A Summer Amish Courtship (Love Inspired) Page 3

  “See you for supper,” Phoebe called after him.

  His back now to her, he raised his hand in response.

  Ethan found Ginger occupied at the register ringing up an English woman. “My dat?”

  She nodded over her shoulder as she dropped fly paper into a brown paper bag. “Back in the buggy shop, I think. UPS delivered leather for seat covers.”

  Ethan went through the swinging half door to get behind the counter, then through the next door and into the leather workshop. He nodded to his brother Jacob who was busy with an awl punching holes in what looked to be a new bridle he was making. Beside him, seated on a stool, was their eleven-year-old stepbrother, Jesse, who was talking a mile a minute about a bass in their pond he was set on catching.

  Ethan walked through the shop and into a hall where the newly constructed walls had drywall but no paint yet. Doorway cuts in the walls led to empty space now that could be turned into additional workrooms or an office if his father wanted to expand later. At the end of the hall, he found the door to the buggy shop open.

  Benjamin Miller’s door was always open, figuratively and literally, and not just to his wife and children and stepchildren, but to his community, as well. He was a good listener, but he also didn’t hesitate to give his opinion if it was asked. His father was the wisest man Ethan knew and even though he had just had his thirty-third birthday, he was still young enough to need his father’s guidance occasionally. Old enough to know it.

  Benjamin turned on the stool where he sat at his workbench and peered over the glasses he wore for up close work. “Get that stovepipe?”

  Ethan shook his head. “Didn’t make it to Byler’s. Had a problem with one of my students. Had to take him home. I’ll go get the stovepipe tomorrow.”

  “Whenever you get to it will be fine.” Benjamin looked up at his eldest son, reading glasses perched on his nose. In his fifties, he was a heavyset man with a reddish beard that was going gray, a square chin and a broad nose. Ethan had his father’s brown eyes, but his mother’s tall, slender frame.

  “I’m hoping this break in the weather means we won’t be needing to light that old woodstove ’til fall,” his father went on, nodding in the direction of the stove they’d recently installed. His father had traded a new full harness for the stove with a man from over in Rose Valley. Benjamin liked bartering and did it whenever he could. He said it reminded him of his childhood back in Canada where he’d grown up. In those days, he said, paper money was rarely exchanged; a checking account was unheard of. The sizable Amish community relied mostly on themselves and traded for everything.

  Benjamin turned back to the piece of paper he was studying on his workbench: a sketch of the buggy he and Ethan were building together. It was a small, open buggy, referred to sometimes as a courting buggy. “You said you had a problem with a student. Get it worked out?”

  Ethan took a deep breath. He sighed, removed his wide-brimmed straw hat and ran his fingers through his blond hair. His gaze settled on the box on the cement floor that had been opened to reveal yards of leather they would use to upholster the new buggy’s seat. “Ne... Well, maybe. I don’t know.”

  Benjamin removed his glasses. “Want to talk about it?”

  Ethan sighed again, and then the whole story just came out. It wasn’t the first time he’d talked to his father about Jamie. He knew the boy had been a problem since he’d arrived at school, but still, he listened patiently, commenting or urging Ethan on as he relayed the most recent incident.

  When Ethan was done, he dropped down on a stool near the door. “I’ve just had it, Dat. I’ve half a mind to—” He halted and then started again. “I’ve half a mind to resign, effective the end of the school year. If I give the school board notice now, they’ll have time to find another teacher by September.”

  “That what you want to do? Quit teaching?”

  Ethan set his hat on his knee, studying the courting buggy that was nearly complete. The project was so close to being done that Benjamin was already working on the plans for a more traditional family-sized buggy. “I don’t know, Dat. I’m thinking maybe there’s some truth to what Abigail said. Maybe I’m not cut from the cloth of a schoolmaster.”

  “Not sure I agree with that. Other folks in Hickory Grove would say you’re the best teacher they’ve had for their children. Last Saturday over at the mill, John Fisher was talking about inviting some other Amish teachers—men and women—to our schoolhouse for a day for you to run some kind of training. To get teachers together to talk about ways to teach our children about the world we live in these days. It’s not like in my day when we were isolated from Englishers. Insulated. No denying that as the world has changed, we’ve been forced to change. But that doesn’t mean we have to give up who we are. That means we’ve got to deal with the changes not just in our homes and our church, but our schools, too. Men like you, you understand that. You understand how hard it can be for our children. To hear the music, see the behavior and not covet it.”

  Ethan worried his lower lip, thinking. Everything his father said was true. Teaching school wasn’t easy, not with Amish kids being exposed to Englishers: the clothes, the cars, the behavior. You couldn’t keep young folks on the farm all the time so they had to know how to deal with the world they were supposed to stand apart from. He knew they needed to be guided in how to stay on the path their ancestors had set out for them and school was one of the places they could find that guidance.

  What Ethan didn’t know was if he was really the one to be doing it.

  “That said,” his father went on, “if you do decide teaching isn’t your calling, you know you can join me here.” He gestured to the workshop they were both proud of. “Before you know it, Levi will be home and we’ll be getting serious about production.”

  Over the winter they’d added an overhead door in the shop big enough to accommodate a buggy, and they purchased quite a few tools. A buggy maker had to be a welder, an upholsterer, a carpenter, mechanic and painter all rolled into one and he needed different tools for each aspect of the construction. Ethan’s brother Levi was staying with friends in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, apprenticing as a buggy maker. His plan was to learn what he could over the next year or so and then return to Hickory Grove. At least that’s why he said he’d moved to Lancaster, though Ethan suspected it was the larger population of single women that had attracted him to accept the position.

  Ethan eyed his father. “You think we’re ready to go into business, do you? So far, we’ve just made that new family buggy for ourselves and the one for Lovey and Marshall.”

  “And your courting buggy is nearly done.” Benjamin smiled, pointing at the sleek black buggy that took up the center of the shop.

  Ethan shook his head. “Not mine. Will and Levi would get more use of it. Jacob. Before you know, Jesse will be taking girls home from singings.”

  Benjamin hesitated. “I know you don’t want to hear this—”

  Ethan held up his hand. “Dat—”

  “I know you don’t want to hear it but I’m going to say it anyway.” He got off his stool and walked toward Ethan. “Because it’s my duty as your father to say things you don’t want to hear.”

  Ethan rose, clamping his hat down on his head.

  “It’s time for you to marry again, sohn.”

  Ethan shook his head, surprised by the emotion that rose up in his throat, threatening to prevent him from speaking. He took a moment. “Dat,” he said when he found his voice. “We’ve been over this a hundred times. I don’t know that I’ll marry again.” He stared at a spot on the floor, embarrassed by the feelings welling up in him. His father was never one to tell his sons it was wrong to show emotion. Benjamin Miller was an emotional man, Ethan’s brother Joshua, too. But Ethan wasn’t like them. He didn’t know what to do with his sadness, his loneliness, except tamp it down, close it off, stay one step ahead of it.


  “You need to find yourself a nice young woman, marry, have children.”

  Ethan stood there, unable to meet his father’s gaze.

  Benjamin smoothed the straps of his suspenders and then went on. “You join me in the shop and we’ll start making buggies not just for family and neighbors but we’ll take orders from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, even. Rosemary’s cousin in Kentucky says that when we’re ready, he’ll be the first one to put cash on our workbench. He’s running a buggy that was his grandfather’s because there’s no one making them down there.”

  Benjamin took a step toward Ethan. “I’m not getting any younger, you know. Rosemary and I, we’ve talked about building a smaller house here on the property. Once you older boys are married, and Rosemary’s girls, we’ll have no need for such a big house. You marry and start having little ones and the big house is yours. Someday I’ll be gone and this farm, this family, will be yours. Now, you know I’ve got things worked out so you and all your brothers will have a piece of it, but you’ll be the head of this family someday—you’ll be here to father your little brothers should I pass before they’re full grown men.”

  “Dat,” Ethan murmured.

  “Sohn, it’s what God means us to do. A man is to marry. And to marry, you have to get out there and meet a woman, court a woman.”

  Ethan closed his eyes, beginning to regret having come to his father. After the day he’d had, he didn’t need a lecture. “Dat, even if I did have a notion to court a woman, who would that be?”

  “Plenty of single young women in Hickory Grove,” Benjamin declared, gesturing with his hands.

  “Young. Exactly. Can you imagine me with one of Ginger’s or Nettie’s friends?” Ethan lifted his gaze to meet his father’s.

  Benjamin shrugged. “So you want a more mature woman. A little harder to find, but they’re around. There’s that niece of Eunice’s who stays with them sometimes. Dottie? She’s not much to look at, but she’s a woman of faith.”

  Ethan almost smiled. He knew Eunice Gruber’s niece Dottie, one of the many nieces the woman paraded in front of the single men of Hickory Grove and he knew her well enough to know Dottie wasn’t the kind he would court. It wasn’t her looks that he cared about. He truly believed that beauty was in the eye of the beholder. It was Dottie’s incessant giggling that bothered him. She might have been a woman over thirty, but she acted more like she was fourteen.

  “I don’t think Dottie is my type, Dat.”

  “Fine.” He threw up his hands. “What about Abigail Stoltz? Nice-looking woman. She lost her husband. She understands what it’s like to be alone, to—”

  “Abigail?” Ethan demanded, almost laughing out loud. “Dat, did you not hear anything I said? She accused me of doing my job poorly. She threatened to have me fired.” He shook his head adamantly. “I can guarantee you that if I took a mind to court a woman, she’d be the last one I’d pursue.” He turned toward the door. “I need to move hay before supper. We’re short in the barn.”

  “Just think on what I said,” Benjamin called after him.

  I’ll think on it all right, Ethan said to himself as he walked out the door. Now he was as frustrated with his father as he was with Abigail.

  * * *

  “Amen,” Daniel King announced heartily as he drew silent grace to an end. He clasped his calloused hands together, looking across the kitchen table at Abigail. He was plump to his wife’s slenderness, his gray hair cut short in a bowl cut, his beard long and gray. His gray eyes twinkled with kindness when he spoke. “Looks good, dochder. Let’s eat. I did a little plowing in the garden this afternoon and I’m hungry enough to eat this table.”

  Jamie giggled. “You can’t eat a table, Grossdadi. You’d get splinters in your mouth. Knock out some teeth.”

  “Only if the teeth were loose.” Daniel tousled his grandson’s blond hair. “Like yours.”

  “Just this one.” Jamie wiggled one of his front teeth with his fingers.

  “Not at the table,” Abigail chastised as she put a pork chop smothered in gravy and onions on her mother’s plate and then her son’s. She passed the serving dish to her father.

  “I knew a boy who once ate a table,” June said, heaping cinnamon applesauce onto her plate. “A big supper table we used to use for church dinners. Ten feet, I suspect. Chewed the boards to sawdust and had nary a splinter to swallow.”

  Jamie cut his eyes at his mother but didn’t contradict his grandmother. Instead, he began scooping the gravy and onions off his pork chop and dumping them on his mother’s empty plate.

  Abigail gave her mother and her son a serving of mashed potatoes, then passed the bowl to her father. “More gravy on the stove if anyone wants some.” She glanced at her mother who was now spooning applesauce onto her pork chop. She rested her hand on her mother’s for a moment. “You won’t like that, Mam,” she said quietly.

  “I like it,” June declared loudly. “They’re dry.” She dumped another spoonful on her pork chop.

  “They’re not dry, wife,” Daniel put in, adding pats of fresh homemade butter to his potatoes. “Abby makes a fine pork chop.”

  “Dry as the boards in that table that boy Israel ate.” June began putting applesauce on top of her mashed potatoes.

  Abigail gently took the Ball jar of applesauce from her mother and served her son.

  “Not near the potatoes!” Jamie complained, laying his hand across his plate.

  “My day,” Daniel said good-naturedly as he took the quart of applesauce from his daughter, “a boy ate what his mother put on his plate. That or he put his own food on his plate. You’re old enough to get your own pork chop, boy.”

  Abigail tried to spoon green beans onto Jamie’s plate, but he held out his hand to her.

  “I don’t like green beans. No green beans.”

  “I’m only giving you three. You can well eat three measly green beans,” she said, irritation creeping into her voice. She wasn’t upset with Jamie, of course. It was his teacher. It was Ethan Miller who had her struggling to control her exasperation and think of him with kindness in her heart. She’d been stewing over him since he’d brought Jamie home. She still couldn’t believe the nerve he had to come there and try to tell her how she should raise her son.

  “You don’t like green beans with bacon?” Daniel scoffed. He took the serving bowl from Abigail. “Suits me just fine. More for me.” He put a healthy portion on his plate and then a smaller one on his wife’s. “Saw that the teacher brought Jamie home. Spotted that dun of his from the garden,” he remarked, directing his comment to Abigail. “My grandson in trouble again?”

  Abigail took a moment to gather her thoughts before she responded. She and her father got along well, but like all parents and adult children, especially those living together, they had their disagreements.

  He had a lot to say about how she was raising her son, and much of it critical. He thought she coddled Jamie, that he was immature and that she expected too little of her boy. He’d actually used the word discipline the other day, the same word Ethan had used, which had annoyed her all the more. Men didn’t understand the relationship between a woman and her only son. And neither knew what it was like to lose a spouse, to be raising a child alone.

  Abigail stalled, using the time to cut up Jamie’s pork chop for him as she chose her words carefully. “There was an incident at school today. Ethan wanted to talk with me about it.”

  “Naughty boy,” June chastised, shaking her fork at her grandson.

  Abigail pushed Jamie’s plate back to him and began to serve herself helpings of the green beans, pork chops and potatoes. Then, suddenly remembering that she had buttermilk biscuits in the oven, she rose from her chair. “Oh, goodness. The biscuits. I don’t think that pesky timer is working.” She hurried for the stove, grabbing a hot mitt off the counter.

  “What’d you do, Jami
e?” Abigail’s father asked.

  As Abigail opened the oven, she glanced over her shoulder, waiting to hear what her son would say.

  Jamie stared at his supper plate, his hands clasping it. “The kids are mean to me. They don’t want to play with me at recess.” He stuck out his lower lip. “I want to go home to Maple Shade.”

  “Oh, Jamie, you know that’s not possible.” Abigail pulled the pan of biscuits from the oven. Luckily, she’d caught them before they began to burn. “We sold our farm, remember? We live with your grandmother and grandfather now. We came to help them with the farm.”

  “What did you do?” her father repeated, putting a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. “Mmm. Just like I like them. Lots of pepper.” He eyed his grandson as he chewed and waited.

  After a long moment of silence, Abigail said, “The schoolmaster said—”

  “Daughter, let my grandson tell me. He can speak. He has a mouth.”

  “Oh, you’re in trouble now,” June said quietly. She reached for the jar of applesauce again.

  Abigail dumped the pan of biscuits onto a plate and carried them to the table. “You have to eat something besides applesauce, Mam.” She set the biscuits in the middle of the table and put one on her plate.

  “He’s in trouble,” June responded, pointing at Jamie with a serving spoon that was heaped with applesauce. “That handsome schoolteacher brought him home because he tipped over the outhouse, girl inside.” She plopped more applesauce on top of her potatoes.

  “He didn’t knock it over.” Abigail gently took the spoon and the jar from her mother’s hands and then slid into her chair. “Go on,” she encouraged. “Tell your granddad what you did.”

  The boy pressed his lips together, slowly looking up. “I was trying to make a lever. Like you showed me at the barn the other day when you were trying to get the cardboard under the rain barrel. I wanted to see if it would work.”

  Abigail’s father met her gaze but he held his tongue, though only until supper was over and Jamie had been excused. The boy took no time at all to race from the kitchen and out the back door, headed for the barn he said, to feed the cats.