The Amish Midwife - By Mindy Starns Clark Page 0,140
start’ somewhere else. Last I heard, he was living up in Canada somewhere. Probably still running around with women half his age.”
So much for wanting to meet my half brother. Instead, I felt a deep surge of pity for Marta, not to mention an even stronger bond.
“What happened to the one here, the Amish woman, and their baby?” I whispered.
Marta studied my face for a long time as all around us crickets chirped and fireflies lit up the night.
“You already know the answer to that question.”
Then she turned and began walking back toward the house. After a beat, I raced to catch up with her, my mind spinning.
“I do?”
Marta glanced at me and kept walking.
“She was so young, so ashamed, so ambivalent about all that lay ahead. Finally, after much prayer, I felt the Lord leading us to raise the baby as our own. I suggested adoption.”
“You and Freddy tried to adopt her baby? His baby?”
“Well, actually, that’s what we told people, but in truth only I adopted him. Freddy didn’t need to, because he was already the child’s father.”
I stopped walking, my mouth flying open. She was talking about Zed! The baby Marta’s husband had conceived out of wedlock with an Amish woman was Zed. The boy Marta loved and cared for and had raised as her son—despite the fact that he was living proof of her husband’s infidelity—was Zed.
“That’s the only reason Freddy stuck around at first and tried to make a go of our marriage, because he had a new son,” Marta told me now when she saw I had been rendered speechless. “But it was no use. By the time Zed could crawl, Freddy had walked out on all three of us, gone for good.”
Still stunned, I ran my hands through my hair, gathered it into my fist, and let it fall.
“What happened to the woman?”
“Crazy as it sounds, she and I became friends.”
“Friends? Marta, how on earth—”
“It started during the pregnancy. Despite all that had happened between her and my husband, once she agreed to the adoption, I knew I wanted to be there when my baby was being born. I only intended to observe, but when I learned she was actually willing to let me be the midwife, of course I agreed.”
“Unbelievable,” I said, shaking my head, knowing that such an arrangement was surely due to their faith, to the concept of not just forgiving but also forgetting. Just as I had with James earlier, suddenly I was seeing Marta with new eyes.
“Throughout the entire pregnancy and birth, I guess you could say that she and I bonded, as odd as that sounds. Of course, once we brought Zed home, nothing mattered at all except that he was ours. Mine.” Her eyes grew fierce. “He is mine, you know, as surely as if he had come from my own womb.”
I knew. Remembering Mama, remembering Dad. I knew. Smiling, I thought of James’s words earlier, of how God could redeem a bad situation and bring from it, in the end, so much good.
“You stayed in touch with his birth mother?”
“Yes. She eventually married a wonderful Amish man, and when they were expecting their first child, she asked me to be her midwife again. I was happy to do it. In fact, I successfully delivered all of her babies. Until the last one, that is.” Marta shuddered.
“What happened?”
She gave me a look, as if to say, as she had before, that I already knew. “What happened is that she was in labor with her fifth child when something went wrong. Both she and the baby died.”
“Come again?” I asked, wondering if I had misunderstood.
Holding out her hands, palms upward, Marta simply looked at me, willing me to get it. Then it came to me. The person she was talking about, the one who had given birth to Zed so long ago, had been Lydia, the very patient Marta had lost in childbirth all these years later.
The very patient Marta been accused of killing.
I said Lydia’s name aloud. Glancing around us, Marta moved closer, gripped my arm above the elbow, and lowered her voice to a whisper.
“Yes. It was Lydia. Now that you know, you can understand the astonishing position I have found myself in over these past few months. Freddy’s affair with her happened years ago. Water under the bridge. Forgiven. Forgotten. Truly, I had nothing but love for Lydia, nothing but gratitude for her having given me my son.”