The Waiting Read online

  Sometimes, Matthew thought, a little too responsible and a little too unselfish.

  At lunch on Sunday following church, Matthew could see that something was definitely amiss between Jorie and Cal. Jorie served the men at the table seated far away from Cal. More than a few times that day, Matthew caught Cal watching her with sorrow in his eyes.

  At rare moments, Matthew thought, you could catch a person in an unguarded moment. What he thought and how he felt showed on his face for a brief second, before passing away.

  It hurt him to see Cal suffering. First he lost Mary Ann, now he was losing Jorie. Not that Matthew knew that for sure, but he knew Ben’s effect on others, especially women. It had always been that way. Ben had an easy, charming way about him that drew women to him like bees to a flower. Even Lizzie seemed to light up like a firefly when Ben was around. And she was still making every sweet and cake and pie she knew how to make, just to entice Ben to eat.

  Lizzie had never baked Matthew a thing. Not one blessed thing.

  That evening, at the singing for the young folks, Matthew made a point of getting on Lizzie’s volleyball team. He tried to be thoughtful and set up shots for her, but she never seemed to notice that he was going out of his way for her. In fact, she seemed to be going out of her way to ignore him. He was getting tired of being treated as if he was nearly invisible.

  Afterward, he saw Mose Riehl head toward Lizzie, probably to ask her if she wanted a ride home. He made a quick beeline for Lizzie and reached her side just as she was opening her mouth to answer Mose.

  “She can’t. She’s going home with me,” Matthew said firmly.

  “Oh I am, am I?” Lizzie said, eyes narrowed, hands hooked on her hips.

  “Yes,” Matthew said, trying to look as cool as a cucumber even though his heart was pounding. “You are.”

  Lizzie stared defiantly at Matthew, then turned to Mose’s befuddled look, then back to Matthew. “Well.” She lifted her chin a notch. “I guess I am, then.”

  Matthew smiled. Things were looking up.

  Cal woke earlier than usual and slipped outside. The morning air was crisp and clear, like pure water from a spring. It would be a warm, sunny day, a good day for plowing the north field and getting it ready to plant corn. After a substantial breakfast, Cal and Ben hitched up their large draft horses to the metal plows and led them out to the field. Cal started on one end of the field, Ben on the other. They could have plowed separate fields, but this was the way their father had taught them. Working together made the work go faster, Samuel Zook had often said.

  When the horses met in the middle, Cal and Ben stopped to rest the teams. They sat against the fence that separated Bud’s property from Beacon Hollow’s. The hum of Bud’s tractor plowing a nearby field underscored the quiet.

  Cal drew in the scent of the early morning. The distant whiff of manure from a neighboring farm drifted his way, mingling with the aroma of thawing earth. Of spring. He lifted his face to the sun and reveled in it. “Smell that, Ben? What a fragrance. Freshly plowed dirt.” He handed Ben the water jug.

  Ben rolled his eyes. “I’d like it a whole lot more if I were sitting on Bud’s tractor.” He took a long drink of water. “Those English have a way of making easy work out of hard things.” He gave a sideways glance to Cal. “Have you given any more thought to no-till farming? Sure beats plowing.”

  “I enjoy plowing,” Cal said, stretching out his long legs. “No matter which angle I look from, I fail to see the benefits of using chemicals on fields.”

  A few days ago a salesman from a large chemical company had paid a call at Beacon Hollow, trying to convince Cal and Ben of the merits of no-till farming. “I know you Amish have unscientific minds,” the salesman had said, “so you need to rely on outside experts to understand proper soil management.”

  Kindly overlooking the salesman’s patronizing remark about his intelligence, Cal listened patiently to a lecture on the virtues of no-till farming.

  “You can get twice the output from half the work,” the salesman explained. “It will free you up to get off the farm and go work in a factory. You’ll make extra income.”

  When Cal asked the salesman why he assumed extra income would improve the quality of life, the man had no answer and soon left.

  But ever since Ben heard the salesman’s pitch, he kept badgering Cal to consider no-till farming. “Why can’t you just give something new a try?” Ben asked, tipping his straw hat over his eyes to shade them. “Just because generations of Amish have farmed one way, it doesn’t mean there isn’t something new to learn.”

  “Generations of Amish have developed a way of farming that is proven, that is excellent. And our way doesn’t harm the environment, either.” Cal rose to his feet, looking out to the edges of his fields. He waved his arm in a large arc. “There’s the Kings’ farm, and Bud’s, and along the treetops you can see the barn roofs of other neighbors. Many of those herbicides that the salesman was trying to sell are suspected carcinogens. If I used those herbicides on my fields, every time it rained, those chemicals would leach into the streams and creeks that run into our neighbors’ properties.” He turned to Ben. “Tell me this: how can we love our neighbor and do such a thing?”

  Ben closed his eyes and lifted one shoulder in a careless shrug. “Beats the drudgery of plowing.”

  One fine sunny morning, Jorie had just finished first and second grade arithmetic recitation when the door opened and in walked Cal. Behind him was a short, slight, unhappy man who seemed to have the weight of the world’s troubles on his bony shoulders. Cal motioned to Jorie to come to the door.

  “Jorie, this is Harry Whitehall.” As they shook hands, Cal added, “The public school superintendent.”

  The scholars, especially the eighth graders, turned toward Mr. Whitehall with wide, worried eyes.

  Mr. Whitehall, ignoring the dramatic effect his appearance created, merely walked to the front of the classroom and started unloading the contents of his dark leather bulging briefcase, filled with whatever a public school superintendent carried with him. He started to unpack reams of paper and peered at the back of the classroom, toward the large eighth grade, who sat stiffly at their desks, like cottontails caught in the glare of a lantern. “Are you ready, class, for your exam?”

  Jorie glared at Cal and hurried to the front of the class to talk to Mr. Whitehall. “Perhaps if we had some notice . . .”

  “Were you not informed that your class would be tested, come May?” Mr. Whitehall asked her.

  “Yes, I knew.” Jorie lifted her eyebrows at Cal, hoping he would intervene, but he raised the palms of his hands, helpless.

  Unconcerned, Mr. Whitehall continued unpacking. “Well, then. Is it not the month of May?”

  “Yes, but it’s only May 2nd!” Jorie said. “I expected the test to be closer to the end of the month – ”

  Mr. Whitehall held up a hand to stop her. “We’ve agreed that it is, indeed, the month of May. So let’s stop wasting time and begin.”

  Jorie turned to the row of eighth grade boys, who stared back at her with blank looks. She felt a great sinking feeling in her stomach. She exhaled, resigned. “Perhaps I should take the other classes out so that you can have the classroom to yourself.”

  Mr. Whitehall waved her away. “Do with them whatever you want.”

  “How long will you need?” she asked.

  He managed a thin smile for her. “As long as it takes.”

  Jorie told the rest of the scholars to take their tablets and lunches and go sit under the large maple tree. She gathered some books and walked past the eighth grade, giving them encouraging looks.

  When she passed Ephraim’s desk, she stopped and leaned over to whisper, “I’m counting on you, Ephraim, to boost the average for the rest of the class.”

  He whipped his head up in alarm.

  She squeezed his shoulder. “You can do it. The Lord gave you a good mind and he will not fail you.”

  Ephraim dropped
his head on the desk with a clunk. She patted him on the back and went outside. Waiting outside the door, Cal intercepted her.

  “You could have warned me,” she hissed at Cal.

  “I didn’t know he was coming!” Cal said, clearly uncomfortable. “He just showed up at the house, not thirty minutes ago.”

  Cal took a step toward Jorie and she took a step back but hit the porch railing. She was stuck. He was so close that Jorie saw the darker blue flecks in his eyes and the lines around his mouth and a few gray hairs at his temple that she hadn’t noticed before. Had those gray hairs just sprouted in the last few months, brought on by all of the burdens he had been carrying? The sight of those gray hairs made her resolve weaken. She felt that same tenderness for him begin to melt her heart. She wanted to reach out and touch him, to let him know that everything was going to turn out all right.

  But it wasn’t.

  The superintendent was here and her eighth graders were probably going to flunk the test and . . . then . . . there was Ben. She didn’t even want to get started on Ben – her feelings for him were as tangled up inside as one of Marge’s balls of yarn. She didn’t even know where to find a loose end to start unraveling the snarled mess, and she was even more uncertain about where it would end.

  She lifted her eyes and looked right at Cal. His light blue eyes were searching her face and they were soft, so soft. So very soft.

  She had to remind herself to breathe.

  A shout from the playground distracted them and Jorie used the moment to slip around Cal. Before she stepped off the porch, she turned back to him. “Have you asked Maggie what’s been troubling her lately?”

  Cal looked surprised by the question. His eyes searched out Maggie on the playground. He found her crouched under the elm tree, playing tic-tac-toe in the dirt, alone. “Well, no. What makes you ask?”

  Jorie looked at him as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Haven’t you noticed? She’s stopped humming.”

  In the middle of May, spring weather finally arrived. One warm evening, Atlee noticed Marge walking across the driveway from the barn to the house. “What were you doing out there at this time of night?” Atlee asked her, holding the kitchen door open for her.

  “I just wanted to see little Indigo,” Marge answered. “She might be the prettiest foal we’ve ever had.”

  Atlee looked worried. “You locked up, didn’t you?”

  “Of course I did,” Marge said, clearly annoyed.

  Atlee glanced at Jorie and she gave a slight nod of her head. When it came to horses, she could read her grandfather so well that he didn’t even need to utter a word. As she watched her grandmother climb the stairs to go to bed, Jorie got up to go check that the barn had, indeed, been locked up. Just as she put her hand on the kitchen door, she heard strange noises coming from the barn. Something was wrong with the horses. She could hear neighing and stamping, much more than was normal at night.

  Alarmed, Atlee grabbed his gun and followed Jorie outside. She reached the barn first and found the door wide open. The horses were in their stalls, pacing and huffing in alarm. At the end of the dark corridor was Fancy, out of her stall, rearing and kicking out at something in the shadows. Jorie aimed the flashlight at the end of the corridor and felt her heart skip a beat. There was a cougar with its mouth around Indigo’s head. Atlee pushed Jorie into Fancy’s stall and shot his rifle into the rafters, shocking the cougar. It dropped Indigo and darted past them, disappearing out the open barn door and into the woods.

  Atlee grabbed Fancy’s enormous-sized halter to get her back in her stall so that Jorie was able to get to Indigo. The foal lay quivering on the ground, panting quick short breaths. Blood was everywhere. Jorie worried the foal was going into shock. Telling herself over and over not to panic, she found some blankets in the tack room and covered Indigo.

  “Stay here by her and I’ll run to get Dr. Robinson,” she told her grandfather, who looked as if he might be going into shock himself.

  The story of the cougar attack spread quickly throughout the neighborhood.

  “Dr. Robinson was able to save Indigo’s life,” Jorie told Ephraim when he came to see the injured foal the next day. “She’s probably going to be blind in one eye, and we have to watch her carefully for infection in the next few weeks, but if all goes well, she might still be able to be a broodmare.”

  “It’s all m-my fault,” Ephraim told Jorie, when he saw the foal’s eye, covered in a white bandage.

  “How could it possibly be your fault, Ephraim?” Jorie asked. “It was my grandmother’s doing. She opened Fancy’s stall to pat the foal and forgot to close it – the barn door too. She wasn’t thinking straight.” Marge had slept soundly through the entire night’s drama.

  And what a heartbreaking drama, for so many reasons. Dr. Robinson sedated Indigo to sew and bandage her wounds, gave her a shot of an antibiotic, and explained to Jorie and Atlee that the foal would be blind in one eye. The cougar’s teeth had punctured the sclera. But even more upsetting than the foal’s injury was the reason that it had happened. Jorie and Atlee sat at the kitchen table until nearly dawn, still in shock over what had occurred and all that it meant. She would never forget the defeated look on her grandfather’s face, or the way his voice broke when he finally admitted, “My darling is losing her mind.”

  Indigo sneezed, shaking Jorie to the present. Ephraim had opened the bag he had brought with him and was handing her his sketch pad. Jorie flipped the cover and slowly went through the pages. On page after page were sketches of the cougar, caught in different poses. In flight, crouching before pouncing, standing at the top of a rock ledge, peering over the ridge. Jorie didn’t say a word. Toward the end, the pages included two kits.

  “I’m the one who’s b-been f-feeding the c-cougar. I thought if I c-could f-feed her, she wouldn’t be t-taking our livestock. But L-Lizzie started to n-notice that our f-freezer was emptying out and I c-couldn’t t-tell Cal what I was d-doing b-because he would m-make me stop. So I tried g-getting the cougar squirrels and c-cottontails with my slingshot. But then she had her k-kits. She m-must b-be so hungry that she needs m-more than I c-could hunt for her.”

  Confused, Jorie told him to slow down. “Take a deep breath and start at the beginning.”

  The entire story spilled out, starting with the circus, including the day that Cal was beaten. When he was finally finished, Jorie put her arm around his shoulder. “Aw, Ephraim. She’s a wild creature. You’ll never be able to change the nature of a wild animal, no matter how kind or loving you are. She was just born to be wild and free.”

  Matthew practically ran from the bus stop to Beacon Hollow but slowed as he reached the rise. He couldn’t wait to see Lizzie again but didn’t want to seem too eager. He took the kitchen steps two at a time, opened the door, and worked to keep a grin off of his face when he saw her standing by the stove. He dropped his sack off with a thud, hoping she would turn to look at him. Instead, she slammed the spatula on the counter and turned her attention to chopping tomatoes.

  “Lizzie, I’m home.”

  She ignored him and kept chopping.

  He took a step toward her. “Uh, is everything all right?”

  She spun toward him with the sharp edge of the knife pointed right at him. “You tell me, Matthew Zook!”

  He took a step back. “Did I do something to make you mad?” He couldn’t imagine what he could have done. They had fun on the way home from the volleyball game, laughing and teasing each other. When he said goodbye, everything was fine between them. More than fine. She even let him hold her hand when he walked her to the house.

  She took a step toward him; the knife was still in her hand. “After you dropped me at home from the volleyball game last week, did you or did you not take Sarah Bender home in your buggy?”

  He gave a faint, guilty smile and took another step back, for safety’s sake. “I did.”

  She turned back to the counter and started chopping the tomatoes with a
vengeance.

  Matthew watched her for a moment. She finished the tomatoes and turned her attention to cracking eggs in a bowl. She cracked an egg against a bowl so hard that half of it landed on the counter. Matthew grinned. Well, what do you know? Lizzie is jealous – of a girl like horse-faced Sarah! “I was heading home and passed Sarah’s buggy. Her horse had gone lame, so I tied her horse to the back of my buggy and took her home.” He took a step closer. “That’s all.”

  With one arm, Lizzie held the bowl of eggs against her body; with the other hand, she was whipping them senseless. “Sarah told . . . everybody! They’re all teasing her, saying you’re sweet on her.”

  Matthew took one step closer to Lizzie. No one might ever call her pretty, but she was a girl full of strength: a high forehead, a strong jaw, wide cheekbones, large brown eyes. Why did he once think her eyes were too big for her face? Those eyes were wonderful: large and luminous. And it shamed him to think he used to call her Fat Lizzie. She wasn’t fat – not fat at all. As far as he could tell, she had curves in all the right places. He gazed at her fondly.

  When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “I’m not sweet on anybody but you, Lizzie Glick.”

  Lizzie stopped stirring and was still for a long moment. She put the egg bowl down and turned to face Matthew. They stared at one another in silence for a long moment. Matthew leaned forward to kiss her, but she deftly picked up a plate of freshly baked cookies, putting it between them. He looked down at the plate, picked up a cookie, and took a bite.

  “So, do you like it?” she asked, eyes dancing. “It’s a recipe I made up this morning. I call it my Green-Eyed Monster Cookies.”

  “Very nice,” Matthew said, his voice quiet, his eyes locked on Lizzie’s. “Very, very nice.”