The Amish Bride (4 page)

Gritting my teeth in frustration, I opened my eyes, got up, and went to my closet. As I changed into my nightgown, I remembered Sarah Berg’s book in my backpack. I took it out, curled up on my bed, and pulled the quilt to my chin. I started at the beginning, hoping this would help take my mind off my troubles.

The book began with an entry on the first page dated January 12, 1898, and from the look of the handwriting, I would have guessed her to be a young girl, maybe eight years old or so. It read:

Opa Abraham sent me this book from Switzerland because he liked the drawing I sent him for the box he carved. He said I should draw more, but Mamm says I should use the book to write down recipes, which, unlike my drawings, I’ll actually need.

Ouch. Sounded as though little Sarah’s creativity hadn’t exactly been encouraged around the house. That was a shame, because she was clearly talented. On the very next page was an excellent drawing of a young hen. It was a good rendition with lots of texture and shading, but what was
most striking were the eyes, which weren’t those of a chicken, but rather more like an intelligent human. Sarah had been a gifted illustrator, especially for her age.

On the next page, carefully printed across the top were two words, “My Recipes.” Below that was a recipe for making sugar cookies, including an ingredient list followed by the instructions. I scanned it quickly but then slowed down and read it again, sure that this was the very same recipe
I
used when I made sugar cookies. Just the thought filled me with some emotion I couldn’t name—not exactly joy, but close—like an intense sort of wonder at the connection of it all.

The next page had a piecrust recipe, followed by one for berry pie filling, with drawings of different leaves all around the border. Then a couple of more pie filling recipes. I was getting hungry just reading them.

Interrupting the recipes was another journal entry, dated August 2, 1898. Still scrawled in a childlike hand, it read,
Opa Abraham passed away. He was planning to come visit, but then he died.

Those sad words were followed by a page covered with tiny drawings of birds and plants. But then she must have put the book away and forgotten about it for a while, because the next entry was dated five years later, June 17, 1903. Headed “Recipes for Life,” the handwriting there was in a tight script, much messier than before, which made it more difficult to read.

I think the word “recipe” can mean many different things. A drawing follows a sort of recipe. So does the behavior of birds. So does drying herbs and making a quilt. So does a song. I think other things do too, like friendships and marriages. Brothers don’t seem to follow recipes, though. They seem to do whatever they want, whenever they want, in a far more random fashion. My brother Alvin is especially hard to figure out. Mother says God has a special blessing for all of us through Alvin and that I must be more patient. She says it is a sin for me to ridicule him for his sloppy ways.

A smile crept across my mouth. Clearly Sarah Gingrich had a desire for order, not to mention a mind of her own.

Feeling impatient, I stopped going page by page and began flipping through the whole thing, skipping over the sections written in the weird script-and-number code
Mammi
wanted me to figure out for her.

There were recipes for chocolate sauerkraut cake, lemon tart, and trifle.
The last few seemed downright fancy, especially for that time and place. Reading them, my mouth began to water. The book was quite thick, and as I made my way through it, I noticed that most of the recipes had a symbol at the top. A flower. A crow. A hawk. An alpine horn.

I went back to the scripted code, taking a closer look, but, again, I had no idea how to decipher it. I skipped ahead to an entry about halfway through the book that was dated October 3, 1920, and featured drawings of a vine and leaves encircling the words:
Hang bird feeder. Finish quilt. Sort herbs. Marry D.
I smiled as I read the entry a second time.

My eyelids were growing heavy, so I decided to save the rest of the book for another day and turned to the very last page instead. It featured a hand-drawn maze with a symbol at every correct turn, leading to the middle. First there were mountain peaks, a small flower—probably edelweiss—and the alpine horn again, then a flock of crows, a chicken, a hawk, a city, and an owl. Next was an eagle, the chicken again, but this time with chicks too, and then a small bird. At the very center of the maze was a daisy, and in the center of the daisy was a tiny drawing of a farm.

A little more than a year ago, my cousin Ada had given me a beautiful wooden box that had originally been carved by our Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Abraham. The carving on the box’s lid showed a farmhouse and a barn amid wheat fields, and I knew he had based that carving on a picture Sarah had drawn for him.

I was positive this drawing was of the same farm that had been featured in the carving of my box. Underneath, in a cursive script that was shaky and hard to read, was written “the Home Place.”

I shivered. What a beautiful illustration. What beautiful words. I wanted something like that in my life. A place where I belonged.

I traced my finger above the ink, working my way through the maze again, thinking about my own life. Mom was at one turn. Zed at the next. My father at the end of a blocked-off pathway.

Ezra was at the end of the maze, waiting for me at our own someday place. He was my daisy. I grabbed the spiral notebook I used for my journal and flipped to the next blank page. I picked up a pen off the bedside table and drew my own maze with a cottage and a motorcycle, a box and a book. I put a daisy in the middle with a question mark at its center.

Like Sarah, I wrote “Recipe for Life” at the top. I flipped back to her list:
Hang bird feeder. Finish quilt. Sort herbs. Marry D.

I wrote my own list.
Find job. Go to school. Open bakery. Marry E.
And then, on a sudden impulse, I added one more item.

Visit the Home Place.

Then I sat back and smiled, knowing my words had less to do with
Mammi
’s request than they did with my own deepening curiosity.

A
month later I still hadn’t found a job, let alone made any progress on the rest of my plan. It wasn’t that I hadn’t looked for work. I had—every day. First, I applied at my favorite bakery, a place called Nick’s. Then I applied at a few cafés. Finally, I even applied at five fast-food places. I took the bus downtown and crunched through the frozen snow day after day in my worn boots, checking back at the places I’d applied to, but I hadn’t even had an interview in all that time.

I’d also done more research on culinary schools, finding possibilities across the country, several that I would absolutely die to go to. But the local community college offered classes at a very reasonable price. I was sure that was the direction I would take, starting next fall. As long as I could find a job to add to my savings from all the babysitting I’d done through the years to pay for it.

On a Sunday morning in mid-February, Mom knocked on my bedroom door. “I have a mother in labor and don’t have time to get you and Zed to church,” she said. Public transportation was limited on Sundays and not an option. “Be sure to do your chores.”

I called out a groggy “Okay.” I waited until the putter of her car
disappeared before I crawled out of bed, collected my clothes and head covering, and went to the shower.

The day loomed ahead of me, monotonous and boring. Zed would insist he had homework to do so he could spend time on the computer, which was only supposed to be used out of necessity. Still, Mom had recently upgraded our Internet service to help him with his schoolwork—something she hadn’t done for me, even though I’d asked multiple times.

Zed had been avoiding me as much as possible due to my constant pestering about his birth mother. Mom hadn’t said another word about any of the family drama since the night she revealed that dear old Dad planned to move back to Lancaster County, and Zed had been just as tight lipped as she.

It had been a bleak stretch of days, to be sure. The weather had turned cold and icy, which meant Ezra hadn’t been able to ride his motorcycle and I hadn’t seen much of him since our night on the covered bridge.

Yesterday, the weather had finally warmed above freezing, but he would be going to church with his family today.

The cold rain began to pelt the bathroom window as I dressed, and when I came back to my room and was making the bed, my eyes fell to Sarah’s book on the nightstand. Feeling listless and in need of a distraction, I got myself comfortable on top of the covers, grabbed it, and opened it up.

I’d spent quite a bit of time the last couple of weeks studying the book, and every time I looked through it I saw something new. It was fascinating—at least, what I could read. Whole sections were in that coding system Sarah had used, which I hadn’t yet been able to figure out. I’d even done some research on breaking codes and tried to play around with the numbers in the first few entries. I couldn’t see any correlation between the numbers and letters they might represent.

That wasn’t my only problem, though. Even sections not in code were hard to read because the handwriting was so small and flowery. It took a lot of time to go through it with a magnifying glass, and I had to review those sections several times to figure out what she’d written.

At least some of my questions about her multiple husbands were answered. One section talked about her first husband and how he was
killed in a hunting accident—shot by one of Sarah’s brothers, of all things—not long after they were married. It was so sad. Another was about her second husband, who died too. He was originally from Great Britain, which explained the recipes for trifle, scones, and Irish soda bread. She met him after her first husband’s death, when she moved to Indianapolis to go to nursing school. He was a doctor who ended up going off to serve with the Red Cross in the Great War and died from the 1918 flu pandemic while on the western front. This poor woman, twice widowed at such a young age.

Besides the recipes, I was fascinated to see that the book also had herbal remedies written out, plus notes about how she used the same herbs in other ways. Lavender in pound cake and soap. Clove oil for a toothache and to “help a marriage.” I could only guess what her meaning behind that was.

Mammi
had said the images were symbols, and she was right. I was certain they represented people, places, or her way of life. For example, I felt pretty sure the edelweiss was for her mother and the alpine horn her father. The mountain peaks looked like the Swiss Alps and most likely represented her grandfather, Abraham. The first three symbols all ceased to appear after about the middle of the book, probably as those people passed away. I had a feeling that all of the birds represented people, mostly because of the eyes she’d given each of them. They weren’t the eyes of birds, that was for sure.

A lot of her recipes had symbols at the top, and I felt pretty sure that was her way of indicating who liked that recipe or who had given it to her, depending on whether the symbol was on the right side or the left.

Only one symbol was carried throughout the entire book, and that was the hen. It changed from the young one at the beginning to an old one at the end. The quality of the drawings improved over time, but what was especially interesting were the eyes. Although the eyes drawn on the first hen were amazing, each rendition grew more and more realistic, until the last few were absolutely full of life and pain and joy. It was odd that such detailed eyes were wasted on a hen, unless it represented a person.

Toward the end was a page entitled “Home Place Recipe.” On it she had drawn all of the various symbols used previously in the book, plus the
words “hope,” “trust,” “love,” “cherish,” “believe,” and “forgive.” Though the placement of the words and symbols seemed random, I couldn’t know for sure because they showed up in the middle of a long string of entries written in code.

The more I read, the more I wanted to understand—and the more I really did want to visit the Home Place, not just for
Mammi
but for myself too.

My stomach growled for some breakfast, so I put the book back on my table and went downstairs. Despite the pleasant diversion from the past, by the time I reached the dining room my mood had again turned as dark as the dreary winter day. Sure enough, Zed was on the computer, but when I turned to see what he was doing, he minimized the screen.