The Lesson (26 page)

Besides, the thought of gambling repulsed Chris. It reminded him of his mother—always wanting something for nothing.

Jimmy Fisher had an answer for gambling, when Chris asked him why a Plain person was at the tracks. Jimmy said that horse racing was in the best interest of the animal. “These horses are trained day after day to forget the instincts they’re born with.” Jimmy insisted that racing helped a horse work out its desire to be free, to roam wild, so that it could return to the fieldwork as a happier beast, knowing it had reached its full potential.

There was no point in responding to such a bogus explanation. Jimmy had an answer for everything, Chris had quickly discovered. Still, he found himself enjoying Jimmy’s company. Jimmy was hard not to like.

Chris pulled the horse over to the side of the road, trying to decide if he would go in to talk to the sheriff or not. Maybe. Maybe not. Should he? Or shouldn’t he?

He’d come so far these last few months, and the slightest misstep could wipe all that out.

“Got something else for me, Yoder?”

Chris practically jumped at the sound of the sheriff’s voice right at his buggy window. “Last night,” he said, “I woke up from a dead sleep. I had a vision so real that I couldn’t remember if I dreamed it or it was real.” He took a deep breath. “There was a woman who had come over to help us
sometimes. She took pity on our family and used to bring food. She would give me her son’s hand-me-down clothes. Stuff like that.”

“Go on,” Sheriff Hoffman said, leaning his arms against the open buggy window.

“One afternoon, my mother sent me upstairs to check on the baby. Jenny was crying, and I remember hearing my mother’s voice get louder and louder. I crept down the stairs, and I saw the neighbor lady holding my mother’s arm as if she was trying to stop her.”

“Stop her from what?”

This was what was hard to say. “From doing drugs. My mother is—was—is a drug addict. Methamphetamine. Back then, she would buy a lot of Sudafed and make her own meth.”

The sheriff didn’t miss a beat. He was probably used to this kind of thing, but it still shamed Chris. “Go on. What happened next?”

“My mother became angrier and angrier at the neighbor. She saw me on the stairs and yelled at me to get upstairs.” Chris paused to collect himself for a long moment. “The neighbor lady was trying to calm my mother down, but my mother was shouting at her to leave and mind her own business. Then, suddenly, there was silence. A strange silence. The next thing I knew, my mother raced upstairs, grabbed a suitcase, and started to throw things into it. She picked up the baby, told me to get in the car, and we left Stoney Ridge.”

“Did you see the other woman leave the house?”

Chris shook his head. “No. We went out the back door of the kitchen to get to the car.”

Sheriff Hoffman rubbed his chin. “What do you remember of this woman? Do you remember her name?”

Chris squinted his eyes, thinking hard. “No, I can’t remember her name. Only that she was Amish.” Out of the blue, a name popped out at him. “Mattie. No—Maggie.” A cold chill ran through Chris. He had a feeling that he had just made things much, much worse by telling the truth. He should not have said anything at all. But he had to know. “Why? Did something happen to that woman? Did something happen that day?”

Sheriff Hoffman gave an infinitesimal nod of his head. “I was just a rookie that spring. I was told to make an arrest for accidental manslaughter. I did what I was told. I made the arrest. But something never added up to me. Something always bothered me about it.”

“But . . . who did you arrest?”

Sheriff Hoffman’s penetrating stare was unnerving. “Your grandfather. Colonel Mitchell.”

Was it possible? How could this be? Amos followed Jenny Yoder’s instructions to drive to her house. He felt a shiver up his spine when she pointed to a narrow drive that led to Colonel Mitchell’s house. He hadn’t been to this house in fourteen years, and he had never wanted to cross the threshold again. Not ever.

Fern and Jenny were debating bread dough and starters and yeast and he couldn’t even make any sense of their conversation. All that he could do was to pray one prayer, over and over and over: Herr, hilf mich.
God, help me.
When Amos reached the house, he saw the water spewing out from the side yard pipe. He hopped out of the buggy and went straight to the pipe. He needed time to think and was grateful for something to do.

When he noticed Fern climb out of the buggy, he called out, “This won’t take but a moment. You stay put.”

She snapped her head up at the sharp tone in his voice and gave him a strange look. “Jenny is going to show me the house. It won’t take long.” She turned her attention to Jenny and helped her out of the buggy.

Fern didn’t understand. But how could she, when he had never told her how Maggie had died? He had only told her it was an accident. That God had been merciful and Maggie hadn’t suffered. He hadn’t told her that she had been trying to help the English neighbor that bordered their farm, because there was no father, and the mother wasn’t quite right. The woman had a little boy, a few years older than M.K., and a baby girl who cried a lot. And she lived with her father, Colonel Mitchell. A tough guy, he liked to call himself. A former Marine. And a former football player, in the days when helmets were flimsy, he would say.

His mind racing, Amos looked around until he found the main water pipe to the house and turned it off. Then he went to the broken spigot, wrenched off what remained of it, screwed on the new spigot, turned back on the main water. Checked to see if there was any leak, gathered his tools.

Why was Chris Yoder living here?
Why, why, why?

And then it hit him—so hard he had to sit down. A melee of emotions—dread, anger, guilt—struck him all at once. He realized why he thought Chris looked vaguely familiar. Chris was the Colonel’s grandson. Chris was that little boy Maggie was always worried about. Too serious, Maggie had said. Much too serious for a little boy. Always worried about his mother and his baby sister. It was as if he hadn’t been allowed a childhood.

And Jenny—she was only a baby. A baby with colic, like
his own son, Menno. Maggie had found goat’s milk helped Menno’s indigestion as a baby, so she wanted to take goat’s milk over to the Colonel’s house. He vividly remembered the day—it was the first warm day of spring after an exceptionally cold winter. The crocuses were blooming, and Maggie had been so excited to see her first robin that very morning. “Spring is finally here,” she told Amos as she explained where she was headed. Julia and Sadie were in school. Menno and M.K. were in the barn with him, playing with some new kittens.

“Let them stay and play,” he had told Maggie. “I’ll watch them.”

She had kissed him on the cheek and promised she wouldn’t be long.

But she never returned.

Looking back, Amos viewed his life as if divided into two halves: before Maggie died, and after. He believed that God’s hand was on Maggie’s passing. He believed that her life was complete. He believed that God had a purpose. God had a plan. He believed that with his whole heart. He banked his eternal life on that belief. But the reality of living without Maggie was a harsh one. He likened it to how someone must have felt if he lost his sense of taste: a person might continue to eat, to provide sustenance and nourishment to his body, but life had lost all flavor. Grief-stricken was just the word: grief had literally reached out and struck him, and left a permanent mark.

“Amos, are you all right?”

Fern and Jenny appeared beside him, shocking him into the present. He picked up the wrench and the broken spigot. “Yes. Yes. I’m fine. I’m ready to go.”

Fern looked at Jenny and dusted her hands together the
way she always did when she was making up her mind. “I think we should organize a work frolic to help Chris with some repairs.”

Jenny’s face scrunched up. “I don’t think Chris wants any help.”

“Nonsense. It’s our way,” Fern said, being annoyingly practical. “Come back to the house and we can make plans.” She started back to the buggy.

Jenny looked to Amos to intervene. “I don’t think Chris is going to like that.”

Amos had no idea how to respond. He still felt as if he was trying to process through a mountain of buried memories. “We can count on Fern to know what to do,” he managed at last.

Back in the buggy, Amos flicked the reins over the horses’ backs. Slowly the buggy started off again. His heart and mind, though, remained at Colonel Mitchell’s house.

14

E
arly Monday morning, Teacher M.K. stood by the schoolhouse door, waiting for the scholars, smiling and talking with everyone in her mile-a-minute way. As hard as Jenny tried not to, she found herself growing increasingly intrigued by Teacher M.K.’s unique teaching style. And Teacher M.K. wouldn’t let Jenny fade into the background like she usually did. She simply wouldn’t allow it. She would call on Jenny in class even when she didn’t raise her hand. She would read parts of her story out loud as if she thought they were any good. And they weren’t. Jenny was sure they weren’t. Anna Mae Glick told her so.

With Teacher M.K., the world got bigger and then it got smaller. Jenny was amazed. She was starting to notice things she had never noticed before.

First, Teacher M.K. taught them about the stars in the sky, and how the ancient mariners could find their way across the oceans by charting the stars. She brought in seashells and pieces of coral that she had found at a garage sale. She pointed out how a conch seashell looked like the inside of a person’s ear, and that coral looked like veins and arteries.

Next, she brought in an old microscope she had bought for
$5 at that same garage sale. She had the class look at things that were too small to see. She said there were much stronger microscopes that could see things even smaller than they could see with the garage sale microscope. A drop from the water pump became a regular sideshow of squirming cells. Jenny hadn’t taken a sip of water from that pump since.

Today, Teacher M.K. had brought in fern leaves and put one on every single desk. “Tell me what you see,” she said.

The room went very still as the scholars counted the leaves. Even the rowdy boys who usually whispered and snickered throughout the lesson sat as still as mannequins.

“The lines on the leaf are like blood vessels,” Danny Riehl said. He adjusted his spectacles for a better look. Danny had this way of looking at things very carefully, even little things. He was always taking things apart and putting them back together. Anything he was curious about. Jenny was a little sorry that Danny was younger than she was, and even more sorry that Anna Mae had dibbs on him. Jenny thought he showed great promise. “And would that be the nervure?”

“He’s always making up them big words,” Eugene Miller sputtered. “He talks like he’s playing Scrabble and is looking for points.”

“
Nervure
is a word for the rib of a leaf,” Teacher M.K. said. “It’s just a more precise way of explaining something.”

Danny looked at Teacher M.K. and smiled that smile of his, like when she told him about black holes in the sky and stuff like that. In a strange way, Jenny thought they understood each other.

Teacher M.K. said that there were all kinds of illustrations in nature that pointed to the Creator of the universe. God’s handprint was on all of his work, just like when we sign our drawings. Just like that.

Gazing at the fern leaf, Jenny blurted out, “Count the little leaves! They come out just right! Look. On each row there’s just one more leaf less, until it gets to the top.”

Teacher M.K. looked pleased. “You, Jenny Yoder, just figured out today’s arithmetic problem.”

Imagine that,
Jenny thought.
Me. Arithmetic.

Mary Kate had been teaching for nearly ten weeks now. She had good days and she had bad days, but she wasn’t thinking quite as often about running off to Borneo. Last week, she had a terrible, awful day and promptly sent off her passport application in the mail. Eugene Miller had gone too far, yet again, and put a snake in her pencil drawer. She hated snakes! Always had. She blamed Jimmy Fisher and a certain black racer snake.