Sarah's Sin

“Deacon Lapp suggested a visit to the Ohio relatives,” Isaac said. “A period for you to pray and reflect, to heal the soul.”

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.”

Matt nodded curtly, not looking up, though he wasn't taking in a single word of print. His first thought was to ask when Sarah was leaving, but he stifled it ruthlessly with common sense. It was over. There was no point in trying to see her again. She didn't love him enough to leave her folk and he loved her too much to ask. Time for any smart bachelor to cut bait and run. Actually, it was past time for that. He never should have let himself get so involved in the first place. But he'd been so in need of something, anything that would help life make sense again, and there had been Sarah, the embodiment of everything he thought had gone out of life—goodness, innocence, faith.

Maybe Julia had been right. Maybe he had been trying to compensate. Maybe he had been trying to withdraw from the world, wrapping himself in the cocoon of Sarah Troyers homemade skirts.

“I'll be going back to the Cities at the end of the week,' he announced.

Ingrid said nothing. She probably knew he was not well enough to return to work, but she also knew better than to protest.

Outside the wind howled and hurled rain against the panes of the bay window. In the snug warmth of the library, the Righteous Brothers sang the mournful opening bars of “Unchained Melody.” Matt folded his Star-Tribune with quick jerky movements and hurled it across the room in a burst of temper. In the front hall, Blossom sent up a howl as someone began pounding on the door.

Ingrid had just pushed herself up out of her seat when Sarah came rushing into the library, looking like the headless horseman had chased her all the way to Thornewood. Her kapp was gone. Her hair hung loose in wet strings, and rainwater dripped off the end of her reddened nose. The heavy black cloak she wore smeUed of wet wool and horses.

“Sarah!” Ingrid said on a gasp.

Sarah looked right past her, her terrified gaze focusing on Matt. “Matt!” she exclaimed, her eyes huge in a pale face. “It's Jacob. He's terribly ill. You have to come. Please say youTl come right away!”

“Of course, I'll come,” he murmured, so stunned by her sudden appearance that he had yet to react.

“Now!” she insisted, flying across the room to grab his hand and pull him up off the couch. Her fingers were like icicles, wet and white and painfully cold. She tugged him like an anxious child, sobbing, teeth chattering. “There's no time to lose! I'm afraid. Oh, mein Gott, I'm so afraid he's going to die!”

She began crying then and Matt instinctively pulled her into his arms, offering her his warmth and strength for an instant… and his love. It poured out of him unchecked, and he squeezed her tightly, not caring that her cape was wet or that her hair was dripping on his cashmere sweater. The hurt he had been struggling with was instantly set aside, concern for Sarah and for Jacob overriding all else.

“Hush, sweetheart,” he whispered, stroking a hand over the damp tangle of her hair. “Everything's gong to be all right. Tell me what happened.”

“Jacob … he's ill. So hot … in such pain. I'm going to lose him,” she whispered, trembling violently in Matt's arms. Her legs and arms ached from clinging to the back of the horse she had ridden there bareback, and now her knees threatened to give way beneath her. She was scared out of her wits thinking about Jacob, thinking about how they had waited too long to try to save her own little Peter. “Please, Matt, she sobbed, sagging against him. “He's going to die!”

“Nobody's going to die,” Matt said firmly, standing her back from him. “Do you understand me, Sarah? Nobody's going to die.” He grabbed the jacket Ingrid tossed him and shrugged into it, his eyes never leaving Sarah's. “Not as long as I can prevent it,”

Ingrid drove because she knew the way and had experience driving on gravel. The horse Sarah had galloped to Thornewood on had been hastily locked in the barn. No time had been spared to see to the animal's needs because Jacob's-life hung in the balance.

The trio burst in on the Maust family like marauders, flinging back the kitchen door and storming into the house in a swirl of rain and wind that made the lanterns flicker in protest. A stunned Isaac raced into the kitchen to meet them, his feet bare, his suspenders dangling.

“Sarah! What is the meaning of this?” he demanded in a thunderous voice. “Why do you bring these people into my home? How dare you-”

“I dare because Jacob is dying!” she shouted in his face.

“Nonsense! The boy has been to see a doctor—”

“I won't take the time to argue with you on that point, Mr. Maust,” Matt said, shouldering his way past Sarahs father. “Sarah's word is good enough for me. Where's the boy?”

“Upstairs. Hurry!” Sarah shouted, well beyond the verge of hysteria. “Hurry!”

Ignoring the stunned faces of the rest of Sarahs family, Matt turned and took the stairs as fast as he could, blocking out his own pain with the need to get to Jacob as quickly as possible. Footsteps rumbled like thunder behind him. At the top of the stairs he hesitated, uncertain of which direction to go and Sarah nearly bowled him over, running into him and shoving him down the hall.

In Jacob's room, he set about the business of examining the boy as best he could without benefit of any of the tools of his trade. The old cool settled inside him. His hands were steady. His mind functioned with the flawless precision of a computer, absorbing information, analyzing it, considering and discarding options and answers. He rattled off questions in rapid succession.

“When did he first become ill? How long has his fever been this high? Is he taking any medications?”

Anna Maust answered him in a thin, trembling voice as she stood beside the bed looking down on her youngest with tear-filled, worried eyes.

“The doctor said flu is all it is,” she murmured almost to herself. “He prescribed aspirin.”

Matt didn't waste energy commenting on Coswell's diagnosis or on the idiocy of prescribing aspirin to a child with a high fever in view of the latest findings on the dangers of Reye's syndrome. He concentrated on Jacob, checking his pupils, feeling glands, running his sensitive hands gently over the boy's belly, frowning as his lightest touch brought groans of pain from Jacob.

Sarah fell to her knees beside the bed on the far side, sobbing, reaching out to touch the child she had always loved as her own. Ingrid and the rest of the Maust family stood back, watching, silent except for Isaac.

“We don't want you here, English,” he hissed vehemently. “We have a doctor. Your interference—”

Matt straightened from the bed and wheeled on the man, his face a mask of stone. “My interference is going to save your son's life if we can get him to a hospital fast enough. His appendix is on the verge of rupturing.”

Isaac Maust turned white, the seriousness of the situation penetrating his anger. He stared into Matt Thome's eyes and saw nothing but the grim truth.

“What can we do?” he asked.

“Pray.” Matt was already in motion.

There was no phone to call for an ambulance or time to wait for one. Jacob was wrapped in the blankets from his bed and carried out to the back of Ingrid s station wagon, where Matt and Sarah climbed in beside him. Ingrid dove behind the wheel and the elder Mausts settled in the backseat, slamming the doors as the car's wheels spun on the gravel driveway.

Jesse Community Hospital sat on the north edge of town, a modern U-shaped one-story structure of red brick that housed a nursing home in one wing and a small number of hospital beds in the other. There were no more than five cars in the lot. Ingrid halted the station wagon at the glass doors emblazoned with the word Emergency in red, and Matt led the way into the hospital with Jacob curling against him in his arms, the boy moaning and crying. Sarah ran beside him, her fist gripping the sleeve of Matt's leather jacket, tears streaming down her cheeks. The nurse on duty, a stout, middle-aged woman with a puff-ball of red hair and a name tag that proclaimed her to be Velma Johansen, R.N., rushed around from behind the desk to meet them.

“I'm Dr. Thorne from County General in Minneapolis,” Matt announced in a voice that rang with authority. “We've got a boy here with an appendix that's just about ready to blow. I want him prepped for surgery stat. Where can I scrub?”

“Down that hall on the left, Doctor,” Nurse Johansen answered efficiently, pointing with one hand and yanking a gurney away from the wall with the other. “I'll call the nurse-anesthetist. Well have him ready for you as soon as possible.”

“Make it sooner,” Matt barked, bolting down the hall.

He nearly collided with Dr. Coswell as the older man stepped out of an office to see what all the shouting was about. Coswell hefted his bulk out of the way at the last instant, jerking his cigarette out of his mouth.

“Dr. Thome! What brings you here?”

“I don't have time to chat, Coswell,” Matt said, shrugging out of his jacket. “I've got an emergency appendectomy to perform.”

“You can't just come in here and take over my hospital!” Coswell bellowed, incredulous.

Matt gave him a cool look. “Watch me.”

“This is completely irregular!” Coswell exclaimed, his face turning an unhealthy shade of purple. “I won't stand for it!” he said, his smoker's cough choking off the end of his sentence.

“Yeah, well, I'll cut that kid open with a pocketknife before I let you get near him with a scalpel, so you'd better get used to the idea,” Matt said. He left Coswell sputtering and went to ready himself to save Jacob Maust s life.

The wait seemed interminable. Sarahs parents sat on a low couch, huddling together under the glow of the fluorescent lights, offering one another quiet support. Sarah felt too frantic to sit and paced along the end of the waiting room with one arm wrapped around her midsection and her other hand pressed to her mouth to keep from crying out or screaming in frustration. Her hair still hung loose and she had made no effort to comb it, letting it dry in a wild tangle of waves that fell past her waist.

Ingrid got up to pace with her, putting an arm around Sarah's waist and leaning her head against the taller woman's shoulder. “Matt's a great doctor,” she said softly. “And he's not just talented, he's as stubborn as a two-headed mule, to boot. Hell take care of Jacob.”

“I know,” Sarah murmured, hugging her friend. “I would trust him with my life.”

Ingrid gave her a long, speculative look. “Would you?” she asked, and Sarah knew they were no longer speaking of Matt's abilities as a physician.

The question stopped her cold but just as she started to ask Ingrid what she had meant, Matt emerged from a door at the end of the hall. He limped toward them looking tired and rumpled in baggy surgical greens. Lines of worry and concentration had etched themselves across his forehead and around his mouth, making him look ten years older. As he neared the waiting area he pulled his surgeon's cap off and mussed his hair with his hand. He stopped first to say a few words to Anna and Isaac, who listened intently, then bowed their heads in prayer, then he turned toward Sarah, his dark eyes fastening on hers.

“He's going to be fine,” he said softly.

Her whole body shuddered with relief. She closed her eyes and said a quick prayer of thanks, then the tears started to flow. Without hesitating, she sought the refuge of Matt s embrace, pressing her cheek to his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her temple.

“It's all right, sweetheart,” he whispered tenderly. “It's all right. Everything's going to be just fine.”

He held her that way for a long while, not caring in the least that her parents were watching. If he couldn't have her forever, at least he could have her for now, and he could give her comfort if she wouldn't take his love.

“It's all right,' he murmured, brushing his lips against her hair.

Sarah looked up at him and sniffed. “Thank you for saving him, Matt. I love him so much.”

“I know.”

“And I love you,” Sarah whispered, lifting a hand to stroke her fingertips down his cheek.

But not as much, he thought sadly. Not enough.

Eventually he took them to see a groggy Jacob. While Sarah was busy fussing over her brother, Isaac drew Matt out into the dark hall.

“I've done you a disservice, Matt Thome,” Isaac said humbly. “You saved my son's life. For this I thank you.”

“And for Sarah?” Matt asked, meeting the old man's gaze head-on.

“Let her go,” Isaac said. There was no anger in his eyes now, only sadness and pleading. “She belongs with her people. You know nothing of our ways, nor she of your world.”

“I love her.”

“How can you love in so short a time? I think you cannot even know her.”

“That's funny.” Matt's mouth twisted into an ironic little smile that held no humor as he thought of Sarah with her hunger to learn and the inner fire she had yet to release. “I was just thinking the same thing about you. You've had her with you her whole life, and I don't think you know her at all.”

“I know that she is Amish, as is her family,'

Matt said nothing. He turned and looked into the room to see Sarah bent over her brother Jacob whom she loved like a son. She was smiling and teasing him, her face glowing. I would have given her sons, he thought, pain tightening its fist inside him. I would have given her a family. I would have given her anything.

But she hadn't asked.

He turned slowly then and walked away, wondering if the town of Jesse had a bar.