The Waiting Page 14

  Cal jerked his head up. “No.”

  “So she’s the one you want?”

  “Yes.” Yes, she was. Yes! He suddenly realized that Jorie was the only one for him.

  “Tell me again what she said.”

  Cal repeated the conversation.

  “Sounds to me like she wasn’t saying no at all. Sounds to me like she was giving you another chance by telling you what she didn’t want.”

  Cal felt a pang of regret. He leaned back on the sofa. “It wasn’t so hard with Mary Ann.”

  “Aw, you were just kids. You grew up together. This time, Cal, you’re going to have to woo her.”

  “What?” Cal asked, mild panic rising in him.

  “Woo her! She’s a woman, Caleb. What does she like?”

  “We’re Amish,” Cal said, as if that explained everything.

  Bud rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

  “I guess I don’t know that much about her,” Cal said.

  “Try to think of something,” Bud said in a longsuffering voice.

  Cal exhaled, resigned. “She likes reading books. She likes taking walks in the Deep Woods. She loves her horses. She likes teaching. And children, even the difficult ones. She’s able to find the good in people.” He leaned forward on the sofa. “She’s got a flair for drawing, especially things she spots in nature. She loves church – I can tell by the look on her face. In fact, it’s usually pretty easy to tell what she’s thinking or feeling. If you can’t see it written on her face, she’ll tell you. She speaks her mind, that Jorie. She’s not much of a cook – ”

  “Well, well, well,” Bud said, interrupting, folding his hands behind his head as he leaned back in the chair.

  “What?” Cal asked.

  “Thought you didn’t know her.”

  8

  After church one Sunday, Isaac asked Cal to stop by his farm on Tuesday for an informal meeting of the ministers. Cal braced himself for some kind of sticky problem with a church member. Hardly a few weeks went by without some kind of need arising. Being a minister was harder than he could have imagined. It wasn’t the time he gave to sermon preparation – that he found nourishing to his soul. It was knowing so much about the inner life of his people. In the last few months, he had learned things he would rather not have known: Petty quarrels. Flirtations with worldly temptations. Young couples who got ahead of their wedding night. It was hard for him to shake off.

  After Isaac’s wife served the men coffee and pie, Jonas jumped right in to explain the reason behind today’s gathering. “There’s concern brewing about Jorie King,” he said. “About her teaching methods.”

  Isaac crossed his arms against his chest. In his slow, meditative way, he asked, “Caleb, Samuel, what do you think?”

  A short, stocky man with a kind heart, Samuel Riehl shifted in his chair as if he felt uncomfortable, then shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Maybe I’ve heard a few things.”

  Then all three men looked to Cal for his opinion. He felt his stomach tighten into a knot. “She might be a bit unconventional – ”

  “A bit?” Jonas sneered. “Her class spent the better part of December counting birds over by Blue Lake Pond.”

  “There’s a reason, Jonas,” Cal said. “That bird count helps the government keep track of bird populations. Birds are an indicator species. They reveal a lot about the health of an ecosystem. If their numbers are down, there is a problem somewhere.”

  Jonas leaned back in his chair. “Her job is to teach those scholars how to read and write. That’s all.”

  Cal stole a sideways glance at Jonas, a man he had always considered a friend. He wondered how much of Jonas’s complaint toward Jorie had to do with the fact that he had chosen her to teach over Emma, Jonas’s eldest daughter, who didn’t have an interesting thought in her head. Cal knew what kind of teacher Emma would make. He had plenty of those kinds of teachers when he was in school. He had decided that he would have to risk disappointing Jonas; he just couldn’t foist Emma Lapp on those scholars.

  “First things first, I always say,” Jonas continued. “We need to make sure those scholars are getting their basics in, before they go traipsing off to the woods to count birds.”

  “Counting those birds is a lesson in arithmetic,” Cal said, trying to keep his voice calm. “And science too. Maggie said they had to memorize the birds’ names in Latin so they could identify the species. That’s a language lesson, right there.”

  Jonas leaned forward. “That state exam in May has two hundred questions on it and I don’t think there will be any questions in Latin.”

  Cal lowered his head. He didn’t know why he felt such a strong need to defend Jorie, but he knew he would do anything for her.

  “Maybe you could talk to her, Cal,” Samuel said.

  Isaac stroked his long white beard, a sign he was thinking. “Samuel has a good point. Perhaps, Caleb, you could speak to Jorie. Just to remind her to get the basics in, before the bird counting.”

  Cal folded his hands together. He couldn’t say no to Isaac. “I’ll talk to her.”

  Later in the week, Cal stopped by the schoolhouse as Jorie was locking up the door for the evening. “Hello, Jorie.”

  She spun around. “Hello, Cal. What are you doing out tonight?”

  “Earlier today, old Eli Stutzman stopped by to say his wife was done.”

  “Done what?”

  “That’s just what I asked him. ‘Done living,’ he said.”

  “Clara’s passed?” Jorie’s eyes went wide.

  Those eyes of hers, they kept changing colors, he realized. Tonight, in the dusk of winter, they looked as blue-gray as an ocean storm. “She did. Very peacefully. Her heart gave out on her. I’m just coming back from their place now.”

  Jorie locked the schoolhouse door. “Now she’ll be seeing those sunsets from high above.”

  They stopped for a moment and looked at the setting sun. Its rays were casting long shadows that appeared blue on the pure whiteness of the powdery snow.

  “E. B. White once wrote, ‘I am always humbled by the infinite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow,’” Cal said softly.

  Jorie caught his eye, smiled faintly, and looked away, as if she was a little embarrassed he caught her looking at him. He noticed a couple of tendrils of hair, loosened by the breeze, curl about her ears.

  The wind kicked up hard as they started walking up the road that led to their homes. Cal’s hand flew to his head, barely snatching his hat before it went sailing.

  She pulled her cape around her, shivering. “How does Matthew like living in the city?”

  “He hasn’t said. Probably means that he likes it very much.”

  “I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to live in a city. Out here, most everything around us has been made by God: the grass and trees and birds. But in the city, so much is made by humans: those hideous electric wires, telephone poles, asphalt, cars, pollution.”

  Cal half listened to her, looking for a segue to broach the real reason he had stopped by. To talk to her about the scholars, like Isaac wanted him to. “Jorie, I know you like taking the class out on nature hikes . . .” He swallowed hard.

  She stopped and turned to him, her blue eyes wide with happiness. “Oh, I do. I do! And you understand why, don’t you, Cal? Do you see how knowing about God’s earth only brings us closer to him? How it helps us to feel the awe and majesty? That’s what I want the scholars to discover. So that all of their lives, they know to look around them, at nature and up at the heavens, and they remember God.”

  Her face was so lit up with joy that the sight of it took his breath away. Imagine what it would be like, having a teacher like her to open scholars’ minds and point them to God’s majesty.

  “Well, I’ll be on my way,” she said, when they reached the turnoff to Stoney Creek. She turned and started down the long drive.

  “I’ll walk you to the farmhouse,” he offered, falling into step beside her. �
�Don’t want you crossing paths with that cougar.”

  She glanced at him, alarmed. “Do you think it’s still a danger? I haven’t heard of anyone losing stock.”

  “Samuel found the remains of a deer carcass near his field. Thought it looked like a mountain lion had taken it down.”

  A worried look passed over her face.

  “Don’t you worry about that cougar,” he said in a voice of gentleness. “It’s probably moved on by now. Cougars don’t want to tangle with people.”

  Her mouth curved into a smile. “Well, come springtime, it had better not try to tangle with my new foals.”

  “How many are you expecting?”

  “Four, Lord willing.”

  As she described each mare and what traits she had been looking for in the studs and what she hoped to get from the pairing, Cal watched her. He thought her face was even lovelier when it was animated by excitement. The intensity of her look, the sparkle of eagerness in her eyes, made him lose track of what she was saying. In the fading sunlight, he noticed a light sprinkling of freckles over her nose. He had never noticed those before.

  Too soon, they arrived at her farmhouse. He saw that the moon was rising, yellow as a wolf ’s eye. Somehow, they had stopped walking and were facing each other. Without thinking first, he reached out, and pushed a loose strand of her hair back under her cap. Then he stepped back, worried that he offended her. But she only smiled and said, “Good night, Cal.”

  On the way home, Cal slapped his forehead when he realized he never did get around to the subject of sticking to reading and arithmetic in the classroom.

  Oh well, he thought. Another time.

  Caleb Zook kept surprising Jorie. Tonight, he seemed genuinely interested in what she was trying to inspire in the scholars. Maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised. Cal was known to plow a field with a book in his coat, so that when the horses rested, he could read. After hearing his sermons, she could almost imagine him more as a professor at a fancy English university than as a dairy farmer. Yet he loved his dairy and his farm. And more than anything, he loved being Plain.

  Last week, he surprised her another time with that marriage proposal, said in his roundabout way, with a stain of flush brushing his cheeks. She knew he was getting pushed by the aunties to remarry. Probably others too. As fond as she was of Cal – and she couldn’t deny she felt a little flutter of pleasure in her chest when he asked – something held her back.

  Sometimes, Jorie wondered if something was wrong with her. Most of her friends were keen to get married. If they were still single, as she was at the age of twenty-four, they were more than keen. They were desperate. Half the girls in Stoney Ridge would like to marry Cal. Maybe it was vain and foolish, but Jorie wanted more out of marriage than to be a poor substitute to the memory of a first wife, especially to dear Mary Ann.

  Her grandmother complained that her grandfather had spoiled Jorie for marriage by expecting too much. By that she meant the conversations Jorie and her grandfather would have about the Bible and other books they’d read, plus their late-night discussions about breeding and training Percherons. Marge was never especially interested in the horses, and Atlee preferred she not go near them, anyway, after she nearly killed one with an herbal remedy for worms. But he would always ask Jorie’s opinion before choosing a pairing. Jorie would spend hours poring through files, with measurements, notes, charts, cross-references – going back five generations into the horses’ lineage. Atlee grumbled that all she did was point out a horse’s fault. “But the first question about any potential pairing,” she would insist, “is not how great the offspring will be but what problems it might produce.”

  Ben never understood her love of horse breeding. She tried to teach him about the mysteries and complexities of genetics. “Just put two horses you like together and they’ll make a horse you love,” was his response.

  “It isn’t just one or two traits we’re looking for,” she tried to explain to him, “but how the horse combines all these things. The whole of every horse is always greater than the sum of its parts.” Ben would listen for a while but soon lose interest. Anything that smacked of farming bored him.

  But he did like book reading. He was a Zook in that way. Their shared love of books was one quality that had drawn her to Ben. Her grandmother often said that Ben was charming, gregarious . . . and handsome as the devil. “That man could charm the spots off a leopard and sell them to a zebra,” Marge would say, though she was fond of Ben. Everyone was fond of Ben. And the weaknesses in him – his wild streak, his fiery temper, his tendency to be a fence jumper – Jorie had hoped those would change in time as he grew into manhood.

  But Ben was gone now. And she had never imagined herself married to anyone else.

  Before going inside the farmhouse, Jorie stopped to make sure the barn doors were locked tight. The wind blew her apron up against her face. As she smoothed it down, she thought again about changing her apron from white to black, from unmarried to married. It would be a significant step, a message to others that she was choosing to remain single. At least she had been thinking about it . . . until yesterday. She had dropped by the Robinsons’ cottage with a meal and a baby quilt. Lisa let Jorie hold the baby – a warm little Easter egg of a body. With his tiny belly full of milk, he fell sound asleep in her arms. A pang of longing pierced her heart as she realized she might not ever have a child of her own. Yet for all that was hard about it, remaining single might be what the Lord wanted for her. And the Lord knew best.

  Maybe she would wait to change her apron, though. Just in case.

  9

  On a cold and sunny afternoon, Ephraim went cougar snooping, hoping he might spot her. Every few days, he left a big chunk of raw meat for her on that rocky ledge where he first saw her. When he returned, it was always gone. He hoped Cal hadn’t noticed that the meat packages in the freezer might be diminishing faster than usual, but he wasn’t too worried. Cal still seemed pretty distracted and wasn’t paying attention to details the way he used to. The way Ephraim reasoned it out, if he could make sure the cougar could get food, she wouldn’t be as tempted to kill their stock or their neighbors’.

  When he reached the ledge, he took out the frozen meat, a roast, from his sack, unwrapped the paper and laid it out in the sun to thaw. Then he hid in a small crevice in the rocks. Out of his sack, he took the charcoal pencils and sketch pad Jorie had given him. He settled down to wait, hoping to see the cougar. He wanted to try to draw her, not from memory, but from real life. While he was waiting, he went ahead and polished off his lunch.

  He didn’t mean to doze off, but the winter sun was shining down on him, the rocks were warm, he was sheltered from the wind, and Lizzie had made him an enormous lunch. He startled awake when he heard a man’s voice, then another. He crouched down low and hid until the men passed by him. He heard one say, “We warned him. We told him what to do – what to not do. I think we need to teach them a lesson so they’ll all take notice.” Ephraim didn’t see their faces but he did see Rex, Jerry Gingerich’s dog, trotting along behind them. Rex spotted him and let out an earbusting woof, but Jerry whistled and Rex ran off to join his master. That dog was too good for the likes of Jerry Gingerich, Ephraim thought. He wondered what warning they were talking about. And why. He thought he might ask Cal. His brother had a way of fitting things together, like the last piece of a tricky jigsaw puzzle. He made things Ephraim couldn’t understand seem so clear. But then he thought better of it. Cal would ask why he was out in the Deep Woods when he should have been home, choring. And that might lead to questions he didn’t want to answer about cougar snooping.

  Remembering why he had come in the first place, Ephraim eased out of the crevice and walked over to the ledge.

  The meat Ephraim had left for the cougar was gone.

  After Maggie and Ephraim were sound asleep, Cal took out all of his books and spread them on the kitchen table. Matthew, home for the weekend, had gone out with friends and wouldn�
�t be home for hours. Cal had been looking forward to this evening of quiet study. He needed to infuse himself in the Word of God, like steeping a tea bag in hot water. He shook down the ashes in the woodstove and added new wood. The new wood settled into the fire with a hiss and pop. As he sat down at the table, he released a contented sigh, opened his Bible, and prayed for God’s Spirit to give him understanding.

  He was engrossed in a passage of Scripture and didn’t know how much time had passed when a noise of hooves outside interrupted him. The kitchen door blew open, bringing in a swirl of frigid air. Matthew stood, feet planted, at the open door threshold.

  “Was fehlt dir denn?” Cal jumped up to pull Matthew in and closed the door tightly behind him. What’s the matter with you? He was alarmed by the angry look on his brother’s face.

  “It’s Lizzie Glick. You’ve got to fire her.”

  Cal gazed steadily at Matthew. He had to work to keep a grin off of his face. “Do I?” He went to the stove and picked up the teakettle. “Any particular reason?”

  Matthew pulled the kitchen chair out and sat down, leaning on his elbows, hands clasped together. “I’m sorry to say I have discovered a serious moral lapse in Lizzie Glick.” He had a very earnest look on his face. “It’s Maggie I’m worried about. Lizzie could be a bad influence on our Maggie.”

  Cal pulled out two mugs, dropped a tea bag in each one, then filled them with steaming water. “And what seems to be the cause of this moral lapse?” He handed a mug to Matthew and sat down beside him.

  “She went home tonight with Mose Riehl.” When Cal didn’t seem to look shocked, Matthew leaned closer. “He is seven years older than she is.”

  Cal had to swallow a retort about how age didn’t seem to matter when Matthew was doing the considering. He took a sip of tea and tried to look as if he was giving the matter serious reflection. “Did you happen to ask her home?”

  “I did,” Matthew said, leaning back in his chair. “Out of kindness.”

  Cal felt a smile tug at his mouth and fought it back. “Kindness?” He knew his brother wasn’t used to putting himself out to make a girl notice him. When it came to girls, Matthew rarely, if ever, met with failure.