An Unseemly Wife

by E.B. Moore

Genres: Amish & Mennonite; Family Life; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Not all journeys come to an end.... 
1867. Ruth Holtz has more blessings than she can count—a loving husband, an abundant farm, beautiful children, and the warm embrace of the Amish community. Then, the English arrive, spreading incredible stories of free land in the West and inspiring her husband to dream of a new life in Idaho.
 
Breaking the rules of their Order, Ruth’s husband packs up his pregnant wife and their four children and joins a wagon train heading west. Though Ruth is determined to keep separate from the English, as stricture demands, the harrowing journey soon compels her to accept help from two unlikely allies: Hortence, the preacher’s wife, and the tomboyish, teasing Sadie.
 
But as these new friendships lead to betrayal, what started as a quest for a brighter future ends with Ruth making unthinkable sacrifices, risking faith and family, and transforming into a woman she never imagined she’d become….

Release date: October 7, 2014

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 336

Sample

CHAPTER 1

Fall 1867

Ashadow on the sun should have marked the day the way God marked Cain, a warning to Ruth her quiet world would soon be cast asunder. But that September morning, sunlight flooded the orchard ripe with peaches, pears, and apples, their scent carried on a breeze through Ruth’s kitchen window. She savored the smell, and, black sleeves pushed above her elbows, she worked a ball of dough in steady rhythm.

A wisp of hair strayed from her white prayer cap and dangled in her face. With a flour-smeared wrist she brushed the brown strands aside. Her glance happened out the window to the dooryard, past the white barn, to the spread of gently rolling fields cut by the lane, and there they were on horseback, man and boy. Not Plain, not any sort of Amish—English,in their sorrel-colored pants and shirts, the man with red-veined cheeks, his hairless chin smooth as his son’s, the two of them on the road. They paused at the end of her lane.

Blood surged within her, and she swelled, protective as a she-bear. “Mein Gott.” Ruth dropped the dough. She moved fast to the door of their fieldstone house, made herself flat against the frame, and peered out. “Not a peep,” she said to Esther. Her three-year-old sat cross-legged on the kitchen floor, a doll in her lap, the doll in black dress, apron, and shawl.

Ruth pursed full lips, her rounded cheeks flattening. The tip of her nose felt cold. Her Opa had warned her against English. He’d told stories of hooded men in the Old Country, their torture rooms and his escape across the ocean.

Here,the dreaded Them rode hatless, fancy collars and buttons down the front of their shirts. These two, the first English ever to step on their land, hers and Aaron’s, pristine Lancaster farmland.

Granted, these English came without hoods and thumbscrews; nevertheless, having them at her door gave Ruth a chill.

She put a finger to her lips. “Shhh.” She wished Aaron in from the barn, where he’d been all morning. The boys were safe in the woods, Daniel, responsible at eleven, sent to watch Joseph and Matthew collecting nuts.

“Stay away from Gropa’s oak,” she’d told them. Who’d have thought the ancient tree climbed high would be a lesser danger than those close to home?

The English guided their horses into the lane. Ruth leaned toward Esther, her voice urgent. “Stay in the house.” The strings of her white cap flying, she left the child working on the doll’s bonnet, latched the door, and, unmindful of floured hands, clutched her skirts as she rushed to the barn. She’d head the English off, but she needed Aaron.

Ruth stopped in the tack room doorway, one eye on Them,and hissed toward the stalls. “Aaron.”

Thank God Joseph and Matthew weren’t in the yard. Too curious by half, what would they do faced with hatless English? They might talk to them.

Hallooing, the English reined in. Aaron came from deep in the barn, handed Ruth his pitchfork, and ducked under the lintel. He smoothed his beard and brushed straw from his black clothes.

Ruth gripped the fork’s handle and stood behind the door, her nose pressed to the cool hinge. She watched through the gap. If the English made a move toward the house, she’d . . . she’d what? Stab them with the pitchfork?

She set the long handle against the wall. Aaron would deal with this intrusion. She listened to pigs snuffling in the barn and felt their restlessness, a change in the air to match the change in her body. Aaron, too, had been off his feed for months now, as if he were the one blessed with new life in his innards.

From his horse, the English looked down at Aaron and said, “People say you raise the best horses.”

So it was voiced throughout the Plain community, but it was something Aaron never claimed. On his tongue, the words would be prideful. A sin. He took pleasure in the raising and training as Ruth did, their work blessed with accomplishment.

“Do they?” Aaron said. He waited, square beard below his collarbones, no smile softening the line of his smooth upper lip.

Uninvited, the English slid from his saddle. “We’re going west,” he said, with a satisfied air. “Lock, stock, the wife, and three boys.” He spread his arms. “I’ve a big wagon, and nothing to pull it.”

Aaron, hat in hand, passed the flat brim through his fingers.

“Uncle’s out there,” the boy offered from his horse. He was maybe nine, like Joseph. “Got a thousand acres. Idaho land, beats Pennsylvania hollow.”

“Free land, stake it and it’s yours,” the man said. “A government promise.”

Aaron’s shoulders twitched, his usual answer to something laughable. Government. Aaron and Ruth’s people had nothing to do with government, never would.

The man nattered on. “Apples, peaches, and apricots”—whatever those were—“all big as the boy’s head.”

Aaron eyed the boy and grunted. “Did you see?” Aaron said. “Your own eyes?”

“Sure. Couldn’t risk the family on hearsay.”

Behind the door, Ruth kept her hand to her mouth. Oh, those English.

“What’s your land?” With a swing of his arm, the man took in Aaron’s fields. “Seventy-five, a hundred acres? Nothing to what’s out there.” He swaggered toward Aaron. “Got to get moving ’fore it’s gone.”

“Won’t be gone.” The boy slouched in his saddle. “There’s lots.”

“So they said in ’49.” The English gave Aaron a knowing look. “And where’s the gold now?” He took Aaron’s sleeve. “I need horses.”

Aaron withdrew his arm and started toward the pasture. Still talking, the English followed, spreading his hands bigger and bigger to illustrate whatever his mouth announced. Aaron nodded, a matter of politeness, Ruth assumed.

She nipped to the house and hovered by the door, an eye on Esther and one on the field where Aaron showed horse after horse, smoothing his hand down a haunch, rubbing tendons, exposing the frog on a hoof of each horse.

The men came back to the dooryard, the English all a-chatter, leaning close to Aaron. Aaron shifted away and inclined his hat as a buffer. Finally the man mounted his mare. He and the boy turned toward the road.

At that moment, Ruth’s three littles in black pants, jackets, and low-crowned hats broke from the woods. They ran across the stubble field toward Aaron. Joseph in the lead, always in the lead despite his short leg. His built-up boot clumped the ground.

Out of breath, Matthew lagged behind. He worked his stocky five-year-old legs. Behind him, Daniel, the eldest, walked with the bag of nuts. Joseph raced into the dooryard. “Papa, who’s that?”

The English looked back.

“Hurry,” Ruth said. She calmed her voice. “In the house.” She pushed Joseph along. “It’s near dinner. Esther’s waiting.”

Joseph balked. He shaded his eyes at the sky. “Not by the sun,” he said. Nine, and he questioned most everything.

“Verrückt,” Aaron said. “The man’s crazed—you should’ve heard him.”

Ruth checked the lane once more. The English, their backs to her, gained the road and set off at a trot. To her left, the noon sun fell on the orchard where branches burdened with ripe fruit bent toward the ground. This abundance, Ruth and Aaron’s reward for loving care, had been a blessing, but today the blessing weighed on her, as if their overflowing cup might exact a toll.

A week passed, and Aaron’s sister Anna bore her eleventh child, a son. Ruth dropped all thoughts of English.

Anna couldn’t hide her disappointment. She’d made no bones of wanting a girl, and, oddly, Aaron seemed to share her distress.

His nights grew fitful.

By day, he walked the farthest hedgerows of the farm and scratched his head. He ignored weeds flourishing around the dooryard fence posts. Paint peeling on the barn went unscraped until Ruth did it herself and brushed on whitewash.

He counted his sheep, then ignored them as they overgrazed the field. He traveled the county talking to whom, she didn’t quite know. He held his own bubbling council.

“Aaron,” she’d start. “Shouldn’t we . . . ?” And he’d walk away midsentence as if he hadn’t heard. At moments he seemed a different person.

Ruth moved the sheep to their upper forty, where alfalfa grew knee high. What could these unknown people be telling him?

One restless bedtime with Ruth beside him, he lay on his back, arms folded across his chest. “Another child,” he said. “What will they do?”

“Your sister has a son—aren’t you happy? Wouldn’t you want one?”

“Yes,” Aaron said. “But when he’s grown, he’ll need a farm of his own. What then?”

He worried about Anna the way Ruth’s brother Dan’l worried about her. Family. She knew the pull, the sweet ache, love wrapping them warm and safe.

“Acreage,” Aaron said. “They need acreage.” He rolled on his side and tapped her hand.

“I’m listening,” she said and bent her head, her long braid falling between them.

“They’ve a scant seventy.” He twined work-worn fingers in hers. “A farm for each son—they’ll sit cheek by jowl. They best think ahead.”

“How?” Ruth said. “Stop babies?”

“No.” Aaron laughed. “Only old age does that.” He stretched and pulled her against his body. “English would say go west.”

“Verrückt,” Ruth said. “They’re crazed—you said so yourself.”

Aaron nuzzled Ruth’s neck. “I’m crazed for you,” he said and kissed behind her ear. Pink surged from lobe to crest. She couldn’t hide her feelings if she wanted to. This man, the Aaron she knew and loved.

“Ahh,” he said.

A warm shiver took her, and she curled into the scent of him, myrrh and aloes. How she treasured the touch of his fingers at the back of her neck, his nuzzle, his heated breath as he whispered loving words. Words she’d be embarrassed to repeat.

Where would she be without him, his guiding hand at her back, the strength of his arms around her, their devotion like a stone bridge built rock by rock. Without him her world would be rubble. But why think it? She arched against him, losing herself in the surge of their bodies.

Two evenings later, the Englishreturned with money. Aaron gave horses in trade; they had little use for money.

Ruth stayed in the shadows of the barn milking Bathsheba, the smell of hay and warm milk rising around her. The man didn’t leave. He and Aaron lingered by the stalls, where she heard the talk talk talk he stuffed in Aaron’s ear.

As the cow chewed her cud, the man made the westward trek sound simple, over the river and through the woods to Pittsburgh, as if Oma lived there. But instead of Oma, there’d be a gathering, hundreds of English from all over the east. Leave it to them. Ruth would stay snug where she was, on the farm. She milked faster as she listened, her head pressed to the cow’s side.

The man said, “Forty, maybe fifty wagons in a line, protection against highwaymen and Indians.” They’d live in the wagon for half a year, more if they wintered over short of the mountains, the wagon their home.

What home? A box on wheels with a canvas bonnet, its tongue sticking out for horses to pull? A box made of beams and planks and slats in an order so exact the box had a name, not a useful name like corn crib or coffin, but a proper name: Conestoga. Still, just a box on wheels, so big it demanded a six-horse team. Ruth’s hay wagon used but two. So conspicuous, one could say fancy. Fine for English, but not for Plain like Ruth and Aaron.

The man’s voice rose. “. . . river, that’s the Mississippi,” he was saying. Over plains and mountains and deserts, and there it would be, free land. “The heaven of it.” He gave a triumphant laugh. “Sitting there waiting.”

How could anyone be so daft? Idaho wasn’t heaven.

Without realizing, Ruth squeezed hard on Bathsheba’s teat. The cow kicked. Her hoof hit the pail and with a clang it tipped into the straw. The evening’s milk flowed to the gutter. Bathsheba lifted her tail and let loose a yellow arc.

“Amen,” said Ruth to the cow.

One early November evening, after supper, the littles in bed, Ruth and Aaron sat warming by the stone hearth. In her armchair, Ruth sewed in the light of a candle, the flame playing shadows on the whitewashed walls. The dark wood windows and doorframes glowed. Red coals sank in the ash. She couldn’t have been more content.

“West,” Aaron said. “Where the land is. That’s where they should go.”

“Your sister?” Ruth laughed. A separation like that? No. Their lives were too entwined, the same as Ruth and her family. When Ruth married and moved to the other side of New Eden, the distance, only a few hours by buggy, felt enormous. She’d missed her parents and Dan’l most of all.

“Yes,” Aaron said. “With all those littles, they’ll have to. They can’t stay here.”

“Leave the Fold?” Ruth wasn’t laughing now. “They’d never—it’s against the Ordnung.” They all lived by the Ordnung, and the Elders held them to its rule.

Ruth flicked her hand as if green-heads buzzed in her ear.

Aaron sat forward in his chair. He took off his boots and scooped tallow from a tin. With a cloth, he rubbed first one boot, then the other. “There’s no better place.” He didn’t raise his head.

“Not better than here,” she said. “I know what happens.” Ruth rested the needlework in her lap. “People die, if not from hunger, then worse.” She held up a hand and counted off on her fingers. “Tainted water, no water at all, frozen dead in the mountains.” She pushed her sewing into a basket on the floor. “Delia says Indians take people’s hair and skin to the bone.” Delia, her friend and constant visitor, had a gruesome story on every subject, from root rot to childbirth, and now Indians. “You wouldn’t wish that on your sister.”

“Wild tales. What does Delia know?”

“Horst told her.”

“He’s her brother—she has to believe him, but he doesn’t know everything.” Aaron worked the rag on his boot and scowled. “You can’t believe every wagging tongue.”

“You seem to.” Ruth shifted forward, hands on the wood arms of her chair. “Free land indeed!”

He lifted his head. “It’s true.”

“Land or no,” she said. “They couldn’t live among English.”

“Don’t be a goose.” Aaron dropped his boots on the hearth. “English don’t bite.”

“They have teeth,” she teased. “Great spiky teeth.”

“Nonsense.” He banged his stocking feet on the floor and stood.

“Why so angry?” Ruth said. “This is nonsense. We’re not the ones with eleven children.”

“Not yet,” he said and stomped from the room.

Ruth blanched. He couldn’t think they themselves would go west. No.

She wouldn’t worry. Their eleventh child was a long way off. Aaron always said, Tomorrow’s sorrow is not for today. His habit of rhyming away her fears made her smile.

They couldn’t leave. God and community the structure of their life, Aaron the bread of hers, together her existence made whole. He wouldn’t ask her.

CHAPTER 2

Spring—A Snake’s Tongue

The wagon lumbered ever farther from home, the six-horse team straining on the steep terrain, Bathsheba tethered by a long rope to the tailgate. The trail west weighed on Ruth, shriveled her as she hunched on the Conestoga’s bench. The April wind with a whiff of decay shifted, bringing her a solid stench. She recrossed her black shawl tight over tender breasts and held one corner to her nose.

A carcass lay in trailside weeds, a great beast, bones disjointed, flesh devoured beyond any notion of a living shape. The family rolled slowly past, ample time to know whatever brought the creature down had been bigger yet, and eaten its fill, maybe wolves, a pack of them, followed by foxes, the bones scattered, and scattered further by birds and rats and winter-starved creatures unused to eating meat. And there, pale in the black remains of a rib cage, maggots thrived.

Ruth wished Aaron had obeyed the Ordnung. Stay separate,its rule, but Aaron had to have that free Idaho land. “Other Amish will follow,” he’d promised. “Until then . . .”

Until then, they would be on their own, no Fold to turn to, out of grace and alone.

In New Eden, Ruth had squelched her objections, her temper in check. She knew the submissive woman her mother taught her to be, the woman she never quite managed. Such a woman was God’s will, the Elders said, and her husband wished at least a semblance, so she’d held No in her mouth. She held it writhing until her lips betrayed her and “No” leapt out sharp as a snake’s tongue, and she didn’t stop there.

“The Elders will have your head on a platter, a gift to the crows.” Louder and louder, how good it felt, having it all out, a collywobble of words. And soon as the sickness ran its course, mortification set in.

So unseemly. Head low, folding her skirts close, she’d edged toward the hearth of their fieldstone house and bit her offending lips.

Yet she couldn’t squelch her thoughts. She and Aaron should have worried the bone together, but he had said nothing. Tall and sure, he’d turned on his heel and strode to the barn, where his near-finished wagon awaited the final topping, canvas he would spread over the arc of wood ribs.

And all too soon she had found herself stopped on the ridge, their farm still in sight nestled at the heart of the valley.

Ruth had climbed from the wagon. Loosening kinks in her hips, she’d stretched and walked a bowlegged circle of the family’s campsite. A bell sounded, muffled in the distance. She knew the timbre, the easy tone—her own bell calling cousin Ely to dinner.

She thought she saw him moving from barn to house. Transfixed, Ruth tasted bile, covetous of him and his bride, covetous of their new life on her land, tending her animals, sleeping in her bed. This, Aaron’s doing.

She’d wished she could talk to her brother.

That night she wrote:

Dearest Dan’l,

Dark is on us yet I see the farm as it was at sunset. The barn door stands open. The fence Joseph helped whitewash glows with sun. He still has the white in his boot seams.

I see every beam Aaron’s Gropa cut from the woods, every piece of fence you helped us hammer in place. This leaving weighs my heart more than you can imagine.

Aaron’s excitement infects the littles and for this I am grateful. I wish the same excitement infected me. Instead I am gnawed with foreboding.

Much as I love Aaron, and I do down to my very toes, I find myself resentful of being stampeded. This unwifely resentment so hard to admit even to myself I put in a letter for your eyes and no one else. If I were to write in the beautiful book you gave me these words would burn my eyes upon every opening. So I pray my feelings will disappear along with this letter.

The good news—under way Aaron is again the man I married. We will be as one soon.

After writing I feel better already.

Your Loving Sister,

Ruth

Nausea took her, and pain. Was it the trailside carcass, or Ruth’s time finally come, the unborn child compressing her innards. She held her distended belly, one arm under, the other over the top, feeling the prod of an elbow, maybe a knee, as her belly tightened.

She reminded herself, this timing wasn’t Aaron’s fault. They’d had deadlines dictated by snow and swollen rivers, by mountains many hundreds of miles distant, by people they didn’t know and didn’t trust.

For the last week, she’d squirmed with twinges as the horses hauled the white-topped wagon into the Appalachians, the start of two thousand miles overland, and their fifth child way overdue.

She waited for the tightness to ebb, and as her muscles loosened, the wagon broke from bare trees. Below, three to four miles off, a sudden valley spread. So reminiscent of home.

Here, fields gave way to gardens tilled in straight rows where green shoots testified to spring and the attention of loving hands. Mustard bloomed in the hedgerows, dogwood scattered white in the edges, and at the heart of the valley houses nested beside a narrow river.

“Aaron.” Ruth’s call a whisper. His name couldn’t carry through Esther’s chatter and the boys raucous as blackbirds, all of them ahead of the horses.

Esther’s high voice rose with excitement. “Let’s live here!” Three and a half now, she rode on Aaron’s shoulders, Daniel, Matthew, Joseph, clambering beside them, their black clothes speckled with dried mud.

“We can’t live here,” Aaron said.

“Why?” Esther’s fists full of his dark hair, she twisted Aaron’s head. She leaned sideways, her cheek close to his.

He gripped her knees. “It belongs to someone else,” he said.

“I’ll hammer a stake.” She clapped her hands. “Then it’s ours.”

Aaron swung her to the ground. “When we get to Idaho, you will hammer the first stake.”

“When?” Esther skipped beside him, a hand in his. “Tomorrow?”

Ruth clutched the bench. Aaron wouldn’t want to stop. They might miss the line of wagons leaving Pittsburgh, lose the safety of numbers, the guidance they needed threading wilderness, the greater mountains, the desert.

If they missed the gathering in Pittsburgh, the wagon train would leave, and sure enough they’d be separate—not the separate God intended, close within their Old Order; they’d be alone at the mercy of . . . of who knew what. Ruth could imagine what Delia had called a Thomas-hawk embedded in Aaron’s head. She shouldn’t have confided her fears to Delia, yet she always did. Best friend or no, Delia loved to tease. Who names a hatchet anyway?

Ruth knew of Gabriel’s nameless sword and David’s slingshot, Saint Sebastian’s arrow-filled body. Any such could cut them down, clubs, lances, daggers. In the Bible, nary an Indian showed himself.

She believed she could guard against English, keep her soul safe and her littles, close her eyes, cover their ears, but the body? She couldn’t protect against attackers, and strong as he was, Aaron could only prolong the inevitable, so in this case contact with English would be a blessing. She hoped she was right, and God would understand the difference.

Ruth’s pains bit harder and closer together, sapping the strength it took to hold to the seat. In full labor, she called louder this time.

“Aaron.” His name rasped from her throat, squeezed as she clenched. They’d make up time later. She had to stop.

Aaron looked over his shoulder, his hand on the lead’s bridle. “No stopping,” he called. “We’ll eat under way.”

“But . . .”

He turned and walked backward. “What’s the—?”

“The baby,” she said.

He blinked. “Are you sure?”

She gave him a withering look.

Above his beard, his face lost its robust color. He pulled the team from the trail, across the verge, and into a field. With a crack, their wheel crushed a stray bone deep in the winter-killed grass.

Spring kept to the valley. The ridges, still waiting, smelled of melted snow.

“Daniel,” Aaron shouted. “Set the picket.” Daniel hurried to anchor the line and tie their horses.

“Matthew, Joseph, collect wood.”

“Now?” Joseph banged skinny arms on his sides. “It’s midday.” He kicked the grass with his built-up boot and headed off with a hop-skip. Matthew, half his height, followed, sausage arms out soaring like a hawk.

Aaron leapt onto the bench beside Ruth, his long legs folded. “Lots of wood,” he bellowed at the boys. “And take Esther.” He straddled the bench, his footing unsteady as he bent over and inched a hand under Ruth’s knees. Despite his great reach, her belly blocked him.

“What are you doing?”

“Helping,” he said.

“Helping what?”

“I’m picking you up?”

“No, you’re n—”

Her mouth opened, lips stretched across her teeth. Aaron extracted his hand, raised his arms in retreat, and just short of falling, he caught the wagon top.

When she regained her breath, Ruth said, “Youare not picking me up.”

A thock-thock sounded as Daniel’s mallet drove the picket into the ground. Minutes later, deeper thunks announced Joseph dropping an armful of deadfall.

“Papa?” At the side of the wagon, Esther’s little voice. “More wood?”

“Lots more.” Aaron, his words fast. “Lots and lots. Go.”

“Don’t shout—you’ll frighten her.”

“I’m not shouting,” he shouted.

With a frantic look in the wagon, then down at houses in the valley, he flexed his fingers. Sweat beaded his smooth upper lip and slid into his beard.

Aaron in a dither, she wouldn’t have thought it possible. Wasn’t he the one, in the comfort of their own home, the one who’d discounted birth on the trail?

One evening in their bedroom, Aaron had said, “We go when the mountains clear.” Slipping into bed, he’d pulled the quilt over his chest.

“But the baby.” Was he funning? She held her belly as if warding him off.

Give birth in a wagon? No, not even a Conestoga. A wagon took people places, took goods and chattels, the labor of one’s living. A wagon wasn’t meant for the labor before birth.

Aaron had settled into the thick mattress. “We go,” he said, “when the trail’s right.”

Ruth had one knee on the bed about to crawl in. She stopped and stared at Aaron. “And the birthing?”

“Can’t be worse than birthing a foal.” He put his hands behind his head. “I’ve done plenty.”

Ruth, now on her feet, hands on her hips, white nightdress hanging off her growing bulge. “And the mare stood by?”

“Well . . .”

Ruth snatched her braids loose. “You could ask Esther for help. She’ll be there watching me bleed.”

A hint of worry crept into his face. He turned away. “I pray it won’t come to that,” Aaron said. “But why argue? It’ll come when it comes—that’s what your mother always said.”

Ruth sat in the chair. She wouldn’t get in the bed.

Ruth’s mother had been there for all the birthings, her practiced touch and reassurance a godsend. If only her mother were still alive—two years, and Ruth still missed her. She wanted to ask her, Do all men behave this way?

Delia would have said, Yes, men do, Horst being Horst.

Ruth missed her too, Delia, as beyond reach as her mother.

Ruth had to remember, Aaron had always loved her, and she him.

Though he’d made light of birth on the trail, and she’d been angry, Ruth knew, if he could, Aaron would have postponed their leaving.

In a lull between spasms, Ruth spoke slowly. “Spread canvas in the wagon,” she said. “Birth in the grass, that’s fine for you and the mares, not me.”

“Of course not.” Into the wagon, he stretched a long leg, froglike; then his hands and the other leg followed, swimming over their possessions.

She listened to Aaron dig through baskets, shift mattresses, heard the whoosh as he threw the stiff cloth over them. She dreaded rearranging the mess his haste created.

Back home, Ruth didn’t mi