A Summer Amish Courtship (Love Inspired) Page 6

  He shrugged. “Like I said, everyone is welcome. The more folks there, the faster the barn will go up. There will be a big dinner of course, and it looks like we’re going to have a good day for it. Sunny and seventy degrees.”

  Jamie turned around to face his mother. “Can I run ahead?”

  Abigail hesitated.

  “Please?” Her son bounced on the balls of his feet, his lunch pail banging against his leg. He was obviously a bundle of energy after sitting at his desk all day.

  “Fine,” she agreed.

  The boy took off.

  “But you better stay away from Karl’s cows!” she hollered after him. Then she sighed. “Boys.” She glanced at Ethan. “I suppose you think I should have made him walk beside me all the way home.” Her tone suddenly grew prickly. She was enjoying the walk home with Ethan, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t forgotten the animosity between them. “To discipline him.”

  “I see no trouble letting him run ahead. You’ll be able to see him if he climbs Karl’s fence.” Ethan glanced at her and then ahead again. “I wanted to talk to you alone anyway.”

  She looked at him and back at the grassy path trampled by others who took the same route to and from school. “What’s he done now?” She said it almost as an exhalation. Her day had been a long one already.

  She and her father had had words when she had come home from dropping Jamie off at school. She’d arrived to find her mother trying to make bread using a cup of warm vinegar instead of water to dissolve the yeast. Her father had made light of the incident, saying her mother had just “forgotten.” Abigail had argued that a woman seventy years old, who had been making bread since she was ten, did not forget how to make it. She felt there was more going on with her mother than forgetfulness but no matter what happened, her father insisted there was nothing wrong. He usually countered any argument with Abigail on the subject by recalling an incident where he’d forgotten to pick up an item on the grocery list or left a feed bin open for the chickens to get into. And she always responded with the fact that it wasn’t the same, but her father was an obstinate man, especially when it came to the subject of his wife.

  Abigail didn’t look at Ethan. She just put one foot in front of another. This was probably something trivial again. Obviously the schoolmaster didn’t like her son and he was going to take every opportunity he could to pick on the boy.

  “I wanted to talk to you about—” Ethan went quiet for a moment and then blurted, “Abigail, I don’t think Jamie can read.”

  She halted and turned to him. “What?” she demanded with a mixture of indignation and disbelief.

  Ethan met her gaze. He didn’t seem angry, only concerned. “I don’t think he can read. No,” he corrected himself. “I’m sure of it.”

  “That’s ridiculous. I’ve heard him read,” she argued, settling her hands on her hips.

  “You’ve heard him read what?”

  “Um...” She thought for a moment. It wasn’t as if students brought their reading books home and read aloud to their parents at night. Reading was for school. And understanding that children, no matter their age, had chores to do when they got home, Ethan didn’t often give homework. “I don’t know. A sign in the grocery store? On...on a feed bag.”

  Ethan shook his head no. “That doesn’t mean he’s reading. He’s a smart boy. I think he’s guessing.”

  She dropped one hand from her hip, her annoyance with him rising by the second. “What do you mean?”

  “He knows the sounds of most of his letters, but he’s using context clues to guess the word. The pictures. Or the item. Sure, he can read a sign that says apples because he can see the apples in the bin. A bag of chicken feed?” He lifted his hand and let it fall. “A chicken on the bag.”

  Abigail walked. They had almost reached her father’s driveway. She could see that Jamie was nearly to the house. “That’s ridiculous,” she repeated again. “Jamie is... He’s bright. Mischievous, but...bright. And he’s good with math. He adds and subtracts well. Multiplies.”

  Ethan caught up to her and walked beside her again. “You’re right. Jamie is bright. And he’s also good with math in his head. But I’ve been a teacher here for years now and I know a student who can’t read when I see one.”

  She reached the driveway and turned to face the schoolteacher, feeling defensive. “Jamie started school when he was six, right on time,” she sputtered. “His teacher back home never told me he couldn’t read.”

  “Was he getting into trouble at his old school?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “That’s often an indication of a problem with learning. Students who aren’t learning at the same pace as other students their age, slower or faster, act out from boredom. Or sometimes frustration.”

  “I have to get home.” Abigail took her basket out of his hand, being none too gentle.

  “Me, too.” He walked past the driveway, then turned back to her. “It would be easy enough for you to see for yourself. Test him.”

  She didn’t know what to say, maybe because the thought crossed her mind that possibly Jamie couldn’t read as well as he should have been able to. She immediately thought of a couple of instances over the last year when he’d misread something. But she’d just chalked it up to all the changes in his life. The idea that a nine-year-old boy couldn’t read, her nine-year-old, was absurd.

  “Test him,” Ethan repeated, heading down the road. “Then we’ll talk.”

  * * *

  That evening, after the supper dishes had been cleared away, the family had settled in the living room for an hour before bed. Abigail was still fuming about what Ethan had told her. Of course Jamie could read. Maybe he just didn’t want to read for Ethan. Maybe the subject in his reading book was boring. There had to be a dozen explanations.

  But what if Ethan was right? That thought had been creeping into her head since she’d discussed it with him earlier in the day.

  Abigail glanced up from the list she was making for their trip to Byler’s store the next day. They needed groceries, including several items to make the macaroni salad her mother wanted to take to the barn raising on Saturday. It turned out that her father had already heard about the community event when he was at the harness shop that morning—the harness shop owned by Ethan’s father. At supper, her father had announced that he told Benjamin Miller he would help and that they would all be going to the barn raising in Marydel. He’d been assigned to a work crew right on the spot.

  Abigail tapped her pencil on the pad of paper on her lap. Her mother was sound asleep in an old recliner that had been left in the house by the previous owner. Her father and Jamie were playing a game of checkers.

  “And that’s your last one,” her father announced, skipping over Jamie’s black checker with his red one. “I won.”

  Jamie frowned, crossing his arms over his chest. “You never let me win.”

  “No, I do not. But if you listen to what I tell you, you’ll be beating me on your own in no time,” his grandfather said, beginning to reset the board for the next time they would play.

  Abigail watched her son for a moment and then called his name.

  Jamie looked over as he got out of his chair. “Ya?”

  She waved him over with the pencil in her hand. “Come here for a second.” As he crossed the cozy living room, she turned the pad of paper around so that she could point out one of the words she’d printed neatly on the page. “What does that say?” she asked, tapping beside the word pears.

  Jamie looked down and then up at his mother, suddenly seeming uncomfortable.

  “That’s...that’s your shopping list,” he said.

  “Ya,” she agreed. “And I want you to tell me what that word is on my list.”

  “I’m tired,” he whined. “I want to go to bed.”

  “You can go in just a second.” A feeling of dread was growing stronger inside her with every second. What if Ethan had been right? What if her son couldn’t read? “Read the word to me, Jamie,” she said, the tone of her voice telling him she wouldn’t tolerate disobedience.

  He groaned loudly. “P...p...” he repeated the sound. “Potatoes!” he exclaimed.

  She didn’t know what to say. She tapped the next word on the list: crackers.

  Jamie stared at it. “K... k...” He looked up at her. “I don’t know. Your writing is messy.” He wiped at his eyes that had suddenly turned teary. “May I go to bed? I’m tired.”

  She hesitated, then rose from her chair and kissed the top of his head. “You may.”

  “What was that all about?” Abigail’s father asked as Jamie hurried out of the room.

  “I’ll tell you later,” she whispered. Then she carried the pad of paper into the dark kitchen, not sure what she was more upset about at that moment. Was it that Jamie couldn’t read, or that she was going to have to apologize to Ethan Miller again?

  Chapter Five

  By eight on Saturday morning, the sound of hammers and saws echoed across the Brubacher farm. The day was bright, the grass still damp with dew and the air filled with the scent of spring blossoming around them. It was a good day, and Abigail was grateful to God for the gentle weather.

  Next to the family’s farmhouse, women and girls set up tables in the yard, while boys took charge of arriving horses and buggies. At the construction site in the barnyard, eight men were already raising the frame of the first wall on the new barn. According to Abigail’s father, because the block foundation was in place and the poured cement floor laid, they would have four walls and a roof by sunset.

  Friends and neighbors were coming from every direction, on foot, in wagons piled high with lumber, in buggies, and on push scooters. Abigail and a young woman she’d met that morning, Phoebe, walked among the men offering mugs of steaming coffee and breakfast sandwiches wrapped in aluminum foil to keep them hot.

  “Sausage, egg and cheese on an English muffin or bacon, egg and cheese?” Phoebe asked a handsome young man who looked to be in his early to midtwenties.

  Phoebe had introduced herself the moment Abigail and her family had arrived and had quickly steered each of them in a different direction. She’d sent Abigail’s father to speak with Abner Brubacher who was overseeing the barn raising. She’d taken Abigail’s mother to join a group of older women at a picnic table where they were wrapping silverware in paper napkins for the noonday meal. And to Jamie’s delight, Phoebe had waved Ethan’s brother Jesse over. The two boys had run off with talk of fetching nails for the men, and Abigail hadn’t seen her son since.

  “Which ones did you make?” the man asked Phoebe, pointing at the basket of hot sandwiches her new friend was carrying. The way he was grinning, Abigail suspected that he was smitten with Phoebe.

  “None of them,” Phoebe answered, smiling back at him. “Bacon or sausage, choose quick, or I’ll be choosing for you.”

  Phoebe’s brash statement, combined with obvious flirting, confused Abigail. She knew that for an Old Order community Hickory Grove was relatively relaxed, but the way these two were looking at each other was certainly not something she witnessed often. It embarrassed her and tickled her at the same time. And made her miss her husband.

  “Abigail.” Phoebe turned to her. “This is Joshua Miller. My husband,” she added, looking back at him.

  Abigail smiled. He was her husband. That made sense, though they were still rather flirty with each other.

  “And my husband is getting bacon, egg and cheese because we have more of those left,” Phoebe went on as she took a foil-wrapped sandwich from her basket and offered it to him. “This is my new friend, Abigail. She just moved here from northern Wisconsin. Her parents are June and Daniel King. I know you’ve met Daniel at the harness shop. They live right down the road from us.”

  Joshua propped his hammer against the foundation and accepted the sandwich.

  “Coffee?” Phoebe asked.

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  “There certainly are a lot of Millers here.” Abigail only said it to make conversation. There had been a lot of Amish Millers in Wisconsin, too. “My son’s teacher is a Miller, too.”

  Joshua took a sip of the coffee he’d taken off the tray, his gaze moving from his wife to Abigail. “That would be my big brother, Ethan.”

  “Oh... I... I didn’t know.” Abigail looked down at the tray in her hands not understanding why this information surprised her or why she cared. Ethan had already told her he would be there. In fact, she’d spotted him when her family arrived. He was one of the men now securing the first wall of the barn.

  “My other brothers are here, too. Well, Jacob, Will and Jesse. Our brother Levi is living in Lancaster, apprenticing as a buggy maker.” He cut his eyes at his wife. “At least that’s the story he’s giving us. We all have a notion he’s there because the courting pond is larger. Levi has a bit of a reputation for being a ladies’ man.”

  Phoebe frowned, but only half-heartedly. “You shouldn’t say such things, Joshua.” She looked to Abigail. “He means a ladies’ man in an Amish kind of way.” She shook her head. “Not in the way Englishers mean it. Levi’s a good man, faithful and good-hearted.” She shrugged. “He just likes to flirt.”

  “He’d be flirting with you, Abigail, if he was here. I guarantee you that. You being single and all.” Joshua set down his coffee and began to unwrap his breakfast sandwich. “He keeps trying to give Ethan tips on how to get a girl’s attention. He’s been pushing hard lately. Every time we see Levi, he’s trying to introduce Ethan to a girl he thinks might be suitable.”

  Abigail knit her brows. “Wait, Ethan is—I thought he was married.”

  Phoebe shook her head no, ever so slightly.

  Abigail wouldn’t have been any more surprised than if Joshua had just said that the next load of wood coming in from the sawmill would be on the back of an elephant. “But he has a beard,” she argued. “Married men have beards. Single men don’t.”

  Phoebe’s face softened. “Widowed.” She looked to her husband. “What? Going on six years now?” Her tone was soft and kind.

  Joshua held his sandwich but didn’t take a bite. “About that.” He glanced at Abigail. “His wife, Mary, had epilepsy. She had a seizure and passed away.”

  “She’s with the Lord now,” Phoebe said gently.

  Abigail bowed her head. “I... I assumed that because he had the beard,” she stammered, “that he...” She stopped and started again. “Where I come from, a clean-shaven man is unmarried, a married man has a beard.”

  “It’s that way here, too.” Joshua took a bite of his sandwich. “But when you get to widowers, the rules aren’t so black-and-white. Our friend Eli is widowed. He had a beard for some time after his wife passed, but now he’s shaved it. He said that, for him, it was part of the mourning process. I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose your wife or your husband.” He looked at Phoebe. “If I lost my Phoebe—” His voice caught in his throat and Phoebe reached out with one hand and rubbed his shoulder.

  “I’m not going anywhere, silly,” Phoebe murmured to him. Then she looked at Abigail and said, “And I’m sorry about your husband.”

  “It’s been three years,” Abigail answered.

  “Doesn’t matter.” Phoebe smiled. “I’m still sorry for you and for your son.”

  Nodding, Abigail pressed her lips together looking away from them. Joshua reminded her a little of her father. Amish men didn’t always talk so freely about such things. She had liked Joshua the moment she met him, but she liked him even more now.

  Her thoughts darted from one place to the next. Joshua’s brother was Ethan. Ethan who was not married. She didn’t know why but the idea made her feel completely off balance. Because of the way he had handled Jamie, obviously she didn’t care for him. But a part of her suddenly felt almost attracted to him. Which fascinated her and dismayed her at the same time.

  “Mam!” Jamie’s voice drew her attention.

  She turned to see him and Jesse and a boy she didn’t know running toward them. “Jesse’s mam said you had sandwiches,” Jamie huffed, out of breath from running. “We’re hungry.”

  Abigail had fed Jamie a nice breakfast of buckwheat hotcakes with honey from Fifer’s orchard, scrapple and stewed apples with cinnamon before they came that morning, but his appetite seemed endless these days. Her mother said it was because he was growing. “Do we have enough or are these just for the men working?” she asked Phoebe.

  Phoebe gave a wave of dismissal. She was such an attractive woman with light brown hair and blue eyes. She had a son, too: John, who was younger than Jamie. “We have plenty of sandwiches. And Claudia—you met her earlier. This is her new barn. She’s got more eggs and meat frying on her cookstove.”

  “Are you boys helping with the building?” Abigail asked as she nodded, indicating Jamie could take a sandwich from the basket Phoebe offered.

  “Ne.” Joshua finished off the last bites of his sandwich and handed his wife the crumpled foil. “These rascals would be more in the way than they’re worth. Back to the house with the three of you,” he ordered, retrieving his coffee mug from the tailgate of the wagon where he’d set it down. “Tend to the horses and do whatever the women ask.”

  “Good behavior,” Abigail warned her son as the three boys took off.

  “Joshua!” a man called from the far end of the first wall frame. “We need you on this beam.”

  “Guess I better get back to work.” Joshua nodded to the women and, taking his coffee with him, strode toward the place where the men had begun construction of another wall on the ground.

  “You’re going to have to put the coffee down,” the man who called to Joshua hollered.

  Abigail looked up to see a man who looked identical to Joshua speaking to him and she glanced at Phoebe. “Your husband is a twin.” It wasn’t a question. Most large Amish families had at least one set of twins. Abigail had known a family in her old church district that had three sets of twins.