“Ne, not on that knee. It may need stitches. If you try to walk, you could do yourself more harm.” He shifted her weight. “You’ll be more comfortable if you put your arms around my neck.”
“I...I...” she mumbled, but she did as he said. He kept walking. She knew that this was improper, but she couldn’t figure out what to do, what to say. The sun shone warm on her face; she could hear a mockingbird singing.
“You must be the little cousin Sara said was coming to help her today,” he said. “I’m Gideon, her hired man. Gideon Esch. I just arrived last night from Cashton.”
Little cousin? Gideon’s words sifted through her tumbled thoughts. Little? She was five foot eleven, a giant compared to most of the local women, and taller than three quarters of the men in her community. She almost giggled. No one had ever called her little before. But what came out was only “Vo?” She’d never heard of Cashton.
“Wisconsin. My home.” He smiled down at her, and sunlight lit his face. His eyebrows were fair and neat, his face clean-shaven. He wasn’t married. Her heart pounded.
She didn’t know what to say. She had to say something, didn’t she? “The...stile...step broke,” she managed.
“I saw. Falling into that fence. You could have been seriously hurt.”
She nodded. Gulped. Maybe this was a dream...
“You don’t say much, do you?” He looked down at her in his arms and grinned. “Not like my sisters, eight of them. Talk, talk, talk, all the time, until a man can’t hear himself think. You know what I mean?”
Dorcas nodded again.
He grinned. “I like you, little cousin. Do you have a name?”
“Dorcas. Dorcas Coblentz.”
The gray eyes narrowed, and Gideon shook his head. “You don’t look like a Dorcas to me.”
What was she supposed to say to that? She’d never thought her name suited her, either, but it had never mattered. Dorcas was the name her parents had given her at birth.
He stopped walking to look down at her with a serious face. “I don’t suppose you have a middle name?”
She nodded. “Adelaide.”
“Better.” He grinned down at her. “Adelaide,” he repeated. “Addy. That’s what I’ll call you. You look a lot more like an Addy than you do a Dorcas.”
“Addy?” The syllables rolled off her tongue, not quite the same as the way Gideon said it with his Wisconsin Deitsch accent, but well enough. The idea settled over her as easily as warm maple syrup over blueberry pancakes. “Addy,” she repeated, and then she found herself smiling back at him. Addy was such a pretty name.
Dorcas wasn’t pretty. She had never been pretty. Her parents and grandmother had made that clear to her as a child. “Teach that one to cook,” her grossmama had declared on the morning of her first day of school. “She’s as plain of face as you were, Martha, too tall for a girl and skinny as a broom handle. And that mouth...” Her grandmother had spread her hands hopelessly. “Be firm with Dorcas while she’s young, or I warn you, you’ll have an old maid on your hands, just like my sister, Jezzy.”
“Almost there, Addy,” Gideon said, bringing her back to the present.
She opened her eyes, half expecting to find that it wasn’t a handsome young man carrying her across the field, but some shriveled-up old farmer with straw in his beard and hair growing out of his ears.
But there he was. Dorcas sighed with relief, as a smile bubbled up and spilled out of her wide mouth and spread across her face. Gideon Esch—a perfect name for any Plain girl’s secret wishing.
“Gideon Esch! Was in der welt?”
Dorcas turned her head to see Sara Yoder drop her basket of laundry at the clothesline.
She hurried toward them, apron flying. “How bad is she hurt?”
“The stile broke on the south fence line, and she fell into the hedgerow. She cut her knee on a nail, I think. She might need a tetanus shot,” Gideon told Sara.
“Had one this year,” Dorcas squeaked.
“I thought...it might not be goot for her to walk on it.”
Sara looked at Dorcas then at Gideon and then back at Dorcas again. Her dark eyes narrowed, and something passed over her caramel-colored face. A thought Dorcas couldn’t identify. Then Sara’s eyes snapped wide and she said sternly, “Dorcas, have you lost your mind? Unless you’ve got broken bones protruding from that knee, you’d best get out of Gideon’s arms this instant!”
Dorcas’s fantasy evaporated as she realized how inappropriate this must look to her new employer. She squeezed Gideon’s shoulders. “Put me down,” she urged. “Now!”
He let go of her, practically dropping her, then thought the better of it and caught her before she hit the ground. Holding her under her arms, he gingerly tilted her upright.
Dorcas took a single step, winced and looked down at her leg. Below the hem of her torn, blood-stained dress, a thin trickle of blood oozed down her shin. “It’s not so bad,” she said.
“I think it might need stitches,” Gideon protested.
Sara leaned over and carefully raised the hem of Dorcas’s dress high enough to examine her knee, but not so high as to expose too much leg to Gideon. “Don’t be silly,” she huffed. “A little soap and water, maybe a butterfly bandage, and that knee will be as good as new.” She stood up, lowering Dorcas’s dress hem. “Into the house with you. Come along.” She turned on her heels and started for the back door.
Dorcas hobbled after her. As they reached the porch, she glanced over her shoulder to see Gideon still standing there in his shabby, patched clothes and battered straw hat. Her cheeks burned, but beneath the flush of embarrassment, her skin still tingled with the excitement of Gideon’s touch.
* * *
After supper that evening, Gideon sat in Sara’s kitchen and watched as she and Ellie cleared away the dishes and put the room in order. Although he was new to Sara’s, the familiar routine felt comforting. He liked this time of night at home, when supper was over and there was time to talk as the day came to an end.
The house in Wisconsin where he had grown up had always buzzed with the female chatter of a bevy of sisters, both older and younger than he was. And his mother reigned over them all. Sara reminded him of his mother in a lot of ways. She wasn’t stern, but she had a commanding way about her. And she was every bit the cook his mother was. Sara Yoder set a fine table, and the bountiful meal had included a fine sage sausage and the excellent cheddar cheese one of his sisters had tucked into his suitcase. Although coming to Delaware hadn’t been his choice, it appeared as though his stay might not be unpleasant, after all.
Ellie, who was a little person, had set a stool at the sink and was washing dishes while Sara dried. They were an unusual pair, and would have stood out in any group of Amish women, but both were interesting and good company. How the two had come to live together, he didn’t know yet, but he had already learned that diminutive Ellie was the new schoolteacher in Seven Poplars. The previous teacher, Sara’s cousin Hannah Yoder, had recently wed and, like most Old Order Amish women, had chosen to stay at home with her husband rather than work full-time. Ellie would begin teaching in September.
Gideon’s gaze shifted to Sara. He guessed she was between forty and fifty years of age. She wasn’t that tall, about his mother’s height, but that was where the physical resemblance ended. His mother’s hair was as yellow-blond as his own, but Sara’s was walnut-brown and so curly as to be almost crinkly, what he could see of it under her prayer kapp. Her skin was the color of his morning coffee,