Free Davey's Daughter by Linda Byler

not even know it.”
    Sarah plodded along beside her sister as Priscilla babbled on about Omar and his Belgian and how kind that Lee was. Sarah’s head spun, and she wished Priscilla would just be quiet.
    “Where was Matthew?”
    “He didn’t feel good.”
    “Poor baby.”
    Sarah didn’t feel the remark deserved an answer, so she walked on under the early spring sky, the night air still sharp with cold. But she could hear the sweet sounds of the earth waiting to burst into new life. The peepers were still persistent, their shrill mating calls stirring some old, bittersweet memory for Sarah. She became nostalgic, thinking back to when life was less complicated, soft and innocent, the way the years of her youth had been for so long.
    The stars twinkled down from the black velvet sky as if to remind Sarah of their steadfastness. They were a guiding light, a trusting age-old light that God had planned the same way he had planned the spring peepers, the changing seasons, and, above all, the design He had for her.
    Unbidden and mysterious, two tears emerged, quivered, and slid slowly down her soft cheeks, lit only by the light of a waning moon and about two million stars.

D at said if Lancaster County had responded well to disaster in the past, the caring was doubled, tripled, quadrupled for the poor widow after Hannah spread the word effusively and colorfully about the under-stocked pantry.
    Even conservative members of the Old Order Amish voiced their outrage now. Something had to be done about all the fires. Old Dannie Fisher talked to the media, a vein of anger threaded through his dialogue, and no one blamed him. His old, bent straw hat was the focal point of the photograph on the front page of the Lancaster paper.
    Ya, vell (Yes, well), they said. Enough is enough.
    That poor Lydia Esh.
    She’s so geduldich (patient).
    Aaron had passed away after a long and painful battle with lung cancer. The medical expenses had climbed to phenomenal heights. Always she’d accept the alms and the deacon’s visits with a bent head and a strong face, any sorrow or self-pity veiled and hidden from view. She expressed gratitude quietly, showing no emotion, and no one could remember seeing her shed a tear at her husband’s funeral.
    And now, with hundreds of men swarming about her property, vanloads of people arriving daily from neighboring counties and states, her situation spoken to the world through the eager media, she showed no emotion — only a certain clouding of her eyes.
    Sarah was in the small wash house, sorting through boxes of groceries — tin cans of fruit in one box, beans, tomato sauce, and other vegetables in another, and cereal, flour, sugar, and all the other dry staples in another. Many friendly faces she did not know assisted with the pleasant work.
    The day was sunny, as if God knew they needed good weather to begin building the widow’s barn. The mud was the biggest hurdle. Great deep pools of water had turned the already soaked fields into a quagmire. Load after load of stone was poured around the barn foundation, and still vehicles became hopelessly embedded in the wet ground.
    Men called out, hammers rang, trucks groaned through the dirt and the mud and the gravel, and the sun shone as folks from all over came to the aid of Lydia and her children.
    Someone had the idea to paint the interior of the house after noticing the stained, peeling walls and the lack of fresh, clean color. They’d buy paint after the barn was finished. They’d organize work days for different districts, have frolics to paint and clean, freshen the entire house. They’d plant the garden, mow the grass, plant some shrubbery, and build a fence.
    Sarah approached Lydia that Monday, her eyes bright with the plans the women had devised. Lydia sat at the kitchen table, her angular frame so thin, her black apron hanging from her waist. Her hair was combed neatly, dark and sleek, her eyeglasses were sparkling clean, her covering clean but