Sarah's Sin

the yard light that stood between the house and the barn.

“I feel worse than you look,” he murmured.

The hound whined and lay her head on her paws in apparent sympathy.

Ingrid emerged from the shadows of the house and came to sit beside him on the bench with his leather jacket draped across her lap.

“You shouldn't let yourself get a chill, Dr. Thome,” she said with absolutely no censure in her voice.

Matt didn't take the jacket, nor did he say anything for a long while. He just sat there absorbing his sister's silent comfort, staring out at the night and marveling at the quiet of it.

“Do you think she'll make them understand?” he asked.

“I don't know. They'll forgive her if she asks for it. They're very forgiving people.”

“What about that thing you told me, that mide thing.”

“The Meidung. Shunning is serious business for the unrepentant. It might not come to that. Like I said, they're gentle, forgiving people.”

Matt gave a harsh laugh. “Her father doesn't seem very forgiving.”

“Isaac is a hard man, almost bitter for some reason. He's very strong in the Unserem weg, the old ways. Very strict.”

“I could have killed him for hitting her.”

“I know”

They sat in silence for another few minutes. Ingrid leaned over and rested her head on his shoulder. She took one of his hands in hers and squeezed it tight. “I'm sorry, Matt.”

So am I, he thought, hurting in a way no drug could ease.

“Is there anything I can do to help her?” he asked.

“Stay out of it. They won't tolerate interference, especially not from you. Make a clean break. Get on with your life.”

What life? a lonely voice asked inside him.

Realistically, he knew he would take In-grid's advice. Realistically, he knew he would go back to work, and in a few months his brief stay here and his brief affair with a young Amish woman would be a memory, the awful pain dulled by the anesthetic effects of time. Realistically, he knew all of these things, but in his heart he couldn't accept any of it at the moment. In his heart he knew only that he'd found something bright and pure that had lighted his life when everything had seemed bleak and dingy, and now that special something had been snatched away from him, wrenched from his grasp even sooner than he had feared. In his heart he knew only that he felt more alone than he had ever felt before.

He wondered if Sarah was feeling the same way.

He looked out at the starlit sky and listened to the breeze rattle the skeletal cornstalks and the dried leaves in the trees. He felt the autumn chill bite into his bones, and he thought about Sarah in the house down the road.

Dorit be sorry you loved me.…

“Deacon Lapp suggested a visit to the Ohio relatives,” Isaac said. “A period for you to pray and reflect, to heal the soul.”

As if her love for Matt were an illness she could recuperate from given some time in a sterile environment, Sarah thought bitterly. They sat at her mothers round oak kitchen table, Isaac and Anna Maust and herself. The rest of the family had been sent to bed with no explanation of what was going on or why Sarah was home. It seemed quite clear to one and all it was not a joyous occasion. The talk going on in the kitchen by the light of the kerosene lamps was serious stuff.

“No confession?” Sarah asked. She felt numb and it had nothing to do with the buggy ride home into the chill of the October wind.

“He knows only of what Micah Hochstetler told him, and he tends to be lenient toward you for some reason I cannot fathom. Time away to clear your head of foolishness, he thinks, and I say we send you before things get worse. I won't have you disgrace my family.”

My family, as if she were not a part of it, as if he had already shunned her himself. The remark cut, but Sarah didn't let it show. She gave him a long look of contempt for his hypocrisy. He could call her a harlot and a sinner, but God forbid anyone else should find out. Were her supposed sins any less because he was the only one who knew of them? As righteous as Isaac pretended to be, Sarah thought he should have gone ahead and reported her to the bishop. Isaac would no doubt have taken great delight in her excommunication if not for the fact that it would reflect badly on him.

She looked at her mother, knowing Anna Maust would not argue with her husband on this point or any other. Plump and still blond, more than ten years her husbands junior, Anna Maust had ever been the quiet, dutiful wife. She was a woman with a kind heart and a soft touch, who had always looked on her eldest daughter's restless spirit with a kind of puzzled awe. She looked at Sarah now with sad blue eyes and said, “It is for the best, Sarah. Es waar Goiters Witte.”

It is Gods will. Her mother had said that same thing to her when her baby had died of pneumonia and when Samuel had been killed. Every terrible thing that happened, Anna heaped the blame on God s doorstep.

“No,” Sarah said quietly, rising from her chair. “It is Isaac Maust's will.”

She expected an explosion from Isaac, but none came.

“Tomorrow I will see to the getting of the bus ticket,” he said.

Sarah gave no indication she had heard him. She turned and left the kitchen, making her way upstairs toward the tiny bedroom she used when she was home. On her way down the hall she stopped at Jacob s door and looked in on him. He was asleep but terribly restless, tossing and turning, groaning a little in his sleep.

“He snuck too many pieces of apple strudel last night,” Anna whispered, coming up close beside her daughter. “He suffered for it today, but I gave him a good big dose of castor oil. He will be better by morning.”

Sarah watched her baby brother for another long moment, feeling apprehension stir in the pit of her stomach. She hated seeing Jacob ill. It frightened her. And the thought of leaving him in a few days tightened her apprehension into a knot.

“To bed now with you, Sarah,” her mother said, pulling Jacobs door shut. “This day has been too long. I am wanting another sunrise to brighten things.”

Sarah turned toward her mother and said, “In my heart there will be no sunrise.”

Anna was quiet for a moment, lost in thought. “Did you love him so much, this Englishman?” she asked at last, her voice soft and wistful.

“Yes.”

Anna closed her eyes and bowed her head, as if in fervent prayer, then squeezed her daughter's hands and bid her a whispered good night.

By morning Jacob was no better. Anna bundled him up and rode with Isaac into Jesse, where she took the boy to see Dr. Coswell while Isaac made his pilgrimage to the bus depot. The doctor casually pronounced Jacob's malady as a case of the flu that was currently going around and sent him home.

Sarah spent the morning packing her things for her trip, carefully folding her dresses and aprons and underthings. As a gesture of pure rebellion, she packed her Glamour magazine and her bottle of Evening in Paris perfume. Throughout the process she kept thinking that she didn't want to go. She wanted to go back down the road to Thornewood and to Matt, but she knew better. Matt had never suggested they had a future together. She had given herself to him in love, knowing in the end they would part. And she had to think of her family, of her mother and her sister Ruth and her brothers and Jacob. She had remained in the faith because of them, because she loved them. It was for their sakes she would go to Ohio to stay with relatives she barely knew.

In the afternoon she helped shuck corn until her thumbs were blistered, then helped prepare the evening meal for the family. No one had much to say to her. Even her brother Lucas, who at seventeen had honed teasing to a fine art, was unusually quiet. Isaac said nothing at all once he had announced she would be on the eight o'clock