Meek and Mild (43 page)

“Should we clean up the baby first?” Clara asked.

“There’s time for that later. Show Atlee.”

Lizzie opened the door, and Clara walked through it with the baby. Abe was there with Andrew, and Atlee had returned from his prayer session in the barn.

Clara choked on the effort to speak. “A girl! And Martha is fine!”

The men gathered around to admire the newest Hostetler. Atlee put a broad hand under his daughter’s back, but his gaze went to the bedroom door.

“She really is fine,” Clara whispered. “She’ll be ready for you soon.”

Release sailed out of Atlee’s lungs. “So this is our Catherine, at long last.” He bent and gently kissed his daughter’s face.

Clara blinked against the tears as her uncle began to drift toward the bedroom, whether or not his wife was ready. Andrew put an arm around Clara’s shoulder, and they leaned their heads together to marvel at the new life. Clara decided Martha was right after all. The baby’s chin was like hers.

Andrew stroked Catherine’s cheek. “She looks perfectly at home in your arms.”

Clara was perfectly at home holding her, with Andrew’s nearness stirring up a memory that was yet to be, when they would bend toward each other like this over their own child.

And they would have a child. She knew this now.

Fannie, Lizzie, and the midwife emerged from the bedroom.

“
Mamm
is already asleep,” Fannie said. “
Daed
won’t want to leave her now.”

“We should take the baby back in,” Clara said.

“There will be plenty of time for that,” the midwife said. “Right now Martha needs to rest.”

Lizzie moved across the room. “I’ll make sure there’s warm water in the kitchen to clean the new
boppli
.”

The midwife trailed after Lizzie. “The room must be warm before we unwrap her.”

They disappeared into the kitchen.

“Here, Fannie,” Clara said. “Hold your little sister.”

Fannie shook her head. “I think I’ll find an empty bed and rest for a while myself so I can be some help later.”

Clara watched her cousin climb the stairs. Fannie had rallied for the birth. But this babe in arms, exquisitely beautiful, was no remedy for her melancholy.

M
orning was not far off. Exhaustion settled over the house for a few hours after the midwife left, but farm rhythms did not pause for the birth of a baby.

Though Fannie had slept in the bedroom of her girlhood, when she woke a scant four hours after pulling a quilt up to her neck, she was disoriented by the silence. Elam and Sadie were the morning noisemakers at her house. Fannie threw off the quilt and went down to the kitchen. With one hand Fannie pulled her shawl more snug, and with the other she shoved wood into the belly of the stove. This was not her farm, but Fannie knew well its demands.

Her father’s footsteps in the hall betrayed his effort to be quiet. Fannie raised her eyebrows and closed the stove’s door.

“They’re sleeping,” Atlee said. “Both of them at the same time.”

Fannie gave a small smile. “All’s well.”

“Your
mamm
thought you might come back in during the night.”

Fannie fixed her gaze on the bowl of eggs on the table, four different shades of shells. “I thought I could be more useful if I rested.”

The rational part of Fannie’s brain justified the truth that her sister’s birth had irritated a festering wound, and Fannie had run from the sight of innocent Catherine.

“The cows don’t stop for a baby,” Atlee said, pulling his jacket off a hook and fastening it closed.

“The boys can milk,” Fannie said, glad for the change of subject. “I’ll get them up.”

Atlee shook his head. “I’ll want to do it.”

He would be praying again, Fannie knew. This time prayers of gratitude, prayers for the future. If only she could borrow his unspoken words.

Satisfied that the fire in the stove was catching and would soon both warm the room and provide heat for breakfast, Fannie padded through the house. In the front room, Clara and Andrew startled her. Fannie’s own withdrawal after the birth had been so swift that she did not consider that someone should offer them beds. Even Lizzie and Abe, whose farm was nearby, had stayed through the night. Andrew and Clara would not leave before daylight. Their heads tilted toward each other, shoulders meeting, each of them asleep under a quilt from the cedar chest under the window.

Clara would have known where to find more bedding, Fannie thought. Her cousin had chosen this closeness with Andrew. Envy stirred. Everything lay ahead of them. They had not yet decided to marry, but Fannie knew Clara well enough to be sure she would not rest so easily against a man she did not love. Though Fannie and Elam had not yet observed their seventh anniversary, their unmarried optimism was a far-off land already.

Careful not to wake them, Fannie slowly opened her parents’ bedroom door and slipped in.

Her father had stoked the fire before he left for the barn. It snapped and crackled behind the grate, throwing heat and orange light into the corners of the room. Her mother was in a fresh nightdress and slumbered in fresh bedding with the baby on her chest. Atlee had tucked pillows on both sides of his wife, propping up the sleeping arms holding the baby.

Just in case
, he would have said. He was a cautious man. A thoughtful man. A generous man.

Fannie used to think of Elam that way.

Little Catherine’s mouth started to twitch. Was she hungry? Dreaming? Stretching against the tight bundling? Tiny sounds dribbled out of her mouth, not quite cries, not quite coos. If the household had been bustling at its usual volume, Fannie would not even have heard them.

Clara had tried to hand Catherine to her a few hours ago, and Fannie could not make her arms receive the child. Now she sucked in a series of small breaths.

This was her sister.

When she thought her mother might not survive, Fannie was willing to take this child home with her. In the face of fear, her heart was wide open. Why had it closed in the face of joy? She had not even touched Catherine’s tiny hand.

Fannie wondered if her father was praying for her along with his new little daughter.

Pressing her lips together, Fannie moved toward the bed and lifted the baby from Martha’s chest. She stepped toward the fire and opened the quilt to see her sister. The soft white cotton dress she wore was new. Martha had long ago given away the tiny clothing her other babies wore. Unbundled, Catherine began to kick her feet and thrash her arms. Her eyes opened, and though she seemed to look at her big sister, Fannie wondered what a baby really saw.

Sadie had been like this once. New and wondrous and vulnerable and delicate and tiny. Fannie had soaked up every sensation then, and if she had known she would not have another child, she would have pondered even more deeply in her heart.

Catherine yawned, her lips hardly bigger than a doll’s, making the most perfect oval Fannie had ever seen. Fannie held her diminutive hand, stilling its aimless movement through the air and kissing the row of tender fingertips. Then she tucked the quilt back around the baby.

“Thank You,” she whispered. A prayer. The first in a long time.

Fannie might never have another child, and she might never know what had closed her womb after Sadie’s easy arrival.

Elam might never regain his ambition for the farm in the absence of sons or a larger family to provide for.

Fannie might—
would
—have aching moments when she did not understand why Catherine had come into the world and not her own child.

But Catherine had come. She was here in Fannie’s arms, two sisters a generation apart while their mother slept.

If Fannie’s only prayer was
Thank You
, it would be enough.

Martha stirred, her empty arms floundering briefly before her eyes found their focus.

“My girls,” she said.

As tears filled Martha’s eyes, they also spilled from Fannie’s.

Clara’s neck was oddly stiff, and a sharp pain shot into her shoulder and made her suck in air. She had begun her sleep with her head against the back of the davenport. When she felt Andrew’s shoulder under her cheek later, she was too groggy to change positions. Now her head had slipped down to his chest. The heartbeat she heard was his.

Not too fast. Not too slow. Thumping steady and strong.

This was the first time Clara had heard Andrew’s heartbeat, but it would not be the last. Andrew’s heartbeat on one side of her and his arm wrapped around the other was where she wanted to live.

Cautiously, she straightened her neck to relieve the pressure of the awkward position.

Andrew murmured. “Is it morning?”

Clara glanced out the window. “Almost. The sun is just coming up.”

“I love morning light,” he said. “His mercies are new every morning.”

Clara leaned away from him and took his hand. “Let’s go see it. We’ve never seen the sunrise together.”

Above them, Clara heard her cousins beginning to move around. Abe and Lizzie and Thomas had stayed the night, but they would need to get home to their own farm and waiting cows. Her youngest cousin was in his last year of school, and in his mother’s eyes even the birth of his sister would be no excuse to be late. The other two knew a full day’s labor awaited them. Clara wanted this moment with Andrew, just the two of them watching the mystery of spreading orange and pink hues give way to full light.

Outside, they leaned against a post on the porch, shoulder to shoulder.

“Thank you for bringing me,” Clara said, unsure whether she had expressed her gratitude for his complicity in this unscheduled trip across the border.

“It was God’s will,” Andrew said. “Why else would I have been on the road to your farm at just the moment you needed a ride?”

Clara smiled, suspecting that he’d had other motives than purely putting himself at the disposal of God’s will. Hadn’t he said something about sneaking onto the farm to take her for a ride?

“I won’t ever forget this night. Martha worked so hard! Fannie thought we would lose her, and the midwife didn’t offer much reassurance. But Martha held on, and Catherine is safe.”

“Many prayers answered,” Andrew said.

“And Martha would do it again. I could see it in her face. Whatever it took, it was worth it. I always thought of joy as something to feel. Now I know it is something to hold.”

Andrew angled himself toward Clara. “Would it be worth it to you?”

She met his eyes.

“I would be right there,” he said. “Whatever it took, and whatever happened, we would face it together.”

“I know,” Clara said. “I know.”

“The wedding season has only just started.”

She nodded.

“We can have our banns read.”

Clara nodded again, this time more dramatically. She wanted him to ask the question—again—so she could reward his patience with the answer he’d waited so long to hear.

“I can talk to Mose,” he said. “Of course I should speak to your father first.”

She breathed in through her nose and waited.

“Rhoda will come around, won’t she?” Andrew said. “She’ll help you get ready for the wedding, surely. It’s what she wants, isn’t it?”

Clara locked her eyes on his.

“It won’t be perfect,” he said. “We won’t always understand God’s will, especially in days of pain. But whatever it is, we will hold the joy together.”

She moistened her lips and nodded.

“Clara Kuhn, are you saying that you’re ready to marry me?”

“If you would ask a proper question,” she said, “I would give a proper answer.”

He smiled. “Clara Kuhn, will you become Clara Raber and let me love you for the rest of our lives?”

“Nothing would make me happier.”

Clara leaned into his kiss, her lips tangling with his in a delicious moment that Andrew seemed keen to prolong. Clara offered no objection as she wrapped her arms around his waist and his hands took her face in his.

Atlee cleared his throat, and they jumped apart—but not very far.

“Somehow,” Atlee said, “I suspect our Catherine’s safe arrival will not be the only good news we celebrate today.”