him watching, and his face was so open, so utterly unguarded—everything stripped away to leave only wonder, tenderness, and a love so strong it had nowhere to hide—that she looked away for a moment, quickly, as if looking away from something almost too bright to look at directly.
Then she looked back. Because she was Jodie Schwartz, and she had never, in her life, looked away from anything for long.
“Would you like to hold her?” she said.
Lloyd’s hands were shaking. He had not noticed until now. “Nee, I do not know how to.”
“Ach, don’t be silly. Here. You need to learn.” She shifted the baby carefully, cradling her small head with one hand, and guided Greta into the crook of his arm. “Remember to support her neck. There. Like that. She will not break, Lloyd. She is stronger than she looks.”
“Then she is her mudder’s dochder,” he said, and his voice came out rough and strange.
Jodie looked at him, and he looked back at her.
Between them, in the small, warm space of his arm, Greta Schwartz yawned enormously and closed her eyes, as though she had said everything she needed to say for now and was entirely satisfied with the arrangements.
David appeared in the doorway.
He stood there for a moment without speaking.
He looked at his daughter, damp-haired and exhausted, luminous with something that went beyond mere tiredness.
He looked at his new granddaughter, asleep in the arms of a man who had walked into their lives just a short while ago, carrying nothing but a battered satchel and a broken heart.
He looked at Lloyd—sitting in the bedside chair, holding the baby with the careful reverence of a man cradling something that would change him forever—and David Graber decided.
It was not a decision he would put into words until much later.
He was not, as a rule, a man who spoke when action could be used more efficiently.
But it was there, in the way he entered the room and pulled the chair to the other side of the bed.
He sat down and placed his broad, weathered hand over his daughter’s.
“She is wunderbar, dochder, quite beautiful,” he said softly. “She looks so much like your mudder.”
“Everyone seems to look like Mamm today,” Jodie said. She was laughing and crying at the same time. David pressed her hand as Ruth tidied the room with a loudness that was meant to give everyone the privacy they needed. No one told Lloyd to go.
He stayed sitting in the chair with Greta sleeping against his chest. Jodie’s hand rested on his arm, and outside the window, the September evening was turning gray.
Everything was quiet over Crystal Lake. The hills settled into their dark shapes against the sky, and the first stars were beginning to appear in the gaps between the clouds.
The evening closed around them after a very eventful day.