She considered, knowing she’d asked herself the same questions. “No, but neither can I choose a life that would be . . . second best.”
“Thanks, you’re really letting me down easy.”
She laughed; she had to. He was good at that, at making her smile against her will, but she could not build a life upon it. She knew that even if Grant never returned, it would always be him that haunted her days and her nights and her heart.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“Don’t be . . . I suppose this should be our last walk together, then?” He sounded wistful, but she knew she had to be firm.
“
Jah
, you will find someone better, Jacob.”
He laughed ruefully. “Will I, Sarah King? I think not when she ’d have to match eyes like a forest glen and a heart like a breathing garden.”
“You will,” she said again with finality and was glad when he gave her a cheerful wave to show he had no hard feelings toward her. She went onto the porch and back inside, feeling much lighter in spirit.
T
he spring weather continued, and many of the plants in the doctor’s greenhouse began to take on even more palpable signs of growth in the form of new buds and shoots, blossoms and sprouts. Sarah made it a point to slip across the fields and use the key that she wore on a ribbon around her neck at least once a day to water and check on the plants. This late afternoon, the Bustles had gone to Philadelphia for a few days and Sarah had promised to keep an eye on things. She felt a thrilling sensation when she realized that the door to the greenhouse stood ajar. Her first thought was that Grant had come back at last, and the idea of seeing him sent her heart racing. She pushed open the door, searching the corners of the building, but saw no one.
“Grant?” she called, beginning to walk among the rows of plants. When the door squeaked shut behind her, she turned with a smile to come face-to-face with Matthew Fisher. He looked bad, she thought. He was thin, his hair scraggly, his smell rank. He wore a blue jacket, and Sarah thought of the fire. Then, somewhere inside her, she began to pray, because she knew that she was in great danger. A hundred Bible verses swam in her mind, but especially she recalled the story of angels encamping around those who thought the odds were too far great against them.
Please God, send Your angels to me now. Give me words to say to this man. Calm his troubled soul
.
“Calling for the doctor, Sarah King? I think I owe him one.”
“Well, he ’s gone,” she said, surprised at the steadiness of her voice.
“He should be,” he said, reaching to give her
kapp
string a pull and dropping it to the floor. “Messing around with a good Amish girl like you—the
Englisch
dog.”
Sarah stood her ground, resting one hand on a plot of tomatoes and feeling the fuzzy comfort of the vine.
“I saw your
mamm
. Father was in the hospital; she works there.”
He froze at her words, then seemed to shrug them aside, reaching out to cup her chin. “You’re beautiful, Sarah King,” he growled, moving as if to kiss her.
“It’s
Der Herr
that you see in me that is beautiful, nothing more.”
Again her words arrested his movements, and he stopped, as if listening to something far off, but then he moved, his mouth coming toward hers. She turned her head, and his lips found her cheek. “I’ve prayed for you,” she told him.
“That was a waste of time.” He put his hands on her shoulders.
“Matthew, I saw the scar on your mother’s cheek; I can only imagine the scars on your heart.” Her voice was still steady as images of a younger Matthew came to mind, sitting forlorn in a buggy while his father blustered.
He shook her, but without much heart. “You think you’ll turn my head with your gentleness, but I’ll not have it.”
She nodded as if in agreement. “Just talk to me; not everything has to be anger.” She took a deep breath. “Then, if you wish to kiss me, I will let you.”
“You will kiss me when I desire it,” he stated, but there was a spark of interest in his eyes and she was quick to see it.
“Maybe I should tell you a secret about me,” she said. “It’s unfair to just hear everything from one person.”
He scoffed and pushed her away. “What secret does a good Amish girl have? That you’re in love with an
Englischer
?” He looked away. “You might be better off.”
“No . . . that’s not a secret. I love him, but he left me. That’s my secret. He wrote me a letter and cut me off. I should have admitted it to myself sooner. I’ve hurt other people all because of wanting something that can’t be—just like your father can never be the one you want.”
Matthew took out a cigarette, then dropped it, grinding it beneath his grubby sneaker. “I have no father.”
“You will only get angrier if I say it, but you have
Der Herr
.”
He barked out a laugh. “Yeah, what a great Father—to give me this life.”
“We all want things to be different sometimes. But you have a choice. You can be a good father yourself. You can give a normal, healthy life to your wife and children someday.”
He stared down at her hand. Tears welled in his eyes and fell down the hollows of his thin cheeks.
“Normal?” he rasped. “There’s nothing left that’s normal about me. You want me to talk to you? I cannot even bring myself to say the things my father did to me. You wouldn’t understand half of them if you heard them. There ’s nothing left of me . . . I’m an animal, or worse.”
“Matthew Fisher, I’ve seen your
mamm
outrun it, outlive it . . . somehow, some way . . . with the Lord’s help. Do you think that she can do this and you can’t? I tell you, you can.”
“How?” he asked bleakly. “I don’t have your faith. I can’t regrow your father’s crop; it’s too late. If they catch me, I’ll go to prison.”
“I don’t know if you would; I don’t think Father would press charges. You can have a different life if you choose it.”
There was a prolonged stillness, an uncanny sense of breath being held, and worlds swinging in pendulum, while she prayed.
“I have an uncle in Ohio; he ’s
Englisch
,” he said finally, and she almost sobbed aloud with joy. “I could go to him, maybe. If he’d have me . . . He knew what my father was like.”
“Then let’s go inside and use the doctor’s phone to call him!” Sarah cried, her beautiful eyes wide and excited.
Matthew stared at her. “You would break the rules and call on the telephone?”
“
Jah
. Most certainly. I’ve used a phone before, so I know how to do it.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know his number.”
“Do you know how to work a computer and the Internet? I have a key to the doctor’s house. You could look up the number.”
He was looking at her in amazement. “Why would you help me?”
She took a deep breath. “Because you’re worth it. And you can take a bath while you’re in there and find some of the doctor’s clothes to wear.”
“You’re crazy, girl.”
“Maybe I am,” she said with a lift of her chin, as she walked to retrieve her
kapp
. “But I am going to help you.”
S
arah unlocked the back door and walked into the kitchen she ’d helped to paint in what seemed like an eternity ago.
Matthew followed her, looking hunted when she glanced at him.
“Let’s switch on as few lights as possible,” she said. “I don’t want my family to notice and think something’s wrong.”
“You would make a
gut
criminal mind maybe.”
“No, I’m just practical.”
He was staring around the kitchen and peering into the shadow-filled living room. “It seems so different here now. I . . . can’t seem to recognize it.”
She went to him and patted his arm. “I forgot, Matthew, that this was your home.”
“It was no home ever, no matter how much
Mamm
tried.”
“But she is well now and happy. She worries about you.”
He nodded but didn’t speak.
“I’ll show you the computer. Can you work it?”
Jah
. . . I learned a little here and there.” “
She watched as he dealt with the mysteries of the machine and then somehow found his uncle ’s phone number. “I’ll go out while you call.”
“Sarah?” He called to her from the desk, the telephone in his hand.
“
Jah
?”
“Are you going to leave?”
“No,” she promised. “I won’t leave you here alone.”
He nodded and then started pressing buttons on the phone.
She paced the distance from the foyer to the parlor and back again many times before he came out. He looked exhilarated. “My uncle . . . he’s leaving tonight, to come and get me. I’ll hide in the woods in a place he remembers, and he will pick me up.”
She clasped her hands together with joy. “I’m so happy, Matthew.”
He ran a hand ruefully through his long, greasy hair. “I do wish that I looked better to greet him.”
“Go upstairs and bathe. I’ll cut your hair after and find you some clothes.”
“Not the Amish bowl cut?” he asked, half-seriously.
Nee
. . . I can do it differently.” “
And she did, layering his now-clean hair over the too-large collar of one of the doctor’s shirts; she cut his hair into some semblance of the outside world.
“I have to go back now, or the folks will be wondering,” she told him at last, after she ’d fixed him some canned goods and made him a cup of tea.
“I don’t know how to say thanks, Sarah. I can’t believe how you helped me, and I have to tell you something. The doctor . . . the one you love . . . he, well—he helped me too, one day, though I didn’t know it at the time. He talked to me.”
“It was the Lord,” she said, thrilled to hear of good that Grant had done, but noting that Matthew’s mouth turned down at the words. “Please, Matthew, don’t forget
Der Herr
’s love . . . even if you’ve never believed much in it before. You can be different; you can make a difference. One day, you can be whole again.”
He couldn’t look her in the face, so she leaned near to him. “I promised a kiss if you would talk with me. I freely give it.” He glanced up, and she kissed him on his cheek. His eyes welled with tears.
“
Danki
, Sarah. You make me feel—human again.”
They went about cleaning up and shutting things off and then went out into the oncoming evening. She pressed his hand as she began the run across the fields and turned over her shoulder only once to see him loping off into the woods to wait at his rendezvous point. “Dear Lord.” She laughed, praying aloud. “Dear Lord, You are amazing. You turn the darkness into light and set the captives free! Amen. Amen.”
W
ell, she ’s up to something good, she is.” The bishop rubbed his hands together as he perched on the edge of Grant’s bed.
Grant was still half asleep in the predawn hour. “What’s that?”
“Sarah helped Matthew Fisher escape to Ohio last night, used your house to do it too. Edith, at the post office, gets all the gossip. They say Matthew has an
Englisch
uncle who’s going to help him, and it was all Sarah’s doing.”
Grant rubbed his eyes blearily and ran a hand through his hair. “Am I dreaming?”
“
Nee
.” The bishop laughed. “But she ’s becoming a woman of her own, she is. I always wanted to help that boy but could never get around the father. Guess it took a woman’s touch, after all.”
Grant shouldered the light blanket. “I’m going back to sleep until chore time. You can tell me later that this was a dream.”
The bishop slapped his back. “You’ve got three minutes to sleep, Son. The cows are waiting.”
Gut
. . . three minutes. I’ll take it.” “
T
he King family decided to make their annual trek to the farmers’ market in Lockport on a beautiful sunny day of the last week of April, when the bees had come back to life to flit about in the fresh air. Each family member had something to sell; the boys had leather tooling; Father, fishing lures;
Mamm
, crochet work; and Sarah had her Patch of Heaven quilt. She had thought long and hard as to what to do with the quilt, but as the months had passed and no word had come from Grant, she decided that holding on to it would only serve to remind her of a brief time of happiness that now caused her great pain. It would be better to let the quilt bless someone else with its warmth. So the family set off in the wagon and stopped by the Kemp farm, where John, Chelsea, and the baby joined them in their own wagon full of various cheese wheels.
They sang snatches of cheery songs as they rode along or called back and forth to each other with jokes or riddles. Even Sarah joined in, feeling some of the fun spirit of the day. She could remember being a very little girl and going to the farmers’ market for the first time. She ’d been so excited that she could not sleep the night before as she worried and wondered whether anyone would buy her tied rug made from
Mamm
’s scrap bag. Sure enough, the rug had sold early, and Sarah had spent the day sitting on a pile of potatoes and watching as Father and
Mamm
did business with both
Englisch
and Amish. She smiled at the memory; life had seemed so much simpler when she was a child.
They arrived early in Lockport, and Father paid the fee for the stalls where they could set up their wares. Sarah helped arrange everything attractively, then draped her quilt over a couple of piled baskets in the background of all the different canned goods. There were other quilts across the way. She could see the patterns of Jacob’s Ladder and Solomon’s Rose and the more traditional, Sunshine and Shadow. Embroidery work and crocheted pillows were also in abundance.
“
Ach
, Mama,” Father urged. “We ’ll have to stroll around later and see everything.”
“
Jah
, we will,”
Mamm
assured him.
The boys had drifted off to meet with friends and to see the harnesses and stock, and Chelsea and John were involved in slicing cheeses for passersby to sample and purchase. Sarah perched on a crate and spoke to her parents. “
Mamm
and Father, please go for a walk around. I will watch things for a while. It won’t get busy until later.”