Wonderful Lonesome (4 page)

Then she scanned the room. Next week would be Willem’s turn for a thorough cleaning, but Abbie looked for any task that appeared urgent for this day. Willem had been more generous with space in building his house than many of the settlers, and this pleased Abbie. There was plenty of room for a wife, and even a child or two. Willem also had partitioned off a true bedroom. Abbie peeked in there now, something she had come to be able to do without blushing at the thought that this would one day be her bedroom as well.

She found little to do. Although Willem ate the bread she brought and appreciated her cleaning efforts, he was remarkably neat for someone who lived alone. His habits were thoughtful and purposeful, features she believed she would appreciate even more when she was his wife.

By the time Abbie tidied up at Widower Samuels’s house and made the wide circuit back to Rudy Stutzman’s farm, bordering in a narrow strip on the Weavers’, midafternoon had pressed in on the plain with the fiercest heat of the day. A wisp of humidity made Abbie reconsider her position that there was no reason to think it might rain that day. The whole community would raise hearts of gratitude if it were God’s will to answer their prayers for moisture.

Rudy stood in a pasture with two
English
men about half a mile from his house. Abbie slowed the horse and cart long enough to try to recognize the
English
, but she could not see their faces well and could not be sure whether she had ever seen them before. At their ankles nipped a black and white dog. The mixed breed had turned up one day as a pup not more than ten weeks old and attached himself to Rudy. Because of his shaggy coat, Rudy had dubbed him Rug. When Abbie caught Rudy glancing up at her now, she had half a mind to tie up the horse and traipse through the pasture, but she would have no good explanation for doing so. With reluctance, she nudged the horse onward.

Rudy’s house was built for a bachelor, one modest room for sleeping, cooking, and eating, and a functional covered back porch for storing an unsystematic array of household and hardware items. Abbie put the bread in the middle of a table and found the previous week’s limp flour sack hooked over the unadorned straight back of one of Rudy’s two mismatched chairs. Then she looked in the water barrel and mentally gauged how much she would want for a proper cleaning. She would not use that much, of course. Rudy had a well, and as far as Abbie knew it did not threaten to run dry for household use and watering the animals, but water was too dear to use a drop more than necessary.

Abbie reached for the broom propped in one corner and began carefully dragging it through the dusty footprints on the floor of patchwork linoleum strips. She hung Rudy’s extra pair of trousers on a hook, decided that the weak seam in his quilt would have to wait till another day, slid aside the few plates he owned so she could wipe down the shelves, and cleaned the dirty bowls in the bin that served as a sink. Every few minutes Abbie’s gaze drifted out the open front door. She wished Rudy would walk through it and she could find out once and for all what was happening in that pasture.

Rudy chided himself. He ought to have known better than to agree to a meeting with the
English
on an afternoon when Abbie was due to come. But the visitors had gone to the trouble to track him down in his farthest field, where he fought a battle against weeds that only grew more futile in the face of strangled crops, and rode with him to the pastures where his eight cows and three horses grazed.

“You have some fine animals,” Mr. Maxwell said, “though the coats on several of the cows lack a healthy sheen. That will, of course, affect the price we can offer. We cannot offer top dollar for unhealthy specimens.”

Rudy said nothing. The cows were healthy. He would not engage in a discourteous conversation to prove his point. Only two days has passed since he mentioned to the owner of the feed store that he might sell his cows to the right owner, along with one of his horses. With his crop choking, the dairy cows were his livelihood. He would have to be certain of the decision he made.

Nothing required him to accept the offer the Maxwells might make. He was inclined to, though, unless the number they offered was grossly insulting. He could always list the property with an agent on short notice. He would not have to be present for the agent to show the land or close a deal. The animals were another question. If he sold them now, they would be worth more than they would be a few weeks later when they had chewed the pasture’s scrabble down to the dust and he had nothing more to feed them and could not keep up with a growing bill at the feed store.

Rudy shook hands with the Maxwells, agreed to wait to hear from them, and watched as they mounted their horses and turned toward the road leading off his land. He had intended to retreat to one of the fields until he was sure Abbie was gone, but he spun around now at the clack of her cart behind him.

“Hello, Rudy,” Abbie said. She scrutinized him and then peered down the lane at the dust the two
English
stirred up in their departure.

“Hello, Abbie. Any problems up at the house?”

She shook her head. “I hope you will be pleased with my work.”

“You never disappoint.”

Abbie searched his eyes. Rudy was not so foolish as to think she had not seen the
English
on his land. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen
English
visitors on your farm before.”

“It’s the first time.”

Indignation welled. Why would Rudy be talking to
English
on his own land if it were not about a sale? “What’s going on, Rudy?”

“We had some business to discuss. That is all.”

“Business? What are you getting ready to sell to them?”

“I have come to feel that I do not need eight cows.”

“Are you giving up on the dairy?”

Rudy waited a second too long to answer.

“Rudy, you cannot live out here by yourself without a cow. Have yours all dried up?”

“No, that’s not the problem.”

Abbie slipped off the cart’s bench and paced toward Rudy. “You are not still thinking of leaving, are you?”

When his response was again delayed, Abbie’s stomach tightened.

“I bought a voucher for a train ticket,” Rudy said finally. “It does not have a date on it yet, but I wanted to buy one while I could still scrape together the cash to pay for it.”

“Oh, Rudy. No. Please, no.”

“Why not, Abbie? My wheat looks more pitiful by the day, even though I planted half what I put in last year because I cannot afford to irrigate my acres no matter how much milk I sell. I’m sure your
daed
knows how expensive it is to truck in water.”

“But you belong here.” Abbie dug her heels into the dirt. “We all do. We are here together.”

“And we are stretched thin. Even you cannot dispute that.”

“It will not always be this way.”

Rudy turned in a full circle, gesturing to the flat dustiness of his land with upturned palms. “It might be.”

“You have so much to look forward to here, Rudy. You have a future here.” Abbie slapped a hand in Rudy’s still outstretched hand.

He looked her straight in the eye. “Do I?”

“Of course you do.”

“I mean apart from the land, Abbie.” He closed his fingers around hers.

She shrugged, not understanding his meaning.

“Has Willem declared himself to you, Abigail?”

Abbie withdrew her hand and stepped back. “Not in so many words, no.”

“But you feel certain that he will?”

“Nothing is certain except God’s will.”

“What if Willem does not meet your hopes, Abbie?”

Abbie broke her gaze.

As Abbie cut through the back road that tied Rudy’s farm with her family’s land, the rain started with little warning other than the darkening clouds that blew across the plain on most summer afternoons without dispersing their moisture.

In her cart, halfway back to the Weaver farm, Abbie laughed out loud. She did not care that she had no covering, nor how drenched she might become. Rain! All around the region, farm families would be pausing in their work and looking up in exultation. Abbie turned her face to the sky, closed her eyes, and stuck out her tongue. She had not done that she since was a little girl in Ohio, but it seemed the only appropriate response now. The rain gathered in a thunderous drumbeat, and Abbie hastened the horse. In relief, she realized her dress already was damp enough that it was sticking to her skin.

Rain!

Abruptly the sound changed to a clatter of stones pouring from the heavens. Pea-size at first, then larger. The icy rock that struck her nose made Abbie’s breath catch. The horse’s feet danced while Abbie’s chest heaved in protest.
Not hail. Please, God. Not hail
.

The nearest farm was Ruthanna and Eber’s. They kept a hay shed near the road, but it stood empty now. By the time Abbie reached the shed, unhooked the mare from the cart, and dragged the horse under the shed’s narrow overhang, tears streamed down her face. Abbie tied the horse tightly so it could not stray, then took refuge in the empty shelter.

She looked out at Ruthanna and Eber’s tender crop and knew it could not survive this vicious pelting. No one’s crop could.

The force that had destroyed the hope of harvest last summer once again rent in two the yearning of Abbie’s heart.