“I’ve come full circle,” she murmured to no one in particular. All those years of being away, and she could now put on an Amish dress, pin up her hair, and almost become the girl who’d run barefoot through these fields and struggled to learn to churn a pound of butter.
Rachel stared out into the farmyard, her gaze unfocused, not really seeing the lines of gray and black buggies or the groups of black-coated men in wide-brimmed wool hats standing out of the wind. The ground was wet, the gravel and dirt churned up by the horses’ hooves and the running feet of children. Little was left of the two inches of snow that had fallen the previous day. Most had melted when the temperature rose, making the area around the barn particularly messy.
A middle-aged Amish couple approached the back porch, the red-cheeked woman dressed in black, balancing a four-layer coconut cake. “We’ve come to pay our respects, Rachel,” the man said solemnly in Deitsch.
The wife nodded.
Rachel returned the greeting in the same tongue. Among her people, Deitsch, mistakenly called “Pennsylvania Dutch” by outsiders, was the language of choice, although all but the youngest children also spoke English fluently.
“How is Mary Rose holding up?” the woman asked as she came up the steps.
“Doing poorly,” Rachel replied. “It was a shock, losing Daniel that way. Especially with the new baby.”
“God’s ways are not always easy for us to understand,” the husband remarked. “He was a fine young man, devout and hardworking.”
“Always mindful of his elders,” the woman added. “Bringing groceries to the shut-ins. A credit to his parents.”
Rachel motioned toward the door. “I think Mary Rose is with the bishop in the parlor. Kind of you to bring the cake.”
“A small token,” the woman intoned. “We’ll remember the widow in our prayers.”
Her husband opened the door and held it for her. He was a stocky man of medium height with graying hair, a broad German face, and light-blue eyes. “We pray for the whole family,” he added.
For a moment, the sounds of the gathering drifted out onto the porch, and then were muffled again as the door to the house closed behind the couple. Rachel pulled her mother’s shawl tighter around her shoulders. It was a raw day, above freezing, but still cold with a damp chill. She wasn’t ready to go back inside yet, though. There were too many people there, too much talk, and too few open windows. Unlike her immediate family, some in the conservative community hadn’t adopted the English habit of using deodorant, and the multilayers of winter wool clothing didn’t mask the body odor.
Rachel knew her mother needed her, and standing there with idle hands wasn’t encouraged. But she’d been on her feet since dawn and she needed to catch her second wind. Hard work didn’t bother her; she’d been raised to appreciate it. But it lifted her spirits to step away from the communal grief and listen to the wind whipping down off the mountain and the shriek of a red-tailed hawk high overhead. Just another few minutes, she promised herself, and she’d be ready to plunge back into the controlled chaos again.
On the side of the barn, in the shade of the overhang where snow still lay, Rachel caught sight of something red. She studied it. What was it? A mitten a child had dropped? If so, small fingers might grow cold on the way home. Rachel went down the steps off the porch and, taking care to avoid the puddles, she walked across the yard toward the object.
As she grew closer, she realized her mistake. It wasn’t a mitten but a bird, a cardinal lying sprawled in an unnatural position on the white snow. Odd that she hadn’t noticed the brilliant red feathers against the white when she first stepped onto the porch. She wondered if the bird had died of illness or flown into the barn wall and broken its neck.
Evan was an accomplished bird-watcher, outfitted with expensive binoculars, telescopes, and membership in multiple birding organizations. He could recognize hundreds of species of birds, often just by their song. But cardinals were common enough that she’d recognized them since she was a small child. She had rarely seen a dead one in all her years on the farm. She decided she would move the poor thing and get one of her brothers to bury it. No sense in leaving it for children to see.
But, to Rachel’s surprise, as she neared the dead bird, it suddenly revived. It shuddered, shook out its wings, hopped, and flew up, fluttering over the top of the barn in a flash of crimson, vanishing from sight. Not dead, then, Rachel decided, but only stunned. Alive and strong enough to fly.
A pity poor Daniel Fisher couldn’t have done the same, she thought. What would his widow have thought if Daniel had abruptly sat up from his bier and walked? Not dead as everyone supposed, but only stunned and suffering some sort of coma? That was the sort of wondering best kept to herself or shared with Evan. Her parents wouldn’t understand and take her musing as disrespectful to the deceased.
Rachel turned back to the house and then remembered the buttermilk she’d come out to retrieve. As she turned toward the springhouse, she met two of her distant cousins on the path. One carried a pitcher of milk, the other a wheel of cheese.
“Such a pity it had to happen to Daniel,” the oldest was saying in only slightly accented English. “And him so
