The Divide by Jolina Petersheim

Author:Jolina Petersheim [Petersheim, Jolina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Christian / Romance, FICTION / Amish & Mennonite
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

The moon, inviting and ripe, glints off the lines of quart jars carefully placed over each plant, and the centipede of hoop houses constructed over the long, single raised bed. Our greenhouses destroyed in the valley fire, Jabil and I had to improvise by bending branches into hoops, and then we covered these hoops with a series of large, thirteen-gallon trash bags someone retrieved from Field to Table before we left.

Small pine resin torches glow inside the houses and will be replaced throughout the night—a ritual as solemn as the changing of the guard. With my face pressed against the plastic, I can see the tiny green shoots pushing through the dirt: each a promise of the harvest season when—for a while, at least—our people will no longer have to live in fear of want.

Side by side, Jabil and I continue walking. My bare feet sink into the earth, padded with moss, and I can feel my weary body releasing the tension coiled in my shoulders and spine. Jabil crouches and holds out his lamp. Silver-pink night crawlers dart like lightning into the soil, recently turned for yet another planting of seeds. Jabil secures a squiggly handful of worms, grabbing them before they can disappear into the ground, and drops them in his tin bucket to be used for his fishing trip in the morning. “Quite the date, isn’t it?” he says, laughing.

I do not laugh. For weeks, Jabil and I have been taking these nightly walks after the rest of the community quiets down. It’s a time for us to talk about our day and the plan for the coming week. And though we’ve often seemed as effortlessly conjoined as a long-married couple trying to reconnect after tucking our unruly children in bed, I have never considered any of these walks dates. Furthermore, Jabil’s never said anything to confirm the shift in our relationship, even if—every now and then—he looks at me like he wants to.

Jabil presently stands, his smile slipping. “Did I say something wrong?”

I shake my head. “Of course not.”

His fingertips, feather light, brush against my cheek. “Then what is it?”

“Nothing.”

But it’s everything. I tell my heart to still, my mind to focus on the man standing before me rather than replaying the image of the man I imagined I would spend my life with, who has since abandoned me twice. When Jabil takes my hand, I let him. I even go so far as to lace my fingers through his. His grip tightens gratefully. In his other hand, he carries the bucket of night crawlers, and I imagine the two of us being watched by that brilliant lunar eye.

We walk farther from the compound than we have all spring. Jabil pulls apart pine branches and steps underneath them. “I did this for you,” he says and shows me another patch of cleared earth. I glance at it, trying to understand.

And then he kneels, just as he knelt before. Setting down the lamp, he presses his thumb into the soil.

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