Upon A Winter's Night. Karen Harper

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СКАЧАТЬ workers, but in a row of about five-foot trees on a slant of the hill overlooking her house. She would, of course, have a chance at the funeral tomorrow to tell him she was sorry for his loss, but he’d be busy with other people. He’d been so upset that night they found his aunt in the snow.

      “If you don’t mind,” she told Mrs. Esh, “I’ll just walk back to my house. Cutting down the hill will be much shorter.”

      “Of course, my dear, and we thank you for the help, we surely do. We will be in prayer tomorrow that you and Josh Yoder will represent our people well at the funeral.”

      “Danki,” she told them. “I appreciate all the prayer support I can get.”

      * * *

      “Lydia’s late,” Sandra told Josh when he came back to the house to see how she was doing. She was sitting at his dining room table still typing away on her laptop about, he guessed, Old Amish Christmas. “She’s not in the barn, is she? I’d rather go over a battle plan with her in here.”

      “A battle plan?” Josh said as he poured himself a mug of the now-tepid cider he’d left for Sandy and Lydia. He threw his coat over his chair and sat across the table from her. “You still have a lot to learn about our ways.”

      “Our meaning the Amish, or you and Lydia? I can see you care for her, and she— Let’s just say the same.” As if they were making a toast, she leaned across the table to clink her cider mug to his.

      “Lydia’s just the tomboy next door who grew up,” he countered.

      “And so doesn’t know her own power over men yet? But you do, right, and you’re very surprised. Besides, you sound defensive, my friend. By the way, you know what she asked me?”

      “I’m afraid to hear it. She really cuts to the heart sometimes.”

      “Touché. She said since I didn’t like animals, why was I at the zoo in Columbus where you and I met?”

      “Ya, I did mention that. So you told her you got the ticket free and as a starving grad student couldn’t turn down wine and a buffet?”

      “I told her I was hunting for a rare beast to study and I found one. No, don’t look at me that way. I told her grad students seldom get invitations like that, and I was always up for a new adventure, at least at a place where the animals were all in cages. She also asked me why I didn’t like animals— Was I afraid of them because of something that happened to me when I was young? You never asked me that. Lydia’s bright and perceptive. You’d think she was a soc or psych major, for heaven’s sake!” she said, leaning back in her chair and closing her laptop.

      “She’s a rare one, exotic in her own way,” Josh said. “Good with animals and good with people. Most girls—young women—who weren’t being told about their real parents by their adoptive ones wouldn’t be so careful not to hurt them, at least I think so.” He leaned forward in his chair. “But did something happen in your past that kept you from liking animals, at least some animals?”

      Sandra jumped up from the table and started to pace, dining room to living room and back with jerky steps. “I wish I had a cigarette or a drink,” she muttered, wrapping her arms around herself as if she were cold.

      “I’m proud of you that you gave up smoking, and cider’s the strongest thing I have in the house.”

      “I wasn’t being serious! But—but yes, I once closed a closet door on my brother’s puppy when I was about six. I—I smashed his head, and he yelped and cried and I felt horrible when he died. I ran and hid in the basement, but had to face up to what I’d done. I swear, my brother hated me for months after that—years—and nothing my parents said about it being an accident made things better for me.”

      She sniffed hard and strode away again. “The thing is,” she said, her voice shaky and almost choked, “I think I meant to do it— I mean, looking back at it now, analyzing, playing my own shrink. Grandpa had given that dog to him, not me, and everyone was fussing over it. I was the first born, used to be the family princess, and then here came my brother and everyone doted on him...

      “Oh, damn—sorry,” she blurted out, but he wasn’t sure if the ‘sorry’ was for swearing or for telling him her painful story. “You just heard true confessions about what an idiot I was—still am.”

      He stood and snagged her arm when she passed again, hugged her awkwardly with one arm around her shoulders. “We all have things in our past that haunt us. Look at Lydia, even me.”

      “You? Such as what?”

      “I agonized over jumping the fence, you know, leaving home to pursue my dream of working at a zoo for several years. I hurt my mother. I’m regretful to this day that her grieving, even though I hadn’t yet joined the church and so wasn’t shunned, probably made her cancer worse and hastened her death. And that I was too late getting a ride back here and didn’t get to say a final goodbye. But you’re not going to hurt animals ever again, or be hurt by them, and my mother needed to accept my dreams, even if they weren’t to work the fields and milk cows with Daad and my brothers.”

      She pulled away and blew her nose. “That— You helped me. Lydia did, too, like you say, cutting to the heart of things. You know what? I have a bumper sticker I should put on the back of the car that says, I Brake for Squirrels. I do, really. Now, camels and donkeys, I don’t know, but maybe later, sometime while I’m here, I’ll go out to the barn with you or Lydia. Now, what in the world is keeping her?”

      * * *

      “You been up to the house?” Connor called to Lydia as she approached him down a row of white pines that were not quite as tall as he was. Next year’s trees, she guessed. “My mother’s in town with my wife.”

      “I heard. I was just helping some of our women deliver food for the funeral and thought I’d walk home. This is like a well-ordered forest,” she said, with a sweep of her gloved hand at the acres of trees. She noticed he had hastily put aside what looked like a spray paint gun. Ya, she could see he’d been spraying some of these trees with a green paint that smelled. On closer look, some did seem a bit brown on the tips—wilted.

      “Not that well-ordered. It’s a struggle. I was just touching up some of these with insecticide where a beetle’s been at them. See. They have a few dead needles, but I just knock those off.”

      Though she was no expert, Lydia knew this wasn’t the time of year to be spraying for insects. And that was paint for sure, so was he doing something wrong by covering up the wilted branches? She decided she’d better not ask or let on she suspected him of lying and maybe more. For a moment, she just watched him handle two pitchforks, one in each hand as he quickly knocked dead needles off the tree. But it seemed to her the needles falling to the snow were more than a few.

      “Besides,” he said, “the darn deer have been nipping the tops off seedlings on the other side of the hill, and here I am worrying about pests I can’t even see. But,” he said, stepping closer, “I’ll find a way to get rid of them.”

      “Hopefully, these trees will be all right by next year.”

      “They’re for this year—apartment size.”

      When he frowned at her, she said in a rush, “I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about your aunt—that she died that way. I know you’ll be too busy at the funeral and meal to tell you СКАЧАТЬ