The Captive Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

experts while making all the bricks for their own house and outbuildings. John Hershberger put Jake in charge of the brickmaking crew, and Rachel took singular delight in showing him how it was done.
    Miriam watched them together, saw the way Jake looked at her younger sister, the way he listened to her, respected her. The way he smiled at her. They were very good together, and it was a little irritating after what had happened with Domingo.
    Fortunately, she didn’t see Domingo very often. He was only a hired hand, so most of the time he was off somewhere plowing or planting or helping build one of the new houses. Her heart still leaped when she saw him, even at a distance, but her face kept her feelings secret. Domingo probably didn’t even know he had torn a hole in her heart. She would wait, and take whatever came. Either Domingo’s heart would change or the pain would wear away over time.
    Twice a week Miriam taught school for the Amish kids, as well as any of the local Mexican children who wished to attend. Through the winter Domingo had attended her class regularly, pretending to ride herd over his two boisterous nephews while he learned to read along with the children. But when the planting started in late February, he stopped coming to class. What with the building of two new houses across the valley and the planting of oats and wheat and corn and clover, he claimed he didn’t have time for school, but Miriam suspected he was avoiding her. In spite of her own discomfort, she fervently hoped he would continue to sharpen his reading skills, if only by reading the copy of Don Quijote she had given him at Christmas.
    In her spare time Miriam helped Emma plant trees. Levi and Ezra, Miriam’s brothers-in-law, had finished both their houses in late fall and now were busy plowing their own fields, turning the new soil again and again to let the sun kill the weeds. Her sister Emma, Levi’s wife, grew bigger by the day that spring, her second child due to be born in late summer. Emma kept house for Levi, tended her kitchen garden, cared for little Mose, and spent what little spare time she had putting out trees. The trees were Emma’s passion. She missed the forests of home, and when she wrote to ask the newcomers to bring trees they overwhelmed her with saplings and seeds and nuts from Ohio. Every day she and her growing belly could be seen planting oaks in strategic spots around the houses so they would one day provide shade, planting lines of poplars and elms along the driveways and scattering an army of maples and fruit trees along the edge of the woods at the base of the ridge.
    Miriam kept very busy that spring, telling herself in dark private moments that Domingo was right about the fences, and it was for the best. But the dream of the stallion and the jaguar came to her again one night, as vividly as the first time, and it haunted her. Try as she might she could not banish him from her heart. She could not stop herself from hearing the whispered word cualnezqui , and she could not shake the feeling that the recurring dream was a veiled premonition of things to come, a disturbingly clear vision from Gott himself. All her life her religion had taught her to be careful of what she wanted, but now she was learning that the wanting itself was not always a choice. Most of the time a girl could choose what she would have , but she could not always choose what she wanted . The wanting simply would not go away. Domingo had captured her heart, and like it or not, she wanted him.
    But he made no move toward her. Domingo stopped by at Hershberger’s once while she was helping the boys make bricks, and she couldn’t keep herself from making eye contact. When he made a little joke she couldn’t keep herself from laughing a little louder than the others, and when he made a casual observation about the bricks she was the first to acknowledge his expertise. But he made no move toward her. He was