Butterfly Garden (30 page)

Adam sat as if he were too weak to stand. He rubbed his face with a shaking hand. His expression, when he looked up, held panic, desperation. “But if it comes to a choice,” he said, his voice pain-graveled but determined.

Jordan stiffened. “Between her and the babe?”

Adam looked suddenly more ravaged than he had after months of drunkenness. “If it comes to a choice, no matter what Sara says, save her first.”

“I have taken an oath, Adam, to save every life I can, but sometimes that means choosing to save one more likely to survive … over one less likely.”

* * * * *

For weeks after his visit to the doctor, Adam’s obsession with Sara got worse.

His mother seemed to understand their need to be alone and cooperated whenever she could. Once, she kept the girls for two days while Adam took Sara with him to Sugarcreek. From there, they took the Wheeling and Lake Erie train to Zanesville, where they rented a room in a hotel and spent nearly an entire day in bed.

It was awful, Sara had said with a grin, how they could be … indecent … in the middle of the day, while somebody else cooked the meals, brought the food to their room, and cleaned the dishes after. She would never be able to show her face in this district again.

Adam personally thought he might go to hell for spending money in such a way, but he wasn’t certain who enjoyed the experience more, him or Sara.

In the fall, he took to seeking her out after chores, just to sit out on the hill overlooking the rolling pastures and talk. Twice, they came together in the woods. Once, she seduced him on a quilt by the stream.

Right there, in the light of day, beneath God’s blue heaven and two feet from Zeb Troyer’s dry stone wall, his wife pushed him onto his back and unbuttoned his broadfalls to release him into her hand.

Adam gasped, he moaned, he cried out. He begged for more, and more, until she mounted him, shocking him to his soul, but not so much that he would stop her from riding him. In fact, the events of that afternoon became his second best daydream ever, right after their night in the shack.

Even big with his child, Sara was beautiful. Her cinnamon hair shone when she let it down for him to run his hands through. Her cheeks glowed, her green eyes sparkled like the emeralds they’d seen in that Zanesville jewelry shop window.

Sara actually seemed to thrive on his sexual attention. How amazing to have such a wife.

As the nights grew crisp, they took to walking through the meadow after supper, while they planned next year’s crop. Often the girls came along, gamboling around them like a frisky litter of newborn pups. It was then, when they’d speak of the year to come, that worry intruded into Adam’s new world.

He began to pray again, in earnest, a practice he had all but abandoned after Abby died. Sometimes he even thought God might hear and answer. But as Sara’s time drew near and hope became more and more difficult to hold onto, he would become frightened out of mind and seek Sara out once more.

At the end of September, the Bachmans moved out of the Sussman house and bought Dead Elam Raber’s farm. The price was good. Only problem was, it had no barn. Like its owner, the structure had died a long, slow death. Now, two years after Elam had returned to the earth, his barn had become nothing more than a pile of rubble trying to do the same thing.

Jordan attended the barn-raising, not so much because he wanted to lend a hand, though he did, but he wanted to see how Sara and her fretting husband fared.

Yes, and he wanted to see Emma too.

To his delight, she ran right over when he arrived, though she stopped short of throwing herself into his arms, almost as if she’d run into an invisible wall a foot before him. Just as well, from the looks they were getting. If he were not careful, some of the women would try to protect her from him.

While that would be best for both of them, Jordan simply wasn’t ready for it, so he tipped his hat and made for the wood-framed barn.

Right behind Adam, he climbed to the tallest beam, drew his hammer from the worn leather pouch around his waist, and began to nail the thing together—him and about two hundred Amish and, maybe, six other non-Amish, like him.

Beside the clothesline, on the far side of the house, Jordan noticed Sara and Mercy comparing the sizes of their respective bellies. He grinned. They must do that every day; they were together so often.

Around him, hammers made a clamoring racket while most of the women below acted more like worker ants, scurrying to and fro, playing with children, setting tables, laying bright quilts in the grass on such a perfect Indian-summer day. But not a one of them looked as fresh and vibrant as Emma wearing a dress the color of blackberries—one of Sara’s Bishop-vexing creations, no doubt.

Adam must have noticed him gazing at Emma, because he cleared his throat and frowned pointedly.

Jordan warmed beneath his collar, looked down, saw the plank he’d left half-nailed, and got back to work.

At noon, six hammering hours after they began, the Bachman barn was half done. It would be complete by dusk. Jordan made for solid ground to break for lunch. Lunch, be damned; in the world he’d left behind, it would be called a banquet.

Adam followed the surprisingly hard-working
English
down to the ground. If the fancy man had designs on Emma, he’d best forget them.

“Sara looks good,” the man dared, setting Adam’s back up.

“I don’t need anybody to tell me that,” he snapped. “And it was not Sara you watched.”

When The
English
leaned close, his grin aggravated Adam the more. “Medically speaking, your wife looks good. Since I am a doctor and you’ve been, um, concerned about her condition and all, I thought you’d like to know that she came for an examination the other day and she and the child are doing well.”

Adam grunted and went to sit at one of the dozen or so tables, his stomach in knots. Sometimes he forgot to worry about it, and there went The
English
reminding him that his wife might die.

As ever, Sara came to serve him first. “You’re not nailing ground floor planks today,” she said near his ear.

“Hurts just to think about it,” he returned, his smile breaking, even as he tried to glower.

He had always anticipated her approach at fellowship meals with mixed emotions. He wished she wouldn’t bring attention to him by teasing him or serving him first. But, if she did not, he would wonder why, and ponder it to death.

These days, he wished she would just lie down and take this time before the baby as something of a holiday, to gather her strength, as Abby used to do.

Adam noticed Jordan and Roman, across the table, watching him, some joke at his expense sitting between them. He bit into a corn cake with a vengeance. In his mind he was taking a piece out of either hide with great satisfaction.

Fortunately, none of the other men had noticed his foolish preoccupation with his wife. They spoke mostly among themselves, though Zeb Troyer teased Sara about her inability to get any closer to the table. By the time she reached the end of its seven foot length, she had gone back to get more food three times. Adam could tell the way she walked that her back ached again. These days, most nights began with his rubbing wintergreen liniment into it, to her moans of pleasure.

He shifted in discomfort just thinking about Sara moaning.

Zacharius, the idiot too blind to see that she plainly suffered, asked for more corn and Sara turned to fetch it.

“Damn it, Sara,” sit down and rest. He shoved old Jake Kicher over with his hips to make room for her. Then he grabbed her hand and tugged her down beside him. “Get your own thirds, Zack. Sara needs to rest.”

Everyone stilled.

The
English
and Roman looked at each other, at him, then at each other again. “Alive, and kicking,” Roman said, and the doctor chuckled.

“Eat, eat,” Adam said to the rest of the staring men. “What’s the matter with everybody?”

“They never saw Mad Adam Zuckerman act nice before,” Roman confided in a mock-whisper loud enough to draw laughter.

“To his wife, even,” one man added.

Sara’s face turned nearly as bright as the
ferbudden
dress she’d made for Emma, her stubborn chin rising, despite the fact that she was the only woman at a table reserved strictly for the men. “I can’t stay here,” she said.

“You can if they go,” Adam all but shouted, giving the men a look calculated to shiver them in their big, clumsy shoes.

Some did leave, but not all of them.

“Why don’t you go to the quilting bee this afternoon and make sure she has a cushion for her feet,” Abe Zook called from the end of the table. “And leave the carpentry to the men.”

“Abraham Zook, you nasty man,” Sara snapped. “Adam is the one sent you a hundred dollars last month when Irenee needed to go to the hospital in Philadelphia.”

“Sara,” Adam gasped, shocked to the soles of his feet that she had revealed something he’d told her in confidence.

“Ya,” Roman said. “He’s the one always gives the most for those in need. He’s mad alright.”

Adam stood, mortified, unmoving.

“Why is Mommie sitting with the men?” Pris asked Lizzie as the girls approached, unaware of the turmoil about them.

“Because she’s fat,” Katie said.

Lizzie giggled. “Mommie’s not fat. She’s going to have a baby.”

“My don’t want her to die like my other Mommie,” Katie said, which made Pris whine and throw herself against Sara.

Adam didn’t know who made him madder, Roman and The
English
, the men, Sara, his girls, or his rutting self.

If anything happened to Sara, because of his selfish lust, he did not know how he would survive. No, nor the girls either.

One thing he knew for certain. He could not touch her after this baby came and he’d best get used to it. If he knew what was good for him, and for Sara, he’d best not touch her again, starting today.

Chapter 18

Sara realized over the next days and weeks that Adam had withdrawn from her, not only in the physical sense. She felt bereft and out of sorts, unloved, adrift.

Harvest chores kept him outside so late some nights, she was asleep when he came to bed. They never went walking. They never even talked anymore.

Her husband had become moody and snapped at unexpected times. She knew exactly how he felt. She had not only argued with him, she had bickered with her mother-in-law, and once, even, with Emma, though she wasn’t sure exactly how they’d managed it. She knew only that they’d parted in tears, the both of them.

There was a lot of making up for her to do, though not between her and Adam, because he kept saying nothing was wrong.

In October, the Hershberger house was struck by lightening and burned to the ground. The aging couple had never had children. Levi had been ailing for some time, though his wife, Sovilla, did well for her eighty-eight years.

Roman invited them to share his daudyhouse with his mother and father. His dead sister’s teen-age children already lived in the main house with him, so his home and his pocketbook were stretched tight.

Several days after the fire, later in the evening than was normal for callers, Sara heard a knock at the kitchen door.

“I came to collect for the digitalis Doc Marks special-orders for Levi from Boston,” Roman said as he came inside.

Without a word, Adam abandoned the farm catalogs spread across the kitchen table and unlocked the tiger-maple desk, where he dipped into the cracker tin of money he kept there.

While Adam silently counted out their contribution, Roman accepted a cup of sarsaparilla tea and a slice of warm Ob’l Dunkes Kucka. “Mm. Good Sara. I think maybe you make better applesauce cake than my mother, but don’t tell her I said so.”

“How are they all?” Sara asked.

“Mom and Pop are
goot
and they are happy to share their home with people of their years. Levi has aged for losing his own home, but Sovilla has a new spring in her step, just having my mother for company. Pop and Levi play checkers, when neither of them is napping.” Roman grinned. “So they play about an hour a day.”

Even Adam chuckled.

“But what about Levi, does he do any better?  Does the digitalis help him?”

Roman shook his head. “I don’t know. Doc says he might need something costs more.”

Sara regarded her husband. “Adam, did you give him enough?”

“I did.”

“Are you sure?”

Sara could tell it annoyed Adam, her questioning his generosity before Roman, but—

“Leave it, Sara,” Roman said.

“Well, how much did you give him?” she asked her husband as she rose and went for the cracker tin.

“Why do you want to know?,” Adam snapped. “So you can tell all our neighbors how much?”

Sara felt as if he’d slapped her in public. She was so embarrassed, she nodded in Roman’s general direction and said goodnight.

Not much later, she heard Adam come to bed.

He tried to coax her into his arms, but she refused to be budged. What did it matter?  That’s about as much as he cared to touch her these days anyway. With her big belly, she disgusted him. With her big mouth, that day at the barn raising, she had destroyed any trust or caring he might have felt for her. He hadn’t touched her in passion in weeks.

“I am sorry,” he said into the silence some minutes later.

“For never touching me anymore?” she said before she had a chance to think, then she rolled even further away. She would not beg. “It’s all right. Go to sleep.”

“Passion between us hurts you,” he said. “This is the way it must be. If you … after the baby, this is how we must be. There will be no more children, Sara. If we are still together … after … believe me, I will be grateful every moment for the life we share.”

“A life where you insult me before our neighbors?”

“A life where we raise our children together.”

“We are not together. We are as far apart as we were the day I came to deliver Hannah.”

“We are the same. That night you flayed me with words; tonight I flayed you … in front of Roman, to my distress, and yours. I repeat, I am sorry.”