Butterfly Garden (23 page)

And if he was determined, simply, to have no more children, how would he react to the knowledge that another was on its way to them, even now.

Sara shivered, and Adam pulled her close, as if he sensed her need to be held just then, or as if he needed the contact as much.

* * * * *

Jordan came everyday to check Adam’s leg, and refuse to let him up, no matter how much he threatened—and Adam threatened loud, and often, to break The
English
in half, if he didn’t let him get up.

“I’ll tie you down, if I have to,” Jordan shouted back, on the fifth day after Sara was up and about again. “And I’ll get Roman to come and sit on you to keep you there. He would do it,” Jordan added. “You know it as well as I do. And he’d take all the credit for saving your leg on top of everything. It’d give him something to crow about for years.”

Jordan and Sara laughed. Adam did not.

Sara saw that Emma smiled at their laughter, leaning against the outside door, clear across the kitchen. The girl mostly avoided the kitchen now that Adam was awake and grousing, but not when Jordan came to visit. Being lovesick herself, the malady was easy for Sara to identify in someone else. She wondered if Jordan realized that Emma had come to adore him.

Poor Emma. To love outside the Amish faith was
ferbudden
. No good would come of it, Sara knew, especially if Adam discovered it. He already disliked Jordan enough without such a threat.

Sara shook her head at the impossibility of it all and went looking for Lena.

She found her mother-in-law outside with the girls. They were giving her a tour of the yard.

“We’ll make gardens together, ya,” Lena promised them as Sara approached. “In the springtime.”

The girls loved the idea and began suggesting flowers to plant, Nettle, Lupine, Foxtail, Bleeding Hearts. Laughing at the odd assortment, surprised by their knowledge of such unusual flowers, Sara sent them into the barn to get Roman for lunch. Their poor beleaguered neighbor was back doing Adam’s chores, not that Adam appreciated it. He might never forgive Roman for suggesting their marriage, she often thought.

Sara disregarded the twinge the realization brought and watched Lena watch the children, love shining in her eyes, and she took her mother-in-law’s arm with a squeeze to lead her to the house. “Tell me, Lena, has Emma been baptized in the Amish faith yet?”

Lena shook her head. “Nein. The Elders thought her silence meant she was too childlike to know her mind. But she understands enough to choose Baptism. Why do you ask?  Do you think she is ready?”

“No,” Sara said quickly. “Far from it,” she added. “I just wondered.”

With Jordan’s infinite capacity for patience where Emma was concerned, it just might be that her sister-in-law’s fondness was returned. In which case, with Emma not baptized, there would be one less … horror … among many, to deal with, if the worst happened, if they discovered love and declared their intent to marry.

Only a baptized member of the Amish Church could be shunned for marrying outside the faith. While a family might be saddened by a non-baptized member’s choice of a non-Amish spouse, communication and visits between them would not have to stop.

For Jordan and Emma there remained hope.

For Adam and Sara, who knew?

While the light frosts turned into the morning dew of Spring, Sara’s hope wavered from one day to the next.

Buds not damaged by the late blizzard, blossomed, while lambs kicked up a frolic in the meadow and cows dropped calves on the hillsides.

Amid all these signs of new life, Sara Zuckerman became more and more certain that she carried her husband’s child.

Chapter 14

While Adam was still stuck in the daybed, the Zuckermans welcomed unexpected company. Jonah and Susan Lutz, little Annie, and littler David, came to thank Adam for saving their lives the night of the blizzard and to return his horses.

It was the Lutz market wagon had turned over in the worst spring blizzard Ohio had ever seen, pinning Jonah beneath it. Annie hadn’t the strength to move it, neither could she find a way to bring her children to safety.

After Adam’s buggy collided with their wagon, he freed Jonah and put the family on Titania and Tawny to take them to their farm. He’d set Jonah’s leg and put down their horse before walking home.

Sara was shocked to learn what he had gone through that night. At how many miles he had walked on that leg. It was a good thing Lena didn’t know how bad it had been when he got home, or she would never have let him go out again.

Sara might have died that night. “Five people you saved that night,” Sara said, drawing everyone’s attention, then needing to explain what had happened and how Adam saved her too.

In the telling, Sara realized Adam had really saved six people, because their little one would not have been conceived if he hadn’t come for her. She wondered if the day would come when he would be pleased to know it.

It was good to have new friends. Sara saw right away that she and Susan could become so. They found humor in the same odd situations. Their children played well together for the length of their visit, almost making Sara believe hers was a typical, happy family.

* * * * *

In May, Sara felt well enough to deliver several babies while Adam remained sentenced to the daybed in the kitchen, demanding all the while that she stay home.

Her telling him, once again, that he could stop her when he could stand up and do so, made him roar Emma out the door, but eventually he calmed and Emma returned.

Adam feared she would get lost again; Sara understood that. She even understood the reason for his orders, despite the fact that she could not obey them. She went on her way, delivering babies where she was needed, but now she took Emma along for company.

She delivered more babies after Adam had been allowed the short trek back to their bed, when he was still too weak to stop her.

After he rejoined her in their bedroom, however, he spent another two weeks growling like a bear.

At the end of June, Jordan pronounced Adam’s leg healed, once and for all. “But the limp will be a lasting reminder of your stupidity,” Jordan added.

Adam was out of bed in a shot. After he sent the doctor packing, he went to the barn to throw Roman Byler off the property as well.

Jordan took her husband’s bluster in good stride and Sara laughed at his mock-hasty retreat. Then she laughed again as Roman ran toward his buggy, Adam shaking his fist from the barn.

“He loves you like a brother,” Sara called to Roman as he scrambled into his vehicle.

Roman spat off the side of the buggy. “Ya, a blood brother, one whose blood he wants to spill.” And he was off.

Adam came up beside her and raised his arm toward Roman in a last gesture of threat as their neighbor cleared the drive.

“He loves you like a brother,” Sara told her husband.

“Bah, you’d think—”

Adam’s skeptical response was halted by the brightly-colored Yankee peddler’s cart entering the drive. “You the midwife?” the grizzled driver asked.

When Sara responded in the affirmative, the man passed her a note, nodded goodbye and turned his cart around.

“It’s from Hetty Yoder,” Sara told Adam. “She’ is in labor. I have to go.”

“She is being shunned, Sara. You cannot go. It is against the ordnung. You will be shunned, too, if you go.”

“Her baby should die, maybe her too, because she thumbed her nose at a bishop or something?” Sara shook her head and went to the barn to hitch her buggy. “What horse should I use?” she shouted, hands on hips, as Adam entered. “You will want yours for farm work and your mother has taken hers to market.”

Adam nodded toward a far stall where Sara saw the new filly Jonah Lutz had brought with Adam’s horses. She looked from the filly to Adam and back.

“I bought her for you at the auction on the day of the blizzard,” he said. “I only told my mother I bought her to breed, so I could surprise you. I didn’t think Old Joe was in very good shape.”

“You were certainly right about that. Poor Old Joe. Wait a minute; you were angry with me, yet you almost got yourself killed to buy me a new horse … as a surprise?”

“I was angry with myself,” Adam said. “For being angry with you.”

Sara about wilted with relief, almost enough to change her mind about going to Hetty Yoder’s, just to please him. But two lives were in jeopardy and she could not afford to falter. She reached for the harness. “Thank you Adam. She is beautiful.”

Adam took the harness from her hand and returned it to its peg.

Sara took it down again. “I told you, I am going, no matter what you s—”

“If you speak to Hetty and are shunned, your heart will break, because you will lose the companionship of the people you care about, including the mother and sister you have just found.”

Sara let go the halter and fisted her hands, feeling bested, but only for a minute. “Fine then, I will not speak to her. I will speak to her husband. Surely he—”

“Her husband has been dead for a year, Sara.” He raised a speaking brow. “And she is with child. That is why she is being shunned.”

Sara released an aggravated breath. “Fine then. Emma will come with me. She has not been baptized, so she can speak to Hetty without fear of being shunned for it.”

“Emma?”

“Your sister communicates fine. You have simply not seen her do it. And she likes to help me with deliveries.”

“But you—”

“Nowhere, nowhere, I tell you, in our ordnung, does it say that I cannot take a child from it’s shunned mother’s body.”

His wife’s plain speaking startled Adam, but he recovered quickly, despite the embarrassment warming his face. Sara had managed, however, to disarm him enough to make him give in. “Fine,” he said, hiding a grudging admiration, “We will take the big buggy. It will be safer.”

“We?”

“I will take you, in case of bad weather.”

“Bad weather?  It’s nearly summer. Besides, Emma will be frightened if—”

“Better get your bag,” he said. “Or I will leave without you.”

Sara chuckled. “But Emma,” she said, placing her hand over his, to make him listen.

He regarded their hands for a bit, sighed, and wove their fingers together. “I will be as gentle as a lamb and silent as a stone. For Emma.”

Sara outright laughed. “As if you could.”

Adam’s eyes might just have twinkled then, Sara thought. “Emma may hesitate when she sees me,” he said. “But she will climb into the buggy just the same, if only to protect you from me. She is stronger than we both believe, our Emma.”

And for once, Sara saw, when Emma came outside, Adam was right.

As they drove home, Adam was pleased to be right, but he was also shocked at the way Emma had related to the laboring woman. She did communicate, did their Emma, in ways most people might have ignored, coming as they did from a speaking world.

And when Sara had placed that wailing baby in Emma’s arms, just as he entered the room in response to her call, his sister’s smile was so wide, directed even for a beat at him, that Adam knew he would not have missed that delivery for anything.

No, nor any other either, he decided. Because he was never going to let Sara go traveling without him again. Besides, he had to face facts; his Sara was a born midwife.

Several days later, the Bishop did not agree with Adam’s assessment. In fact their white-bearded Elder roared his disapproval, not once, but half-a-dozen times, at least, as he paced their best room.

Sara sat in a rocker, head bowed, deceptively docile. Adam knew better. But then she raised her eyes to his and silently begged his help. Damn.

Rather than flash her the I-told-you-so look he’d kept at the ready, Adam was forced to let it go. “Bishop Weaver, you mistake the matter,” he said. “Sara never once spoke to Hetty. Neither did she sit at table with her or take food from her hand.”

“She broke the ordnung. Hetty Yoder is being shunned.”

“Nowhere in our rule of life does it say that a midwife cannot take a birthing babe from its shunned mother’s body,” Adam said, and Roman began to cough. He coughed so hard, he had to step into the kitchen for a drink of water.

The harried bishop blustered, but after several impotent buts, words failed him entirely.

Adam was about to continue when he caught his wife’s warm look of gratitude, and a melt took place somewhere deep inside him, bringing with it a warmth he refused to consider. Whatever it was called, it straightened his spine and stood him taller. “My Sara will tend every mother and child that comes within her power to tend, and, frankly, I would have it no different. If you wish to bring Sara before the church district for saving the lives of our women and children, that is your choice. I will say the same before everyone. So, too, I suspect, would the women who might not be in attendance, but for Sara.”

* * * * *

Adam turned over in bed yet again. Tired as he was, he could not sleep, probably because Sara was driving him crazy staying on her own side of their bed, which she had been doing since he moved back into it, despite her gratitude to him for averting her excommunication.

Last night, he had tried to coax her into his arms, but she wouldn’t budge. Even sound asleep, she was stubborn, though he’d been certain she was pretending. Now she slept beside him, but apart. He listened to her soft breaths and inhaled her vanilla scent, but touching the woman was useless.

Adam was troubled, not because of his sexual frustration, but because he sensed as much banked yearning in her, as himself.

Had he done something to turn her from intimacy?  Had he frightened her in the shack, the day of that terrifying blizzard?  The way he’d left that morning, perhaps … in what might have seemed to her to be anger?

But he had been gruff previous to then, and that had never stopped her from welcoming him in their bed.

He feared what might have happened in the shack. He kept having a wild dream that made him pulse with need, a fantasy that haunted him, especially in his delirium, so vivid, he did not even need to be asleep to have it.