Butterfly Garden (3 page)

He couldn’t keep them. Not alone. Not without somebody who cared enough to keep them safe. Without Abby, no one was left who knew why but him, and he wanted to keep it that way. Neither he nor Abby had family. Ab had said that together, with their children, they were a family, but what was a family with no heart?

Broken.

Only one person in the district whose heart he knew, because she was the only one ever came close enough ... Spinster Sara.

Sara visited Abby — not often — but when she did, usually when he was away, Abby chattered on for days after about Sara.

She’d damned near leveled him with a barn-board at Zook’s barn-raising, and that was the first time he set eyes on her. At fellowship meals after service, Sara often served him first. Looked him right in the eye, she did. Wasn’t afraid of anybody, that one. Spoke her mind.

Lord, she drove people crazy with speaking her mind. She was fractious all right. He’d often thought she served him just to prove she could handle anyone. Look at her trying to become a midwife. She was in for a fight with that. The whole district was set against her.

Spinster Sara. Midwife Sara.

Scrapper Sara, more like.

Bad enough she’d been earning her own living for years with her salves and remedies. Now she was trying to learn doctoring, something no woman should. Worse, she was going about it all wrong. Spending weeks in the company of the English doctor ... it was scandalous, immoral, a man and a woman tending to the intimate needs of a woman in labor, sometimes overnight. Adam clenched his fists and gritted his teeth.

And, Sara, unmarried on top of it.

He’d once lost his temper over her foolishness, and Ab had laughed at him and—  Adam stopped pacing, struck in an almost physical way with shock and remorse. Here he stood, consumed with fury at another woman, when his own wife had just died.

Ah, and here, in loud and rattling reproach, came the cabinet-maker with his spring wagon bearing Abby’s casket. His father was right. He was worthless. He’d failed as a son, and now as a husband and father. He was defective, body and soul. His children didn’t need him. They needed Sara. Already he’d seen her give them a mother’s smiles.

Sara would take good care of Abby’s girls.

When she’d drawn them to her, without extending so much as a finger, and let them name their sister, he knew he’d been right to send for her.

And Sara was right too. He’d killed Abby as surely as that empty casket sat waiting for her body. God he could still hear Ab weeping for a son. He’d hated himself for his weakness, had vowed if she weren’t pregnant after that one time, she would never be again. But she was.

And now she was gone.

“Datt?”

Adam looked down, toward the barest whisper of sound, and wondered when his oldest daughter had arrived to stand before him. Lizziebelle.

He fisted his hands at his side to keep from reaching for her.

“Why can’t Mommie feed Hannah with her Mommie’s milk?”

Adam leaned against the lambing pen, seeking balance in a careening world. Guilt. Hard. Raw. He swallowed and forced himself to take a breath, and needed two more before he could speak. “What did Sara say?” he asked in a voice that did not sound like his own.

“That you would give me a lambing bottle and we would feed Hannah cow’s milk to make her strong.”

Adam nodded and turned his back on his motherless child, because for the life of him, if he did not, he would gather her up and ... condemn her to the punishment love enforced.

* * * * *

The girls played quietly in Abby’s sewing room while Sara rocked baby Hannah and fed her milk from the boiled bottle and nipple.

Abby’s body would soon be carried in an open box from her bedroom into her best room.

At the very thought, the sharp claws of anxiety clenched Sara’s every muscle, holding her captive in the same way it had fifteen years before.

Her mother’s labor had gone on for more than a day. Her father had set off in an ice storm for the doctor ... and died in a ditch with a broken neck.

Sara had been fifteen when she’d taken that lifeless baby boy and placed him in her mother’s weak arms. Fifteen, when she’d pushed wadded towels between Mama’s legs to stop the blood ... but watched her life drain away, instead.

The next morning, in a house gone silent, Sara had stepped into the best room to see three caskets — two large, and one too tiny to bear. Crude boxes with covers to smother.

She’d had trouble breathing then.

She had trouble breathing now.

Once again, panic rushed her. Abby’s girls were too young to see such a sight. But Sara couldn’t take them, not from their father. It would be the greatest cruelty to lose both parents at once; no one knew that better than her.

And yet, with such a parent?

Her mind scrambled for an answer, examining and discarding every possibility, until….

If she took the girls ... for a time ... and taught their father, somehow, to know and love them…. It seemed an impossible task, and yet Abby said there was something worthy hiding deep inside Adam Zuckerman, something he wanted to keep buried. Sara thought she had glimpsed a shadow of that something today. She was almost certain of it. Besides, what choice did she have?

She wasn’t sure which would be more difficult, reforming Mad Adam Zuckerman or letting his children go once she loved them. Except that wasn’t even a consideration, because she loved them already.

Sara rose and went to the window. The clouds were dark and angry still. She sought guidance from beyond the firmament, but neither faith nor entreaty would come, only anger, and in her heart, she gave it voice. I won’t let them lose both parents, she informed He who seemed to have abandoned them, almost expecting thunder and lightening in reply. Then she admitted that she could not do it alone and whispered, “Help. Please.”  But neither comfort nor response was forthcoming.

“Fine then,” she snapped. “I’ll do it myself. And this time I won’t fail.”

Sara hurried to the bottom of the stairway. “Adam,” she shouted, angry with God for not listening, and with Adam for ... everything. “Adam, come down here, now!”

Like a mule team spooked by a jackrabbit, he came, but he stopped when he saw her, his face pale and taut, his breath short.

“I’ll take them,” she said. “Until after the funeral,” she added in a rush. “And if I’m called to deliver a babe while I have them, I’ll go if I have to take them with me.”

Adam hesitated then nodded once, his relief so apparent, Sara thought she might have imagined the wretchedness that preceded it. “Shut Abby’s door,” she said. “I’m taking them upstairs to get their things. I’ll tell them about Abby later. It’s best they think of their mother smiling and happy in heaven, not cold and silent in a box.”

Another single nod, a hard swallow. “I won’t show her till you’re gone.”

Chapter 2

Through her yard, Sara chased Abby’s daughters, the two oldest shrieking almost as much as her. And though Pris wasn’t excited, or even smiling, it seemed as if her eyes almost danced ... until the girls rounded a corner and came upon their father by his buggy in the drive. Then everything stopped — sound, movement, joy. Sara came up behind them and touched each small shoulder in turn, telling them without words that she was there.

Adam absently looked them over, then he stiffened, anger, fear, transforming him. “Where’s the baby?” he shouted.

No hello. No mention of his reason for coming. And Sara panicked. Not because of his bellow, which was normal, but because she expected he’d come to tear her heart from her flesh.

Two days and already she couldn’t bear the thought of giving his children back. But for some reason, she sensed she could not let him know how much she wanted to keep them, so she masked her dread and pointed to her porch. “Hannah is there, in her cradle.”

“
Mein Gott
, she’ll freeze to death!”  Adam marched right over, as if he expected to find proof of his foolish accusation, and found a swaddled infant, instead, her chubby apple-cheeked face peering up at him with huge gray eyes exactly like his. Hannah gurgled and cooed when she saw him, swinging her arms in her excitement, for all the world as if she knew him.

Sara tapped the tiny pink nose and got a bubble for her effort. “She likes it out here. We all do. We don’t stay long. Just a few minutes, to use up energy and get fresh air. It’s cold for autumn, yes, but….”

Adam looked away, and Sara guessed he was no more displeased than usual. “Can we go inside?” he asked, with as near to manners as Sara had ever seen.

She offered the girls cookies and cocoa, and they got in line for plates and cups to bring to their small table by the hearth. She was pleased they were doing as she’d taught them and looked to see if Adam noticed how well they behaved, but he wasn’t even looking at them.

Adam took in every aspect of the tiny cottage, finding it difficult to ignore Sara’s bed, with that bright flower-garden quilt covering it, as if the sun shone down on her even in sleep. He shifted, uncomfortable about invading what amounted to a spinster’s bedroom.

He hadn’t realized she had only the one room. He’d have to get her a bigger place ... if he convinced her to keep the girls longer, until after the funeral ... and after that to keep them till harvest, then until Christmas, then spring planting, and longer still, until she loved them too much to let them go.

Adam didn’t let his gaze linger on the girls. They were fine. No more or less happy, it seemed, than before, which was as good as could be expected, he supposed, after the loss of a mother. Though it had taken Pris a minute to remember to pout, which raised his spirits for some odd reason.

Sara placed a cup of chocolate and a plate of cookies in front of him, then she sat across from him. He’d never seen such a small kitchen table as this one, with barely room for the two of them. He had to turn sideways to keep his knees from touching hers.

The girls were nibbling cookies at a child-size table, Katie chattering, Lizzie listening and Pris staring into the fire.

“My father was a carpenter,” Sara said. “He made me the table and chairs when I was small. Mom and I used to have cookies and milk there. The girls like it. I think they’re doing well, considering….”

Adam grunted, wondering if she’d already taken to doing those ‘mothering’ things with them. He didn’t remember his own mother doing such things, but then she had always been too busy looking over her shoulder.

Adam cleared his throat and leaned close, afraid the girls might hear. “You told them, then?”

“Not yet,” Sara said. “Do you want to tell them together, now?”

“No!”  Adam cringed inwardly. His cowardice, he got from his mother’s side of the family. All gazes were now turned his way, nobody moving, not even Spinster Sara. Adam shook his head. He hadn’t
meant
to frighten them that time. “I brought you money,” he said, taking a small leather pouch from his pocket and shoving it toward Sara.

She regarded it with a scowl then ignored it to watch the girls.

“Pride is a sin,” he said, reading her and making her prickly-mad, which he had once found sporting, like baiting a line or a trap. “It costs to feed them,” he said. “You have no time to earn money for food while you’re caring for them. I take care of my own, Sara.”

“Oh,” she whispered, leaning forward, brows arched. “So you remember they’re yours?”

With a growl, Adam pocketed his cookies and stood. “I brought meat and vegetables too. They’re in the buggy. Come.”  At the door, he turned. “Lizzie, watch your sisters.”

He led the way outside trying to hide his nervousness. The girls’ future depended on his success right now, yet seeing them made it difficult to keep to his purpose. He wanted to pack them in his buggy and run away with them, which might be laughable, if it wasn’t so sad.

Scrapper Sara stopped before him, hands on hips. “You didn’t bring me out here for food. This had better be good, Adam Zuckerman.”

He felt as if he were ten again, waiting for a knuckle-rapping from teacher — half dreading the pain, half glad he’d got her attention. Adam shook his head, turning from Sara’s sassy scowl to lead her around his buggy. Lifting the back flap, he indicated the crates. “Potatoes, squash, winter beats, ham, turkey. I’ll help you take it in before I go.”  He was stalling, he knew; she knew it too. And they both knew he’d brought too much food for a few days. He was trying to turn her up sweet, but it was no use. Spinster Sara could be sour as pickled cabbage. “Sara, I need a favor.”

She raised only one of those winged brows this time.

Adam sighed. The woman didn’t even need to speak to sass him. No use putting it off anymore; there was no softening her, so he forged ahead. “I ... the girls need you to keep them a bit longer.”

To Adam’s surprise, Sara bit her lip, blanked her features, and looked beyond his shoulder. No sass. No scrapping. Probably planning her next jab. But when she faced him again, there seemed to be no more fight in her. “How much longer?”

Hope. He heard it in her voice, and his own hope soared. But he needed to be cautious. He had to act as if he planned to take them back, while making it seem more and more impossible to do so. “Well, I ... can’t work the farm and take care of them at the same time. I mean, it’s coming on harvest. Winter vegetables have to come in soon.”  He felt his face heat for the way he’d reacted to the baby being outside. “Even bundled up warm, like you had them, I can’t keep them outside for as long as chores take.”

“What about relatives?  A mother, an aunt, a sister?  Isn’t there anyone who could come and help you with the girls?”

Adam hadn’t thought much about his mother and sister in years, except to think how lucky they were. “My mother and sister are dead. A carriage accident ... or so
he
said.”

“He?  Who is he?”

Adam could not believe he had voiced the old doubt. Heat climbed his neck. “I was five when they died,” he said. “I have a child’s confused memories. I did not mean to ... you have an annoying way of.... You disarm me, Spinster Sara.”

“And you, Mad Adam?  You worry me.”