The Captive Heart Read Free

already starting breakfast, and stopped by the back door to put on her coat. She lit a lantern, grabbed her bucket and stool from the back porch and headed for the barn.
    Setting her bucket and stool down at the milking corner, she put a little feed into the manger and went out to rouse the cows. As usual, she found them lying in the grass not far away, waiting. When the cows saw her lantern, they hauled their heavy bodies up and plodded toward the big door, long accustomed to the routine. Her bare feet were freezing from the dew, so she stood for a minute in the impression left by a cow, absorbing the warmth before she followed them inside.
    As she went back through the door of the barn someone laid a hand on her shoulder. She gave a little shriek and nearly dropped the lantern as she spun around.
    â€œGood morning,” Jake said, smiling sheepishly. “I’m sorry I scared you.”
    She melted into his strong arms and warmth flooded through her. She said nothing. No words were necessary.
    He gave her a too-brief hug and said, “I’ll help you with the milking. I’ll have to round up John’s cows and milk them too, so I’ll be needing the space.”
    She nodded, stifling a giggle. “Miriam will be here in a minute. We wouldn’t want her to catch us like this.”
    Milking was no longer a chore with Jake beside her. Nothing was the same. Her whole world had taken on new and vibrant colors.

    That morning, for the first time since the Shrocks and Hershbergers arrived, the three Amish families gathered for church services in the Benders’ barn. Miriam sat on a backless bench alongside her sisters, but part of her was elsewhere. Despite the pure and palpable joy in the air that morning—for they had been reunited and were a community again—Miriam’s mind kept wandering, reliving an all too vivid dream.
    They sang a few songs from the Ausbund , Hershberger said a long prayer of thanks for traveling mercies and then her dat got up to speak. He fidgeted and shifted uneasily from foot to foot, for Caleb Bender was not sanctioned by the church as a preacher. It was one thing to speak in front of his family on Sunday morning, but a crowd of fifty was very different.
    â€œI was thinking on it this morning at breakfast,” her father said, standing before the assembled families, the women seated on one side and the men on the other, all of them dressed in their Sunday best. “I was thinking about how in the beginning, every time Gott made something new He always said it was good. And it goes along like that until after He makes a man. But then comes the first time Gott says something is not good. He said it was not good that the man should be alone.”
    Now he had Miriam’s full attention. Alone. The word struck a chord in her. It meant almost twenty and unmarried, with no prospects.
    Her dat paused, biting his lip, choosing his words carefully.
    â€œGott meant for Adam to have a wife, a helpmeet,” he said slowly. “But I think mebbe there is more to it than that. I believe the thoughts of Gott are truth, whether He thinks them in a small way or a big way.”
    There was great stillness then as everyone stared at him blankly, not sure what he meant by this. Miriam glanced at the faces of the boys sitting across the aisle. At the mention of a wife, Jake Weaver’s attention drifted subtly from Caleb’s face to Rachel’s. The faintest trace of a smile touched the corners of his eyes before he turned his attention back to her dat.
    But then she saw Micah, the strapping big twenty-one-year-old son of Ira Shrock, sitting next to Jake. She couldn’t help noticing that he glanced at her too often for it to be accidental.
    Micah had been there too, on the wagon with her on the way back from Arteaga when the bandits struck and tried to take her. In her mind it was Domingo who had saved her, taking down the bandit whose pistol was aimed at