Chapter 12
Bishop Hershberger came by on a Tuesday, early in the morning.
Jodie saw him first through the kitchen window—his black coat billowing behind him as he battled the residual wind.
He walked along the path from the road, his expression giving nothing away.
She knew, though, that Bishops did not make Tuesday visits for pleasant reasons.
Bishops made Tuesday visits when something needed to be addressed.
“Daed,” she called out. “The bishop is here.”
David set down his coffee. He looked out the window, and his face stilled.
“I will meet him at the door,” he said. “You put the kettle on. He will want some kaffe after walking in this wind.”
“Daed. Wat if this is about Lloyd?—”
“We will hear what the mann has to say before we decide wat it is about.”
Bishop Hershberger was seventy years old and had led the Crystal Lake community for the better part of thirty-five years.
He was not a tall man, but he carried himself well.
He had a long white beard, sharp blue eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles, and the calm of a man who had heard every kind of trouble the human heart could produce and was no longer surprised by any of it.
He sat at the kitchen table and accepted coffee with cream and sugar. He looked at his cup, then at Jodie and David. Slowly, he reached into his coat pocket and produced a folded letter. He placed it on the table between them, smoothed his shirt, and began.
“This arrived for me from Houndsville yesterday,” he said. “From a frau named Susan Bontrager.”
Jodie’s hands tightened in her lap beneath the table. Beside her, her father’s face grew placid.
“She writes to say that Lloyd Kauffman is a man of poor character,” the bishop continued.
His voice was even and unhurried, giving the words their proper weight without adding any of his own.
“She states that he abandoned a formal betrothal. She has requested that the Crystal Lake community refuse to accept him as one of their own.”
The kitchen was quiet. The clock ticked. In the cradle by the hearth, Greta slept in peaceful oblivion, unaware that her mother and grandfather were having a very difficult morning.
“Bishop Hershberger,” Jodie said, her voice steady even though her heart was not. “Nee, there was no formal betrothal. Lloyd has told us?—”
The bishop raised one hand, gently. “There is more.”
He unfolded the letter, but he did not read from it directly—he was not the kind of man who read other people’s correspondence aloud—but he summarized, with care.
“Susan Bontrager also writes that the late Isaac Schwartz owed a considerable sum of money to a man named Jacob Glick. Jacob was Isaac’s great-uncle, and he is now in financial difficulty himself.
The debt was three hundred dollars, borrowed some two years before Isaac’s death.
I believe it is, in fact, the single largest item in Isaac’s ledger—recorded only as a debt to a Pennsylvania creditor.
” He paused. “And it has komme to my attention that since Lloyd has been in Crystal Lake, he has been trying to repay this debt himself. Without telling anyone in this haus. Susan Bontrager implies that he cannot be trusted either.”
Jodie could not speak. She stared at the bishop. Then she stared at the letter. She turned to her father.
“Three hundred dollars,” she said at last. “The Pennsylvania creditor. That was Jacob Glick?”
“Yah, it seems it must be.”
“And Lloyd has been trying to pay it back. Out of wat? He has no money. He has been warrick here for his keep and nothing more.”
“That is something I cannot tell you,” the bishop said. “You will need to ask him yourself.”
David spoke for the first time. “Bishop. This letter. Wat do you think?”
The bishop folded his hands. He was quiet for a moment, choosing the right words to say.
“I have komme to know Lloyd Kauffman,” he said.
“I have observed him at warrick. I have spoken with him before. I have heard Ruth Yoder’s assessment, which was characteristically direct and which I trust entirely.
” He permitted himself the smallest possible smile, one that reached only the corners of his eyes.
“As for Susan Bontrager’s letter—it is the letter of a wounded person.
Not a dishonest one. There is a difference, and it is an important one.
There were expectations, yah. There were understandings, perhaps.
But there was no formal agreement. No vows were exchanged. No promises were witnessed.”
He picked up his coffee and took a slow, deliberate sip.
“The matter of the debt is more interesting to me,” he said.
“A man who quietly pays another man’s obligation, without seeking credit for it or telling the frau he loves wat he is doing—that is not a man of poor character.
That is a man of considerable character who is perhaps not very skilled at explaining himself. ”
Jodie fought back the tears that threatened to spill. She blinked hard and set her jaw.
“Bishop Hershberger. Wat does this mean for Lloyd? For us?”
The bishop set down his drink. He looked at her with the steady gaze of a man who had married, buried, counseled, and forgiven for thirty-five years, and who knew, better than most, what love looked like when it arrived in unlikely packaging.
“I will see you both at the Sunday meeting,” he said.
That was all. And somehow, it was everything.
He stood. He thanked them for the coffee.
He touched Jodie’s shoulder once, briefly, as he passed her chair—the lightest pressure of an old man’s hand, saying more than his words had said.
Then he walked out into the cold November morning and down the path to the main road.
Jodie watched him go and felt the stone in her stomach dissolve into something warmer, something that spread through her chest and up into her throat, making her press both hands to her face for a moment before she could trust herself to speak.
“Daed,” she said, muffled by her hands.
“Yah, I heard, dochder.”
“He has been paying off Isaac’s debt this whole time, without telling me or you.”
“Yah.”
“He has no money, Daed. He came here with nothing. Where did he find three hundred dollars?”
“I suspect,” David said carefully, “that you will need to ask him that yourself. And I suspect you will want to do it before you say anything you cannot take back, because you have a look on your face right now that I have seen before. It is the look your mother wore when she was about to be either very angry or very tender, and neither of us ever knew which it would be until she opened her mouth.”
Jodie lowered her hands and looked across at her father. “Wat do you think it will be?”
“I think,” David said prudently, “that it will be both.”
Lloyd came in from the fields at half past four, as he always did when the light began to fade.
He hung his coat on the peg by the door, then pulled off his boots and set them on the mat beneath the peg.
He went into the kitchen, rubbing his hands against the cold, and saw Jodie standing at the table with the ledger open in front of her.
The bishop’s visit was written on her face, and he stopped.
“You know,” he said.
“Yah, I know.”
He stood very still. He did not try to explain, excuse, or diminish. He simply stood there, in his stockinged feet, with his hands at his sides, waiting for her to say something.
“Pliese, hoch dich anne, Lloyd.”
Pulling out a kitchen chair from under the table, he sat.
“Tell me,” she forced out. “All of it. From the beginning.”
He told her about Jacob Glick—Isaac’s great-uncle, a distant relative and an old man in Houndsville who had lent Isaac three hundred dollars two years before Isaac’s death.
Jacob himself could barely remember why, but he did remember that he had never been repaid.
Jacob had then been forced to borrow from The Amish Oak Tree Bank to cover the loss.
Lloyd informed her that he had originally come to Crystal Lake to try to retrieve the money for Jacob, because Jacob was too proud to ask and too old to travel, and someone needed to do something about it.
It could well have been the reason he was on their property.
“And then you hit your head in my ditch,” Jodie said.
“And then I hit my head in your ditch. And I completely forgot why I had komme to Crystal Lake. When I remembered—I saw the farm, you, and David, and how hard everything was for you—I could not ask you for money you did not have. So, I decided to pay Jacob back myself.”
“With wat, Lloyd? You have no income. You warrick here for your keep.”
“I sold my tools,” he said quietly. “The ones I brought from Houndsville. My carpentry set. They were Aaron’s too. They were gut tools—hand-forged, some of them. I sold them to the hardware merchant in town and have been sending the money to Jacob each month. It is not fast, but it is honest.”
Jodie stared at him. “You sold Aaron’s tools.”
“Yah.”
“Your brother’s tools. The only things you had left of him.”
Lloyd looked down at his hands. His empty, calloused, tool-less hands. “Aaron would have understood,” he said. “He would have done the same. He was always better at doing the right thing than I was.”
Jodie pressed both hands flat against the table.
She looked at the ledger, then her gaze shifted to Lloyd Kauffman, sitting across from her, grief and honesty written on his face.
She felt the anger and the tenderness arrive at the same moment, just as her father had predicted.
She opened her mouth and let them both out at once.
“You are a wunderbar, ridiculous man,” she said. “You are also impossible. You have been paying off my husband’s debt with your brother’s tools, and you did not think to mention this to the frau you asked to marry you?”
“I did not want you to feel burdened by it,” he said.
“I did not want you to think I had done it to earn something from you…” He paused.
“I had no idea wat you were going to be like, Jodie. When I started, you were a name in Jacob’s kitchen.
By the time I knew wu you were, the debt was already mine, and I wanted to carry it.
Not because I had to, but because I wanted to. ”
Jodie shook her head and smiled softly. Her blue eyes were very bright. Her hands, which had been pressed flat on the table, were trembling, and she did not try to hide it.
“You are not carrying anything alone anymore,” she said. “Do you understand me, Lloyd? Not the debt or the grief. Not any of it. You are done carrying things alone. That is not how this works.”
He looked at her. The green of his eyes was steady and full of something she rarely saw—the first time was when he had seen Greta born, and then when he had held her and his whole face had shown love.
“Yah, Jodie,” he said simply. And then, very quietly: “I love everything about you.”
She stood up and walked around the table. Taking his face in both her hands—his rough, cold, honest face —she kissed him, tenderly.
“I love you too,” she said. “You ridiculous man. Now komme and hold your dochder. She has been asking for your touch all afternoon.”
“Greta cannot talk.”
“Greta communicates her preferences very clearly. You are one of them, along with copious amounts of milk.”
They married in December, when the distant hills were white and the valley lay quiet beneath the first deep snow of winter.
Ruth Yoder insisted the ceremony be held in the community hall, on the grounds that no one would be standing outside in the snow.
The bishop agreed, and Ruth took it as a personal victory, mentioning it to no fewer than twelve people before the service began.
Greta, now three months old and thoroughly unimpressed by the solemnity of the occasion, offered intermittent commentary throughout.
She objected to the opening prayer. She briefly approved of the singing.
She objected again, with considerable volume, to the exchanging of vows and had to be bounced on David’s knee until she consented to a grudging silence.
Eli, as best man, Eli dropped the ring. He retrieved it from under the third row of chairs.
Then he rather foolishly dropped it again.
This time, he retrieved it from Ruth Yoder’s bag, which, he said afterward, was the most frightening place he had ever had to enter.
He would be reminded of this at every community gathering for the next twenty years, and he would bear it with the good-humored resignation of a young man just setting out on his life’s journey.
David moved into the dawdihaus the following week; he had been quietly waiting for exactly this outcome and was too dignified to say so.
When Jodie asked him if he was certain, he looked at her over the top of his reading glasses and said, “Dochder, I have been certain since the night that bu ran a mile to be at your side. I was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.”
That evening, in the quiet of their own home.
Lloyd sat by the fire with Greta asleep against his chest and Jodie beside him, her head resting on his shoulder.
Outside, Crystal Lake was knee-deep in snow.
The east field, drained and turned, was now ready for spring planting.
The hills stood dark and certain against a sky full of stars.
“I asked Gott for a sign,” Jodie said quietly. “In September. The night I found you.”
“Wat sign were you asking for?”
“I did not specify. I should have been more particular.” She felt him laugh—just the movement of it, low and quiet, in his chest beneath her cheek. “I think He sent me a man in a ditch covered in blood and mud because He knew he would be perfect for me.”
“It was a very undignified sign.”
“All the best ones are.” She tilted her head back to look at him. The firelight caught the green of his eyes, the pale line of his jaw and the small smile that lived at the corners of his mouth. The one she had been watching for and waiting for, then falling in love with for the past months.
“Are you happy, Lloyd Kauffman?” she asked.
He looked down at Greta, then up to Jodie—at her bright blue eyes and her shiny chestnut hair. It was the face he had carried in his mind since the morning she had handed him a cup of broth and told him his name was enough to start with.
“I had forgotten wat happiness felt like,” he said. “And now I remember, and I am not going to forget it again. I love you entirely and completely, Jodie Kauffman.”
She settled back against him. The fire crackled. Greta gave a tiny sigh in her sleep—a small, contented sound, as if a question had been answered and she was satisfied with it. After all, she had the love of a good man, her parents and a whole life ahead of her.