Amish Christmas Twins. Patricia Davids
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bellows. Sweat poured down his face. He tasted salt and ashes on his lips, but he didn’t move back. The fire was almost hot enough. Using long tongs, he held a flat piece of iron bar stock in the glowing coals, waiting until it reached the right temperature to be shaped by his hammer. A black heat would be too cold. A white heat would be too hot. A good working heat was the red-orange glow he was waiting on. The smell of smoke and hot metal filled the cold air around him.
Movement out on the road that fronted his property caught his attention. He let go of the tongs and shaded his eyes with one hand to see against the glare of the late-afternoon sun. Was his mother coming home from the quilting bee already? He didn’t expect her for another hour.
A buggy approached the top of the hill, but it wasn’t one he knew. He didn’t recognize the skinny horse between the shafts, either. He’d put shoes on nearly every horse in the area. He knew them and their owners on sight. This was someone new, and he or she was driving erratically.
The horse trotted up the road veering from side to side in a tired, rambling gait. Its black hide was flecked with white foam, but it kept going. The road led uphill to where his lane turned off at the crest. Just beyond that, the road sloped downward for a few hundred yards before it ended in a T where it intersected the blacktop highway that skirted the edge of the river just beyond. The tired horse crested the hill and stumbled but didn’t turn in John’s lane. As it went past, John realized there wasn’t anyone in the driver’s seat.
It was a runaway. Without someone to stop it, the horse was likely to trot straight across the highway into traffic and perhaps even into the river.
John let go of the bellows, sprinted up his lane and out into the road after the buggy. Had the horse been fresh, he wouldn’t stand a chance of catching it, but it was tiring. The steep climb had slowed it.
“Whoa there, whoa,” he shouted, praying the horse was well trained and would respond to the command. It kept going. Sprinting harder, he raced after the vehicle, his lungs burning like his forge. There was traffic below on the highway. A horse-drawn wagon loaded with hay slowed several cars, but one after the other, they pulled out and sped around him. The buggy was unlikely to make it across without being hit.
Running up behind the vehicle, John realized it was a Swartzentruber buggy. The most conservative group among the Amish, the Swartzentruber didn’t fit their buggies with the slow-moving-vehicle sign, windshields, mirrors or electric lighting. One rear wheel wobbled heavily. He finally drew close enough to grab the rear door handle. Yanking it open, he gave one final burst of effort and threw himself inside, no easy task for a man of his size.
The buggy wasn’t empty. There were two little girls in black bonnets holding on to each other in the back seat. They started screaming when they saw him.
“Shush, shush. Ich bin freind.” He spoke in Deitsh, telling them he was a friend. He quickly climbed over the seatback. An Amish woman lay slumped on the floorboards, her face obscured by the large black traveling bonnet she wore. The reins had fallen out of her hands but not out of the buggy. He glanced out the front and saw the horse was nearly at the bottom of the hill. The highway was less than ten yards away.
John grabbed the reins and pulled back as he stomped on the buggy brake. The foam-flecked black mare stumbled to a halt and hung her head, her sides heaving as a car zipped past. The poor horse didn’t even flinch.
John quickly checked the woman on the floor. She was dressed in a heavy black winter coat, gloves and a black traveling bonnet. He could see she was breathing. He tried rousing her without success by shaking her shoulder. He had no idea what was wrong. The girls in back kept crying for their mama.
After lifting the woman onto the seat, he spoke to the girls again in Deitsh. “What are your names? Do you live near here? What is your papa’s name?”
They were too frightened or too shy to answer him. As he pulled his arm from behind the woman’s head, he noticed a smear of blood on his sleeve. He untied her bonnet and removed it. Her kapp came off with it and her blond curls sprang free. His breath caught in his throat as he recognized the woman he’d given a lift to several days before.
What was Willa Lapp doing here?
The side of her head was matted with dried blood, but the wound under it was only a shallow gash. Had she struck her head hard enough to be knocked unconscious, or had she hurt herself when she fell? He had no way of knowing.
He asked the children what had happened, but they only stared at him fearfully without answering. He would have to wait until the woman could answer all his questions when she came to.
Leaving her settled more comfortably on the seat, he stepped forward to check on the horse and noticed a piece of harness hanging loose. It had been repaired with a loop of wire at some time in the past. The wire had snapped, leaving a sharp point sticking through the leather. The flapping piece of harness had been jabbing the mare’s side with each step she took, forcing her to keep moving even as she was close to exhaustion.
Now what? John pulled on the tip of his beard as he looked around. He couldn’t ask the trembling, exhausted horse to pull the buggy back up the steep hill. He didn’t want to leave two crying children and an unconscious woman at the side of the road until he could return with a fresh horse. The mare had to be walked until she cooled down or she would sicken in this cold. It left him with only one option. He had to take them all together.
The girls had stopped crying and were huddled behind their mother. She hadn’t stirred. He found a horse blanket beneath the back seat, unhitched the mare and covered her with it. Leading her back to the buggy door, he opened it and held out his hand to the nearest child. “Kumm, we lawfa.”
She pushed his hand aside. “Bad man. Go away.”
The other girl patted her mother’s face. “Is Mama sick?”
He switched to English. “Ja, your mother is sick. I will take you to my house. Come, we must walk there.”
They looked at each other with uncertainty. He slipped his arms beneath their mother and lifted her out of the buggy. His suspicion that Willa was pregnant proved to be true. Starting up the hill with his burden, he glanced back. The children climbed down and hurried after him, giving a wide berth to the horse he was leading. They reached his side and stayed close, holding hands with each other as they struggled to keep up with his long strides. He slowed his pace.
One of the girls caught hold of his coat. “Horsey man, wait.”
He stopped walking. “I’m not horsey man. My name is John, John Miller.”
“Johnjohn.” She grinned at him.
“Just John, and what is your name?”
“Lucy. Is Mama okay?”
“You are all okay thanks to God’s mercy this day.” He had stopped this woman’s buggy from running into traffic and being hit by a car. Why hadn’t someone stopped Katie May’s buggy before it had been smashed to bits and her life snuffed out?
Why hadn’t he stopped his wife from leaving that day? It was a question that haunted his days and nights.
The woman in his arms moaned, pulling his mind from the past. He started walking again. She wasn’t heavy, but his arms were burning by the time he reached the front steps of his house. He dropped the horse’s reins and hoped she was too tired to wander off until he got his unexpected guests settled. This was costing him valuable time away from his forge and wasting fuel. He didn’t like interruptions when he was working.
He carried her into the living room, laid her on the sofa and then knelt beside her. The little girls pressed close to him.
“Mama’s sleeping,” whispered the one who’d told him her name was Lucy. The only way he could tell them apart was that Lucy still had her bonnet on. The other sister had taken hers off somewhere between the buggy and his front step.
He gazed down at Willa’s peaceful face. Her dark blond eyelashes were fanned against fair cheeks framed by golden curls. She was even prettier than