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 bus day after tomorrow. Her mother was full of worried and sympathetic looks, but short on words of comfort beyond her usual Es waar Cotters Wille.
Sarah kept her chin up and her mouth shut. She thought of Matt every single moment. She had never in her worst nightmares imagined it would hurt this much to leave him. After all, she had known the end would come eventually; she had been prepared for it from the first. But the ache gnawed at her incessantly, and she wondered vaguely if it were possible to die of such a pain.
When the dishes had been done and everyone else had settled into the living room to read or sew, she sought the one person in her life who had a chance of easing her suffering just by smiling at her—Jacob. He had had a miserable day of sickness and fitful sleep. As Sarah let herself into his room he moaned and kicked the quilt that covered him.
Sarah lit a lamp on the simple bedside table and settled herself on the narrow bed, bending over her little brother and brushing back damp strands of blond hair-from his forehead. He was burning up with fever. That alone was enough to put her heart in her throat, but when Jacob clutched his stomach and moaned, her worry soared to near the panic margin.
“Shhh … rest, bobbli” she whispered, trying to soothe both him and herself.
“Sarah?” Jacob called out weakly. “Sarah, it hurts me too much.”
“What hurts?”
He didn't answer her but clutched his stomach and started to cry. Sarah bit her lip until she tasted blood, desperate to help Jacob, but uncertain of what she could do. He seemed much more ill than Dr. Coswell had diagnosed. Dr. Coswell, the man Matt had said wasn't fit to practice medicine on monkeys. What if the man had been wrong about Jacob? What if the boy had something that could threaten his life? She couldn't bear to lose Jacob!
In a panic she flew down the stairs and through the living room, saying nothing to anyone, registering their shocked looks only in the nether reaches of her mind. At the back door she paused only long enough to grab her cloak off its peg, then she was gone.
“She's being sent to Ohio to stay with relatives for a while,” Ingrid said, slipping into the armchair catty-corner from Matt. They were in the library. The stereo hummed in the background. Matt had wedged himself into a corner of the sofa he had once shared with Sarah, sitting stiffly, riffling through the Minneapolis paper. He scowled and turned a page, cracking it like a whip, glanced over the columns without reading, turned a page, snapped it open with a flick of his wrists.
“No word of excommunication”
“Good news travels fast,” he said sarcastically.
Ingrid ran a hand through her short dark hair and sighed. “I just heard via the grapevine. Isaac purchased a bus ticket this morning.”