Stranger's Gift (18 page)

“Well,” Hester said, “those books and boxes of papers are soaked through.” She quickly loaded a box, determined it was too heavy to lift, and started to slide it toward the open front door.

“You'll scar the floor,” Olive huffed as she lifted one side of the box and waited for Hester to take hold of the other.

Hester stared at the water-stained floor—a floor that would have to be replaced—and then back at Olive. “I've got this.”

“Suit yourself,” Olive said and dropped her end of the box. “You always do,” she added as she turned her attention to removing books from the shelves and stacking them in piles on the floor.

Hester had had enough. She was past thirty years old and a trained nurse, not to mention an experienced community organizer. She pushed the box out onto the front porch and then returned to face Olive.

“Olive, I am doing the best I can in a situation that is beyond what anyone might have imagined. And yet I sense that you don't agree with my approach to this project.”
Or any project I am involved with
.

Olive continued removing books one by one, flipping through the pages of each before setting it in one of the piles. “If you must know, Hester, there are several people who don't think that you are doing your best.”

Hester took a moment to listen to the sounds coming from other areas of the house. The rest of her crew was occupied. She and Olive were alone and unlikely to be overheard or disturbed. The time had come. “Please explain that statement,” she said quietly.

Olive turned and looked at her. Hester met her gaze directly and lifted one eyebrow to emphasize her determination to get their differences out in the open once and for all.

“Very well. You have an unfortunate tendency to give your attention to outsiders when many in your own community are suffering.”

Hester opened her mouth to respond, but Olive held up a restraining finger. “For example, it has been noticed and commented upon that you put the welfare of that man, John Steiner, before the welfare of your own grandmother, never mind others in this neighborhood who should have been evacuated hours before it flooded—”

“The county command center gave specific instructions about—”

“And since when do we take our direction from some outside government agency?” Olive demanded. “That is your problem, Hester Detlef. You have always put far too much stock in what outsiders want.”

Hester waited a beat, fighting to quell the tide of her own anger and resentment toward this woman's constant judging of her. “That's really what this is about, isn't it?”

Olive sucked in her cheeks. “I don't know what you mean. You asked—”

“Oh, Olive, I truly believe that you have my best interests at heart. Your respect for my father and the years of friendship you shared with my mother make that clear. But just because I have friends in the outside world and I sometimes—”

“Sometimes? Do you not see the sin that is your ego and pride, Hester? I know you think you are merely following in your dear mother's path, but you are not. And I must warn you …” Olive raised one gloved hand, stained now with the ink from the wet newsprint she'd begun collecting once she'd gone through the books. She shook her finger in Hester's face. “I feel compelled to warn you that neither your father's position in the community nor the memory of your dear mother can protect you should you continue down this path of pride and conceit.”

In the silence that followed this announcement, Hester was aware of a light tapping on the open door, and then Rosalyn stepped inside. “Sorry I'm late,” she said, glancing from Hester to Olive and back again. “I—is everything all right?”

“Fine,” Hester said. “I'm just going to check on the others.” She brushed past Olive, who had returned to her work as soon as Rosalyn entered the room.

But she stopped halfway to the bedrooms and forced herself to take several deep breaths to regain her composure. Olive's words had struck closer to home than Hester was willing to admit aloud. She had chosen to help Grady with the situation at Tucker's Point when she should have focused on getting her grandmother and the others packed up and moved to shelters. Due to her negligence, they had barely avoided disaster. She twisted the tie of her prayer covering around her finger. Pinecraft was her community, not the world beyond that and certainly not Tucker's Point.

Olive had hit another nerve, too. Ever since her mother's death, Hester had felt this urgency to fill her days with work. It was almost as if by running from one task to the next she might be able to suppress the discontent and restlessness that dogged her even when she tried to sleep.

Hester retraced her steps down the hall. “Olive, do you have a minute?” she asked.

The older woman eyed her suspiciously but put down the cloth soaked in beach solution that she was using to wipe down a painted built-in bookcase and waited.

Rosalyn looked from one woman to the other. “I'll just go see if I can be of help in the kitchen,” she murmured as she hurried off.

“I'd like to apologize,” Hester said. “Both for my behavior earlier and for my actions over the last days and weeks. You were right.”

Olive released a self-righteous huff but said nothing.

“Actually, you have done me a great favor,” Hester continued, picking up the cleaning rag that Rosalyn had left behind and starting to wash the wall next to where Olive returned to her scrubbing. “I was feeling such guilt about how long I waited before helping my grandmother and others get moved to the shelters. I am so thankful that nothing happened to any of you. If someone had been injured or suffered a heart attack from the stress …”

“Fortunately for you, God was with us that day. Perhaps He was using the situation to teach you a valuable lesson—one you have refused to heed despite numerous warnings from others.”

Hester did not like thinking of God placing others in harm's way simply to teach her a lesson, but she held her tongue. This was no time for a theological debate. She had come back to apologize and confess that there was an element of truth in Olive's concern.

“Yes, well, I wanted you to know that my rudeness before was born of that sense of guilt.”

Olive sloshed her rag in the bucket of sudsy water and twisted it into a skein to squeeze out every extra drop before she returned to wiping down the top of the bookcase and then started on the wall above it. The two of them worked in silence for several minutes until every inch of the wall had been scrubbed clean. All the while Hester was aware that Olive's lips were pressed into that thin line that was a sure sign that she was about to make a pronouncement.

“Am I to understand that you are telling me that you have seen the error of your ways at long last and that you will be resigning your position with MCC?”

Hester could not have been more shocked if the woman had asked if she planned to cut off her right arm as retribution for her transgressions. “I…Why would…?”

Olive ignored her sputtering. “Because if you are truly sorry for what you admit is a fault brought on by your decision to volunteer for that agency, then perhaps …”

“MCC is a Mennonite agency,” Hester reminded her.

“Do not lecture me,
bitte
. I am well aware of who and what they are. I am also well aware that over time the people who have been given responsibility for running that agency have fallen prey to the ways of outsiders. MCC is barely distinguishable from—”

“They do good work—
we
do good work,” Hester said quietly as she tried in vain to stem the anger rising inside her.

“That may be, but as the daughter of a minister, you would do well to reconsider your allegiance to that group. CAM is a far more appropriate group, as your friend Emma Keller has been quick to appreciate.”

“Appropriate?”

“For us. For you, the only daughter of our pastor.”

Hester bit her lower lip and closed her eyes, silently praying for God's guidance. Aware that Rosalyn had returned and was standing in the doorway, Hester forced herself to remain calm. “My work—”

“Your
work? What about God's work? Oh, Hester, sometimes I despair for you,” Olive moaned. “Against all tradition you decided to pursue a career, and, unpaid though it may be, you clearly see yourself as a working woman.”

Hester had opened her mouth to deliver a retort that she was sure to regret when Rosalyn stepped the rest of the way into the room and saved her. “Seems to me, ma'am, that we are all working women, at least until we get these houses cleaned up and folks moved back in.”

She did not give Olive a chance to respond, but turned instead to Hester. “Kitchen's almost done, so I thought I'd get started on Lizzie's house. If you'll come show me what you want done over there, Hester, I'll round up some warm bodies and get to work.”

Gratefully, Hester dropped her rag back into the bucket and followed Rosalyn outside.

John was having trouble focusing, literally. His eyes constantly clouded over from the sweat that dripped off his face like raindrops, making it next to impossible to see what he was doing. Between his broken wrist and the ankle he'd twisted, he was already severely limited in what he could accomplish on any given day.

Still, he had made some progress. With Zeke's help he'd managed to get a tarp over the exposed rafters of the house where the roof had blown off. He'd also scrubbed down the kitchen walls and removed anything that had already produced mold or that might if left untended. It would be some time before he could afford the repairs that would be necessary to restore the second story of the main house, so he had decided to focus his energy on the packinghouse and smaller outbuildings instead. To that end his plan was to make use of the plywood sheets that he'd nailed over the windows before the hurricane came ashore to put down a base for the roof of the packinghouse and work from there.

He had leaned the boards against the walls of the packinghouse that had remained standing after the storm and turned them daily to allow them to dry. Of course they had warped, but not so much that they wouldn't do until he could afford something better. With his one good arm, turning the boards took several hours all by itself, and there was no way that he alone could wrangle them up and into place on the rafters without help. So he would wait until Zeke decided to stop by and they could do it together. He had learned that Zeke's schedule was unpredictable to say the least.

Samuel was more reliable. He had biked out to John's property several times in the days that had passed since leaving the camper with him. He always came alone and after dark when his work in town was finished for the day. John understood that his impromptu visits were the young carpenter's way of building trust. And it was working. He never stayed long, just walked around looking at what John had been able to accomplish since his last visit. Every once in a while he would comment on the progress in Pinecraft.

“MDS has cleared out all of the houses along the creek,” he'd told John on his latest visit. “The women from MCC and CAM are scrubbing everything down, and Pastor Detlef expects some folks will be able to start moving back in as early as next week.”

“That's good.” It occurred to John that Samuel never mentioned Hester. Not that he had any reason to talk about her to John. Besides, why should he care?

“Everybody doing okay otherwise?”

“Sehr
gut. Jeannie Messner and her husband took in a bunch of people, and others did the same. The shelters aren't nearly so filled as they were right after the storm.”

John waited for more explanation of Samuel's definition of
very good
as applied to the situation at hand, but apparently Samuel had nothing more to report. “Well, I'll go back now.” He paused and studied John for a long moment. “You look thinner, John. Are you eating?”

“I am. Margery shows up regularly to check on that, and to just in general be sure I'm still breathing.”

Samuel nodded. “That's good. She's a good person, perhaps too concerned at times about the welfare of others. She probably told you that she suffered some real damage during the storm, but far more afterward when the floods came. Now that we've cleared out the houses in Pinecraft, Pastor Detlef plans to take a team over to help her get her repairs done so that her business can open again.” He mounted the bicycle and began pedaling slowly toward the lane out to the main road. “God bless you, John,” he called.

As John watched him go, he had the sudden urge to call him back, to suggest a cup of coffee or a game of checkers—not that he owned a checker set. But he wanted to know more about Margery. He'd been so wrapped up in his own problems that he'd failed to consider that Margery had to have suffered such serious losses as well. It struck him that watching Samuel pedal into the darkness and not knowing for sure when he might see him—or anyone—again, he felt something he hadn't felt in a very long time. John felt loneliness.