The Tempted Soul (3 page)

For a moment Carrie thought he would actually flap the reins over poor Jimsy’s back and make him do it, traffic and curves notwithstanding. “Joshua—”

“What?”

“I thought you—” She swallowed and subsided. “Never mind.”

He shook his head. “Carrie. What a low opinion you must have of me if you’d think I would race a horse that doesn’t belong to me, while I was driving a buggy that doesn’t belong to me, next to a woman who doesn’t belong to me.”

“I don’t—”

“Your husband has entrusted you to my care for a week, and believe me, I take that seriously.”

“I’m not in your care.” It bothered her to hear him say such a thing—wasn’t he just looking in now and again? She wasn’t in anyone’s care except for Melvin’s and God’s, and that’s exactly the way she wanted it.

And now she sounded like a sulky child. “But I do appreciate your helping us,” she said in a gentler tone.

To her enormous relief, he said nothing more, only slowed the horse as they approached the highway junction. “Have you and Melvin worked out a schedule for the things he wants done?” she asked. And did he mean to start today? If he did, they would stay on the highway and go home. If not, they would make another right turn, and she would drop him at his parents’ place, where he was staying.

He nodded. “I have to go to work at Hill’s today, but I can come by tomorrow afternoon if that suits.”

“That would be fine. It’s baking day, so there will be cake to eat with your coffee, if you want.”

“That’s the second best offer I’ve had all day.” He flapped the reins and made the turn toward his folks’ farm, leaving her to wonder what the best offer had been.

And then deciding she really didn’t want to know.

A
fter lunch the following day, Carrie had barely got the first of her pans of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies in the oven, when she heard the crunch of wheels in the lane through the open window.

“Sorry I’m late,” Joshua called as she walked onto the porch. He jumped out and tied the horse to their rail, where he began cropping the grass. The first of her flowerbeds had been strategically located just out of reins’ reach, but the grass was fair game to visiting horses.

“I thought you were going to Hill’s first.” Her tone was friendly, but really, when a man said he was coming by in the afternoon, he didn’t usually mean one o’clock. She had cake batter waiting for when the cookies were finished, and then there was all the cleanup to do before anyone could sit at the table.

“I did,” he said. “I had to wait for the vet, or I’d have been here sooner.”

“I wouldn’t have been ready sooner,” she told him. “I’m not ready now.”

“We can talk while you work. I don’t mind.”

She did, but she tamped it down and tried to be gracious. He was here to find out how he could help. She’d better be careful, or he’d get offended and go away, and then she’d have to explain to Melvin what she’d done. He deserved a nicer homecoming next week than that.

Her timer pinged. While she took the tray of cookies out and set them on the racks on the counter, he settled himself at the table. After she slid another tray of cookies in, she got down a mug and poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the stove.

“Thanks. Those look good.”

“They’re too hot to eat yet.”

“What else are you making?” He looked as though he was about to scoop a fingerful of cake batter out of the bowl.

“A carrot cake and a lemon–poppy seed cake. I’m invited to Emma and Lena’s tomorrow night, and I told them I’d bring dessert. Lemon–poppy seed is Emma’s favorite.”

“I remember. When we were kids, she used to get in trouble for cutting a slice out of the cake before dinner, especially when she’d made it.”

That didn’t sound like Emma. “More likely a certain person egged her on until she did it.”

He grinned, an easy smile that took credit for the bad behavior as much as it enjoyed the memory. “Maybe. Once or twice.” He gazed into the distance, in the direction of the window over the sink. “I miss those days.”

“I think Emma prefers now to then.”

His attention snapped back to the table and the present. “I suppose she does. When’s the wedding?”

“November first. Her sister Katherine and I are going to be
Neuwesitzern
.”

“Not Amelia? I thought you three were tight.”

She frowned at the
Englisch
expression, which didn’t seem so complimentary to her Amish ears. “Amelia has her boys and her husband to think of, but of course she’ll still be there. Emma and Katherine are close, and she and I are close, so I think it’s very appropriate.”

“Lucky thing you’re already married. All these weddings. What do the
Englisch
say? Three times a bridesmaid, never a bride?”

The timer pinged again, thank goodness, and she got up. As she transferred cookies from pan to rack and dropped raw dough onto new pans, she cudgeled her brain for something else to talk about. The subject of weddings would inevitably lead to the subject of children, which she would not discuss with someone she didn’t know very well. Or with those she did, for that matter.

“So what’s the book on the windowsill?”

He’d gotten up, coffee mug in hand, and was ranging around the room as though he’d grown up in it. She had no doubt that at some point he would circle in on the coolest of the cookies.

She resisted the urge to snatch up the book and stuff it in a drawer. “My songbook.”

“You play an instrument?” He sounded surprised, as well he might. The Amish didn’t play instruments—they were showy, made an individual person stand out in a crowd, and drew the kind of attention that could all too easily become a source of pride.

“Of course not.”

“Sing, then?”

“We all sing, Joshua.”

“But this does not look like
die Ausbund
, Carrie Miller. What songs are you singing in your own house that you wouldn’t sing in church?”

“Oh, don’t look so shocked. Lots of people make songbooks.” He leaned over the sink to pick it up, and she fought down a ridiculous panic. There was nothing in that book to be ashamed of. It was just private, that was all. “
Gibts mir
.”

“In a minute. I want to look.” He held it out of her reach, holding it over his head and looking up into it as he flipped from page to page.

“Joshua. Stop it.” She would not jump and snatch; that was clearly what he wanted. It was just like with the ​
chickens
—​the more a bird showed she wanted someone else’s worm, the harder they’d try to keep it away from her. So
Carrie
poured herself a cup of coffee and began to arrange the warm cookies on a plate.

He came back to the table, looking interested. “So you collect songs. Where do they come from?”

She shrugged, and offered him the plate. When both hands were busy with the cookies, she whipped the book off the table and slid it into the nearest drawer, among the clean dish towels. “Most of these are from when I was on
Rumspringe
.”

“And you remember the tunes after all this time?”

He made it sound as though she were as old as Lena ​
Stolzfus
. “I’ve been singing them for years. When I do the dishes. When I feed the hens. They’re like old friends.”

They held precious memories, too, of going to Singing on Sunday nights and being the one who dared to suggest a song in the little hymnbook, or one that the Mennonite kids sang—even, that one time, a Psalm set to music that she’d heard the
Englisch
young folks singing at a tent revival meeting at the park in town. It had a jazzy syncopated beat that was irresistible, and she’d come home and written it down.

Unto Thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.

And then the boys and girls would split, the girls singing the echo.

O my God

I trust in thee:

Let me not be ashamed, let not mine enemies triumph over me.

“So,” Joshua said, evidently looking for another subject now that he’d failed to rile her with this one, “Melvin gave me a general idea of what to do around your place. Paint the sheds, clean out the barn and organize it, that kind of thing. But I want to know what you’d like me to do.”

She waved in the general direction of the back part of their acreage. “I have a dozen apple trees out there whose fruit is going to the birds if I don’t finish picking them. That’s the first thing on my list.”

“Sounds like the first priority,” he agreed, nodding. “I never objected to leaving painting for another day.”

“That’s not true. I saw you helping out at Amelia and Eli’s not so long ago. They painted everything that was nailed down, just before their wedding.”

“Ah, but that was different. Everyone who could swing a brush was there, including that
Englisch
man who turned up from New York City and embarrassed Emma so bad.”

“He’ll turn up again,” Carrie informed him. “His name is Tyler West and he’s invited to her wedding.”

“Maybe he’ll come early and paint.”

Now, there was a sarcastic tone. “What’s the matter? Don’t you like him?”

“Whether I like him or not isn’t the point. He’s an
Englisch
man and he has no business here, especially at our weddings.”

Carrie gazed at him curiously. He sounded so emphatic, and his face had darkened with displeasure. He really meant it. The joker and tease of a few minutes ago had disappeared completely.

“That’s for Emma to decide,” she said mildly, “and he is representing her book. In a way, he’s her business partner.”

Joshua pushed away from the table. “I’ll go look over those sheds. I’ll need to know how much paint to buy.”

The door had swung shut behind him before Carrie found the wits to open her mouth. “All right,” she said to the empty room. “Remind me not to bring up Tyler West again.”

It was no secret that Joshua had wanted to court Emma earlier in the summer. He hadn’t been the only one. But Carrie had never seen Joshua react this way to the mention of Calvin King’s name, or of Grant Weaver’s, either. Did he have some kind of problem with the
Englisch
? Or just with Emma’s agent in particular? Or maybe the subject of weddings was as sore with him as it had once been for Emma. He was long past the age when a man usually settled down.

Shaking her head, Carrie turned at the timer’s ping and took the next tray of cookies out of the oven. She would have to ask Emma about it when she saw her tomorrow night.

“I have no idea,” Emma said when Carrie told her and Lena the story over spareribs and macaroni and cheese the next evening. Emma never served chicken when she knew Carrie was coming. “To my knowledge, Joshua has never even spoken to Tyler West.”

“Maybe it was something else, then. Maybe he just has a problem with
Englisch
folks.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Lena put in, a little dryly. “Not the female half, anyway.”

“Mamm!” Emma sounded shocked.

“That boy has a bad reputation, and you know it. I’m a little surprised at Melvin, if the truth be told. Not every man would let Joshua Steiner hang around his place when he was away.”

It was a good thing that Carrie had known Lena all her life—and what’s more, loved her nearly as much as Emma did. Otherwise, she might take this as a slight on her own morals, and get offended. Taking offense was a sin, because it meant you had too high an opinion of yourself. “I’m sure those rumors aren’t true.”

“They aren’t,” Emma said steadily. “Joshua told me so himself. That girl he was supposed to have gotten in the family way up in Indiana turned out to have been playing around with an
Englisch
man, too. And she went outside and married him.”

Every Amish woman faced that choice once in her life—the opportunity to discover the world outside the church. That was what
Rumspringe
was for, after all: to give a person the experience to make an informed decision.

Carrie had had her share of running around until she met Melvin, and then the choice wasn’t a choice at all. Joining church was the most natural thing in the world when it meant having the life she knew with the man she loved.

“Even if he had the worst reputation in the world, he has still leased one of our fields,” she said. “And Melvin trusts both me and him.”

“Of course he does,” Emma said. “You probably won’t see much of Joshua anyway if he’s doing the outside work.”

“That’s true,” she said. “And it’s good. He makes me nervous.”

“Nervous how?” Lena looked up from her plate.

“Oh, I don’t know. He’s nosy. He was in the kitchen yesterday, supposedly finding out what we needed done, and he spent nearly the whole time needling me about my songbook.”

“Your songbook.” Now Lena put down her fork. “Why?”

Carrie shrugged. “Maybe he’s never seen one before, and there it was, lying on the windowsill by the sink, where I’d been doing the dishes.”

Even Emma looked perplexed. “Well, I never. You’ve had that book practically since you were a girl. Didn’t we used to copy out songs in it in the days before the
Youngie
would let us come to Singing?”

“That’s the one. We’d sit up in the tree in the orchard here and practice, like so many birds on a branch.”

“Is that how my Pink Lady got broken that one summer?” Lena raised her eyebrows. “You girls up in it singing?” Carrie and Emma made identical
uh-oh
faces at each other, and Lena laughed. “That poor tree. It made the best pie apples, and it died that winter.”

“The price we paid for our reckless ways,” Carrie told her. “I’ve always been sorry, and did my singing at the sink after that.”

“It was hard, though, being fourteen and fifteen,” Emma said, gazing into the distance at the memory of the girls they had been. Girls who had graduated from eighth grade but who would not go on to high school, like
Englisch
students. Hardly any Amish scholars went on—an
Englisch
education promoted self-sufficiency, pride, and a tendency to criticize and challenge the way things were always done. Amish parents spent a whole childhood training those things out of their offspring. Nobody wanted them to go where they would be put back in. “Too old to be in school, and too young to go to Singing. Even the sixteen-year-olds looked mature and experienced to us.”

“Now we look at someone like Lydia Zook and think, oh, she’s so young.”

“You two are still young,” Lena said, her eyes misting. “And now my youngest will be married and have a home and family of her own.”

Emma smiled at her with such love that Carrie’s own eyes filled. “I wish everyone could find the one that God means for them. Even Joshua. He’s always at home in a crowd, always has something amusing to say…but he just seems so lonely.”

“Is that why you let him court you?” Carrie asked.

Emma snorted and stood to collect their plates. “The world’s briefest courtship. I think it lasted one evening.”

“I wouldn’t have called it even that,” Lena said, attempting to get up.

“Mamm, sit and let me do it. I only have a few weeks left to do things for you. What would you have called it?”

“Oh, I think you and your friends probably came to the same conclusion I did. That boy was using you for a cloak of respectability, and every time I see him, I want to take him to task for it.”

“It’s over and done, Mamm, and it doesn’t matter.”

“Maybe not. I suppose once you’re married, I’ll have to forgive him.”

“I hope you’ll forgive him before then.” Emma’s eyes laughed at her, though her mouth remained solemn. “Your being mad at him won’t bother him a bit, and it will just put a hard spot in your heart that God will have to soften.”

“I won’t put God to that trouble,” Lena said. “Is that lemon–poppy seed cake?”

“Carrie brought it. She’s trying to fatten me up so I can’t get into my wedding clothes.”