An Uncommon Grace (16 page)

“Truly said.”

Rose removed the dishcloth from his hand and dried his cheek where she had touched his face. “There are some blessings that have already come, even from this tragedy. I have been allowed to know my sister again, and I have spent time with her children. One of the biggest blessings is that I’ve gotten reacquainted with you—and you, Levi, are someone worth knowing.”

“Only God is worth knowing. I am nothing.”

“I know we are a plain people, and I know that we are to be humble people. I also know that there are those among the other Amish orders who make fun of the Swartzentruber sect.”

“You mean calling us ‘woolly lumps’?” Levi smiled and rubbed his knuckles over his chin. “That does not bother me. I am as yet without a beard.”

Rose did not smile in return. Her face was worried. “You are handsome and strong, and you have a valiant heart. You would make some woman a wonderful, good husband. But you deserve a good wife. Don’t settle for someone like Zillah. Marriage is too intimate to be shackled to someone who does not make your heart sing.”

The door slammed as Zillah walked back into the kitchen. Levi could not help but think how his mother had taught her children to close doors gently to show respect for the house and the inhabitants within.

He thought about Zillah’s mother. He did not know the bishop’s wife well. She was a quiet woman who rarely spoke, and too often had a sad, faraway look in her eyes. He did not blame the poor woman for being sad—what with living with Bishop Weaver and Zillah her only child. That ghostlike woman would be no match against either of those strong-willed people.

But he was not the bishop’s wife, and he would go up against the strong-willed Zillah if it was necessary.

G
race wiped her hands on the seat of the most ragged pair of jeans she owned. Elizabeth sat on a folding chair supervising as she worked on the vegetable garden that her grandmother had started back before her heart attack.

“You’re planting those lettuce seeds a little too deeply, dear. They barely need a dusting of dirt on them.”

“Are you still feeling okay, Grandma? You’ve had an awfully big day, what with going out for the first time since your surgery, and now this.”

“I feel better out here than I did in the house.” Elizabeth turned her face to the sky as though soaking up the last rays of the late-afternoon sun. “Your grandfather always joked that I must be solar-powered. I never liked staying inside if I could be out.”

“Teaching must have been hard for you.”

“On the contrary. It was perfect for me. I had summers off to play outside.”

“Even as a little girl I wanted a garden,” Grace said, “but Mom wasn’t interested. I think moving so much took the desire to plant and watch things grow out of her. She tried not to get too attached to the places where we lived. It feels good now to have my hands in dirt.”

“Didn’t they have dirt in Afghanistan?”

“Not like this.”

She had just covered up the first row when a squad car pulled in to their driveway. A man wearing a sheriff’s uniform and a crew cut approached them.

“Hello, Gerald,” her grandmother said. “What’s brought you out here on this fine spring day? Have you met my granddaughter? Grace, this is Sheriff Newsome.”

“No, ma’am. I have not had the pleasure.” He took off his hat, a gesture of respect Grace had not seen from any Amish man.

Grace stood up, put her hands on the small of her back, and stretched. “How can I help you, officer?”

He pulled out a small pad and glanced at some writing.

“You’re the nurse who was first on the scene at the Shetler home? The one who was with Mrs. Shetler in the hospital when my deputy came by?”

“I am.”

“You were also with Levi Troyer that day.”

“I took him to Children’s Hospital to be with his younger brother.”

The sheriff scribbled something on his pad. “Did you know Levi before this?”

“I’d never met the man before.”

“Did Levi say anything to you on the ride there? Maybe about enemies the family might have had? Threats they had not told anyone about?”

“Levi is not much of a talker, Sheriff.”

“That’s the problem.” He closed his pad and put it back in his pocket. “None of the Amish are talkers when we’re around, even when we’re trying to protect them. The Swartzentrubers are the best when it comes to being closemouthed.”

“I wish I could help. Do you have any leads?”

“Not one—and we’ve been talking to everyone we could. Strange thing—it had been raining the night before, a hard rain. If you noticed, the Shetler farm only has a dirt driveway—good enough for horses and buggies, not so good for cars.”

“How is that significant?” Elizabeth asked.

“I was the first one there after the ambulance left. I was able to see Grace’s tire tracks and the ambulance’s. I could see the hoofprints of Levi’s mare.”

“But?” Elizabeth cocked an eyebrow.

“There were no other tracks except the ones the children left when they ran for the barn. Whoever killed Abraham came on foot, and they probably came through the fields and backyard.”

“On foot?” Grace asked.

“We lost what we think were the murderer’s footprints at the creek behind the Shetler house. Couldn’t pick them up again. We’re afraid whoever did this might be local.”

Elizabeth and Grace looked at each other with consternation.

“You ladies need to be real careful for a while until we find this fellow.”

After the outside chores had been done, after the kitchen had been cleaned, and after his mother had settled down to sleep with Daniel beside her, Levi moved his few things out of the house and up into his workroom.

A few months earlier, he had created a private space for himself above his stepfather’s workshop. It looked as if the babies were going to be coming hard and fast, and so in anticipation of needing quiet from time to time, he had insulated and Sheetrocked and put down proper wood flooring.

Because he had done all the work himself and paid for the supplies, his stepfather had not minded his creating a room where nothing had existed before. There was a cot up there, a couple of chairs, and a table. Most of his specialty weaving supplies were there, also.

Beneath the window was his favorite thing in the room. He had built a low bookcase holding a collection of high school textbooks that he had been reading these past months. He had seen them spilling out of two broken cardboard boxes sitting atop an overflowing Dumpster near a used-book store in Millersburg one day. What had been trash to the used-book store owner had been a treasure trove to him. He would never have deliberately purchased such a collection of books, but it seemed a terrible waste to leave them there to ruin.

On the long ride home, he struggled with his conscience, but his desire for learning held sway. He had carried the boxes straight up to his workroom. There were books on chemistry, geography, calculus, science, world history, geometry, and biology. Such treasures! There was even a thick book on American literature—which had been quite an eye-opener. He especially enjoyed the stories written by a man named Mark Twain and had read them over and over, chuckling at the man’s talented use of words.

Of course, all these books were strictly forbidden by his sect. That very fact, to his shame, made the reading of them even sweeter.

He rationalized his self-indulgence with the fact that these textbooks would not be forbidden in an Old Order household. He had even overheard an Old Order teacher, a young man near his age, patiently explaining to a tourist that even though the Amish did not go to school beyond the eighth grade, their learning never stopped. He explained that many
studied various subjects on their own, as he himself did in order to become a better teacher.

Levi sometimes thought he would enjoy being a teacher—but not in a Swartzentruber school, where the curriculum was so severely limited. He knew that he would soon be in trouble for trying to supplement the children’s education.

The hour or so that he stole from time to time to read these books was a great luxury. It was, in his opinion, his greatest sin: this thirst for knowledge. He was ashamed of this vice. But still, he started a fire in the small woodstove he had installed against the chill of an early-spring evening, lit the oil lamp sitting on the table, and anticipated an enjoyable evening reading.

He was lost in the study of a drawing of the human muscular system when he heard footsteps on the stairwell. He glanced at the clock. It was nearly ten, much too late for the rest of the family to be stirring—unless there was an emergency. Perhaps something else had gone wrong with Daniel, or his mother. Perhaps it was Rose coming to him for help. Before he could get to the door, there was a loud knock.

He answered the door and his jaw dropped.

It was Zillah. The foolish girl had followed him out here.

The first thing he noticed was that she was wearing no prayer
Kapp
. He was seeing her hair unloosed for the first time. She had brushed it to a shimmering gold, and it hung down over her shoulders in waves. She looked stunning in the moonlight.

“May I come in?”

The only thing he could think to say was an abrupt “No!”

Her head jerked back, as though she had been slapped, and her eyes widened in shock. Zillah was not used to being refused, but it took her only an instant to regroup.

“When my father told me I would be living here for a
while, my mother and I spent all day yesterday sewing my
Nacht Rock
. I knew that if I was living here, I would have need of a beautiful new nightdress. It’s pink, look.” She began to unpin her overdress.

“You need to stop right there, Zillah,” he said. “Do not remove one more pin.”

Her hands stilled, and she glanced up at him with a confused expression.

He knew she would be wearing a modest new nightgown in a color that was forbidden to wear in public, but he had no desire to see the thing. It was not at all unusual for a mother and daughter to make these special nightdresses together, creating them specifically for the Swartzentruber tradition of
Uneheliche beischlof
—bed courtship—where a girl and a boy would chastely lie in bed together, talking and getting to know each other.

At least that was how it was
supposed
to be and often was, but he knew of a few cases where it had not been so chaste. These things were sometimes talked about in whispers during the young folks’ singings. Yet the tradition went back so far with their people that it was seldom questioned by the Swartzentruber sect. The New Order Amish, on the other hand, strictly forbade it. At this moment, Levi was wishing desperately that Zillah and he were New Order Amish.

But this bed courtship, sometimes called
bundling
, was supposed to take place in the girl’s bedroom, not the boy’s. For Zillah to come to him like this was completely out of bounds.

“I thought we could talk about our future together,” she said.

“We have no future to talk about, Zillah.”

“Why not?” This came out as a whine, as though she were a little girl being denied a treat. She even stamped her foot. “I have been waiting on you for a long time, Levi Troyer.
Neither of us is getting any younger. I have shown you every way I know how that I have picked you for my husband. There is not one girl in our church my age who is not already married. Girls younger than me already have three or four babies.”

“I am not
in lieb
with you, Zillah. I never have been.”

“Why?” she demanded. “Why don’t you love me?”

How did one tell a girl that although she was beautiful on the outside, she was a mess on the inside? This was not something he knew how to do.

“Is it that nurse who came to the funeral?” Zillah demanded. “Do you care for her instead?”

This was going too far. He could not afford for Zillah to start gossip.

“There is nothing between us. She is only a neighbor.”

Zillah thought this over. “I am prettier than her.”

He took hold of the door, anxious to close it behind her. The careful dance he had done around Zillah’s fixation on him had been going on for years and he was sick of it.

“You should leave now, Zillah.”

“Never mind about love.” Zillah stepped closer and looked up at him through slanted eyes. “I want you. That should be enough. I want to bundle with you—even if you don’t love me.”

The Swartzentrubers did not allow the tradition of
Rumspringa
for their young. There was no closing of their church’s eyes when a young person chose to run wild. But thanks in part to the ancient tradition of bed courtship, some babies still came suspiciously early.

For a moment, in spite of his dislike for Zillah, Levi felt a wave of desire so strong he knew it must be a direct attack from Satan. He had never wanted anything to do with Zillah, but just for a moment he seriously considered ignoring the consequences and simply doing as she wished.

Zillah read the momentary weakness in his face and her eyes once again took on that sly look he had known since childhood. It was like a splash of cold water. She was planning something—and she being Zillah, it was not good. Giving in to her could very possibly trap him for life. An Amish man did not abandon a woman he had impregnated. A few minutes of pleasure with her could buy him a lifetime of misery.

“No, Zillah.” He shook his head and reached for the door. “You need to leave.”

She saw that he had closed himself off from her and it made her furious.

“You will be sorry for this,” she warned.

“I am certain you are right.” He knew she would find some way to punish him. But he also knew that he would be a whole lot sorrier if he did as she wished.

She had stepped inside the room as they had talked. Too late, he realized that his temporary living quarters were open for her perusal.

“What have we here?” she said.

“Please leave, Zillah.” He tried to block her view.

She sidestepped him and headed straight to the table where he had been reading. Unfortunately, the biology book was still opened to the pages explaining the human muscular system.