The Amish Clockmaker (35 page)

She at last turned from the footings sticking out of the ground to look at him.

“You're making this for me?”

“I am.”

A slight smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “You don't have to go to all this trouble, Clayton. I know how much this spot means to you.”

He put both arms on her slim shoulders. “I
want
to do this for you, Miriam. I realize it doesn't look like much now, and the concrete's still wet, but when it's built, it will—”

She silenced him with a gentle kiss to the cheek. “It's the nicest thing. Really. Thank you, Clayton. I'm overwhelmed.” She looked down at the nearest footing. “It's still wet, you say?”

He nodded, trying to ascertain if she was truly happy or not.

“Then you should put your mark in it, the same way you sign your clocks.”

Clayton stared down at the gray, malleable foundation. “But it's not my gazebo. Why don't you sign it instead?”

She turned to look at him again. “Can't we share it? It should be
our
gazebo.”

Though she still hadn't rewarded him with the exuberance he had hoped for, the fact that she wanted to share the gazebo with him lightened his heart.

“Then I suppose we'll need a new mark. One that stands for the both of us.”

Miriam grabbed a nearby stick and knelt at one of the footings as together they decided what their mark might be. Once they had chosen, she wrote in the cement the letters
MMCR
for “Mr. and Mrs. Clayton Raber” and the citation for Mark 1:35, a Bible verse perfectly appropriate for a place of one's own:

In the morning, rising up a great while before day, he went out, and departed into a solitary place, and there prayed
.

The next morning, when Clayton came in from doing the chores, he learned from his mother that Miriam had gone on to work extra early. At first, he wondered if she was down at the gazebo site, already eager to spend time in that “solitary place,” just like the Bible verse said. But then he remembered a brief exchange between the two of them before falling asleep last night, something about her going in first thing to get the Uptons' clock ready for shipping and him bringing the buggy down when he came later so she could head right on out to the post office as soon as he got there.

Sure enough, when he reached the shop at his usual time and stepped inside the back door, he spotted the box on the desk, wrapped and addressed and ready to go.

“I thought I heard you coming down the hill,” Miriam said as she came through the showroom doorway and retrieved her purse from the shelf. “Carry it for me?” she asked, gesturing toward the package.

“Sure.” Clayton set down his things, scooped up the box, and then carefully carted it out to the buggy, setting it on the floor inside.

Miriam seemed preoccupied as she walked around and climbed in from the other side, so he didn't try to make conversation. Instead, he just unhitched the horse from the post, handed her the reins, and watched as she drove the buggy away.

Her odd mood seemed to linger even after she was back, and she was silent and distracted for much of the day. Clayton spent the afternoon on a complex clock repair, though as he worked his mind kept going back to a niggling, disturbing thought, one that had to do with that day last month when he'd come upon his wife in the back room writing a letter. She had said she was just working out her thoughts on the page, and yet, Clayton realized now, she had not shared those thoughts with him at any point since, nor had she given him the letter. Their kiss that day had been pure heaven, but looking back at it now, he had to wonder if his tentative trust had been misplaced.

As he finished his repair now, fixing the erratic rack and snail movement of a porcelain Waterbury clock, he decided he had waited long enough. He would ask her again about that letter, soon.

He waited until they were in bed that night, the lights extinguished and the two of them lying side by side. The covers were off and the windows were open to let in what small breeze might come to cool off the room. It took him a full ten minutes to summon the words.

“Miriam, remember last month when we were at work and I came into the back room and you were writing me a letter?” he whispered into the dark.

But she made no response.

He turned his head toward hers and could just make out the confines of her profile. Her eyes were closed, the rising and falling of her chest slow and even.

“Miriam?”

No response. She was asleep.

Turning on his side, he prayed that God would show him how to let her know she could tell him anything—and that he would be able to hear whatever it was she found so hard to say.

Clayton wasn't aware he drifted off, only that the next thing he knew, Miriam was calling for him in a dream. They were in the pasture between their houses, and she was screaming his name, over and over, but he couldn't get to her. He looked down at his legs and saw that both were now disfigured lumps of scar tissue and mangled bone. He could not run to her. He couldn't move—

“Clayton!”

He awoke to the sound of Miriam's screams from down the hall.

He heaved himself out of bed, knocking over his bedside lamp as he struggled to find his footing. The glass chimney shattered, and broken bits skittered across the hardwood floor. He smelled spilled kerosene as he grabbed his flashlight from the dresser and stumbled toward the bedroom door.

Throwing it open and moving into the hall, he realized he was hearing his mother's voice now as well, low and soothing as she tried to calm the still-screaming Miriam. Flipping on the flashlight, he hobbled forward through the shadowy hallway until he reached the open door of the bathroom. He came to a stop and directed the beam inside.

In the jerky half-light he saw Miriam doubled over on the bathroom floor, groaning in pain. His mother was kneeling beside her, and all around their folded knees was a growing puddle of blood.

Clayton had only been in an
Englisch
hospital one other time in his life, after the buggy accident, when a doctor with a hawk-like nose and a bushy
moustache told his parents that he'd been able to save the leg, but it would never function normally again.

Now, as Clayton sat next to Miriam's bed, holding her hand as she stared out the window at the soft light of dawn, the fear he had felt in this place as a child came flooding back to him.

The hospital was where you found out everything was different, but you didn't know what that difference really meant, or how it would change your life. You didn't know how it would change you, only that it would.

“What was it?” Miriam whispered now, her tone void of expression.

“Miriam,” Clayton whispered back, afraid to answer her.

“I want to know what it was.”

Clayton swallowed back the growing ache in his throat. “A girl.”

“Did you see her?”

Clayton had not asked to see the tiny stillborn child Miriam had been carrying. It had not occurred to him to ask. “No.”

“Where is she? What have they done with her?”

Clayton didn't know. Was he supposed to know? “I'm not sure.”

Miriam's eyes closed as tears pooled and then slid down her cheeks. A nurse came into the room to do a quick exam and told Clayton he could wait out in the hall.

He hesitated. The nurse's timing couldn't have been worse. “I don't think I should leave her. Can't it wait just a few minutes?”

The nurse opened her mouth to reply, but Miriam filled the space with an answer of her own.

“It's okay, Clayton. I'd like some time to myself, anyway.”

He was startled. Alone? Now?

“Really,” she pressed. “You can go. And you don't need to rush back.”

The request fell off her lips softly, but it felt like a load of bricks hurled at his heart. “Miriam?” he asked, certain she couldn't possibly mean what she had said. She hadn't even looked at him.

She just turned her head more fully toward the window.

The nurse smiled compassionately at him and nodded for him to leave.

“Aw, don't take it out on him, honey,” he heard the woman say to Miriam as she pulled a curtain around the bed. “It's not his fault. There's nothing he could have done to save the child.”

Clayton hesitated, listening, but Miriam did not respond.

“Sometimes it just happens. I've been in this job a long while and I can tell
you that you didn't do anything wrong either. Trust me. You and your husband will be able to have many other children.”

Still Miriam said nothing in response. Clayton continued on into the hall, lost in thought. He knew what had happened was God's will, but knowing it and believing it on the inside were two different things.

He hovered just outside the doorway for a while, wondering what he should do once the nurse was finished. More than anything, he wanted to go back into the room to be with his wife, but he also wanted to respect her wish to be alone. He was still waiting, still debating with himself, when Miriam's mother came rushing down the hallway, her
kapp
strings flying behind her.

“Where's my daughter?” Abigail demanded when she reached Clayton.

He nodded to Miriam's room. “She's in there, but the nurse is with her right now.”

She pushed past Clayton and went inside.

At least that answered his question. Miriam had wanted him to stay away so she could be alone, but as long as her mother was here, she wasn't alone anyway. Once the nurse was done, he was definitely going back in.

From where he stood in the hall, Clayton could hear the murmur of the nurse talking to Abigail. He wanted to get the facts as well, so he moved closer and listened as she said that Miriam's vital signs were good despite the loss of blood and that she was a very lucky young woman. The room fell quiet after that, and Clayton imagined the look Abigail was giving to Miriam, knowing luck had nothing at all to do with this.

He heard the nurse speak again, breaking the silence as she tried to reassure Abigail with the same words she had used for Miriam. “Your daughter and her husband will have plenty more children, Mrs. Beiler. You don't need to worry about that.”

Then, with a
swoosh
of metal rungs along the steel rod, the nurse pushed away the curtain and exited the room, moving past Clayton in the hallway with an efficient nod, her attention already shifted to her next patient.

He stepped back into the room, but the sight of his wife and mother-in-law was blocked by the curtain, which the nurse hadn't managed to slide fully out of the way. Not realizing he was there, Abigail spoke to her daughter.

“I'm glad you didn't tell her the child wasn't his. It's none of her business.”

He froze.

“Why would I?” Miriam responded listlessly.

“Oh, Miriam,” Abigail said, and from the scrape of the chair, Clayton
knew she was taking a seat next to the bed. “This is so awful. Here you went and married Clayton to save yourself from disgrace, and now that the child is gone, the entire marriage was for nothing.”