Wonderful Lonesome (31 page)

The next pain seized her.

Abbie was scrambling around the stove, trying to stoke the fire and looking for a pot.

“The big one is on the back porch.” Ruthanna forced the words out between gritted teeth.

“You’re going to be all right, Ruthanna.” Abbie touched Ruthanna’s shoulder before stepping out the back door.

The room suddenly went frosty. Ruthanna began to shiver. Her husband was wrapped in a sheet, and her baby was coming a month early. How could she have a baby without Eber?

She leaned forward and keened.

As soon as he dragged half a bale of hay through the back door and Abbie spread the most tattered quilt she could find over it, Willem excused himself. He paused only for a scant look at Eber before dragging the now empty water barrel out of the kitchen and toward the well. The cows would need to be milked before long, and he wondered when the last time was that Ruthanna took a slop bucket out to the chickens. Eber’s horse was still hitched to the buggy Ruthanna had taken to the Weavers.

Willem was glad for the chores. He could stay near without feeling in the way of the birthing work. He stood the barrel on end next to the well and began to fill it one bucket at a time.

Rudy galloped into the yard. “I ran into Ananias on his way for the doctor.”

“It’s too late.” Willem sighed and dumped another bucket.

Rudy slung out of his saddle and folded his long form as if he had been kicked in the stomach. “God’s will is surely mysterious sometimes.”

Willem nodded. “There’s no way to get word to the doctor that he need not come.”

Rudy let out one long, slow breath. “Perhaps he will have a potion for Ruthanna. She must be frantic, but she will need to rest.”

“I’m afraid it is too late for her to rest as well, although she might yet have need of the good doctor’s expertise before the night is over. I assume he knows how to deliver a baby.”

Rudy stopped Willem’s cranking motion with one long hand. “Ruthanna is birthing her child now? With Eber just gone?”

“What we really need,” Willem said, “is an undertaker. I know we usually bury our dead within a day or so, but Ruthanna will be in no condition. And she will insist on being there.”

“She should be there. Eber will only have one funeral.”

“Eber will have to be embalmed to give her some time to recover from the birth. A few days, at least. We could try to buy some ice to put under him, but the days are still warm. It will be difficult to cover the smell.”

“You are right that he should be embalmed.” Rudy released his hold, and Willem resumed cranking up the bucket. “But an
English
undertaker will want a fee.”

“Yes, I suppose he will. We’ll have to sort that out later.”

“Maybe he would like free eggs and fresh milk for a few weeks.” Rudy turned back to his horse and prepared to mount. “I will go to Limon and see what arrangement I can make.”

Abbie knelt at Ruthanna’s head and let her friend dig her fingernails into her arm with neither flinch nor protest. When she was not grunting against pain, Ruthanna sobbed and cried her husband’s name. On the stove, the soup pot of water seemed to refuse to boil, and when Willem returned with the barrel, Abbie wanted to start another pot.

Abbie reminded herself that her mother had been an unofficial but experienced midwife at dozens of births, but still she admired the quiet calm Esther exuded as she went about getting Ruthanna comfortable on the pallet of hay with her knees up and inspecting to see how far labor had progressed.

“Try to relax between contractions,” Esther said with one hand on Ruthanna’s abdomen. “I do not think it will be long before it’s time to push.”

“It was not supposed to be like this.” Ruthanna’s voice was at near-shriek pitch. “Eber wanted a child even more than I did. God waited years before giving us one.”

“
Shh
.” Esther patted Ruthanna’s arm. “The hardest part is ahead of you. You must save your strength.”

Ruthanna flopped her head back on the hay. “My strength died with my husband.”

Esther positioned herself where she could look Ruthanna in the eye. “You still have a baby coming. Nothing is going to change that. You must focus on what you have to do.”

Ruthanna’s head swung widely from side to side. “What does it matter without Eber?”

“This child is a gift from God,” Esther said softly but firmly. “When he is in your arms, you will treasure him. You will see Eber in his face every day. Right now you must birth him, nothing else.”

Ruthanna’s cry settled into a whimper, but when the next contraction came, she was ready.

Abbie squeezed her hand. Many Amish women her age had several children of their own, but Abbie had never before been present at a birth. It was wonderful and terrible at the same time. Her mother seemed to know just what to do. Abbie tried to imagine what it would be like when she had a child. Would her mother be able to remain calm when her own daughter travailed?

“Abbie,” Esther said, “we are going to need string and a clean pair of scissors or a knife.”

Abbie looked around.

“In the basket on the top shelf.” Ruthanna’s voice was flat but her instructions accurate.

Abbie could see the basket now, the one Ruthanna had used as she worked on her baby’s quilt. When she pulled it off the shelf, Abbie could see the small quilt neatly folded in the flat woven bottom.

“The cradle,” Ruthanna croaked. “It’s still in the barn, but I think Eber finished it.”

“There’s plenty of time for that.” Esther pushed Ruthanna’s knees apart. “When the next contraction begins, you can bear down.”

The water had barely reached boiling when Eber and Ruthanna’s daughter slid into the world. Esther laid the baby on a clean towel and then tied off the cord and cut it. Just as the child let out her first wail, Esther turned her toward Ruthanna and Abbie.

Abbie gasped. “She is beautiful, Ruthanna. So beautiful!”

Esther wrapped the baby in the towel and handed the bundle to Abbie. “Don’t spend too much time admiring her. She’ll want her mother soon enough.”

Ruthanna smiled through the streaks of grimy tears on her face. “And her mother wants her.”

Marveling, Abbie released the baby into Ruthanna’s waiting arms and then settled in again as together they counted fingers and toes.

“She’s perfect. Her father would have—” Ruthanna’s voice broke.

Abbie leaned her head against Ruthanna’s. She had no words for the moment.

“Poor Willem,” Ruthanna said, “waiting outside all this time. You’d better go tell him.”

Abbie wiped her eyes with the back of one hand and nodded.

Outside, a moment later, she stopped to gaze at Willem in the fractured instant before he sensed her presence. This was the man she had imagined having children with. The thought that they might have no future triggered tears.

Willem spotted her from where he sat on the ground with his elbows propped on his knees and his head hanging between his dangling hands. He jumped to his feet. “The baby?”

“A girl. They’re both fine.”

A grin cracked Willem’s face. “A girl. I hope she is as lovely as her mother.”

“Every bit.” Abbie’s throat was too thick to say more.

Willem opened his arms, and Abbie went into them for the second time that day. She breathed in the sweaty scent of a man unafraid of hard work—and a man whose salvation her own father would question if he knew what Willem contemplated. Abbie banished the thought.

“I guess my
daed
could not find the doctor,” Abbie said. “He never came.”

Willem kissed the top of her head. “Rudy was here. He went for an undertaker.”

The weather was not cold and dreary, as Ruthanna had supposed it would be. She had not imagined the day she buried her husband could be warm, sunny, and inviting. It was the sort of day that beckoned giggles and bare feet in a creek, picking wild sunflowers and naming clouds.

Those were the wishes of girlhood, not the order of a funeral.

Standing behind her home, Ruthanna pulled the baby’s quilt away from her face and stroked a silken cheek. She had barely discovered how to feed the child comfortably, much less face the fatherless years that stretched ahead. Someday this innocent little girl would hear the story of her father’s death on the day of her birth. Ruthanna would avoid the topic for as many years as she could. No child should have to learn to mingle grief with rejoicing, missing a man she never knew simply because of a coincidence of dates.

Not coincidence, Ruthanna reminded herself.
Gottes wille
. Was not everything that happened God’s will and meant to teach her something? Ruthanna could not see the lesson in tragedy. She saw no hope in devastation, no justice for a little girl with no
daed
.

The back door opened. Abbie’s face looked as drawn and pale as Ruthanna supposed her own was.

“Is it time?” Ruthanna asked.

“The first buggies are here.”

Ruthanna adjusted her daughter’s slight weight in her arms and followed Abbie into the house, where Abbie and Esther had prepared the humble home for the service. The undertaker’s black wagon had come early in the morning to return Eber to his bedroom, this time embalmed and laid in an unlined coffin on a wide plank balanced over a bench. The crisp white sheet would come off soon. All other furniture in the room had been removed to the barn, save one chair for Ruthanna. Esther had insisted it was too soon to expect Ruthanna to stand to greet the Amish families who would come to see Eber. Dark cloths covered the windows, casting the room into unfamiliar midday gray shadows.

“Do you want to see him before the others come in?” Abbie asked.

Ruthanna nodded, the knot in her throat too big for speech.

Abbie stepped quietly across the room, which now felt cavernous to Ruthanna, to lift the sheet and gently fold it into a tight, small rectangle.

Ruthanna’s heart pounded. Eber lay in the same unadorned white shirt and dark trousers that had been his wedding suit, with his arms folded across his chest. The undertaker had made Eber look healthier than he had been in the last few weeks, the fullness of his cheeks unlike the gaunt outline Ruthanna had become accustomed to.

Oh Eber
.