She wasn’t so sure about traveling by buggy right now either. Every part of her was sore, from the obvious parts all the way to her fingers and toes. Her hair was the only part of her that didn’t feel like it had been run through the mill. The thought sent a wistful smile to her lips. “Two days,” she said, confirming his news.
He nodded. “Maybe three. But after that we should be able to get you home.”
Chapter Fifteen
Levi sat at the kitchen table and watched the second hand tick away. Upstairs in the first room on the right lay a woman he barely knew and the baby she just had. The whole thing sounded crazy. Add in the ice storm outside and it was almost too much to believe. How had he managed to get in the position he was in right now?
The Lord works in mysterious ways. It was what Mamm was always saying.
But could he really believe God was behind this?
Who else would it be?
Mims would say that. She would tell him that he had shut himself off and done his best to forget about the world around him, and this was God’s way of bringing him back.
And she might be right. There was no way to know for certain. But it seemed like an awfully big coincidence. But perhaps that just showed that the Lord did indeed work in mysterious ways.
There was one thing he knew for certain. They were stuck there for a couple of days. Thankfully, he had plenty of firewood already cut, stacked, and waiting, and Mims had provided him with enough food to feed half the district. They would be fine. The baby . . . Tiny babies had needs. Diapers and tiny little clothes.
He pushed back from the table and slowly made his way down the hall to the room just next to his. The door was closed, as it had been since the last time he’d been in there. He had tried several times to go in and clean through everything, but he hadn’t been able to get past the door. It was just so hard. But the baby upstairs needed the things that he had in that room. And so some good use would be found for them.
With a heavy sigh, he opened the door and stepped inside. Sunlight filtered through the window and landed on the crib. A crib much too big to cart up the stairs. But there were other things. A bag of disposable diapers, a stack of the cloth kind, and rubber pants. Large safety pins, tiny little cotton gowns, minuscule socks, sweet little hats, and a cradle that would be no problem at all to carry.
He packed all these things and a stuffed bunny of sunshine yellow into the cradle. But he stopped before actually picking it up. It made his heart hurt to see those things there, those tiny little baby things that would have belonged to his son. And it hurt even more to think about the son who would never use them. The mother who would never see her child grow and learn.
But there’s a baby upstairs who can use them, even needs them.
He sucked in a fortifying breath. Then he hoisted the cradle and carried it from the room. He set it in the hallway and closed the door behind him. For the first time since Mary and the baby had died, he left the room with a lighter heart than the one he went to it with. It seemed almost a miracle. A surprising, astonishing miracle. He missed them; he probably always would. They were gone—he knew that. He had understood it from the beginning, but he had not been able to get rid of the things that belonged to them, Mary’s clothes and the various baby items that had been brought over from well-meaning family members and friends. But now these things had a new purpose.
He stopped outside the door of the bedroom where Tillie had slept, where she had given birth, and he knocked on the door. He waited for her response before he set the cradle down and opened the door for himself. Then he picked up the mess of things he had gathered from downstairs and carried them into the room.
Her eyes grew wide.
She had taken his suggestion and was wearing his button-down shirt. He supposed she also had on Mary’s odd skirt. He still didn’t know what she had intended to do with it, but that was Mary, always with the ideas.
“What is all this?” Tillie asked.
Suddenly Levi felt extremely self-conscious. He had helped this woman bring a life into the world, and suddenly he was embarrassed over the items he had brought to her. He wasn’t sure why. So he swallowed back his emotions, cleared his throat. “Some stuff for the baby. I didn’t know what all to bring up. There’s diapers, a couple of gowns, a pair of socks or two.” He shrugged. “And the cradle.”
She looked at the cradle filled with various things for the baby and back up to his face. “Did these things belong to your baby?”
He didn’t bother to ask how she knew that his child was gone, seeing as how she had been gone when Mary had died. Someone must have told her, even in the short time that she had been back in Pontotoc. It was the way small Amish communities worked.
“Jah,” he said. “I haven’t been able to get rid of them yet. I guess that was a good thing after all.”
“Levi,” she breathed his name, and he knew from the
