The Amish Suitor

Someone talk to you.

“Who?”

The little boy pointed in the direction they’d come.

Eli’s next question went unasked when he saw Miriam standing behind him, about ten feet away. By herself. Her friends were putting food on the tables set in the grass. Knowing he shouldn’t be paying attention to such details, he couldn’t help noticing how Miriam’s dress was the exact green of her eyes. Her white kapp glistened as light sifted through the heart-shaped top, and her apron of the same shade seemed to glow in the sunshine.

She said something as she walked toward the buggy.

He assumed it was a greeting because she gave him a polite smile.

“I know Caleb wants us to work together,” he said.

She blinked, and he guessed she’d expected him to chat about the weather or the church service before getting to the subject of the school. She couldn’t know how difficult it was for him to make small talk.

“Ja,” she said.

So far, so good.

“Miriam, I want to say danki for what you did at the store.”

“You already...”

He hoped she’d said something about him previously thanking her for helping Kyle.

“It means a lot to me for someone to come to my nephew’s defense as you did.”

“...little boy, and he...nothing wrong.” He was surprised when Miriam peered past him and into the buggy.

“Looking for something?” he asked. Too loudly, he realized when she winced.

After four years he should be used to that reaction from people when his voice rose with the strength of his emotions. He wasn’t.

“I was...no matter.”

Or at least that was what he thought she said as she stepped aside as Kyle jumped out of the buggy and gave her a big grin. Her expression grew uncertain and wary.

Of his nephew? Why?

Unsure how to ask that, he said, “I don’t know if Caleb told you my nephew is living with me. His name is Kyle. He’ll be one of your scholars. School starts next week, ain’t so?”

When she forced a smile, it looked as if her brittle expression could shatter. She seemed to shrink into herself, acting as if she were allergic to Kyle and him.

He thought again about how she’d jumped to his nephew’s defense at the grocery store. Why had she changed from that assertive woman—too assertive, many would say, for a plain woman—to a meek kitten who acted afraid of her own shadow?

“If you want to play ball with the kinder for a few minutes, Kyle,” he said, “go ahead. Just come when I call you.”

Kyle punched the air and ran off to join a trio of other boys and two girls near his age.

Knowing he should keep an eye on his nephew, though there were plenty of adults around, Eli couldn’t stop his gaze from shifting toward Miriam again and again. She stared at Kyle and the other kinder as if they were a nest of mice about to invade her home.

Shock rushed through him. Why would Miriam Hartz agree to teach the settlement’s kinder if she didn’t like kids? Hadn’t Caleb told him that she’d been a teacher in Pennsylvania? He had missed something, something her brother said or she did. No Amish woman who stood up for a little boy as she had displayed such an undeniable distaste for kinder. Why had she cringed away from Kyle?

As she noticed him appraising her, she said something he didn’t hear and hurried toward the house and her friends. He’d better figure out her odd actions if there was any chance of Miriam and him working together successfully. He wished he knew where to begin looking for an explanation for her peculiar behavior.

Chapter Three (#ucc0a5fe9-4d2d-5b55-a3dc-66a2bf29eb85)

Miriam stood by the window offering the best view of the rolling foothills of the Green Mountains at the horizon. When she’d first arrived at the Harmony Creek farm, the hills had been a sad gray brown. The bare trees had grown thick with leaves and bushes until the hills looked as if they were covered with tight green wool.

Closer were the neat rows of her gardens. Caleb had rototilled two beds for her as soon as frost left the ground. She put in seeds and the immature plants she’d started in the cold frame. The simple wooden box topped by glass acted as a miniature greenhouse. Using it added to the time the plants could grow, which was important when the growing season in northern New York was short. Now in June, the plants were thriving in the earth.

With a chuckle, Miriam tossed her dust rag on the table and checked that her simple blue kerchief was in place over her hair. Why was she inside on such a beautiful day? School was starting at the beginning of the week—the reason why she’d been trying to get her weekly chores done today—so she wouldn’t have as much time to enjoy her garden.

She glanced around the large space with its quilt walls. The ones hanging as “bedroom doors” had been pulled aside to let air circulate. It was strange to live in a place like this one, but it was beginning to feel like home.

As she walked outside, she thought of how truly blessed she was. She had gut friends, including those in the Spinsters’ Club. She laughed. So far she hadn’t shared the name and their plans to enjoy outings together with anyone else. She wondered what the reaction would be. Though she’d considered mentioning it to Caleb, she hadn’t. He was so solicitous of her, and she wondered if he would think she’d lost her mind amidst her desolation about the canceled wedding.

The grass beneath her bare feet was as soft as the breeze making loose strands dance around her face. She curled her toes into the grass and drew in a deep breath as she watched Comet, their dappled-gray buggy horse, rolling like a young colt in the pasture. He was taking advantage of the day as she was.

Pausing to pluck a couple of weeds out of the flower bed to the right of the barn door, she glanced at the battered farmhouse. It was two stories high, but the roof dropped low over eyebrow windows. Caleb had replaced missing slats on the roof and installed drywall inside the house. Because he’d had to remove everything to the studs, he’d asked her to redesign the first floor. She’d made the kitchen bigger and added a mudroom and laundry room with a door to the yard, so it’d be easier to take laundry out to the line that ran from the house to the biggest barn. He’d put a movable wall between the two front rooms. That way, when it was their turn to host church, the wall could be shoved against the kitchen wall, making enough room for the Leit.

The outer walls would be painted white, and he’d agreed the shutters should be the same dark green as the shadows beneath the pine trees. The barns were a worn red, and he’d have to repaint them, too, but for now he was concentrating his scarce free time on the house.

Miriam admired the buds on the daylilies. They soon would be blooming. She planned to transplant her perennials along the front porch, and the best time for moving daylilies was August. She could wait longer to shift the daffodils she’d found in the woods. For the first two days after she brought the bulbs closer to the house, a groundhog had dug them up. She’d convinced the irritating burrower to leave them alone by dousing the flowers with a liberal amount of chili powder mixed with water. The strong scent had kept the animal away...at least so far.

She squatted by the flower bed and went to work. Less than five minutes later, she heard buggy wheels rattling toward the barn. Wondering who was coming, she gathered the weeds she’d pulled. She tossed them onto the compost pile before she walked around the barn’s corner. If someone was looking for Caleb, she’d have to admit she wasn’t quite sure where he was. He’d had a long list of errands to do in Salem and in Cambridge, about ten miles to the south.

She stopped in midstep, surprised when Eli climbed out of the family buggy. Why hadn’t he said anything yesterday about plans to stop by?

Her breath caught when his nephew hopped out behind him. The little boy looked around with the candid curiosity of a six-year-old, and he pointed to Comet. The horse wasn’t a common color for buggy horses. If the little boy went into the pasture and frightened him, it could be—

Stop it!

She scolded herself for looking for trouble where there might not be any. She wanted to stop reacting to the sight of a young kind, thinking of things that could go wrong, but she couldn’t. Kyle reminded her of Ralph Fisher. Both were spindly and all joints as their elbows and knees stuck out from their thin limbs while they grew like cornstalks.

Eli had noticed her dismay yesterday after the church service. Nobody else had, not even her friends in the Spinsters’ Club. She needed to keep her feelings to herself to halt the questions from beginning again—such as why a teacher hated kids. She didn’t hate them; she loved them. Because she loved them, she didn’t want to be the one to put any in danger.

“Gut mariye,” Eli called.

She waved to him and his nephew and waited for them to cross the yard to where she stood. A siren sounded from the main road, and she flinched.

Kyle did, too, and scanned in every direction to see what sort of emergency vehicle it was.

Eli kept walking as if nothing had happened.

How bad was his hearing?

It wasn’t her business. However, the teacher in her was curious how he’d managed to get by with only his young nephew to clue him in. A few quick tests he wouldn’t know were going on would tell her the extent of his hearing loss.