The rain began on the twenty-second day and did not stop for three days.
Not ordinary rain — a spring mountain downpour, dense as a curtain, cold as well water. It turned the trail into a stream, the stream into a torrent, the torrent into a river. Wagons sank to their hubs. Horses slipped. Children cried from cold — impossible to light a fire, everything wet, even the firewood they'd been carrying.
The first day they endured. The second they fell silent. On the third, Moses Yoder came to Beiler.
"We can't go on. Wagons are stuck. Children are sick. Sara…" he broke off. "Sara is coughing."
Beiler stood in the rain, soaked to the bone, and looked every one of his sixty-two years — plus twenty more.
"We make camp," he said. "We wait."
Waiting was the hardest thing on the entire journey.
Harder than mountains, harder than the river, harder than wolves. Because mountains can be climbed, rivers crossed, wolves driven away. But rain — nothing. You sit in a wet wagon, listen to water drumming on canvas, and wait.
Jakob stretched extra canvas between two wagons — his and the Stoltzfus family's — and under it managed to build a fire. Small, smoky, pitiful — but fire. Rachel cooked something hot — the last cornmeal, the last salt pork. Food supplies were melting. By Jakob's calculation, at current consumption they could last another week. Ohio was — in good weather — ten days away.
The arithmetic didn't add up. And Jakob, who believed in God but also believed in arithmetic, felt for the first time on the journey that the ground was shifting beneath him — not literally (though literally too, in all this mud), but inside.
On the third night of rain, a child was born.
Graber's wife Hannah — a quiet, unnoticeable woman who had spoken fewer than ten words the entire journey — went into labor at midnight. In the rain. In a wet wagon. On a featherbed that had been wet for three days.
Rachel went to her. Jakob tried to stop her — "you can't, the children are alone" — but she looked at him in a way that silenced him. There are things in which a man has no voice.
Labor lasted four hours. Jakob heard screams through the rain — once, twice, then silence. Then — an infant's cry. Thin, indignant, demanding. The cry of a being that had just entered the world in a mountain downpour, in a wet wagon, a hundred miles from the nearest doctor — and was not pleased about it.
Rachel came out near dawn. Wet, exhausted, with red hands.
"A boy," she said. "Healthy. Hannah too."
Jakob embraced her. She pressed her forehead to his shoulder and stood like that for a minute. Then pulled away, wiped her hands on her skirt, and went to feed the children.
On the fourth day the rain stopped.
Not gradually — abruptly, as if someone had turned off a faucet. Clouds parted, sun struck the wet forest, and everything sparkled — leaves, stones, puddles, drops on canvas. Steam rose from the earth, from the horses, from clothing.
Beiler came out of his wagon, looked at the sky, and removed his hat.
"Danke," he said. Thank you.
Graber carried the newborn into the sunlight — wrapped in a dry blanket (the only dry blanket in the entire camp, which Rachel had found at the bottom of a trunk). The boy blinked at the light and was silent.
"What will you name him?" asked Beiler.
Graber looked at the mountains surrounding them — wet, green, endless. Looked at the column — seven wagons, muddy, wet, but whole. Looked at his wife in the wagon — pale, weak, but smiling.
"Jakob," he said. And turned to Jakob. "If you don't mind. You fixed our axle. Your wife delivered our son. Let him carry your name."
Jakob found no words. He nodded.
Little Jakob Graber, born in a mountain downpour on the twenty-fifth day of the journey, became the first person in the column who didn't know Pennsylvania. For him, the whole world began here — between wet mountains, under the first sun after the storm.