Free Robin Lee Hatcher by Promised to Me Page B

carried them out of the bedroom and down two flights of stairs to the laundry room in the basement, where she dropped them onto the growing pile of dirty clothes and bedding.
    When was the last time Jakob had washed anything? Karola wondered. Then she tried to imagine her father doing laundry. An impossible image to conjure. Gottfried Breit gave no thought to how or why he had a clean white apron to don each morning as he began his workday. Karola doubted he knew how hard his wife labored to make certain he did.
    She pictured her mother then, not scrubbing clothes in a washbasin but down on her knees, her worn Bible open on the bed before her. It was the way Frieda Breit began every day, in an attitude of prayer.
    I should ask God to help me with Maeve .
    Hadn’t she read in her Bible that it was the Lord who gave wisdom and that out of his mouth came knowledge and understanding? Of course she should ask him for help. She should have done so earlier.
    Quickly, she knelt on the cold, stone floor beside the mound of dirty laundry. Closing her eyes, she bowed her head and clasped her hands before her chest.
    Lord, help me to help Maeve. I do not know what to do for her or what to say to her. I can see that she is hurting, but I am not wise enough on my own to know what to do. I need your wisdom, Almighty God. For whatever purpose, you brought me to this family. Help me to do your will in my time with them.
    She waited for a brilliant flash of understanding, but none came. It seemed she would be forced to exercise patience as she waited to become wise.
    Jakob lifted the control gate, allowing water to spill through the opening and rush along the narrow ditch toward the alfalfa fields. He hoped that within two years he’d have all of his land under irrigation. Maybe then he’d be able to attempt a few more profitable crops.
    Not that he hadn’t done well with the wheat and alfalfa. He had. But he wouldn’t mind a little more money with which to line his pockets as protection against future hard times.
    He grabbed the shovel from the ground and followed the ditch toward the east.
    In his first year in this valley, Jakob had become actively involved in the fledgling Shadow Creek Irrigation Project. He’d spent many evenings poring over government reports and reading agricultural articles in newspapers and magazines. He knew as well as any of the farmers in this valley—and better than most— that irrigation wasn’t a solution to all of their ills. It couldn’t prevent a drought, and it certainly wasn’t effective if a farmer didn’t properly grade his land or if he continually spread too much water on his fields.
    Bradley Mason, who owned the section of land to the south of the Hirsch farm, was a good case in point. Jakob would be the first to admit that his neighbor had a heart of gold and was generous to a fault, but Bradley was also unbelievably inept when it came to understanding the mechanics of irrigation. Try though he might, no amount of cursing had enabled Bradley to force water to flow uphill, and it certainly hadn’t kept him from finding himself mired up to his knees in mud on more than one occasion due to both seepage and overwatering.
    To be fair, Jakob had at times applied too much water to his land, too. Gauging the exact amount of moisture needed was difficult, if not impossible. There were so many variables to consider— the type of soil, the lay of the land, rain or the lack of it, temperatures, the particular plants under cultivation. Nature stubbornly resisted a farmer’s attempts to control and regiment it, and that went for irrigation, too.
    Or maybe it was the farmer who was stubborn, Jakob mused. He remembered the many times his father had stood at the head of the table, his sons seated to his left and his right, as he quoted the Scripture: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and