The Choice (14 page)

Carrie sighed. The story only raised more questions than it answered. She reread it, looked again at Abel Miller’s photograph and stared at it for a long while. Her heart felt a pity for this Abel. How humiliating for an Amish man to have his photograph taken and printed in such a way. For the first time, Abel seemed real to her. Not just a shadowy figure in the Miller family, but a real man.

She wondered why Abel took Daniel’s place in jail. More importantly, why had Daniel let him?

She folded the paper up carefully and placed it in her apron pocket. She didn’t want Yonnie to come across this, adding to her suffering. Yonnie carried on bravely, but Carrie knew she was grieving deeply over Eli and Daniel.

One evening, Carrie went through Eli’s accounting books to see what kind of expenses she would be facing. She knew there would be feed bills, a propane gas bill, and in a few months, yet another tax bill to pay. She knew they needed to sell another quilt or two to pay for expenses until the harvest, but it pained her to ask Yonnie.

Carrie was doing her best to keep the farm up, but it was already looking like the weary efforts of two women and a boy, not the pristine condition that Eli and Daniel had kept it in. Every few days, a kind neighbor or two stopped by to lend a hand with a chore or two, but they had families and farms of their own to care for. Thankfully, Daniel had finished pruning the trees in January and had returned the beehives to the orchards in early March, but her vegetable garden—food that she counted on for summer canning and for roadside stand sales—looked limp.

As Carrie closed Eli’s accounting book, she suddenly felt a weariness that settled and went bone deep. She felt anxious about the future, and then anxious about being anxious. She put her head in her hands and squeezed her eyes shut.

Yonnie came up behind her, rested her hands on her shoulders and said, “Try not to worry. The Lord God hears our prayers.”

Carrie patted Yonnie’s hands and told her she was right, of course. But a part of her mind told her that maybe Daniel was right. Heaven had gone deaf.

As Carrie said goodnight to Andy, he asked her if they were going to lose the farm.

“What makes you think that?” she asked.

“I heard you and Yonnie talking. I saw you scribbling down numbers on a pad of paper.” He climbed under the quilt covers. “Maybe I should quit school and stay home. I could do stuff. I could make money choring for people.”

Carrie smiled at him and tousled his hair. “Your job is to stay in school and learn all you can. Someday, these apple orchards will be yours. You’ll need to know all about numbers.” She stroked his hair.

“I know plenty already. More than that ol’ teacher. Bags of fat on her arms bounce when she writes on the board!” He lifted a skinny arm and pinched it, trying to mimic his teacher.

Carrie tried to frown at him but broke into a grin. “Enough of that talk. Like I said, you do your part by doing well in school. It’s my part to think about making ends meet.” She reached over and turned off the gas lamp. “Night, little brother.”

“Night, Carrie.”

Before she closed the door, she asked, “Are those English boys still bothering you?”

“Nope.”

“Daniel was right, then. He said they would lose interest.”

Andy didn’t respond. He just rolled over on his side.

“Andy, do you miss Daniel?”

“Nope.”

Carrie leaned on the doorjamb and watched him for a moment. She worried about him, her Andy. She knew he must be hurting. She wondered how he really felt about Daniel’s death. He didn’t show any emotion during the viewing and funeral. He didn’t really show much emotion about anything, she realized, except for caring for the baby Cooper’s hawks and Mattie’s hatched goslings.

Those downy goslings looked like yellow balls of cotton that followed Andy around like he was their mother. It was incredible how quickly they grew; in just a few weeks, they were the size of leghorn chickens. Carrie and Andy made a makeshift cage for them in the barn. She was grateful that these creatures hadn’t died. It made her sad to think Andy had grown calloused to death, at the tender age of nine.

She had to admit, she wasn’t really sure how she felt about Daniel’s death, either. She pushed thoughts of him off to the side before they could settle in for a stay, just like she did with Sol.

Spring training was under way. Sol thought he might be able to add a little more speed on his fastball after the weight training he’d done in the Clipper Magazine Stadium workout room all winter. The manager had even used him as an example to the other players.

“If the rest of you players would work as hard as this guy,” he patted Sol on the back during the team meeting, “you’d have a chance for making the All-Star game this fall.”

The way the manager said it, it seemed as if he was hinting that Sol had a chance for a pitcher’s spot on the All-Star team. Just thinking about it made Sol all the more determined to speed up his pitch. It was all so close to him, within his grasp, this dream of making something of himself, he could practically see himself in the All-Star uniform, jogging out to the mound in Newark or Camden or Long Island, wherever the games were going to be held.

The only thing missing was no one would be there to watch him.

But then he got to thinking, with Daniel Miller gone—and it shamed him to admit it but when he heard the news from his mother he was elated—he and Carrie were given a second chance to get it right. Maybe by fall, she’d be at that All-Star game, watching him.

Late one afternoon, Veronica McCall walked right into Carrie’s farmhouse. “Hello? Hello? Is anybody here?” she called out, before spotting Carrie by the far window in the living room, letting down the hem on Andy’s trousers. “There you are! I knew someone would be home.” She blinked her eyes. “Why is it always so dark in here?”

“We use the sun’s light. And it’s a cloudy day.” Carrie put down the trousers and stood to meet her guest. “Is something wrong?” She could tell Veronica McCall seemed more on edge than usual today.

“There’s a flaw in this quilt of Yonnie’s.” Veronica threw the quilt on the kitchen table, searching it over. “There! There it is! See?” She pointed to a corner piece in which a mismatched fabric was sewn in, disrupting the pattern.

“I do see,” Carrie answered calmly.

“So she needs to fix it.”

“No. It’s meant to be there.”

Veronica McCall looked at Carrie as if she were a dense child. “I can’t have a flawed quilt. She’ll have to fix it.”

Carrie smoothed a hand over the red and yellow quilt. “Yon-nie’s quilts have a mark of humility.”

“A what?”

“It’s a sign of imperfection. Man will never achieve perfection, and we don’t want to be prideful in even trying to achieve it. So many Amish quilts are made with an intentional flaw.”

“Every one?”

“Not all, I suppose.” Carrie folded the quilt gently. It pained her still, to have sold Yonnie’s quilt.

“Well, that’s . . . interesting, I guess.” Veronica tapped her chin. “Hmmm . . . I wonder if I could spin it? Maybe I could even point customers to the flaw, to prove it isn’t machine made . . . oh, this could be good!” She clapped her hands together, delighted. “Bet I could charge more too.” She scooped the quilt out of Carrie’s arms and left, nearly knocking Andy over as he came in from school. “Toodles!” she called out, banging the kitchen door behind her.

Just an hour later, Andy sat at the kitchen table eating a snack while Carrie was making dinner. Suddenly, he spotted something out the window and flew out the door, tossing over his shoulder, “Gotta check on my birds!” Instead of going straight to the barn like he always did, he slipped around the side of the house and behind the vegetable garden, out of sight. Carrie saw a young Amish woman walk up the path to the kitchen door. When she reached the house, Carrie could see it was Andy’s teacher, Rebecca King.

She started the teapot to boil as Rebecca took off her cape and bonnet. “What a nice surprise, Rebecca! On such a cold spring 98 day too.” Carrie took two teacups down from the cupboard and filled them with hot water from the kettle. “Seems as if we should be getting warm weather by now.”

Rebecca’s round cheeks were bright red with cold. She wrapped her hands around the cup to warm them. “I wish I could say that the reason for my visit was just because we’re overdue, Carrie, but . . .” She glanced at Yonnie, quilting in the other room.

“Something about Andy?” Carrie straightened. “He’s not giving you trouble, is he?” She had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, like something terrible was coming.

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” Rebecca said. She took a sip of tea. “You see, he’s not at school. Ever since . . . your Daniel passed . . . he hasn’t been to school.”

“But that’s been weeks now!” Carrie said, shocked. “Where has he been all day?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that he told the kids he was very sick. He said it was extremely contagious. I can’t remember exactly what the disease was.”

Carrie looked out at the barn. “Was it leprosy, by any chance?” “Yes! That’s it!” Then her face grew worried. “Does he really have it?”

Slowly, Carrie shook her head.

“I didn’t think so.” Rebecca finished her tea and picked up her cape and bonnet. “I’d better get home. You’ll speak to Andy about returning to school?”

“Yes. He’ll be at school tomorrow,” Carrie said, walking Rebecca to the door. “You can count on it.”

For the next few weeks, until the school term ended, Carrie rode the scooter alongside Andy to school every morning. She even waited to leave until Rebecca rang the bell and she knew he was inside the one-room schoolhouse. Carrie never could get Andy to confess where he had been spending his days; out by Blue Lake Pond, birding, most likely. Once Daniel introduced him to birding, he preferred watching nature to watching Rebecca’s jiggly arms dance on the blackboard. But it bothered Carrie to discover that Andy was so at ease with telling lies. He insisted that they weren’t lies, he just didn’t volunteer the truth.

“And the part about the leprosy?” Carrie asked, one eyebrow raised. “Your cast has been off for months now.”

“Well, the doctor said it
looked
like leprosy,” he told her solemnly. “And my skin did look gross when the doctor took off the cast. All wrinkled and white.”

She tried to make him understand that not telling the truth
was
an untruth, that lies start with a seed of untruth that quickly grows into vines—jungles—of deceit. She could tell she wasn’t making much of an impact. What he really needed was his father. She couldn’t do anything about that, but she could make sure he finished out the school year, like it or not.

7

Spring inched to summer and the apple blossoms in Carrie’s orchards faded and died, leaving in their place the promise of a crop to harvest, come autumn.

One August afternoon, the sun burned the back of Carrie’s neck as she drove the wagon over to the Stoltzfuses’ roadside stand to deliver tomatoes to sell. She stayed too long for a visit with Ada Stoltzfus, a woman known to be blessed with the gift of conversation. Carrie ran a few errands in town but was later than she wanted to be as she returned to the farm. Angry, dark clouds had choked out the sun, the air was gummy and heavy, foreboding a downpour, and the wind whipped fiercely against the trees. A summer storm was coming and she wanted to get home as fast as she could.