Huckleberry Harvest (4 page)

Mandy put her arm around Mammi. “It’s okay. We will give the house a gute dusting once the stove is in.”

Noah took the sheets of cardboard and laid them over Mammi’s floor, making a path to the front door.

“Don’t want to hurt the wood,” Dawdi said.

The other boys moved out of the way, and Noah deftly slid the jack under the stove. He pumped the handle up and down, and the jack slowly rose, lifting the stove with it. Adam and Melvin supported the massive stove on either side to ensure it wouldn’t tip, and Noah slowly wheeled the jack with the stove to the door.

The boys followed Noah outside with Mandy and Sparky close behind. At the edge of the porch, Noah lowered the jack and slid it out from under the stove. Dawdi stood back. As much as he liked to do things himself, he was an eighty-five-year-old man who was wise enough to know he didn’t want to strain his back.

The seven young men surrounded the stove and lifted it from the porch to the ground. Noah pumped up his jack again and pulled the stove over the grass to his flatbed wagon parked in front of Mammi and Dawdi’s house. Again the team of seven was needed to lift the stove into the wagon. This was an amazing feat. That stove had to weigh at least eight hundred pounds. All the boys looked strong, but Noah was by far the most muscular, with arms as solid as good timber. In the tepid air of early September, sweat dripped down his face.

Once the stove sat in the middle of the wagon bed, Noah wasted no time. He pulled a pile of ropes from a box near the wagon seat and started securing the stove to the wagon. No wonder Noah had brought a team of horses. It would take quite a bit to get that thing down the hill.

With a bandanna, Freeman mopped up the moisture from his face. “What will you do with the old stove?”

“Noah’s going to sell it,” Dawdi said, overseeing proceedings from the porch with Mandy and Mammi.

Noah tied the stove to the wagon as if he’d done such a thing a thousand times. “If nobody wants it, I’ll sell it for scrap.”

Davy ran back into the house and emerged with the stovepipe. Noah secured it onto his wagon with his seemingly endless supply of rope.

“He’s got gute hands for it, don’t he?” Dawdi said as they watched Noah work.

“Noah’s a gute boy,” Mammi said, paying no attention to what Noah was doing. She nudged Mandy with her elbow. “What do you think of Davy? His ears stick out a bit, but he has beautiful long eyelashes.”

Mandy gazed with concern as Noah tied knot after knot. Was he making them tight enough? Would the stove slide off the wagon the minute it got going down the hill? What man was ever careful about such things?

“Cum, everybody,” Mammi said. “Let’s have some of Mandy’s pie.”

The boys began to file into the house. Unable to resist, Mandy leaped off the porch, dodged Adam and Melvin coming the other way, and went to Noah’s wagon. Starting at one corner, she tugged on the ropes and fingered each of Noah’s knots to make sure they would hold. The ropes seemed to stretch sufficiently taut to hold the stove in place, and she wouldn’t have been able to loosen those knots even if she had twenty fingers on each hand.

Noah seemed to sneak up beside her. “Checking to see if I did it right?” he said as he secured one last knot. There was more of exasperation in his voice than resentment.

“Just making sure,” she said, lifting her chin slightly so he knew he couldn’t intimidate her. So he knew there was at least one person who wasn’t fooled by his big muscles and clever mind. “I don’t know you very well. You might be careless.”

Mandy glanced behind her. No one would hear their conversation. Everyone else was probably sitting at the table with their forks in the air, eagerly awaiting a slice of pie.

Noah’s brows inched closer together. “You knew everything about me yesterday. Maybe you think a boy who treats girls like dirt is incapable of doing anything right.”

She caught her breath when she heard her own words tossed back into her face. “You don’t have to confess your sins to me. I’m already fully aware of what kind of boy you are.”

He pinned her with a piercing gaze. “Are you?” he said, scorn dripping from his tone.

“You told me to get my hinnerdale off your porch.”

He folded his arms. “You wouldn’t leave.”

“You insulted my freckles.”

He rested his hand on the wagon and leaned closer. She leaned away. “I like freckles,” he said. “It’s your nose in my business I don’t like.”

They scowled at each other until Noah seemed to give up on the conversation. He gave the nearest rope one last tug and turned his back on Mandy. “You can be as indignant as you want,” he said, “but I’m going to have another piece of that pie. The girl who made it has a sharp tongue, but her pies are sweeter than honey.”

After her fourth morning of bran flakes, Mandy repented of ever thinking an unkind thought about Mammi’s Eggs Benedict. At this point, she would have been content with a nice pot of boiling water just to break up the monotony. Last Friday, the new stove had arrived half an hour after Noah and the other boys had hauled the old one out of the house, but Noah had taken one look at it and insisted the deliverymen put it back on the truck. Dawdi had ordered a stove that couldn’t be converted to run on liquid propane gas, so another one had to be ordered. No one in the Amish community would have allowed a delivery on the Sabbath, and today was Labor Day, so the stove would supposedly be delivered tomorrow after a very long weekend of cold cereal for every breakfast, bread and cheese at every supper, and tuna salad with pickles for dinner.

After milking and other chores, Mandy borrowed Dawdi’s buggy and made a beeline for Kristina’s house. Surely Kristina had a working stove and food in her fridge. Mandy thought she might die for a warm cup of cocoa with marshmallows floating on top or even a piece of slightly warm toast.

Hopefully Kristina would offer to feed her something. Anything. Especially if it hovered above the temperature of lukewarm milk.

Noah had stayed after the other boys had left, patching the hole in the roof where the stovepipe had been. Mandy’s tongue had gone dry when she had overheard Dawdi asking Noah to reshingle the entire roof once he had installed the new stove. She was only going to be on Huckleberry Hill for a month. Would she have to endure Noah’s presence for the entire visit?

At least he wouldn’t be in the house making a pest of himself. She could easily ignore him altogether even if he clomped around on the roof all day. At least she wouldn’t have to endure the painful silences that prevailed when he was in the same room with her.

Mandy turned the horse down the road to Kristina’s house. She planned on spending the entire day with Kristina, offering her comfort and talking her out of ever trying to get back with Noah. Kristina and Mandy had grown up together in Charm and had been best friends for as long as Mandy could remember. Kristina’s dat had bought a piece of land at a gute price and moved his family to Bonduel last year. Mandy had cried so hard when she said good-bye that her eyes had stung for days afterward. She and Kristina wrote every week and told each other the secrets they never shared with anyone else.

Mandy loved Kristina, even if she was a bit melodramatic at times. To Kristina, life was either absolutely, gloriously marvelous or dismally, depressingly horrible, with no emotions existing between the two extremes. Dat said Kristina was needy. Mandy was just happy to be needed.

As she got closer to Kristina’s house, Mandy spied her friend ambling down the road barefoot with a sunflower dangling from her fingers. Mandy reined in the horse as she reached Kristina’s side. Kristina paused and slumped her shoulders.

“What are you doing?” Mandy said.

Kristina sighed mournfully. “Just taking a stroll and thinking about the boy I love.”

“Really, Krissy. You’ve got to stop. He’s not worth the aggravation.”

Kristina slid open the door, jumped inside the buggy, and pulled her phone from her apron pocket. “He won’t answer my texts. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“How do you even get service out here?”

“They just put in a new cell phone tower in February. Almost everybody gets service now.” She punched a few buttons on her phone before her demeanor altered almost immediately and she acted as if she’d just been invited to a surprise birthday party. “Oh, Mandy. I’m so glad you’ve come. We’ve got to get to Coblentz’s pasture immediately.” She shut the door and tapped impatiently on the dashboard. “Hurry. I don’t want to miss him.”

Mandy didn’t even so much as jiggle the reins. “What is going on?”

Kristina was so eager, she seemed to bounce like a ball. “Noah. I found out he’s helping Jethro Coblentz fix his corn picker. If we hurry, we can spy on him from behind the trees by the river.”

Mandy’s eyebrows nearly flew off her forehead. “You’re not serious.”

“I am too.” She waved her hand in the direction of the horse. “Go, Mandy. I don’t want to miss him.”

Surprise rendered her incapable of movement. “Krissy, thirteen-year-olds spy on boys, not nineteen-year-olds. It’s childish.”

Kristina stuck out her bottom lip. “Dori Rose and me spied on Noah all summer, whenever he was out working someone’s field or raising a barn or fixing a water pump.” No one could whine at quite the pitch Kristina achieved. “Come on, Mandy. I want to see him. He’s so handsome. I just want a peek.”

“All summer? But why would you spy on him when you were courting and could have seen him anytime you wanted?”

Kristina suddenly became very interested in her fingernails. “I just like looking at him. You understand, don’t you, Mandy? You’ve seen him. You know how handsome he is.”

Jah, she knew how handsome he was. She also knew how disagreeable he was. “I don’t want to spy on Noah Mischler. You need to put him out of your mind, Krissy. He’s no gute.”

Tears pooled in Kristina’s eyes. Big, plump tears that splashed onto her cheeks and made her look utterly pathetic. “I love him. I want to see him again. You’ve never been in love. You don’t know how it feels.”

“That’s true,” she admitted. She might have had her eye on a boy or two back home, but romance was completely foreign to her.

Kristina sniffed and stuttered violently. “There’s no harm in sneaking a look. He never sees us.”

In truth, as reluctant as she was, Mandy would do anything to stop Kristina’s tears. She hated to see her friend so unhappy, especially when she had the means of transportation to take Kristina where her heart wanted to go. Who was she to stand in the way of love?

Mandy heaved a sigh. “Okay. I’ll take you.”

Kristina clapped her hands and exploded into a smile. All was right with the world again.

Mandy raised her voice to be heard above Kristina’s squeals of delight. “But I refuse to stay for longer than five minutes. Do you understand? Five minutes is all I’m giving you.”

Nothing could dampen Kristina’s mood. “Okay, five minutes. That’s all I need.”

Kristina pointed Mandy in the direction they needed to go. When they approached Coblentz’s pasture, they couldn’t just stop the buggy next to the field and stare at Noah from ten feet away. Oh no. Kristina knew a secluded trail near the river where they parked the buggy and then hiked ten minutes through the thick woods. Kristina giggled like a schoolgirl as they came to the edge of the woods about a hundred feet from the pasture.

To their left, Mandy could hear the river slapping against the boulders in its path. It ran alongside Coblentz’s cornfields for nearly a mile. Three people stood in the field looking at the idle corn picker. Mandy and Kristina were close enough to hear muffled voices. Before Mandy got a good look at any of them, Kristina grabbed her arm and pulled her behind a maple tree at the water’s edge.

“Stay behind the tree,” Kristina said, giggling as if she couldn’t stop herself. She was a little too excited about this whole spying thing. Did she really adore Noah that much? “We don’t want them to see us.”

Kristina leaned her head around the trunk to take a peek, gasped, and quickly pulled back. “He’s over there,” she whispered breathlessly. Mandy had to strain to hear her. The river roared not five feet away. “He’s with Alvin and Jethro.”

Mandy planted herself firmly behind the tree. Let Kristina look if she wanted to. She’d be mortified if anyone discovered her spying on Noah Mischler. Maybe she should hike back the way they’d come and wait in the buggy.

Kristina seemed to be having the time of her life. She peeked around the tree again. “He’s holding up one side so Jethro can look at it. Oh, he’s so strong. Look at those muscles.” She turned to glance at Mandy and motioned for her to lean in. “Come on, Mandy. You’ve got to see his muscles.”

Growing more uncomfortable by the minute, Mandy folded her arms and took a step back, being careful not to lose her footing on the riverbank. She’d already seen Noah’s muscles when he’d hefted that stove onto his wagon. She didn’t need to see his muscles ever again.