“That sounds like a good deal.”
Chapter Two
Rebekah and Thomas’s childhood home seemed somehow solemn as it sat, veiled in raindrops, against the backdrop of gray thunderclouds that darkened the horizon.
Are those raindrops or teardrops?
Rebekah bit her tongue to keep the words from spilling out into the freshly tense world around them. She bounced Dawson absently in his bopplin sling.
“The house looks sad,” Thomas said. “Does it look sad to you, too?”
Joseph shot Rebekah a look over Thomas’s head. She ignored it.
Yes, yes it does. It looks as if it is in mourning. If a house could mourn, that is.
Rebekah’s throat tightened around the words, lest they escape.
In tandem, the trio strode up to the Stoll homestead.
***
The house inside was cool and dark. The normally bustling living room, filled with hand-hewn furniture, quilts, and lifetimes of warm, bright memories, was silent.
Waiting.
Rebekah dared a peek down at Thomas. “Everyone must be upstairs in Ma and Pa’s room.”
“Shall we join them?”
Thomas nodded and slipped his small hand into hers. “Jah.”
Together, Rebekah, Dawson, and Thomas led Joseph up the stairs, which still never uttered a creak or a groan thanks to their fater’s excellent craftsmanship, into the upstairs story of their home.
“Where are our brothers?” Rebekah whispered to Thomas. “It is much too quiet.”
“When Fater took sick, Ma asked that we all go to the Stoltzfus’s homestead. That was where I dropped off the boys and came to get you.”
Rebekah’s lips turned up into a smile. Thomas, one of the youngest Stoll children, sounded so grown up as he spoke to his big schweister about having taken care of his brothers, all but one older than himself, before coming her get her.
She gave his hand a squeeze. “Such a good brudder.”
Thomas wore a look of consternation, complete with downturned lips and a furrowed brow, as they arrived at Samuel and Elnora’s door. “Do you think Pa is…”
Rebekah sucked in a breath and opened the door. There, next to the window in a chair that Samuel had made for her during their courtship, sat her beautiful mother, Elnora. She wore the black bonnet, one that was to be worn by married women, and faced the window. Her dress, pale, cornflower blue, like the spring Indiana sky, was wrinkled as though she had slept in it before wearing it again today.
I doubt that she has slept at all.
“I knew you would be here as soon as you could, dochder.” Elnora sighed, her back still to them. “I did not want to worry you prematurely.”
Before she could go to her mother, Rebekah caught a glimpse of the bed. There, beneath a quilt and looking smaller than he ever had before, lay her beloved fater, Samuel.
“Oh, Pa,” she whispered.
From behind her, Joseph appeared and silently took Dawson from his sling.
She rushed to her fater’s bedside. “Pa?” She felt for his hand. It was cold. “Oh Ma, is he…”
Elnora finally turned her face toward them. Her cheeks were tear-streaked and puffy in odd places. Sadness cloaked her like a quilt. “No, he is not passed,” she said in broken Englisch to her dochder’s unasked question. “At least not yet.”
Rebekah stared at him. He did not appear to have an ounce of life left.
“His chest, it rises. He is breathing.” Elnora assured her.
Or perhaps she is assuring herself.
Whenever she became emotional, her grasp on the Englisch language loosened and her native German dialect shone through. “His chest hurt beginning last night. Then he fell to sleep.”
“He is so cold.” Rebekah held her fater’s cool, limp hand in hers, and studied his face. Beads of sweat dotted his forehead, and his breath came in shallow, strange, jagged rasps. “Oh no, Ma. Oh, this is not good. Not good at all.”
She glanced back at Thomas, whose wide eyes were waiting for just that moment. The answer to his is time to worry yet question had come. As if on cue, he knelt down on his knees and began to pray.
Elnora’s face bespoke pain, both pain of the heart and pain of tradition. As a member of the Amish faith, contact with outsiders, known as Englischers, was strictly forbidden. However, since Elnora and Samuel had taken in an orphaned Englischer child as her own, which is how Rebekah came to be their daughter. Since then, the Amish rule of not dealing with Englischers was more bent than broken.
Rebekah thought for a moment. Well, perhaps it has been broken a time or two.
Elnora cleared her throat. “Last time, there was the Englischer doctor. He saved your fater’s life.”
Rebekah nodded. “Joseph can go for the doctor, Mater.”
