The Keeper (6 page)

Every school morning, M.K. waited at the crossroads to meet up with her friends, Ethan and Ruthie. Ethan was only nine, but he was brilliant—nearly as smart as M.K. but not quite—so she was willing to overlook his youth. Ruthie was already twelve, kind and loyal, though she had a squeamish digestion that didn’t tolerate anything too far out of the ordinary. Still, Ruthie was willing to hold a grudge against Jimmy Fisher for throwing a black racer snake into the girls’ outhouse while M.K. was attending to business. Acts of such devotion had earned her a spot in M.K.’s heart.

Jimmy Fisher was a thirteen-year-old blight on humanity, a boy born with his nose in the air. Unfortunately, Jimmy wasn’t bad looking. He was a tall blond, the tallest in seventh grade. Every girl kept one eye peeled on him. They looked at him all day long. It made M.K. disgusted and was added to her growing list: Why Jimmy Fisher Should Be Stuffed into a Rocket Ship and Sent to the Moon.

That particular list was started when M.K. was only five. Jimmy Fisher, then seven, played a trick on her. He tucked a walkie-talkie under his dog’s collar and told M.K. that he had a talking dog. M.K. believed him and carried on long conversations with the dog during lunch until Sadie found out and blew the whistle on Jimmy. Too late! Jimmy and his friends called M.K. Little Gullie—short for little gullible—from that point on. M.K. wasn’t a girl prone to letting go of her grudges. And Jimmy Fisher topped the list of permanent grudges.

M.K. sat on the split rail of the fence, swinging her legs, when she spotted a horse and buggy coming toward her. She shaded her eyes from the morning sun and recognized the horse as belonging to the Smuckers. With any luck, Gideon Smucker would be driving the buggy to town. M.K. jumped off the fence and smoothed her skirts, then waved at Gideon. He pulled over to the side of the road.

“Hey there, M.K.! Need a ride to school?”

Drat! There was nothing she would rather do than arrive at school in Gideon’s buggy. She’d love to see the look on Jimmy’s face then! But she couldn’t disappoint Ethan and Ruthie. “Thanks, but I’m waiting for some friends.”

“How’s everyone at Windmill Farm?” Gideon asked.

M.K. looked up into his face. He was sixteen or seventeen, tops, with freckled cheeks and a shock of red hair that flopped down on his forehead. Propped on his nose were spectacles that gave him, M.K. thought, a very learned look. Julia said he looked like he was peering at life through the bottom of two Coke bottles. Sadie, more kindly, thought he wore the look of an owlish scholar.

Sadie was the one he was really asking after, in Gideon’s roundabout, acutely girl-shy way. He was frightened to death of girls his own age. M.K. thought it was a serious flaw in an otherwise perfect young man. Gideon adjusted his spectacles, acting nonchalant as he waited for M.K.’s answers.

“Everyone’s fine. Just fine.” She was being mean, but she enjoyed watching his ears turn bright red.

Gideon looked up at a crow cawing in a tree. “How’s your father’s heart? Improving?”

“Oh . . . about the same.”

“And Menno? How’s he doing?”

“You know Menno. He’s always fine.”

Gideon scratched his forehead. “And Julia?”

“She’s . . . well . . .” What could she say? She was worried about her sister. Julia didn’t complain or speak ill of Paul; she seemed distracted, preoccupied, sad. How could Paul treat her sister like that? Julia might be a little pushy and demanding, a tad overbearing, maybe a little vain . . . but she was also loving and kind and beautiful. She’d practically raised M.K. “Fair to middlin’.”

“Edith Fisher paid us a visit yesterday. She told my mother that Paul canceled the wedding. Any idea why?”

“Paul’s a dummy. That’s why.” All of those Fishers were dummies. With all that went on this morning, it nearly slipped her mind that she had a score to settle with Jimmy Fisher. The usual slimy slugs in the lunch pail never fazed him. She cast about for something that would.

Gideon grinned. His smile was dazzling. How could Sadie resist it? “Seems like Julia needs to shake Paul up a little. He doesn’t know a good thing once he’s got it.”

M.K. rolled that remark around in her mind for a moment. Interesting!

“Mary Kate? I asked how Sadie is doing.” Gideon was staring at her.

Lost in her thoughts, she hadn’t caught what he was saying. She couldn’t help but notice his ears had turned fire-engine red. “Oh! Sorry, Gideon. My mind got to wandering. Sadie’s fine. Just fine.”

“Well, if you don’t need a ride, I’ll be off then.” Gideon made a clucking sound and his horse started off down the road.

M.K. hardly noticed he had left. Without meaning to, he had given her a whopper of an idea. She just might be able to fix two problems at once.

Yesterday, Jimmy had whispered to her that Paul finally came to his senses once he realized that M.K. would be his sister-in-law. When Paul made that discovery, Jimmy said, the wedding to Julia was off. “It would take wild horses to drag a vow out of Paul now.”

M.K. thought that feeble remark deserved a response. She didn’t know why Julia ever wanted to marry into that Fisher family. And to have Fisher babies! M.K. shuddered.

But Julia loved Paul, and love was a mysterious thing, sickening though it was. M.K. felt any Fisher would make a sorrowful choice for a husband, but she was willing to cook up a plan to help make that happen for her sister. She had a talent for involving herself in other people’s business.

An idea took form in M.K.’s mind and a mischievous grin lit her face. At last she had a plan of attack pretty well worked out. Off she darted with wings on her heels to meet Ethan and Ruthie as they rounded the bend on the road. The whole day had brightened.

One thing Julia couldn’t deny about Fern—quietly dubbed Stern Fern by M.K.—she was a get-it-done machine. Since her arrival, every closet, cupboard, and corner of Windmill Farm had been scrubbed and polished. Julia wasn’t complaining. It was rather pleasant to have a well-run home, even if it did require effort to stay out of Fern’s cleaning frenzies. And her cooking! It was
amazing
. This morning, she woke early to find Fern in the kitchen, flipping a tower of blueberry buttermilk pancakes for Menno and M.K.

Late in the morning, Julia came in from the garden to get something to drink. As she poured herself a glass from a container of iced tea, Fern walked into the kitchen and dropped a pile of mail on the counter. “I’d appreciate it if you’d stay out of the refrigerator. Everything’s organized the way I like it.”

Julia resisted rolling her eyes. “I won’t move anything I don’t eat.” Fern was a monumental pain, but Julia was going to try to be more understanding. Sadie had scolded them all last night after she caught M.K. trying to slip a bullfrog into the refrigerator when Fern was upstairs. “Maybe if we weren’t so snippy to her all the time,” Sadie had said, “she wouldn’t be so snippy herself.”

Sadie had a point. They
were
snippy to Fern. Not Menno, but the rest of them were definitely snippy to her, even Uncle Hank. Yesterday, Uncle Hank wandered into the kitchen and Fern told him he smelled a little ripe. And when had he last bathed? Uncle Hank stomped away to his Grossdaadi Haus. Later, though, Julia noticed he had showered and shaved. Fern had moved in and had taken over, with plans to improve them all.

Julia wasn’t sure why Fern had come to help them, but she was confident there was some tragic story behind it. For a woman her age—was she fifty? Sixty?—she was quite handsome in a plain way. But she never mentioned a family of her own, no children or husband. Most likely, Julia pondered, her heart had been broken. Remembering the pain of that particular ailment, Julia felt a small wave of empathy for Fern. She took a fresh tack. “Did you grow up in Ohio?”

“Yes.” Fern pulled a mixing bowl from the cupboard.

Julia tried again. “Have you always worked as a housekeeper?”

Fern slapped the cupboard door closed. “I don’t have time for idle chitchat. So much to do. Meals to prepare, beds to make, towels to wash. Then I need to get a head start on dinner.”

“Someone took my bell,” Amos said crossly.

Julia and Fern spun around to face Amos standing by the stairwell. “I took it,” Fern said. “Got tired of hearing it ring every five minutes.”

“Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of a patient having a bell?” He pouted like a child.

Fern put her hands on her hips. “What do you want?”

“I’m hungry. I came down to make myself some lunch.”

“I told you I’d make lunch.”

“I’m not falling for that again. Yesterday I got a bowl of thin broth.”

“And crackers and an apple. Stop being such a baby.”

Amos scowled at Fern and turned to go upstairs, muttering halfway up the stairs until his breathing became labored and his coughing started up. Fern followed him.

As Fern’s footsteps faded, Julia pondered the changes since she had arrived, just a few days ago. Fern had made herself thoroughly at home in Windmill Farm, rearranging furniture, dusting and sweeping and scrubbing the house as if it was as dirty as a pigsty. But as irritating as Fern was, she was exactly what her father needed. He had been so discouraged by his slow progress that he had stopped doing exercises. Fern would tolerate none of that self-pity. She had made him do his exercises every day since she arrived and ignored his steady complaining. And she was just as bossy with the rest of them—especially so with Uncle Hank and M.K. All but Menno. Him . . . she spoiled. Julia smiled as she heard Fern order Amos to get dressed and take a walk to the road and back.

Fern was a tyrant, a dictator, but not quite the bully she liked to think she was.

4

A
t the age of fifty, Amos Lapp felt as if he had just acquired a middle-aged mother in the size and shape of Fern Graber and he didn’t like it. But then he didn’t like much of anything or anyone these days, especially himself. He wanted all of this heart nonsense to go away.

Fern had just brought him a cup of coffee and it was decaf! He wanted real coffee. He waited until he heard the door shut to Fern’s bedroom, then tiptoed downstairs. By the time Amos made it to the bottom step, he was wheezing. A year ago at this time, he was plowing fields and planting corn, sunup to sundown. Virtually overnight, because of his weak heart, he had turned into an old man.

Last summer, Amos was out in the barn on a warm afternoon, when he suddenly had trouble with shortness of breath and funny palpitations in his heart, as if his heart were a bubble ready to burst. At first he thought it was just indigestion from Sadie’s dinner. The next thing he knew he was lying on his side on the barn floor. Menno came in, found him, and an ambulance was called.

His next memory was being in the Coronary Care Unit with oxygen lines in his nose, an IV in his arm, and hooked up to beeping monitors. Dr. Highland—a man who looked younger than Menno—came to visit him on rounds. He was the same cardiologist who had taken care of him in the emergency room.

“I guess this was serious?” Amos asked.

“Pretty darn serious,” the doctor replied. He explained that Amos had suffered a major heart attack—something called idiopathic cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle.

Dr. Highland couldn’t explain why it had happened. Amos wasn’t in the high-risk category. He had never smoked, never used nonprescription drugs, was trim and fit from a lifetime of vigorous farming work.

After a series of tests, the cardiologist ended up implanting a mechanical device to assist Amos’s heart, and put him on so many pills that he needed a chart to keep track of them all. Over the next few months, Amos’s rebellious heart settled down, but during winter, his heart had weakened to the point of being in heart failure. He would become short of breath and fatigued when walking up stairs, taking a shower, or performing the simplest of chores. And always coughing. He couldn’t take a full breath without coughing.

The doctor recommended retirement—the thought of which horrified Amos. He always wanted to drop in the harness. Then the doctor brought up the notion of a heart transplant. That stunned him too. His response was immediate and strong—no heart transplant for him. He wasn’t afraid to die.

Funny, now that he looked back on that time, he had never felt any fear. His faith had stead him well, and he knew, with as much certainty as anyone this side of heaven can know, that this life was but a hint of things to come.

No, he had no fear of death. It was the thought of leaving his children behind that grieved him.

Amos listened carefully for a moment before tiptoeing into the kitchen. He didn’t want to alert Fern that he was on the prowl for coffee. That would be cause for panic. First, Fern’s. Then, his, when she started scolding him like he was a five-year-old.

The doctor told him panic was bad for his heart; stress of any kind could take a toll on him.

Amos felt as if he couldn’t trust his heart—that it had become as fragile as spun sugar. And he was so tired. Most days, he stayed inside, in his bedroom or at his desk, bored to tears but too weary to do much about it. Some days, he didn’t even get dressed.