For an instant she was one of them, furious at being without a phone in an emergency. Who lived this way? What if someday something happened to her baby and she couldn’t get help?
She stumbled into the barn, clutching the jack. Samuel had already replaced the jack Joseph must have been using, and he had rigged up a lever with a heavy anvil and a barn post.
He grabbed the jack she carried.
“Has he said anything?” she asked.
“No.” He tried to maneuver the jack into place. “It’s better this way, Anna. Best if he’s unconscious while we’re getting the car off him.”
How could he sound so calm? She clutched her hands together. But panic wouldn’t help.
Myra ran into the barn, white-faced but tearless. “They are here—”
Others brushed by her then, men all alike to her dazed vision with their black pants and beards, hurrying to Samuel’s side. Myra made an instinctive move, and Anna caught her before she could go closer.
“Wait, stay here. Give them room to work.”
“Ja.” Catching back a sob, Myra nodded.
A woman bolted into the barn—English, with a cell phone in her hand. “I’ve called nine-one-one. They’ll be here soon.” She put her arm around Myra, exchanging glances with Anna. “How bad . . . ?”
“Joseph is trapped under the car.” The car. Her car, which shouldn’t even be here.
“I’m Rosemary Welch.” The woman was slim, in her early thirties, probably, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt over a white tee. She ran a hand through curly dark hair. “I’m sorry my husband wasn’t home to help. What can I do? I’ve got my car. Do you want me to go for anyone?”
Myra didn’t seem able to answer. She could only stare at the car, her whole being straining toward her husband’s motionless body.
“I don’t think so, thank you,” Anna answered for her. “Thank you so much for coming and for calling the paramedics. We are grateful.”
“No problem.” The woman glanced toward the car, as if wondering what it was doing in an Amish barn, but she didn’t ask. “I’ll wait. I can drive Myra to the hospital if need be.”
“Thank you,” Anna said again. “Maybe the children . . .”
Myra seemed to rouse herself. “They were still sleeping when I heard the bell. Someone should go to them . . .” Her voice trailed away, as if she couldn’t complete the thought.
Again Rosemary and Anna exchanged glances. “I’ll look after them, Myra,” Rosemary said quickly. “You stay with your . . .” She stopped, apparently not knowing who Anna was.
“I’m Anna Beiler, Joseph’s sister. Some of the other women will come soon, I’m sure. If you could stay with the little ones until they get here?”
The woman nodded, already moving to the door. “Call me if you need me.”
When she’d gone, Anna put her arm around Myra’s waist. “You have gut neighbors.”
“Ja.” Myra seemed to rouse herself. “Do you think—Can’t we go a little closer?”
Nodding, Anna led her around the side of the car, safely out of the men’s way.
“They’ll have him out in a moment. It will be all right,” she murmured.
She didn’t know that it would, and the fact that Joseph was still unconscious seemed bad to her, but Myra needed hope to cling to. They both did.
Samuel was directing the operation, the other men moving without question to follow his lead. He was calm and steady despite his anxiety for his friend.
The anger Anna had felt at him for not moving more quickly drained away, leaving her cold inside.
“Now,” Samuel said.
She saw what they intended. The men were levering the car up, shoving jacks into place as it lifted. She held her breath. If it slipped . . .
It didn’t. Samuel dropped to the floor, peering beneath the car. “Once more,” he said.
Again they levered the car up, muscles straining, shirts darkening with sweat. The instant the jacks were in place, Samuel snaked his body under the car next to Joseph. She held her breath, praying, knowing Myra was praying, too.
She saw Samuel’s hand gesture, and the men bent as one to slide Joseph gently out.
“He’s alive,” someone said, and Myra seemed to sag against her.
Thank you, Lord. Thank you
.
Figures darkened the rectangle of sunlight in the open doorway. The paramedics had arrived and were moving quickly to Joseph, kneeling next to him in the center of a circle of Amish figures.
“You’ll go with me to the hospital,” Myra said, clutching Anna’s hand.
“Ja, of course I will,” she soothed.
But all the time her thoughts spun in a wheel of blame. This was her fault. She had brought the car to this place where cars were forbidden. If not for her, Joseph wouldn’t be lying there, bloody and motionless. She should never have come home.
How
much longer would they have to wait for word? Anna moved to the window of the waiting room, trying not to fidget, and stared out over the flat roof of the adjoining hospital wing. It had been hours, surely, since Joseph had been taken to surgery.
Please, Lord. Be with my brother
. She fought to compose her mind to prayer, but her thoughts skittered helplessly in every direction. Now they fled to Gracie, and she yearned to be sitting with her at the kitchen table right now, spooning cereal into her mouth.
“You’re not worrying about Gracie, are you?” Mahlon moved to her side, a cup of coffee looking too small in his big hand.
She tried to manage a smile for the gawky teenage brother who’d turned into a responsible married man while she was gone. “How did you guess that?”
“Wasn’t hard. You’d either be thinking about her or about Joseph.”
“I’m doing plenty of thinking about him. And praying, too. If only . . .”
“Ja,” Mahlon said. “He shouldn’t have tried to do that by himself, for sure. But he’s strong. He’ll come through this fine, ain’t so?”
He was asking for reassurance, she realized. Beyond his height and beard and outward maturity, she glimpsed the boy he’d been—a year older than she, but always seeming younger, the happy-go-lucky boy who’d tumbled into mischief without thinking.
“That’s right,” she said, trying to sound confident. “Nothing can keep Joseph down for long.”
He nodded, pressing his lips together as if to keep them from trembling. “You don’t need to worry about your boppli, either. My Esther will take gut care of her and little Sarah, too, for sure.”
“I know she will.” Mahlon’s young bride had come straight to the house to take over the babies, while Levi’s wife, Barbara, organized the folks who kept showing up to help.
Those who weren’t taking over duties at home were here, it seemed. The waiting room had slowly filled up as word had spread through the Amish community.
She turned back to the room. Daad was talking to Bishop Mose in one corner, a few older men forming a supporting circle around them. With their dark clothes and white beards they looked like a cluster of Old Testament patriarchs.
Leah sat on one side of Myra, clasping her hand. Samuel was on the other, supporting his sister. Other Amish, their faces as somber as their clothes, waited with them, murmuring softly now and then.
Suddenly Anna saw them as her sociology professor would have . . . a strange, anachronistic group with their old-fashioned clothes and their identical hairstyles, talking in their own version of Low German interspersed with English words.
Different. Odd. He wouldn’t have used those value-laden words, but that’s what he’d have meant. She stared at them, feeling as if she were looking at an illustration in a textbook.
She blinked, trying to shake off the sense that she saw them from both inside and outside the group. Coffee, that was what she needed.
She skirted a small group of men and headed for the coffee urn. As she passed, a word from their conversation reached her.
Car
. They were talking about the car, of course, the cause of this tragedy. Her car, which never should have been in Joseph’s barn to lure him to disaster.
Her hands weren’t quite steady as she lifted the lever on the coffee urn, filling the cup. Naturally they’d be talking about it, even as they prayed for Joseph. She glanced again at Myra, her face tense with strain, and at the supporting figures on either side of her, hiding their own pain to comfort her.
Was this what it had been like the night she’d landed in this same hospital after the borrowed car she’d been driving had hit an Amish buggy? Had Daadi and Mammi grieved and been comforted by the community?
She didn’t know. She hadn’t even thought of it as she’d come out of the daze of medication, aware only of her own misery. Mammi, Daad, Leah—one of them, patient and loving, had always been next to her when she woke.
She’d repaid them with impatient words and stony silences, so obsessed with her own concerns that she hadn’t even thought about what they were going through.
She spotted Bishop Mose coming toward her. She took a hurried gulp of the coffee, trying to wash away the shame that had hit so unexpectedly.
“Some coffee for you?” She reached for a cup, trusting that the movement hid her face for a moment.
At his nod, she filled the cup, adding the sugar she knew he used.
“Denke, Anna.” He took the cup in a work-worn hand that was stained by the oils he used in his harness shop.
“People out there,” she said, jerking her head toward the window, “they couldn’t imagine a bishop who has to do his own job as well as his ministry.”
Bishop Mose didn’t seem surprised by a comment that had to sound odd under the circumstances. But then, it would take a lot to startle him.
“I guess that’s true. But Paul still made tents when he was an apostle, ain’t so?” He didn’t seem to expect an answer. “How are you, Anna?”
She clenched her teeth, determined not to say what she was thinking. But the words slipped past her guard and came out anyway.
“It’s my fault. If I hadn’t brought the car here, none of this would have happened.”
For a moment those wise old eyes surveyed her. “Joseph had nothing to say about what he did, then?”
“I didn’t mean that.” She fumbled for a way to express what she felt. “Everyone knows how fascinated Joseph is with machinery. I should have realized that if the car was there he’d start tinkering with it. I should have gotten rid of it.”
“And Joseph should have known better than to crawl under a car supported by one old jack, ja? And all alone, besides, with no one there to help him. Ain’t so?”
Somehow she’d rather cling to her guilt. Was that just another way of being self-centered?
Bishop Mose patted her hand. “We’ve all got plenty of real things to feel guilty about in this life, without taking on burdens that don’t belong to us.” He squeezed her hand briefly. Without waiting for a response, he moved off toward Myra.
Things to feel guilty about
—she had those, all right. They’d been slapping her in the face ever since she’d returned. Her friends in Chicago would reassure her that she hadn’t done anything wrong, that she’d just been trying to find herself, that she deserved to be free.
She didn’t. The conviction landed on her. She didn’t deserve that freedom she longed for so much. Not until she’d made things right with the people she’d hurt.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Samuel
held Myra’s hand in his, heart aching for his little sister.
Dear Father, give her strength. She will need it
.
Strong
wasn’t a word he’d ever used to describe Myra. Their sister, Elizabeth, on the other hand—no one ever doubted Elizabeth’s powers. Even though she came between Samuel and Myra in age, she’d bossed them all around from the cradle, and no doubt was doing the same for her husband and kinder out in Indiana.
Myra was the gentle, easily wounded one, and maybe closer to his heart for that reason. He’d always thought he had to protect Myra. Until she married, of course. Then she’d found her strength in Joseph. It was a knife in his heart to think she might lose that, all from a moment’s thoughtlessness.
He should have insisted on going with Joseph. He might have known Joseph wouldn’t be content to tinker around with the car’s insides. No, he’d have to test out every bit of it, because that was the kind of mind he had, endlessly curious about every piece of machinery he saw.
“Samuel.”
He jerked his mind back to the present, realizing his name had been spoken more than once, and stood to greet Daniel Glick, Leah’s husband.
“I just came from your place,” Daniel said, turning his straw hat in his hands. “Everything is fine there. The kinder are happy and the animals fed. I locked up your house and saw to the horses myself.”
“Denke, Daniel.” He’d known, of course, that everything would be taken care of. That was their way in times of trouble.
“Is there any news?” Daniel lowered his voice, glancing at Myra.
“Not yet.” Samuel realized he was clenching his hands and deliberately relaxed them. “All we can do is wait. And pray.”
“Ja. I am doing that, for sure.” Daniel hesitated. He glanced at Leah, and it seemed a silent communication passed between them. “I was thinking that my oldest boy, Matthew, might be some help to you in the machine shop if Joseph is laid up for a while. He seems to have a gift for machinery.”
“He does that.” Samuel had seen enough of young Matthew to be aware of the boy’s interest. It was a sacrifice for Daniel to be offering him, both because Daniel could use the boy’s help on his own farm and because it was well known that Daniel would rather see the boy a farmer. “Let’s talk to Joseph about it, soon as he’s able,” he said.
Please, Lord . . .
“Things will change with Joseph laid up.” Myra looked up at them suddenly, her face pinched. “I don’t know how we’ll manage.”
“You mustn’t worry about that now.” Samuel bent to pat her clasped hands. “It will be all right. Joseph will be fine.” She needed to believe that.