A Quilt for Jenna (5 page)

“No, ma'am,” he answered. “With the storm pickin' up, there might not be anyone along here for a good while. Most people would take Highway 30 in this storm. Besides, the ditch is just deep enough to keep us out of view. I can make it into town well before dark and get somebody to come for you. You just wait here. I'll be back in no time.”

Henry closed the door, went around to open the trunk, and pulled out the shipping company blanket he kept there. It was thin and dirty, but it was all he had. He closed the trunk and handed the blanket in through the back door to Jerusha. He tried to keep up a good front as he said, “Don't worry none, Missus Springer. I'll be back before you know it. I'm going right up to Nussbaum Road, over to the Township Highway, and then right into town. I'll probably get picked up before I even get there. Just bundle up and don't leave the car. I need to know you'll be here when I get back.”

“Don't worry, Henry,” Jerusha said. “I don't think I'll be going for a walk or anything.”

Jerusha managed a wan smile as Henry patted her on the arm. He handed her the car keys.

“If it gets really cold you can turn the car on for a few minutes. She's got a good heater and she'll warm up pretty quick. But don't leave 'er on too long—five minutes at most. You don't want to get carbon monoxide poisoning.”

He closed the car door and started off up the road to Dalton. The white snow closed in around the car, and in a few seconds Henry had disappeared. Jerusha sat still, staring into the gathering storm.

This is Your fault
, Jerusha thought.
You are still punishing me. What did I do to make You hate me so much?

Not far away lay another wrecked car, still on its roof, partway out onto the frozen pond. Inside the car lay the little girl. The seat cushion, some extra clothing, and a lone blanket that had piled up around her during the crash were all she had to keep her from the bitter cold. Her eyes fluttered open, and she looked out through the window of the upside-down car. She remembered the look on the bad man's face as he sank beneath the water. He had stared right at her as he clutched the edge of the ice with one arm. Then the water had dragged him down, his open mouth filling with water as he choked out one last scream. Now she was alone in the storm, and there was only one person she wanted to comfort her, to hold her close...but that person was gone.

The girl stirred weakly and began to cry. “Mama, I'm cold,” she said. “I'm so cold...”

C
HAPTER
S
IX

Apple Creek

J
ERUSHA SAT IN THE BACK
of Henry's car, wrapped in the thin blanket the boy had given her. She felt as if she had been sitting for hours, waiting for Henry to return. As time wore on, her thoughts crowded in on her. Reuben's face was before her now, staring at her with that empty look that had filled his eyes on the day he went away after Jenna's death. Jerusha closed her eyes and shook her head as she tried to keep her thoughts on her present situation.

She didn't want to think about Reuben or Jenna or Apple Creek, but she couldn't stop the thoughts. While she had been making the quilt she had been intent on her work, and her single-minded determination kept at bay the demons that wanted to devour her soul. She remembered the moment she had finished the quilt.

Always before, she had followed the Amish tradition of deliberately sewing a mistake into her quilts to avoid offending God with human perfection. But she hadn't done that this time. This quilt
was
perfect, and she had made it. If that was a sin, then so be it.

When she had come to the place where she normally would have sewn a mistake into the patchwork, she had paused. The quilt was stretched tightly on the frame, the beautiful silken fabric glowing in the last rays of light coming through her window. The effect was almost sublime in its perfection, and she had leaned back in her chair to admire her work.

She remembered how she had broken the last thread of the perfect quilt in defiance, and suddenly a weariness overcame her. Her head nodded as she sat wrapped against the cold in the back of Henry's car. Her thoughts, once churning like the water in the millrace behind her father's gristmill, began to still themselves. The days of planning and sewing and hating had taken their toll, and in the cold light of the gathering storm she remembered the days of her happiness...before.

The days of Jerusha's childhood had been good days, filled with the comfort of a stable family and the practice of her faith. Her family was Old Order Amish, and she loved the ways of her people. The Hershbergers lived on one of the largest farms in Apple Creek. The family had been in America for more than two hundred years—since the Plain People accepted William Penn's offer of religious freedom. Even before that, when the first Amish came to Pennsylvania from Switzerland in 1720, the Hershbergers were among them.

When the Amish moved west in the early 1800s, the Hershberger family had followed, arriving in the village of Apple Creek in 1857. The land was fertile and open, and it greatly suited the Amish folk and their agricultural skills. The Hershberger family had homesteaded a tract of land outside the village, and over the years they had purchased neighboring farms. Now they held more than two hundred acres of the most fertile land in the township, and Hershberger milk and cheese were renowned throughout Wayne County.

During her childhood, the rest of the nation was suffering through the Great Depression, and the Amish were not sheltered from the turmoil of those years. But the Amish were accustomed to doing more with less. The Hershberger family and their neighbors simply pulled inward and depended on each other, so Jerusha grew up in an atmosphere of love, self-sufficiency, and community. The Amish of Apple Creek remained an island of safety and prosperity in those troubled times.

Jerusha's days were filled with the simple tasks of a farm girl—planting in the spring, tending the animals, and cooking for her father and brothers as they harvested the corn and wheat. She watched her grandmother and mother can and preserve the garden produce and put up the fruit for the winter. They filled the root cellar with potatoes, onions, and barrels of apples. Her father brought ice from the winter pond and packed it into the cold house, which was dug into the side of a hill behind the house. Then they prepared hams, chickens, and sides of beef and stored them away for the festive dinners and holiday celebrations that were the hallmarks of her youth.

Jerusha's father was an
Armendiener
, a deacon, and she loved to sit quietly while he read from the Bible during the Sunday meetings. The scriptures came alive to her as he read, and his rich baritone voice soothed her and filled her with a certainty that the God her family served could only be a good and loving God.

When she was old enough, her father gave her the job of bringing home the milk cows every evening, a job she thoroughly enjoyed. Like most farm children, she liked being alone. In those days, before World War II, the fields around Apple Creek were open to the horizon, and there were many stands of trees with small creeks and ponds. Jerusha found great comfort in the simplicity of her life as she wandered through the fields and woods. Every so often she would hear the train chugging along the tracks to parts unknown, its mournful whistle seeming to warn of the dangers and sorrows of a complicated modern world.

At these times Jerusha would kneel down on the earth and touch the grass or stop by a cold clear brook and dip her hands in the water, feeling the coolness on her skin and letting her thoughts focus on the God who could create such beauty with a spoken word. She didn't comprehend the deeper theological issues that surrounded her faith, nor did they really interest her. She only knew that at some time in the past, wise men had led her people away from the traps and pitfalls of a world that catered to men's basest natures and distracted them from this God of wonders who revealed Himself to her in every wooded path and every spring flower.

Many days, after her chores were done, Jerusha found her way to the old red barn and climbed up the wooden rungs into the sweet-smelling hayloft. She would lie on her back in a soft mound of hay and fix her thoughts on the psalms and prayers that were the staple of her people's life and daily work. Often she brought her family's copy of the
Ausbund
, the ancient Amish hymnal, and read the lyrics to herself. There was no musical notation in the book, but the melodies had been passed down from generation to generation and were as familiar to her as the stars of the night sky. Her favorite was the
Loblied
, the praise song, which was sung every time the people gathered for church, and her sweet voice would lift in praise to her God. As she sang, she often felt that she was wrapped in God's comforting arms. Often her father, passing by on his way to some part of the farm, would stop and listen as Jerusha's clear soprano floated down out of the hayloft like a sweet angel voice singing the praises of God.

“
Kumme, dochter
, there is work to be done,” he would call up to her, yet the tone of his voice would let her know that he took comfort in a daughter so grounded in the faith.

Jerusha would climb down and walk with her father in silence. He did not often speak of tender things, but a gentle hand on her shoulder would fill her heart with acceptance and love.

The days of her young life invited a future that, while unknown, need not be feared, but rather welcomed. This life, uncomplicated and innocent, was all she knew, and it held her secure just as a mother's tender arms hold a newborn. Time was not to be counted in hours and minutes, but rather in revelations and discoveries, in long dreamy summer days that never seemed to end and cold winter nights sitting by a warm fire, watching her mother and grandmother at the quilting frame.

And so it was that when she was ten years old her grandmother brought her into the
dawdy
house where she had lived since
Grossdaadi
's death.

“
Kumme,
Jerusha,” she said, “it is time for you to learn to quilt. See here now,
onest.”
And she began to teach Jerusha.

“The first thing that needs to be done before any quilt is made is to decide which kind of design we will use,” she had said. “We must know in our heart what the quilt will look like when it is finished, because it can take anywhere from four hundred to six hundred hours to put together just one quilt. You can sew the most perfect stitch, but without a good design it means nothing. If the design is not pleasing to the eye from the start, that's wasted time, and to waste time is to try God's patience.”