Chapter 11
The weeks that followed Greta’s birth were busy and beautiful all at once—quiet, tentative, and luminous with love. Love for a small being who had captured everyone’s love and attention.
October came into the valley with a sudden blast of cold, promising cooler winter months to come.
The last of the red, gold, and orange leaves that had been tenuously holding on came down from the maples in one long, wet afternoon.
The mornings were sharp now. Frost laced the fence posts and the edges of the windows with icy patterns that Jodie, rising early to feed Greta, would sometimes pause to study in the thin light.
The way her mother had once studied them and called them God’s natural handwriting.
Lloyd worked with the intensity of a man who had found something worth protecting and was not going to take a single day for granted.
The drainage channel in the east field was completed—the entire length cut and graded, with cool water running into the main ditch.
It was exactly as he had described it to Jodie.
A section of the lower pasture fence had been removed and rebuilt with new seasoned timber.
The barn roof, which had been threatening to leak since September, was patched and sealed.
He rose before David in the mornings and was still working when the light went.
In the evenings, he sat at the kitchen table with Isaac’s ledger.
“The Millers,” David said one evening, turning the book so Lloyd could see the entries. “Wagon wheel repair, thirty-two dollars. And the Lapps—seed grain, forty-five.”
“The Millers can be paid by month’s end if the timber sale goes through,” Lloyd said. He ran his finger down the column. “The Lapps—I spoke with Samuel Lapp at the post office. He will accept twenty now and the remainder in January.”
“You spoke with Samuel Lapp.” David looked at him over the top of his reading glasses. “On whose authority?”
“My own. I did not think you would object.”
“Nee, I do not object. I am merely noting that a little while ago you could not remember anything about yourself, and now you are negotiating payment schedules with Samuel Lapp, who has not accepted a late payment from anyone in this valley in thirty years.”
“I told him the money was cooma, and he believed me.”
“Why?”
“Because I meant it,” Lloyd said simply.
David regarded him for a long moment. Then he made a small sound in his throat that was, from David Graber, practically an ovation, and turned back to the ledger.
Jodie sat in the rocking chair by the stove, with Greta at her breast, watching the two of them across the kitchen, and felt something she had not felt in this house for a very long time.
It took her a moment to identify it. Then she had it.
It was the feeling of a family sitting together in the evening, doing ordinary things.
She and Lloyd had not spoken of what had passed between them in the birthing room.
Not directly. The words he had said—you were the first thought, you were the only thought that mattered—sat between them, waiting to be acknowledged.
They moved around each other with a careful tenderness that was new to them.
He brought her coffee in the mornings without being asked.
She left a plate of supper for him on the stove ledge when he worked late.
He held Greta in the evenings while Jodie ate, cradling the baby against his broad, muscular chest with the gentle awkwardness of a man learning a new skill.
They had not touched. Not since the birthing room.
The unspoken understanding between them was that whatever this was, it could not be rushed, and that rushing it would break something that deserved to be handled with care.
But there were looks. Jodie was constantly and frequently aware of the looks from every direction.
He would gaze at her when he thought she was not watching.
She caught it in the kitchen window's glass, in the dark evening reflection—his green eyes following her across the room as she moved from the stove to the table, then to the rocking chair.
Resting on her face with an expression so quiet and steady that it made her breath catch every time.
She too looked at him when she knew she should not.
When he was concentrating on the ledger with David, the lamplight caught the line of his jaw and his pale hair falling across his forehead in a random curl.
Best of all was when he held Greta and spoke to her in a low murmur about the spring planting, the moon, and the stars, as though the baby were a colleague whose opinions he implicitly valued.
When he stood at the kitchen door in the early dark of a November morning, with his coat collar turned up and his breath white in the cold air, he looked out at the land with the expression of a man who was beginning, carefully, to think of the land as his responsibility entirely.
You are staring, Jodie told herself. You are a grown woman with a newborn baby and a house to run, and you are staring at a man as if you are a young girl at her first Sunday meeting.
She did not stop; she could not stop.
It was on one of these evenings—Greta was a few weeks old, the fire was burning well in the grate, and the ledger had been spread out between Lloyd and David—when David set down his pencil and folded his hands.
He looked at Lloyd with the steady expression he wore when he had something important to say.
“Lloyd,” he said. “I have been meaning to speak with you.”
Lloyd looked up. “Yah,”
“You have been here ten weeks. You have worked this farm as though it were your own. You have settled debts that were not yours to settle. You have been…” David paused, and Jodie, watching from the rocking chair, saw her father search for a word, reject several, and finally find the one he wanted.
“You have been a blessing to this house. And I want you to know that you have my?—”
The wind hit the farmhouse as though it would take the roof away.
It came without warning—a gust so sudden and violent that the kitchen window rattled in its frame and the fire’s flame dipped dramatically.
A loose shutter somewhere on the north side of the house banged open with a loud crack.
Greta, who had been sleeping soundly in the cradle by the hearth, woke and began to cry with the full-throated outrage of a baby disturbed from its rejuvenating sleep.
Lloyd was on his feet before David had finished his sentence.
“The animals,” he said. “The barn door—the new latch will not hold in a wind as strong as this?—”
“Go,” David said. “I will see to the haus.”
Lloyd pulled on his coat and was out the kitchen door into the wild wind before Jodie had drawn her next breath.
The wind took the door from his hand and slammed it back against the frame.
She heard his boots on the porch steps, then the hard, fast rhythm of him running across the yard toward the barn.
Jodie stood. She crossed to the cradle, lifted Greta, who was now expressing herself at considerable volume, and placed her carefully in David’s arms.
“Jodie,” David said. “Wat are you doing?”
“He cannot manage the barn door alone. It takes two people.”
“You have not long given birth to Greta. You are not going out in?—”
“Daed.” She was already reaching for her heavy shawl. “The barn door takes two. You know it. I know it. Eli is at his mudder’s tonight. There is no one else.”
David looked at his daughter. He looked at Greta, howling in his arms. Jodie could tell he was performing one of his rapid internal calculations—the ones where he weighed his need to protect her even though he knew she was right—and watched the exact moment when his decision was made.
“Go,” he said. “Quickly. And komme back as soon as the job is done.”
The storm was worse than it had sounded from inside.
The wind was coming off the western ridge in long, violent gusts that bent the bare maples sideways and drove the rain almost horizontal across the yard.
The ground was already slick. The sky was black, properly black, without a single star or gap in the clouds.
The only light was the yellow square of the kitchen window behind her and the thin, swinging glow of the barn lantern ahead.
She found Lloyd wrestling with the barn door.
The new latch had held, but the hinges on the left side had loosened in the wind.
The door was swinging wide and wild, banging against the frame with a sound that was making the horses frantic.
Solomon was stamping and blowing in his stall.
The old mare was pressed against the back wall, her ears flat.
Lloyd saw her coming, and his face showed something complicated—alarm, relief, and frustration, all at once.
“You should not be out here!” he shouted, over the wind.
“This door takes two people to manhandle it!” she shouted back. “Stop arguing and take the left side!”
He took the left side. She took the right.
Between them, leaning into the wind with their full weight, they hauled the great wooden door back into its frame and held it there as Lloyd drove the bolt home with the heel of his hand.
The impact jarred up his arm, but the door held.
The wind screamed against it, yet it still held.
They stood for a moment in the lee of the barn wall, breathing hard, soaked through.
Rain ran down Jodie’s face and into the collar of her dress.
Her shawl was plastered to her shoulders.
Her hair had come loose from its pins and hung in dark, wet ropes against her neck.
She was shaking from the cold and the effort, and she was aware that she looked about as far from dignified as it was possible to be.
Lloyd was staring at her. He was gazing at her the way he had when she had given birth to Greta.
“You are going to catch your death out here,” he said.
“So are you. Komme inside.”
She grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the house.
They made it to the porch and stopped beneath the narrow shelter of the roof, dripping and breathless, as the storm threw its weight against the buildings and the landscape beyond.
The barn held. The fence held. The yard was a river of mud and rain. The wind roared in their ears.
Lloyd turned to face her squarely. Water ran down his face, slicking his hair against his head.
His green eyes were very close, flickering in the dim light from the kitchen window.
His chest rose and fell with the effort of the work, and he looked at her with an expression that made the cold, the rain, and the storm fall away until there was nothing left but the two of them and the narrow, dry space between them.
“Jodie,” he said.
She waited. The rain hammered the porch roof.
“I have nothing to offer you,” he said. His voice was low and steady, but beneath the steadiness, she could hear the faintest tremor, like a current beneath still water.
“No completed life. No haus of my own. No land. No money. Nothing that a sensible woman would look at and say, yah, that is a foundation.”
“Lloyd—”
“Only wat I can build.” He held her gaze.
“Only wat I can make with my hands, my time, and whatever Gott sees fit to give me. But I would like to build it here, with you, with Greta. If you will have me. You see, Jodie, I have fallen deeply and madly in love with you, and I want to spend every second of my life with you. If you’ll have me. ”
The wind blew wildly. The porch creaked. Inside, Greta was faintly crying, and David was speaking to her in his low, rumbling voice. The whole warm, ordinary life of the farmhouse was carrying on behind the door as though her world had not just tipped on its axis.
Jodie looked at him, thinking of the man who had walked into her life through a drainage ditch with nothing but a battered satchel, a head wound, and a grief he carried like a stone in his chest. He had mended her fences, drained her fields, and held her hand through the hardest hours of her life.
Then he had held her daughter as though she were his own.
Now he stood on her father’s porch in the rain, asking her, with everything he had, if she would share his life with him.
Unable to find the words to express herself, she stood on her toes and softly kissed his cool but inviting lips. She noted his sharp intake of breath and the way his whole body went still, as though the kiss had stopped something inside him and he was pleased with that.
“Ach, I have been waiting for someone to build something with me for twenty-five years,” she said, very quietly, her mouth still close to his face. “I think you are definitely worth the wait, Lloyd Kauffman.”
His smile started the way it always did—slowly, at the corner of his mouth, uncertain of its welcome.
Then it arrived all at once, wide and unguarded, so full of light that Jodie felt her eyes sting.
She couldn’t tell whether it was the rain, the wind, or the overwhelming, bewildering, wholly unexpected joy of being looked at by a man who was not going anywhere.
He lifted his hand and touched her face.
Just once. Just the tips of his fingers against her cheek, brushing a strand of wet hair away from her eyes.
The gentleness of it undid her more than any grand gesture could have, and unable to resist, she kissed him again, this time for a little longer and with a tad more passion.
“We should go inside,” she whispered. “Before Daed komme out here and finds us on his porch. You know, he has opinions. He is of the last generation.”
“Yah.” He was still smiling at her. “We should go inside.”
Neither of them moved for a long, sweet, rain-soaked moment.
Then Jodie laughed—a real laugh, warm and startled and full of something new.
She took his hand, and they went inside together, dripping and shivering but happy, into the bright, warm kitchen.
David was gently rocking Greta by the fire.
The kettle was beginning to sing, and the storm outside was just a storm, nothing more, because all that she had ever wanted was right here in the room with her.