The Amish Clockmaker (22 page)

“I suppose.”

She inhaled deeply, seeming to draw strength from the tableau of mother and offspring before her.

“Anyway, I'm glad you didn't do it right away, like some.”

“Well, at the moment there's plenty of milk for us and Butternut. But there will come a day when he will have to be weaned.”

“
Ya
, but not yet.”

“No. Not yet.”

They stood there for a few more minutes, Miriam lost in thoughts Clayton could not read.

The words he wanted to say rolled around in his mind like a windmill in a storm.
Who were you running off with late at night? Where were you going and what do you do there? Why are you so quiet now?

He knew he couldn't ask these things. It seemed so pathetic, him watching her from the window night after night. If he voiced his concerns, Miriam would have a few choice questions for him in return, ones he wasn't ready to answer.

He glanced over at her. Without warning, an image came to him, the same image he had been trying to erase from his mind for weeks.

Miriam in the early dawn light. Her hair down and flowing behind her as she ran.

It had looked so inviting, so fascinating, and yet it was a violation of the Amish way. He was not meant to observe her loose, flowing hair like that. But he had. And he hadn't been able to forget about it since.

“Will you and your mother be okay?” she asked, interrupting his thoughts. “You're not going to sell the shop or the house?”

For a second he couldn't answer. Her concern for him and his mother rendered him momentarily speechless. Then he managed, “We… we'll be fine. We have a lot of family we can call on. And we're not selling anything.”

“Good. I'm glad. I can't imagine your not living here or working down at the shop.”

“I can't either.”
It's all I have.

She turned her head to look at him. “You know, I always thought someday that I would buy one of your clocks.”

I would give every clock I have to you.

She took a step away from the open barn doors. “But I'd want a pretty
Englisch
one and you probably wouldn't sell me one of those.” She flashed him a half smile.

Words of response hung in his throat, unuttered.

She patted his arm and laughed as she swiveled away from the building, but the sound was without mirth. “I'm only kidding, Clayton.” She started to walk past him, her unspoken burden clearly back on her shoulders.

He turned awkwardly and took a lumbering step to follow her, his balance precarious for a second. Miriam saw and reached back to steady him. Normally he hated to have someone help him regain his footing when he started to falter, but her hands on his arms felt like heaven, and he wished she would never let go.

They stayed that way for several seconds, her arm looped easily around
his. Then she released him, and the moment was over. They began walking back toward the house together. Ahead of them, another buggy was arriving, and several others were leaving.

“I wish I were like you,” Miriam said dreamily.

Clayton cocked his head to look at her. He couldn't have heard her right.

“No, I mean it. You don't try to change what you can't change. You just accept it. You live with it.”

He laughed uneasily. “I wouldn't say that, exactly. I'm known for my temper.”

She waved the air with her hand as if to sweep away that last comment. “No, I know that. I've seen you angry. It's just that…even when you don't like something, even when you're angry about it, in the end you just let it come because you know you can't stop it.”

Clayton felt his face grow warm. Her compliment was not only too good, it wasn't true. It couldn't be true. Miriam shouldn't be like him. There was no merit in allowing something unwanted to come just because that was easier than trying to stop it.

He very much wanted to stop Miriam from doing… whatever it was she was doing.

He wanted to take her in his arms and tell her not to marry Vernon Esh.

He wanted to look her in the eye and beg her to never see the man in the car—whoever he was—again.

Clayton was about to say she was wrong about him, but he'd waited too long to respond.

“Do you remember last year when I came down to the clock shop one day to tell you I had gotten the job at the furniture store?”

He nodded wordlessly.

“You were working on a grandfather clock that seemed as big as a house. Your father said something about time that day, that we can use it or misuse it or waste it, but we can't stop it. The sun will come up and the sun will go down on every good day and every bad one. That's how you are, Clayton. You're steady. Constant. As constant and enduring as the rising and setting of the sun.”

He tried to speak, to say that's not who he was, but her words had stolen away every thought in his head.

She took his silence as agreement and gave him a final nod. Her parents and brothers and their families were coming out of the house now. The
Beilers, a dozen of them, approached to offer words of comfort. When they had said their final goodbye, they started for Norman and Abigail's next door. Abigail put her arm around her daughter's waist as they walked away. Miriam looked back once as they neared the path between the properties. She smiled and mouthed the word “goodbye,” as though she were leaving him forever.

S
EVENTEEN

T
he first full week after his father's passing was like a strange dream, Clayton thought, the kind where a person's surroundings were both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The house was unchanged, yet without
Daed
there it felt completely different somehow. The shop, as well, seemed both unchanged yet inextricably altered, starting with the Raber and Son Clockmakers sign above the door, which was all wrong now. Clayton would not contemplate changing it, but he found himself staring at it often, wishing the sign's words were still true.

Each day, while he worked at the shop, all sorts of food made its way into the kitchen of the house—casseroles and loaves of bread and trays of sweets and more, all lovingly prepared and delivered by members of the community. And though Clayton appreciated how such efforts were temporarily lessening his mother's load, he had to admit that most of it tasted a little off somehow—not bad but different from what he was used to.

Chores were the same way. Though the complete takeover of those first three days had come to an end, somehow things kept getting done here and there. Friends and neighbors were obviously still popping by to handle various tasks. And even though Clayton knew this, each time he walked up from the shop at the end of the day to find the horses returned from the pasture, or Rosie milked, or the chickens gathered into their coop, he was startled. It
always took a moment to remember that folks were just trying to be nice and lessen his load during this difficult time.

Until it struck him one day that it wasn't “folks” who were still doing all of this. It wasn't the community or friends or neighbors. It was family. His family. His sisters, finally getting their way by slipping in while he was at work under the guise of community concern and doing the chores they had said all along he wasn't capable of handling.

The evening he figured it out, he had come into the barn straight from a full day in the shop, smelling of varnish and sawdust and linseed oil. But with nothing that needed doing there, he remained untouched by the additional odor of animals and hay and earth.

His steps heavy, Clayton said only four words to his mother when he went into the house. “Who did the chores?”

She looked up from where she stood at the sink, her expression distant and vague as she named two of his sisters.

The very thought made Clayton furious, and he demanded to know why she had let them do that.

Mamm
, who still seemed in a state of quiet bewilderment at
Daed
's passing, simply answered that Clayton's sisters were dealing with the loss too, and allowing them and their children to help was one way they were able to cope.

“It doesn't hurt you to let them help,” she added as she reached into the cabinet and pulled out two plates.

Clayton didn't know how to tell her that somehow it
did
hurt. Coming into the house well before dark and with no outside chores to do meant a very long, quiet evening with just his grieving mother for company.

“They won't be coming into the shop, if that's what's bothering you,” she added when he gave her no reply. “They know how you feel about that.” Then she looked up at him. “Unless you have changed your mind.”

“I haven't.”

“But you'll let me come help you?” Her voice sounded tired, as though she wanted to do so but hadn't the energy just yet.

“When you feel up to it. There's no rush.”

“But Saturday will be busy.”

He nodded.

She sighed gently as she served up a plate for Clayton and then one for herself. “I will come down to help you on Saturday.”

Anger at his own selfishness roiled up within him. It was because of him
that
Mamm
felt forced to work in the shop so soon after losing
Daed
. “I can ask Joanie. Or one of the nieces. It's just one day a week. I'll take care of it.”

His mother stroked the back of
Daed
's chair. It was pushed fully under the table, without a place setting in front of it. “How I wish you would, Clayton. I know I shouldn't be sad, but I just miss him. I miss him.”

Clayton limped to his mother's side as quickly as he could and put an arm around her as silent sobs shook her body.

“I thought I had prepared myself for this,” she murmured as she struggled for control. “I thought I had given this whole matter over to God. I thought I was ready to walk this road.”

“I'll ask Joanie. I promise,” Clayton whispered, unable to think of anything else to say to comfort his mother. He didn't think there were other words that could. Sorrow wasn't a time for words.

She shook her head, swallowed heavily, and sniffed. “No. No, I will help you. I want to do this for you, Clayton.”

“But—”

She patted his chest lightly, just over his heart. “I understand how you feel. I didn't until I began living in this house without your father, but now I know how hard it must be for you to be working in the shop without him and how awkward and strange it would be to have new people in there right now. I will come, Clayton.”

“All right,” he said softly.

The days slipped by, and before Clayton knew it another week had passed. Now that the chores were no longer being done for him, he was able to keep busy until sunset, and his work went by more quickly. But sometimes it felt is if time were creeping by. Each day meant another one without
Daed
.

Another one without Miriam.

Clayton was thinking of her late one Sunday afternoon, almost two weeks after the funeral, when he went to the kitchen sink for a glass of water and saw Norman and Abigail Beiler walking across the yard toward the house. They carried nothing in their hands, and Miriam was not with them.

“Looks like Norman and Abigail are coming by,” he said to
Mamm
.

“Goodness. I don't think we have room in this kitchen for any more food.”

“They're not bringing food.”

Mamm
slid a plate into the sink of sudsy water. “Well, then. If you'll get one of the cakes we've been given, I'll start a pot of coffee.”

He was at the pantry still deciding between a strawberry angel food cake
and an applesauce spice cake when the knock came at the door. He reached for the angel food and set it on the counter next to the coffeepot. “I'll let them in,” he said.

He crossed the kitchen and headed for the open main room and the front door, greeting Miriam's parents and inviting them inside. Immediately, Clayton could see that they both wore worried looks on their faces. Distraught looks. Were they angry with him? He couldn't imagine why. He hadn't seen Miriam since the funeral, so they couldn't possibly think he was messing up their plans with Vernon. Except for the day of the funeral, she hadn't come over even once, not for weeks.