Huckleberry Harvest

Mandy watched Mammi leave with the empty jug. “I’m sorry we didn’t save you any lemonade, Noah. You’re the most deserving one.”

“What about me?” Titus called. “It wasn’t easy organizing everybody into typographical order.”

Noah stopped throwing bales with all those muscles of his and curled his lips into a very attractive smile. “It’s all right. I’m glad there was enough for your future husband, whoever he may be.”

Mandy groaned. “Believe me. My future husband did not drink lemonade today.”

Noah chuckled. “I hope he’s not thirsty.”

His eyes were such a warm shade of brown, Mandy thought she could very well get lost in them. But really, she needed to tear her gaze from his and go into the house and . . . what was it she needed to do?

Noah kept up his steady pace with the hay bales. Did he ever tire?

She should march out of the barn and away from the sight of Noah’s chiseled arms and milk-chocolate brown eyes and go help Mammi do . . . something. Certainly Mammi needed help with something.

Instead, she leaned against the wall of the barn and watched Noah toss every last bale of hay.

The something, whatever it was, could wait....

HUCKLEBERRY HILL

 

HUCKLEBERRY SUMMER

 

HUCKLEBERRY CHRISTMAS

 

HUCKLEBERRY SPRING

 

HUCKLEBERRY HARVEST

 

 

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KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
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The chickens gathered at Anna Helmuth’s feet as she scattered scratch from her pail. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I suppose I should have tossed it away from me if I wanted to keep my shoes clean.”

“You’re doing a fine job, Annie,” her husband Felty said. “The hens are getting fat.”

Anna tiptoed around the chickens as they pecked at the feed. Bitzy, the Plymouth Rock hen, put up a fuss when Anna accidentally stepped on her, but she recovered enough to squawk in disapproval before going back to her breakfast. “Did you bring the chopped carrots?” Anna asked.

Felty pulled a handful of carrot pieces from his pocket. “This is all we had.”

“It will be enough.” Anna took the slices from Felty’s hand and tossed them into the small flock of chickens. She beaned one chicken in the head inadvertently, but surely a carrot to the head wouldn’t have hurt anybody seriously. The chicken kept right on eating and didn’t seem to notice. “I’m planning a special breakfast for Mandy’s first day on Huckleberry Hill, and I want the eggs to be extra-bright yellow.”

“What special breakfast are you making for our granddaughter?”

“She’s only staying a month, so I want every meal to be memorable. Tomorrow morning we’re having Eggs Benedict. I’ve never made it before, but the picture in my recipe book looks delicious. I just have to figure out what a poached egg is, and we’ll be all set.”

“Do you still want to find a boy for Mandy while she’s in town?”

“
Jah
. But don’t worry. I’ll see to it that any romantic goings-on will not be detrimental to your blood pressure.”

“What about my ulcer?”

Anna propped a hand on her hip. “Now, Felty. You don’t have an ulcer.”

“I will by the time Mandy goes back to Ohio.”

“We can’t let Mandy leave Bonduel without a husband.”

Felty stroked his salt-and-pepper beard. “It’s a bit of a stretch to think Mandy will meet a boy, fall in love, get engaged, and plan a wedding in one month’s time.”

Anna bit her bottom lip. “Maybe we could talk her into staying an extra week.”

“We better encourage the chickens to lay more eggs if we need five weeks of Eggs Benefit,” Felty said.

“Now, Felty. We’ll have enough time. Our biggest problem is finding the right young man for our granddaughter. Her plans for a visit took me by surprise. I haven’t had the time to spy out prospective husbands like I usually do. I just don’t know what boy in Bonduel would do for our Mandy.”

Felty nodded. “She’s a spunky sort of girl.”

“Jah,” Anna said, dumping the rest of the scratch from her pail onto the ground. “She needs a spunky, cheerful boy to keep her laughing.”

Felty took the pail from Anna as they walked toward the house. “What do you think of Noah Mischler? He’s as
gute
a boy as ever there was.”

Anna furrowed her brow until the wrinkles piled on top of each other. “Noah Mischler? He’s as solid as a tree.”

“Is that bad?”

“
Nae
. It means he’s not afraid of hard work.”

“Being a hard worker is the most important quality for a grandson-in-law to possess.”

Anna ran her hands down the front of her apron. “Don’t get me wrong, Felty. I adore Noah Mischler. Saloma Miller tells me he put a new gas stove in her kitchen last April that practically makes dinner by itself. Noah is smart enough to fix anything that’s broken, and he’s so gute to his
dat
. But I don’t think he and Mandy would suit. He’s gloomier than three weeks of rain.”

Felty rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe he don’t have much cause to smile these days.”

“Mandy won’t look twice at someone like him. We’ve got to think of somebody else.”

Felty opened the door for his wife of sixty-four years and followed her into the house. “How will we ever find someone in four weeks?”

“Five weeks. We’ll talk Mandy into five weeks. And I’m going to pull out my new recipe book. The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

“In that case, Mandy won’t have a lick of trouble finding a boy. Nobody knows how to cook like you do, Annie.” Felty paused inside the door, looked around the great room, and thumbed his suspenders. He grinned as an idea came to him. “Annie, how would you like a new gas stove for all this cooking you’re going to be doing?”

“Is this the house?” Mandy asked as she pulled Dawdi’s buggy in front of the run-down shack with paint peeling off the siding.

“Jah,” Kristina said, still sniffling after all the crying she’d done today.

Mandy set the brake and tied the reins. “Do you want to come with me?”

“No. Never.”

“I’ll talk to him. Keep an eye out. If he wants to apologize or get back together with you, I’ll wave to you. Okay?”

“Be sure to tell him I still love him.”

Mandy ground her teeth together. Kristina didn’t have a lick of sense about how to handle such things. “Remember what we talked about? That will only make you sound desperate. You’re not desperate.” She patted Kristina’s hand. “You’ve been treated very badly, and someone needs to put Noah Mischler in his place. If his conscience nags at him and he realizes he can’t live without you, all the better.”

“But what if he doesn’t know how much I love him? Maybe he broke it off because he thought I was going to break it off first.”

“I’ll fix it.”

“But how?”

“I’ll make Noah Mischler see the error of his ways. Believe me, I know how to make a
deerich
boy feel guilty. He’ll realize what he’s done, and everything will be set to rights.”

The grass in the front yard grew in tufts like the hair on a balding old man. Mandy tromped along the dirt path worn into the sparse lawn and climbed the two concrete steps to the small cement pad that served as a porch. Thick lilac bushes grew on either side of the house, creating a barrier as impassable as any stone wall. They grew tall and thick and undisciplined, as if they were trying to imprison the house. Without their blooms, they were quite unsightly. No trees or flowers graced the front yard, and a barbed wire fence, tangled and swaying, ran along the north side of the yard. The property looked sad, as if it had lived a long, difficult life and was ready to give up the ghost.

A droopy-eared hound lazed next to the door and didn’t even bark when Mandy approached. He looked as if he had barely enough energy to lift his head.

Pausing, she took the dog’s face in her hands and caressed his ears. “Pretty dog. Good dog,” she cooed. The dog responded by attempting to lick her face. She dodged his tongue and gave him a swift pat on the head before squaring her shoulders and knocking on the door.

Time to show her angry-yet-ready-to-forgive face. Noah Mischler didn’t stand a chance.

She waited for several seconds with no response from the inside and then knocked again—more forcefully this time. Six loud raps that told anyone inside she meant business.

A young man, sturdy and tall, answered the door. When he gave her a tentative smile, the air stuck in her throat, and she forgot to breathe. This pleasant-looking, muscular young man was Noah Mischler? The boy who had scornfully stomped on her best friend’s heart? By the way Kristina had described him, Mandy had expected a scowling, sinister boy with fangs and bushy dark eyebrows.

The boy standing before her was not at all what she had pictured. His wavy hair was the color of wheat just before harvest and his dark, lively eyes called to mind the deep browns and rich greens of the forest. His face, lean and tan from the summer’s work, looked as if it could belong to one of the statues standing in a museum in Milwaukee. No wonder Kristina wanted him back.

He tilted his head. “Can I help you?”

She realized she’d been staring and cleared her throat. This was no time to be distracted by a handsome face.
Pretty is as pretty does
, that was what Mamm always said. If Noah Mischler wasn’t a godly man in his heart, it didn’t matter how he looked on the outside.

“Are you Noah Mischler?”

“Jah,” he said, holding out his hand. Instinctively, she shook it even though she had determined that she wasn’t going to be friendly. Noah needed to see the stern side of Mandy Helmuth today. He must be made to understand the seriousness of his transgressions.

She quickly pulled her hand away. Puzzlement flitted across his face as he stepped out onto the porch and shut the door behind him. “And you are . . . ?”

“Mandy Helmuth.” She cleared her throat again.

“Helmuth. Are you related to Anna and Felty Helmuth on Huckleberry Hill?”

“Jah. I am their granddaughter. I’m visiting from Ohio.”

“Nice to meet you. Felty is . . . friends with my dat.” His eyebrows inched closer together as he studied her face and waited for her to explain herself.

Suddenly she found the words harder to push out of her mouth than she had expected. He seemed so nice, the way he eyed her curiously but with no apparent ill will.

She took a determined breath and arched her eyebrows. Looks could be deceiving.

“Noah Mischler, I came to tell you that what you did to Kristina Beachy is despicable, and you’d better repent right quick.”

His face immediately hardened like cement or, rather, like cold, hard granite. She’d never seen an expression so unyielding. “You don’t know anything.”

“I know that you flirted with Kristina for months and months and took her home from gatherings in your courting buggy and made her believe you loved her and then broke the whole thing off with a text message.”

He stared at her with fire in his eyes even as the rest of his face could have been chiseled out of solid rock. “Like I said. You don’t know anything about it.” He stepped back and took hold of the door handle, as if he were planning to leave her standing there. As if the conversation were over!

“I’m not finished,” Mandy said.

“I am,” he replied, opening the door and stepping inside.

Mandy pointed to the buggy. “There is a heartbroken girl in there, wondering what she did to deserve such cruelty from you.”

“Cruelty?”

“You treated her like dirt, and yet she forgives you.”

The lines of his mouth twitched with simmering resentment. “Kristina has an overactive imagination.”

“Don’t you think she at least deserves an apology for how you treated her?”

“Nae.”

“You won’t even apologize? Kristina hasn’t stopped crying since you dumped her.”

His eyes narrowed into slits. “She’s been crying for three solid weeks?”

Mandy shouldn’t have exaggerated. It made her sound childish. “All I’m saying is that she is devastated. You led her on. She has a right to an explanation.”

“I said all I needed to say in the text.”

She was losing ground. Not even the faintest hint of remorse tinged his features. “And that’s another thing. Kristina told me you’ve been baptized. Why does a baptized member of the church have a cell phone? I can understand Kristina having one. She hasn’t taken baptism classes yet. But why do you have one? What would the bishop think if he knew you were breaking the rules of the
Ordnung
?”

Nastiness crept into his voice. “Why don’t you go ask him and find out?”

“Maybe I will. Maybe if you lose your phone, you won’t be able to break more hearts. At least in a text.”

He folded his arms, moved closer, and stared her down with those fiery brown eyes. She resisted the urge to take a step back. She wouldn’t appear weak, not even if Noah Mischler was strong enough to break her like a twig. “Maybe, Mandy Helmuth, you should get your superior little
hinnerdale
off my porch.”

She nearly choked on his words. How dare he? Fighting the urge to hiss like a cat, she wrapped her arms around her waist until she felt composed enough to speak. “So, you refuse to see reason.”

“I’m not the one who refuses to see reason. You got precisely half of the story, which isn’t true, by the way, and you aren’t reasonable enough to ask my side. But it doesn’t matter, because my side is none of your business.”

“It’s my business when a dear friend gets hurt.”

He grunted so that Mandy knew exactly what he thought of that logic. “Why don’t you stick your little freckled nose into someone else’s life? I don’t care what you think.” He backed away and shut the door in her face before she had a chance to answer him. Before she could even give him a lecture about the proper way to treat girls and the punishments awaiting deceivers in hell.

Well then. If he refused to improve himself and repent of his wrongdoing, then his soul was not Mandy’s problem. She’d done all she could. Even her dawdi, as kind as he was, couldn’t have been expected to do more.

Mandy stomped down the stairs, gave the dog one last pat, and made a beeline for the buggy, not caring how many pathetic tufts of grass she trampled along the way. That lawn wouldn’t last another winter anyway. If she were them, she’d till up the whole thing and plant new grass seed next spring.

She couldn’t hide her indignation as she climbed into the buggy and got it rolling as quickly as possible. Noah Mischler would try the patience of Job.

“What did he say?” Kristina asked, as if Mandy held all her hopes and dreams in her hand.

“I don’t understand why you like Noah Mischler. He has no remorse for anything. He’s
doomkop
. Forget him, Krissy.”

“I can’t.”

“Jah, you can. There’s dozens of other boys who don’t scowl and who don’t say words like ‘hinnerdale’ right to a girl’s face. You can do so much better.”

“That’s not true. Noah is the most wonderful boy in the world, and I think I’ll die of a broken heart if he doesn’t take me back.”

Kristina always did have a flair for the dramatic. Still, Mandy sympathized with her completely. Insensitive, aggravating Noah Mischler had made her friend miserable, and Mandy had been left to pick up the pieces of Kristina’s heart.

Mandy would be perfectly happy if she never laid eyes on that boy again.