Is blood thicker than water? You be the judge in this heart-wrenching tale of a brief encounter between a young woman and her sisters husband.
Libby was widowed and childless at age twenty-two. She was a handsome woman. When she pulled her chestnut hair into a ponytail, she looked like a schoolgirl. When her husband died, her shining green eyes went almost gray, and her skin turned pale in mourning.
She went to live with her sister Anne and brother-in-law Jacob on their farm. Libby was going back home, to the Mennonite community that had shunned her. Not a soft place to land, but she had nowhere else to go.
Anne did not comfort her younger sister. Not because she was cold, but because she was weak and could not bear the burden of Libby’s heartache. She avoided the pain in her eyes, turned away and led her upstairs to her room.
“Jacob will be in from the fields soon,” she said. “You can come help with supper if you want.”
Anne, fragile-looking and drawn, left the young widow standing in the sparse room, suitcase in hand.
The following day, the sister’s went to their parent’s grave. It was a sunny September morning. Libby ran her fingers across the simple headstones, laid side by side on the pebbled ground.
“You’re angry with me for not coming when she passed, aren’t you?” Libby said.
Anne parted her pierced lips. “We’re taught to forgive.”
Libby rose up. “I know what we were taught. I know that, but what do you feel? If you’re angry, tell me!”
“I was taught to forgive, so I do.”
“And that’s that?”
“Yes. Simple, really. You left because the simple wasn’t good enough. You had to have things complicated.”
“No, I just…” Libby sighed and looked out across the hills. Hills she tumbled down head over heels with Anne, when they were little girls in handmade dresses. When they were untouched by the world and adolescence. When the world was just soft grass beneath their feet and chocolate ice cream on summer afternoons.
She turned to her sister, thinking to take her hand and run pell-mell across the meadow like they used to. But Anne stood rigid and Libby thought better of it.
Weeks later, in the kitchen, Libby stood beside Anne as they shucked corn. Anne’s young sons, three in all, knickered and barefoot, chased each other in the yard, barreling into the kitchen, then back out again. The three daughters sat on the pantry bench swinging their legs and singing Sunday school songs. Libby, who in recent days was coming out of her gloom, laughed when they innocently sang the wrong words, but not Anne. She was immune to the children’s chatter, and rather was more concerned with getting the laundry off the line before dark.
Jacob came in from the fields. A towering presence, yet gentle and quiet. He rolled up his shirt sleeves and washed his hands at the sink. The blonde hair on his arms was thick and curly, and Libby, missing anything manly, felt a longing so deep and raw, she wanted to run out the door. It was startling to her, this heavy feeling he brought with him when he entered the room. She began to long for it, wait for it, wanting helplessly to be carried away by him.
He kissed Anne’s cheek, but she didn’t turn away from her work. Passion didn’t run in her veins. Clean trousers, a warm supper and a house full of children is what she offered.
The following day was Saturday. Anne was in the kitchen, Libby was in her room, dressing. She answered the gentle knock to her door. It was Jacob.
“I’ve decided to go with you to Church,” she said, smoothing out her black cotton dress. “I’m just not used to the bonnet.” She let out a little laugh. “I’ll need Anne to help me with it, I suppose.”
He said nothing. He only looked at her with pain and longing, drawn to her, yet not moving. There, facing one another, silent, suffering, they finally embraced. She clung to him with clenched fists; he rubbed his cheek against her soft neck. He took her face in his hands and kissed her.
Then there she was, Anne, standing on the eighth step up, expressionless. Then she disappeared.
Jacob leaned against the threshold and let out a faint moan.
“I’ll go after her,” Libby said.
“And tell her what?”
Libby bit her lower lip to keep it from quivering. “I don’t know!”
Jacob took her by the shoulders, looking hard into her eyes, but did not speak. Libby tore away from him, down the stairs, calling for Anne.
Gathering the children, Jacob loaded them into the wagon.
“Where’s mama? Isn’t she coming with us?”
Libby turned to Jacob. “Maybe she’s walking the fields.”
He shook his head. “She wouldn’t, for anything She’s afraid to run up on snakes. Check the barn again.”
The children grew restless. The tinier ones asked for their mother, the others squirmed in their seats.
“We’ll be back come afternoon,” Jacob said.
Then, when he saw the worried eyes of Libby, he took her gently by the arm, but was suddenly at a loss for words.
She found Anne. Tucked away, hidden in the far stall. A tangle of black dress and petticoat, knees drawn up to her chest. A tin of horse tranquilizers lay within her reach, the white pills spilled about her.
“Wake up! Wake up!” Libby cried, scrambling to pick up the pills, counting them. She had no way of knowing how many Anne took.
Then Anne opened her eyes, halfway, dreamily.
Libby cradled her sisters head in her hands, crying, “Anne!”
Her skin had gone stark white, her lips a slight tint of blue. She struggled to speak. “We… we took you in.”
Anne was laid out in the upstairs bedroom. The shades were drawn, the house scrubbed clean. Jacob never left her side. He sobbed quietly through the night. Libby could hear him, and in the early dawn, she went in. His eyes were rimmed red, staring at the floor as he rocked on the bed.
Libby fell to her knees at her sister’s side and reached up to Jacob, to touch his arm, but the warm passion that drove her to him was gone. It was now a cold stranger that looked down on her.
“What have we done?” she cried bitterly.
He didn’t answer, only stared at his dead wife, with that rocking motion that nearly drove Libby crazy.
She rose up and he lifted his empty eyes to hers. She turned away quickly from his gaze, fleeing to the barn, the grief finally spilling out. Not in tears, but in moans from deep within her gut. Her beloved husband was gone, and her sister, though dispassionate, was still her flesh and blood. Gone too. And Jacob, not to be reached and might never be.
Her weak moment of hunger. Yet that hunger had been unbearable and needed to be filled.
They’d been right years ago, the community, the Church. Libby Bender was wicked, driven by something they couldn’t identify. She didn’t belong there, or anywhere else in the world, for how could she contain a passion within her soul without dying?
She threw herself on the back of the gelding and rode through the soy fields lit gold in the Indian summer sun. The steep rocky hills were up ahead. She knew not to ride there. She knew, like everything else, she knew.
Bare-back, at a full gallop, she rode the gelding off the cliff. Time stood still and the earth stopped turning as she went air borne, over the golden fields and all she once loved, to pain no more. To pain no more.
(Charlestown, Rhode Island) - Welcome to AILEEN’S GUESTHOUSE where locals and lodgers have more in common than first meets the eye. And, there's plenty of blame to go around.
(Baxter Springs, Kansas) - Discover how a beloved high school guidance counselor twists fate on behalf of four troubled misfits, and turns their life around.
