The Search (14 page)

Oh no. That meant that everyone in town knew about Mammi’s car thievery. “Tell them I’m neither.” She pushed his hand away from her waist and rolled her eyes. They both looked ridiculous, covered up with so much mosquito netting, and she couldn’t help but laugh at the sight, which got Billy grinning.

“Well, I’ll pass that information along.” He put the netting on the shelf and picked up a matchbox and the smoker, then placed it on the wheelbarrow. “So what’s this about algebra?”

“I see no reason to study math,” she said firmly. “No reason in the world.”

“I love math,” Billy said.

Bess looked at him. “What is there to love?”

“Math is . . . entirely predictable,” he said. “There’s always a right answer.”

“Only for those who make sense of it in the first place.”

“You’re not looking at it in the right way. Math is based on all the patterns around us. They are constant and repetitious and dependable, like . . .” He looked out the barn window. “Like rows in the fields, ripples in a stream, veins on a leaf, snowflakes. Man-made or natural, those patterns are there. Math is always the same.”

She had never thought of math like that. She didn’t like to think about math at all.

Billy picked up the wheelbarrow handles and pushed it out the barn door. He waited until Bess joined him, then slid it shut behind her. They walked down the path to the rose fields. “Isn’t there anything about learning you love?” he asked.

“Words, I guess. How you can tell by the root the way words get started in the first place. And then how they change over time.”

“See? Not so different. You’re looking for patterns too.”

She pondered that for a while and decided he was probably right, but she still felt suspicious about math.

“Since you’re over being mad, I need some advice.”

Her heart skipped a beat. Billy came to her for advice? Her madness melted away. “What kind of advice?”

“I’ll tell you more when we’re done. I need to concentrate.” Billy pushed the wheelbarrow down to the beehives in the back of one rose field. As they approached the hives, the buzz grew louder. He lit the smoker and waved it all around the stack of hives. She noticed that he sang softly to the bees as he worked. It touched her, that gentle singing. It was one of the hymns from church, sung in a slow, mournful way. He told her his singing calmed the bees; that they were smart creatures and appreciated a good tenor voice when they heard it. She rolled her eyes at that but couldn’t hold back a smile.

Carefully, Billy lifted a hive onto the wheelbarrow as Bess held it steady. A few stray bees buzzed around them, curious. They rotated the hives among the fields where the roses were in bloom. It made for more honey, Bertha had taught him. The bees didn’t have to work so hard on the gathering and could concentrate their energies on the honey making. He took one more hive and gently placed it on the wheelbarrow. When he was finished, he emptied out the smoker and they headed to the barn. About halfway there, Billy stopped to make sure the bees weren’t swarming, indignant that their homes had been moved. Satisfied, he told Bess she could take off the netting now.

He helped her unwind it from around her bonnet, carefully rolling it up again to reuse. “Yesterday afternoon, I went to the lake and saw the truck dumping the sawdust. Backed right up to the shoreline and lifted the truck bed up and dumped. Deep enough so that it all sank.”

She pulled the big gloves from her hands. “Did you say anything to the driver?”

He shook his head. “No. I stayed out of sight.”

“What are you going to do with that information?”

“That’s what I don’t know. That’s the part I need your advice about.”

Her heart skipped another beat. Maybe Billy was finally starting to notice her. She admired how much he cared about the lake. He was genuinely troubled about it.

“If I tell my father about it, he’ll only say that we need to let English problems be English problems, and Amish problems be Amish problems.”

“Is that what you think?” she asked.

“I can’t just do nothing and let the lake die. God gave us this earth to care for properly. But my father is right about one thing too. It’s not my place to get the law involved. It’s not our way to demand justice. We leave those matters in God’s hands.”

Bess shrugged. “It’s just letting consequences have a place. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“Still,” he said, hesitating, and she knew. These kinds of situations were complicated. How could they care for God’s earth and not want the lake to be protected? And yet by protecting the lake, they would need to get involved with the law. Billy lifted the wheelbarrow handles and started walking carefully to the rose fields. Bess followed behind, thinking hard.

She stopped as a new idea bubbled up. “Maybe there’s something in between.”

He turned his chin toward her. “I’m listening.”

She took a few steps to catch up to him. “Every afternoon, I’ve been going to the bakery to visit with Lainey. There’s a newspaperman—Eddie Beaker—who comes in after three so he can buy Danish for half off. He’s always asking Lainey if she’s heard any big news stories. Even not-so-big stories. Any story at all, he said. Just yesterday I heard him complaining to her that he doesn’t like summer. Said it’s too hot and it always makes for slow news months.”

Billy stopped and spun around to face her. “You think maybe he could break the story?”

She nodded. “Mammi says Eddie Beaker is ‘a wolf in cheap clothing.’ ”

Billy smiled, then stroked his chin. “Bess Riehl, du bischt voll Schpank.” He tapped his forehead. “Und du bischt en schmaerdes Maedel.”
You are daring. And you’re a smart girl.

Jonah leaned against the doorjamb at Rose Hill Farm and looked around the kitchen. It hadn’t changed, which comforted him somehow. The wrinkled linoleum floor, the pale green walls and ceiling. Even the bird clock on the wall was the one he had grown up with. He used to think that clock was irritating. Now, it seemed endearing. “I see that the early rain has been good for the roses.”

“Now we need sunshine to keep them dry and blooming,” his mother completed his thought.

He hung his cane on the wall peg and put his straw hat on top, then sat in a chair. It was the same chair he had always sat in. He knew it would always be his chair. His place in the family. “Bess seems happy. She’s as brown as a berry. Looks like she’s gaining some weight from your good cooking.”

Bertha nodded in agreement. “She came here looking as brittle as a bird. Now she’s as fat as a spring robin.”

Hardly that, Jonah thought, as Bertha poured two cups of coffee. But Bess’s appearance had changed. In just a few weeks, she seemed older, more mature. “The sheriff gave me his side of the story. Mind filling me in on yours?”

Bertha eased into her chair. “I had to do something that would get you back here.”

“Why didn’t you just ask?”

“I did,” she said flatly. “Been asking for years.”

So she had. Jonah leaned back. “What is so all-fired important that you need me to be back in Stoney Ridge? Right now?”

His mother took her time answering. She sipped her coffee, added sugar and milk, stirred, then sipped it again. “Simon’s dying.”

Jonah snorted. “Impossible. Dying would take too much work. He’ll outlive us all.”

“He’s dying all right.”

“Where is he? The cottage looked empty.”

“He lost that years ago when the bank took it. It’s been up for sale for a long time. He’s at the Veterans Hospital over in Lebanon.”

Jonah sighed. “What’s he dying of?”

“Some kind of cancer. Hopscotch disease.”

“Hodgkin’s?”

“That’s what I said.” Bertha stood and went to the window, crossing her arms against her chest. “Them doctors are looking for family members. They want bone marrow for him.” She turned back to Jonah. “They think it might cure him.”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting tested to give your brother—a man who has done nothing for anybody his whole livelong life—don’t tell me you’re planning to give him your bone marrow?”

“I tried. I’d give it to him if I could. But I’m not a match.” She sat down in the chair. “But you might be.” She looked into her coffee cup and swirled it around. “And so might our Bess.”

“Bess?” Jonah looked up in surprise. “She’s a distant relation to him.” He easily dismissed that notion. “What about your sisters? Why don’t they get tested?”

“Two did. Three refused because he’s still shunned. The two that did—Martha and Annie—they aren’t a match.” Before Jonah could even ask, she answered. “And their husbands won’t let their children or grandchildren test for it.”

“Because he’s been shunned.”

Bertha nodded. “You and Bess . . . you’re his last chance.”

Jonah exhaled. “What makes you think Simon would accept my bone marrow, even if I were a match? You always said he was as cranky as a handle on a churn.”

“You leave Simon to me,” she said in a final way.

On the following Sunday, before church, Jonah was buckling the tracings on the buggy horse. Bess and his mother were upstairs getting ready to leave. His mind was a million miles away from churchgoing. He was thinking about what his mother had told him yesterday, about wanting him to take a blood test to try to cure Simon from his cancer. His mother rarely spoke of her brother—Simon had been excommunicated from the church years ago. He wasn’t included in family gatherings, his name wasn’t spoken, and he was ignored when he was seen, which was often.

Jonah could never figure out why Simon stayed in Stoney Ridge. He moved there right after he was discharged from the army due to an injury. Simon had been drafted in World War II and served as a conscientious objector, stationed as a maintenance worker in a base camp in Arkansas. He was accidentally shot in the foot. He claimed he was cleaning a gun, but the story was vague and changed each time he told it. Samuel, Jonah’s father, said it probably went more like this: Simon was doing something he shouldn’t have been, like hunting when he was supposed to be on duty, then blamed the Army for the accident. Using his disability pension, Simon bought a run-down home near his sister’s farm and ran it down even further. It was as if he enjoyed being a thorn in everyone’s side. But . . . that would be Simon. His father said Simon was born with a chip on his shoulder.

Jonah slipped the last buckle together on the bridle and looked up over the horse’s mane to see Lainey O’Toole walking toward him.

“Bess invited me,” she said, as she took in his confused look. “To church.”

“Our church?” he asked, wondering why Bess would have put Lainey in such an unfair position. She might have meant well, but Lainey shouldn’t feel obligated to come. “Our church . . . the service lasts for three hours.” He knew enough about the English to know they zoomed in and out of church in scarcely an hour’s time. Why, the first hymn was just wrapping up after an hour in an Amish church.

Lainey shrugged. “I’m used to that. The church I’ve been going to the last few years has long services, plus Sunday school.”

“The preachers speak in Deitsch.”

“I remember. I used to go with your mother.” She smiled. “As I recall, those preachers can get a good deal across with just their tone of voice.”

A laugh burst out of Jonah. She surprised him, this young woman.

“I can still understand a little bit of Deitsch. Growing up in Stoney Ridge . . . living with Simon those few years, I picked up a bit.”

Jonah looked past her to the rose fields, then turned back to her. “Du bisch so schee.”
You are so lovely.
Did he
really
just say that? Oh please no. He suddenly felt like Levi Miller, self-conscious and bashful and blurting out ridiculous, awkward compliments.

She gave him a blank look. “I guess I don’t remember as much as I thought.”

Oh, thank you, Lord!
“I said, ‘Well then, hop up.’ ” He offered her his hand and helped her into the buggy. He happened to notice that she smelled as sweet as a lemon blossom.