The Search (4 page)

Her father always paled a little when Sallie dropped those hints. Sallie kept at it, though. Bess overheard her point out to her father that every girl needed a mother, and poor Bess—poor Bess, she always called her, as if it was one word—had gone without one far too long. She needed a mother’s love before it was too late.

And what could her father say to that? Sallie’s dogged determination was causing her father to weaken. Just last week, he asked Bess what she would think about having a little brother or two around the house.

The truth of the matter was that Bess thought it would be a terrible idea. Sallie’s twins weren’t like most Plain boys. Sallie’s twins were as tricky as a box of monkeys. Their idea of fun was spreading Vaseline on Bess’s toilet seat. But to her father, she only said, “Well, now, that’s certainly something that needs serious thought.”
Long and hard.

Her father grew pensive at her response. And that was the moment when Bess decided to come to Stoney Ridge for the summer. She may not be able to stop a marriage with Sallie from happening, but she didn’t want to watch it happen.

Bess suddenly realized that Mammi’s gaze was fixed on her, and she was sure her grandmother could read the dark thoughts that were darting through her mind. Her cheeks grew warm and she looked out the window. Billy was coming up the drive and gave a wave to them before he disappeared into the barn.

Mammi smacked her palms down on the table. “We got us some roses to tend.” She was on her feet now, making short work of the dishes.

Not ten minutes later, they joined Billy out in the rose fields. Mammi repeated the rose petal–picking instructions she had given out yesterday. Bess didn’t interrupt her to say she understood; after all, her grandmother was older than the hills.

“The best time is in the late morning, after the dew has dried and before the strong afternoon sun.” Gently, Mammi held a large pink rose with the tips of her fingers and pulled it off the base. “Trim the white sections with scissors—this will save you time.” She quickly snipped the white part off of each petal and then let them shower into the basket by her feet. “Next, cut the stem to the next five leaves. That’s where the next bud will form.”

It amazed Bess to see Mammi’s chapped, man-sized hands handling the roses like they were made of spun sugar. Her own hands looked like a child’s next to her grandmother’s. And she was embarrassed by how soft her hands were. As careful as she tried to be, thorns kept pricking her. Within fifteen minutes, her hands were covered in cuts and scratches. And how her back ached, bent doubled over!

When they had harvested a large basketful, Mammi gave a nod to Bess to come along, and they went to the barn. Boomer trotted behind, never more than a few feet away from Mammi. Inside, Bess stopped abruptly when she noticed that the cow stanchions and horse stalls were empty. There were no animals other than Frieda, the buggy horse. She had been so distracted by the sight of Billy Lapp yesterday that she hadn’t even gone into the barn.

“What happened to the animals?” The last time she was here, this barn had been filled with horses, mules, cows, and even two ugly sows.

“Couldn’t take care of them without my Samuel, so I sold them at auction,” Mammi said matter-of-factly. “I buy milk from a neighbor. Still have my ladies, though.” She meant her hens. She loved those chickens and called each one by name. She slid the door shut behind Bess. In the center of the barn were rows of sawhorses with screen doors laid on top. “This is how we dry the petals. Lay ’em out so they can air dry. No overlaps or else they’ll mold. They need to get as crisp as cornflakes.”

“Why don’t you just put them out in the sun to dry?” Bess asked. “That’s what we do with apricots and peaches. Apples, even.”

“No. I keep them in the barn and out of direct sunlight.”

“Have you ever thought about drying them in a warm oven?” Bess asked. “Once when it rained all summer, Dad put sliced up fruit in the oven to finish drying.” She felt pleased with her suggestion. Maybe that was one way she could be helpful to her grandmother this summer: by pointing out ways to improve the farm. Being fifteen, Bess had some pretty good ideas about modernizing, and her grandmother had lived here since Noah’s ark reached Mt. Ararat. She could use Bess’s help with such things
. Like indoor plumbing.

Mammi cast her a look as if she might be addle-brained. “Might work for fruit but not for my roses. You’ll lose oil. Lose oil and you’ll lose fragrance.” She straightened and pressed a hand against the small of her back. “Go bring me another basketful.” She handed the empty basket back to Bess. “Be quick about it. We can’t pick flowers in the afternoon. It’s gonna be hotter than hinges today.”

Bess took the basket and went out to join Billy in the fields. Yesterday, he had left soon after she arrived so she hadn’t had time to get acquainted with him. Mammi said he usually only worked a few hours a day, then needed to get home to tend to his father’s farm. Bess was looking forward to getting to know Billy. She followed behind him as he worked. He culled roses from the right row of bushes, she from the left. She could see he was concentrating on the work. He kept peering at the roses as if he was learning something from them. She racked her brains for an interesting thing to say, but nothing bubbled up to the surface. Finally, Billy stopped for a moment to gaze at a golden eagle flying overhead and seemed surprised to discover she was there.

“So, Bess, where are you from?” he asked.

“Berlin, Ohio.”

Billy went back to examining roses, so Bess hastened to add, “Some folks think it’s Ber-Lin, like the place in Germany. But it’s really pronounced Burrr-lin. Folks changed the way they pronounced it during World War I, so it would seem less German.” She could tell Billy wasn’t really listening. Silence fell again. She tried to come up with a topic that would create conversation. Something that would make him notice her and realize she was bright, intelligent, deep. Nothing came to mind.

He stopped at a bush and examined a few blossoms, then started picking them. “You sure don’t look anything like your grandmother.”

That was a good thing, in her mind. Mammi must be nearly six feet tall and half as wide.

He eyed her bright blue dress. “Is it different in Ohio? Being Amish?”

“What do you mean?” She shrugged one shoulder. “Amish is Amish.”

He snorted. “That’s like saying roses are roses.” He put a hand on his lower back and stretched, looking out at the wide variety of blooms. “What color is your buggy?”

“Black.” So maybe there were differences. Lancaster buggies had gray tops.

“Some folks think Ohio churches are more worldly than ours.” He shook the basket so the petals spread out. “Can you ride bicycles?”

“Yes.”

“Telephones?”

“Only in the barn.”

“You drive a car?”

“Gosh, no.” Billy looked so disappointed that she added, “Once I drove a neighbor’s tractor, though. And I take a bus to the public school.”

He whipped his head up. “You go to public school?”

“High school.” Bess had just sailed through ninth grade and was in shooting distance of high school in Berlin. All that stood in the way was that dreaded algebra class. That was the other half of the reason she changed her mind about spending the summer at Mammi’s. On the day she took her final exam for algebra, she decided Stoney Ridge didn’t sound so bad, after all. And if she hurried about it, she could leave Berlin before report cards would be mailed home, which suited her just fine. That way, she wasn’t being deceitful. She didn’t know for sure that she had failed the class. She had a pretty good idea that she did, but until that report card arrived, there was a slight hope she had squeaked by. And had she failed, well, if she were in Pennsylvania, then she couldn’t possibly attend summer school in Ohio.

She searched for something—anything—to pique Billy’s interest. “My dad got arrested for letting me skip school,” she blurted out. Then she clapped her hand against her mouth. Why in the world did she say
that
?

Billy spun around to look straight at her.

Oh my! but he was fine looking. Those dark brown eyes nearly undid her. She felt her cheeks grow warm. “Last September, Dad said I didn’t have to go to school anymore. Kids in the county right next to ours had stopped going the spring before and no one bothered them, so a few families in our district decided to quit too. But it didn’t work. The truant officer came knocking on the door and took Dad to the county jail.”

“What happened then?”

“He was fined and let go. And now I have to go until I’m sixteen. Ohio law.” Her dad wasn’t going to mess with the law anymore, he’d said more than once when she tried to convince him to let her stay home. “I can’t imagine stopping school at the eighth grade.” She couldn’t imagine it, but she sure would enjoy it. She had often thought she had about all the education she could absorb. Especially math.

A look came over Billy’s face, as if he thought she might be a very dense child. “What makes you think an education has to stop?”

That was a new thought for Bess. She gave his backside a sharp look. A book stuck out of his back pocket. She never thought it any fun to be bothering about books when you didn’t have to. “My teachers say you need a formal education to get ahead in the world.” Now, why did she say that? Why did her mouth not seem to be connected to her brain today?

Billy took his time answering. He pulled a few more rose blooms, snipped the petals, and tossed them in the basket. Then he lifted his chin and looked at her. “I guess it all depends on which world.”

They picked blossoms in silence for a long while. When the basket was full of rose petals, he picked it up and leaned it against his hip. “Have you followed the Wisconsin trial?”

“No.”

He shook his head as if she had just arrived from the moon. “
Wisconsin vs. Yoder
. It’s a big court case going on in Wisconsin right now. Might bring about changes for us.”

She hated to seem ignorant, but curiosity won out over pride. “What sort of changes?”

“It’s possible that we won’t have to attend public schools. That we could have our own schools right in our districts. Schools that would stop at eighth grade.”

Such a thought made Bess’s heart sing with gladness. She . . . would . . . be . . . done . . . with . . . algebra!

He handed her the basket to take into the barn. She broke into a skip on the way there, so thrilled by the news of
Wisconsin vs. Yoder
.

Billy and Bess picked rose petals for a few more hours. The sun had already begun to punish them when Billy said it was time to quit.

“I’ll be on my way,” Billy told Mammi as he handed her the last basket. He put his straw hat back on. “But I’ll be over tomorrow morning, first thing.”

He nodded goodbye and tipped his hat slightly in Bess’s direction, which made her knees feel weak. The boys in Berlin would never dream of tipping their hats to a girl.

Mammi watched him go and said to no one in particular, “He’s a good one, that boy.”

Bess wanted to ask Mammi more about Billy Lapp, but then she thought better of it. Mammi saved herself a lot of bother by not being the kind of person who answered nosy questions.

Mammi closed the sliding door of the barn to keep it cooler inside. “After lunch,” she said, “we got us an errand to do.”

A few hours later, Bess hurried to keep up behind Mammi as she breezed through the Veterans Hospital in Lebanon. On the bus ride there, Mammi told her they were going to pay a visit to her brother, Simon, who was seriously ailing. Bess had heard terrifying stories about Simon, bits and pieces of his life woven together from tales her cousins whispered to her at her grandfather’s funeral. She knew he was Mammi’s only brother, was the youngest in the family, had always been a black sheep, and—worst of all—that he had been shunned.

But Simon was nothing like Bess expected.

She had prepared herself for a hulking brute of a man, with eyes narrowed into slits and teeth sharpened into points and horns sprouted on his head. A monster.

Instead, before her was a tired, pale-skinned old man who looked as if he was weary of living and ready to die.

Bess and Mammi stood by Simon’s bedside in the ward, trying to determine if he was awake or asleep. Bess had a fleeting thought that he might have passed.

She looked at her grandmother and whispered, “Should I get a nurse?”

Mammi ignored her and leaned over him. “Wake up, Simon!” she boomed, and the room echoed.

Simon’s eyes flew open. “Oh Lordy. It’s the town do-gooder.” He glanced at the basket Mammi held in her hands. “Did you bring your jam?”

“I did,” Mammi said.

“Homemade bread?”

“It’s in there.” She put the basket on his bedside table. “You always did take better care of your belly than your soul.”

Simon squinted at Bess. “Who’s that?”

“That’s Bess,” Mammi answered. She eased her big self into a hard-backed plastic chair.

“Jonah—your nephew—he’s my father,” Bess filled in. She shifted her weight awkwardly from foot to foot while standing at the end of the bed. There wasn’t any other chair to sit in. “So I guess that makes you my great uncle.”