Brides of Ohio (22 page)

“That’s not what I mean,” Mary said.

When Jonah had come home, Mary had lived with him for a while, taking care of the housework. When she moved to Delaware, Adele had thought it was because Katherine needed her help. Her condition was making her feel weak at times.

“Katherine’s condition was not the only reason I came here. One night, a month or so ago, I heard a noise coming from the yard. I got up thinking Jonah hadn’t heard it, but when I got outside, he was already there.”

“He must have heard the same noise. What of it?”

“No, Adele,
he
was the noise. When he can’t sleep, he walks around the farm with his gun. That evening I startled him. It was only by the grace of God he didn’t shoot me. And in the daytime, he carries it with him everywhere.”

“I have heard of many men doing that.”

“Out West maybe, and for good reason, with outlaws and the like,” Mary said. “But Ohio is not the wild frontier it used to be.”

“Adele,” Katherine said, “Mary says he even sleeps with it.”

“He does not sleep with it,” Adele said. “It lies on the floor at the foot of his bed.”

“
His
bed?” Mary asked curiously. “Don’t you mean
our
bed?”

“Oh! Uh … yes,” Adele said carefully. “I guess I am not used to that yet.”

“Of course,” Katherine said with a little smile. “We understand.”

No
, Adele thought,
you do not understand.
It was purely by chance she had seen where Jonah kept it while he slept. They didn’t share a bed. He had absolutely refused. She wanted to tell Mary and Katherine but hesitated. What would they make of it? Would it reinforce their worries about him?

She rose from her seat and walked to the window, mouth clamped shut. No, they were already worried enough over his rifle. His rifle. She hadn’t realized he was so obsessed with it. She had, of course, seen it with him several times, but she had not known. Had she been too rash?

Adele looked out the parlor window and brushed back a stray strand of her bright blond hair, her eyes not seeing the fine houses neatly situated along Liberty Street. Instead, she saw Jonah as he had been before the war: tall and strong, brushing light brown hair out of his emerald eyes as a gentle smile crept over his handsome face. A stark contrast to how cold and angry he was now.
No, there was nothing else I could have done.
She couldn’t have allowed one of her best friends to be hauled away against his will.
He needs an old friend now, not a doctor who barely knows him.

Mary’s voice roused Adele from her thoughts. “Dr. Kelly should be here shortly. What will you say to him?”

“I will tell him, of course,” Adele replied. She noticed the slightly stricken look on Katherine’s face and continued. “I have always made it clear to Noah we are friends. Nothing more.”

“I know, Adele. And Daniel has tried to reinforce that over the past several months, but …” She looked at Mary.

“What?” Adele asked.

“He’ll be done guest lecturing at the university at the end of this term,” Mary said. “He’s made plans to set up a practice in Ostrander. And he’s made it no secret to us as to why.”

Voices came from the hall, and soon Dr. Noah Kelly entered with Daniel not far behind. “Noah, you should have waited to finalize your plans.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Daniel, I—Adele.” Dr. Kelly smiled and stepped toward her eagerly. “I have wonderful news.”

Adele stopped his progress with an outstretched hand. “Noah, I have news as well. Perhaps you should sit down.”

J
onah Kirby quietly slipped out the kitchen door at the back of the farmhouse, his Enfield rifle in hand. He stood in the courtyard for a moment looking at the bright, full moon before walking through the small orchard and up into the trees and fields beyond. The air was cool, but it wasn’t long before he felt warm from exertion.

The Kirby farm, which had belonged to his family for two generations, was set along a gentle hill that leveled off every so often as it sloped to the valley below where Mill Creek busily flowed east toward the mighty Scioto River. The house, gardens, barn, and outbuildings sat on a wide plateau while the fields lay at the top of the incline. It was planting time, and he soon came to a field that had been plowed only yesterday. He walked along the edge of it so his boots wouldn’t press down the rich brown loam.

Continuing on, he came up on the northern corner of the property, the part he had allowed to become overgrown and wild—Daniel’s share of the farm. Jonah really should clear it. Plant something. The soil would be rich, and the yield from whatever crop he sowed would be well worth the effort. But his green eyes narrowed at the thought.

Before dying of a heart attack when Jonah was just a teenager, their pa, Joseph Kirby, had carefully divided up the land between his three sons. But Toby, the youngest, was dead, and Daniel was no farmer. The entire farm belonged solely to Jonah, the eldest of the Kirby brothers. He’d worked Toby’s share, but Daniel’s share was a different story. A few weeks after the funeral, his brother had announced he was going to go to school instead of honoring Pa’s wishes. Daniel offered to sell his share to Jonah, but Jonah refused. They fought, and in the end Daniel had told him to do whatever he wanted with it. Jonah had done just that.

As he turned to go on, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Jonah dropped to the ground. Was that gunpowder he smelled? There hadn’t been the sharp report of gunfire, but a man couldn’t be too sure. Leaning into a small tree, he pointed his rifle toward a dense thicket several feet away. A man’s form appeared, and Jonah began to squeeze the trigger, swearing he had seen a glimpse of Confederate gray.

The man’s face materialized in the moonlight, and with a start Jonah saw it was Cyrus Morgan, laying out traps. He lowered his rifle and slunk away, acutely aware he had almost shot one of his own hired hands. He shook his head to clear the confusing thoughts. This was his own property, not a battlefield; he was a farmer again, not a sergeant in the Union Army. He’d given Cyrus permission to trap there weeks ago.

He came to an old stump at the edge of an adjacent field, sank down against it, and looked down at his rifle. Relief immediately spread through him. The percussion cap, the small mercury-filled pellet that lit the gunpowder and fired the bullet, had not been in place. He kept them in his pocket now, ever since his aunt Mary startled him one morning and he’d come so close to shooting her. But that hadn’t been enough to keep her from moving out. She said it was because of Katherine’s “delicate” condition, but he knew better. Jonah rested the butt of the weapon on the ground between his legs and laid his forehead against the cold steel of the barrel. He clenched his jaw and felt his fingers tighten on the gun barrel.

Being a farmer, Jonah had seen and helped butcher so many hogs that the sight of blood shouldn’t have bothered him when he went to war, but it had. That and the cries of men suffering and dying, the news of old friends suddenly gone from this world, and his failure to keep himself and others from being captured had affected him more than he ever thought it could.

And then there was the realization of how futile his prayers to God were—prayers that begged for deliverance from the horrors of the notorious Andersonville prison camp. He hadn’t been released until after Lee’s surrender, and then it was only to be put aboard the overcrowded steamship
Sultana
, which exploded as it made its way up the Mississippi. He just barely made it to safety. When he finally got to the farm, he discovered Ma and Toby were dead. Since it had been presumed he was as well, Daniel had tried to sell the farm to a neighbor so he could marry and realize his dream of becoming a professor.

After all that, he had gone to church and had hardly been able to stand the lesson that had been taught that day: the compassionate nature of God.
God’s taken too much for me to ever believe that again
, he thought as he rose and continued on his trek across his property.

He hadn’t been back to church. Instead, he threw himself into running the farm. It felt good to work the soil again, feed the animals, mend equipment. After four bloody years of war, the world was beginning to make sense again. But then, from out of the blue, the nightmares came. He would wake up screaming, scaring his poor aunt half out of her wits. She had tried to get him to talk about them, but he didn’t want to. He just wanted things to go back to normal.

He worked all the harder, and the nightmares faded after a while. Then, every few nights or so, he’d wake well before chore time and couldn’t get back to sleep. And he couldn’t think of anything better to do than to take a walk. He certainly didn’t want to read his Bible as his aunt had suggested. The problem was the thought of going out at night—or anytime for that matter—without his gun made him nervous.

Jonah stopped for a moment and stared at the weapon in his hands. Well, what did he expect? That after all those years of fighting, he would be able to just lay it aside without a second thought? When he’d been caught, he’d been beside himself without it. On the way home, he’d managed to get ahold of another gun, and since then, he hadn’t been parted with it.”

Eventually the moon faded in the sky, and the horizon began to redden. Jonah walked a little south and soon found himself on the edge of pastureland with a full view of the house and barn. He looked over everything with a deep measure of satisfaction. Pa would have been proud. Everything was exactly as he had kept it, house and trim painted, grass kept short and tidy, the barn with a fresh coat of red paint. It looked so exactly like it had before Pa died, he half expected to hear his father calling for him.

He caught a faint scent of biscuits in the morning air, and his heart beat faster. Ma’s biscuits? But the sight of Adele walking back from collecting eggs shook him back to reality. Before he realized it, he’d made a beeline for the house.

As he drew near, he could hear the pump being worked out back. His head told him to continue on to the barn, but his feet rebelled and took him along the side of the house to the brick courtyard outside the kitchen. He peered around the dormant vines on the garden trellis to see Adele filling a bucket. His breath caught as he saw her golden hair gathered up in braids and neatly coiled together at the nape of her slender neck. He stepped back and leaned against the house. There were chores to get to, and he had no business spying on her. But he found his mind drifting back to the first time he had ever seen her.

Her hair had been the first thing he noticed. She’d been sitting under the tree in the school yard, knees pulled up to her head, on the verge of tears. She’d been Adele Braun back then, and she and her older brother, Erich, had moved to Ostrander from a German community in Zoar, Ohio, after the death of their parents. The other girls had not quite known what to think of such a tall girl with a thick accent. Jonah and Nate Stephens had been on their way to their favorite lunch spot when he saw how bright her hair was—
like corn silk.
He’d stared at her until Nate had shoved him.

“Hey!”

“Well, stop starin’, Jonah! Bad enough the girls were teasing her.”

She looked up, and Jonah couldn’t breathe. Her eyes were so blue. It hadn’t seemed right to him that they were filled with tears. He glanced at Nate then looked down. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “We’ll leave you be.”

But Nate had edged closer and was glancing into her lunch pail. “What’s that? Sausage?”

Adele nodded slowly.
“Ja.
Bratwurst. You would like some? I can share.”

Nate smiled. “Sure, we’ll share, too.”

The other girls eventually warmed to Adele, but she remained close to him and Nate. Especially Nate. Where Jonah always seemed to trip over his own words, his best friend always knew exactly what to say. So he had won her.

Jonah looked at the ground. Nate should still be here to take care of her. But God had used the war to take him, too.
He loved her so much. How could I have married her?
His face quickly darkened. What choice had he been given? If it had been up to them, Daniel and that Dr. Kelly would have sent him to that asylum, and he could have lost the farm. Adele said if she were there all the time to take care of him, they might back down. And the only way for her to be at the farm all the time …
I’m so sorry, Nate. It was the only way.

He heard the kitchen door and looked around the trellis. Adele had walked into the house with her water and come back out to look up at the sky. She closed her eyes and breathed in the crisp morning air. He marveled at how such a tall, capable woman could still look so sweet and delicate. Guilt squeezed at his heart, and he leaned back against the house. He had no business even thinking things like that. He’d made a promise, and he had to stick to it.

He straightened. There were chores to do, and besides, Adele had brought her Bible out with her. Even though they had only been married for a few days, he knew she read it every morning and night without fail. Why was beyond him. When she lost Nate, she had lost their farm as well and had to scrape by for who knows how long. How could she turn to a God who had taken so much from her? As he started to walk off, his foot tangled in the vine, causing the trellis to shake.

“Is someone there?”

Jonah winced, turned around, and walked toward where his wife sat on the porch bench.

“Oh, Jonah.” She smiled as he drew close, and his heart began to pound. Her eyes flitted to his gun. “You had a good walk?”

He gave her a curt nod and turned to leave, but she laid a hand on his arm. He frowned, tightening his grip on his rifle. “I have to get to the chores before breakfast, Addie.”

“Can you not sit for a moment?”

He swallowed. Her accent wasn’t so thick now, but her voice was no less musical. “We need to get more fields plowed before the rain comes.”

Adele looked at him with amusement as she stood. The faint smell of soap and lavender he breathed in as she brushed past made his head spin. She looked at the blue that had begun to unfold across the sky and then back at him.