Jacob's Return (36 page)

What?

Forgiveness?

Then she saw Ruben’s and Atlee’s smiles and she knew. But how did it happen?

Because of Levi?

Because of her father?

He gave her his hand to rise and led her to a bench, but she did not sit. Instead, she turned to leave, not daring to look back at the disapproval she knew she would see on his face.

She needed to find Jacob. Had he been heard yet? Would his turn come now? She ran outside to look for his buggy. Gone.

She turned back to get Levi, changed her mind and ran toward the barn for Gadfly.

An arm caught hers. She screamed.

“Hush, Mudpie.”

“Ruben, you scared me. Where’s Jacob? Has he been heard? His buggy is gone.”

“He has left. Come, I’ll take you to him.”

After Ruben prepared his buggy, she climbed inside. They rode a good distance in silence. She never knew Ruben to be so quiet. “Tell me what happened.”

“Well your father started—”

“Jacob?”

“Well—”

“Banned or not?”

“Banned.”

“No!” she cried, beating on Ruben’s arm, her sobs overcoming her. “You were supposed to say, ‘not!’”

For a while Ruben let her hit him, then one-handed, he stopped her wild flailing and pulled her close. “Shh, Mudpie. You will do him no good like this. And those babies, all of them will be wild if they see you. Blow your nose.”

She sniffed. “You sound like Jacob.”

“Then you must never know enough to wipe your nose.”

“What are we going to do, Ruben?”

“That, you two will have to decide.”

“I can’t think. I can’t think about it. I just want him to hold me.”

“I’m not good enough, huh?”

“You are a good friend to us.”

“Better than you know. Living with my new bride in somebody else’s house all those months. Nosy four-year-olds, no privacy.”

Rachel accepted his handkerchief. “Don’t even try to tell me you couldn’t go near your wife. I know better.”

“Esther tells those things? Or did she tell you about the new baby coming?”

“You know?”

“I’m not stupid, Rachel. A man knows about his wife.”

“You’re smiling. You’re not afraid this time, Ruben?”

“I am. But I have some kind of new faith. Probably comes from watching you and Jacob take on your problems. With help from above, you’ll handle this one too.”

“I’m not sure He’s on our side anymore,” Rachel said.

“He’s always on your side, Mudpie. Shame on you for forgetting it.”

She squeezed his arm. “We’re here.”

He stopped the wagon. “So go, already.”

She flew into the kitchen and stopped at the look on Jacob’s face. Stone-hard and just as cold. “You forgiven?” he asked.

She nodded.

“Your father’s a better man than I thought.”

“Jacob, I need you to hold me.”

He shook his head. “I cannot just hold you and you know it, especially after all this. There won’t be any marrying for us now. Another baby of mine and your father will ban you without a hearing. I am worried about last night as it is. What was I thinking?” He shoved his hand through his hair as he turned to look out the window, his back rigid.

His stance frightened her. “Just hold me. For a minute. Nothing more.”

“No.”

Rachel sat, beginning to feel as if dead winter blew about her, no fires burning within. Ice in the middle of July. “What are we going to do?”

“You’re a wonderful mother, Rache. Emma, Aaron, Mary and Anna, they’re lucky children. Growing up here with you, with Datt — it’s everything I want for them. You’ll do a good job.”

“What are you saying?”

“You will keep them. I will leave. It’s the only way.”

Chapter 21

Jacob stared out at the gray afternoon.

Rivulets of water from the sudden shower ran down the window pane with seemingly no beginning or end.

He felt like that rain, falling aimlessly, no direction. Just falling. He shuddered, whether from the dampness, or the turn life had taken, it was difficult to say.

Yesterday morning, the Bishop’s decision had been made. Yesterday afternoon, he moved into the
kinderhaus
. Alone.

Now he understood the isolation Simon must have known here, and wondered if it might have contributed to the complicated lengths to which he went to exact revenge. Long quiet hours of brooding surely went into the unholy production he staged.

But Simon had been lonely his whole life.

Jacob wondered if he could have done something to change that, and wished to hell he had tried.

Now, like Simon, he was in exile.

Without family, Amish or otherwise.

Without Rachel.

Without his children.

He’d kissed his babies, all of them, when he arrived home after service, wondering how many more times he would do so before he must leave them.

How long would they look for him before they would forget he existed?

Would they ever forget?

On the one hand, he wished, for their sakes, they might forget, on the other, he prayed they never would.

They had come full circle, him and Simon. When they were young and Jacob had Rachel, Simon wanted her. Then Jacob had come home with his children, only to discover how much Simon wanted children.

Rachel belonged to Simon then, and he had taken her away — though, he might not have been able to do so had Simon cherished her.

Now, the circle was closed. Neither of them would have her.

Simon’s ultimate revenge.

No. Jacob shook his head in denial. No, he could not blame Simon for the turn his life had taken. His sins were his own and he knew it. And they had hurt the woman he loved.

Rachel had suffered at her husband’s hands, and she did not deserve to have that suffering, or the result of her rescue, known.

Rachel deserved goodness. She worked hard and offered her toil as prayer. She loved her fellow man. She loved her children … his children. She would make them a good mother.

Jacob pressed his powerless fist against the glass that separated him from the world, a world where the sun now peeked through the clouds after a good rain.

A symbol of hope.

But not today.

Jacob pressed hard, wishing the glass would break and cut him, make him bleed. He deserved to bleed.

His chest ached, as if his children were already hundreds of miles away.

They might as well be.

Aaron and Emma were probably snuggled together in their crib for their nap, the babies taking turns at Rachel’s breast.

“I love you all,” he said, wishing they could hear him, then he shouted it. “I love you!”

Wanting to say it, to show it, was the reason he needed to leave. Difficult enough to stop complicating Rachel’s life, without the added temptation of having her in the next room. Lord, he’d already given into loving her there, not once, but twice.

Jacob gazed beyond dwindling rain clouds and brightening skies. “How much do You forgive before you stop?” he asked.

He and Rachel should never have allowed themselves to love in such a free and unencumbered way the night before the hearing.

What had he been thinking?

The truth, that’s what. Deep in his heart he knew that night was their last. He knew they would not be rewarded for their sin with forgiveness and a future together.

Life did not always work out the way you wanted it to.

Hardly ever.

Mostly, it seemed, it worked out the worst way it could.

Rachel had not yet reached that sorry realization and Jacob worried that this would be too brutal a lesson for her. When she realized later, after he left, that they would never be together again, never see or speak to each other even, she would be more than a sparrow with a broken wing. She would be broken in ways that could never be mended, into pieces that would never fit together in quite the same way again.

But he knew his Mudpie. She would pull herself together and make a life for their children — the best life they could have —an Amish one, with his father and hers, with their Aunt Esther and Uncle Boob to look after them.

Jacob punched the wall by the window, cracking the plaster — and maybe a couple of fingers, he thought, as pain shot through his hand. Well, good. Such pain was no more than he deserved.

He needed to be punished. He needed to leave.

What other choice did he have? If he stayed....

Ah, if he stayed, he would claim her, love her, hold her and never let her go … and in the claiming, he would destroy her, tear her from the life she loved, from her Amish family and community, from Esther and Ruben and their children. From her father and his.

Rachel could not survive in the English world. Too brutal it would be for her. Neither could she survive in an Amish one as an outcast. She loved her joyful, unchanging Amish world. She said so herself. It would be like losing your soul, except you could not seem to die.

Her words haunted him.

And his babies. If he left them with Rachel, they would grow, in heart, body and soul, surrounded by the love of their big Amish family, grandfathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, just as he wanted for them.

They would be so loved.

And if he told himself often enough that he was doing the right thing, maybe he would come to believe it.

An anguish so keen shot through him, it near broke him. He started to flee the lonely, haunted room, cried out and slammed the door instead, shutting himself away where he belonged.

Falling to his knees by the bed, Jacob brought the corner of the quilt to his face to muffle his sobs. He cried for the brother he lost. For his Datt who lost both sons at once. Then he cried for him and Rachel and their children, for the life they would never have.

And still Jacob sat on the floor. His children.

Emma. Aaron. Bright beacons guiding him, saving him, giving him a reason to go on. A reason to look forward to each new day. A reason to come home.

Home to Rachel. Mudpie. Momly.

She welcomed them like a sunflower welcomes the sun. She’d needed healing too, and together they’d begun the process.

If not for Simon....

If not for Simon, would their lives be as they wished? Who knew? Sometimes, like now, the master plan, which he must accept without question, seemed difficult to comprehend, impossible to accept. Especially if one could not imagine what it might be.

Jacob wiped his eyes and rested his back against the side of the bed. Head back, eyes closed, he prayed for the strength to leave them.

Two little faces came to mind, tiny, dimple-faced girls whose new smiles filled him with the knowledge God could be merciful. He’d prayed for them at their birth, willing to do anything to keep them alive.

He tried now to pray again, recited words he’d heard and said hundreds of times. Prayer, he thought, a quick and easy remedy for every hurt. Like a bandage or a sling, a short prayer could always be counted upon to bring hope for recovery.

Except, from this, there would be no recovering.

Jacob sighed, halted his foolish, wandering mind and attempted to pray in earnest.

He recited a prayer he’d learned in the English world, the words, “Thy will be done,” stopping him. Suddenly they meant something. He repeated them again, louder. Could he accept the meaning of those words with his whole heart? Did he have the strength to place this impossible situation in the Creator’s hands and accept, unconditionally, the high holy will ordained for him?

Jacob went to the window to look out at the valley he loved. A light breeze rippled fields of ripe wheat in never-ending waves. The Bontranger children, their exuberance having been tamped down inside during the shower, now danced around the family dog and her playful pups in the hollow.

With his eyes, he followed the slope of the land upward, past the horizon and into a sky slashed pink-through-blue. Sky-blue-pink, Mom used to call it. He wondered if she would consider putting in a good word for him right now.

He sighed again. Up to him now. Too late for Mom to fix.

“If this is Your will, Lord, so be it,” he said. “And if You have other plans for a wretched soul like me, show me the way. It frightens the hell out of me, Your will, but I’m listening.”

* * * *

Rachel roamed the empty, lonely rooms.

Night had come for the third time since the hearing.

The children slept peacefully.

She had cried off and on for the better part of two days. Jacob would not unlatch the door between the main house and the
kinderhaus,
no matter how much she called, begged and pounded.

He’d let Atlee in after the hearing and she’d been so hurt.

She’d seen nothing of Jacob since he told her of his decision to leave her with the children. Her distress had seemed a mountain she could never hope to scale, and so she sat at its base and cried for lack of recourse. Even to calm the children, she could barely stop. Anna and Mary were so agitated by her state, they fretted and nursed for short unsatisfactory lengths of time. They cried too much too. She needed to get hold of herself or starve her children.

Though Aaron and Emma did not understand why she cried, they missed their father. Emma kept asking for Pa-pop, Aaron said nothing. At nap-times, she had to lie down with them, her arms over them, before they would give in to the rest they needed.

If only Jacob would explain this foolish need of his to desert her and his children, for desertion it would plainly be, if he did not stay.

Desertion. Again. By Jacob.

The pain of his leaving four years before had nearly destroyed her. She did not think she could bear it again. And his children. Oh God, his children.

True, if he stayed, she could not talk to him because of the ban, though she would never shun him inside the house where no one would see them. Levi would not care if she spoke to Jacob, even if he could not. Neither would Esther or Ruben. Of course if her father took it into his mind to enter their door unannounced, which he sometimes did, and she and Jacob were caught conversing, or even if he happened to be taking something from her hand, or she from his … Well perhaps they could not converse, strictly speaking. But they would at least be together, in a way. But to be together and not touch. Not love....