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“Not just my idea,” Simeon corrected. “Nay. I say plainly that I believe it’s God’s plan. And John’s in agreement with me. Think about it. I don’t know why we didn’t see it before. Here I sit with two unwed sons, one with motherless children he struggles to care for and the other sashaying back and forth across the county from one singing to another in a rigged-out buggy with red-and-blue flashing lights.” His brow furrowed as he stared hard at Micah. “And don’t mention rumspringa, because it’s time you put that behind you and came into the church.”
“Listen to your father.” Ellen’s dat nodded. “He’s speaking truth, Micah. He wants what’s best for you. He always has.”
“Jah,” Simeon said. “I’ve held my tongue far too long, waiting for the two of you to stop sitting on the fence and court some young woman. Neziah’s mourned the boys’ mother long enough, and Micah’s near to being thought too flighty for any good family to want him. It’s time.”
Micah toyed with his fork. “I’m not yet thirty, Vadder. It’s not as if no girl would have me.”
“I’ll fetch the coffee and apple pie,” Ellen offered. She began clearing away the plates while Simeon wagged a finger at Micah.
“You know I’m but speaking what’s true. Deny it if you can. Neither of you have been putting your minds to finding a good wife. And you must marry. It’s not decent that you don’t. I’ve talked to you until I’m blue in the face, and I’ve prayed on it. What came to me was that we didn’t have to look far to find the answer to at least one of our problems.”
“Jah.” Ellen’s mother leaned forward on her elbows and pushed back her plate. “And you’ve worried about your sons no more than I’ve lost sleep over our girl. She should have been a wife years ago, should have filled our house with grandchildren. She’s a good daughter, a blessing to us in our old age. But it’s time she found a husband, and none better than one of your boys.”
“I agree,” Ellen’s father said. “I’ve known Neziah and Micah since they were born. I could ask no more for her than she wed such a good man as either of them.” He smiled and nodded his approval. “The pity is, we didn’t think of this solution sooner.”
“No solution if Ellen’s not willing,” Neziah pronounced. His serious gaze met hers and held it. “Are you in favor of this plan or are you just afraid to speak up and turn us out the door with our hats in hand?”
Everyone looked at her again, including the two children, and Ellen felt a familiar sinking feeling. What did she want? She didn’t know. She stood in the center of the kitchen feeling foolish and clutching the pie like a drowning woman with a lifeline. “I...Well...”
“Is the thought of marrying one of us distasteful to you?” Neziah asked when she couldn’t answer.
He had none of the showy looks of his brother. Neziah’s face was too planed, his brow too pronounced, and his mouth too thin to be called handsome. Not that he was ugly; he wasn’t that. But there was always something unnerving about his dark, penetrating gaze.
Neziah was only three years older than she was, but he looked closer to ten. Hints of gray were beginning to tint his walnut-brown hair. The sudden loss of his wife and mother in the same accident three years ago had struck him hard. Maybe it was the responsibility of being both father and mother to two young children that stamped him with an air of heaviness.
“We’re all friends here,” Neziah continued. “No one will think less of you if this isn’t something you want to consider.”
Micah relaxed in his chair. “I say we’ve thrown this at her too fast. I wouldn’t blame her for balking.” He met Ellen’s gaze. “Give yourself a few days to think it over, Ellen. What do you say?”
“Jah,” Ellen’s mother urged, rising to take the pie from her hands. “Say you will think about it, daughter.”
“You know your mother and I wouldn’t even consider the idea if we thought it was wrong for you.” Her father beamed, and Ellen’s resistance melted.
What could be wrong with thinking it over? As Simeon and her dat had said, either of the Shetler brothers would make a respectable husband. She would be a wife, a woman with her own home to manage, possibly children. She took a deep breath, feeling as if she were about to take a plunge off the edge of a rock quarry into deep water far below. She actually felt a little lightheaded. “I will,” she said. “I’ll think on the whole idea, and I will pray about it. Surely, if it is the Lord’s plan for me, He’ll ease my mind.” She held up her finger. “But my agreement is to think on the whole idea. Nothing more.”
Simeon smacked his hands together. “Goot. It is for the best. You will come to realize this. And whichever one you pick, I will consider you the daughter I never had.”
Ellen turned toward Simeon, intent on making it clear to her neighbor that she hadn’t agreed to walk out with either of his sons when the little boys kicked up a commotion.
“Me!” Asa and Joel both reached for the pie in the center of the table. “Me!” they cried in unison.
“Me first!” Joel insisted.
“Nay! Me!” Asa bellowed.
“I knew you’d see it our way, Ellen,” Micah said above the voices of his nephews. He rose from his chair. “I was so sure you’d agree that I brought fishing poles. You always used to like fishing. Maybe you and me could wander down to the creek and see if we could catch a fish or two before dark.”
Ellen looked at Micah, then the table of seated guests, flustered. “Go fishing? Now?”
“Oh, go on, Ellen,” her father urged. “We can get our own pie and I’ll help your mother clean up the dishes.” He glanced at Micah. “Smart thinking. Best strike while the iron is hot, boy. Get the jump on Neziah and put your claim in first.”
Mischief gleamed in Micah’s blue eyes. “It’ll get you out of here.” He motioned toward the back door. “Come on, Ellen. You know you want to. I’ll even bait the hook for you.”
She cut her eyes at him. “As if I need the help. If I remember correctly, it was me who taught you how to tickle trout.”
“She did,” Micah conceded to the others, then he returned his attention to her. “But I’ve learned a few things about fishing since then. You don’t stand a chance of catching the first fish or the most.”
“Don’t I?” Ellen retorted. “Talk’s cheap but it never put fish on the table.” Still bantering with him, she took off her kapp, tied on her scarf and followed him out of the house.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Micah stepped out on a big willow that had fallen into the creek. The leaves had long since withered, but the trunk was strong. Barring a flood, the willow would provide a sturdy seat for fishermen for years. And the eddy in the curve of the bank was the best place to catch fish.
He turned and offered Ellen his hand. “Don’t worry,” he said, “it’s safe enough.” He had both fishing poles in his free hand, while Ellen carried the can with the bait.
The rocky stream was wide, the current gentle but steady as the water snaked through a wooded hollow that divided his father’s farm from her dat’s. When they were children, he, Neziah and Ellen had come here to fish often. Now, he sometimes brought his nephews, Joel and Asa, but Neziah didn’t have the time. Sometimes the fishing was good, and sometimes he went home with nothing more than an easy heart, but it didn’t matter. Micah thought there was often more of God’s peace to be found here in the quiet of wind and water and swaying trees than in the bishop’s sermons.
“Thanks for asking me to come fishing, Micah,” Ellen said as she followed him cautiously out onto the wide trunk. “I needed to get out of there, and I couldn’t think of a way to make a clean getaway without offending anyone.”
“Jah,” Micah agreed. “I wanted to get away, too. Not from supper. That was great. But my dat. When he takes a crazy notion, he’s hard to rein in.”
“So you think that’s what it is? His idea that you and Neziah should both court me, and that I would choose between you? It’s a crazynotion?”
The hairs on the back of Micah’s neck prickled, warning him that he’d almost made a big misstep, and not the kind that would land him in the creek. “Nay, I didn’t mean it like that. It’s a good idea, one I should have come up with a long time ago. Me and you walking out together, I mean, not you picking one of us. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it. My vadder is right that I’ve been rumspringa too long. I didn’t want to discuss it back there, but I’ve been talking to the bishop about getting baptized. I’m ready to settle down, and a good woman is just what I need.”
Ellen sat down on the log and dangled her legs over the edge. She was barefooted, and he couldn’t help noticing her slender, high-arched feet. “I’m nearly four years older than you,” she said.
He grinned at her. “That hasn’t mattered since I left school and started doing a man’s work. I’ve always thought you were one of the prettiest girls around, and we’ve always gotten along.” Maybe not the prettiest, he thought, being honest with himself, but Ellen was nearly as tall as he was and very attractive. She’d always been fun to be with, and she was exactly the kind of woman he’d always expected to marry when he settled down. Ellen never made a fellow feel like less than he was, always better. Being with her always made him content...sort of like this creek, he decided.
“And our fathers’ lands run together, of course.” She took the pole he offered and bent over her line, carefully threading a night crawler onto the hook. “Handy for pasturing livestock.”
He studied her to see if she was serious or testing him, but she kept her eyes averted, and he couldn’t tell. He decided to play it safe. “We’ve been friends since we were kids. We share a faith and a community. Maybe that’s a good start for a marriage.”
“Maybe.” She cast her line out, and the current caught her blue-and-white bobber and whisked it merrily along.
“Dat says all the best marriages start with friendship,” he added.
“And it doesn’t bother you that I’m thirty-three and not twenty-three?”
“Would I be here if it did?” Now she did raise her head and meet his gaze, and he smiled at her. “It was my vadder’s idea, but I wouldn’t have agreed if I didn’t think it was something I wanted to do. You’re a hard worker. I hope you think the same of me. I’ve got a good trade, and I own thirty acres of cleared farmland in my own name. And the two of us have a lot in common.”
“Such as?”
“I like to eat and you’re a good cook.” He laughed.
She smiled.
“Seriously, Ellen. You get my jokes. We both like to laugh and have a good time. You know it’s true. There’s a big difference between me and Neziah.”
“He has always been serious in nature.”
“And more so since the accident. He doesn’t take the joy in life that he should. Bad things happen. I didn’t lose a wife, I know, but I lost my mother in that accident. You have to go on living. Otherwise, we waste what the Lord has given us.”
She nodded, but she didn’t speak, and he remembered that he’d always liked that about her. Ellen was a good listener, someone you could share important thoughts with.
“Sometimes I think my brother’s meant to be a preacher, or maybe a deacon. He’s way too settled for a man his age. Just look at his driving animal. I always thought you could tell a man’s nature by his favorite driving animal.”
“Neziah drives a good mule,” she suggested.
“Exactly. Steady in traffic. Strong and levelheaded, even docile. An old woman’s horse.” It was no secret that he was different than Neziah. He liked spirited horses and was given to racing other buggies on the way to Sunday worship, not something that the elders smiled on.
“Don’t be so hard on your brother,” Ellen defended. “He has his children’s safety to think about. You know how some of these Englishers drive. They don’t think about how dangerous it is to pass our buggies on these narrow roads.”
“Jah, I know, but I’m careful about when and where I race. I don’t mean to criticize Neziah. He’s a good man, and I’d not stand to hear anyone criticize him. But he’s too staid for you. Remember that time we all went to Hershey Park? You and me, we liked the fast rides. Neziah, he got sick to his stomach. We’re better suited, and if you’ll give me a chance, I’ll prove it to you.”
“I think I—” She sounded excited for a second then sighed. “I had a bite but I think the fish is playing with me.” She reeled in her line and checked the bait. Half of her worm was missing. “Look at that. Now I’ll have to put on fresh bait.”
He steadied himself against a branch and watched her, wondering why it had taken his father’s lecture to stir him into action. For years he’d been going to all the young people’s frolics, flirting with this girl and that, when all the time he’d hardly noticed Ellen. He had seen her, of course, gone to church with her, worked on community projects with her, eaten at her father’s table and welcomed her to his own home. But he hadn’t thought of her in the way he suddenly did now, as a special woman whom he might want to make his wife. The thought warmed him and made him smile. “You don’t think I’m too young for you, do you?” he asked.
“Nay,” she said, taking her time to answer. “I suppose not. But it’s a new idea for me, that I marry a friend, rather than someone I was in love with.”
Micah felt a rush of pleasure. “How do we know we won’t discover love for each other if we don’t give ourselves the chance?”
Her dark eyes grew luminous. Her bobber jerked and then dove beneath the surface of the creek, but Ellen didn’t seem to notice the tension on her fishing pole. “You think that could happen?”
He grinned. “I think that there’s a very good possibility that that’s exactly what might happen.”
Chapter Three (#ulink_39ed9dd8-4cf0-5335-8d02-cfc834832562)
They walked back to her lane just as twilight was falling over the farm fields. “Danki, Micah,” Ellen said. “The fishing was fun. I’d forgotten how much I liked it.”
Her first moments alone with him, when they’d left the house, had been awkward. But then they’d fallen back into the easy rhythm of their younger days with none of the clumsiness of the situation that she’d feared. Being so comfortable with Micah made her wonder if maybe they could be happy together. What if Micah was whom God had intended for her all along?
“You should take these,” he said, holding a string of three perch.
“You caught two of them. Don’t you want to take them home to fry for breakfast?”
He still held them out. “Three measly fish for the five of us? Not worth the trouble of cleaning and cooking them. No, you’d best take them.”
“Danki for the fish, too, then. Dat loves fried fish for breakfast.”
“You’re welcome. And you are going to think about walking out with me,” Micah reminded. “Right?” He stood there, fishing poles in hand, smiling at her and completely at ease.
“Jah, I will.” She smiled at him. “God give you a restful sleep.”
“And you, Ellen.” He used no courting endearments, but she liked the way he said her name, and she felt a warm glow inside as she savored it. She didn’t want to spoil the feeling and was afraid that he might linger, might want to sit with her on the porch or stay on after her parents had gone to bed. Instead, he bestowed a final grin and strode off whistling in the direction of his own home.
Ellen walked slowly up the driveway and through her father’s barnyard, inhaling deep of the scent of her mother’s climbing roses and the honeysuckle that grew wild along the edge of the hedgerow. She drank in the peace of the coming night. Crickets and frogs called their familiar sounds, and evening shadows draped over the barnyard, easing her feelings of indecision. How wonderful life is, she thought. You expect each day to be like the one before, but the wonder of God’s grace was that you never really knew from one hour to another what would come next.
A single propane lamp glowed through the kitchen window, but the house was quiet. Simeon, Neziah and the boys had left. The only sign of movement was a calico cat nursing kittens near the back door. But the light meant that her parents were still up. Her father was too fearful of fire to retire and leave a lamp burning. Ellen stepped inside, the string of fish dangling from her finger. “Mam?” she called softly. “Dat?”
“Out here.” Her father’s voice came from the front of the house.
Their home was small as Amish homes went, but comfortable. When her father and his neighbors had built it, he and her mother were already past the age when they expected to be blessed with children. A big kitchen, a pantry, a living room, bath and two bedrooms comprised the entire downstairs. Her room was upstairs in an oversize, cheerful chamber with two dormer windows and a casement window that opened wide to let in fresh breezes from the west. She also had a small bath all to herself, a privacy that few Amish girls had. Growing up, her girlfriends, most from large families, had admired the luxury, but she would have gladly traded the cheerful room with its yellow trim, clean white claw-foot tub, fixtures and tiny shuttered window for a bevy of noisy sisters crowded head to foot in her bedroom.
The double door near the staircase stood open, and her father called again to her from the front porch. “Come, join us. And bring another bowl for beans.”
Butter beans, Ellen thought. The family often sat on the porch in the evenings this time of year and shelled butter beans. She and her mother canned bushels of beans for winter. Quarts of the beans already stood in neat rows in the pantry beside those of squash, English peas, string beans, corn, tomatoes and pickles. She wrapped the fish in some parchment paper and put it in the propane-run refrigerator. They’d keep until morning when she or her father would clean them. She washed her hands, found a bowl and carried it out to the porch. Her parents sat side by side in wooden rocking chairs, baskets of lima bean hulls and bowls of shelled beans around them.
“Catch any fish?” her father asked.
“In the fridge. If you clean them, I’ll fry them up for our breakfast.” Ellen took the chair on the other side of him. Her chair. Her mother sat still, her chin resting on her chest; she was snoring lightly. Her mother often drifted off to sleep in the afternoon and early evening. She didn’t have the vigor that Ellen was used to, and she worried about her. “Has she been asleep long?”
“Just a little while. Company wore her out.” He dumped butter beans still in their shells into Ellen’s bowl. “Course, you know how she loves to have people come. And she adores children, even those rascals of Neziah’s. Nothing makes her happier than stuffing a child with food, unless it’s singing in church. Your mother always had the sweetest voice. It was what drew me to her when we were young.”
Ellen nodded and smiled. She knew what her father was up to. They were so close that she was familiar with all his tricks. He was deliberately being sentimental about her mother to keep Ellen from talking about what she’d sought him out for. He knew that she was unhappy with the ambush that had happened at supper, and he wanted to avoid the consequences. But she suspected that he’d be disappointed if she let him get away with it, so she went straight to the heart of the pudding.
“You shouldn’t have asked the Shetlers here for supper to talk about this courting business without talking to me first,” she admonished gently. “I can’t believe you didn’t wait to see whether I was in favor of this or not.”
“Ach...ach, I was afraid you’d be vexed with me. I told your mother you would.” He gestured with his hand. “But it is such a good solution to Simeon’s problem and ours. And how could I refuse him? He came to me at midday, told me what was on his mind and said that he’d already approached you with the idea and you were in favor. Then he invited himself and his sons to supper.” He shrugged as if to say, what could I do? “He’s a good neighbor and an old friend.”
“Friends or not, I’m your daughter, and who I will or won’t marry is a serious matter. If you knew I wouldn’t approve, you shouldn’t have done it,” she said, unwilling to surrender so easily to being manipulated.
She had the greatest respect for her father’s judgment, but he’d always fostered independence in her. Even at a young age, he’d treated her more as another adult in the home than as a child. Maybe it was because her mother had always been an uncomplicated and basic person, content to allow her husband and the elders of the church to make decisions for her, while his was a keener mind that sought in-depth conversation. Or perhaps it was because she’d been the only child and he doted on her.
In any case, the Bible said “Honor thy father and mother,” and she hoped she hadn’t taken advantage of his leniency. She’d taken care not to be forward in front of others, especially with the more conservative of the community. But here, in their own home, with none but him to hear, how could she do less than protest his high-handedness?
“What was I to say to Simeon?” he went on. ‘“Nay, old friend, you can’t come to share bread with us until I see if my daughter wants to marry either one of your boys?’” He found a withered lima bean and cast it to the brown-and-white rat terrier sitting at his feet. Gilly caught the bean in the air and chomped it joyfully.
“It was a shock to see Micah and Neziah all dressed in their best, here at the table.” Ellen glanced at her mother, but she snored on, her hands loose in her lap, her bowl of unshelled beans hardly started. “She was good tonight, don’t you think?” she said, waffling by talking of something easier. “Her morning started bad, so I worried...”
Her father’s face was lost in shadow now, but Ellen knew he was smiling. He had such fondness for her mother, his love seemingly growing stronger with his wife’s slow mental decline. “She perked up when I told her that the children were coming. Buzzed around the kitchen like she was forty. Her biscuits were light enough to float, don’t you think? And she was sharp as a needle at supper.” Her father continued to hull limas, his fingers moving unconsciously without pause. Fat beans dropped by ones, twos and threes into the wide basket in his lap.
“Jah,” Ellen agreed. “No lapses in memory.” And her mother’s biscuits had been good tonight. She’d not forgotten the rising or the salt as she did sometimes. And she hadn’t let them stay in the oven until the bottoms began to burn. Once, not long ago, Ellen had come in from the garden to find the kitchen full of smoke and her mother standing motionless in the center of the room, staring at the stove and coughing. Ellen had had to get the biscuits out of the oven and shoo her mother outside where she could breathe. It was those lapses in judgment that made Ellen apprehensive about her mother’s health.
“So, Dochter, did you enjoy yourself on your outing with young Micah?”
“I did have a good time,” she admitted. “But you know I would have put the Shetlers off if I’d had the choice. This isn’t something that I can decide in a few hours.”
“But you are open to being courted by Micah or his brother?” When she didn’t answer right away, her father pressed on. “You have to marry, Ellen. You know that, don’t you? What will you do when your mother and I go to our reward? We’re not young, either of us. You’re a healthy young woman. You need a family of your own. And it would fill our hearts with joy if you could give us a grandchild before we die.”
She swallowed. Her throat felt tight, as if an invisible hand was squeezing it. It was all perfectly logical, of course, but what about her heart? Her parents had married for love, and she had hoped for the same.
“I’m not asking you to marry either of Simeon’s boys,” he father went on. “I’m only asking that you give them a chance.”
Her gaze met his, but she still didn’t speak.
“Just...just a month. That’s all I ask of you. Give them a month.” He smiled the smile he knew she could never resist. “Is that too much for an old man to ask of his daughter?”
