The Tempted Soul (11 page)

“Amish cases?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either, and I suspect it’s because there have been none.”

Carrie grasped at another straw. “But what if there have been some? What if we wrote to the other bishops and asked if they had allowed it?”

“What good would that do, Carrie? Other bishops allow lots of things that Daniel will not. Radios in buggies—red trim on houses—yellow dresses on the young girls—the approval of one of these men will hold no water with Daniel, I’ll guarantee you that.”

Another long silence fell while Carrie stared at her slice of pie and tried to imagine swallowing some. She would not cry. She had drained herself of tears on this subject so many times that all she was capable of now was a tired sense of surprise that they still kept coming.

“Thank you for talking with me about it,” she said at last, when for once Mary showed no signs of taking the conversation elsewhere. “I’m sure you have other things to do.”

“I do, but they’ll be there when I’m ready to turn my hand to them,” Mary said comfortably. “I was ready for a little rest, anyway. I’ve been putting up squash all day. Maybe you’d like to take some with you.”

“I would. Melvin loves squash.”

Mary gazed at her, compassion soft in her eyes. “I will talk this matter over with Daniel. I just can’t promise that he’ll do or say differently than I told you.”

Carrie nodded. “
Denki
.”

“I’ll write to you with his answer. Now, finish up that pie. I hate to waste it by giving it to the hens.”

“I don’t give mine anything with sugar in it. They’d still eat it, but I don’t think it’s good for them.”

“As long as it fattens them up before we butcher them, that’s all I care.”

Oh dear. She should have taken her leave before this. She shoveled down the pie and escaped before Mary could really get going on the subject, a couple of jars of golden mashed butternut squash in her bag to keep the umbrella company.

It was a long walk home, but she couldn’t bring herself to stay and talk about the poor hens until Daniel was ready to hitch up the buggy. She didn’t mind. The rain was holding off, and there were even rents in the clouds with blue sky showing.

Even so, the little shoot of hope inside her did not survive the walk.

C
arrie was an old hand at covering up her feelings and getting on with life. Company was coming for dinner, which was something to be thankful for. She could tidy and cook and even spend a few minutes outside picking the last of the autumn chrysanthemums for the table, keeping her hands busy and sometimes even her mind.

At least the Steiners were good company. Brian and Melvin had a lot to talk about, and Erica was a gentle soul, shy and prone to sitting in the corners of couches, where holding the baby gave her a good excuse not to talk. But she was a little more forthcoming when there weren’t so many people.

When dinner was over and she and Erica were doing the dishes, the baby in her basket on the floor, Melvin shrugged on a jacket. “I’m going to take Brian out to the barn so he can see what his cousin has been up to lately.”

“I still can’t believe Joshua is working for you.” Brian tugged on his own jacket and held the door. “I mean, actually working.”

“He’s doing a good job on that loft. You’ll see.”

The door closed behind them, and Erica hung up her dish towel while Carrie wiped down the counters. “It still surprises Brian that any good can come out of Nazareth.”

“He shouldn’t be surprised. Joshua picked bushels and bushels of apples, painted our sheds, and has started inside the barn. After the loft, I think Melvin is looking at having him wall off the lower section of it for a shop, with shelving and benches and things.”

“So he’ll be around here for a while, then.”

“Until Thanksgiving, I think. Maybe longer.”

“And it doesn’t bother you, being alone with him?”

Carrie shook her head. “He’s just an overgrown teenager. Sometimes he’s sensible, and sometimes he has his ‘me first’ blinders on. Emma told me how to handle him, and it seems to work.”

Erica laughed and picked up the baby. They went into the sitting room and she handed her to Carrie with no ceremony and no comment. When the bathroom door closed behind her, Carrie settled the baby in her arms as naturally as though she were one of her own siblings.

And waited for the pain.

Little Elsie reached up and patted her cheek, and Carrie touched her perfect hand, chubby and warm. Tiny fingers wrapped around hers with a grip that was surprisingly strong. Elsie gurgled happily, her eyes crescents above plump cheeks, with lashes that were going to play havoc with the little boys when she went to their local one-room schoolhouse for the first time.

When Erica came back, Carrie realized with a kind of dazed relief that holding the baby had been like a gift, not the tearing in her soul that she’d felt in the past.

Was this resignation, then? Or had her heart simply given up?

Erica tucked herself into the corner of the sofa, her feet up under her like the girl she still was. “She likes you.”

“And I like her.” She smiled down at Elsie and was rewarded by a big-eyed gaze that made it impossible not to make silly noises and a goofy face.

Elsie giggled, and the two of them laughed in response. “You’re so good with the young ones,” Erica said. “I see you at church with a crowd of the girls around you, and it always makes me smile.”

“It makes me smile, too. I don’t know what it is, or why they include me in their little news about flowers and birds’ nests and boys, but I love it.”

“That’s probably your secret.” Erica watched Elsie’s eyes close and made no move to take her, so Carrie settled in to enjoy the moment while she had it. “You said a minute ago that Joshua was like an overgrown teenager. Do you suppose that’s why he’s still in no hurry to find himself a wife?”

“I think it’s the opposite—why none of the girls of marrying age are looking at him for a husband.”

Erica raised her brows briefly in acknowledgment. “A woman wants to look to her man for safety and sound judgment. I’m not sure Joshua is a judge of much but a good time.”

“There’s nothing wrong with a good time, but sensible girls eventually settle down and look for a good man instead.”

Erica didn’t respond for a moment, and Carrie got the impression that she was working up to telling her something. Silence was the most fertile ground for confidences to grow in, so Carrie let it deepen.

“I think Lydia Zook might not be one of those sensible girls,” she said at last, in such a low tone that if the house hadn’t been utterly quiet, a person would have missed it.

“If she isn’t, she’s probably being pretty discreet.” How discreet, though, if people other than Carrie’s immediate circle were concerned about it already?

“Most girls would tell their parents if they were seeing someone, but Abe Zook doesn’t seem the kind who would welcome a girl’s confidences.”

That was an understatement.

“My youngest sister, Mariah, is in her buddy bunch with Sarah Grohl, and she says she’s been leaving the group volleyball games and outings and going for long walks and finding unnecessary errands in town and dressing in clothes you can see from a mile off. Goodness knows it’s hard to keep a secret in this district. I just get the feeling it’s because the boy isn’t suitable.”

Bright hair and reckless eyes, squashed into a buggy in a way that would embarrass most girls. Too much familiarity. It had been staring them in the face all this time. They hadn’t met Lydia on the road by accident. It had been carefully planned.

“It’s Joshua.”

Erica looked up with an expression that told Carrie this was what she’d deduced, too—and it wasn’t what she’d wanted to hear. She pulled one of the sofa pillows into her lap and hugged it as though, without the baby, she needed something to cuddle. “He’s twelve years older than she is—and about two centuries older in experience. The kind of experience that good husband material shouldn’t have.”

“He’s been baptized, though. Is she thinking of it?”

“I don’t know. I suppose we’ll see on Sunday. But she’s only begun
Rumspringe
. She doesn’t seem like the type to cut it short and join church so young. And there are other things. If I were Abe Zook, I’d be worried.”

“What things? What’s worrying you?” The echo of Susan’s voice sounded in her mind, asking her to talk to Lydia. Had Erica tried and failed, too?

“There are only six years between us, you know. It used to be that the young girls in Mariah’s group could come to me and talk about anything. But lately…” She sighed, put the pillow aside, and held her arms out. Gently, Carrie put Elsie into them.

“Lately?”

“I’ve seen Lydia walking on the county highway in the direction of Hill’s. The hired man has his own rooms in the barn there, did you know that? Joshua stays with his folks so the room doesn’t come out of his pay, but he still has the use of it. There’s a kitchen to make a cup of coffee, a bathroom to wash up in, and a furnished bedroom. So he told me once, when he first got the job.”

“You think they might be…?”

“I think that a sensible girl would not put herself in the way of temptation.”

And they’d already concluded that Lydia was not a sensible girl. “Erica, if you’ve tried to talk to her, and maybe if Mariah has tried, we’ve done all we can short of locking her in her room.”

“But no one has tried to talk to Joshua.”

That was true. “I could ask Melvin. They seem to get on fairly well.”

“I don’t think he would take correction from a man. That teenage-boy tendency would get in the way,
nix
?”

“Then who? Maybe Emma?”

“He is here in your yard during the day,” Erica said softly.

Carrie swayed back, her shoulders flat on the rear cushions of the couch. “Oh no. I’m done with meddling in people’s business. Lydia has probably already told him about my attempts to talk with her. He’ll think I’m a busybody—and he’ll be right.”

Erica subsided and began to coo at the baby, but Carrie could tell that her thoughts on the matter hadn’t changed one bit. And she was using the same tactic that had worked on her—a little silence went a long way.

By New Birth Sunday, when the congregation was streaming into Old Joe Yoder’s huge barn for the service that included the baptism, Carrie’s feelings hadn’t changed. She had no business talking to Lydia, or to Joshua Steiner either, about whom they courted or how.

But there was Lydia, whose reckless ways seemed to have triggered a “project” among the women of the community. Susan, Miriam, herself, Erica…well, that was how it was done,
nix
? When there was a problem to be solved—whether it was a quilt that needed to be stitched or a young woman who needed guidance—the community pitched in.

Carrie watched with interest as the folks who were taking the step of baptism filed into the front row. A number of young people had been taking instruction from the bishop for the past eighteen weeks—among them, she noticed, Sarah Grohl, who was in Lydia’s buddy bunch.

But not Lydia. So did that mean she was not thinking of marrying Joshua? Not that a girl so young had to marry the boy she was dating. That would be unwise, especially if he had no means of supporting a wife yet. It would have been quite the surprise to see, anyway. A young woman joined church when she had matured enough to make the most important decision of her life—more important even than the man she would marry. Because earthly marriage ended at death, but the choice of Jesus as her eternal bridegroom lasted for all eternity.

There were one or two others in the front row as well…a man who had left the church at least a decade ago and gone out into the
Englisch
world had come back during the summer. His mother wept silent tears of joy on her bench near the front when she saw him walk in, head bowed and hands covering his face as a sign of his unworthiness.

The baptism always left Carrie feeling clean and joyful—as though the bishop were pouring the cup of water over her bare head, washing away her sins. But today, though her body sat quietly in her place toward the back of the barn—ahead of the
Youngie
, but behind the older women and the women with families—she felt her mind to be one step removed.

Or maybe it was her heart that stood at a distance, looking on instead of being involved. She was standing on a path that no one else had walked, and no one
would
walk if Melvin and Amelia and Mary Lapp all had their way. Everyone else in the
Gmee
trod the familiar paths, said the familiar things, sang these hymns and murmured prayers that generations of their families had before them. And here she was, all alone on her narrow road, pulling her courage around her and hoping it would keep her warm.

After the noon meal, she found Emma walking toward the pasture with one of Grant’s girls on either hand. “We’re going to see if the pond froze over last night,” Emma called gaily. “Come with us.”

“Are you planning to skate?” Carrie fell in beside seven-year-old Katie. “If it did freeze, you’ll be able to break it with your finger.”

“
Nei
,” Katie said, respectfully enough, but Carrie got the impression her intelligence had been found wanting. Nobody skated until Christmas, when a good three or four inches of ice on the ponds had been tested by someone’s
Daed
and his approval given. “We’re learning in school about animals hibernating. I want to see if the fish have gone into the mud, like Miss Hannah says.”

“You wouldn’t be able to see them,” Carrie said.

“I don’t think that’s the point,” Emma said as both girls let go of her hands and ran down the slope to the pond. The dried brown stalks of the cattails clattered in the wind being pushed toward them by the big clouds overhead. Even the blackbirds had deserted the pond, and gone where cheery summer birds went when the winds blew down from Canada. “Grant says the girls were a handful this morning, and I think they’re avoiding him.”

“A little too much wedding excitement?”

“
Ja
, I think so.” She turned to Carrie, her eyes sparkling from much more than the wind. “Only think, Carrie. By the time we meet for church again, I’ll be married.”

To which the only reply was a hug.

After a few moments, Carrie saw that the girls were beginning to tire of not finding sleepy fish in the crunchy mud at the edges of the pond. She would miss her opportunity if she didn’t take it now.

“Emma, can I ask you something?”

Emma raised a brow. “That is the most unnecessary question I’ve ever heard. This is me you’re talking to, remember?”

“And I’m glad of it.” She took her arm and hugged it close, the fringes of their shawls blowing together. “Have you heard anything of Joshua Steiner and Lydia Zook courting?”

She felt Emma’s body stiffen and knew the answer before Emma even spoke. “I haven’t. But you have, evidently.”

“I’ve seen them together, and I was talking to Erica, and to my sister Susan, and everyone seems to agree that there might be cause for worry there.”

“If there is, it’s Abe who must deal with it.”

“I don’t think he can. Not alone. I think it might just turn into a ‘project.’”

“Ah.” Emma watched the girls, who had discovered that if you tore the fluff out of the tops of the cattails, it would catch the wind and sail away by the handful.

“I just wondered if Joshua had spoken with you.”
And if he has, if you told him about my private worries.

“I don’t talk much with Joshua anymore—nothing more than hello at church and when I see him on the road.”

Well, that seemed to answer one question. Relief trickled through Carrie. She should have known better than to doubt her friend. But there was still the other question.

“But could you talk with him about it? A man his age has no business courting a girl of sixteen, especially with his reputation. I’m surprised Abe hasn’t put a stop to it, if he knows.”

“Carrie.” Emma turned to face her, concern etched into her smooth skin. “I decided that Grant was the man for me when I was only a little older than Lydia. I would have thanked God on my knees if he had given me more than that one ride home from Singing.”

“But Grant is steady. Dependable. And he doesn’t have—”

“—a reputation. So you said. The truth is,
Liewi
, I don’t have time to go chasing after Joshua to give him a talking-to. With all the work there is to do in the next ten days, I’ll be lucky if I
have
a wedding. Do you know I haven’t even made my cape and apron yet?” Emma scraped an errant wisp of hair out of her eyes. “I’m so grateful that the cake, at least, is in your hands. That’s one thing I don’t have to think about.”