once, when he was in a deep melancholy, that he had vowed never to return home until their daed apologized to him for what Daed had said the night Johnny decided to leave.
That had never happened, and she had known it wouldn’t. Johnny had inherited his stubbornness from Daed.
Ezra looked past her, and she turned to see Mandy standing behind her. Her niece was the image of Johnny, right down to the sprinkling of freckles across her apple-round cheeks. There might be something of Mandy’s mamm in her looks, but Leah didn’t remember much about the young Englisch woman who had never exchanged marriage vows with Johnny.
Leah knew her mamm had been pleased to see her granddaughter dressed in plain clothes at breakfast, and the dark green dress and white kapp did suit Mandy. However, Leah sensed Mandy viewed the clothing as dressing up, in the same way she had enjoyed wearing costumes and pretending to be a princess when she went to her best friend Isabella’s house. Mandy seemed outwardly accepting of the abrupt changes in her life, but Leah couldn’t forget the trails of tears on her niece’s cheeks that morning.
Motioning for Mandy to come forward, she said with a smile, “This is Amanda, Johnny’s daughter. We call her Mandy, and she is my favorite nine-year-old niece.”
“I am your only nine-year-old niece, Aunt Leah.” Mandy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of a preteen.
“Ja, you are, but you’re my favorite one.” She put her arm around Mandy’s shoulders and gave them a squeeze. “This is Ezra Stoltzfus. He lives on the farm on the other side of our fields.”
“I spoke with your daed the day before yesterday,” Ezra said as he looked from Mandy to Leah, “and he didn’t say anything about you coming to visit.”
“Coming home,” Leah corrected in little more than a whisper.
“I see. Then I guess I should say welcome home, Leah.” He didn’t add anything else as he strode away.
She stood where she was and watched him go into his brother’s buggy shop. When he did not look back, she sighed. She might have come home, but her journey back to the life she once had taken for granted had only begun.
Ezra walked between the two rows of cows on the lower level of the white barn. He checked the ones being milked. The sound of the diesel generator from the small lean-to beyond the main barn rumbled through the concrete floor beneath his feet. It ran the refrigeration unit on the bulk tank where the milk was kept until it could be picked up by a trucker from the local processing plant.
He drew in a deep breath of the comforting scents of hay and grain and the cows. For most of his life, the place he’d felt most at ease was the bank barn. The upper floor was on the same level as the house and served as a haymow and a place to store the field equipment. On the lower level that opened out into the fields were the milking parlor and more storage.
He enjoyed working with the animals and watching calves grow to heifers before having calves of their own. He kept the best milkers and sold the rest so he could buy more Brown Swiss cows to replace the black-and-white Holsteins his daed had preferred. The gray-brown Swiss breed was particularly docile and well-known for producing milk with the perfect amount of cream for making cheese.
He hoped, by late summer, to be able to set aside enough milk to begin making cheese to sell. That was when the milk was at its sweetest and creamiest. He might have some soft cheese ready to be served during the wedding season in November or December if one of his bachelor brothers decided to get married.
He squatted and removed the suction milking can from a cow. He patted her back before carrying the heavy can to the bulk tank. She never paused in eating from the serving of grain he’d measured out for her. Opening the can, he emptied the milk into the tank. He closed both up and hooked the milking can to the next cow after cleaning her udder, a process he repeated thirty-one times twice a day.
Usually he used the time to pray and to map out what tasks he needed to do either that day or the next. Tonight, his thoughts were in a commotion, flitting about like a flock of frightened birds flying up from a meadow. He had not been able to rein them in since his remarkable conversation with Leah.
Johnny was dead. He found that unbelievable. Leah had come back and brought Johnny’s kind with her. Even more unbelievable, though he had hoped for many years she would return to Paradise Springs.
Her mamm must be thrilled to have her and her niece home and devastated by Johnny’s death. How would Abram react? The old man had not spoken his twins’ names after they left. But Abram kept a lot to himself, and Ezra always wondered if Abram missed Leah and Johnny as much as the rest of his family did.
If his neighbor did not welcome his daughter and granddaughter home, would Leah leave again and, this time, never come back?
“Think of something else,” he muttered to himself as he continued the familiarly comforting process of milking.
“If you’re talking to the cows, you’re not going to get an answer,” came his brother Isaiah’s voice.
Ezra stood. Isaiah was less than a year younger than he was, and they were the closest among the seven Stoltzfus brothers. Isaiah had married Rose Mast the last week of December. He had been trying to grow his pale blond beard since then, but it remained patchy and uneven.
“If I got an answer,” he said, leaning his arms on the cow’s broad back, “I would need my head examined.”
“That might not be a bad idea under the circumstances.”
“Circumstances?”
Isaiah chuckled tersely. “Don’t play dumb with me. I know Leah Beiler’s reappearance in Paradise Springs must be throwing you for a loop. You two were really cozy before she left.”
“We were friends. We’d been friends for years.” Friends who shared one perfect kiss one perfect night. He wasn’t about to mention that to his brother.
Isaiah was already worried about him. Ezra could tell from the dullness in his brother’s eyes. Most of the time, they had a brightness that flickered in them like the freshly stirred coals in his smithy.
“Watch yourself,” Isaiah said, as always the most cautious one in their family. “She jumped the fence once with her brother. Who knows? She may decide to do so again.”
“I realize that.”
“Gut.”
“Gut,” Ezra agreed, even though it was the last word he would have used to describe the situation.
His brother was right. When a young person left—jumped the fence, as it was called—they might return...for a while. Few were baptized into their faith, and most of them eventually drifted away again after realizing they no longer felt as if they belonged with their family and onetime friends.
While he finished the milking with Isaiah’s help, they talked about when the crops should go in, early enough to get a second harvest but not so early the plants would be killed in a late frost. They talked about a new commission Isaiah had gotten at his smithy from an Englisch designer for a circular staircase. They talked about who might be chosen to become their next minister.
