Courting Ruth

“Here’s your bag, Mam,” she said too loudly as she entered the room. “So many buggies in the yard, it took a while to find ours.” That wasn’t dishonest, was it? Or had her foolishness with Eli Lapp caused her to make up lies as well?

“Look at these colors,” Mam said as she took the bag from Ruth. “Barely faded in all these years. And such beautiful needlework. I vow, Johanna, you must have inherited your great-great-grandmother’s gift with stitchery.”

Ruth settled gratefully into her empty seat and picked up her square of cloth. She would make up for her wasted time in the barn, and she would forget Eli and his inappropriate behavior. It would have been a much easier task if the memory of his hand on hers wasn’t so real or if she could forget how nice it had been sitting next to him in the privacy of the big barn. No boy had ever made her feel that way before.

Hazel Zook’s round cheeks and pink laughing mouth rose to haunt Eli, replacing the image of Ruth Yoder’s angelic face in his mind. He picked up his pace as he strode back across the wet fields toward his uncle’s house. Glimpses of that night flashed in his head. He’d put miles and months between him and Hazel, but it wasn’t enough. He just couldn’t get her and what had happened off his conscience.

Light rain hit him in the face as he walked, and he wondered if coming to Seven Poplars might have been a mistake. Maybe he should have run farther, gone into the English world and never looked back. He wondered what was keeping him from taking that final step? He was already lost to his own faith. People would never let him forget what had happened back in Belleville.

What was he thinking coming here? Was he going to ruin another woman’s life now? Ruth Yoder was a nice girl, a girl from a strict family and church. She deserved respect. And the best thing he could do for her was to stay away. He should never have gone to the Beachys’ tonight. Better choices.

He wished things could have been different, that he’d made a better choice that night at the bonfire. He wished he’d done the right thing, but now it was too late. There was no going back and no changing what had happened.

The bishops and the preachers said that God was merciful; they preached it every service. They said you could be forgiven any sin if you truly repented, and maybe that was true. But what they didn’t say was how you could forgive yourself.

Chapter Five

The following Monday afternoon, Ruth left Susanna and Anna baking bread to walk to the school. Mam wanted to work on lesson plans after supper, and Ruth had offered to carry her heavy books home for her. It was so rare that Ruth had time alone to think, and it was such a pretty day that she enjoyed having the errand.

Eli Lapp and how to handle him was foremost in her mind. It was clear that he wasn’t going to stop following her around until she made him understand that he was wasting his time with her. She needed to explain that it was nothing against him; she had no plans to marry anyone.

Still, she had to admit that she liked being told she was pretty, and that he was both clever and attractive. Vanity, she feared, was one of her sins. After all the talk about her being an old maid, it was nice that someone liked her, but it had to stop. The trouble was, she didn’t know what she should say to Eli. How could she tell him to quit courting her when he’d said nothing about wanting her for his girlfriend? What if he laughed at her? What if he told her that she had completely misunderstood, and she was the last girl he would consider as a wife?

And then there was the problem of Irwin. The boy had promised Mam that he’d meet her at the schoolhouse on Saturday, but he hadn’t shown up, and she’d had no opportunity to speak to him alone at church. Ruth wondered if Irwin had come to school today and if Mam had been able to question him about the fire.

Eli Lapp hadn’t attended the Sunday services, but that hadn’t kept him from being the center of attention. Hearing the girls giggling about how handsome he was, or the mothers repeating that Eli was just the sort of boy that Preacher Reuben warned them about, was no help.

“Shepherds of our church must be diligent to protect our lambs,” Aunt Martha had warned a group of mothers. “The loose ways of the world threaten our faith.”

Ruth wondered if her father would have agreed with Aunt Martha, or would he have made Eli welcome and tried to turn him back to the Plain ways? Ruth hadn’t done anything wrong in the barn, but if people knew she’d been alone in the buggy in the barn with Eli, her reputation could be tarnished. For all she knew, Irwin was the kind of person to tell tales, and that worried her. It wasn’t necessary to simply avoid wrongdoing, but a Plain person had to avoid the perception of wrongdoing as well.

For an instant, just as Ruth rounded the bend through the trees, she remembered the schoolhouse as she’d seen it the day of the fire, and a knot rose in her throat. So many bad things could have happened. But this time, there was no smoke or the scent of smoke. School was out for the afternoon, but a few of the boys had remained for a game of softball on the grassy field. Samuel Mast’s buggy was there, as well as Roman’s big team and wagon, the horses standing nose to nose at the hitching rail.

When Ruth entered the schoolroom by the temporary steps, she found Roman, Samuel and her mother deep in conversation about the building repairs. Mam was smiling, and it sounded as though she was getting her wish for more room. The hand-drawn plans spread out on the desk enlarged the main area by the size of the original cloakroom and included a new porch with an inside sink and water faucet.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” Mam exclaimed. “We’ll be able to add eight more desks and a new cloakroom.”

“Will it be done in time for the new school year?” Ruth asked, looking over the drawing.

Roman nodded. “With Eli to help, we’ll finish by September.”

“So Eli’s good with his hands,” Samuel observed.

“Ya, he’s a fine craftsman, that boy.”

“You can go on home,” Mam urged, resting her hand on Ruth’s arm. “We’ve still got things to discuss here, but there’s no need for you to wait for me. If you can take the reading books and the big arithmetic book, I can manage the rest.”

Ruth gathered up all the texts, including the oversize cursive writing book, said goodbye, and walked out of the school. She had just started toward the woods when Eli stepped out from behind the shed.

“Don’t pop out at people like that,” she said. Her cheeks felt as warm as if she’d been standing over a kettle of simmering jam. Just being near him scrambled her wits and made her tongue thick, and she was immediately more annoyed with herself than with him. She was a woman grown and should have more sense.

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