by Anna Schmidt
What People Are Saying About The Women of Pinecraft Series:
“Amish fiction fans will be swept away by Schmidt’s captivating story of love, the importance of dealing with grief and caring for others, and how God can help and guide even in the midst of life’s storms.”
—Christian Retailing
“A new series about Mennonite and Amish cultures with memorable characters who just want to help people. Schmidt is a wonderful storyteller. She invites readers into a world few outsides get the chance to experience.”
—Romantic Times
“As a lover of contemporary rom-coms I don’t often reach for books that straddle the fence of time, sticking buggies and horses next to modern convenience. Yes, I’m speaking of that great-selling, over-published subgenre of the inspirational market known as: Amish fiction.
“I’m not (usually) a fan.
“The new series by award-winning author Anna Schmidt, however, doesn’t fall into the tidy Lancaster County box we’ve come to expect from cardboard-cutout Amish romances. In A Stranger’s Gift, Book 1 in The Women of Pinecraft series, Schmidt has broken new ground by creating intelligent, original characters and setting her novel in Sarasota, Fla., within the Conservative Mennonite and Amish community of Pinecraft (yes, it is a real place!). Plain folk on the beach? I did not see that coming.”
—USA Today
“A Stranger’s Gift is an inspirational, uplifting romance that beautifully demonstrates both the strength and kindness of the Mennonite people. Even as a hurricane rages across Florida’s Gulf Coast, even as her hometown faces destruction from the wind and water, the heroine works to help those in need. No matter what she must face in the aftermath of the hurricane and in her heart, the faith she has in God doesn’t waver.”
—Melanie Dobson, author of Love Finds You in Amana, Iowa
“This fast-paced novel (A Stranger’s Gift) takes you on a journey into Florida’s Mennonite community that you won’t soon forget. Schmidt’s characters come alive as their world crashes around them. You won’t be able to stop turning pages until you reach the satisfying end. Can’t wait until the next in the Women of Pinecraft series.”
—Mary Ellis, author of Abigail’s New Hope
“A Stranger’s Gift, Book 1 of Anna Schmidt’s Women of Pinecraft Mennonite series, is an engaging tale of loss and redemption, set against the background of hurricane season on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Mennonite aid worker Hester Detweiler finds her courage and faith challenged by the devastating loss suffered by stubborn loner John Steiner. Schmidt crafts a fascinating picture of Mennonite life in an area that has been little explored in Plain fiction, and readers will be delighted with this new entrant in the popular genre.”
—Marta Perry, author of Vanish in Plain Sight and Katie’s Way
“Anna Schmidt takes us back to Pinecraft, Florida, and her Women of Pinecraft series with this compelling novel (A Sister’s Forgiveness) set in this Mennonite community. It’s a story about love of family, dealing with death and anger and finding forgiveness. It’s about learning to seek forgiveness from others and to give forgiveness. In Tessa’s journal she questions what mercy is and asks if that is what forgiveness is really all about. Your heart will be blessed by this story.”
—Viki Ferrell of Fresh Fiction
“I do believe Anna Schmidt is one of my new favorite authors. Her books differ in style and content than most others in the Christian genre that I read. Redemption is a strong element and the characters dwell on things other than romance. These characters face real-life problems and struggles. I recommend this series, The Women of Pinecraft.”
—Sally Riley, The Friendly Book Nook
© 2012 by Anna Schmidt
Print ISBN 978-1-61626-236-5
eBook Editions:
Adobe Digital Edition (.epub) 978-1-62029-634-9
Kindle and MobiPocket Edition (.prc) 978-1-62029-633-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without written permission of the publisher.
All scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.
For more information about Anna Schmidt, please access the author’s website at the following Internet address: www.booksbyanna.com
Cover design: Kirk DouPonce, DogEared Design
Published by Barbour Publishing, Inc., P.O. Box 719, Uhrichsville, OH 44683, www.barbourbooks.com
Our mission is to publish and distribute inspirational products offering exceptional value and biblical encouragement to the masses.
Printed in the United States of America.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Epilogue
Discussion Questions
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Writing any story means finding “partners” to guide the process especially in those areas where the author is admittedly no expert. As with other books in this series I am deeply indebted to my Pinecraft/Sarasota friends Rosanna Bontrager, Doris Diener, and Tanya Kurtz Lehman. In addition I could not have brought the medical pieces of the story together without the assistance of Lois Pearson, Suzanne Berg, Barbara Oleksy, Jill Wiench, and Jim Greear. My thanks also go out to editors, Rebecca Germany and Traci DePree, as well as to my agent, Natasha Kern—a dear friend and unwavering cheerleader. Finally not one of the books I have written could ever have come to light without the constant love, support, and encouragement of my husband, best friend, and life partner, Larry.
Prologue
Ohio, Late Autumn, 2010
Rachel Kaufmann stood at the end of the lane that led to the farmhouse and waited for her husband to return from harvesting the last of the winter feed corn. It was coming on darkness and the wind that had come out of the southwest all day had shifted north.
She pulled her shawl over her white prayer covering and wrapped her hands in its folds. She had left her gloves back at the house, so anxious had she been to share her good news with James.
For several years she had helped supplement their farming income with private-duty nursing jobs, but now she’d been offered a full-time job as school nurse for their rural district. The nursing degree that she’d completed just before she and James married would finally be used to its full potential. She knew that her husband would be as pleased by the news as she was.
What could be keeping him?
She shivered a little and stamped her feet to offset the damp and cold as she peered into the lengthening shadows, listening carefully for the sound of the old tractor he would be riding back to the farm. It had rained steadily for days now, and the fields were awash with standing water. Twice that week the tractor had gotten stuck and James had had to abandon the work, but that morn
ing he’d been confident that the strong overnight wind had done its job so he’d headed back to the fields.
She heard a car approach and knew it was a regular vehicle, not the tractor she longed to see coming around the sharp curve in the road. Headlights swept over her as the driver slowed and turned onto the lane.
Her sister-in-law, Rose, rolled down the passenger-side window. “Rachel? Is that you?”
“Of course it’s her,” James’s brother Luke snapped irritably. “Who else would it be?”
“Just waiting for James,” Rachel said. She drummed her fingernails on the back window, drawing the attention of the four children crowded on the backseat and waving to them.
“It’s freezing,” Rose protested as she wrapped a shawl more tightly around her shoulders. “Get in.”
“No. I’m all right. I’ll wait.”
“Better you come on back with us and help Mom get supper on the table.” Luke was not making conversation. He was—as usual—giving an order that he fully expected to be obeyed.
“James will be along soon.” Rachel met her brother-in-law’s eyes.
“Suit yourself,” he said as he gunned the motor and sprayed gravel behind him on his way to his parents’ farmhouse. Rachel saw Rose’s hand waving at her as they sped away.
Perhaps it would have been best to stay in the house even though her mother-in-law, Grace, had smiled when she saw how Rachel kept glancing out the kitchen window watching for James. “Why don’t you go on down there? Surprise him.”
“Getting colder,” James’s father, Earl, had announced as he entered the house and hung his broad-brimmed black straw hat on its usual hook by the door. Next to it was the hook where James would hang his hat. “Just going to wash up,” he’d added as he passed by his wife’s rocker and leaned in to kiss her temple. “Take your shawl, Rachel. That wind is shifting.”
Rachel loved her in-laws dearly. She just wished that she and James could have blessed them with more grandchildren. James’s brothers all had large families, but James and Rachel had only one son, ten-year-old Justin.
“Can I come with you?” Justin had asked.
“No, finish your homework. We’ll eat as soon as Dad gets home.”
Now as she turned away from the tail lights of Luke’s car and took up her vigil for the sound of James’s tractor, she frowned. When she had told Justin that she had applied for the school nurse job, her son had asked a surprising question. “Dad will let you work there, right?”
“Of course. He’ll be happy for me—for all of us. Why would you ask that?”
“Because Uncle Luke says that good Mennonite women shouldn’t work outside the home,” Justin had said. “He says that Aunt Rosie has plenty to keep her busy and then some.”
“Aunt Rosie has four children all under the age of seven,” Rachel had replied before she could censor herself.
But she knew that Luke would disapprove of her taking the job. In his view, if a woman wanted to take on the occasional cleaning job to earn what he called “pocket money,” that was tolerable. But a job like this one, working for the county—outsiders—that would definitely not be to his liking. Even though Luke was the youngest of James’s three brothers, he was the most conservative when it came to what he thought Mennonite women should and should not do. He was so strict that Rose always wore solid-colored caped dresses—never the occasional small floral print that other women of their faith wore. And the children—even though they were all well under the age when Mennonite boys and girls would be baptized, join the congregation, and start to follow the dress code and traditions of their elders, Luke insisted they be dressed in the homemade clothing that he and Rose wore.
Just then she heard the familiar sputter of the tractor, and all thoughts of her differences with her brother-in-law flew away on the wind that whipped at her skirt. James was coming. He would be as happy about this as she was. He would pull her up onto the tractor beside him, hold her tight, and kiss her. “That’s my girl,” he would say, and then he would kiss her again.
She stepped into the road as he came around the curve, the dim headlight of the battered tractor barely visible in the gathering dark. But she could see him waving, so she knew that he had spotted her, and she knew that he was smiling as he began steering the tractor into the left turn he needed to make to reach their lane.
Suddenly she heard another sound, much louder and far too close. Before she could cry out a warning to her husband, she was blinded by headlights that lit James from behind as if he were on a stage.
He motioned for Rachel to step back as he turned the tractor’s steering wheel hard to the right.
In the chaos that followed, the screech of brakes applied too late, of metal hitting metal, the blaring of a car horn, Rachel stood frozen to the spot where she had last seen her husband.
And then she heard feet running toward her.
“Call 911, Grace,” Earl shouted.
“Stay there, Justin,” Luke ordered.
Rachel walked slowly toward the large modern car, its headlights now spotlighting a scene that she could not wholly comprehend. That vehicle showed no signs of damage other than a white airbag lying limply against the driver’s seat. A young man was stumbling around next to it, making low keening sounds. On the far side of the car, the tractor lay on its side in the ditch. Pinned underneath it was the very still body of her beloved husband.
“James,” she cried as she scrambled into the ditch, uncaring of the muddy water that soaked her skirt and apron. She knelt next to her husband, touching his cheeks and forehead, covering him with her shawl. “Lie still,” she instructed. “Help is coming.”
But she was a trained nurse. As she searched for a pulse and bent to administer CPR, she knew that the ambulance siren she could hear faintly through the fog of her shock would never arrive in time.
Part One
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
PSALM 121:1
Chapter 1
Summer—Two Years Later
Rachel stood at the end of the lane waiting for the mail to be delivered. It wasn’t that she was expecting anything. Her daily walk to the mailbox had become one way that she could find a few minutes respite from the way her life—and Justin’s—had changed over the two years that had passed since that horrible night.
At first, as she had faced the hard grief besetting her following James’s death, Rachel had asked God for many things—mostly for the strength to go on and for the wisdom to know how best to care for Justin. Certainly her strength to move forward without James’s comforting presence had been tested many times and in many ways.
Earl had suffered a mild stroke, and the family had known that there was no way the elderly man could continue to manage the large farm with only some occasional help from his remaining sons. A week after that her brother-in-law Luke and his family had moved into the farmhouse.
Wanting to make them feel as welcome as possible, Rachel had immediately offered them the large upstairs bedroom that she and James had shared. Their boys had moved in with Justin while their girls took over the room once occupied by James’s parents. Grace and Earl moved out to the smaller cottage behind the main house.
Rachel had tried blaming their mutual grief for the tenseness that permeated the house. She told herself that everyone was feeling the loss of James in different ways. But as time passed she realized that the discord arose not because everyone was missing James so much but because Luke did not approve of her working.
“Your son needs you,” he would tell her.
“Justin is in school during the hours I am at work,” she pointed out. “When he is at home so am I.”
“And leaving Rose to manage everything,” he had continued as if Rachel hadn’t spoken. “It’s a large house.”
Rachel did not point out that whenever she came to the kitchen and offered to help prepare their supper or feed the youngest children, Rose would shoo her away. “You go and re
st now,” she would chide. “You’ve been working all day.”
Rachel had made the best of the situation and tried to encourage Justin to do so as well, promising that it would just take some time for them to all settle in. But after a year of Luke ordering Justin around and openly criticizing her failure to be the Mennonite woman he thought she should be, Rachel knew that there would be no settling in. This was their life.
A life without James.
And then one snowy afternoon just before Christmas break she had been called to her supervisor’s office and told that her position as the school nurse was being eliminated due to budget cuts.
Without her job to fill her days, Rachel found herself spending more and more of her time out in the smaller cottage that James had built for his parents. She would sit at the kitchen table with her mother-in-law, rolling out dough or peeling apples for the pies that Grace made and sold at the local store. But after several weeks, she had to admit that there was little room for Justin and her in either house—physically there was, but they didn’t fit in other ways. She considered moving down the road to the farm where she’d grown up, but her parents had died and the running of the farm was now shared by her two brothers, both of whom had large families of their own.
As the seasons passed, she watched helplessly as Justin became more withdrawn and somber. Now with no school in the summer he was even more at the mercy of his uncle’s demands and criticisms.
“I can’t do anything right,” he’d muttered one evening as he stormed into the house and up to his room.
“Get back down here, Justin,” Luke ordered.
“Let him be,” Rachel said. “He’s doing the best he can, Luke.”
“No he is not and neither are you, Rachel. James was too soft on both of you—taken in by that pretty face and sweet smile of yours from the day you two met. Well, I’m not James, and I expect you and your son to do your part around here.”
Rachel had walked away from him without another word. She’d gone up to Justin’s room and tried to console him. But her attempts at comfort and reassurance fell on deaf ears—Justin’s and her own.
