The Revealing (30 page)

She didn’t believe in love at first sight or any such foolishness, but there was something that drew her to Jon. She couldn’t say what it was. For all she knew, it was the pull of the moon on the Amish countryside. The only thing she was certain of was that she felt sad when the bakery closed and their coffee and cinnamon roll accidentally-on-purpose dates were over. She counted the hours until she would see him again. Those were the thoughts that spun around in her mind as she sat across from Jon at their special table at the Sweet Tooth Bakery.

“What’s going on at Eagle Hill?” he asked.

“Too much, if you ask me. I wanted peace and quiet and, instead, it’s been as busy as a weekday at Grand Central
Station. The family is going to hold church Sunday soon, so there’s a lot of sprucing up going on. Tons of people in and out, painting and hammering and the like. Frankly, the place looks much better.” She smiled. “Maybe other churches should do the same thing—threaten to hold church at your home so you’d clean it up now and then. Imagine how many home improvement projects would get finished if you thought you were hosting church for two hundred people.”

“I think you mentioned a baby?”

She nodded. “Now that’s something interesting. Didn’t I tell you? I thought for sure I’d told you all about it. The mother of the baby disappeared. Left the baby and vanished into thin air. I heard her car sputter off in the middle of the night and then the oldest girl—Bethany—yelled for her to come back.”

Jon looked shocked. Then he quickly arranged his face in its normal, slightly quizzical, casually interested expression. “Any idea where she might have gone?”

“None.”

“Think she’ll be back?”

Brooke shrugged. “She wasn’t much of a mother type, if you ask me. Seemed very young and immature. Maybe it’s for the best, now that the boy is back from jail.”

Again, Jon’s eyes went wide but just for a split second. “You didn’t tell me that, either.”

“Didn’t I?”
So what?
Why would it matter?

“Sounds more like a soap opera than a quiet Amish farm.”

Brooke laughed. “You’re right. It does.”

And then the subject changed as Jon wanted to know what her plans were for the next week. “Nothing!” she replied, too quickly, too wide-eyed. Then, dropping her head, “Well, nothing that couldn’t be rearranged.”

He swept a slow glance across the bakery and she studied his profile: those beautiful deep-set eyes, the crisp, straight nose, the dimple in his cheek, that thick, wavy hair. “Maybe it’s time to make some plans,” he said, offering up that dazzling smile that made her stomach do cartwheels. Their eyes met and she heard her own pulse drumming in her ears.

She was sure, just sure, that he was going to ask her out soon.

17

O
utdoors it was unmistakably May. Lilacs bloomed, fields were velvet green, purple martins swooped around white birdhouses on tall poles, and Eagle Hill had never looked better. Every member of the family, along with friends and neighbors, had spent days cleaning and sprucing up the farmhouse. The windows had been washed, the floors rewaxed, every cupboard and bureau drawer was swept out and reorganized. Even the barn had been tidied so that you wouldn’t recognize it. Not a single spiderweb remained.

“I think the farm was perfectly all right,” Vera grumbled as Rose finished preparing the food for tomorrow’s fellowship lunch. She looked around her transformed home and saw nothing different.

Tomorrow, church would be held at the farm and Bethany and Tobe would be baptized. Rose wished that Dean could know how well his family was doing. She hoped he did.

The kitchen was a hive of activity and Rose looked on in amazement. Chickens boiled in a huge pot, bacon sizzled in another. Fern Lapp had brought over a large pot of bean soup, Bethany and Naomi had baked loaves of bread and
dozens of cookies and brownies, other neighbors would bring additional food.

Bethany put the finishing touches on a tray of brownies and swatted away Luke’s hand as he tried to snatch one.

“It isn’t fair if we don’t get to eat them,” he said, a whiny twang to his voice.

“There’s bound to be leftovers,” Bethany told him.

The next morning, there wasn’t a hair out of place, a dirty chin, or a bare foot to be seen. Luke and Sammy looked like little angels, Rose thought. It was always a great surprise to her—the difference a little cleaning and polishing could make.

She had barely rinsed out her coffee mug when she heard the wheels of the first buggy crunching onto Eagle Hill’s long driveway. Soon, bearded and bonneted neighbors spilled from their buggies and crossed the yard to gather quietly and shake hands. Children, with freshly polished shoes already coated in dust, darted behind their mothers’ skirts and around their fathers’ legs. The sheep and goat’s pasture had become a temporary holding spot for the many horses that had transported families to church. Galen had brought over a few wheelbarrows filled with hay to act as temporary food troughs.

By 7:45 a.m., a crowd of almost two hundred people milled around the yard. Some of the men leaned against the fences or walls, stiff and stern in their dark Mutza coats, discussing weather and crops. The women gathered together in clumps, their black bonnets nodding as they chatted about canning or gardening or children.

Furniture had been moved out of the downstairs to make room for the long, backless church benches, which arrived by wagon and could be transported from home to home.
The benches were placed in every spare inch so that nearly everyone could see the center of the house from his or her seat—the center being where the ministers would preach.

Shortly before eight, as if drawn by a silent bell, the women organized themselves into a loose line and filed into the house. The young single women walked at the front of the line, the older ones at the back.

Rose half listened while Elmo preached a message, her attention focused more on keeping an eye on Luke, seated on the other side of the room from her. Normally she followed every word of the sermon, but this morning she wished the ministers would finish early. She was eager to get to the baptisms of Tobe and Bethany and felt very distracted.

A small plate of graham crackers was making its way around the room for parents who had little ones curled beside them. Rose saw Luke reaching out to grab one and she sent him an arched eyebrow look, straight across the room. Luke’s hand hovered over the plate, sensing his mother’s message without acknowledging eye contact. His shoulders shrugged in a big sigh and he passed the plate along, untouched. Down the row on the women’s side, a little girl was making a handkerchief mouse to amuse her toddler sister. She glanced over at Sarah, sleeping in Naomi’s arms.

Mim nudged her with an elbow. “Mom, who is that?”

“Where?”

“Sitting next to the insufferable Jesse Stoltzfus.” Who, Mim tried to ignore, was flashing her one of his sweet-rascal smiles.

“It’s Jesse’s cousin, visiting from Ohio. Why?”

“He can’t stop staring at Bethany. And Jimmy Fisher keeps noticing that very thing.”

To be sure, Jimmy was scowling at Jesse’s cousin, who was
staring dreamily in Bethany’s direction. She was oblivious, Rose realized, her mind a million miles away.

Mim was glaring at Jesse’s cousin, not saying a word, of course, but then, she didn’t have to. Rose knew just what her daughter was trying to communicate; it was something Vera would do and she had to stifle a smile. Church, Mim was saying with her pointed stare, was not the place to make eyes at a girl.

The silence lay heavy and warm over the house. Bethany relaxed, they were nearly there. Only a few more moments and the baptism would begin. She breathed in the Sunday smells of laundry starch and shoe blacking and coffee percolating. So familiar, yet on this sunny spring morning, she felt as if she were experiencing church for the first time.

Bethany and Tobe had four crammed sessions with David Stoltzfus studying the Dordrecht Confessions. Usually, a minister spent nine sessions of instruction classes to go through all the Articles, but the bishop was eager to get Tobe baptized. Most likely, Bethany reasoned, he wanted to hurry before Tobe changed his mind.

Bethany expected the instruction classes to be boring, and they mostly were, but her brother made them surprisingly enjoyable. He peppered David Stoltzfus with all kinds of bold and audacious questions that the minister didn’t seem to mind at all. In fact, he enjoyed Tobe’s inquisitive mind and encouraged questions. It was a pity Jimmy Fisher declined to take part in the classes, Bethany mulled for the umpteenth time, because she knew he would’ve enjoyed the spirited and lively debates.

Earlier this morning, before church began, Jimmy had sidled close to her and asked if Tobe had smooth talked her into getting baptized with him. It wasn’t just smooth talk; Tobe had badgered her into taking the classes with him, but Jimmy didn’t need to know that. She gave him a benign smile.

“I just can’t understand why you’d want to go ahead with it now. I thought we’d wait and do it . . . you know . . . later.”

She tipped an eyebrow his way. “Oh? What’s later to you?”

“Well, what’s the rush to you?”

“It’s hard to explain. But it’s a real thing, you know, baptism opening the floodgates of grace.”

His mouth formed an
O
, but the word never made it past his lips. He gave her a strange look, before she moved to the porch where the women were gathering.

When the time came for the baptisms, Bethany looked out at the congregation, all those she knew and loved. Her face grew hot and her voice trembled and she felt herself perspire, but she didn’t waiver. Bishop Elmo asked her and Tobe questions: Did they still desire to be baptized? Were they ready to say goodbye to the world and to rebuke the devil? Would they stay in the church until the day they died?

Tobe gulped at that last one, took a long time answering, so long that everyone leaned forward on their benches, straining to hear him. He turned and held Naomi’s gaze for a moment. In a loud voice, he said, “Yes. Yes, I will,” and there was a sigh of relief among the benches.

Then the bishop turned to the congregation and asked questions of affirmation. He motioned to Tobe and Bethany to kneel for a prayer. A prayer so long that Bethany was sure her knees had sailed past hurting and had gone completely numb. The bishop’s wife unpinned Bethany’s prayer covering
as Elmo took a pitcher of water and poured three trickles of water over Bethany—one for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Ghost—and she felt the water stream down her face. Then she was up, dripping and wet and cold, and she felt new.

The tables groaned with food. Oval platters offered up sandwiches of peanut butter and marshmallow cream mixed together, slathered on homemade bread. A simple bowl of cut apple wedges sat at each table’s end. There were trays of bologna and cheese, dishes of pickles and red beets. Coffee, tea, and containers of unsweetened grape juice—a lively purple from Amos Lapp’s own vineyard.

Rose set out a pitcher of hot coffee on the table and noticed Galen standing by the doorjamb. There was something about the set line of his mouth that made Rose decide to go and see what might be wrong. She followed him into the kitchen to find Bethany, Mim, and Vera, standing frozen in a tableau, their faces expressing different degrees of horror.